A Fan's Notes Read Free

beneath me, a place with elm trees and church towers and bone-clean streets; sitting at the bar, the city could be thought of as a place remembered, and remembered as if from a great distance.
    This distance was important to me. For a long time I had been unable to engage my home town with any degree of openness. What friends I had had were married, raising families, and had locked themselves, ever so tightly, behind their neat-trimmed lawns and white clapboard houses, their children cute, their wives sexless and anxious, my friends plotting their next moves to achieve the Black River Valley Club, never asking themselves what, if they achieved that—the town ’ s most venerable institution—could possibly be left for them. My friends and I had long proved an embarrassment to one another; I embarrassing them because I drank too much, was unreliable in my debts and working habits, and had been “ hospitalized ” a number of times; I embarrassed because they were. We never stopped each other on the streets without, eyes avoiding mine, their patronizing me with queries about my health. It was distressing because there was a kind of gloating—undoubtedly a good deal imagined on my part—in these encounters, as though they were telling me that getting myself proclaimed mad and dragged away a number of times was only a childish and petulant refusal to accept their way of life as the right way, that in seeking some other way I had been assuming a courage and superiority I hadn ’ t possessed. After a time these encounters had proved so painful that whenever I found myself compelled to move about the streets in daylight hours, I dropped my eyes to the sidewalk and charged through the streets as though in a hot-brained hurry. A dim-lighted haven for inarticulate young men and women who arrived in the late hours of the evening and, throwing themselves together in mock couplings, struggled energetically about the dance floor to the plaintive, standard tunes rendered by a local trio, a piano, a drum, a first-rate horn, The Parrot was not a place where I feared encountering any of my “ friends. ” Most of these young people I knew by name or by sight, and I felt comfortable with them . They took me for what I was, a youngish-old teacher from Glacial Falls, one who drank too much and who was a little tetched on the subject of the Giants; but they seemed to like me and didn ’ t appear to begrudge me that I was without the desire to achieve the Black River Valley Club. Sunday afternoons were different. Then, with the music stilled and the blinds thrown open allowing the golden autumn sunlight to diffuse and warm the room, I would stand at the bar and sip my Budweiser, my “ tapering-off ” device; munch popcorn from wooden bowls; and in league with the bartender Freddy, whose allegiance to the Giants was only somewhat less feverish than mine, cheer my team home. Invariably and desperately I wished that the afternoon, the game, the light would never end.
    On the night of the tenth—the night before the “ seizure ” —I stayed late at the bar, drinking heavily and talking with B., a grieving young man of twenty. Having recently been rejected by a girl he loved, he was in a state near hyperesthesia. I don ’ t know why he chose to burden me with his lament. I did not know him well. In high school his brother and I had played football and basketball together; we had at the same time, or I would guess that we had, taken long aching looks at the same girls who were, in some celestial way, blossoming right before our eyes, so that we must once have been “ almost friends. ” But a few years before, when I was without a job, drinking and drifting, I had borrowed twenty dollars from that brother; and many months later, when I had attempted to repay him, he had steadfastly refused the money, saying, “ If the tables had been reversed, buddy, I know you ’ d have helped me. ” He had said this with a certain “ style, ” as