Pages from a Cold Island (10 page)

But I shan
’
t. In the first place, I haven
’
t for years seen any validity whatever in the Freudian voodoo and cannot read the most obvious psychological maxims without my nose plugging and wrinkling in the most exorbitant distaste. In the second place, there come moments with every writer when he yearns to address his reader familiarly and say something he constantly fights against saying. Due to a vow I made twenty-odd years ago when I was just out of college, had just taken my first job in New York City, and was living in a lonely Y.M.C.A. room, the effort will prove doubly strenuous for me. Having very little money to do the town. I spent most of my free time reading the newspapers (there were seven then!) and there was a certain sports columnist, Jimmy Cannon, who on occasion—and though I admired him immensely—used to drive me mad! In these particular columns Jimmy
’
d invite his talentless and closeted reader to step into the shoes of the mighty.

“
You are Joe DiMaggio
,
the son of an immigrant San Francisco fisherman,
”
Mr. Cannon would begin,
“
and you are the greatest center fielder who ever played in Yankee Stadium, and you are married to Marilyn Monroe, the heartthrob of a nation.
”

It goes without saying that, lying on an iron cot in a bleak Y.M.C.A. room, with three bucks in my pocket to last me until payday, I
’
d take heated umbrage with Jimmy and talk right back to him, aloud.

“
Nah, nah, Jimmy, Joe DiMaggio I ain
’
t. The greatest center fielder who ever played in Yankee Stadium I ain
’
t ever gonna be! And about as close as I
’
ll ever get to Marilyn Monroe will be to get that fouled handkerchief hidden under the clean shirts in my dresser and do a savage number on my prick while looking at the latest Life photo of Marilyn!
”

For that reason, and to this day, I
’
ve never been able to address the reader with the familiar
“
you
”
and write a line like
“
You are driving down Route 66 and you look across the wide green pastures to your right and you see the moocows grazing lazily in the sun
”
because I
’
ve invari
ably imagined my reader saying,
“
Nah, nah, Exley, I ain
’
t driving down Route 66 and I don
’
t wanna see no fucking moocows grazing lazily in the sun!
”
Be that as it may, let me say here and now, and at last put to rest my fatuous hangup, that of course those days were excessively com pounded by the most reprehensible self-pity.

And fuck
you!

One day on the Hatteras I was well into a fifth of vodka, rereading Walker Percy
’
s The Moviegoer, when I had what I thought an inspired notion. At the glass booth on the docks I charged the call to my home phone and after the usual hassle with the operator at last got through to a policeman in Panacea. Drunkenly I explained everything.

“
Conceded it sounds crazy,
”
I said.
“
Saying the guy
’
s a friend of mind and not even knowing his name. But he is, my
compari
. Look, don
’
t hang up. How big can Panacea be? Yeah, the heavy equipment business. An Italian guy. Lives right on the Gulf there, a white stucco house with a pool. Three kids, all grown, the oldest boy is up in Canada, the other an ensign in the navy, and the baby daughter Lucia is over in Florence bangin
’
some greaser—no, only kiddin
’
, she
’
s over there studyin
’
. Yeah, I can appreciate that you
’
ve had a bad storm down there and how busy you are, that
’
s what the fuck I
’
m callin
’
about. Just give me the fuckin
’
guy
’
s name and I
’
ll call
’
m. Just wanna make sure everythin
’
s okay.
”

The policeman hung up on me.

I told the operator I
’
d been cut off and got through to him again.

Sore, he said,
“
You
’
re drunk, boy, get yourself some sleep.
”

He rang off again and I made my way slowly back to the Hatteras. I drank all night and well into the morning. When I awoke later in the day, and I do not remember how I got home much less into bed, I opened my eyes once again to Mr. Walter Cronkite (it was as though he
’
d summoned me up from drunken slumber) and as I focused on the screen there leapt from among the colored shadows another image from out of the past, that of my
“
friend
”
Ms. Gloria Steinem. My days of grief ended as abruptly as they
’
d begun.

5

The Democratic primaries were over and South Dakota
’
s Senator George McGovern held a substantial enough dele gate lead to appear a first-ballot Presidential nominee at the upcoming Miami convention. In Washington the party
’
s platform and credential committees were meeting to draft a platform and entertain challenges to the seating of those delegations that did not
appear to have honored the Demo
crats
’
new guidelines for a representative corpus of women, blacks, chicanos and young voters in the proportion that they in fact existed in a state. The
“
nonpartisan
”
Women
’
s National Caucus was hovering churlishly in the wings making their demands known.

Ms. Steinem had come to town in a huff.

One of the women
’
s demands was that the convention be co-chaired by a woman (in the colossal nit-picking of their unisexually prone minds they wanted their selection called a
“
chairperson
”
); and a ghostly memo which was never put forward and which McGovern called a
“
mis
un
derstanding
”
had come to light whereby the McGovern high command had apparently suggested appeasing the women by appearing to go along fully cognizant the convention would be chaired by Larry O
’
Brien. Aides of Alabama
’
s Governor George Wallace were, among other things, telling the platform committee that the bussing of schoolchildren solely for the purpose of integration was neither financially viable, politically practical, morally right, nor in fact legal. The women
’
s caucus demanded women be granted total dominion over their reproductive means and insisted the platform adopt an
“
abortion on demand
”
clause (an astute pundit had written that al
l the McGovern claques were say
ing
“
gimme this and gimme that,
”
a far cry from John Kennedy
’
s
“
ask not what your country can do for you
”
motif) and it now appeared that the McGovern forces were backing away from this sticky issue.

Ms. Steinem wore a long-sleeved black jersey turtleneck and big round raspberry aviatrix
’
s spectacles, and though the color on my TV was poor she appeared to have abandoned the bleached blond strands which habitually fell over and triangularly framed her high cool brow. I smiled. When I had complimented her on the loveliness of her hair and asked her if she tended it herself, instead of graciously accepting it for the harmless compliment it was, she had, to my uneasiness, used the occasion to ascend her platform. A woman named Rosemary—
”
Sister Rosie,
”
she
’
d called her—was her colorist, the best in Manhattan, but in a man
’
s game Sister Rosie didn
’
t get credit for so being. Looking at her now and smiling, I
wondered if poor put-upon Rose
mary, carried round the bend by the discriminatory practices of all those fag (were these the men to whom Ms. Steinem was referring?) hair stylists in New York City, hadn
’
t finally in a swoon of oppression gone off the deep end and taken a jolly leap from the heights of the Pan Am building.

“
I love you, Gloria. I worship and adore you.
”

Directly Ms. Steinem began debasing the language by saying something to the effect that she
’
d come to Washing ton—I had a movie idea:
“
Ms. Steinem Goes to Town
”
— to join hands with her
“
black brothers and sisters.
”
Again I smiled tentatively, sadly. Did Gloria really believe that keeping company with the black Olym
pic decathlon cham
pion Rafer Johnson—
”
Shit,
”
I thought,
“
half the women in America would do the same!
”
—gave her some privileged insight into the black soul, made her a Daughter of Islam? She doubtless did and seemed not in the least to understand that when the black revolution came it would be she above all who got that splendidly milky and columnar throat slit first. In the same way William Styron so acutely has Nat take a fence post and bash in the chestnut-haired head of the lovely, betaffeted Miss Margaret Whitehead (she who above all in her young, innocent and ignorant way had inti mated a comprehension of Nat
’
s plight), there was nothing the black loathed so much as the presumption (if we could give him nothing else, he demanded the right to the unique ness of his suffering) of an intimacy with his humiliation, abuse and degradation at the hands of a white America. Obviously referring to Governor Wallace and his ilk, Gloria said that all the pressures being brought to bear on the platform committee were erupting from the right and she
’
d come to the Capitol to rectify that. Failing to do so, she implied she would wit
hhold her support from the Demo
cratic Party.

Oh, my!

Her performance was restrained to the point of being coldly mannered, brittle, arrogant, slightly nasty, and not altogether fair. Her lovely head was incapable of admitting that in the primaries Governor Wallace had taken his views to the people (which
she
certainly hadn
’
t), had been nearly assassinated and rendered paraplegic in the process, and that in fairness to the delegates he
’
d picked up his views had every right to an airing. Nor could she admit the historical reality that in any close election, which if the Democrats won (and at the gut level I knew McGovern hadn
’
t a prayer) this was certain to be, no Democrat had ever won without a heavy Roman vote in the cities and that
“
an abortion on demand
”
clause was suicidal, not to mention that there is now and wil
l always be a continuing philos
ophical and legal debate on whether or not the fetus has rights.

At the moment I could not isolate what it was— though unlike Ms. Steinem I wasn
’
t sure of anything and stood abjectly poised to admit it might be the obvious emasculatory fear—but as I had been when I
’
d last seen her I once again found myself afraid of as well as for her. Her posture was so vulnerably rigi
d that one suspected the slight
est well-placed jab would cause the collapse of her entire spinal column and that behind that moisturelessly cool and beautiful mask there wer
e harbored unspeakable griev
ances, mean furies and aborted passions, and I knew that if she represented the New Democrat, I could not in con science vote for McGovern. Since I
’
d last talked with her she
’
d apostrophized into her thinking a reverse sexism wherein she
’
d begun to elevate women to a plateau both beyond and quite apart from the concerns of men, she had equated women
’
s role in marriage with that of whores, and she appeared either to be seeking headlines (a very real possibility) or to have become tetched. And how unworthy, unmanly and self-indulgent she made me feel, with my wretchedly unbecoming grief at Edmund Wilson
’
s demise and my lunatic calls to Panacea. Her very presence was a stinging reprimand and summons to get off my ass, to cease from my unseemly jerking off, and to enlist myself in her and McGovern
’
s holy cause.

But, alas, I couldn
’
t.

From a young academic at Oberlin College I
’
d once been sent a note and a student
’
s term paper on
A Fan’s Notes
. The paper was brilliant, hilario
us and totally derog
atory. Taking as his vantage point the fact that my narrator had thrown away all of the Sunday
Time
s
save for the sports section, the student said that nobody could seriously approach a protagonist who wasn
’
t interested in
“
significant things like world events.
”
Proceeding from there, and in a wildly funny and sardonic way, the student had destroyed my narrator for what the student considered my narrator
’
s monumental self-indulgence. In his note the academic told me the boy was an electronics engineering student, had an IQ
“
off the charts,
”
and that though he wrote splendidly and the paper was obviously worth an A, how did one
“
teach
”
such people?

On my post card in reply I wrote,
“
One doesn
’
t.
”

And the discomforting thing about Ms. Steinem, and all the Steinems of the world, was her similarity to this boy: her cocksure capacity to make one feel unworthy in the face of her concerns, this haughty need to make her concerns my concerns. She reminded m
e of those students who so dili
gently perused school issues of
Time
, boldly underlining everything, and got their A
’
s in what we used to call
“
cur
rent events
”
while I had dreamt of dry-fucking cheer leaders. There was a kind of rigidly terrifying single
-
mindedness about these people which I frankly considered uneducable and I knew that, were I to save my soul, I couldn
’
t under any circumstances permit them to make their obsessions mine.

Let Ms. Steinem go to Miami, run hand-wringing and weeping up and down the aisles of Convention Hall and imagine herself caught up in historical events of great pith and moment, I had my own
“
selfish
”
griefs to allay. I would go to Talcottville, talk with the few people who had known him, and find some way to help put the ghost of Edmund Wilson on its way. Yes, I thought, let history judge whether the wiser course was to have petitioned Elizabeth I to engage the Spanish Armada in the Channel or to have wept at the bier of Shakespeare. If one could draw any consolation from Steinem
’
s troubled performance it was that she was still embarked on her
“
temporary aberration
”
of proselytizing the women
’
s gospel. She had told me that speaking at universities and what she called her
“
whole public bag
”
was merely a temporary aberration (she had used that expression three times), that her real work was writing, and that when she felt she
’
d contributed everything she could to the movement, she would go back to that real work. At the time I hadn
’
t been unkind enough to say that she
’
d better hope her temporary aberration lasted forever, but watching her forbidding performance on TV I had, if for nothing else, to be thankful that she was still in this public limbo and that we were therefore being spared her prose.

In December I
’
d interviewed Ms. Steinem at the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne in Florida. I
’
d gone to her a troubled,
“
wounded
”
man, my life a shambles. When in early September I at last accepted that
Pages from a Cold Island
, a book on which I
’
d been working for four years, was a bad book, I decided to go to Europe. With brown supermarket bags and heavy blond cord I tightly wrapped the four hundred and eighty pages of yellow second sheets that comprised the manuscript and deposited the excessively neat (with scissors I even trimmed the excess cord) package into the trunk of my gray-green Chevrolet Nova parked in the windswept sandy lot behind the hotel, where for three years it had sat in dumb anticipation, the relentless sun having baked its paint lime-white, the elements having rusted out its fenders from beneath. In stolid sadness I packed my bags, took a Shawnee Airlines dozen-passenger Beechc
raft to Nassau, a Bahamas Inter
national Airways flight to Luxembourg. Thence I flew to Rome. I
’
d never been to Europe before and wasn
’
t in fact in any shape to
go any
place—perhaps to the loony bin.

I had to go. As I
’
ve said, except on those infrequent occasions when by friends I was
“
kidnapped
”
and driven across the causeway to the Riviera Theater on the main land, I never left the island, and even these outings were disastrous. At an interval of eighteen months I had on two Saturday nights been taken to
The Godfather
and
The French Connection
and sitting among full-house weekend crowds I had understood not a word of what was taking place on the screen. It was something more unsettling than the dialogue and the understated sound tracks with which the writers and the directors had attempted to catch the idiom of characters caugh
t up in a society given over en
tirely to a sleazy verbal shorthand. What had proved so ignominious was that on both occasions I had found myself next to perfectly attuned young couples who had caught everything and had on cue roared and moaned and gone rigidly breathless throughout the films while I had sat in exasperation, tilting my head to the right and to the left, in suppliance leaning forward toward the screen, feeling as dense and unresponsive as lard and older than Methuselah; and to imagine that I, who couldn
’
t even understand a movie, was ready to leave the idyllic stillness of that room and hike jauntily on the Appian Way, stand in humbled awe before the Colosseum, or reverently explore
San Pietro in Vaticano
indicates the extent to which my book
’
s failure had deranged me. In fact, I understand in retrospect I
’
d never do anything like sightseeing in Rome. I suppose I thought if I came at last to lie retchingly drunk beneath tables of the sidewalk cafes on the Via Veneto, if I could create that ultimate torpor and sloth, those epiphanies might come. I could then flee back to Singer Island prepared to outflank the manuscript now imprisoned in the hot tomb of the Nova
’
s trunk, and thereupon deliver a
“
masterpiece.
”