by Neal Pollack
His parents started letting him watch television, and things got even better. He was from 2010 and therefore used to being continually entertained. But he also remembered TV, good old-fashioned four-channel TV. He longed for it. Then, one morning Rose needed to get some work done, and she turned on the PBS block of Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
The screen was tiny, almost pointillist in its lack of clarity. Most of the time, the picture seemed blurred and fuzzy. You had to turn knobs to fix the picture. But Brad didn’t care. He luxuriated in a warmly flickering cathode bath.
It was TV! At last!
Brad didn’t need Sesame Street as preschool. He was already more or less not racist, and he knew how to count to ten. Give him a sheet of paper and he could even do simple algebra. Not only did he know the alphabet, he knew the Russian and Hebrew alphabets. But TV still accomplished its pacifying magic. He sat gurgling, humming along to old Cookie Monster songs he remembered, enjoying it when Ruth Buzzi showed up, and wryly observing that Bert and Ernie really did seem like a weird middle-aged postsex married gay couple. He legitimately laughed, flapping his arms because he could. His parents found that really cute.
The TV went in spurts at the Cohen house, based on whether his parents were getting along. If the marriage were on sound footing, they’d often spend the evening reading, talking and smoking, sometimes with other couples. There were dinner parties and Dylan albums on the hi-fi. But when things dipped domestically, usually during those dim periods where Don was having passive-aggressive affairs with grad students, the TV started coming on at night as well.
It was mostly early ’70s stuff that Brad had previously only seen in reruns. The Bob Newhart Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had intelligent humans who understood comic timing at the helm. But almost all the other shows were unwatchably moronic, especially seen through the prism of a failed twenty-first-century TV writer. Brad watched Laugh-In, President Nixon turning to the camera and saying, “Sock it to me?,” cringing at how weak the material actually was, though he did like Jo Anne Worley.
Watching television was strange for Brad, and it just got stranger every day. He knew what was going to happen, maybe not in specific episodes, but in general. WJJM would shut down, Mary would be the last one out of the room, and Lou Grant would resurface a few years later without a laugh track as a California newspaper editor. The jarring appearance of Cousin Oliver meant that The Brady Bunch was about to cross over into oblivion. From now on, Brad would know the ending of more or less every movie and TV show, definitely every Super Bowl. He’d also know the ending of every famous person.
One night NBC was rerunning Elvis’s ’68 Comeback Special. Brad had never seen it before. It was exhilarating to watch the King at the height of his gyrating, spangled, long-haired, gospel-tinged middle period, before the fall.
This is entertainment, Brad thought.
“Elvis!” he exclaimed.
“What was that?” asked Rose.
Brad had been able to talk for a while now. But he’d been waiting to spring some sort of iconic first word on his parents. A simple “da-da” wouldn’t do.
“I think he said, ‘Elvis,’ ” Don said.
“Elvis!” Brad said again.
“Our baby is talking!” Rose said, “And his first word is ‘Elvis.’ ”
But Brad took it a little too far.
“He’s going to die on the toilet,” Brad said.
“What?” said Don.
“He just said that Elvis is going to die on the toilet,” Rose said.
“I want him to say it again,” Don said.
“Uhhh,” Brad said. “Elvis?”
“No, son,” said Don, “say exactly what you said before.”
Brad’s parents looked at the strange beast they had created, the boy who, before his second birthday, had predicted the exact manner of Elvis’s death. Their gazes held a mixture of fear and wonder. It was more than he’d ever inspired in them the first time around.
“How do you know?” Don said.
It was only 1971. People didn’t want to know the truth about their King. And if Brad came out and said to them, “I’ve lived this exact life before and I know everything that’s going to happen until 2010,” they would have him hospitalized forever. Then, once his predictions started to come true, he’d end up in a government research institute, simultaneously probed, harassed, and shunned, like some sort of third-tier X-Man. That wasn’t what Brad wanted. Right there he made a conscious decision to project a vague illusion of normality until it was acceptable to do otherwise.
He wiggled his arms, touched his nose, and pointed at Don. “Da-da!” he said. “Yaaaaay!”
It worked pretty well. Brad’s parents got a lot of subsequent mileage out of the fact that Brad’s first word had been “Elvis.” They always omitted the “He’s going to die on the toilet” comment, though, because, let’s face it, that positioned their son badly. They preferred to paint Brad as a kind of quirky, bell-bottomed pop savant, not a sinister doom prophet.
In reality he was neither. He was a man in a boy’s body forced to live through the 1970s for a second time. The decay, the disillusionment, the malaise: Brad could feel it bloom like a cloud over Three Mile Island. Vietnam would go horribly wrong; Nixon would get caught and flee in disgrace. There would be gas lines and an Islamic revolution with a hostage crisis that would top the decade like a rotten cherry. Brad could see it all coming. It was like he was living in the past, the present, and the future all at once. He tried to ignore it like so much background static, but it was always there, always on, and always calling.
His life felt like a repeat, dished out in thirty-minute, commercial-soaked increments. Single-box TV served him a constant mental diet of all-knowing nostalgia, one scoop of vanilla, when what Brad really wanted was a twelve-flavor banana split with whipped cream, cherries, nuts, sprinkles, and six different toppings, including pineapple. Scooby-Doo and Super Friends were fine once in a while if they came on Boomerang and you were high and you could click away whenever you wanted. But there was no Boomerang. Or Netflix. Or Internet. Or anything. There was barely even HBO. Brad couldn’t click away. And he was, regrettably, never high.
Most of the time, Brad kept it to himself, but he’d occasionally drop a smart bomb just to fuck with his parents. A simple viewing of The Love Boat could turn into an existential crisis.
“Hah,” Brad said. “Gopher.”
“This show is the worst,” said Don, who nonetheless tuned in for every single episode that guest-starred Charo.
“Gopher,” Brad said, “is going to be a reactionary Midwest congressman someday.”
Don looked at Brad with a little fear, which he always did when Brad was entering soothsayer mode.
“Oh, come on,” Don said.
“It’s true,” Brad said. “He’s going to be in Congress, and so is Steve Largent of the Seattle Seahawks.”
“You’re just making this up.”
“And Sonny Bono,” Brad said, a statement that caused Rose to spit out her wine.
O. J. Simpson, wife murderer. Michael Jackson, child molester. Kermit the Frog on the cover of Vanity Fair. Abba on Broadway. Don and Rose would be plagued by weird aha moments their entire lives, continually tripped up by their son, the snarky prophet.
One Saturday afternoon, a Ronald Reagan western was “Movie of the Week.” Don turned it on. Brad moaned. The Gipper appeared on horseback.
“That man’s going to be president,” Brad said.
Don just laughed. But he’d lived with this strange boy for a while. He knew that, when it came to really important matters, what Brad predicted always came true.
A couple years later, America elected Reagan in a landslide. Don called a psychiatrist.
For himself.
THE ’80S
The years passed, and
the world caught up with Brad. He could relax a little into his second incarnation. The world had less to fear from an eleven-year-old who talked like a grown-up than it did from a three-year-old who did. Don got tenure and stopped screwing around, Rose got into natural health, and Brad got into comic books. Family life normalized.
In May 1981, Brad’s parents took him to see The Empire Strikes Back on opening night. Brad had begged them, even though it would be technically the sixtieth time he’d seen the movie. He was still looking forward to seeing Empire on the big screen again after all these years. But he was also operating on a metalevel that no one else on earth could understand. Brad really wanted to see the faces of the other kids when Darth Vader made the big reveal. He wanted to remember wonder, what it was like when the world was young, before spoilers, before Jar Jar Binks ruined it for all of us.
“We could go see it at the Ford City Mall,” Don said.
“On Cicero?” said Brad. “That place is horrible. The screens are so small.”
“Look who’s Gene Siskel all of a sudden,” Rose said.
“We have to go downtown to see it on a big screen,” said Brad.
Don thumbed through the Sun-Times, what he called a “workingman’s newspaper” even though he was no workingman himself.
“It’s playing at the Esquire,” he said. “We can go to the Berghoff afterward.”
That sounded like a good night. Brad and his parents took the bus over to Thirty-Fifth Street, transferred to the El, and sat on the train as it dimly chugged down to the Chicago Avenue stop, where, underground, an old man played “Sweet Home Chicago” on a beat-up Stratocaster with a portable amp barely bigger than a desktop radio. Brad had spent most of his life in Chicago once, so it was kind of weird to go back and do it all again, especially now that Chicago had mysteriously reverted from the yuppiefying boomtown of the ’90s back to the gritty Chicago of The Blues Brothers, when you could actually still see Junior Wells on Maxwell Street. It was like watching urban renewal simultaneously in forward and reverse. He didn’t even remember what it was like to live there when a Daley wasn’t in charge. Now he knew. It was awesome. Also, it smelled like pee.
Brad tipped the blues guitarist thirty-five cents, his Junior Mints money.
“What’d you do that for?” Don asked on the stairs up.
“I like the blues,” Brad said. “I can relate.”
Don and Rose thought that was very funny.
“What have you got to feel the blues about?” Rose said.
If they only knew.
They walked east toward the lake. The Esquire, a grand, 1,400-seat movie palace from the Golden Age, was definitely not at its height in 1981. Plitt Theatres, that not-so-great name in cinema history, had taken it over, letting the stuffing come out of the balcony seats. The carpet had frayed, the bathroom sinks leaked, the walls were oily, and the upper balcony rows reeked of sex and booze. Brad knew the Esquire’s future. It would be multiplexed into banality in 1988 and then close for good in 2006, though with the big orange-and-yellow neon sign still out front to remind people of a time when the Gold Coast was sort of interesting.
They turned onto Oak Street. Brad saw the neon and the awning. The marquee read:
20th CENTURY FOX PRESENTS
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
DIRECTED BY IRVIN KERSHNER
Now that was something Brad could feel freshly excited and nostalgic about at the same time. It was so amazing, he wanted to use his phone to tweet a picture. But there were no phones, at least not ones that could take pictures, and there was no Twitter. There was only memory and a big salted tub of half-rancid popcorn and a watery Sprite that could float a barge and a box of Junior Mints that would sit like a flaming brick in Brad’s stomach for two days.
They sat through a preview of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was also coming out that summer to blow everyone’s mind. Everyone stared at the screen raptly, no matter how old they were. They had no phones. They weren’t particularly distractible. Movies went on and on, and they’d sit for hours, just happy to be entertained. Brad looked around him and saw 1,250 people staring in innocent wonder at the blockbuster world. The beautiful fools, they had no idea what was coming. George Lucas would betray them all.
Don must have enjoyed the movie, because he always walked or took the bus and never sprung for a cab. But on this day, after the movie was over, they took a cab down State Street to the Berghoff, where Don had reserved a table. Brad loaded up on sauerkraut and the biggest damn plate of knockwurst he’d ever seen. Don ate pig’s knuckle. Rose mopily stirred a bowl of gelatinous stew. She never liked what she ordered.
“I can’t believe that he’s Luke Skywalker’s father,” she said.
“An actual plot twist,” Don said. “Who’d have thunk it?”
“I knew,” Brad said. “I’ve known forever.”
His parents looked at him and sighed.
“Of course you have,” said Rose.
Brad lived mostly in his mind, apart from other kids. He did well in school, definitely top 10 percent (except in math, where he still veered toward the middle), but not so well that he’d draw suspicion to himself. He could bang out a five-paragraph paper in twenty minutes. He had a lot of free time and didn’t do much.
“Why don’t you ever play with other children, Brad?” Rose Cohen asked him.
“Because they’re boring,” Brad said.
“You wouldn’t know unless you talked to them.”
“I’ve talked to them,” Brad said. “I know.”
But sometimes Brad invited other kids over to play Atari, because it was always better to play video games with kids. He had the 2600, the 5200, and the Intellivision, and the ColecoVision. All the visions. Whenever a new system came along, he boxed up the old one, with all the games, in boxes labeled, “Precious Childhood Artifacts. Do Not Discard.” He knew that people would pay a lot someday for antiquated gaming systems in decent working order.
Brad was also an arcade warlock in a way he’d never been the first time around. He kept an eye out for new consoles. When Centipede and Galaga, games on which he already had a head start, appeared, he went at them with a fistful of quarters. He concentrated on those, because he knew they had staying power. Maybe he should have been learning French. But level thirty-two on Joust was also a laudable goal.
Brad knew that, someday soon, nerds would rule the world, and he knew exactly what they valued. He became a collector, like in Guardians of the Galaxy, which he also collected. But unlike the first time around, when the comics had come in the mail and he’d torn into them like a hungry dog, this time every issue went straight into the plastic case, to be unearthed twenty-plus years later, along with a tremendously valuable cache of twenty thousand other comics and Star Wars figures and Nolan Ryan commemorative no-hitter Topps cards.
He didn’t read any of them. The Frank Miller comic-book shot-in-the-arm was still years away. Jack Kirby was rolling in his grave. Except that Brad didn’t think he was dead yet.
Hey, he thought. Maybe I could meet Jack Kirby.
So he wrote Jack Kirby a letter.
“Dear Mr. Kirby,” it went. “My name is Brad Cohen. I am eleven years old, and I live in Chicago, Illinois. In my opinion, you are the greatest comic-book artist of all time . . .”
Jack Kirby never wrote him back, but it got Brad into a new hobby. He sent lots of fan mail because he could and because he knew whose autographs would be worth something in years to come. Mostly, he asked people who he knew weren’t going to get out of the early ’80s alive. It was cynical. He couldn’t save them, but he could cash in on them at auction. Andy Warhol and John Lennon never fulfilled his requests.
Most people didn’t, but occasionally the mail would yield a nugget. John Cleese sent a signature on a piece of stationery that had a dead parrot at the top, and Mel Brooks sent an autographed photo
. He got a handwritten note from Johnny Cash that went, “Dear Brad: Thanks so much for your kind letter. Sorry I haven’t written back sooner. It’s been a dark period for me. But I’m glad that young people today are still liking my music. Good luck with everything and stay happy. Best, Johnny Cash.”
That one got framed. For the rest of his second life, Brad would display it on the wall of his office. Whenever anyone important dropped in, he’d turn it into a talking point. It became a pillar of Brad’s reputation, which probably isn’t what the Man in Black had intended.
His body, thin and hairless, was growing like some sort of sharp-jointed alien emerging from a pod. Every day revealed a new angle or a fresh rib. Brad looked at himself in the mirror for hours. Thirty years forward, he knew this body would be hairy and bloated, with strange warts where they really should not exist.
Now he stood at the brink of boyhood’s end. He’d gone from being the old man in Death in Venice to Tadzio. It was a reprieve for sure. He’d been looking forward to this phase for a long time.
Boy, did he miss sex. The first time through, even at the supreme nadir of Brad’s misery, when the world had seemed broken and hopeless, he and Juliet had still been going at it three times a week, sometimes only twice if the kids were sick and keeping them up at night. He had not been a sexually frustrated man.
Yet here he was, a virgin anew.
Sex was the best thing in the world. And he was pretty good at it, especially compared to most twelve-year-olds. He had several decades of experience, which had given him a couple of good moves and a reasonably decent sense of timing. He longed to get back in the game.
But how? Certainly not with anyone he knew. Brad’s biological age was twelve, but his chronological age was fifty-two. The thought of kissing a girl made Brad feel like a pedophile. His wife, the only sexual partner that he could fully remember anymore, the woman who may or may not have put him in this situation in the future, or the past, or whenever, was at this point a nine-year-old girl in suburban Cleveland. He couldn’t exactly call her up and proposition her unless he wanted to get sent to a juvenile psych ward for the rest of the 1980s.