Free Pages from a Cold Island by Frederick Exley Page A

neighbor dropped his pants and the flow began immediately. Solemnly removing a package of Kleenex from the glove compartment, I jogged across the street, stood in front of him, and as well as I could protected him from the view of passing motorists. From the property next-door a man holding a croquet mallet stepped through the hedge and said something about “ drunken bums. ” When I said that though a good case could be made for our bumhood we weren ’ t drunk and that what was hap pening obviously couldn ’ t be avoided, his anger refused to be abated and he pointed out how abhorrent this was in front of his and his neighbors ’ children with whom he was having a Sunday afternoon croquet game. All popeyes and indignation he was.
    “ I ’ m calling the police. ”
    I was on the verge of telling him to do anything he damn pleased, call the FBI for all of me, but that he better go back on his own property before I grew irritated and knocked his teeth out when a little boy about five, whose croquet mallet was as tall as he, stepped through the hedge. With great and touching dignity he looked at my squatting friend, then at me, then at his father, then back at my friend, and with the marvelous ingenuousness and directness of children said, “ Are you sick, mister? ” to which my friend and I laughed in unison, my friend with a weary and heavy exhaustion saying, “ Sick to be sure, kid. Sick to be sure . You and your daddy go back and finish your game, I ’ ll be okay. ”
    Then I handed him the Kleenex, then his pants were up, then we were in the car and gone, laughing, and I know of no way of equating those days following the news of Hur ricane Agnes and Panacea other than in equating my state to that of my friend ’ s malaise, save that in lieu of lower intestine my tear ducts were ulcerated. It was as though I ’ d touched the lodestone of some universal grief and found it infectious, and though the death of Edmund Wilson was certainly tied up in it and the memory of that guy at La Guardia, it had nothing whatever to do with self-pity: it was as though my entire being, at times over which I had no control, were ridding itself of some putrefaction of grief, were eliminating the soul ’ s sick fecal matter.
    One afternoon in the lounge of Cavallario ’ s Steak House in the Bay I was drink ing and talking with two attrac tive young couples from Syracuse, and one of the men told an incredibly funny story. In general the tale reflected how little the word fuck has come to mean in our society; in par ticular it had to do with a guy who couldn ’ t employ two words without one of them being that word; in that the story had a rising crescendo of punch lines, each funnier than its predecessor, it was the hardest kind to tell; the young man who told it was very gifted, as he ’ d have to be to get away with it in mixed company; I ’ d started roaring even before he ’ d got to the first of the punch lines, and presently I was hysterical, ready to go under the table and roll tummy-huggingly around the carpeting and plead with the guy to refrain.
    “ Whoa! No more, no more, I beg you. ”
    But then an unsettling thing happened. Before he reached the end of the joke I suddenly detected that every one at the table had ceased laughing and was staring in open-mouthed and shocked dismay at me and that, like my buddy ’ s molten stool pouring forth from his diseased body, grief was again erupting from me. Furious with aggravation I bolted upright, spilling my drink on the table, fled the lounge and, head down, rushed breathlessly past the moored cruisers to the end of the village docks, repeating over and over, “ He won ’ t haf nofing left. ”
    And though I had never learned to pray there was something of the devotional in my ramblings. I invoked the Spanish god of storms, Hurac á n. “ Hey! ” I cried. “ Listen here, just listen to me: don ’ t let it be that stucco house, that patioed blue pool, that