Bucky F*cking Dent (7 page)

He got out of the car and headed up to the house. He looked on the sidewalk where once he had scratched his name in the wet cement, but it was no longer there. It was smooth, like when a wave washes away initials in a heart someone drew in the sand. So many waves. Always more waves than words in hearts in the sand, it seemed.

He imagined what he as a boy would make of the man he was now, staring up at the window. As if in a
Twilight Zone
: “Consider Ted…” The beard, the belly, the aura of homelessness. He probably would've scared himself. The young him might've made fun of him now. I'm not letting you in, ya fat tie-dye fuck, not till my parents get home. He shook his head—that was a crappy thought. Ted ascended the reddish clay steps of the old brownstone and tried the door. The feeling he had was not quite déjà vu. He had the sensation that he had already done the things he was doing right now, walking the stairs, opening the big door, because he had done them thousands of times as he grew up. So while this day had never happened before, it felt like it had already happened over and over. But he felt no comfort and he felt no hope. He instinctively checked up in the sky to see if planes were falling to earth, worlds exploding. Nope. It all seemed pretty copacetic up there in the wild blue. He walked in.

The house was messy and didn't smell right. A bad scent, but not one he could immediately identify; it smelled something like a frightened animal had been slaughtered. An unholy brew of menthol, egg, urine, and smoke. “Marty?” Ted called out for his father.

Marty appeared around a corner in an old, dark purple robe untied in the front, so Ted could see his tighty whities, so old and worn, you'd have to call them loosey grayies. “Teddy, you came,” the old man said, and the genuine surprise and thankfulness of his tone disarmed and moved Ted, gave him an unexpected hitch in his throat. Marty shuffled toward him and hugged him. He smelled terrible. Ted gagged, but held it down and covered it; he felt stuck, felt no agency, like he himself was not at home. His arms hung at his sides.

“Hug me, ya faggot,” Marty whispered mock-lovingly in Ted's ear. Ted put his arms around his father, who was so thin, it was like hugging a child or a suit on a hanger. “You smell. Like the pot.”

“You smell like the shit.”

“Don't squeeze so hard,” Marty said. “You tryin' to hug me, fuck me, or kill me?”

“Ah yes, this is just how I pictured our reunion.”

Marty pulled away. “I think you broke a fucking bone. Let me help you with your bags,” he said. “Your plastic bags.”

Ted said, “I'm into recycling.”

They walked up to the second floor, Marty stopping several times to catch his breath. He put his hands on his knees and his head down after only a few steps. Ted got the image that the old man's ruined lungs had the capacity of two empty envelopes to hold paper-thin volumes of air. That collapsible and sticky. “I gotta get one of those elevator seats for old fucks. By the way, if I ever talk about getting one of those elevators for old fucks seriously, shoot me in the head.” Slowly they made their way to Ted's old room, the room he'd had as a child. Ted didn't want to walk faster than his father. Their progress was so halting, he wasn't sure if he was walking or standing still. He let Marty open the door to his old room. “The honeymoon suite,” he said, and held out his hand as if for a tip.

“Yes. Yes. This is where the magic never happened,” Ted said, and he walked into the small rectangle that was the world he had grown up in.

 

13.

The cliché of the unchanged childhood bedroom in movies and TV is usually shorthand for a parent who does not want to let the child grow up, or the child who refuses to grow up, or the parent in mourning for the dead child. A Miss Havisham thing without the sexual politics. If Ted had wanted to be extra hard on himself, he might've said that his room was pretty much as he had left it for Columbia because his father was mourning the death of what he thought Ted could have been. But that might be ascribing too much sentimentality to Marty; it was more like Marty was lazy as shit and a bad housekeeper. Seemed all four floors of the house were basically unchanged over the last ten or fifteen years, as the life that Marty had been living was collapsing in upon itself geographically, and the space he actually inhabited had shrunken more and more, until he really existed only in the living room downstairs, and in the kitchen and the bathroom. If the universe was constantly expanding, Marty's universe was constantly contracting, its central sun losing touch with its outer planets and outer rooms, on its way to collapsing into one room, a small dot, a black hole, death.

“You should go take a shower or something, Marty, you reek.”

“Thanks for the tip, son. I'll leave you to commune with memories of your salad days,” Marty said. “Ah, if these walls could talk.”

“I'd tell them to shut the fuck up.”

Marty shuffled off, leaving Ted alone. Ted stood frozen, looking at his single bed and its New York Yankee sheets, pillowcases, and blanket. Vinyl albums lining the walls—LPs and 45s. He picked up a 45—“(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.” Elvis. Elvis, America's uncrowned king, had died just last summer. His death had felt like the end of something, but Ted didn't know what. He wouldn't be caught dead listening to Elvis these days, but he understood his presence in the room. There were a couple of Pat Boone albums. “Love Letters in the Sand.” Holy shit, that was embarrassing. Perry Como. Johnny Mathis. Gogi Grant? What's a Gogi Grant? There was a Sam Cooke album. That was acceptable. On the wall above his bed was a Technicolor poster from the 1955 sci-fi nonclassic
This Island Earth.
He couldn't remember if he'd put that up there ironically or if he really dug the kitsch of its tagline: “
TWO MORTALS TRAPPED IN OUTER SPACE … CHALLENGING THE UNEARTHLY FURIES OF AN OUTLAW PLANET GONE MAD!
” Two mortals trapped in an outer borough. Looking around his room at these artifacts, Ted had the feeling he was trying to decipher hieroglyphics. He grew up in the '50s, which were really the '40s, he'd have to give himself a break.

Ted hated memory lane, so he walked to the dresser, tossed in some of his clothes from the plastic bags, and dumped his toiletries in the bathroom. He ran the water from the tap until it flowed from dark brown to light brown to New York City clear. He put his head down to swallow some and laughed as he remembered he'd read that Kosher Jews had to get special permission from the rabbi to drink tap water in the city because it contained microscopic crustaceans, undercover shrimpy shrimp, treif on tap.

He walked over to the closet to hang up his jacket, a dark blue Yankee Windbreaker he had gotten free at work, and he saw some old T-shirts and sneakers, Chuck Taylor Cons, and in the back, some winter and beach stuff—ski boots, scuba gear. He bent down to check it out and saw a stack of black-and-white composition books. Ted had initially preferred to write in these before he moved on to the yellow legal pads that sprang up in his own apartment like daffodils. He grabbed a few of these composition books and sat on the edge of the bed. The distinctive Pollock-like splatter of black and white, the white square in the middle for identification, the black spine. As familiar an appearance and shape as something in nature. He could tell by the lettering on the covers that these belonged to a young person. “
KEEP OUT!!!!!!!
” was scrawled across the front of many of them, “
UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH OR WORSE!!!!!” “IF YOU ARE READING THIS AND YOU ARE NOT THORDORE”
(misspelled, Ted noted—
Thor-dore
—with a sudden, almost overwhelming tenderness for his young self: Thor, the god of thunder!)
“LF FULLILOVE YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN DEEP SH#T THAT MEANS YOUUUUU!!!!!
” warned another. It's all right, Ted thought, I'm
THOR-DORE LEFT FIELD FULLILOVE
, I should be okay.

The handwriting was the blocky, slightly too large penmanship of an eleven-year-old boy. The calligraphic equivalent of pretestosterone bluster. A blowfish blowing up. Ted had used to catch these blowfish, or cowfish, when they visited relatives in East Islip. He would fish with a bamboo pole in Great South Bay using frozen minnow as bait for snapper, and a plastic bobber on the surface. Too often the blowfish, not snapper, would take the bait. The animal's only defense when threatened was to inflate itself to two or three times its size in order to appear a more formidable foe to a predator. The fish had no defense but inflation of self, Ted thought, like so many people, blowhard blowfish. Ted would unhook the fish and stroke its belly, which would initiate this hilarious response. They weren't good eating; allegedly only the tail was not poisonous to humans. Being poisonous is a better defense than becoming a balloon, Ted thought. In a few seconds, Ted would have a living fish balloon in his hand, like something out of an LSD dream. Only the buck teeth and horned brownish head, which did make it look like a little cow, hence its name, would not swell to epic proportions. And he would roll the living ball from hand to hand, like a pitcher looking for a grip, the smooth skin now stretched to bursting, with the prickly consistency and feel of his father's three-day beard on a Sunday. It was like holding his father's cheek.

Some friends of his might take their little knives and pop the fish exactly like a balloon, something that struck certain young boys as hysterical, leaving the fish to a slow, leaking, protracted death. But Ted wouldn't do that. He would wind up and throw it as far back out over the water as he could. The fish would land and float on the waves for sometimes a minute, staying inflated, not yet sure that the threat had passed. There was something in this so human and sad to the young Ted, the laughable yet desperate bluster even after the fact, though he would not have been able to verbalize it like that. Threat gone, but still this operatic display, this inflated softball of a being, bobbing on the waves, belly up, head submerged. And then, when the poor thing had somehow determined it was safe, by recognizing a favorable change in conditions known only to itself, it would deflate comically and sink underwater, swimming away to inflate again and make pint-sized sadistic humans laugh another day.

Ted looked at the date on the front page: 1957. Yup, eleven. He began to skim through the pages. Nothing jumped out at him. These were journal entries Ted had kept as a boy. His father had made him write every day. “It's a muscle,” Marty would say. “Use it or lose it.”

“Well, why don't you write every day?” young Ted would respond, because he'd much rather play a dice baseball game when alone in his room, rather do almost anything other than write.

“Why don't you shut the fuck up?” was his father's usual retort.

Ted was intrigued. These journals could hold a key of sorts for him, a clear, unadulterated glimpse into the past that might help unlock a future. If he could know what he was, it might help him become something other than what he is. He stopped on a random page and read what was apparently a book review.

 

14.

Better Baseball by Tommy Heinrich

The Beginning of this book is about Tommy Heinrich telling about baseball and offense and defense are in almost all games. in baseball offense is up and defense is in the field.

Perhaps this particular bit of acute baseball knowledge and literary criticism was not the magical key Ted was looking for. He flipped through pages and read another entry, dated 3/27:

I took Walt to Peter Cooper and as [“I” crossed out] usual I regret it. He is such a bore he didn't want to do anything at all. [“When” crossed out] I hate when somebody does that I can't explain it but I just hate it. I met Richie Grossman and Chris Modell (Bow-Wow) and Chris is the kind of guy that when you say something he'll rank you out. You can imagine what he did to Walt. Other than that I just played basketball.

Ted was wondering about the “you” addressed in these thoughts. Who did he think was listening to what happened in the postwar middle-class housing projects of Peter Cooper and Stuyvesant Town? Who did he think gave a flying fuck about what he thought or who Chris Modell was ranking out that spring? He heard his father calling him from downstairs. He put the composition books back in their hiding place for another time.

Ted walked downstairs and found his father on a recliner in front of the TV.

“How you been, Marty?” he asked.

“Aside from the squamous lung cancer, terrific.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I piss vermouth and shit silver dollars.”

“That sounds lucrative. But painful. Maybe you should have that checked.”

“Why do you call me Marty?”

“'Cause that's your name.”

“Why don't you call me Dad?”

“Why don't you call me Son?”

“I think I do sometimes. Don't I?”

“I don't know. Maybe.” Then: “You want me to call you Dad?”

“I don't give a fuck, really.”

Ted sighed and took a seat on the couch. They stared at the TV for some time, even though it wasn't on.

“That color?”

“It's not on.”

“I know that. When it's on, it's color?”

“Yup. Technicolor. I don't like it. Japanese. Soulless.”

“A purist.”

Silence.

“Some people watch TV, but I'd say that you look at the TV. You ever turn it on?”

“I lose the remote a lot. Game tonight?”

“I think so?”

“You workin' it?”

“No, they're still away.”

Back to staring at the TV. A full minute crawled by. Marty began to whistle an indistinct tune, then said, “We don't have to talk if you don't want to.”

“Yeah, we've done fine the past few years without it.”

“Has it been a year?”