Authors: Frederick Exley
More often that not, taking the offensive had the desired effect, proving so disarming to the man that he was rendered momentarily dumb. Recovering himself, he would be off on a :itany of reasons why HKI & W and I could make a marriage: paid vacations, hospitalization, good working conditions, annual bonuses; while I, in what must have been an infuriating response, shook my head
no
, decidedly
no
, to every inducement save high salary, as though I considered them all totally irrelevant.
“
We
’
ll call you,
”
they
’
d say, extending their glad-hands. No doubt remembering our opening handshake, they would then red-facedly withdraw these hands. I would smile knowingly, as though I never for a moment doubted that indeed they
’
d call.
Did I really believe I
’
d get a job in this way? It would be easy for me to say that I didn
’
t, that for some perverse reason, masochism or a neurotic need to be rejected—a possibility to which I would later in my life give great weight—I was willfully acting in such a way as to alienate myself. But I doubt the validity of this. I had large faith—the faith of youth—in the city
’
s capacity to absorb me, hair-do and all; and it was only after summer was gone and autumn was casting long shadows that I began to take these rejections as personal affronts. It is very wearing to be honest, no matter how naïve or misreckoned that honesty is, and continue to be spurned for it. After a time it becomes numbing, like heavy, repeated blows to the face. I spent a lot of time that autumn on my aunt
’
s davenport, watching slow-legged, sexless women in soap operas drink coffee and weep into each other
’
s teatless bosoms while I spun the ever-increasingly detailed fantasy I called my future.
After a time I developed another outlet for my mounting fury, and it was this more than anything which prevented me from slipping over into that state the world seems so facilely prepared to pronounce psychotic. Each morning I found in the
Times
the most ludicrous advertisement and answered it. I always answered other advertisements, but it was only after I had answered the former that I could get on to those that might reasonably hold out hope of a job to me. Now these advertisements, the most puerile, were generally display advertisements and could be found anywhere from the classified to the sports to the financial sections:
This shop is looking for an intelligent, ambitious young man interested in becoming a copywriter—one who won
’
t wilt like a tired flower under a little sound, even harsh criticism, one who isn
’
t afraid of a hard knock or two, one who, in short, can roll with a punch and come out fighting. Write Box —.
Occasionally I spent an hour, even two, composing my replies, wanting them to be exactly right. It was only after they were completed, placed in an addressed envelope, and sealed that I was able to get on to answering those more reasonable advertisements.
Hard knocks? I used to have a boss who rapped me on the head just for kicks. He was a stupid bastard, though. From him I didn
’
t learn a thing, save that working for a stupid bastard is without profit—humiliating, loathsome, and utterly demoralizing. With you —and it is obvious from your advertisement that you are a man of high parts—it would be different. When you begin bouncing me off the ropes, just make sure I get the point. Okay? Then, after a time, I
’
ll be as knowledgeable and as flinty as you, and together of course we
’
ll live in your—shop, isn
’
t it?—as miserable sons-of-bitches forever after.
It was due to such an advertisement and the foregoing reply, or one not unlike it, that one day in late autumn I found myself in the presence of a man I will here call Cary Grant. When I received his letter asking me to stop by and see him, I thought my name had come to him from one of the placement agencies I was dealing with: I didn
’
t ordinarily sign my name to these letters, preferring to sign them Billy Earnest or Wilbur Straightshooter, giving my address as the Waldorf Towers or the Plaza. It was only when he handed me the letter and asked,
“
Did you write this?
”
that I realized that through some grievous mistake I had signed my own name. Even prior to this I had felt thoroughly intimidated by Mr. Grant. He looked not unlike that movie man, a tall, dark, and suavely graying man with an ocher complexion, the product no doubt of many hours spent in southern suns. He wore a royal-blue suit that didn
’
t so much fit as lie against him, a soft blue button-down shirt, and an expensive-looking and brilliantly shaded maroon-and-gold four-in-hand. On his feet—and he casually kept one foot on his huge, uncluttered mahogany desk throughout the interview—he wore black, grained shoes that appeared to weigh about five pounds apiece; though I had never before been conscious of seeing a pair, I knew they were the goods:
custom-made
. He was, in brief, the kind of man who makes other men feel pale by comparison. It was a discomfort he was aware of arousing. Even before he said anything to me, he spent many moments looking me up and down, over and around, and all the time he smiled, as though I were striking in him some humorous chord and it was all he could do to restrain himself from laughter. It was a smile that had me trying to hide my scuffed-up shoes beneath my chair, brushing my bangs from my forehead, and staring uneasily at the deep, Chianti-colored carpeting. Then he handed me the letter and asked me about it. I read it over and over again, even in a groping and moronic way mouthing the words, as if I were actually having trouble appraising it as my handiwork. I was of course stalling, as I could not imagine—save for the worst: postal inspectors waiting in the wings to spirit me off for conveying obscene material through the mails—why in the world he had written me.
“
Know why I sent for you?
”
he said finally, obviously cognizant of my bewilderment.
I smiled blankly.
“
No.
”
“
Because you remind me of myself twenty years ago. Arrogant. Snotty. Got a hard-on for the world.
”
I smiled blankly.
“
Oh.
”
He paused, obviously determining the best way to proceed. He smiled that unnerving smile: he had obviously hit on the best way. He told me that if I were Hemingway I should go to Paris, live on fried potatoes and ketchup, write The Great American Novel and have done with it; but that if I wanted to go into advertising—which I think even he conceded to be a rather absurd business—I should meet that world on its own terms. He, of course, didn
’
t care a good damn whether I went into the business or not. The truth of his words was having its
effect on me. The blood was hot, constant, and throbbing in my face; the room had begun to drift away beneath me: I was stony with shame. There was an agonizingly lengthy pause now. From the comments that followed, I determined t that he must have been judging how much of my appearance was attributable to indigence and how much to affectation, and that he settled the balance on the latter.
“
For Christ
’
s sake,
”
he said.
“
Look at those shoes. They haven
’
t been polished since you bought
‘
em. And that goddam suit. Ever hear of a dry cleaner?
”
I didn
’
t do or say anything until he got to my hair, which, he said, might go just
“
swell down in the Village,
”
but would hardly inspire confidence in the Wild-root people.
“
It
’
s all part of the game,
kid
. Either play it by the: rules or forget about it.
”
—
I attempted to be master of the situation:
“
Look—lookhere—
”
but my words came out in stammers.
“
I came up here —to—in good faith—
”
“
Oh, cut the whining!
”
he said.
“
You write me a letter like this
”
—and here he rattled the air violently with my letter—
”
and you expect me to treat you like a goddam prima donna! Brother!
”
I was on my feet then, trembling. When I looked at him, I meant to ask, very evenly,
“
Just how fucking tough are you?
”
Bringing my eyes up to his with great and dramatic deliberation, I was right on the verge of speaking when he laughed; and I did, too, laughed easily and without self-consciousness. I laughed because in his laughter there was now neither cold detachment nor condescension, but the sense that we were sharing some grand joke: his laughter seemed as much directed at himself as at me. Together we roared, as people do who have carried a confrontation with each other to its distressingly uncomfortable limits and suddenly have safely passed those limits. For a moment I thought of resuming my seat. He was the first man I had met in New York who seemed neither diffident nor, quite frankly, dishonest. I liked him. But I was in those days much given to self-dramatization and believed that, once on my feet, I should leave lest he take my staying as a kind of submission and invitation to continue his abuse.
Later I was to recall that he asked, with something like concern, where and why I was going, but by then it was already too late. Before leaving I wanted to say something to him. He had so successfully intimidated me up to this point that it occurred to me he did not know the real sound of my voice. In college I had gone about with a brilliant, balding Boston-Irishman, Slattery, who was much given to a certain expression:
“
You
’
re some sack of potatoes,
you are
.
”
At the moment before turning and leaving, that is what I said to Grant. They were the weirdest words that ever issued from my mouth; the voice was not mine at all but my balding, Irish friend
’
s!
The next few days were among the longest and least comfortable of my life. No sooner had I reached the haven of my aunt
’
s couch than it occurred to me that Grant had been the city I had been seeking all along—the magnanimous city. What else, I reasoned, could he have done but hire me after subjecting me to such humiliation? Whether or not this was the case, in my mind I played out that interview over and over again, trying to inject into its slightest nuances the most preposterous import. I might be there yet, the scene having expanded itself into an O
’
Neill-like drama, had I not read in the newspapers that Steve Owen was being fired.
For months I hadn
’
t been able to read anything except advertisements. Sustaining my literary fantasy had required such fierce concentration that my energies were not in long enough supply for even cursory reading, but now, in boredom, I forced myself to read. Even then I did not at first understand what was happening to Owen. The newspapers kept using the euphemisms
“
retiring
”
and
“
resigning,
”
and it was only after I had gone to the columnists that I began to piece together the truth. When I did so, I was outraged. Owen had always maintained that defenses win football games, professional football was increasingly deferring to the forward pass as the ultimate and only weapon, and apparently Owen was being asked to step aside by men whose vision of the game proclaimed it unalterably given over to offensive techniques. These
“
men
”
were of course shadowy, never identified; but one had only to understand the childishly petulant character of the New York sportswriter (he takes every New York defeat as if he had been out there having his own face rubbed in the dirt) to know who the men were. Owen had been losing for a number of years now, and the writers had been on him. Victorious, there was something nauseatingly reprehensible in their doleful, sentimental invitations to the public to come to the Polo Grounds on Sunday to witness Owen
’
s swan song as head coach.
I would never have left the davenport that murderously damp Sunday had I not read that Frank Gifford was starting for the Giants at halfback. When I read that, my mind—as isolated minds are wont to do, offered the least stimulation—began to fabricate for itself a rather provocative little drama. I began to imagine how wonderful it would be if Gifford single-handedly devastated the Detroit Lions as a farewell present for Owen. I had had encounters with both of these men at different times in my life. In a way both had given me something, Gifford a lesson in how to live with one
’
s scars, and Owen no less than perhaps my first identity as a human being. And so that bleak, cold Sunday, I rose—to the astonishment of my aunt, I might add—from the davenport, bundled up as warmly as I could, took the commuting train to Grand Central, sought directions to the Polo Grounds, and got on the subway to the Bronx.