It was 5–3 Yanks in the top of the eighth when Marty got back. Ted switched the TV off when he heard the door close. Marty peered into the TV room. “Score?”
“Score of what?” Ted replied innocently.
“The game, dammit!”
“Oh, is there a game?”
“Teddy, you asshole, hand me the remote.”
“Use your dick, Mr. Holmes.”
Marty shuffled to the TV and flipped it on. The voice of Phil Rizzuto filled the room. The Scooter was going on and on about some pasta he had had the other night. If you closed your eyes, you’d have no idea you were tuned in to a broadcast of a baseball game. Sounded more like Julia Child. “Goddammit, Rizzuto, what’s the fucking score? This guy is phenomenal. He’s like a retard.”
“An idiot savant. I love him.”
“I love him too, but…”
Finally Rizzuto said, “Here come the Bronx Bombers, up five–three in the top of the eighth. Big game today, White, up in Fenway.”
“Fuck!”
“Hey, Dad, what was Eddie Bernays like?”
“Weasely little inhuman genius homunculus.”
“So you … liked him?”
“Didn’t really know him, more like I knew of him. Who’s up? Reggie? Why is that new antenna flashing twelve o’clock all the time?”
“Did you know Ernest Dichter? The Institute for Motivational Research? What the hell was that?”
“Dichter was another unholy genius. Those two brought Freud into American commerce. They were called ‘the depth boys.’ They were gurus to all of us. If we could see so far, it was because we were standing on the shoulders of Austrians.”
“Did Dichter really say, ‘We will change from a needs-based country to a desire-based country’?”
“Something like that. Now I must really be close to death.”
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause you’re showing an interest in me.”
Reggie Jackson pulled a long fly ball that curled just foul.
“Reggie is locked on to Eckersley, he’s all over his shit. Take Eckersley out. Take him out.”
“I read about where Freud lost all his money in the depressed economy between the world wars, and he asked his rich American nephew, Eddie, for a loan. Bernays tried to get Uncle Siggy to publish a psychotherapy primer in Cosmopolitan, but Freud hated America, and said ‘no fucking way,’ in German. Can you imagine Freud doing like a Dear Abby thing in Cosmo? Dear Siggy. ‘I suspect you are suffering from a Sapphic Oedipal or Electra complex, and I suggest you kill your father and travel with your mother to the isle of Lesbos. The pleasure principle of spring says wear black pumps while you do it. Black is the new red. Next!’”
“Funny. Is that what he said? Freud said ‘no fucking way’? Direct quote?”
“More like a paraphrase.”
“Who are you, Ralph Edwards? Why the fuck are you so chatty? What is this, This Is Your Life?”
Ted was hoping his attempt at intimacy would drive Marty out of the house and away from the game. He thought, If I could just bring my poor dead mom back to life and sit her on the couch, Marty would flee outside again in a flash.
“I wanna know about you, Dad. I’m interested in where I come from.”
“All of a sudden.”
“Better late than never.”
“I kept journals from that time. I’ll dig one up for you, okay? Fuck! I can’t take this! I feel like Yogi Berra is jumping up and down on my chest. I renounce God for this cancer.”
“You have to believe in God before you renounce him.”
“Says you.”
“God didn’t smoke all those cigarettes.”
“He made tobacco!”
“Good point. He also made free will.”
“Free will? No such thing as free will. Free will was destroyed by people like me and Bernays. Destroyed even as it was celebrated as the American dream and sold back to the public with Chevrolets. Go back and read your ‘Grand Inquisitor.’ Dostoevsky knew his shit. People are terrified of freedom. People like me took away that awful burden. For a fee we told you who to be by telling you what to buy.”
“You feel guilty about that?”
“You didn’t ask me if I felt guilty about that when it was putting you through Columbia.”
“Another good point.”
“I can’t take this. I can’t watch.” Marty sat up. “I’m gonna be in the bathroom with the water running. Just shout out anything good that happens, okay?”
“Solid plan, old man.”
“Are you high?”
“Actually, no, but that’s an excellent idea. Get outta here, get away from my secondary smoke.”
As soon as Ted heard the bathroom door slam and the faucets turn to baffle the game, he jumped up and pulled a “George Scott game winning 3 run homer” cassette out of his stack and slipped it in the VCR. Marty was flushing the toilet over and over to create an even bigger din. Ted took over for Rizzuto. It would be Ted’s own play-by-play the rest of the way.
On the screen, George Scott came to bat, and Ted paused it. “Goddammit! Goddammit!”
Marty heard Ted’s tone and stopped flushing for a second. “What? What?” he barked through the bathroom door.
“Rally!”
“Who?”
“Boston.”
“Bullshit.”
“Not bullshit, come see.” Marty crept back in warily, almost afraid to look at the TV. He kept a safe distance, as far away from the screen as he could be and still be in the same room. Ted surreptitiously pressed play on the VCR and complained, “They’re comin’ back.”
“Bullshit.”
“Two pitches, two singles. First and second, one out, bottom nine, George Scott up.”
“Those look like away uniforms.”
“How can you tell, everything is green?”
“So, they’re supposed to be at home, they’re at Fenway.”
“I don’t know, maybe they’re at the stadium.”
“Oh.”
“Gossage is in.”
“I see the Goose. If they’re at the stadium, why are you here?”
“Took the day off to be with my dad.”
“I must be tired. Everything does look green.”
“I think those drugs are fucking with your head. I’m telling you, man, legal drugs are bad for you. There’s a reason they’re legal, you know.”
“Maybe so.”
On cue, literally, George Scott connected and sent a long drive toward the right-field wall. Ted feigned horror. “Shit. No.”
“What? Go, go, get out, get out!” And the ball got out, gone, what a surprise. “Yes!”
Ted flipped off the TV and said, “Fuck!”
“Why’d you turn it off?”
“It’s over. Six–five Boston.”
“Yeah, but I wanna gloat!”
“Don’t be a sore winner.”
Marty did a little victory lap around the room, color returning to his cheeks. “Lung cancer? What lung cancer? George Scott is my doctor! Fuck you, Teddy, you front-running, Yankee-loving son of a bitch.”
Ted watched his reinvigorated dad circling the room, cursing out the world. Marty couldn’t have been happier. And neither could Ted.
37.
The young father is not so young anymore. His son had lived and is tenish. Goddammit, he isn’t sure if his son is ten or eleven. I am going to hell for such things, he thinks. He is trying to watch the game. His wife hates him. He can tell. And he deserves it. He no longer loves her. When he had detached from his son, he had detached from everything. Until her. The other woman. But he could not be with her. It isn’t right. Just wasn’t done. So this is what he does. He puts on the game, which signals to his wife and boy that he is not to be bothered, and in that quiet, he journeys into his own mind, deeper and deeper. Where she is waiting for him, where she is. And together in that space, they will make love and build a house and have other children. And those childr
en will grow according to the laws of fantasy and his imagination. But she will never get older. How could she stay young and beautiful forever? Why not? It was his world, endless and inviolate. It took him some time and peace and quiet to get there, but he was getting there, and each time the world was more substantial. He projects his world onto the TV screen like a little god. He isn’t watching baseball, he is watching himself. It had been see-through at first, the new world, paper thin, but now it had more weight, more substance, depth. He could see a horizon. He could touch things. He could touch her.
There she is. He walks toward her. His wife slams a door, she senses another woman. His wife breaks a dish, his boy says something silly—all these are calls to leave, eviction notices, and he will heed them halfheartedly, an always irritable paterfamilias. Walking hand in hand with her on a pristine Caribbean beach. A seagull looks at him, and says, “Dad?” That’s his son. There is his son again by proxy, using the seagull as his mouthpiece, in the way that children play with hand puppets, dropping shit on his shoulder. “Dad? Dad?” There was no denying the bleed-through. Another name for bleed-through is sanity. Heeding the call of this world is a duty, too, after all. He would leave the world of his head and return to the actual. But he had laid a good foundation time and time again. This world of his was also real and was not going anywhere. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t live in it, but he could be there anytime because it was his. He would be alone in one world so he would not be alone in another. It is his and hers. It is his.
38.
The Sox sucked and the Yanks soared, but not in Brooklyn; in Brooklyn the Sox remained ascendant. Ted took to taking his morning coffee and buzz in the prelight dawn on the steps of the house. He was there when the paper came flying in. He would throw it away, or stash it under his bed, and fall back to sleep for a couple of hours, the up of the coffee and the down of the weed battling it out in his tired brain.
A few hours later, Ted would “wake up” with Marty. He’d help Marty get dressed in his Red Sox fan attire. “Don’t you feel a little stupid, a grown man wearing the clothes of a sports team, like a little kid?”
“No,” Marty said. “I like it. It identifies me. Like a bird’s plumage.”
Then they’d go down to Benny’s kiosk. Today, after the fake Boston win, no wheelchair and no cane. Marty had pep in his step. The Sox skid was over and so was Marty’s.
The gray panthers might have been a tad overzealous preparing the charade. But then again, they had nothing else to do, absolutely nothing. Ted’s first clue of this was the appearance of the Times delivery boy speeding toward them on his bike, screaming, “Fuck fuck fuck cocksucker mothersuckerfucker dickass French kiss big tits nipple whore Yankees!”
“I like this kid,” Marty said, and then to the kid, “What’s wrong, squirt?”
“Sox won?” Ted asked hesitantly, by way of cueing the boy. The kid had obviously been given carte blanche by the panthers to do some experimental cursing in his role. He was quite a natural. Sounded good, real.
“Sox won! Fuuuuuuuuuckkk…” and he was off, the “fuck” trailing behind him like sonic exhaust.
Ted saw Schtikker about twenty yards away, gesticulating to the kid to bring it down a notch. The kid certainly was over the top, but enjoyable, a little like a little blue Don Knotts.
Here came another suspicious dude in a suit making way too much of a bee line for Ted and Marty.
“Goddamn Red Stockings of Boston!” he declaimed in nineteenth-century diction as he passed by. Gotta give that guy some notes, Ted thought, and update his fucking playbook. As they approached the kiosk and the gathered men, Betty leaned out her window on cue, and for the first time in her life, sounded wooden, insincere, and just plain weird. “Sixty years of waiting is over, Marty.” She looked down at something; was she looking at a piece of paper, a script? Jesus Christ.
Marty called up to her, “I’d wait another sixty for you, sweet Betty.” Betty looked at the panthers and put her hands up, like what now? Clearly she was not prepared to improvise. She seemed to panic, screamed, “Go Sox! Curse of the Babe! Damn Yankees! Bambino! Yazzz-ce-ze-stremski!” like a greatest-hits run of baseball clichés, and then slammed the window down. The panthers were laughing as they came forward to see Marty. Every moment Marty had his back turned to one of them, Ted would receive an exaggerated wink or the okay sign.
“Ivan, come here and let me check your age.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” said Ivan.
Benny, or rather a hand, reached up over the kiosk counter with Benny’s voice. “Here is your paper, Marty. Your special paper. Special for you.”
“What is this, the Yiddische theater?” Ted said for the benefit of the panthers only.
“Got it, Benny. Thank you.” Ted took the paper, stopping Benny from incriminating himself with further bad acting.
Tango Sam took Marty in hand like he wanted to dance, and Marty looked like he was going to take him up on the offer.
“Marty,” Tango Sam said, “successful advertising executive and long-suffering Sox fan, you look tremendous, loan me fifty.” It was gonna be a good day.
39.
Something was shifting in Ted. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt it was good. That was a strange feeling for him, because usually he didn’t know what it was, but felt it was bad. He’d read somewhere that every six years or so, the body’s cells have completely died and been reborn or something like that, turned over like a car speedometer. Meaning that every six years or so, you were literally a new man. Every scrap of you, for better or worse, head to toe, was not as it was. Ted wondered if the soul molted, too, like a snake angel. Because that’s what it felt like, like his soul was shedding its skin.
One morning, about a week later, Ted overslept, and jumped out of bed. It was after nine. Shit. He ran outside to get rid of the paper. He picked it up and had it over his head to toss it, when he heard, “Ted, what are you doing?”
Marty was at the window, looking down on him. Ted was busted.
“Getting to the bottom of who’s stealing your paper.”
“Who is it?”
“Well, I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of it yet.”
“But you got it today?” Ted looked at the paper in his hand.
“Yeah, I got it today.” And just then the overacting, overcursing Don Knotts kid came flying by on his bike: “Nipple-titty-pubes-fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkk…”
Which could mean only one thing to Marty: the Sox had won again. Sufficiently and happily distracted, Marty pumped his fist in celebration and disappeared from the window.
Ted hustled down to the kiosk to brief the boys. The Yankees were back in town, so Ted had to go to work and couldn’t manipulate the outcome with the VCR. So he had decided to try a rainout. He had the panthers ready with hoses to go up on Marty’s roof and try to create a realistic-enough downpour to convince Marty that the game would get canceled. Then Ted would call from the stadium, corroborate the rainout, say he had to go to a work meeting, then rush home in the Corolla immediately after the game was over. If the Sox won, then he’d say there’d been a long rain delay, but they got the game in after all, and the Sox had pulled it out. It was worth a try anyway, and the panthers were into it. Satisfied that they had some kind of plan, Ted hustled back up the block to home.
“Where the fuck were you?”
“And a good, good morning to you, too, sir.”
Once inside, it was harder to keep Marty away from the paper. Ted held on to it and pretended to read as he fixed breakfast. Marty watched him impatiently. “Can I see it now?”
“See what?”
“For god’s sakes, Ted, the newspaper, can I see it?”
“Oh, the newspaper. Here, can you see it?” He held up the paper for Marty to see. “You see with your eyes, not with your hands.”
“Hardy har-har.”
Ted handed Marty the paper. “You want coffee?”
“Sure.”
As Marty was unrolling the paper, Ted lit a match for the stove, but purposefully held the match to the bottom of the Times. Marty didn’t realize the thin newsprint had caught until the paper had burned halfway up to his hands. He tossed the flaming thing down.
“Whoa, watch it, Ted!”
“Jesus!” Ted stomped on the paper like a winemaker, and grabbed a glass of water to put it out. By the time he’d trod and drenched it, it was an unrecognizable and unreadable mess. He picked up the dripping gray-brown burnt glob and offered it to his father. Marty wouldn’t touch it now. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Sorry, Dad.”
Ted stepped out of the kitchen. He returned with two baseball gloves and a softball.
“Look what I got.”
“So?”
“So let’s go to Central Park and watch some softball. Like you used to play.”
“No.”
“That’s your answer?”
“No. Fuck no is my answer.”
“I invited Mariana.”
“Hand me that glove.”
40.
Ted loaded Marty into the Corolla for the ride to Manhattan, Central Park. First they were to pick up Mariana in Spanish Harlem.
“Smell that?” Marty said, inhaling into his ruined lungs as they sped along Eighth Avenue. “Beans, coffee, plátanos, music, pussy…”
Ted was slightly appalled at the list. “You smell music?”
“Sometimes, yeah, sometimes I smell music and hear pussy.”
Bucky F*cking Dent Page 13