Pages from a Cold Island (2 page)

2

A month and a half before, in the last week in April, I
’
d flown from Singer Island, Riviera Beach, Florida, where I
’
d made my home on and off for a decade, to Iowa City, where to the writing students at the University of Iowa
’
s prestigious Workshop I
’
d read excerpts from my new book,
Pages from a Cold Island
. The reading had gone well enough. On my return to Florida I was offered a visiting lectureship, for the fall semester only, by John Leggett, who heads the fiction section; as
Memoirs of Hecate County
was one of Wilson
’
s two attempts at sustained fiction, I was reading it with a view to imposing on the students my admiration for him—which wasn
’
t apparently as unquali
fiedly idolatrous as I had for a number of years suspected. And I was sorry. Although not nearly so sorry as that I
’
d felt compelled to accept the job in the first place.

Pages from a Cold Island
didn
’
t at all work at that heady level I desperately yearned for it to work. Including moneys owed the Internal Revenue Service, I was fifteen thousand dollars in debt. I needed a change of scene more than I cared to admit. And I
’
d accepted the job in the hope that following a four-month respite I could return to the manuscript renewed, instantly discover a way to outflank it. and attack its four hundred and eighty pages of typescript with the inspired strategems of a Caesar. I do not mean to say the book was unpublishable. All I had to do was xerox it, put it in an envelope and mail it off to my agent. My editor had died at forty-two of a heart attack in December of 1970.1 therefore had no emotional ties with any publisher, and I knew that my agent planned to submit the manuscript simultaneously to a number of publishers and that she would (rather aloofly I gathered)
“
permit
”
the highest bid
der to publish it.

Following the publication of
A Fan’s Notes
, I
’
d idly passed six months in the Village a Christopher Street at the bar of The Lion
’
s Head Ltd., a saloon frequented by writers, editors and agents, and I
’
d there picked up the jar
gon. It was axiomatic, I
’
d been assured, that the reviews of one
’
s first upped the advance price on and sold one
’
s second book and that if one had done well by the reviewers he ought with a kind of zany haste to rush into print with something new. What matter if it were a piece of crap?

“
Look at Mailer
’
s
Barbary Shore
, Styron
’
s
Set This House on Fire
.
”
If one were churlish enough to point out that Mailer himself had been pleased with
Barbary Shore
, and damn the reviewers, or that Styron
’
s second book was in fact the masterful novella
The Long March
, one was looked upon as a damp-souled literalist
childishly refusing to accommo
date one
’
s hickish mentality to what everybody at The Lion
’
s Head
“
knew.
”

Apart from my apparent obtuseness, I had advantages that allowed me to remain free from this kind of certainty. Despite some unanticipatedly generous reviews,
A Fan’s Notes
had not sold well. I
’
d made little money; my life style of lugging my own soiled sweat shirts and skivvies to the laundromat and lunching on cheeseburgers and draft beer had altered not a whit; and I hence had not been projected into an exalted milieu in which it would behoove me to print
“
things
”
to make payments on a Mark IV Continental. Because of the autobiographical and confessional character of
A Fan’s Notes
—what Edward Hoagland writing in the Sunday
Time
s
called
“
a splurging of personal history
”
—I knew from both my late editor and my agent (she told me this to prompt me into proving the experts wrong) that on those very infrequent occasions when my name came up at all I was summarily and disparagingly dismissed as having
“
shot my wad
”
(whenever I heard this I breathlessly sought sanctuary and with or without help did a savage job on my penis, afterwards minutely examining the semen for signs of
“
diminished wad
”
) and I drew perverse gratification from the knowledge of how much comfort my
not
publish
ing would give to those really peculiar people (whatever else they were interested in, it certainly wasn
’
t writing or books) who fret about such things.

After what in an introductory note to the reader in
A Fan’s Notes
I
’
d called
“
that long malaise, my life,
”
I had not published until I was in my late thirties; I was cognizant that after years of excessive drinking, three times resulting in my incarceration in insane asylums, I hadn
’
t the zest or the wit (alcoholic sieves in the cerebrum) to produce what the boys at The Lion
’
s Head called
“
a shelf; and for these various reasons I found it easy to forelay and squelch the commercial allurements and knew that all I really wanted was to produce another book, maybe two, that would be treated as kindly as the first had. When the afternoon came that from down the bar at The Lion
’
s Head I overheard,
“
Of course, had Kerouac lived in the Twenties he
’
d have been Gertrude Stein,
”
I knew it was time to pack the trunk of my Nova and head its fluttering six cylinders southward. I
’
d chosen to go back to Singer Island. Moreover, despite my heavy indebtedness, the fact that
Pages from a Cold Island
wasn
’
t succeeding, and that by the owner, Big Daddy, I
’
d been cut off from my bar tab at the hotel where I was living (truly
“
the unkindest cut of all
”
), I very much liked my life on Singer Island and dwelt in that oddly euphoric languor of a man with no place but up to go.

On my return to the island from my reading at Iowa, May had come and with it summer
’
s relentlessly sunny squalor; but neither high heat nor oppressive moisture is noteworthy in southern Florida at that time of year. Those who make their livings there say,
“
Hot? You call this hot? Wait
’
ll it really gets hot!
”
They lie. In my hometown, Water-town, N.Y., we say to February sojour
n
ers:
“
Snow? You call this snow? Wait
’
ll it
really
starts snowing!
”
In either case it is a balming of one
’
s predicament, a coming to terms with a milieu one has chosen for himself. Or from which one is unable to escape. Most of us seemed helpless to flee the island.

Toni was one of the hotel
’
s regulars. Once her father wanted to take her son from her and in his affidavit alleged that the island was a
“
shabby resort area, the hub of Palm Beach County
’
s drug culture, and a hothouse of whoredom, practiced both formally and informally.
”
Toni was obsessed with the Kennedys (she told me President Kennedy didn
’
t die in Dallas—
”
That
’
s why the fucking casket was closed!
”
—but for months after his shooting lingered at a heavily guarded ranch in Twitty, Texas) and like most dimwits she armored her obtuseness with a mail of arrogance, rudeness and indignation. When, eyes coruscated with the lesions of
“
false
”
accusations, and for what she was sure would be my outraged verdict, she presented me with her copy of the affidavit, I not only laughed loudly but allowed that her father
’
s attorney seemed a strikingly deft opponent, one that, were I a lawyer, I
’
d as soon not take on.

“
Not only has he a nice literary flair,
”
I said,
“
but he has seized our Elysian little sandbox
with uncanny suc
cinctness.
”

“
Fuck you, Exley,
”
Toni said.

She didn
’
t speak to me for two weeks, at which time she rushed into the downstairs bar and gave it to me as incontrovertible fact that—for reasons she never specified —Jackie and Ari Onassis had extended the legal fees to defend sweet Charlie Manson and his three demure cohorts.

“
It
’
s the fucking truth,
”
Toni assured me.

One shouldn
’
t have teased Toni (where did she get this stuff?
The National Enquirer!
Midnight
?
); and in fairness to her desire to keep her son with her, the island—save for our block. Beach Court—was inhabited by respectable middle-and upper-middle-class families. From left to right facing the sea, Beach Court housed the editorial and business offices of
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
; the Island Beauty Salon; a Quick Stop grocerette (open 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.); Schneider
’
s Orange Tree and Beer Barrel (hamburgers served on one side of the Western-type swinging doors, beer and win
e on the other); the Surf Apart
ments (cheap); and the Seaview Hotel, from where I wrote and where beneath me in the Islander Room the nightly floor show featured a comic named Mother Tom and two dancers (variously named Rosa Bella, Harlowe Angel, Sunny Day, Burning Embers, Miss Charlie, Hallow Ween, Honey Hush, Pandora
’
s Box, et al., they came and went) who removed their gowns to the taped music of Aquarius, permitting lonely salesmen and rowdy cowhands in from Pahokee and the Glades to see the G-strings jammed up their raunchy bums.

Outside, our block was commandeered by the kids. All orange-brown from the sun, the girls wore their hair long and parted in the middle—the sun-bleached strands fell in such a way that by contrast
all their brows appeared minia
ture sepia pyramids—and went for weeks in nothing but bikinis displaying smooth flat tummies; and the equally long-haired boys went shirtless, flexing their youthful biceps, their only apparel faded Levis jaggily cut off with pinking shears at the thigh. On their wrists they sported Spiro Agnew watches, around their necks love beads. They leaned against the backs of cars facing the ocean; they offered an up-yours finger to those they had pronominated The Citizens or The Sillies who cruised by and stared in audacious disgust or dismay at them; they drank Busch beer from cans, held in insulated styrofoam containers; smoked pot chased with Boone
’
s Farm apple wine; they popped their pills. For long periods of time they closed their eyes against the relentless sun, opening them to find that all the world was as seen through gauze; now and then they rose from their lethar
gy and walked across to the out
door tennis and volley and basketball courts that separated our block from the beaches, sometimes for a swim going all the way to the sea. Frequently they went up into the apartments above the stores or drove to isolated Airport Beach at the north end of the island where—in my grievous envy I wanted not to believe it, but it was true, true—they fucked and sucked (could I with scrupulosity say
“
made love
”
?) They did not give the finger to me.

When at midmorning I went for the New York
Time
s
and
Daily News
, they said hello, with no detectable respect, with in fact an unmistakable irony. Nevertheless, they did say hello. I was too oldl but I had abandoned skivvy shorts and deodorants and my bare feet and bermudas were as dirty as theirs, my face often as unshaven. Perhaps they housed pity for me, taking me for an old fool or a drooling lecher yearning to be at one with them; perhaps with that reservation dictated by the awful division of our ages they accepted me as a kindred spirit who knew that Spiro Agnew was indeed a Mickey M
ouse whose proximity—the prover
bial heartbeat—to the Oval Office ought by any measure to have made not only the kids but an entire populace drop out. It would flatter me to think they saw me in this latter light. With Beckett (the literary not the historical) I hold it as axiomatic that rather than a deadly sin torpor and sloth comprise a spiritual condition insulating one from life
’
s crippling hurts called disenchantments, a condition out of which there stands revealed, finally, the heart
’
s epiphanies.
I’d
chosen—gone back to—Singer Island because I once again longed to see the world through gauze and to draw sustenance from the closeness of those alienated youth on the hot bright streets beneath me.

By ten when I arrived with the newspapers at the Beer Barrel next-door, having always to cut a bold swath through the surly kids to get to the door, I
’
d already been up for hours. For months past I had out of habit risen at six, had put the aluminum kettle on the hot plate for my Tasters Choice instant coffee, had vigorously brushed my teeth (invariably to the threshold of emission from the previous evening
’
s booze), and had sat at the maple-stained thirty
-
two-by-eighty-inch door I
’
d fashioned into a desk. On its gleaming surface, which with a kind of demented lust I constantly waxed with Lemon Pledge, there was nothing save a cheap high-intensity Japanese desk lamp, two ball point pens, the Random House unabridged dictionary, and stacked as neatly as if it were a freshly unwrapped and unsullied ream of yellow second sheets the manuscript of
Pages from a Cold Island
.