17.
Ted decided that the random image of his mother on the detergent box was a sign to clean up Marty’s house, so that’s what he did all night. It was years-long überfilthy, and Ted quickly got well acquainted with the smells and putrid rejectamenta of his dad’s encroaching disease. He did laundry for hours and hours, filled trash bags with ancient Kleenex crusted by god knows what. He didn’t want to know. Animal mineral vegetable—all three in one? He half expected to find Jimmy Hoffa. But he plowed on. Just because he was a lousy housekeeper for himself didn’t mean he couldn’t be a decent housekeeper for his father. It gave Ted something to do, and made the strained silences between father and son less glaring. If he couldn’t identify something, he tossed it in a trash bag without looking too closely.
When Ted could take no more, they reheated the Chinese and ate in front of the TV, watching the sports news. Father and son both favored the “Amazin’” Bill Mazer on WNEW. The Amazin’ informed the men that the Yankees had won up at Fenway. The loss seemed to make Marty cough. Ted stuffed his own mouth with an orange gelatinous piece of fried something that the mostly unilingual folks over at Jade Mountain identified as sweet-and-sour pork. He had his suspicions. Growing up, there had always been rumors of the dog over at Jade Mountain. Every year was possibly the Year of the Rat or Dog over there. He had no idea what meat was at the center of the sweet, crunchy orange goo, or if it was meat at all, and he stopped himself from wondering how they got it so fucking orange, but it was good chow.
“Stop gloating,” Marty said.
“Do I have to?”
Marty didn’t have much of an appetite. But Ted used his chopsticks to swirl the chicken lo mein, fried rice, and sweet-and-sour orange glue into one insane mass on his plate and ate at it that way as a seamless whole, like a shark might worry at a dead whale. Aside from the chewing and the sound from the TV, it was quiet. Ted took a sip of beer.
“Hey, what’s that nurse’s story anyway? That, what was her name—Maria, was it? Maria—Somethingspanishy?”
Marty laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Ted asked.
“‘What was it?’ You been thinking about her since you met her, checked her card a thousand times, probably sniffed it, you damn well know her name. Probably the only reason you’re here with me right now. The off chance she might show up. You’re transparent.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And she’s mine. She’s outta your league. She’s a spic, ya know?”
“Yes, we established that she’s Hispanic, yes.”
“You don’t have enough juice for her, not enough sap.”
“That’s fucking gross.”
“You understand Latin, son, but you don’t understand Latina, if you catch my drift.”
“You’re on a roll.”
“I wish I hadn’t let your mother dilute your good, Old Testament blood with that Mayflower Wasp weakness. I thought the mix might lend you mongrel vigor, but…”
“Fine, Dad. I get it.”
“My cock used to get so hard I could see my reflection in it. Like a mirror.”
“That’s kind of a non sequitur.”
“My cock. What happened to it?”
“You lost your penis?”
“Can’t remember where I put it.”
“I bet you can’t.”
“Fuck you.”
“Here we go.”
“Where did it go?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Dad, and I’m sure I don’t wanna know.”
“Your mother…”
“Stop! No!”
“Okay, you don’t wanna talk, pass me the remote.”
“The remote? Where is it?”
Marty pointed at his shoe. Ted shrugged. Marty pointed at the shoe again, Ted picked it up, looked underneath it. Marty held out his hand. Ted gave him the shoe. Marty threw the shoe at the TV, expertly turning it off. The remote.
“I used to be able to change channels with my cock.”
“Oh bullshit, Marty, but you could change families with it.”
“Finally, a real person speaks. Why don’t you shut the fuck up? You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You always were your mother’s spy.”
“That kind of cock-talk shit, that can be traumatizing to a kid.”
“Traumatizing—what a bullshit word. I feel sorry for you, you belong to Generation Pussy. Everything’s a fucking trauma now.”
“To a kid, yeah.”
“You’re a kid?”
“No. I was a kid, back when you fucking knew me, I was a kid.”
“Maybe you still are.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“I’m guessing yours?”
They were both breathing heavily by now. Ted got up to go. Marty tried to stay him:
“Okay, I could never really see myself in my cock. At best the image was blurry. Feel better? All grown up now?”
“Yeah, Dad, all grown up now.”
Ted stormed out of the house.
Marty called after Ted’s back as he left, “And it was just getting good.”
18.
Ted sat outside on a bench, smoking ganja by Brooklyn Jerk. New York was a good city to be alone in a crowd. The Rastas would prefer not to talk to him. The brotherhood of the blunt was not blunt. That’s what he needed. He’d brought one of his old journals from when he was eleven and read:
Terrible day! Bad bowling league—124, 108(!), 116! Bringing my year average down to 134.7538658. Couldn’t do anything outside cause it rained so I went over to Walt’s we played cards APBA football and watched football. [Drawing of a football] I didn’t feel bad when I lost 54c in cards but I did feel good when I beat Walt 10–7 in football. I was in a silly mood. I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed at any [sic] but I felt great. I have no right to feel great because there’s school tomorrow. Over the vacation I didn’t do much I was pretty idol [sic]. I feel very bad about being idol, so bad even to the point of wanting to go to school (don’t take it personally)
It was a pretty bad vacation.
Ted wondered at the boy he had been. It seemed like an entirely different person, yet it was him. Who was this child who reported the loss of 54 cents? He loved the specificity of that 54, and he remembered that almost paranoid concern about money that his mother had instilled in him. And he thought, yeah, that’s good writing, good writing is specific. I knew that then. I relearn it right now from myself. A friend of his, a grown man, once told Ted that he practiced his guitar so much because he wanted one day to be able to play “like when I was fourteen.” The child is father to the man. And the bowling average? The obsession with statistics, the purity and power of the number worked to the seventh decimal place, as if some truth were hidden in the golden mean. He could feel his young self grasping for solidity in those numbers, keys to himself—I am this concrete, numerical thing. I am 134.7538658. The unassailable “I am.” Numbers had made the boy real, but the man now still didn’t feel quite real. Where were his numbers now? The exfoliation of his DNA? What mathematical sequence could reveal him to himself, pull off this veil of illusion and skin to uncover the bowling average of his soul? He flipped through the book and came upon page after page filled with autographs of famous baseball players. These were forgeries, all in young Ted’s mimetic hand. He leaned back with a smile and remembered this phase of spending hours and days practicing autographs, almost like trying on other identities for size. Big identities—Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Jimmy Foxx. Writing the double xx a thousand times. As if being able to write like these heroic men would transform him, transport him to Olympus. Clues in numbers. Clues in letters. Clues. Page after page filled with forgeries, not because he wanted to sell them, but because he wanted to be them.
Was he still this soul forger? This grasping, quicksand boy? This kid who didn’t feel he could be “silly,” who felt bad about being idol/idle? That’s not a boy’s word. That’s a Bible word. That
’s a boy parroting an adult. Young Ted the ventriloquist’s dummy. Was he still the boy who wrote this, only with a better vocabulary, longer words to lead him farther away from and efface his simple feelings? His core shame and his silliness. Was he himself or was he the kid or was he himself and the kid? Who was piloting the plane? Moreover, who would make a better pilot?
19.
FALL 1946
The baby didn’t think of itself as a baby. The baby didn’t think. The baby felt. The baby was all that was. The baby was the sky and the sea and the milk. The baby was the inside and the outside. It was a seamless whole, a smooth gleaming perfect world. The baby was the whole fucking thing. Then came a falling-out. The baby’s need was the Fall. Its need caused it to split in two, its need made it not whole anymore, incomplete. I am not whole until I have that thing. Put it in my mouth, put it in me. Its need made it cry. And now this. This new hurt. This new hurt was worse than need. This was need of a different order. A need to have something there that you wanted—that was bad enough, but this was a need to be free of something that was there that you did not want. This was a desire for Absence, for Darkness, for Nothingness. This was too complicated and new. I have only my voice and my anger, felt the baby, this righteous sense of injustice, this anger at God. The baby’s awareness of God was another Fall. Before that, the baby was God, but now there is another God. He is here. He is at my side. He walks with me and He talks with me. There He is. He looks scared. What kind of god is scared? He is speaking. Naming me. Making excuses, making wagers. Betting with the devil in my chest. Punishing me. For what? The baby didn’t know what it had done wrong. But I haven’t done wrong, felt the baby. Then I must be wrong, the baby reasoned. I myself am the Wrongness. That’s what God is saying to my face here. I am what’s wrong. All right. So that’s how it shall be. I accept my fate. But I will love Him anyway, love Him more for knowing I am bad. He alone knows me and pushes me away and fights the devil for me and holds me in the cold night. Thank you, Father.
20.
The young father sits in a hospital by the bed of his baby boy. Maybe they had waited too long to take him to the doctor. The doctor’s eyes had said as much when they arrived. The baby was now hooked up to tubes and wires and machines and had cried so long and so hard that its mouth was open but making no sound anymore. It was wailing without sound. Like it was so far away his father couldn’t hear it, like it was beyond reach, already in another dimension, already in the valley of the shadow of death. The father realized he was thinking of the boy as “it,” a thing, creating distance. He must stop that. A corpse was an it, the boy was still a he. The father wanted to kill himself at his boy’s pain, he wanted to jump out a window, jump out of his own skin. It was unbearable.
The little lungs were filling with fluid. It could be meningitis. They would do a spinal tap. They would stick a needle in his young son’s spine, a spike to the root of his existence; they would stab him and withdraw fluid, life’s blood. And then he would murder the doctor for hurting his son. The father leaned in; the boy smelled of sick. His failure to protect, the one thing a father must do, he had not done. He wanted to go and forget it all. Start again. Meet another woman, have another son, make this all a bad dream. Go to another country, learn another language, change his name.
He put his finger in the boy’s tiny palm. The little hand did not respond. One of the first reactions the child had had, barely born, would be to squeeze a finger in his palm—as if to say yes to life, yes, I’m taking hold, yes, I’m grabbing on. Yes, I’ll play the game of life. Now, nothing. The father leaned into the small head. It was cold and wet and sticky. The wispy hairs matted. He knew there was a demon in there, rooted in the lungs. He knew it. A devil had taken residence. He would remove the demon.
The father spoke to the boy, into the boy, through the boy to the demon. “You coward. You son of a bitch. Have you no pride? You destroy an infant. Why don’t you pick a fair fight? You think you’re a killer? Jump into me. Faggot. Cocksucker. Nazi. Come into me.” The father moved closer still and put his lips on his boy’s mouth.
The mother looked on from across the room and heard “faggot” and “cocksucker” and did not know what it meant. She was spiraling down into her own abyss of helplessness. She would put her faith in science, in the doctors, let her husband put his faith in anger and magic and curses. They would cover the bases that way, fill in the gaps. That’s what two parents do. The father put his lips on his boy’s lips and opened them. Like he was going to give him some of his own air, the breath of life, like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But he did not breathe out and in, he sucked up and out. Sucked the poisoned air from the boy’s lungs into his own. Or so he thought. That was his thought process.
He swallowed the air and sucked deeply again and held it in; as he exhaled, he said, “Come into me, demon. Come into me and see if you can kill a man. You pussy, you cunt. Leave that child be and take me, try to take a man, you dirty piece of shit. You Nazi faggot cocksucker.”
The boy’s eyes focused on his father, and for a moment, the father knew that the boy misunderstood the invective, thought he had been called weak and worthless by his own father. Faggot. Cocksucker. Nazi. The words, not yet understood, were filed away in the tiny elastic pliable mind and taken to heart, translated into feeling. Stamped onto the passport of his very being. The father knew this, knew there was a misunderstanding that he could not redress now. Or ever. That he had committed an unpardonable sin in a preverbal world and therefore made a wounding forever unmentionable, irredeemable. That he had condemned his son to a life of doubt.
The father had no time to regret this. A life of doubt was still a life. And this was the trade-off. He could live with this pain. They both could live with this pain. This was life now. There was no time. The doctors were worthless. He opened his mouth against his son’s opened mouth a third time and inhaled the virus again, the demon, deeply. The father felt something noxious and powerful enter him, like smoke from ancient ritual fires, something tasting of death now and in the future. The little boy closed his eyes and decided to believe in this man, in all the man thought and did, good and bad. The boy exhaled fully, lovingly, surrenderingly into his father’s mouth. He was a worthless piece of shit, but he would live on. He would live. He took up the fight. The boy’s little palm closed over his father’s finger and held tight.
21.
By the time Ted got back to Marty’s, it was well past two in the morning. He entered the house as quietly as possible, reminding himself how he used to sneak back in during high school, guilty and stoned. Come to think of it, he was sneaking back in now, all these years later, guilty and stoned. The more things change. As he walked through the foyer, he could see his father illuminated by the TV static, asleep on the Barcalounger. We met by the light of the test pattern, he thought. Ted tiptoed toward the stairs, not quietly enough. Marty spoke.
“We didn’t finish our heart-to-heart, did we?”
Ted stopped and walked back into the living room. He turned off the TV and stood in a darkness broken only by a streetlamp outside. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s fine.”
“Is it okay? Is it fine?”
“I thought we could pick up where we left off tomorrow.” Ted would be just fine to never pick it up again.
“I don’t know if I have tomorrow. I got no time for bullshit. Cancer has made me a Buddhist: I am totally in the Now, baby.”
“I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Because you asked me to, Dad. Good night.” Ted made to go.
“You shouldn’t smoke the pot.”
“What?”
“That’s bad stuff.”
“You’re gonna father me now? Are you kidding?”
“I’m gonna father you till the day I die. A week from Tuesday. Till the day one of us dies.” Ted could see even in the dark room that his father was very tired and, having been woken from his slumber, vulnerable, his dr
eams clinging to him like his cigarette smoke used to.
“Okay, Dad, I’m listening. You got a pot story?”
“I tried it once. The pot.”
“The pot.”
“Got paranoid at a boho party on Charles Street, in the fifties, I think. Allen Ginsberg made a pass at me, recited the whole of ‘Howl’ with his hand on my knee. Looked like a hairy-knuckled spider. Faygeleh. Never again. I don’t know why you’re so pissed at me, Teddy.”
“You don’t know why I’m so pissed at you?”
“No, your mother loved you enough for the both of us.”
“Huh.”
“She was all over you, tried to make you into a momma’s boy, took away your fight.”
“Your grasp of family dynamics is profound.”
“Oh, Mr. Columbia makes an appearance. Guess what? I didn’t go to Columbia. I went to NYU on the GI bill. I didn’t go Ivy ’cause I couldn’t afford it and because I had to kill Adolf Hitler with my bare hands and schtupp Himmler in the tuchus.”
“I was a sick baby.”
“You were a sick baby, yeah, but she babied you forever. One sniffle and it was high-alert DEFCON Four or whatever. I couldn’t get to you through all that mother love.” Ted the writer wondered if “mother love” was one word—motherlove.
“Well, maybe she gave me all that mother love, as you call it, because you would not accept her wife love.”
Bucky F*cking Dent Page 7
