Bucky F*cking Dent (8 page)

“More.”

“But oh, how I've missed this, this father-son rapport. Can't beat it.”

“No, you can't,” said Ted.

Another interminable minute passed.

“Do you wanna talk?” asked Ted.

“Sure.”

But then nothing else. Ted imagined he heard the tick of that very loud stopwatch they always play on the TV program
60 Minutes
.

Marty spoke up. “Do you not wanna talk?”

“Do you?”

“I'm asking.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Well, it seems we are talking.”

“Are we?”

“My lips and tongue are moving and I am forcing air through my teeth.”

“That is talking. You're right.”

“Or talking about talking. Feels good, don't it?”

“Sure do.”

“Why did we stop talking?”

“You wanna know how we could give this up?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I sent you a book. You called me a name.”

“I called you a name?”

“I sent you a book, you called me a homo.”

“No, I didn't.”

“You did.”

“Oh.” Marty laughed at the memory. “Is that bad, Dr. Brothers? Should I say ‘homosexual,' not ‘homo'? I can't keep up with the fucking word police.”

“I don't care what you say.”

“Apparently you do. Very much.”

“It didn't bother me. It's neither here nor there. You bothered me. I sent you a novel for your opinion and you called me a name.”

“I didn't call you a ‘homo.' I said you write like you might be a homo.”

“Oh, well, that clears it up.”

“Come on, I was just trying to say you need to live a little.”

“What does that have to do with being homosexual? Homosexuals don't live?”

“It's a figure of speech.”

“Bullshit. It's like any sexism or racism or whatever. It's not important.”

“It's something like a figure of speech, Joe College. You'll never be a writer if you worry about the word police. Your mind can't be Singapore, your mind has to be Times Square.”

“Fine.”

“Would you have preferred if I quoted your beloved Berryman and said your life is a fucking ‘handkerchief sandwich'? More palatable? Same fucking thing.”

Ted exhaled hard and audibly, his breath and lips almost forming a word, but not quite, and that seemed to be the end of that, but then he just could not let it be.

“Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that your last three girlfriends were younger than me. And that made me a tad…”

“Jealous?”

“Disgusted. Totally fucking skeeved out.”

“Bonnie!”

“Was that her name? I knew her only as ‘the infanta.'”

“Bonnie. Bonnie, and before her, Amber.”

“Stripper name.”

“She was a stripper.”

“Thank you.”

“And a PhD candidate in African dance, FYI.”

“You can't get a PhD in that.”

“Says you.”

“Twenty-five?”

“Who cares? Twenty-three. Her smell, Ted, her smell gave me health.”

“Jesus.”

“Monica. I should call her.”

“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

“Asshole.”

“Can we not?”

“Oh, oh, yes, we can not. We can not all day.”

Ted couldn't take this, he felt the anxiety rise in his chest. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a joint. Marty looked disapprovingly at him, but then reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out vials of pain pills—an escalation in the drug war. He shot Ted a sideways glance: My shit is better than your shit, I win.

“What is that, Valium?”

“Maybe. I don't know if I'm feeling Valium or feeling Quaalude. You know, sometimes I feel like daffodils and sometimes like daisies.”

“Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't.
Quaalude
's a good Scrabble word, gets rid of an overabundance of low-scoring vowels.”

“I hate Scrabble. 'Lude it shall be.”

Ted shrugged and fired up a laughing bone. Marty popped the Rorer 714 along with some horse-pill-sized vitamin Cs and said, “Don't worry about the smoke, I just have lung cancer.”

“Shit,” Ted said, and blew the smoke in the other direction, waving it away. He snuffed out the joint carefully and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”

They sat in silence again for a while.

“Hey, Dad?”

Marty checked to see if Ted was being wholly ironic with the Dad thing. Maybe he wasn't.

“Yes, son?”

“Wanna go for a walk?”

“No, not really.”

Ted flowed back into himself a little, like a wave receding. He felt he had just extended himself a mile, though he knew it wasn't that far. More like an inch, but it felt like more than it was. Marty sensed this recoil, and bridged a little of the psychic distance.

“I'm not a great walker anymore. I'll go for a shuffle, though. You wanna take me for a shuffle?”

 

15.

Ted had put on his Yankee jacket for the morning chill, and Marty, in retaliatory response, had put his competing Boston Red Sox jacket on over his robe, as well as a Sox baseball cap for overkill. Marty used a cane these days, sometimes even a wheelchair, and he had to lean on Ted for support. There was a green magazine kiosk down at the end of Marty's block where he went to get the paper—the
Post
. The
Times
he had delivered, but Marty didn't really want to admit to reading the
Post
. Nobody did. Except for the sports. He went down there to talk to some other old men who had nothing to do but suck on the butt ends of the unlit, last thirds of cigars, complain, bullshit sports, and tell one another lies all morning long. These men had been in the neighborhood for as long as Ted could remember. While working as an advertising man his whole life, Marty had rarely hung out with them. But since retiring a couple of years ago, Marty had been spending more and more time on the corner, and this group of elders, this Polish Russian Black Italian Irish Greek chorus, had become his social life.

On the way to the magazine kiosk, apropos of nothing, Marty said, “Mariana.”

“What?”

“The nurse's name is Mariana.”

“I didn't ask.”

“You didn't?”

“No, I didn't.”

“Huh.”

Marty seemed to know half the folks who walked by or perched at their windowsills. It seemed his persona as a crusty old fuck wasn't just for Ted, but people in the neighborhood were more amused than irritated by him. As a young couple passed them pushing a toddler in a stroller, Marty whispered to the child, “Five and a half games, you little motherfucker.” The husband laughed and said, “Morning, Mr. Fullilove.” An old woman leaned out the window of her third-story perch and yelled, “Fullilove, you front-running son of a bitch!” Marty lifted his middle finger for her. She laughed. “I made some banana bread, Marty, is that Ted?” She asked like she'd seen him yesterday, and not fifteen years ago.

“Yes, hi, Mrs. Hager, it's me.”

“Good Lord, Ted, it's been ages. My, my, the years go by so fast.”

Marty yelled up at her, “Yes, sweet Betty, the years do go by so fast, but the days are so fucking long.” Betty seemed genuinely moved to see Ted, shaking her head at the confounding, slow-fast passage of time.

“I have banana bread for the both of you. Stop by on your way home.”

It took a surprisingly long while to navigate the one block to the kiosk at the corner. But this was Marty time. Ted would have to acclimate. The gray panthers were all loitering with absolutely no intent but to kill snail-paced time. Benny, the owner of the kiosk, was a dead ringer for Cheswick in
Cuckoo's Nest
. Schtikker was a fat Austrian Jew, always jingling handfuls of quarters in his front pocket, like he was happily suffering from some form of numismatic elephantiasis. Ivan, a very light-skinned black man who constantly rolled cigarette butts from the street into the gutter with the tip of his cane, like a highly specialized, obsessive-compulsive sanitation worker. And a very dapper Tango Sam, who reminded you of Burt Lancaster grown old and who seemed to dance everywhere rather than walk. When they got to within shouting distance of the kiosk, Tango Sam spoke up: “Marty—you big macha you, the retired one of twelve vice presidents of the seventh-largest advertising firm on the East Coast, you look tremendous—loan me fifty.”

Marty cast a thumb at Ted. “You remember my ungrateful progeny? This is my adopted son, Lord Fenway, the peanut man from Yankee Stadium.”

All the men lowed, like a gray herd of grazing cattle. Benny spoke from behind the magazine rack of the kiosk, his face barely visible, he was so short. “Oy vey. Teddy. The little splinter, I haven't seen you since you were yay big.” He held his hand an inch or two above his own head, because even yay big was a touch taller than he was. Benny always seemed on the verge of bittersweet tears. “I have
Sports Illustrated
for you. And the
Post.
You like girls? I have
Playboy
.”

“The jury's out on that one,” Marty said.

Benny continued, “Shut up, Marty, I'm talking to a person who is still alive. I also have
Oui
and
Club
if you like less mystery. You hungry? Want some Goldenberg Chews? They have peanuts in them. Healthy. Protein.”

“Quite the amuse bouche they are, the Goldenbergs,” added Schtikker.

“No thanks, Benny, but thank you.”

Responding to some mystical prompt inside his own head, Ivan offered, “You see where Sweden banned the aerosol can?”

Tango Sam stepped forward and grasped Ted's hand in both of his. “Teddy, you look tremendous, loan me fifty.”

“Hi, Tango Sam. Hi, Ivan.”

Ivan looked up from caning a cigarette butt to the gutter and said, “The Sox don't have enough black players.”

All the men groaned together on cue. Schtikker piped up, “You can have that
schvartze
Reggie Jackson. He's a cancer. And you're not black anyway, Ivan, there is no black man named Ivan. It's an impossibility. Like a unicorn. Or the Second Avenue subway. Hey, Marty, come over here, I read in
Time
magazine where you can guess a man's age by sticking a thumb up his ass.”

“That was in
Time
magazine?” Ted asked.

Benny said, “I just feel bad for the rest of the Wallenda family.” As if he were in the middle of a conversation no one else could hear. But nothing, no matter how far off topic, could stop the crazy flow of these men; the lack of flow was, in fact, their flow.

“Or
Newsweek
,” Schtikker continued. “Mighta been
Scientific American
.”

“
National Geographic
.”

“
The Advocate
.”

“No fair, I thought I was next,” Ivan said.

“Only once a week now, Ivan, we talked about this.”

“It works.”

“Like the rings of a tree. He's seventy-eight.”

“What is this Space Invaders thing? Anyone?”

“He's right, I'm seventy-eight.”

Marty joined in, “Turns out his ass is a hundred, though.”

“With Dutch elm disease,” offered Tango Sam, “and a Japanese beetle infestation. Might have to cut it down to save his balls.”

Ted felt like riffing along with them. “Yeah, but I bet it's the squirrels that are really annoying, hiding their nuts…” but he trailed off as he felt a change in temperature. Total silence. Like the popular E. F. Hutton commercials of the day. The old men turned and stared at Ted with outraged incredulity.

“What?” Ted asked. “His ass is like a tree, so it follows a squirrel might hide nuts in Ivan's ass like in a tree. A tree. If his ass is a tree in this joke, then it's possible a squirrel … I'm just…”

“That's off-color,” Ivan said dismissively.

Schtikker seemed disgusted. “Marty, the lip on that kid. That is no way for a man to talk about another man's cock and balls.”

Marty raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “I apologize, gentlemen. Jesus, Ted, who the fuck raised you?”

“Come on…” Ted protested.

Tango Sam tap-danced toward Ted. “Theodore, I alone love and forgive you. Loan me fifty.” And all the old men laughed in unison. A graybeard herd of laughter, Marty included. It was the first time he'd seen the old man laugh since the hospital. Ted smiled. If his father was laughing, Ted could be the butt of the joke.

 

16.

Around dinnertime, Ted went to pick up some Chinese takeout. He was dying to get high, but didn't want the smoke to bother his father. His stash was at home, so on the way to Jade Mountain, he stopped by a Jamaican restaurant called Brooklyn Jerk, and bought a nickel bag off a Rasta. It was mostly stems and seeds, but any port in a storm. Ted laughed to himself—any pot in a storm—as he rolled a bone in his car and smoked it down. He felt instant relief, and closed his eyes to listen to the reggae music reaching him like a patch of Carribean blue sky from inside the restaurant. But reggae had to fight with the hideous disco that blared from passing cars. Disco was everywhere that summer. The summer before had belonged to Son of Sam and his all-too-real carnage and tabloid domination. Now it seemed no one wanted anything real at all, and disco fit the escapist bill. And, oh, how he hated it. Ted thought coming down with Saturday Night Fever was worse than coming down with the bubonic plague.

Even the Stones, once the poster boys for hard-rock street cred, were back all over the charts that summer with the godawful, hustle-friendly “Miss You,” and its stupid-ass disco bass line. Wyman had slain Richards, and Jagger didn't seem to give a shit, just kept right on singing. Moms could finally exhale, Mick wasn't the Antichrist after all; he was Tony Orlando. Even though Ted wished there were some Puerto Rican girls just dying to meet him, “Miss You” was all you needed to know about the sad state of pop music in the summer of '78. In November, after the World Series, Rod Stewart would sound the nadir of the depths of rock 'n' roll with “Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?” (Fuck no, was Ted's answer, I think ya are ridiculous.) But that was Rod Stewart, and he'd always been kind of a joke with excellent hair. This was the Stones. This wasn't Dylan going electric, this was Dylan going Donna Summer. This was Greg Allman marrying Cher. Dance music without meaning, lyrically submoronic. “Disco Sucks” was a good T-shirt.