Bucky F*cking Dent
Page 22
What Ted first recognized ahead were the remainder of the gray panthers, minus Tango Sam—Benny, Ivan, and Schtikker—standing at attention, saluting their fallen comrade, all wearing Red Sox caps and jerseys. Ted saw Benny’s kiosk, done up in crepe paper, red and white, the colors of Boston. He looked up at the apartment windows and saw an undulating sea of red, people waving Boston pennant flags. Jose, does that banner yet wave? Sí. It sure as shit does. He turned back to Mariana as if to ask whether she had told the panthers, and she nodded yes.
Ted looked around, took it all in as he drove, as slowly as a diplomatic funeral procession. Folks were dancing in the street, champagne and beer bottles in hand. This was a wake, he realized, a helluva wake. Huge banners were festooned across doorways and streetlamps. He read them out loud—“CONGRATULATIONS SOX!!!” “THE WAIT IS OVER!!!” “BUCKY WHO???!!!” “GOODBYE MARTY WE LOVE YOU.” Loving lies all in red and white, without a trace of Yankee blue. An artistic falsehood truer than the truth. Curveship lending a myth to God. Fuck you, winners. Unto us lowliest sometime sweep. Fuck you, Yankees. Fuck you, Death. Love exercising its awesome powerlessness in the face of mortality.
Because the glow from the streetlamps slow-danced through the car windows as they crept ahead, when Ted looked over at Marty, the play of light on his face seemed to make him smile. Only in darkness is his shadow clear. Ted stopped gently at a spot where the light held his father in such a smile. Marty was home. This was the end.
It was the way Marty wanted his story to be told. The way he wanted to go out.
The final hopeless, glorious charade.
Epilogue: Extra Innings
OCTOBER 28, 2004
It is now the twenty-first century. It is the future and it is already the past. There is no difference. In the future, we know that. We know that now. The Dead know, too, they say, “It’s all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago.” They are all here in a sprawling graveyard, over 365 acres in the middle of the city, holding on to names from three centuries. Almost two million dead. Calvary Cemetery off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
A small group of people walks among the irritable Canada geese that chew the green and brown grass. It’s fall again already. Twenty-six years later, more than ten years ago now, and it’s fall again already. The group consists of four people, an older man and woman, and a young man and woman. Even from a distance, they feel like a family.
Come closer. The older man looks so much like Marty, you might think you’re seeing a ghost, but it’s not; it’s Ted, in his fifties now. In one hand, he holds a hardcover book, in the other, he holds Mariana’s hand. She is also older, and as captivating as ever. The years have made her a little thicker, but that just means there’s more for Ted to love. Her hair is still full and wild, now streaked with gray. One of her hands is entwined with Ted’s, and in the other, she holds the hand of her daughter. This must be their daughter. She has Mariana’s coloring and features, but Ted’s unmistakable bemused, deadpan expression. She is beautiful like her mother, but her sharp tongue can cut you in English or Spanish, sometimes both at the same time. She is holding a bouquet of flowers. Walking by her side is a young man who carries a rolled-up newspaper. Except for an untamed head of dark, wavy hair, he is Ted’s double. He looks like a young Ted in a Mariana wig. The children look exactly like what they are—Scottish, Jewish, Catholic, atheist, Communist, Ukrainian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Polish—people. New Yorkers, in other words. Americans, for short.
Come closer. The family arrives at a small, modest headstone amid the endless rows of markers.
You can read the legend on the stone:
MARTIN FULLILOVE
HUSBAND, FATHER
1918–1978
Marty always said he wouldn’t be caught dead in Queens. He was wrong.
Marty’s granddaughter kneels down, places the flowers on top of his grave, and stands back up. Mariana bends slowly, her knees are not what they used to be. She kisses the headstone. She straightens up with a groan and sigh that speak of love and time and work and gravity. Ted kneels and props the book carefully against the stone.
Come closer still. See that the book is a published novel. A sticker on it proclaims it’s a “Reissue of a Beloved Classic” and “Perennial Bestseller.” It is called The Doublemint Men, and it was written by Marty and Lord Fenway Fullilove. Two worlds made one. If we care to read the dust jacket, we will learn that Ted has become quite a successful novelist, and that The Doublemint Men was his first of nine books to be published, three of which have been made into movies and one into a popular television series.
Ted makes sure the book is balanced, steady and proud against the stone. Ted had heard that the expatriate Joyce had been so specific and true and factual in exile to his actual Dublin in Ulysses that if the city were destroyed, you could rebuild it brick by brick, using his book as a guide. Ted hoped something like that for a blueprint of his father in The Doublemint Men. That if you pulped this book, in the mulch would be the genetic code, his father’s DNA, that Marty himself, like a lost Dublin, like a lost Troy, could be reconstituted from these pages.
Finally, Marty’s grandson unrolls his newspaper and lays it flat across the grave. It is the New York Post, that blaring rag. It is October 28, 2004. And the day before, the Boston Red Sox had defeated the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, becoming champions for the first time in eighty-six years. Eighty-six years, the span of a long and lucky life. The last shall be first.
Come now and stand with them, where all have stood and will stand, among the countless graves. Come now and read today with clear eyes what the full-page headline says. Three words, an incantation and an invitation:
Reverse the Curse
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Jonathan Galassi for his continued belief, guidance, and wisdom. Andrew Blauner for his tireless advocacy of this book. Valerie Slaughter for her exhaustive and imaginative tracking down of ’70s minutiae. Karl Akermann, who makes my creative space possible. This story first began as a screenplay, and over the years, people have believed in it and tried to get it made—Susannah Jolly first and foremost among them. I’ve not given up hope. Big ups to my brother from another mother Matthew Warshaw for letting me use his encyclopedia of all things ’70s, aka his brain. A big gracias to Rodrigo Corral for the Spanish help. Also Jimmy Capuano—gone but never forgotten. There is so much great baseball writing and I am indebted to countless sources, but I think I would single out W. P. Kinsella and Roger Kahn for shout-outs on the PA. Also, it was through Andrew Curtis’s phenomenal documentaries that I learned of Edward Bernays. And lastly, this whole story stems from an afternoon one summer years ago when I was out in Massachusetts at Téa’s family home, and two men were working on the roof, just talking while they worked, and I overheard one refer to “Bucky Fucking Dent” and “Bill Fucking Buckner.” Buckyfuckingdent. Like it was one word. Being from New York, I’d never heard it before. The phrase made me laugh. It still does. Something about it. It stuck and waited for a story to be written beneath it. This is how it begins. So—a debt of thanks to the man on the roof.
Also by David Duchovny
Holy Cow
A Note About the Author
David Duchovny is a television, stage, and screen actor as well as a screenwriter and director and musician. He lives in New York and Los Angeles. He bats right and throws right. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
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Epilogue: Extra Innings
Acknowledgments
Also by David Duchovny
Permissions Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Permissions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following material:
Here: “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Here: “They Own the Wind,” from O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto, new expanded edition, edited by Tom Peyer and Hart Seely. Copyright © 2008 by The Phil Rizzuto Estate. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Here: “St. Stephen”: Words by Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh. Music by Robert Hunter. Copyright © 1969 Ice Nine Publishing Company Incorporated, USA. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation for North America. International copyright secured. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited for World excluding North America.
Here: “Franklin’s Tower”: Words by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia. Music by William Kreutzmann. Copyright © 1975 Ice Nine Publishing Company Incorporated, USA. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation for North America. International copyright secured. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited for World excluding North America.
Here: “Box of Rain”: Words by Robert Hunter. Music by Phil Lesh. Copyright © 1970 Ice Nine Publishing Company Incorporated, USA. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation for North America. International copyright secured. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited for World excluding North America.
Here: “The Engineer’s Son”: Permission courtesy of Fondazine Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Rome. John Ashbery’s translation of Emile Bronnaire’s poem used by Giorgio de Chirico as the epigraph to his story “The Engineer’s Son” copyright © 1967, 1975, 1992, 2014 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the translator.
Here: “To Brooklyn Bridge,” from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2016 by King Baby, Inc.
All rights reserved
First edition, 2016
Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material can be found at the back of the book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Duchovny, David, author.
Title: Bucky F*cking Dent: a novel / David Duchovny.
Other titles: Bucky Fucking Dent
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015035382 | ISBN 9780374110420 (hardback) | ISBN 9780374714765 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Fathers and sons—Fiction. | Cancer—Fiction. | Baseball stories. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Humorous. | FICTION / Satire. | GSAFD: Humorous fiction. | Satire.
Classification: LCC PS3604.U343 B83 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035382
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