Last Notes from Home (17 page)
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Authors: Frederick Exley
Rising to my feet, slightly inebriated, I assumed the offensive center’s stance and tried to tell Robin what had happened at Auburn. The winds precluded our even trying our passing game, which was great. The water was ankle deep, so running the ends would have been blatant wantonness; even off-tackle plays turned out to be reckless shilly-shallying. In the end, losing 6-0, we drove downfield “right off the cheeks of my ass.” Slapping my right haunch, I explained to Robin that that was the “one hole,” my left haunch the “two hole” and that we marched down the field never varying from those two holes. “You know, Robin, the shortest distance between two points.” In the huddle at their one, our quarterback, Bill Reynolds—”he’s still a good friend and a hotshot trial lawyer in Buffalo”—called a forty-one on hut, and I said to myself, “No, no, no! Jesus, no, Bill. They’re going to throw their linebackers and entire secondary into those two holes.” And I was right. Snapping the ball, I just veered to my right, the “one hole,” taking as many guys as I could any way I could. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Joe Guardino break two tackles, slip past my right hip and into the end zone. Then I went to the ground and when I looked up I saw the referee throwing a white flag at my knees, grabbing his right wrist with his left hand and beginning to pump his right arm fiercely up and down.
“That’s it, Robin. We blanked the rest of the teams on our schedule, Oswego, Massena—they came down undefeated with an all-state halfback, Gilbert “Gibby” Granger—Onondaga Valley of Syracuse, and Lackawanna of Buffalo.”
“So every time you go straight, you’re making penance for a mistake you made in a dumb football game thirty years ago. Jesus, Ex!”
“Not at all.”
“If that’s not true, when you go on the wagon and start walking, you invoke some mental image of this coach that sustains you?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“That’s easy. When I’m walking, I remember the coach chasing us up the street-lighted boulevard and snapping our asses with his belt. You see, Robin, he was a teacher in the true sense of the word in that he taught us all we could be someone we never thought we could be.”
“Jesus, Exley, I swear you make me want to puke.”
6
If one is as amoral as I, it is little wonder that my best friend in the Bay was—1*11 call him Toby Farquarson HE, for he looks like nothing so much as a Toby Farquarson m. Toby seemed so to symbolize, nay, epitomize that younger revolutionary generation relentlessly committed (armed conflict if necessary) to a confrontation with the Establishment, that from the moment I learned who and what he was, Toby never ceased riveting my attention, though even I was astonished that he’d shown up at the Brigadier’s funeral. Toby’s revolution rose up from some dark excessively hurt and grieving place within himself, and his sometimes violent “cause” was executed in behalf of no one,
absolutely no one,
but Toby Farquarson III. Shortly after we met, when the front pages of every newspaper in America and Walter Cronkite and brethren were rendering us comatose (who needs Serax?) with that stultifying fairy tale “about” Ms. Patty Hearst, “about” that pompous barrister Mr. F. Lee Bailey (I could have given that emaciated poor little rich girl a better defense than he!), “about” Bill and Emily Harris and their salvaging of the Symbionese Liberation Army, I somewhat guardedly asked Toby what he thought of the entire business. Here I couldn’t resist a wry smile.
“From a professional’s point of view?”
We were in the Adirondacks on a snow-splotched dirt road the other side of Harrisville, one that ran by Totem Camp where the upstate affluent had used to unload their bothersome kids during the ten-week summer recess, a camp once owned by my twenty-three-years-dead high school football and basketball coach (how all these upstate locales conspire to haunt and close me in). In his deep blue leather bucket seat Toby was at the rich-looking polished wooden wheel of his sixteen-thousand-dollar 1972 Aston Martin DBS. Toby had dual points on the distributor; had added a high-output coil, modified the manifold to get exhaust in and out as quickly as possible, changed the gear ratio and cam shaft to give the vehicle a better “lift,” and bolted lead weights to the frame. With these modifications Toby claimed the car would cruise at 150 miles per hour and that no trooper in New York State could even have the Ass, as he called it, in the range of the trooper’s vision after a chase of a paltry five miles. When I responded I didn’t much care for cruising at 150 miles per hour and asked how he evaded roadblocks, Toby said he never did anything “naughty” at a location where his route of flight wasn’t protected by at least a half dozen side roads, adding that he knew the precise destination of every one of these roads and the precise speed at which he could travel them.
“Still, Toby, the Ass has absolutely to be the most watched and scrutinized vehicle in upstate New York. Don’t you think it a rather ostentatious car for a rising young man in your line of work?”
“Jesus, Exley, sometimes I think you’re as dumb as the troopers! Only a state policeman would be thick-skulled enough to be looking for the Ass.”
As he said this we were traveling Route 12 upriver to Clayton and passing a weather-beaten barn-red farmhouse. In the yard stood an old wooden spinning wheel and an antique wooden butter churn. In front of these a black half-inch pipe had been driven into the yard, and to the top of the pipe was attached a prepainted red-on-white
for sale
sign of the kind bought in a five-and-dime. From the odd location of the sign one couldn’t understand if the antiques or the farm and the whole kit and caboodle were being offered up for one’s consideration. A 1970 green Ford half-ton pickup truck, all of its fenders battered and rusty, sat in the cindered drive. Toby now pointed at it.
“I might even use that. Afterward I might—I say, /
might
—drive up to the Schine Inn in Massena, put it in the parking lot in the rear, go through the back door, stroll as pretty as you fucking please through the lobby, step out the front door and into an Impala or Lincoln or Caddie next to a perfectly proper businessman—I have a few who owe me, baby” (probably men for whom he’d torched businesses, poor bastards!) “and get my ass royally chauffeured to Platts-burg or Rouse’s Point or Ogdensburg where maybe, that is,
fucking maybe,
I might move in with a lovely half-breed nurse of my acquaintance, or with a fifty-two-year-old widow who likes to mama me, or maybe even with the mayor’s wife. After a week or ten days of lolling about getting my cock sucked, I’d have my Iroquois maiden, my fifty-two-year-old mama, or His Excellency’s wife drive me home.”
“And where the hell is
that
?”
“Hey, man, we got a bargain. Remember?”
This was true. Our deal was that if Toby were ever in trouble, no matter how desperately so, he’d never seek refuge in the old lady’s house. He’d never tell me of any of his capers on which the statute of limitations hadn’t expired. Above all, Toby would never tell me of anything he had on the drawing board. My part of the bargain was simple. I would never probe him about that mysterious Shangri-la he called, for whatever reason, “home.”
On the day we were on the dirt road cruising at seventy further up into the mountains, the early April snow melting and rendering the road soupy in spots, the lovely tall pines so encroaching our passage we seemed to be moving cramped between high stunning green cliffs, on the day I sought Toby’s opinion of
l’
affaire Hearst,
we were on one of Toby’s chives. Every ten days to two weeks he’d walk through the front door, charmingly salute the old lady (she thought him “a nice guy”), ascend the stairs to my attic studio, inquire if I weren’t sick of working on
Pages from a Dum-dum Island,
and ask if I wouldn’t like to take a drive. Invariably I said I was indeed sick of Dum-dum Island and would indeed like to go for a drive.
These drives always carried with them a delicious forbidden tension. During them Toby never talked save when, as in the case of Patty Hearst, I initiated the conversation. Toby never talked but his eyes were everywhere. On these drives I got to know my home state almost as well as Toby. We’d go as far north as Malone (where my father was born), to Geneseo, south of Rochester in the west, southeast in the Mohawk Valley to Gloversville, to Waverly on the southern tier. Toby always drove on back roads through New York State towns which in my mid-forties I’d never known existed. It was as if we were somehow moving through a dream or nightmare of endless Thornton Wilder
Our Towns.
Whether Toby needed gas or not, he stopped at isolated gas stations, bought a Coke, some peanut butter-cheese crackers, and a Hershey bar with almonds, and struck up a conversation with the grease monkey.
“Who’s the genius who decided to stick fuel pumps in this godforsaken place?”
If a cocky and indignant attendant snapped back, “Don’t worry yourself, fella, about what goes into that register,” I always moaned and thought,
“That poor bastard.”
On arriving back in the Bay, Toby would always empty the glove compartment and give me piles of peanut butter-cheese sandwiches and Hershey bars with almonds. He told me I could give them to the old lady or throw them into the garbage as I saw fit.
In Waverly or Gloversville Toby’d abruptly brake the Ass in front of the local bank, histrionically slam the heel of the palm of his hand against his forehead, and with grotesque and laughable sincerity explain he’d offered to buy dinner that night but had only two one-hundred-dollar bills on him. He had to get them changed as the owners of these “shitkicker eateries” were always rendered epileptic at the sight of a C-note. When I baited him, as I invariably did, by saying I had plenty of smaller bills, Toby always replied with feigned outrage that he’d invited me and would goddamn well observe the proprieties by playing host. In his observation of life’s amenities, Toby was truly wondrous to behold.
I had Toby’s modus operandi down pat. He’d never go near a bank on a busy day, Monday or Friday. He was strictly a Tuesday-to-Thursday man and he’d never change these hundreds save at slow hours in the morning and between 1:30 and 2:30 in the afternoon. To break two hundred-dollar bills into ten twenties never took him less than fifteen minutes, sometimes a half hour, occasionally even longer. When on his return I asked, as I also habitually did, if the cashier were a slow counter, one of those unfortunate souls who reads with his lips, Toby always roaringly gave his ritualistic reply—one cockamamie tale or another.
“My god, no. There wasn’t anyone in there but this uglie-buglie skinny four-eyed nineteen-year-old. Not bad boobs, a rather curiosity-arousing ass. I felt sorry for her, started making with the palaver, and turned on the charm. Within five minutes the pathetic creature wanted my cock in her mouth”—right hand off the wheel and raised Boy Scout fashion: Toby the Good making vows to a jury—”so badly her salivary glands were pumping like the pistons on the Ass. She’s been married six months to little Jimmy Thaxton who works down the street in the hardware store.
They’re saving up for a down payment on a split-level. She showed me this wretched little costume jewelry wedding band. It made me want to weep, Exley. I almost came out, slid under the Ass, grabbed the magnetic box I’ve got built into a lead weight, and gave her one of those thousand-dollar diamond-inlaid white gold bands. I might have, too, had not her salivary secretions become so pronounced the spit was leaking all over her funny little chin. Imagine, Exley! Six months married to little Jimmy Thaxton down there in Scrooge’s pots-and-pans emporium and she wants to blow me! What the hell are these kids up to today? And can’t any of these young bucks take care of their child brides? I mean, if s sad,
really sad,
but kind of nauseating! You know what I mean?”
7
Toby Farquarson III was indignant. As I say, when Toby Farquarson III became indignant at the absence of morals in the modern world, he was astounding to behold. And for all I knew the cashier had been a haggard doddering spinsterish seventy. What I did know was that when it was to his advantage, Toby had the charm and boldness to initiate and perpetuate conversations with all manner of people, and that with cashiers he would assuredly be con-vivially chatting away and listening with half a cerebrum, the other half being utterly devoted to a relentless scrutiny of every nook and cranny of the bank. Toby was never more outraged than at my having the dense audacity to introduce Patty Hearst into the chatter of one of those stealthy searches he called “drives.” It was rather as if I’d condemned the entire medical profession for the proverbial solitary quack who leaves a scalpel where the appendix had been. That sick clamp-toothed smile which always somewhat unnerved me froze upon Toby’s countenance. Then, as if he abruptly realized I was the only one in the world to whom he confided (with others he claimed it was “making palaver”), he unclinched his teeth, opened his mouth cavernously, and began to roar.
“You goddamn fool! You goddamn fool!
Were there any justice Hearst shoulda got burned to a cinder with the rest of that Moo-moo Liberation Group in that dump in LA. What do those meatballs know about freedom? You know who’s free?—
you horse’s ass! I’m free!
That’s because I work alone—the same as you do, baby. I mean, we’re both fucking paranoid psychopaths. All writers are! The only difference between me and you guys, you ain’t got the balls to shove a sawed-off shotgun in a bank manager’s face. Can you imagine taking that drippy-nosed teeny-bopper Hearst on a fucking bank job? Sheer lunacy! That’d be as irresponsible as putting your boxer Killer behind the wheel of the Ass. And the fucking FBI? Who can ever take those clowns seriously again? You know—and I’m not shitting you, Exley—a few months back I actually thought seriously of going to whatsiz-whozit—you know, Hoover’s replacement—
Kelley!
—and telling him that for a hundred big ones I’d find Hearst and the Harrises within six weeks and bring them in or take my twelve-gauge, pop in some lovely double-aught buck, and off their fucking skulls. Yeah, I’d’a found ‘em in six weeks and I don’t even know the fucking West Coast. And I’d’a offed them too! Offed them for the magnitude of their imbecility. You know, the way the parents of that Betty Lou Schlock wanted to pull the plug on that lump of protoplasm down in Jersey?”
“Karen Ann Quinlan,” I said.
“Incidentally, writer man, the way Ms. Karen Ann got to be mush was mixing alcohol with too many of those funny pills you keep mooching from me! And you know what’s so wildly ironical—
farcical?.
From what we now know about that prick J. Edgar, he’d of probably given me a contract for a fucking hundred grand!”