Exley, page 19
Doctor’s Notes (Entry 19, Part 2)
The wee hours of the morning, and I am furious and am furiously smoking (cigarettes) for the first time in years and years. If I die of lung cancer, I shall blame M. Why am I smoking? Why shall I blame M.? Why am I furious? Because on page 142, I find myself in Exley’s book. Not myself, rather, but my name; not my real name, rather, but the name M. has given me. The name M. has given me is not the name of a real character in the book or a real person in this Exley’s life; rather, it is the nickname he gives his—I can barely bear to write these words, Notes!—male pudendum. Exley claims this is the French word for the male pudendum. In this he is incorrect, of course: the proper French term for the male pudendum is le pénis. But still. But still. As Exley himself would say, for Christ’s sake! This is an unacceptable way for a patient to treat his mental health professional, no matter how ill the patient. I pledge to myself to teach M. this lesson immediately before taking him to the public memorial service on the Public Square, where I will teach him another lesson. But between now and then, I will read the rest of A Fan’s Notes. Strangely, I am looking forward to it. Strangely, now that I know the part of the book—the part of the book and, indeed, the part of the male anatomy—that M. has used to name me, the more enraged I am, and the more enraged I am—the more pissed off I get—the more the book speaks to me, the more it seems to be just as much about me as it is about Exley.
Part Four
Things I Learned from My Dad, Who Learned Them from Exley (Lesson 4: Shame: Don’t Tell Your Mom)
It was another Sunday. This was when I was probably seven years old, when I was still in the grade someone my age was supposed to be in, still only reading books someone my age was supposed to read. Mother was sitting at the kitchen counter, reading stuff for work. I was sitting next to her, reading the Sunday comics. My dad came in from the living room, jingling his keys. “I think I’ll take Miller to the zoo today,” he said.
“The zoo?” I said. I mean, I knew what a zoo was. I knew there was one right in town. I’d been to it before, with my preschool class. I’d been to it with Mother, too. It was fun when I went with my class. When I went with Mother, everything was wrong. The polar bear looked sick. The monkeys had some sort of skin problem, or at least they kept eating their skin and then gagging on it. There seemed to be more concrete in the pens than when I’d been with my class. The zebras stank so bad that Mother and I had to hold our noses until we got to the reptile house, where all the lizards were sleeping except for the one that was dead. When we got back in the car, Mother seemed to be trying hard not to say something. “Well, that was fun,” she’d finally said.
“Yes,” my dad said. “The zoo.”
“Really?” I said. We’d come back from eating breakfast at the Crystal not fifteen minutes earlier, and during breakfast my dad hadn’t asked me if I’d wanted to go to the zoo or anything like that.
“Really?” Mother said to my dad.
“Really,” my dad said. He looked her right in the eyes when he said this. She looked back at him, then back down at her work.
“That sounds like a nice idea,” Mother said. “I can’t wait to hear all about it when you get home.”
“Good,” my dad said. His lips were set close together. He nodded at me in a determined way. “Let’s go, bud,” he said.
We went, but not to the zoo. I knew that when we got to Factory Street and my dad pulled to the curb and parked.
“This isn’t the zoo,” I said.
“Don’t tell your mom,” my dad said.
My dad got out of the car, and I did, too. We stood there for a while. There were two bars right next to each other. I didn’t know they were bars then but I know that now. One was called C.’s; the other, M.’s. My dad seemed to be trying to figure out which one we wanted to go into. We stood there for a long time. We might still be standing there if an ambulance hadn’t pulled up in front of our car. The ambulance guys jumped out of the ambulance with their gear and sprinted into C.’s.
“Why don’t we go into M.’s,” my dad said. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what M.’s was or why we would want to go into it at all. The place had windows, but they were black, or at least darker than normal windows, and I couldn’t see inside. My dad took my hand, and we walked to the door. He opened it with one hand and gently pushed me inside with the other.
The place wasn’t as dark as the windows, but it was noisy. There was music playing from somewhere. The music was loud and angry. It sounded like it sounded when someone stuck something they weren’t supposed to into one of the machines in metal shop. My dad and I just stood there until the song, or whatever it was, ended. Finally it did. We walked to the bar. There were stools, unlike at the Crystal. My dad picked me up and put me on one of the stools and then sat on the next one to the left. There were a couple of empty stools to my dad’s left. There were a couple of empty stools to my right. Then there were two guys. They were wearing orange ski hats and had patchy beards. They looked older than my dad: there was white in their beards, and the hats had black stains on them. The guys didn’t seem to notice us at first. They were drinking bottles of Genny Light—I remember seeing the label—and looking at one of the televisions. There were two televisions, one above each corner of the bar. The two guys were watching the TV to the right. I couldn’t see what was on it, although I heard voices coming from it. And then another song started playing, with a clang, and someone in the bar shouted. The voice came from behind me. I turned and saw two guys throwing darts at a board. And behind them I saw what looked like a small old lady sitting by herself at a table, a juice glass on the table in front of her.
“You guys got IDs?” a woman’s voice said. I turned back around and saw a woman standing on the other side of the bar. She was around my dad’s age. Her hair came down to her shoulders, where it flipped out, making the letter J on one side, and the backward letter J on the other. She was wearing a white shirt with no sleeves even though it was almost Thanksgiving. Outside, it felt like it; inside, it was warm. The woman had her hands on the bar and was looking at us seriously. I glanced over at my dad. He had a nervous expression on his face. My dad’s coat was off his shoulders and halfway down his arms. It was like he was trying to take it off and it got stuck on his elbows.
Then the woman started cracking up. “I’m just messin’ with ya,” she said. My dad smiled at her and let his coat slide to his hands. He stood up a little, put his coat on the barstool seat, then sat down on it. I kept my coat on. She asked my dad what he wanted to drink. “Genny Light,” he said.
“Right,” the woman said. She reached below the bar, came up with a can, opened it, then handed my dad the beer. My dad took it, drank it in one drink, then raised his finger for another one. The woman got it, then asked me, “What about you, little guy?” I knew she was asking what I wanted to drink. I looked at my dad to see if it was OK if I had strawberry milk. That’s what I normally drank on special occasions, but I couldn’t tell if this was one or not. But my dad wasn’t paying attention. He was squinting at the TV on his side of the bar; then he turned around and looked at the rest of the bar. I turned around, too, to see what he was seeing.
“Pretty interesting, huh?” the woman said to me, then waved her arm at everything in the room. She pronounced “interesting” like this: “innerrestin’.” That was the way some people in Watertown talked. Mother would sometimes tell stories about going to the supermarket, or stories about work, and when she’d do the voices of people who were in the stories, she’d use more r’s and n’s and fewer g’s than she would normally use.
I shot my dad another quick look, but he was back to squinting at the TV and not paying attention to me. So I said to the woman, “I’ll have strawberry milk, please.”
She gave me a disappointed look. “Uh-oh,” she said. She ducked underneath the bar again, came up empty handed, then raised her index finger and disappeared into a room off to the right that I hadn’t noticed before.
“The Crystal closed today, Tom?” one of the guys in ski hats asked my dad. I knew the guy wasn’t really wondering if the Crystal was closed. I knew he was wondering why my dad was here and not there. I was wondering the same thing.
“The Crystal is not closed today or any other Sunday, D.,” my dad said, still looking around the bar.
“What the fuck?” one of the dart throwers said, loud enough to be heard over the music, and the other one laughed like this: “Heh-heh-heh.” Then suddenly they were standing next to my dad and I could see them better. One of them was black; the other was white. They both had buzz cuts; besides me, they were the youngest guys in the bar. They were soldiers. I knew that from the buzz cuts and because you never see a white guy and a black guy in Watertown hanging out together unless they’re soldiers. The white guy was taller than the black guy. He put his hands on the bar and leaned over it and looked toward the room where the woman had gone. Then, still leaning over the bar, he reached over and under the bar, and just then the woman came back. She had a carton of milk, but no syrup. She saw the white guy and scowled at him, and the white guy saw her scowl at him but didn’t move. The black guy backed away from the white guy; he put his hands out, palms up, and shook his head and said, “What the fuck?”
“I just wanted to save you the trip,” the white guy said to the woman.
“Some trip,” the woman said. But she was smiling at him. She swatted at his hand. “Yow!” he said, and pulled it back and shook it like he’d slammed it in the car door. The woman laughed at that. She leaned over. When she straightened up, she wasn’t holding the milk carton anymore, but she was holding two Bud Lights. She put them on the bar, and the white guy took one and handed the other one to the black guy, who was back standing at the bar, next to the white guy, who was standing next to my dad. Only then did the white guy notice my dad. My dad hadn’t noticed him, I don’t think. He was staring nervously at the TV. I say “nervously” because his legs were bouncing up and down on the bottom part of the stool. “Yo,” the white guy said to my dad. My dad nodded, but barely. The white guy mimicked the nod and then turned to the black guy and kept mimicking it. The black guy said, “Heh-heh-heh.” I wanted to leave, right then. I didn’t even care about the strawberry milk anymore.
“Dad,” I said.
“It isn’t even the Giants game,” my dad said. He got up, walked behind the two guys with ski hats, looked at their TV, and then came back to his stool. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, “where’s the Giants game?”
“Huh?” I said. I looked at the TV closest to us. There was football on it: a bunch of guys in silver uniforms hitting a bunch of guys in green. I knew football games were on Sunday, because the kids in my class talked on Monday about the games they’d seen on TV the day before. But we almost never watched the games at home. Mother let me and my dad go to the Crystal first thing on Sunday morning. After breakfast he walked me home; then he went back to the Crystal to watch football. I knew that, because every time my dad went back out again, Mother told him, “Enjoy your game.” But Mother usually didn’t let me watch football at home. She kept me busy. We went to the movies, we went to the mall, we played board games, we raked or shoveled, until my dad came home, sometime after seven, and Mother asked, “Did you enjoy your game?” and then never listened to the answer as he told me whether he had or hadn’t enjoyed it.
“You wanna watch the Giants, Tom, you should go to the Crystal,” said the other ski-hatted guy.
“Jesus H. Keeriiisst, R., normally I’d like that,” my dad said. “But if someone came looking for me today, they’d look in the Crystal. And today, I’ve got my son with me. And we don’t want to be found, do we, Miller?”
I knew then why we weren’t at the Crystal and I also knew who the “someone” my dad didn’t want to find us was. But still, I wasn’t happy, maybe because my dad didn’t seem happy. He was drumming his fingers on the bar now and looking at the bartender, who was talking to the soldiers.
“Can we go?” I said.
“Not yet,” my dad said.
“Laura,” the white guy said.
“Laurel,” she said. She put her hands on her hips and pouted.
“Laurel,” he said. He looked at her. Then he looked at the black guy. Then back at Laurel. “Me and Mario here have a bet,” he said. “How much do you weigh?”
“How much do you think?”
“Mario here says one fifty.”
“One fifty!” Laurel howled. I didn’t blame her. Even I knew that she didn’t weigh that much. But Mario didn’t seem to care. He just shrugged and started watching the TV that didn’t have the Giants on.
“I know,” the white guy said. “He’s a retard. I say one ten.”
“One twenty-five,” Laurel said.
“Get the fuck out of here,” the white guy said. “You don’t weigh that much.”
“And I lost ten pounds since my kid was born,” Laurel said.
“You hear that?” the white guy asked Mario. Mario turned away from the TV and back to the white guy. “You know who we should call . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence, but the white guy nodded. “Laurel,” he said, “can we possibly, please, if you’d be so kind, take a look at your phone book?” He pointed his beer bottle in the direction of the phone book, which was leaning against the mirror behind Laurel. She picked it up and threw it at him. “Oof,” he said, and then he made a big deal of holding and then dropping it and holding and dropping it, before he finally put the phone book on the bar, opened it, and started flipping pages.
“Excuse me,” my dad said to Laurel. She came over to us, shaking her head and smiling. “Could you turn this TV to the Giants game?”
“Sure thing,” she said. She grabbed a big remote control off the bar and pointed it at the TV and a different game came on. This one had a bunch of guys in blue uniforms hitting a bunch of guys in red. “That the one?” Laurel said. My dad nodded. “You want another Genny?” she said. She pronounced it “Jinny.” My dad nodded. She opened another can and handed it to him. My dad drank the beer down in one gulp. He slid the can across the bar; Laurel took it, chucked it in the garbage, opened another one, and handed it to my dad. He drank that beer in one gulp, too. I was about to ask him again if we could go, but Laurel said, “I forgot your milk! We don’t have no syrup, though.”
“That’s OK,” I said. I meant that I didn’t want any milk after all. But Laurel didn’t get that and poured me a glass of plain milk. I thanked her, then turned to talk to my dad again, but he wasn’t on his stool. I turned even further and saw that he was standing in the middle of the room. He was hunched over a little and his hands were on his thighs and he was watching the TV with that happy, crazed look you get on your face when you know something really good is going to happen. My dad’s right leg started bouncing, like he needed to go to the bathroom or was about to start dancing. But he didn’t do either of those things. Instead, he stood up straight, turned, and jogged a few steps to his right. The music had stopped; there was no noise in the bar except for the people on the TV and the two soldiers arguing about the phone book. My dad jogged a few more steps, his eyes on the TV the entire time. “B. is going in motion,” my dad yelled—barked, really. I hadn’t read A Fan’s Notes at this point, of course, and so I didn’t know then that my dad was doing what Exley did in his book and I guess in his life, too: every Sunday, Exley would go to the New Parrot and not so much watch the Giants game as act it out. But still, I could figure out pretty much what my dad was up to: he was pretending to be one of the football players on TV, and he was also pretending to be one of the TV announcers telling us about one of the football players on TV. I didn’t know why my dad was doing it, but I knew that I was about to be embarrassed. “Hut, hut, hut!” my dad yelled, then sprinted toward the back of the bar, where the dartboard was. He really was sprinting, too: I could hear the huff and whine of his breathing. For the first time, I noticed there was another TV on that wall, too: it also had the Giants game on, and my dad was watching it as he ran right into the wall, just to the left of the dartboard. When he hit it, he didn’t run into it accidentally, but instead he left his feet and crashed into it on purpose with his left shoulder, like he was trying to hurt the wall, or his shoulder, or both. My dad hit the wall so hard that he bounced back a little, toward the center of the room, his eyes wide and angry and glaring at the TV. “Where is the fucking flag!” he screeched. Then my dad was running again, back toward me. Which is when I turned around in my stool and faced Laurel. Because I couldn’t watch. Please sit down, I told my dad in my head. But he wasn’t sitting down. I could see Laurel looking at him. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and her eyes were following him back and forth across the room. I wondered if she was going to do something, like kick him out. I looked at the two guys with buzz cuts. They weren’t paying attention to my dad, yet. Mario pushed the white guy away from the phone book and said, “I told you, it starts with a C, not an S.” I heard my dad bang into something behind me, and then I heard him yell, from some distant spot in the bar, “Cheer, you goofies, he’s still on his feet!” Laurel opened her mouth to say something, then closed it; she turned toward the two soldiers to see if they were seeing what she was seeing. The white guy was paying attention now. He was staring at my dad and had a confused, angry look on his face. I could see him mouth the words, What the fuck? and he took a step toward my dad. I was about to get off my stool, walk over, snatch the remote off the bar, and change the channel, when I heard the guy on the TV and my dad yell, “Touchdown!” at the same time. I turned and saw my dad lying on the floor, on his stomach. His arms were stretched out in front of him, his hands together like he was holding on to the football; then he dropped whatever he was supposed to be holding on to, and put his hands and arms straight out and screamed, to the floor, “Oh, Jesus, B. did it! Really good, really swell!” My dad then started pumping his arms and kicking his legs—he looked like someone learning to swim on dry land—and at the same time he was making noises that were closer to the sounds babies make when they’re really happy than they were to actual words.
