Greg's Bible

 Greg's Bible

     We, that is the friends of Gregory Sheehy were readers and we loved to exchange passages from favorite books back and forth. Yet none of us devoted the time that Greg did in pouring over Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" that was introduced to us by cousin Kevin sometime in the early 1970's. The book is without a doubt a "great American novel" that is now taught in Literature classes in snooty universities. In the beginning the value of the writing was being spread by word of mouth and our literate gentleman was able to bring up Exley's words to describe all kinds of life situations. I am leaving most of the this post to the words of the greatly flawed but supremely gifted writer's own sentences we heard from the mouth of Greg. I may humbly throw in a few comments in italics

      “Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.”

I have  text from the day when the doctor told Greg with no wiggle room that he was to cease the use of alcohol. He confessed it and added "sigh"

“I certainly didn't want to fight with him. I did, however, want to shout, "Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss" -- all those things I so cherishly cuddled in my self-pitying bosom. I didn't, of course, say any such thing”

Again, all the things we wished we had said but instead sat there fuming or sinking into humiliation.

 “Whether or not I am a writer,” I wrote, “I have—and this is both my curse and my virtue—cultivated the instinct of one, an aversion for the herd, without, in my unhappy case, the ability to harness and articulate that aversion.”

By the eternal, that expresses it...

“Bunny Sue was nineteen. She had honey-bobbed hair and candid, near-insolent green eyes. She had a snub, delightful nose, a cool, regal, and tapering neck, a fine, intelligent mouth that covered teeth so startling they might have been cleansed by sun gods. Without any makeup save lipstick, her complexion was as milk flecked with butter, the odor she cast as wholesome as bread. On my first breathless vision of her, I wanted to bury my teeth, Dracula-like, into her flanks, knowing that she would bleed pure butterscotch.”

The character representing the cockeyed version of feminine allure we seemed to fall prey to in our hormone ravaged youth

“That my lunacy had been recognized was chastening enough, but the judge's gratuitous "fatuous" carried with it intimations that I was in a blubbering, nose-picking state; an I had visions of arriving at my mother's door, garbed not in the "attractive," melancholic dementia of the poet but in the drooling, masturbatory, moony-eyed condition of the Mongoloid.”

“Whenever I think of the man I was in those days, cutting across the nat-cropped grass of the campus, burdened down by the weight of the books in which I sought the consolation of other men's grief, and aburdened futher by the large weight of my own bitterness, the whole vision seems a nightmare. There were girls all about me, so near and yet so out of reach, a pastel nightmare of honey-blond, pink-lipped, golden-legged, lemon-sweatered girls”

UCLA in my time to a T except substitute denim hip-huggers and peasant blouses

“Then he lost all coherence and began a hysterical giggle, compounded with a slight twitch and very pronounced emission of saliva from his mouth. When he finally fell silent, the stillness was of that horrified kind that follows a fart in a Methodist church.”

Just so Exley and one repeated by our hero many a time

“If it comes at all, Emerson has cautioned that one's call might not come for years. If it doesn't, he remarks it as only a reflection of the universe's faith in one's abstinence, nothing to move the heart to fret”

     Our state at present

“The three of us had a pact, governed by signals—pinching one another, agreeing to step fiercely on each other’s toes when we felt riotous laughter welling up within us. It was not that any of us doubted the efficacy of group therapy for alcoholics (it is probably the only treatment), but, oh, dear heart, alcoholics in the loony bin!”

“The world of the soap opera is the world of the Emancipated American Woman, a creature whose idleness is employed to no other purpose but creating mischief.”