“‘A man in a Hathaway shirt’ does.”
“You do ‘deserve a break today.’” Marty paused. “Then please, Ted, give me a break.”
Marty patted Ted on the head. “Burn it all,” he proclaimed. “The lifetime lack-of-achievement award for the first time this year goes to a duo, a father-son team from Brooklyn, New York…”
He threw some more magazines on and squirted lighter fluid and got quiet. Ted saw that Marty had a bag of marshmallows to whimsically complete the self-lacerating immolation. Marty spoke very softly now, his eyes never leaving the dancing flames. “You think I’m the only one who needs forgiveness, Ted? You get to have more life and you don’t even know what to do with it. You better beg my forgiveness for that. I made you.” Savior. Accuser. Savior. Accuser.
“That’s right, you did produce me, as well as, perhaps, ‘the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.’ Want me to get in the fire, too, with the rest of your crappy output?”
Ted went up to the fire and put his hand into the flames. Marty screamed, “No! Your hand, your beautiful little hand!” Ted pulled his hand back to show he’d only been lighting his joint, not performing a self-inflicted medieval punishment. He smiled and took a big hit, and, as he held in the smoke, offered a toke to his dad.
“The pot. No. Never. I have pills.”
“C’mon, Dad, a little doob’ll do ya … this is what they call peer pressure, old man. All the cool dads are doing it. This is how parents and kids bond in the seventies.”
“Are you always high, son?”
“Not always, but that is my ambition, yes.”
Something sounded throughout the house, like an electric shock, like the wrong answer on a game show times ten. Ted jumped.
“What the fuck was that? Smoke alarm?”
“Doorbell.”
“That’s the doorbell? Sounds like the end of the world.”
Ted left Marty there by the fire to go see what the end of the world was all about.
23.
When Ted opened the door to find Mariana there, his first thought was “I don’t know what I’m wearing.” And he didn’t look down; he had a bad feeling and didn’t want to face it, kept his eyes on the girl, who said, “Hello, Theodore.” Ted thought he remembered a lengthy negotiation that had ended in an agreement to call him “Ted.” Maybe not.
“Hello, the death nurse.”
“Grief counselor.”
“Hello, the death counselor.”
She smiled patiently and would not be baited or charmed.
“Very nice of you to stay with your dad.”
“Very nice of you to … bring … death, you know, to the home, make housecalls, uh.”
“How long will you stay?”
Ted became aware of an overwhelming urge to impress this woman, like enter a hot-dog-eating contest for her, and he shook his head because he knew that thought had no business here at this time. Instead he said, “You know what, as long as it takes. That’s the kind of who I am. I’m a giver. That’s what I do. I give.”
“You’re a giver.”
“Uh-huh.” He stared into her dark brown eyes and saw they were speckled with amber and hazel, like veins of precious stone hinting at what riches lay beneath. He still wanted to say he’d eat hot dogs for her till he could eat no more, but had the good sense to hold his tongue.
She said, “Hey, look at that. You have your dad’s eyes.” Ted sensed that she liked Marty a lot, and that to be like him was perhaps a good thing, for once.
“Well, I am fifty percent him, I guess, you know, genitally speaking.”
Ted felt a shift in the air. Like he’d said something strange, but he didn’t know what. He tried to replay what he’d just said in his mind, but couldn’t hear it clearly.
“You mean, ‘genetically.’”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“You said ‘genitally.’”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“You did.”
God, that was stupid. What was he, four? Maybe. He caught a glimpse of the two of them in a hallway mirror. He saw her first and was taken that this opposite profile showed another person, still a beauty, but another dimension, a depth that concealed as much as it revealed. But then he saw himself. He was wearing his old New York Yankee pj’s, the cuffs of which came to mid-calf, like culottes. Good look. His belly … he couldn’t even deal with his belly at the moment, so he went to his hair, fuck. He gathered up handfuls and twisted and turned them into some kind of ponytail/chignon. Sweat announced itself at his hairline.
“You said you were ‘fifty percent’ of your dad ‘genitally speaking.’ I guess you’re giving new meaning to ‘chip off the old block.’”
“That’s horrible. No. No way. Anyway. If that’s what we’re … I’m sure I’m well over fifty percent. That’s not … let’s say I am the opposite of fifty percent, okay, whatever that is, probably, would be, like … Jesus. According to the abacus in my head.”
“Must be the new math you got working there.”
“Can I shut the door and you knock and I answer and we can start this all over again?”
Ted was aware this might be funny; he was also aware it might not be funny at all, that it might be a rock balanced on a precipice and could roll either way, into the promised land or back onto his head.
“Perhaps I misspoke.”
“Freud says there are no accidents.”
“Oh, the Freud card, okay, cool. You’re gonna make me play the Jung card? Or perhaps pull Otto Rank?”
He might’ve quit at that one, which wasn’t a half-bad play, but he thought he had a coup de grâce: “Freud schmoid.”
There. He was wrong. He did not have a coup de grâce.
“Nice comeback. What’s that smell?”
“My embarrassment?”
“Your embarrassment smells like marshmallows.”
Mariana, concerned about the burning smell, pushed past Ted and into the house. She hustled after the center of the smoke, up to the fourth floor, Ted climbing the stairs behind her, his head inches from her ascending ass. He could’ve climbed those stairs all day. What the hell is that? Oh. Oh. He felt the stirrings of a hard-on and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one. Spring of ’76? Something about the tall ships and a drunken woman/perhaps transvestite in Queens. Whatever. His cock rolled over like a man troubled in his sleep, awakened by a noise outside but not sure if he should bother to rise fully to go check it out. This is interesting, he thought, and heard again his father say in his head, “She’s out of your league.” Ted agreed.
He followed the death nurse and his thoughts of her into the study, where Marty was now roasting marshmallows impaled on the end of a Boston Red Sox promotional umbrella. Mariana took in the scene, stopped, and nodded. She saw the magazines, the life burning, and intuited the rest. She had seen this before. In her job, dying people often asked to have things obliterated, like the burning ships of Nordic funeral pyres, especially intimate things, creative things—as if they didn’t want to be vulnerable when dead, their defenseless ashes picked over by the vultures of posterity. It was a common concern.
She had read that unfortunate mountain climbers, who fell or wandered off lost and perished in the cold of the Himalayas, were sometimes found with their clothes off. That they had stripped as an unreasonable response to freezing to death. It was called “paradoxical undressing.” It seems that when the body is finally shutting down in the cold, the blood moves from the extremities inward, the last bit of heat retreating to the vital organs, in a doomed attempt to stay alive. But by the time this happens, it is already too late. The freezing person experiences this final stage of freezing death as overheating, and may take off his clothes in the subzero temperatures, searching for comfort: freezing and burning simultaneously. Fire and ice. Frozen in time, burned at the stake. She understood that all too well. Marty’s bonfire was something like this, she reas
oned. A cold heat, a paradoxical striptease by a man who does not want to be seen.
She went to Marty and slipped a hand around his waist. Together they looked at a life go up in smoke. “Is that all there is to a fire?” Marty asked.
Mariana’s response to his attempt at ironic distance was to pull him in even closer. From behind, to Ted, they looked like they could be lovers. A May/December thing. Or more like a July/February thing. Marty rested his head on Mariana’s shoulder and pulled the umbrella out of the fire, making an offering, “Marshmallow? Breakfast of champions. Maybe I wrote that.”
She took of it and ate.
24.
Ted, the new housekeeper, busied himself with cleaning up the remains of the fire, while Mariana and Marty did “yoga” downstairs. Apparently Marty, one of the all-time cynics, the snake-oil salesman with a finely tuned sense of the con, enjoyed yoga and all it promised of chakras and balance and third eyes. This man of the ’40s and ’50s, assuming poses in the New Age, preferred to do it in his red Speedo. “Whatever turns you on,” Ted had said. “It’s the most comfortable thing I have,” Marty replied, “and I know I look French, but I don’t give a fuck.” Mariana did not do the yoga in a Speedo. Unfortunately. She wore a beige Capezio unitard over her hourglass figure, which was neither flattering nor unflattering. Whatever was the color of sex—red? Beige was the opposite of that. Beige was the lukewarm color of natural birth control. Even so, even in beige, Ted could not take his eyes off Mariana.
He had the thought that if he finished cleaning, he might join those two crazy kids for some yoga, or an after yoga, whatever the hell it is they do after yoga. Ted was happy that Mariana seemed genuinely fond of Marty, and happy that he wasn’t the only person left in what was left of Marty’s life. With a poker, he broke up the fire into smaller flames that would burn out without taking the house down, too. As he stirred the ashes, the poker struck on something way heavier than a magazine. He carefully reached into the fireplace and pulled out a notebook that had been too thick to catch and was just singed at the edges. He blew some ash off, and opened it to a first page that read, “‘The Doublemint Man,’ a novel by Martin Fullilove.” A novel? He had never known his father to attempt a sustained piece of fiction. Although he harbored suspicions that the Lear- and Whitman-quoting Marty was a closet reader, it’d been decades since he’d seen his father nose-deep in anything other than the newspaper, and Marty often said things like “What kind of Norman Mailer narcissist would you have to be to think you had three hundred pages’ worth of shit worth saying? That takes a chutzpah I do not have.” Marty was terrific with tag lines and phrases for hire, short bursts of clever and seductive, but this, this tome, was a shock. Ted turned to the first page and read the meticulous handwriting:
You’ve seen the Doublemint Man on the street, you may not know it, but you’ve seen him. He walks among you. He is you, hypocrite reader, brother. The man who leads two lives. A double man. Not because of any chemically mandated schizophrenia, but out of hot, conscious choice. The Doublemint Man is white on the outside with a soft brown nougat center and chilled gin in his veins. He works 9–5 with all the other colorless men, but on the weekends, he likes to enjoy the fruits of his leisure; he likes peaches and he likes to play softball. To be underhanded, his wife says, to throw the ball that way.
Ted flashed back to childhood weekends when his dad had loved to play softball on a Puerto Rican team that went by many names depending on the game wager—the Royals, the 21’s, the Crowns, and the Nine Crowns. They usually played for five dollars a man or beer money, and they played their hearts out all over the city. Ted had seen grown men slide into second base on asphalt for a few bucks and pride. They were so good that team name changes were necessitated by the fact that their reputation made it hard to get a game. So when the Crowns got too well known as a dynasty, they became the Royals, and when the Royals’ notoriety became too great, they morphed into the 21’s, and then back again when the Crowns had been forgotten. The names were in a kind of witness-protection rotation.
This novel promised to be autobiographical. Marty had been a pitcher as a kid, a damn good one, and had once played in a game in Brooklyn where the winner was to receive a trophy from Shirley Temple. The Puerto Ricans and Dominicans called Marty “Amy,” for some reason, and he was referred to as Gringo #1, Gringo #2 being Ted’s best friend’s dad, Julius aka Jules, or Julie. There were only two gringos, though, 1 and 2. Amy and Julie. Ted felt his father was writing a little under the sway of the hard-boiled noir writers he remembered from childhood that the old man admired, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett chief among them. Ted smiled and read on:
The Doublemint Man wasn’t looking for anything special, wasn’t aware of a lack per se. But on this Sunday, something was bothering me; I was having some control problems. I could not get the ball over the plate. I walked the bases full. My catcher, Raul, was a big, graceful Puerto Rican cat with nimble feet who could hit a softball 400 feet and had a quasi-religious respect for the black magic in my white arm. Raul treated my arm as a separate entity from me, as if it had found its way onto this gringo’s body by some strange curse or Santeria ritual. And though he knew I knew only grade-school Spanish, he felt my arm must be bilingual, and he chose to talk to it, rather than me, when he came out to the mound to settle me. Raul whispered to my arm words by turns soft and cooing, pleading, cajoling, and then hard and demanding. I looked away, almost embarrassed to be witnessing this lovers’ quarrel.
While Raul had a tête-à-tête with my arm, I looked around, idly scanning the stands. And I saw her. I saw her, and once seen, she could not be unseen. A tall drink of cerveza. She must be Latina, I thought, and she smiled at me. I felt my knees nearly buckle and the air rush from my lungs. I hadn’t felt this way since high school. The Doublemint Man had never seen her before, but in that brief instant, he knew that he would see little else for the rest of his days.
Raul finally raised his eyes from my arm to meet my eyes and said, “Amy! Amy! Tro estreekahs, gringo.” And Tro estreekahs I did. Each time checking to see if the Dark Lady in the stands was watching. In between pitches, I tried as subtly as possible to see if she was with someone. I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. Our shared smiles came more frequently, progressed to nods, and even winks.
“Jesus! ¡Cabrón!” Raul shouted, and tossed his catcher’s mitt down, shaking his hand in pain. I had never thrown this hard, had never had this much fuego.
We won both games for a total of ten lousy bucks a man that day, and I made excuses to loiter like a bum afterward, all the while seeing that she was doing the same on the other side of the field. When the crowd had thinned enough, I walked over to her and introduced myself. She said her name was Maria. I might’ve guessed. I asked her if her son’s name was Jesus. She said sí and laughed. It was like that first groundbreaking, dreaming fish that was used to pulling oxygen out of water, separating the O molecule from the H2, and then suddenly, this jump onto land, and nothing but pure, terrifying oxygen, unadulterated life itself. A fairy-tale manfish, half in one world, half in another, suspended happily in the once lethal air. The rest of the Nine Crowns magically disappeared as if taken by the Rapture and, as the sun set, my lips found hers, and I found my way home.
Ted could sense Marty and Mariana wrapping up the yoga downstairs. He heard “Om shanti shanti,” and he was pretty sure they weren’t reciting The Waste Land. Ted did not want to stop reading. He grabbed the book and headed out into the street.
He wandered and walked/read until he found himself outside Brooklyn Jerk. He nodded at the Rastas, bought his usual nickel bag. The Rasta he knew as Virgil sat down next to him and said, “What a joy to hear the utterance of a Rasta.” Ted smiled and nodded like an awkward paleface in a dreadlocked world. “I and I Virg. Call me dat.” Ted thought of saying something about Bob Marley or Haile Selassie and the Lion of Judah or that he, too, believed the weed was a holy sacrament, but something in Virgil’s eyes told him
it was okay to say nothing. Much is made of social interaction in the West, Ted thought, about the invitation to speak in a welcoming eye, but nothing is made of perhaps the even more welcoming look, the invitation to stay and say nothing at all, to merely coexist as humans in the same spot. Respect.
Virgil reached into the wool cap that contained his dreads, stuffed so full as to give him the appearance, Ted thought, of the Great Kazoo on the latter years of The Flintstones or a Jiffy Pop container expanded to its max. (Ted made a mental note that these were not bad similes and hoped he could find them on a rainy day.) Virgil pulled out a spliff with nearly the girth of a Cuban cigar, a gem from his private stash. Oh Brooklyn, my Brooklyn. Ted thought of Whitman and Castaneda, and how Carlos said that as Native culture became circumscribed and debased, the actual physical journey into adulthood through feats of courage and duress was replaced by the faux journey through drugs and mushrooms; that when there was no longer room to take a trip courtesy of the encroachment of the West and the drive to California, tripping became the trip. As their world got crowded and they couldn’t move, they opened up new territory in the mind. Expanded the hurting franchise mentally—the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves. What a long strange trip it’s been for me, for this country. The final frontier. In his own mind, with Walt Whitman, the bearded bard, he would cross Brooklyn Ferry this day on a spliff nearly the size of a canoe, singing of diminished things. There were seventy-seven of Berryman’s Dream Songs and it was the summer of ’78; he’d reached the end of Henry’s string. He was heading into open waters, his head crowded with the shiny words of the greats. Something new was coming into the world by madly blending what was old.
What a day for a daydream. This daydreaming boy began to tangent off in all directions. Something was being born. His every third thought was of Mariana. That was okay. Like the refrain of a song. This was good shit Virgil had shared. Maybe too good. Ted knew this was a day for a trip, that he would get from here to there, he would move mountains in his mind’s mind. Something was wanting to be born. He could feel the mental contraction. Roll away the stone. Standing next to a mountain, chop it down with the edge of my hand, Jimi sang. Voodoo Chile. The Great Kazoo, Carlos Castaneda, Walt Whitman, Marty Fullilove, and Jimi Hendrix wrestled in his mind to see if there was something new in their collaboration. A supergroup. Like Cream or Derek and the Dominos. “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” Clapton is the common denominator of the supergroup. He’s the free agent signing, the Catfish Hunter of the ax. This is how writing gets done, Ted thought, you let Kazoo and Walt rub elbows while Jimi and Clapton serenade Marty and Catfish, and you see if sparks fly, and, in the light of those sparks, you try to see new thought, new land. He was very high.
Bucky F*cking Dent Page 9
