A Fan’s Notes. Imitation.

Quite a few years ago I came across Esquire’s 75 books every man should read. I began working my way through the list. I haven’t read all of them but the list introduced me to so many great books and writers that might have taken me years to find otherwise.

One book I enjoyed was, A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley. This passage stuck with me and even years after I read it that final line still sticks with me.

“First I would get a splendid job in public relations or advertising, rent an apartment, and begin lining the walls with the shelves to hold my books. For that apartment I would also get a girl. I once had a very clear picture of her: she was to have a degree from Vassar (I was willing to go as low as a B.A. in Fine Arts from Wellesley); she must have bobbed, blond hair, green eyes, and golden, vibrant legs; to offset my increasing “melancholy,” I determined that she must be a gregarious girl, spontaneously witty, and capable of thunderous laughter; still, apart from this delightfully fresh façade, I conceived her adept in the most “enlightened” sexual acts. She was to allay the ache in my heart, and when the ache disappeared and contentment reigned, I would get down to the distressing chore of acquiring Genius. I believed this, too; none of my professors, talking about books in their even, slightly somber tones, had bothered to tell me that literature is born out of the very longing I was so seeking to repress.”

I tried to imitate some of that here…

I wanted to be a the top of the pay scale before I met her but that wasn’t to be. She smiled and I saw my future. Her hair was long and spiraled down her back in dark curls, the shape of waves that surfers coveted. She was thin, the build of an athlete, a runner maybe, but tall with the legs of a volleyball player. I would find out later it was basketball and that she liked running. (It would be years before she’d love it.) She stood between her two friends, they talked, but I didn’t look away from her. Her smile was broad and when she did speak, my heart heard it first.

She was in school, studying and working a blue collar job. Her father was in sales, her mother an aide. They went to church and visited grandma on the weekends. She began coming to my apartment in a friendly way. We’d cook and laugh and she’d fall asleep with her legs open on my couch. I was paralyzed to act and had no idea how to move this friendship to more. I was wrapped in a melancholy of my own creation.

I took a week and flew away. Two thousand miles away from someone has a vantage point with a wakening affect. Why not tell her? Because I loved her already? I had girls I liked way less that I opened myself up to only to find myself in a sort of prison of my own making, now I was in the same prison, different cell.

When I returned I told her with aide of canned beer in a bar with a loud jukebox. Not that night, but a week or so later her long dark legs were around me, and I was willing to throw away the key and enter a different prison.