Last Notes from Home by Frederick Exley Read Free Book Online Page A

brilliantly—with spittle that the smile all but obliterated his chin) with which he acknowledged these raucous hosannas, he was nonetheless drunkenness and defeat and death personified. He was fiftyish, with a full head of abundant and unkempt—Chicago windswept—graying wavy hair. His long forehead was one of the most pronounced I’d ever seen. It appeared hypertrophied, as if his entire brow had received a devastating blow from some aborigine’s thighbone club and its swelling had obstinately refused to recede. His blue eyes were now so red and runny with drink he appeared to have pinkeye or terminal pneumonia. He wore a light tan suit of an obviously expensive winter gabardine, a chocolate-brown button-down shirt, and a snow-white worsted tie sloppily knotted and so far off center from his Adam’s apple that most of the white knot was hidden by the right side of his chocolate-brown collar. There was something gangsterish in his choice of attire. Although his outfit had no doubt cost him dearly, he was so monstrously sanguine and brimmingly puffy with booze, his alarmingly flushed Irish cheeks pushing his red rheumy eyes right up into his copiously haired eyebrows which hung down, like black and gray bunting, from his massively precipitate forehead, his jowls dribbling like globs of dough over his chocolate-brown collar, his potbelly so saggingly and disgustingly pronounced it fell with a kind of damp obesity over his unseen belt, the enormous belly having undone or popped the bottom two buttons of his shirt revealing a pyramid of white undershirt framed in chocolate—so brimming with drink and gluttony and sloth that all his clothes appeared to be crawling up his person, his jacket and shirt up into his lardy neck, his cuffs snaking up his heavy hairy forearms, his breeches up into his balls and sphincter.
    If his doctor had recommended crutches, the guy had scorned them and now made his way down the aisle on one of those knee-to-foot casts with built-in metal braces. Protruding from the cast’s instep was a couple-inch aluminum pipe tipped with a rubber traction cup of the kind used on crutches. Never once abandoning the great spittle-toothed smile that rendered him chinless, he would take four or five wildly theatrical steps, putting his right leg scrupulously and precisely forward, now bending over and swinging his casted leg gingerly up beside his good leg, then pirouetting crazily on his rubber-tipped spoke, all the while his globular gabardine-covered ass swaying in monumental arcs from the seats on one side of the aisle to the seats on the other. Having painfully completed these few steps, he’d pause. In acknowledgment of the ritualistic cries of “Oh Too Me,” he’d straighten up, stretch his arms so exuberantly and loonily Nixon-like above his head I thought his trousers would drop to his knees, a salute the tour members reacted to by going berserk with cheers and applause. Now the four-or five-step charade would begin all over again. “Oh Too Me!” As abruptly as if some laborer had flipped and hit me flush in the diaphragm with his sledgehammer, it occurred to me that this “revered” figure, hobbling gimpily down the aisle and almost upon me, the little padre and Ms. Robin Glenn solicitously bringing up his heels, was being hailed by his name, O’Twoomey. Lord have mercy on us all. This was a group of Irishmen!
    As I now stood up, stepped first out into the aisle, then backward a couple paces so O’Twoomey could slide unimpeded to his window seat and thereby be able to extend his cast on the floor between us, O’Twoomey offered up his hand to be shaken.
    “Hello, lurve,” which I took to mean “love,” “the name’s James—call me Jimmy—Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey.” In a preposterously effusive way beyond my capacity to duplicate, Mr. James Jimmy Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey told me what an altogether kind, generous, splendid, and lurverly chap I was, apparently for having done no