Free Pages from a Cold Island by Frederick Exley Page B

teak-decked Chris-Craft. No, no, no. ” It was too much like the irony of classical tragedy, or the irony of the world in which we live from the stench of the womb to the rot of the shroud, the good man coming to terms with his lot only to discover it is already too late. And so addressing myself to this prick Hurac á n I said, “ If you could have seen his face, you wouldn ’ t do this thing. You see, after a quarter of a century his presence exuded the exaltation of the ultimate acceptance of what his life had been, that life so vividly and humbly illustrated in those colored Polaroid prints of what he ’ d made for himself. ‘ Home, Exley, home, ’ he ’ d said and I know you are not wanton enough to erase all that. He won ’ t haf nofing left. ”
    But as the days passed and Agnes moved her monstrously dumb and hideously brutal way up the coast, and on the colored screen there came the bewildered, drawn and haunted faces of those in her wake, I came at last to accept Agnes ’ s evil whimsicality and grief was with me always, it ballooned in me, weighed me down, I carried it like a knap sack bulging with iron skillets. It came on me with the abruptness of my friend ’ s relentlessly uncontrollable shit. I ’ d be taking my first bite into a porkchop of what looked an altogether delicious supper, and frantically straight up from the table I ’ d come, out the screen door and into the backyard where, dropping into a chair of the umbrellaed lawn table, my head would fall to my arms, and always now there was this he won ’ t ha f nofing left . Like a man pos sessed or LSD-high on grief, I was up and down the stairs a thousand times a day, all day I fled between house and Hatteras where I ’ d have two quick belts of vodka, in some oddly insane way hoping that the fury of my movement would prevent these terrifying “ bowel ” movements.
    But have I not strained the reader ’ s credulity to the breaking point—nay, to the point of inviting his rightful scorn, his sneering mockery, his derisory hilarity—by ask ing him to believe that these days of immoderate grief “ had nothing whatever to do with self-pity ” ? to accept that this daily deluge was utterly divorced from any tears I was lay ing at the feet of my drunken and absurd self? to swallow that my “ nobility ” was of such stunning grandeur that this unseemly woe was brought on by nothing other than the death of EW, a man I ’ d never known save through his writ ings, and the tragedy that had likely befallen that funny self-proclaimed wop with whom I ’ d passed a couple loony hours in an airport bar? Knowing that the reader, like me, grew up in the penumbra of seven-foot-high images of Mr. Clark Gable and Mr. Duke Wayne and was educated to the notion that such unmanliness lent itself to nothing short of damnation, I of course invite his mockery. I might apologize by saying that as an “ unstable ” man I was obviously under going a “ breakdown ” during those endless days, then offer the reader some marvelousl y pointed psychological explana tion to which he ’ d be able to nod his noggin wisely and say, “ Ah, I see. I understand. ”
    But I shan ’ t. In the first place, I haven ’ t for years seen any validity whatever in the Freudian voodoo and cannot read the most obvious psychological maxims without my nose plugging and wrinkling in the most exorbitant distaste. In the second place, there come moments with every writer when he yearns to address his reader familiarly and say something he constantly fights against saying. Due to a vow I made twenty-odd years ago when I was just out of college, had just taken my first job in New York City, and was living in a lonely Y.M.C.A. room, the effort will prove doubly strenuous for me. Having very little money to do the town. I spent most of my free time reading the newspapers (there were seven then!) and there was a certain sports columnist, Jimmy Cannon, who on occasion—and though I