Ten years ago this week, while eating breakfast in my cubicle at a large publishing company in Manhattan, I opened the New York Times and learned that Frederick Exley had died. The obituary reported that on June 17, 1992, the 62-year-old author of the autobiographical novel "A Fan's Notes" succumbed to a stroke that had befallen him a week earlier at his home in upstate New York, though anyone familiar with that book had to wonder if Exley had finally done himself in with one too many weekends of the "foodless, nearly heroic drinking" he so vividly recounted in its pages.

I finished reading, then called my roommate, Randy, whose initiation into the cult of Exley I had recently effected by loaning him my dog-eared copy of "A Fan's Notes" as well as its two sequels, "Pages From a Cold Island" and "Last Notes From Home." There would be no road-trip pilgrimage from Brooklyn up to Alexandria Bay, as I had been imagining. We had missed the chance to embarrass ourselves at Exley's front door, bearing welcome if cliched propitiations (a bottle of Smirnoff, a carton of cigarettes) and sheepishly requesting autographs from--or better yet, an audience with--the man whose elegantly constructed, hilariously filthy sentences we were given to quoting aloud. Randy and I mourned that evening in a private ceremony at a neighborhood bar. I had arrived in New York a year earlier and had immediately begun looking for Exley in the watering holes he'd frequented during his well-documented time in the city, saloons like P.J. Clarke's in Midtown, Chumley's in the far West Village and especially a place called the Lion's Head across from Sheridan Square Park. Though I was fully aware that he didn't live in Manhattan anymore, and though I was barely old enough to drink legally, I would often drift into the Lion's Head after work, plant myself at a stool with something by Nabokov or Edmund Wilson (two of Exley's   favorites, I knew) and order what I thought to be a suitably manly concoction in anticipation of that moment when Fred would walk in the door and--spying me from the corner of his eye between bawdy reminiscences with old friends--intuitively size me up as the rightful heir to his legacy.