Norman Mailer: “An Agreeable Proposal”

I went to the grocery store in the early evening of April 1, 2003. That Tuesday offered yet another freezing spring night, and piles of hard, ugly snow still dotted the town, making it look even more dismal. I had already shopped once that day, and my partner, Thomas, quizzed me about why I needed to go again as I dropped him at our home. “It’s starting to snow,” he said. “What the hell do we need?”

“I have no idea” I said, “But I’ll be back in a while.”

We had just returned home from a late afternoon drink at the Little Bar, our regular haunt, complete with an ancient granite fireplace and familiar faces. The Little Bar, as its name suggests, is a small offshoot of a larger establishment, the Atlantic House, which was built in 1798. The watering hole had, throughout the years, etched itself into history as some businesses can. Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, to name just two long-ago patrons, spent more than a little time there. O’Neill once lived and wrote in a room above it, and Williams was known to drink and hold court among the young men he was half afraid of. As you sit in front of the fireplace after along workday, you can almost sense his ghost trolling furtively among the men of this new century who gather there. I found the old tavern to be practically a temple because of its peculiar gravitational pull for writers. I knew of several less prominent authors than Williams and O’Neill, and not a few poets and essayists, who used the place, for better or worse, as a church.

The crooked slabs of rough slate that comprise the bar’s floor make no distinction about who walks on top of them; affluent or broke, you are bound to stumble after drink three, so you buy your communion of choice and hope for the best. Generally, one’s harshest worries are relaxed in the air of the place, air tinged with the odor of evaporated liquor and low-wage sweat.

Black-and-white photographs of former patrons and well-known drinkers who have passed through the place over the years ornament the walls. Several arbitrarily grace one side of the narrow room, and still others are staggered behind the bar — some tacked up, some only taped. A framed picture of Norman Mailer is nailed solidly above the cheap bottles and just to the left of the coffee pot. In the photograph, which was shot by Annie Leibovitz in 1976, he is dressed in a white suit with wide lapels. He’s got his right hand nonchalantly buried in his pants pocket, and the look on his face is one of complete possession and charge of his celebrity. I always liked the picture but recognized only a fraction of the image of the much older man in it who ambled with common intentions around our town now. I was not familiar with the supremely confident attitude captured in that moment, which seemed a as dated as the clothes he wore.

Thomas had been correct: I didn’t have a reason for going shopping again. All I knew was that I felt compelled to go. It made no sense, but one principle I give credit to is never to ignore intuition. I shoved the Volvo gearshift into reverse, backed from our driveway, and headed to the store. The snow increased, and I recall sinking into a state that was not unlike being on autopilot as I drove. Once at the market, I found a basket and roamed the aisles without purpose until I found myself coming to life in the vegetable section. Twenty feet away from me was Mr. Mailer. True to the ways of town and far removed from the swaggering figure in the photograph at the Little Bar, he looked like any other elderly gentleman doing the evening’s shopping. He was examining a mountain of bananas in a green plywood bin, considering each cluster as if one would stand out markedly from the others. His glance up to me a few moments later was accompanied by a wave, and so I went over.

“How are you, Mr. Mailer?”

His mismatched canes were hanging from the plastic handle of his shopping cart and he leaned on the edge of the bin with one hand as the other held his carefully chosen bouquet. He placed his bananas into the child’s seat of the cart, met my handshake, and said he was fine, just fine.

We exchanged small talk about the bad weather and the Little Bar, where I’d just come from, a place he said he hadn’t set foot in since directing his movie Tough Guys Don’t Dance back in 1986. He then remarked that it was intriguing that we’d run into each other, because I had been the subject of a discussion between him and Norris an hour or so before. Neither of them knew my phone number or recalled my last name, to look me up in the book. I’d long since moved on from the Commons,and the person they had spoken to on the phone there didn’t know where I now worked. They were at a loss as to how to get hold of me.

“I’m into a project and I want to talk to you about it,” he said. “Are you still writing?”