Authors: Frederick Exley
A half-dozen college boys in a white topless convertible go by me, hurling their beer cans and anathemas. Piddling along with my eyes cast downward on the cindered shoulder, an almost rapturous fury and humiliation scorching the nape of my neck, I ignore them. Having passed me
“
face on,
”
they are now behind me; as there is an abrupt absence of thunder, of momentum in the air, I become suddenly and heart-poundingly aware that, to repair a flat tire or due to some mechanical failure, they have pulled from the highway. Turning, I see them standing outside the car. Somberly, disbelievingly, they stare at the vehicle
’
s motionlessness, now and again looking diffidently in my direction, wondering what I am to do. With all my strength I try to do the
“
adult
”
thing and go about my business; but it is always precisely at this moment that a quick and heavy blackness scuttles the dream (as fleeting as the shuttering of a lens this blackness is); and when again the vision comes, instead of walking on I find that I am running fatefully in their direction. So furiously do I come that on reaching them I see by the shyness of their smiles, and by their all but imperceptible gestures of retreat, they are afraid. Gibbering erratically, I am able to catch only isolated fragments of my own hectic spiel. Easy to understand is
“
Am I an American?
”
demanded spittingly of them, as the justifiably outraged and egg-bespattered Henry Wallace once demanded of the American body politic. Considerably more enigmatic, and shouted at them over and over again, is the declarative
“
John Keats was dead at twenty-six!
”
Because even during my acutest paranoia, my delusions never permitted me to draw artistic analogies between Keats and myself, I put aside that possible interpretation, and by discarding something else, and yet weighing another possibility, I finally settled on a meaning that made sense to me. John Jay Chapman once said of William James that he seemed always to be stepping out of a sadness to meet one; as, a little startled, most of us seem always to be stepping out of our predominant hues, whether of gaiety or equanimity or frolicsomeness or gravity, to meet another; and the nightmarish thing about all these young men is that they seem devoid of emotional heritage. Like cinema starlets who have only recently been manufactured, they are precisely like one another: all are six feet, two; all have fine, golden complexions; all have that admired short hair molded formally to their pates; and all are dressed in button-down shirts topped by V-necked cashmere sweaters, below which they sport iridescent Bermudas displaying youthful, well-made legs. Looking at them, I see they are the generation to whom President Johnson has promised his Great Society; the generation which will never know the debilitating shame of poverty, the anguish of defeat, the fateful irony of the unexpected disease; the generation which will visit the barren moon and find it, because they have been conditioned to find it, more lovely than that river which, though so close to it, they cannot even see; the generation which will all retire to the great American Southwest, where under dry, brilliant, and perpetual suns they will all live to be a hundred and fifty, watching reruns of Ed Sullivan on a colored screen twenty feet high. What I am now certain I am beseeching them to consider is that of itself longevity is utterly without redeeming qualities, that one has to live the contributive, the passionate, life and that this can as well be done in twenty-six (hence Keats) as in a hundred and twenty-six years, done in no longer than the time it takes a man to determine whether the answer is
yea
or
nay
. Furiously taking one of them by the elbows, I make my gravest miscalculation, demanding to know of him whether he isn
’
t ashamed. As unnerved and abashed as any Huxleyan character confronted with historical, forgotten emotions, I can see that the idea of remorse has no place in his dialectic. Arousing in him bewilderment and fear of things unknown, he pushes me violently from him. When he does so, I strike him in the face. Because it is only a dream, and as such no succedaneum for life, I fight very well; considering that they have all jumped in now and I am being beaten bloody and senseless by a phalanx of cashmere clubs, I hold my legs much longer than I should, hold them until I am suddenly engulfed by this new, this incomprehensible America. The dream is weird and unsettling and infinitely s
ad, and not in the least sad be
cause I am being beaten. It is grievous because for the past few days I have tried with such excruciating diligence to alter the course of it; and with the dying Christie HI lying in my arms have lain entire afternoons imagining how tonight, this very night, I will find the strength to turn and walk on about my business. But then evening comes, and sleep, and then the dream, and then that shuttering of heavy blackness. And when again the vision comes, I find that, ready to do battle, I am running: obsessively,
running
.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frederick Exley is the author of A Fan
’
s Notes and Pages from a Cold Island, and is currently at work on the final volume of his trilogy, Last Notes from Home, excerpts of which have already appeared in Rolling Stone. He has been nominated for a National Book Award, was the recipient of the William Faulkner Award, received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and won a Playboy silver medal for the best nonfiction piece of . He has also received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant and a Harper-Saxton Fellowship. Although he spends a good deal of time in Palm Beach County, Florida, and on the island of Lanai, Hawaii, he calls home Alexandria Bay, New York, a resort village in the Thousand Islands region of St. Lawrence within a thirty-five minute drive of where he was born, in Watertown, New York.