A Fan's Notes Read Free Page B

leather-jacketed friends, she added, “ Some schoolteacher! ”
    B., the snub-nosed girl, and I ended at my motel room, where, getting me alone in the bathroom, B. offered me what he called “ first shot ” at the girl. I declined, thanking him rather too profusely. I fell asleep that night listening to their mating noises from the adjoining bed. My initiation into sex had taken place on the ground behind a billboard sign advertising beer within walking distance from where I was now lying. The girl had received, with neither complaint nor enthusiasm, a good part of Watertown High School ’ s 1945 football team. Afterward I had had to help her up and walk her, while she clung unsteadily to my arm and wept, to her house some distance down the highway. Listening now, it occurred to me that I hadn ’ t come very far over the years—no farther really than from one “ gang bang ” to another, save that I had learned, as B. had yet to learn, that tomorrow the pain would be even greater.
    When I awoke, B. and the girl had gone, leaving in the wake of their coupling a great mountain of disheveled bedding, a brilliant stain of orange lipstick smack in the middle of the pillow, and on the exposed sheet the untidy evidence of their urgency. It was only eight o ’ clock, and though I had hoped to sleep longer, and had the night before drunk one whisky after another for that reason, as much as any other, I was not surprised at the earliness of the hour. For a couple years past, on these autumn Sundays, I had wakened, started up really, with the terrifying notion that the game was already under way, that I had missed—God knows what—some unsurpassably executed play. Leaping from bed, I would be confronted by the clock and from that moment on my morning would be hell; for I would begin undergoing the nervousness to which only the players should be subjected: the giddiness, the thirst, time ’ s protracted passage.
    On this morning my tension was intensified by my inability to keep my eyes from the awful ruin of the adjoining bed. I closed my eyes and opened them; I rolled over and rolled back, always with my eyes returning to that bed. It was as though I expected to see there some frightful clue to my destiny, some forbidding look into the darker recesses of my being. When I could stand looking no longer, I rose and, with the swift and mechanical propriety of an outraged landlady, made up the bed. Then I made up my own, took a scalding shower, shakily shaved, dressed except for my shoes, and lay back on the bed to watch television. It was a “ religious ” show, a drama about the redemption of an alcoholic woman through the discovery of Jesus Christ. There was a time when these shows had provided me with unending amusement; but understanding the slightness of that which provided my own sustenance, I was no longer able to find amusement where others took comfort, no matter how asininely presented. In this show, though, the woman looked incredibly like my sister-in-law, so that it was impossible for me to believe in either her degeneracy—for my sister-in-law, in her way, was a decent woman—or the resultant redemption. The resemblance awoke in me, moreover, the memory of my ill-advised telephone call of the night before; and I now, in the nervous light of Sunday, became ruddy with shame, then literally sick, dropping to my hands and knees to throw up in the toilet bowl. By nine-thirty, when I decided to go downtown for the Sunday papers, I was pacing the carpeted floor, smoking one Salem after another, and cursing myself for not having bought a six-pack—an abstinence imposed upon myself under the idiotic pretense that I was not a drunk.
    At the newsstand in the lobby of the Hotel Woodruff I bought the New York and Syracuse papers, the Times , the Tribune , the Post-Standard , and the Herald-Journal ; and with that great weight under my arm I walked east on Public Square to The Crystal, where, sliding into a booth, I ordered