Bucky F*cking Dent

by David Duchovny

  “That’s a decent point. You should thank me.”

  “Why now?”

  “Thank me for, with my coldness as a mate, freeing up your mom to, you know, give you all the mother love that Freud says creates confidence in a young man. Siggy say a man who is sure of his mother’s love can achieve anything.”

  “Confidence? Is that what you see here? I’m Mr. Peanut!”

  “You just have that stupid job to pay the bills so you can write.”

  “Don’t you dare take my side now. Too late!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t make excuses for me.”

  “If somebody else talked about you the way you talk about yourself, I’d kick their ass.”

  “Well then, maybe you should kick my ass. Like the good old days. Or maybe we should get Death Nurse down here to help us. Help us seize control of our narrative—is that the bullshit you’re buying? You’d think a con artist who made his living making people want what they don’t need would no longer be blinded by a nice set of tits. You’re like a death in Venice, the con man finally gets conned.”

  “Beautiful tits.”

  Ted just looked down and shook his head. Marty could get expansive on the subject of tits. He was brightening; it was actually kinda cute. The life force, ragged and impotent but still there in the old man. Cute and infuriating.

  “Come on, Ted, they are beautiful tits. She’s like a spic Ava Gardner.”

  Sometimes the only way to stop Marty was to agree with him. Ted weighed in on the tits in question: “Good tits.”

  But Marty was just getting started. “I’d slay dragons for them.”

  “They’re dragon-slaying tits, sure. But I don’t wanna talk tits with my father.”

  “Bullshit. You’re only here ’cause she might show up. I’m not your pimp, you ingrate.”

  Ted was trying, trying to be kind, but Marty would just turn and turn and turn on him, twisting him around and around any subject, like a crocodile in a death roll, with Ted, the prey, in its mouth. Spinning and spinning. Marty gave him vertigo. And there might have been some weird shit in the Rasta weed. Maybe some insecticide they spray it with? Paraquat or something he’d heard about on the news? There was no quality control anymore.

  “I’ll go then. I’ll go in the morning.”

  But it wouldn’t be over that easily, and Ted actually didn’t want it over. Not deep down. He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn’t heard it yet. Marty was the lightning and the thunder.

  “Just tell me what you want me to apologize for and I will. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t have time. I know I was a lousy husband and a lousy father, so are millions of other guys. It’s called being human.”

  “That was really beautiful. Really cleaning up your side of the street. Means a lot to me.”

  “I’m sorry, okay?”

  “For what?”

  Ted was aware of his own sadism, but he felt entitled to it, justified. He wanted his father to spell it out. He wanted to rub Marty’s nose in his own piss.

  “Everything.”

  “Huh. Like what?”

  “Everything. I said everything.”

  “Everything like what?”

  “Everything everything.”

  “You don’t even know.”

  “What?”

  “A million little things.”

  “I’m sorry for a million little things.”

  “And three or four big things.”

  “And three or four big things. Happy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Jesus, Ted, are you wearing the wedding ring I gave your mother on your pinky?”

  “She gave it to me. She left it to me in her will. Lotta good it did her.”

  “Yeah, but I’m sure she wanted you to give it to a woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “A woman with a vagina, for fuck’s sake. Those kinds of women. The ones with vaginae kind.”

  “It’s like you want me to apologize to you.”

  “I’m all ears, baby.”

  “Yeah, okay, you win. I’m sorry for being a shit son, sorry for being the greatest disappointment of your life, sorry for being born.” The pot was stronger and weirder and kept coming on. Ted felt the urge to giggle. He giggled. His father looked slightly horrified; this was even macabre for Marty.

  “That’s funny?”

  “I think maybe it is.” Ted giggled again, verging on a stoned laughing jag.

  “Shit, maybe you’re right.” Marty managed a little laugh himself.

  “We are some funny fuckers.” Ted now burst into outright laughter. Marty followed suit. “Don’t laugh too hard,” Ted managed, “you’ll suffocate. You’ll die laughing.”

  “You were always a funny little fuck, Teddy. To this day, only four-year-old with a sense of irony I ever met.”

  An ironic four-year-old. A four-year-old with a firm grasp on gallows humor and the tone of disappointment. The language of the dispossessed and hopeless doomed forever to say one thing and mean another. Living in the gap between things as they are and things as they should be. Little ironic Teddy. Ted was grateful his father had provided that image for him; it filled him with a small sense of self-knowledge and destiny.

  “Nicest thing you ever said to me.”

  “You being ironic?”

  “I don’t think so…?”

  It was the question mark that struck them both as hysterical. They were in a groove. It felt good.

  “Go to bed, Ted. Don’t go to bed angry.”

  “Okay.”

  “Wake up angry.”

  “Good advice, Dad.”

  They were both wheezing now, unable to stop the laughing fit.

  “Come here and give your old man a kiss good night.”

  Ted didn’t move. He was aware of not wanting to touch his father, as if the two men ran on separate currents, and contact would create shock, like they were magnets pointing the same repulsive poles at one another. Marty sensed this primitive revulsion and said, “Nobody touches the old and the sick.”

  Ted softened and came forward, and put his lips on his dad’s forehead. His skin was cold and damp, inert. They could barely see each other. It was safe to love each other in the dark, Ted thought. They couldn’t see how badly they loved each other, how they always botched it, didn’t have to own that chasm of need. Ted felt his father’s soul open up to the kiss like one of those plants that grow only at night, he thought, without any irony. A nightshade. My father the nightshade.

  22.

  Ted’s old single bed had weird dreams in it. As he fell asleep, he was wondering if certain beds had their own routes into the unconscious and you’d dream certain times and places and people, depending on the vehicle you slept in, the bed. Sure seemed that way. If that were the case, then there was a route etched in this bed many times over to a raven-haired girl in a beige raincoat in Playboy’s August issue of 1960. She wasn’t the centerfold. Ted never went for the front-runner. She was one of those pictorial side stories; a supporting player, a curvy Rosencrantz or topless Guildenstern. Apparently, from what young Ted could deduce, poor unlucky got caught in the rain, ducked into a phone booth, and—can you believe it?—there’s a handsome guy in a tux already in the phone booth. What? Not really much room to move in there. And even though she’s wearing the raincoat, seems she has to take it off because it’s wet, and—what … she has nothing on underneath for some reason. What are the odds? She must’ve been distracted when
she got dressed this morning, late for her job at the school. Young Ted always liked to think she was a seventh-grade teacher, or, a year later, an eighth-grade teacher, and so on, until, by the time Ted went off to Columbia, she had gotten her PhD and was teaching college at a small Midwestern institution. Her generous black hair was everywhere. That she had nothing on underneath the raincoat didn’t surprise the handsome young man at all. In sympathy perhaps, he removed his tux. That’s how adolescent Ted had learned what a gentleman does when confronted by a naked woman in a phone booth, how a real man behaves.

  Something about that Playboy girl, her shape and coloring, had imprinted itself on Ted’s libido like Lorenz on one of his ducks. He would follow her, and her prototype, anywhere. She became his once and future wheelhouse. Teddy had found a way to her in his daydreams and dreams on this bed so many times. It felt like—no, it was a relationship. His first love. She’d be in her forties now, easy, married with kids, a mom. Maybe dead. Ted had the urge to find her and thank her. She didn’t know how she’d helped him. That dark-eyed, Mediterranean woman in a slicker in a phone booth in the rain. She didn’t know how she’d been loved. She should, Ted thought, because he liked to give credit where credit was due. She should know she was treasured. She will live frozen in time, young and beautiful and beloved, as long as Ted shall live.

  He was awakened by a burning smell. It was a bad smell. Was his idiot father trying to cook breakfast? That was a fiasco even when he’d been in the best of health. He checked to see if he had fallen asleep with a lit doobie. No, it wasn’t his ass that was on fire. And no, that wasn’t bacon.

  Ted raced down to the kitchen, but it was empty. He then realized the smell and smoke were coming from upstairs. He doubled back. All the way up to the top floor, where Marty had a pretty decent, presently contained blaze going in the old fireplace. He was kneeling amid a pile of strewn magazines, tapes, drawings, and writings. Ripping photos and advertisements out of magazines, looking over each one before he tossed it on the flames. In between tosses, he was having fun squirting lighter fluid on the barely controlled and toxically smoky flame.

  “Dad, what are you doing? The smoke.”

  Marty spoke as he doused the mess in butane. “You know, during my infrequent spasms of self-reflection, I have looked back on my life and felt that what I’ve done hasn’t amounted to much. But now that I see it all laid out before me like this, all the ignoble effort, all the years of making stupid people want stupid shit, well, it just makes me wanna put a gun to my fucking head.” Marty could be histrionic and operatically self-loathing, and operatically loathing of others for that matter, but Ted could see this was sincere, or as sincere as he’d seen his father. This was sincerity, dying Marty style: “Burn it. Burn it all,” he said. “The bonfire of the inanities.”

  Marty had been a New York ad man in the ’50s and ’60s. He was like Catfish Hunter, a coveted free agent in that world who moved from team to team for the highest bidder. He started at Young & Rubicam. He moved over to Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather shortly after the war. He worked at Doyle Dane Bernbach for a while, and many boutique agencies in between. He never stayed at any one place too long. Those were good times to do what he’d done. He’d been a disciple of the thinking of Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, the father of what came to be known as subliminal advertising. Bernays intentionally used his uncle’s “discovery” of the “Unconscious” to manipulate social behavior and consumerism. Ted had been turned on to Bernays, an unsung villain in American history, during a sociology course at Columbia in his sophomore year. Bernays, starting off as Enrico Caruso’s press agent, coined the term “public relations,” which became the big business of “engineering consent” that begat the big business of advertising. Nobody these days would believe it was Sigmund Freud’s nephew that basically created a business founded on the principle of making people want what they don’t need, but some shit you just can’t make up.

  When tobacco companies found they couldn’t get women to smoke for fear of appearing masculine, that smoking was the domain of man, Eddie Bernays put together a parade of attractive, party-girl debutantes down Broadway, enjoying not cigarettes but “torches of freedom,” thereby successfully linking, in the public mind, smoking with youth, beauty, independence, and empowerment. He made sure it got extensive press coverage, and, almost overnight, millions of women took up smoking. Fast Eddie did this over and over again with products to market, selling not the virtues of the thing, but the feeling the thing would supposedly give you. Lifestyle trumping life. Perhaps Freud really was the disease for which he purported to be a cure, and his nephew was the metastasis of his uncle.

  Ted liked to think of Freud as one of the greatest literary critics of all time, nothing more. Ted had even conceived of a novel he never finished, called Uncle Siggy, that cast Eddie as a sort of American Faust. And Marty was right there in the next generation, coming up with snappy, subliminal copy, figuring ways that beer made men irresistible to women and chewing a certain gum made beautiful blond twins want to bed you. When Ted had the sinking realization that the 800-plus rambling pages of Uncle Siggy might be nothing more than an Oedipal attack on his father by way of Bernays, he felt embarrassed and exposed to himself, and even though he loved the chapter where Freud (in reality, it was Ernest Dichter) suggested that asparagus sales would spike if they were marketed as phallic symbols, he put the book down, never to pick it up again.

  Ted moved in to sit among the detritus of his father’s professional life, all the while keeping an eye on the flames, which threw off some cool blues and oranges from the posters, releasing god knows what chemicals into the air. “You sure that flue is open? C’mon, Dad, there’s stuff to be proud of here. You’re part of the culture that survives to this day—‘a little dab’ll do ya’? That was classic. Those aren’t just advertisements, those are cultural touchstones, those are time machines.”

  “Most of these aren’t mine. I don’t know why I have them. Your mother must’ve saved this shit. She was always proud of the worst shit. She didn’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Forget it.”

  “No. What?”

  “I don’t wanna bad-mouth her anymore. It’s over.”

  “What, Dad, what didn’t Mom get?”

  Marty looked at his son and sighed. “How ashamed I was.”

  Ted could see that was true. And he saw his parents unravel right there before his eyes over this fundamental difference in perception. There were so many other problems between those two, but this one, her goodwill attempts to give her man pride in his achievements that only brought him more helpings of shame, this one hording, heartbreaking expression of love that would have only made Marty’s self-inflicted wounds deeper, was enough. This is how love kills. Ted felt he might sob. He felt he was under deep dark water, so he felt for the ground with his feet and pushed back for the surface, trying for the light. He was aware that his voice was half an octave higher all of a sudden, like he was a full-of-shit glad-hander, a salesman, but like his mom before him, he wanted to save his dad. At least for the moment. Was it love or lack of courage? Was there a difference? He didn’t know. Maybe more air and more light would save them all, save them or kill them once and for all.

  “‘Double your pleasure, double your fun’? Another classic. I remember those twins. Who could forget the Doublemint twins? Volkswagen—‘Think Small.’ Classic.”

  “Not mine.”

  “You made Hitler’s car the best-selling one in America. Who can do that? You! I mean, come on.”

  “Stop. Makes me want to throw up.”

  Ted pulled from the wreckage a poster that would have gone with the infamous “Daisy” campaign for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The political ad depicted a young girl picking petals off a daisy, morphing into a countdown of an atom bomb explosion at the doomsday hand of the Reds. It might have been the first political attack ad on TV. It was certainly one of the best. A chilling piece of pro
paganda. Ted remembered and now imitated LBJ’s Texas twang from the voiceover of the ad—“We must love each other or die. Way to rip off Auden, Dad.”

  “Goebbels got nothing on me, boy, I was paying attention during the war.”

  “Do you know how much I hated you for this ad? I was eighteen. If my friends at Columbia had found out, they woulda killed me.”

  “They woulda stuck a fucking daisy in your rifle? You were all a bunch of pussies. Is that one of the million things you need a fucking apology for?”

  Ted felt himself drawn into the old family undertow of battle, but checked himself, and checked his dad, and saw the man there, the anguished man. Often, Marty appeared to Ted like one of those cheap renderings of Jesus you can see in storefronts in Washington Heights or heavily Catholic areas of the city. You stare at Jesus and tilt your head slightly and the Son of Man’s expression changes. It’s super kitschy, but mesmerizing. Blacklight Jesus. Ted filed that under good names for bands.” Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Blacklight Jesus. Ted once saw one on the Columbia campus that had Jesus turn into Satan if you moved your gaze just a millimeter. Jesus. Satan. Jesus. Satan. And that’s how Marty always was to him, shimmering back and forth between identities malevolent and benevolent. Dad. Man. Dad. Man. Ted realized the actual man, Marty, was somewhere in between the extremes, but could never fix him there, could never stop him from shimmering back and forth between savior and accuser. Ted made a committed choice to keep his eyes fixed on the man for the moment, the man in pain. He patted his dad’s shoulder.

  “There’s no shame in writing for money, Marty. Put food on the table.”

  “Put you through college.”

  “Put me through college.”

  “So you could throw peanuts at Puerto Ricans.”

  “So I could throw peanuts at Puerto Ricans.”

  “Well, one thing was true—we ‘Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.’ Maybe we shoulda thought that one through a bit more.”

  “You’ve ‘taken a licking and kept on ticking,’ my man.”