The Ringer

by Bill Scheft

  Maybe that’s why he yelled at the kid. The kid kept calling him “Uncle Mort.” Like he was visiting a sick relative. Maybe the kid was nervous. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He was nervous. He was visiting a sick relative. Okay, so the kid misfired. But even if you are palsied with fear, even if it’s the terror that clouds your vision like a thumbed box score in the Times, there’s no reason to show up at a hospital, a goddamn hospital, unshaven and without a goddamn jacket and tie.

  Honestly, if they hadn’t hidden his clothes, he’d be wearing a jacket and tie. Well, a jacket. The black woman, Sadie, she’d hidden his clothes. The other day, before she quit. He asked her to leave so he could dress for dinner, and she handed him the bedpan and walked out into the corridor. Always with the bedpan. That she could do. He put on his white J. Press pinpoint oxford shirt and the mid-tan tweed jacket from some long-extinct Madison Avenue clothier who’d finished the first draft of Chapter 11 around 1962. He eschewed the year-round gray wool trousers from Chipp. Bad fit. He’d have to get the pants let out for the catheter. Enzo would take care of it. Maybe the black woman would run the pants down there for him. Do that one goddamn errand. He didn’t see any “No Alterations Allowed” sign around. In fact, he thought that’s what Sadie was doing at first, when she stormed in and grabbed the trousers off the bed. Then she demanded the jacket and shirt and he figured she was going to have Enzo give them a whack with the steam. But when nothing came back two hours later, then nothing still a day later, he knew she’d hidden everything. That’s when he came out with the “Stop extorting me with that bedpan and give me some answers!” line. Pretty good line. Pretty damn good line, for a guy who hadn’t had a drink in eleven days. Now thirteen. That was the worst thing he said. The worst thing he said that he understood. (There was another remark, something about being robbed on the subway—“And don’t think you’re home free on this, Hattie!”) She threw the tie at him before storming out. Good. Now the tie hung around his bare neck, knotted with a serviceable four-in-hand, resting on the cotton tunic. Good-looking tie. Pheasants on a navy field, symmetrically stained. All in all, he had handled the whole thing pretty damn well.

  And then the kid came in this afternoon, avec stubble, sans croissants, and said, “Hey, Uncle Mort, what’s with the tie?”

  At least I’m wearing a tie, you wise-ass cur. Had he said that? Well, you could hardly blame him for snapping a bit. Go climb a gum tree, kid. Right, that he said. I might find your concern touching, I might even have you talk to that Viennese thief, Liebenthal. Was Liebenthal Viennese? Perhaps you might ask Sheila how I’m holding up. No, he hadn’t mentioned Sheila. Couldn’t have. Nobody knew. Get a second opinion on the state of my prick. Oh no, he had. I might even tell you a few stories about your mother, Dottie, who goes through life as if she’s giving the world two strokes. Giving the world two strokes. That was good. He had to remember that. She’s never finished one goddamn thing I’ve written. “Oh Mort, what a gripping first paragraph….” But I shan’t. I find it hard to give a thoughtful response when you clearly care more about the black woman. By the way, I know you gave her the croissants. What? You’ve shown up the last three days like I’m something to check on the way to your locker. For Christ’s sake, kid, pick up a razor at the goddamn gift shop! You’re making me look bad. And put on a coat and tie when you come to see me. And especially when you plan on having this discussion with me. No, that wasn’t excessive. Have a little class, kid. Stop cutting corners. You’ve been doing that for years and people are beginning to talk. Close the door on your way out. I’m well rid of you today. That was.

  “Mr. Spell?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m your new day nurse. My name is Marva. Your nephew hired me. I’ll be here one to ten every day. I’ll stay till midnight tonight, because I’m starting so late.”

  “Narva?”

  “Marva.”

  “And you’re from someplace in the Caribbean?”

  “Yes, Trinidad.”

  “Do you know the runner Hasely Crawford?” He had been there. Hasely Crawford, running in Lane One, had upset a strong field to win the hundred meters at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. He had pulled away in the final forty meters and stumbled across the finish line, ahead of Jamaica’s Don Quarrie and the robotic Russian Valeri Borzov, the defending Olympic champion. The World’s Fastest Human hatched from a country of perhaps but no more than a million people. It was the first gold medal of any kind for Trinidad and Tobago.

  “I know him because everybody in Trinidad knows him. I was already here in the States when he won. But he’s still a hero.”

  “You’re looking awfully well today.”

  “Thank you. Your nephew told me to tell you he’ll be here tomorrow morning at nine.” He should warn her not to steal the croissants when the kid shows up. Wait. She won’t be here. “And he wanted me to give you this.”

  “You open it.”

  A tie. Hunter green, with a silver-stitched rendering of some building. MSH. Where was this place? It was too modern to be a university, too large for the clubhouse at Forest Hills. Christ, why does everything look like a goddamn synagogue? The same building was on the plastic bag. MSH. Mount Sinai Hospital. The kid had bought him a tie in the gift shop.

  “You dropped the note on the floor.”

  “That would be great if you could pick it up and read it to me. I lost my glasses.”

  “They’re right here on the floor.”

  “Hasely Crawford is damn lucky to have a friend like you.”

  “Sorry, they were all out of razors.”

  “You can borrow mine.”

  “No,” this new black woman said. “That’s what the card says.”

  He’d laugh later. The tie fit well. Pretty damn well. He’d show it to the other patients on his late afternoon walk, which should be around now.

  “I think I’ll take my walk now, Marva.”

  “Would you like me to go with you?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Would you like me to take your other tie to the cleaners?”

  “That would be damn nice.”

  “Anything else you need while I’m out?”

  The loafers felt good.

  “I think not.”

  8

  “Before we get into the situation with your uncle, I’d like to talk about our last session.”

  “That was five months ago. What about if we talked about the stuff we couldn’t talk about for a year because all we talked about was this fucking move of yours?”

  “We could talk about that.”

  “Really?”

  “You know, Harvey, I’ll be honest. I’m still very hurt that you left me.”

  “Fuck.”

  Saturday night. College Boy on the 6:05 Hackensack local. New Jersey Transit had lost big coin on this voyage. $5.80 round trip, and College Boy virtually had the entire coach to himself. It had been just him, Bagzilla, three girls snapping their gum and a guy poring over a shopper for the Sears in Hackensack like he was six credits short for his degree in Craftsman Tool Appreciation. College Boy had flipped through the Daily News, which on Saturdays was half the thickness of the Sears shopper. Friday’s 9th at Belmont—9-1-7, $432.20. Fuck.

  Saturday night, and College Boy is on the bus to Teaneck. Going back into The Tank. Tank was College Boy’s word for psychotherapy. Tank, being short for Think Tank. Shrink was everybody else’s term.

  Well, at least Dr. Bettles had agreed to see him, even if it meant shlepping way the hell out to Teaneck. Considering all those Saturday mornings when he had overslept or opted for Felipe’s nine A.M. money game, this was damn thoughtful. A turning point in the relationship. Bettles’s word, not his. There was no “relationship” between him and Bettles. None. Just like every other relationship College Boy had ever had.

  Maybe Dr. Bettles was just curious about Uncle Mort. Maybe he was being thoughtful because he hadn’t seen College Boy in five months. Maybe he was being
thoughtful because College Boy had finally broken down and was coming to him. Gary Beitleman of Teaneck, New Jersey.

  “What’s with Beitleman? I thought your name was John G. Bettles.”

  “Bettles is my New York name, Harvey.”

  “Christ. So, what do I call you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Remember the time you got angry at me about your name, Harvey?”

  Early on, Month Three of their nine-year dance, College Boy had asked Bettles to call him Suss. Suss Sussman, the nickname that had buried “Harvey” through Curtis Junior High, Lynn South, and college, after which he moved to Central Park and became College Boy. Suss. “Hey, Suss.” “How’s it goin’, Suss?” “Get laid last night, Suss?” He loved being College Boy, but he was still okay with Suss.

  For the next six months, this had dominated every session. “Why do you prefer to be called Suss?”/“I just do.”/“Why is it so important?”/“It’s not. I just prefer it.”/“Don’t you like being called Harvey?”/“I just don’t like the name.”/“Your parents gave you the name Harvey. Tell me about that.”/“You’ll have to talk with them.”/“I’d rather talk with you, Harvey.”/“I’d rather be called Suss, Dr. Bettles.”/“But why do you prefer to be called Suss?”

  “Okay, call me fucking Harvey!” he’d snapped, and with that, he had given Bettles the first of four buttons to push over the next six-plus years. Buttons two, three, and four became: “Remember the time you got angry at me when I asked about your gambling?” “Remember the time you got angry at me when I asked how long you thought you could play softball?” and “Remember the time you got angry at me when I told you I was moving my practice to Teaneck?”

  “Go with ‘fuck.’”

  “What?”

  “Before. When I said I was still hurt that you left me, you said ‘fuck.’”

  “Aren’t we supposed to be talking about my feelings? Isn’t that the fucking idea?”

  “Fucking idea.”

  “Christ. I come out here to talk about my uncle and we’re right back where we were five months ago!”

  Actually, they were back where they were a year ago. Five months ago, Bettles had moved to Teaneck. But this was after seven months of trying to convince College Boy to join him out here. At eighty dollars a session. When he’d only paid twenty-eight at the Astor Place Institute for Psychotherapy. For two sessions.

  “Go on.”

  “Every time I tried to talk about things that were bothering me, like some old thing with Rachel, you kept bringing it back to fucking Teaneck. ‘Why don’t you try it in Teaneck?’ Like the Chamber of Fucking Commerce.”

  “You mentioned the chamber of commerce in our last session. After you broke my ashtray.”

  “Before.”

  “Now, which one was Rachel again?”

  “She worked at Macy’s. Wanted us to move in together.”

  “Yes, I remember. The one who rolled off you and said, ‘Well, I came.’”

  “No. That’s Trish. Rachel I still keep in touch with. We’re still friends.”

  “Tell me, Harvey, when was the last time you shit in your pants?”

  Good Christ, College Boy thought. Not this again. With a ringer’s logic, College Boy’s strategy with Bettles had always been to keep fouling off pitches to prolong his half of the inning. For he knew that once he stopped, Bettles would quickly and irrevocably change the subject. He’d yak for thirty-five minutes about Rachel’s latest disappointment, pause to reload, and Bettles would stop lighting his pipe and ask, “How long do you look in the toilet after you flush your shit?” He’d give an unedited account of the time his father forgot to pick him up at the bus station, and he sat there three hours with 101-degree fever and no money until a janitor woke him up and gave him a dime to call home, and Bettles would wait a respectful two minutes before asking, “Does your mother still give you an erection?”

  “The last time I shit in my pants? You mean, other than right now?”

  “You still see Rachel?”

  “Every once in a while. She has a baby daughter named Callie. Sometimes I stop by with a present. Stay for an hour or so.”

  “When you saw her last, what did she say?”

  “Same shit. ‘Take off your cleats. This could have been yours, Suss. When is College Boy going to graduate? What are you so afraid of? Uh-oh, it’s been an hour. You don’t want to get too attached. Better take off. Time to run. I wish I could have been more patient with you, Suss. But I’m happy now. I like my life.’ That kind of stuff.”

  “You called it shit. ‘Same shit,’ you said.”

  “So what if I did?”

  With Bettles, it was all shit and Mommy, Mommy and shit. Like some Freudian Cuisinart, Bettles processed anything and everything into a bowel movement or an Oedipal moment. For the sole purpose, College Boy was sure, of pissing him off.

  “Nice girl.”

  “Too nice for you.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, I did.”

  “Can we talk about my uncle?”

  “You met her on a train?”

  “Trish was the train. Rachel I met at a wedding. A guy on my Bayside team.”

  “This was…”

  “A few years ago.”

  “I’m surprised you went. You so rarely socialize. College Boy is on many teams, but he is a part of no team. He is a team unto himself.”

  “Yeesh.”

  “The groom was…”

  “Jimmy Boyle. Catcher. Could never get the number of outs right. ‘Okay, two down, no, I mean, nobody out.’”

  “This Jimmy Boyle. Did he look like your mother?”

  “Christ. You know, this is the shit that stopped me coming here in the first place.”

  “‘Shit’ again. Interesting…I thought you stopped coming because I moved to Teaneck.”

  “That too.”

  “I remember. You were quite angry when I told you I was leaving the Institute and moving to Teaneck.”

  Men are usually equipped with one of two seminal delusional thoughts. The first is “She digs me,” the second, “I can take this guy.” Some men are outfitted with a deluxe set, which contains the same two thoughts but with interchangeable genders: “He digs me.”/“I can take her.” College Boy had never entertained either bon-machismo. Until nine years ago, when Dr. John G. Bettles hunched into the waiting room at the Astor Place Institute for Psychotherapy and creaked out his name, “Uh-ah, Har? vey Suss? man?”

  I can take this guy, thought College Boy.

  This delusion lasted all of one session. Session number two began with Bettles asking, “Why don’t you lie down on the couch?”

  “Why?”

  “This is therapeutic analysis.”

  “Nobody told me.”

  “I’m telling you.”

  And College Boy lay down, Bettles out of sight behind him, and went back to being a man who never thought, “I can take this guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “‘Yes’ what?”

  “I was angry when you told me you were moving to Teaneck. But really, I was pissed at how we stopped doing anything here. All of a sudden, it was zero fucking progress.”

  “Did Rachel know anyone at the wedding?”

  “Just the maid of honor. They hired her the last minute when the singer fell through. Jesus. A voice like that and she’s buying housewares for fucking Macy’s? I never got that. You do what you do best.”

  “Like you playing softball.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Remember the time I asked you how much longer you thought you could play softball?”

  “No.”

  “You got very angry.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “She had a nice voice?”

  “Unreal. You know that song from Godspell, ‘On the Willows There’?”

  “No. Perhaps you’d like to sing some of it.”

  “What? Um…Anyway, she sang the shit out of it.”

  “Right,
‘the shit out of it’…Sex with Rachel must have been strange with her rolling off you and saying, ‘Well, I came….’”

  “That was Trish. Most of our first date she spent telling me how her mother couldn’t understand how she could have sex before marriage, and most of the second date explaining how all that stuff about her mother was something she had to get out of the way before we could have sex. We did it six times that first night. She said she was going to call in sore to work Monday. People like that, like her, they just talk about doing shit like that. The next morning at the Seventy-seventh Street subway, the train was full. I said, ‘Let’s wait.’ What did I know? But she was gone. She jammed herself into the last car with all the other people on their way to work. I couldn’t handle that. Took a nap on the platform for an hour and a half. A cop woke me.”

  “Six times? Impressive.”

  “You think so?”

  “You certainly do. You took great pains to mention it.”

  “If I thought it was impressive I would have mentioned it eight fucking years ago. It’s just what happened.”

  “You must have felt the need to show her up after she had rolled off you and said, ‘Well, I came.’”

  “That was Trish!”

  “Your mother’s name is Trish, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s Dottie. Dottie Sussman.”

  “That’s a first.”

  After eight-and-a-half years riding the couch, College Boy finally felt he was making something resembling a bit of progress. He had come to understand that he and Trish or he and Rachel had not hated each other; they had a dynamic they were playing out. He had considered exploring the notion that being a softball ringer fed both his grandiosity and his infantilization. He had even allowed for the cringe-inducing possibility that spending two hundred dollars a week trying to hit the triple at Belmont was the fiscal equivalent of diarrhea. Of course, attending the twice-weekly fourteen-dollar sessions at The Institute, as he had for the last two years during the softball off-season, was the fiscal equivalent of a really good morning dump. Just ask Dr. John G. Bettles, API Therapist/Arbiter of All Things Fecal.