Bucky F*cking Dent (17 page)

Mariana nodded and stood up to go.

“He's your father, you don't need my permission. I gotta run, break's over.” Ted watched her leave to go do more death counseling. He exhaled deeply, then inhaled his Jell-O and reached across the table to finish hers, wondering if it was bad to mix red and green.

 

36.

Unfortunately, Marty was dead set on watching the Sox–Yankees game on TV today. Ted worried about controlling a live situation. About an hour before the game, he took Marty for a walk, hoping to get him distracted enough that they'd miss the ball game entirely, but Marty kept checking his watch. He did manage to dump him on the gray panthers for a while, which gave him time to set up the VCR, which he told Marty was a newfangled antenna, and to get his game tapes in order if need be. There were about ten tapes, and all were labeled with helpful specificity—“Carlton Fisk homers vs Yankees,” “George Scott game winning hit vs Yankees,” “Eckersley strikes out side vs Yankees.”

By the time Tango Sam and Schtikker walked Marty home, Ted was about as ready as he was gonna be. The game was more than half over, and the Yankees were ahead. Ted had time to find the clips that might possibly work and pinch hit for reality. The Sox were at home, so should be in their white-based home uniforms, but Ted had both home and away (red-based “uni”) snippets. This was important for continuity if a switch was needed, but he'd just have to wing it and hope Marty didn't notice. Just in case, Ted fiddled with the color controls on the TV and brought the whole spectrum down to a kind of green. Delaying Marty had also given Ted time to talk to some key folks in the neighborhood—the newspaper delivery boy with the erratic rocket arm, a few choice neighbors—and tell them what he and the old boys were up to and why. These folks might be called upon at any time to provide background to the ruse. It was a little like staging a neighborhood play, only there was no script, and the performance might begin at any time on any day.

It was 5–3 Yanks in the top of the eighth when Marty got back. Ted switched the TV off when he heard the door close. Marty peered into the TV room. “Score?”

“Score of what?” Ted replied innocently.

“The game, dammit!”

“Oh, is there a game?”

“Teddy, you asshole, hand me the remote.”

“Use your dick, Mr. Holmes.”

Marty shuffled to the TV and flipped it on. The voice of Phil Rizzuto filled the room. The Scooter was going on and on about some pasta he had had the other night. If you closed your eyes, you'd have no idea you were tuned in to a broadcast of a baseball game. Sounded more like Julia Child. “Goddammit, Rizzuto, what's the fucking score? This guy is phenomenal. He's like a retard.”

“An idiot savant. I love him.”

“I love him too, but…”

Finally Rizzuto said, “Here come the Bronx Bombers, up five–three in the top of the eighth. Big game today, White, up in Fenway.”

“Fuck!”

“Hey, Dad, what was Eddie Bernays like?”

“Weasely little inhuman genius homunculus.”

“So you … liked him?”

“Didn't really know him, more like I knew of him. Who's up? Reggie? Why is that new antenna flashing twelve o'clock all the time?”

“Did you know Ernest Dichter? The Institute for Motivational Research? What the hell was that?”

“Dichter was another unholy genius. Those two brought Freud into American commerce. They were called ‘the depth boys.' They were gurus to all of us. If we could see so far, it was because we were standing on the shoulders of Austrians.”

“Did Dichter really say, ‘We will change from a needs-based country to a desire-based country'?”

“Something like that. Now I must really be close to death.”

“Why do you say that?”

“'Cause you're showing an interest in me.”

Reggie Jackson pulled a long fly ball that curled just foul.

“Reggie is locked on to Eckersley, he's all over his shit. Take Eckersley out. Take him out.”

“I read about where Freud lost all his money in the depressed economy between the world wars, and he asked his rich American nephew, Eddie, for a loan. Bernays tried to get Uncle Siggy to publish a psychotherapy primer in
Cosmopolitan
, but Freud hated America, and said ‘no fucking way,' in German. Can you imagine Freud doing like a Dear Abby thing in
Cosmo
? Dear Siggy. ‘I suspect you are suffering from a Sapphic Oedipal or Electra complex, and I suggest you kill your father and travel with your mother to the isle of Lesbos. The pleasure principle of spring says wear black pumps while you do it. Black is the new red. Next!'”

“Funny. Is that what he said? Freud said ‘no fucking way'? Direct quote?”

“More like a paraphrase.”

“Who are you, Ralph Edwards? Why the fuck are you so chatty? What is this,
This Is Your Life
?”

Ted was hoping his attempt at intimacy would drive Marty out of the house and away from the game. He thought, If I could just bring my poor dead mom back to life and sit her on the couch, Marty would flee outside again in a flash.

“I wanna know about you, Dad. I'm interested in where I come from.”

“All of a sudden.”

“Better late than never.”

“I kept journals from that time. I'll dig one up for you, okay? Fuck! I can't take this! I feel like Yogi Berra is jumping up and down on my chest. I renounce God for this cancer.”

“You have to believe in God before you renounce him.”

“Says you.”

“God didn't smoke all those cigarettes.”

“He made tobacco!”

“Good point. He also made free will.”

“Free will? No such thing as free will. Free will was destroyed by people like me and Bernays. Destroyed even as it was celebrated as the American dream and sold back to the public with Chevrolets. Go back and read your ‘Grand Inquisitor.' Dostoevsky knew his shit. People are terrified of freedom. People like me took away that awful burden. For a fee we told you who to be by telling you what to buy.”

“You feel guilty about that?”

“You didn't ask me if I felt guilty about that when it was putting you through Columbia.”

“Another good point.”

“I can't take this. I can't watch.” Marty sat up. “I'm gonna be in the bathroom with the water running. Just shout out anything good that happens, okay?”

“Solid plan, old man.”

“Are you high?”

“Actually, no, but that's an excellent idea. Get outta here, get away from my secondary smoke.”

As soon as Ted heard the bathroom door slam and the faucets turn to baffle the game, he jumped up and pulled a “George Scott game winning 3 run homer” cassette out of his stack and slipped it in the VCR. Marty was flushing the toilet over and over to create an even bigger din. Ted took over for Rizzuto. It would be Ted's own play-by-play the rest of the way.

On the screen, George Scott came to bat, and Ted paused it. “Goddammit! Goddammit!”

Marty heard Ted's tone and stopped flushing for a second. “What? What?” he barked through the bathroom door.

“Rally!”

“Who?”

“Boston.”

“Bullshit.”

“Not bullshit, come see.” Marty crept back in warily, almost afraid to look at the TV. He kept a safe distance, as far away from the screen as he could be and still be in the same room. Ted surreptitiously pressed play on the VCR and complained, “They're comin' back.”

“Bullshit.”

“Two pitches, two singles. First and second, one out, bottom nine, George Scott up.”

“Those look like away uniforms.”

“How can you tell, everything is green?”

“So, they're supposed to be at home, they're at Fenway.”

“I don't know, maybe they're at the stadium.”

“Oh.”

“Gossage is in.”

“I see the Goose. If they're at the stadium, why are you here?”

“Took the day off to be with my dad.”

“I must be tired. Everything does look green.”

“I think those drugs are fucking with your head. I'm telling you, man, legal drugs are bad for you. There's a reason they're legal, you know.”

“Maybe so.”

On cue, literally, George Scott connected and sent a long drive toward the right-field wall. Ted feigned horror. “Shit. No.”

“What? Go, go, get out, get out!” And the ball got out, gone, what a surprise. “Yes!”

Ted flipped off the TV and said, “Fuck!”

“Why'd you turn it off?”

“It's over. Six–five Boston.”

“Yeah, but I wanna gloat!”

“Don't be a sore winner.”

Marty did a little victory lap around the room, color returning to his cheeks. “Lung cancer? What lung cancer? George Scott is my doctor! Fuck you, Teddy, you front-running, Yankee-loving son of a bitch.”

Ted watched his reinvigorated dad circling the room, cursing out the world. Marty couldn't have been happier. And neither could Ted.

 

37.

The young father is not so young anymore. His son had lived and is tenish. Goddammit, he isn't sure if his son is ten or eleven. I am going to hell for such things, he thinks. He is trying to watch the game. His wife hates him. He can tell. And he deserves it. He no longer loves her. When he had detached from his son, he had detached from everything. Until her. The other woman. But he could not be with her. It isn't right. Just wasn't done. So this is what he does. He puts on the game, which signals to his wife and boy that he is not to be bothered, and in that quiet, he journeys into his own mind, deeper and deeper. Where she is waiting for him, where she is. And together in that space, they will make love and build a house and have other children. And those children will grow according to the laws of fantasy and his imagination. But she will never get older. How could she stay young and beautiful forever? Why not? It was his world, endless and inviolate. It took him some time and peace and quiet to get there, but he was getting there, and each time the world was more substantial. He projects his world onto the TV screen like a little god. He isn't watching baseball, he is watching himself. It had been see-through at first, the new world, paper thin, but now it had more weight, more substance, depth. He could see a horizon. He could touch things. He could touch her.

There she is. He walks toward her. His wife slams a door, she senses another woman. His wife breaks a dish, his boy says something silly—all these are calls to leave, eviction notices, and he will heed them halfheartedly, an always irritable paterfamilias. Walking hand in hand with her on a pristine Caribbean beach. A seagull looks at him, and says, “Dad?” That's his son. There is his son again by proxy, using the seagull as his mouthpiece, in the way that children play with hand puppets, dropping shit on his shoulder. “Dad? Dad?” There was no denying the bleed-through. Another name for bleed-through is sanity. Heeding the call of this world is a duty, too, after all. He would leave the world of his head and return to the actual. But he had laid a good foundation time and time again. This world of his was also real and was not going anywhere. He couldn't stay. He couldn't live in it, but he could be there anytime because it was his. He would be alone in one world so he would not be alone in another. It is his and hers. It is his.

 

38.

The Sox sucked and the Yanks soared, but not in Brooklyn; in Brooklyn the Sox remained ascendant. Ted took to taking his morning coffee and buzz in the prelight dawn on the steps of the house. He was there when the paper came flying in. He would throw it away, or stash it under his bed, and fall back to sleep for a couple of hours, the up of the coffee and the down of the weed battling it out in his tired brain.

A few hours later, Ted would “wake up” with Marty. He'd help Marty get dressed in his Red Sox fan attire. “Don't you feel a little stupid, a grown man wearing the clothes of a sports team, like a little kid?”