by Bill Scheft
Dope fiend. Come on, he was College Boy. Given three more days and Sheila’s knowledge of the building, he could avoid any overweight guy in a short-sleeved shirt. Never see daylight, order in, get the heads up from Sheila after they work out a ring-ring, hang up system with the phone. Do that for a month, and then it’s “Oh, you didn’t hear? Mort’s back. Yeah. A week now. I was just bringing him some soup….” Beautiful. All he needed was soup.
And cash. College Boy, his Prospect Pros jersey and uniform pants undeniably snugger, had the sincere sensation of driving himself to Riis Park for the Sunday Riis Park Ringers doubleheader. He pulled into the parking lot at ten-thirty. Ninety minutes to stretch when he needed a fortnight.
He was the second one to arrive. Felix, Felix Somebody, the Pros manager, walked over and gave him a hug.
“Look who’s here.”
“Playoffs, baby. Money time.”
“You come to watch, College Boy?”
“Funny, man.”
“No,” said Felix. “I’m serious.”
Shit. He forgot. “You frozen?”
“Yeah, man. We had to submit rosters last week for the playoffs. You know that.” He forgot. “End of July. I was gonna call you, but the boys said your shit was still fucked up.”
He forgot. HE FORGOT. Not College Boy. College Boy never forgot. This guy. The guy with the old man station wagon and the tight uniform. This guy. Harvey Sussman.
“Come on, Felix. Who’s gonna check the fucking rosters?”
Felix smiled and College Boy knew he couldn’t take back that last remark. All these guys did was check rosters. Check and be checked.
“Listen,” Felix said. “Nellie will be here soon. I can ask him if he’ll let me add you. He’ll probably say it’s cool. He likes you. Everybody likes College Boy.”
“Great.” He started to reach for Bagzilla. Jesus. Could he possibly drive this thing out to the bleachers?
“But I only got spots to pay twelve guys. Felix gotta make money, too. So, you’d have to play for free.”
College Boy probably heard Felix say, “Or you could bet on the game with us and make some serious cash, man,” squeezed in between the passenger door closing and the Buick station wagon’s engine turning over. He stopped on his way out of the lot to commiserate with the early-arriving Julio Rentas and backhand him ten Valium through the driver’s side window of that mint julep piece of shit held together by its inspection sticker. And he headed wherever nonringers go on a Sunday. Or any day. Whenever that was.
Some plan.
And that, sports fans, was it. The next day, he returned to stay in Mort’s guest room at Vinnin Estates. Here in Salem. Just up the street from Hawthorne Hospital. College Boy, or Mr. Sussman as he would now be known in the nonsoftball world, would try to care about someone else for a little while and see how that worked. Take his mind off himself. Leave the dope-fiending to the dope fiends and not those of us who fall in love with idea rather than truth.
And speaking of the truth, who the fuck was College Boy kidding? He had driven Mort’s Buick Century station wagon back to Salem only after he realized Manhattan had become too much of an island. He ran from three months of back rent, stored whatever the Buick wagon could haul in Mort’s living room at 301 East Sixty-fifth, had Julio Rentas change Mort’s bottom lock (Price: ten Valium), repacked Bagzilla with the maximum carry-on limits of the Federal Witness Protection Program, and left Monday morning at five-thirty after Dan Drake had given him a thousand dollars in cash and said even though the story had been endlessly entertaining, he had genuinely felt bad about the dislocated thumb. Five-thirty Monday morning. He was gone Monday. Just as advertised to the overweight guy in the short-sleeved shirt.
And here’s the beauty part. Somewhere just over the Third Avenue Bridge, just ahead of the sun, College Boy thought, “You know, this is good. I could use a little time off.” He had done it. He had actually dope-fiended himself. That’s when he started crying. That’s when he might have decided to “work on that.”
So began this decidedly regional production of The Odd Couple. In the first week, College Boy made a thousand mistakes. A thousand. Bleaching a few colored socks. Running a tub too hot, too long, or without authorization. Getting the wrong morning ratio of instant coffee to faintly soapy water. Forgetting to take whatever that plastic bag of shit was out of the chicken before it went into the oven. Not to mention the capital offense: Too much goddamn ice in the three o’clock martini (“Do I look like Admiral Byrd?”). And we’re not even talking about not dressing properly for dinner.
Of all the things in his life College Boy had not thought through fully, which, other than his softball schedule, would be all the things in his life, the concept of taking care of Morton Martin Spell was Stonehenge. And here’s the problem: From Hour One of Day One, he had no chance to think about it. It was as if the moment he had pulled the Buick station wagon back into the driveway at Vinnin Estates that August Monday he had paddled himself into an undertow of responsibility and hard labor that sucked him to a place where, if and when his head finally came up, the horizon was more responsibility, more labor, more “Christ, kid, when did Truman start rationing vodka?” The notion of stopping and asking himself, “What the fuck have I gotten myself into?” was something to which he could only aspire.
You cannot go from talking about the Rangers over Czechoslovakian food every two weeks to living together. Well, maybe you could. It quickly dawned on Mort Spell that his nephew was neither a guest nor company, but rather, the only means by which he could survive privately, which is as close to living alone as a man who needs help taking a shit can get. And what dawned on College Boy was nothing. He was too busy.
College Boy was closed. He wasn’t even College Boy anymore. His spirit went away, into cold storage, and the molecules inside his earthbound body re-formed as a vessel. A vessel for whomever he was taking care of. His life, whatever that was, stopped. He was…closed.
His day was reduced to a blindingly mundane run-through of picking up, cleaning up, propping up, freshening up, cutting up, wiping up, waking up, cheering up, and cleaning up some more. Eight hours sleep was somebody else’s headache and free time always smelled like a mistake. But every so often, when Mort went down for the night without a fight or an hour-long filibuster about Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, when College Boy could collapse by himself before midnight in the one truly comfortable living room chair and keep his eyes open long enough to make it through Carson’s monologue, he would hear something from Johnny that chronicled the passage of time. And it would scare the shit out of him.
Wait a minute. Elizabeth Taylor got married? Again? Where the fuck have I been?
If it wasn’t on Jeopardy, ice, hardwood, grass, or artificial turf, he didn’t know about it. The only time he saw a newspaper was when he gathered up a week’s worth of Boston Globes for the recycling barrel. The Globe tended to tilt a little provincial. College Boy remembered a Boston Globe parody in the early ’80s whose page one lead was “Hub Man Dies in Nuclear Blast.” That was about right. So, he didn’t bother. But occasionally, as he walked the stack to the trash room, there’d be an unbreakfast-stained front page lying on top.
Magic Johnson has AIDS? Am I the only one who didn’t know?
Yeah. Go figure. Someone else in the universe besides Morton Martin Spell was sick.
Okay, settle down. It wasn’t as if College Boy had no contact with the outside world. His contact with the outside world amounted to furnishing his mother, Dottie Sussman, with updates and empty crockery from the casseroles and New England boiled dinners she’d drop off every ten days or so. But he was still a vessel. At best, he was Mort Spell’s press secretary, and there was no room for a second client.
And for a while after he returned for good, however long that was, he had spoken with Sheila on the phone regularly. First from Vinnin Estates, then from a payphone in front of his primary source for take-out, China Sails. But that ended and he real
ly didn’t have to remember why or how. And if he did, he didn’t have to let it in. Which was one of the few benefits of being closed. And College Boy was closed.
Occasionally, Dottie Sussman would suspend her guilt to pay her son some drive-by attention (“See how much better things are if you can get yourself some sun.”) or Mort might look up from MacNeil-Lehrer to acknowledge it all (“Other than rewriting my will, is there anything I can do for you?”), but that was it.
Worked out pretty well.
There was one thing. Anger. Which was the one thing there wasn’t. Oh, there was plenty lying around Vinnin Estates, but none of it belonged to College Boy. On or about Indian summer, by which time he had cut his weekly mistakes to ten dozen, College Boy was rousted from his morning dump by Mort screaming “Get away! Get away from there, you bastards! You goddamn prick bastards! Get away!” and pounding on the sliding glass doors that overlooked the communal back yard.
“Jesus, Mort. What is it?”
“Goddamn blue jays. On the bird feeder. Goddamn unwashed pirateering bastards. Where’d they come from? Some goddamn community college? Get out of here, you goddamn bastards!”
“Mort, I think they left.”
“No thanks to you. And by the way, let me know next time you have Bob Oppenheimer or one of your other Manhattan Project buddies down here to rig the lock on this goddamn door!”
“You want me to check the bird feeder?”
“Well, I can’t goddamn do it, can I? Get out there and chase those goddamn bastards, and be sure to take your time so my eggs can get good and cold.”
“Let me redo the eggs, and then I’ll go out there.”
“I don’t believe I said that. You bastards!” College Boy flipped the lock with less than one move. “You know,” Mort flipped back, “I’m beginning to believe some of the things people are saying about you.”
That day (was it that day?), College Boy tried driving around downtown Salem for fifteen minutes and screaming with the windows rolled up. When he returned, there was Mort, still looking out the sliding glass doors, but now swaddled in three blankets. “Kid, I think we missed a few air-conditioning vents,” he said. So really, what was the fucking point?
And what was the point of whining, either? Why, when Mort, the sick one here, was capable of producing self-pity like there was money in it. And what was the point of giving it back to Mort when his uncle’s flippancy throttle was wide open? Yeah, College Boy thought many times, that’s it, make some sort of wise-ass remark about the tremors. Maybe something like, “Hey Mort, can you do any other impressions besides Don Knotts?” Good one. A real chest-puffer. Score one for the broke thirty-five-year-old male nurse with the mob landscaper after him.
And no shrink in front of him. Neither of them. Dr. Levitz sent his regards regularly through the Vinnin Square Pharmacy, and Mort, despite increasing difficulty swallowing (another complimentary gift of Parkinson’s), seemed to prefer taking his emotional inventory in pill and alcohol form.
And for a while, College Boy was right there with his uncle. Then, in October, a little over two months into the Noble Experiment at Vinnin Estates, he stopped drinking. College Boy had been a twice-a-week warrior for years, but living with Mort Spell here turned every day into rushes from The Thin Man series. The Valium went shortly thereafter. That was not a conscious choice. College Boy ran out. The rest of his inherited stash was still at 301 East Sixty-fifth, in Hiding Place V, taped inside the fuse box. College Boy didn’t want to go running down to Manhattan like some bust-out junkie. And he didn’t want to call Levitz like he was some take-out joint and end up owing the doctor an explanation and a favor. He would have called Sheila, except the locks had been changed.
No bourbon. No Valium. And before you knew it, College Boy had new exposed nerve endings to go with his new life. He noticed them. Oh, these babies you couldn’t ignore. It’s hard to ignore anything when you’re doubled over and nobody’s punched you. Sure, College Boy was closed, but that didn’t mean shit couldn’t get through the one vent in Vinnin Estates he hadn’t taped.
Three things helped College Boy through this period. And none of them had to do with telling anybody how he felt or what he was going through.
The first was jumping rope. Forty-five minutes a day, just like during the softball off-season, which was what this all was. Nothing says “fuck off” to an exposed nerve ending like a screaming quadriceps. And Mort loved the post–jump rope smell. College Boy would come back into the living room and after a few minutes, his uncle would yell, “You didn’t tell me Jacques Plante [or some other 1950s NHL goaltender] was stopping by. Do we have any rye?”
The second thing College Boy stumbled onto by accident. During Week Two of Valium withdrawal, he gave in and called Julio Rentas. His former teammate was not at home, but he was treated to this outgoing message:
“Que pasa, this is Papa J…. No man, did you rip that? You fucking rippedit. No man, that’s my last one. Shit. No, I’m all out, Freddy. Why didn’t you let me roll it? Shit. Now Papa J gotta get out the fucking toilet paper roll…. (BEEP!)”
College Boy was laughing too hard that day to leave a message. And the same thing happened the next day. After that, he found himself calling at least three times a week to see if Julio had changed the tape. Papa J never did, so God knows how long it had been on there, Freddy. So, College Boy kept calling, long after he stopped calling for Valium. And it always made him laugh. And he never left a message, even though he wanted to say “Thanks” or “Eat me, amigo.”
The third thing happened two weeks ago. A lunch with Mort and his mom at the Sussman ancestral home in Lynn was canceled after Mort had lost another battle of wills with the front steps. Those fucking steps. College Boy drove the ten miles to Lynn to grab the meal from Dottie Sussman (two courses, plus their usual palate-clearing argument about how he should get some help with Mort, just not from her). On the way back, for only the second time, he thought about rolling up the windows and screaming. Traffic slowed at the light in front of Pazik Liquors. Some sort of backup. What the fuck was it now?
By the time College Boy crept by, he saw a guy between five and a million years older than him, shrouded in mist from an overheated radiator on his van, emblazoned with the logo ROUTE ONE FUN. Waving and giving a “What are you gonna do?” shrug to each car he had inconvenienced, as he awkwardly shifted his weight. And smiling.
College Boy recognized the stance. Randy Zank.
Randy Zank was the best baseball player ever coughed up by Lynn South High School. Before College Boy was College Boy, he was just another kid in Lynn trying to catch Randy Zank. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t try. In June 1969, Randy Zank graduated from Lynn South and headed for the Mekong Delta, where they had a shortage of mythic figures. Six months in, the littlest piece of cartilage had lost to an even littler piece of shrapnel. He returned to Lynn, where he was greeted by the normal indifference extolled upon a Vietnam vet, plus the bonus resentment of a town cheated out of a big league career. The limp from his 5 percent Teflon knee was now barely perceptible.
“Zank!”
“Hey, Suss.”
“Need any help?”
“Nah.”
“How you been?”
“Can’t complain.”
Someone beeped, Randy Zank waved, and College Boy made the light. Can’t complain. Since then, College Boy had that line all loaded up. If anyone asked him how he was. Mort, Dottie, Levitz, Sheila, Papa J. Anyone. “How you doing?”/“Can’t complain.”
That was two weeks ago. It was now March. March, all of a sudden. Nobody had asked. Nobody would. And not because they didn’t care. Because they knew. College Boy was closed.
16
Just after the first of the year, as his condition worsened and his defiance metastasized, Mort developed a bad habit of collapsing into easy chairs. Rather than letting the seat of the chair hit him in the back of the legs and slowly lowering himself down, the procedure diagrammed in every Living with
Parkinson’s handbook, Mort opted for what seemed less tiring. He would toss his cane to the side and drop shoulder first into the chair, which would have to brace for the rest of him. At first, College Boy was impressed. It was one of the few consistent efforts his uncle gave in a day. But quickly, he lost the ability to right himself in the chair and unless his nephew was close by, Mort might spend a half hour with his body position somewhere between fetal and trap block. When he wasn’t exasperated, College Boy might walk in on his uncle and say, “Okay, Mort, hit that sled two more times and then we’ll work on pass protection.” And when he wasn’t cantankerous, Mort would say, “That was awfully good. Now come get me looking like a big shot in this chair.”
Neither of them had been anything but exasperated and cantankerous since mid-January. And the proper method of sitting had been their most consistent battleground. When College Boy threatened to turn the easy chairs against the wall and away from the television and have Mort sit in a straight-back model from the dining room, his uncle threatened to exhibit even less control of his bowels. (“And I’ll do it, too. What do you young people say? ‘Give a shit?’ Well, caveat emptor, doctor.”) When he found a place in Gloucester that rented one of those adjustable chairs that rises up to catch its incoming occupant, Mort complied for however long it takes a seventy-six-year-old to lose an attached remote control, which in Mort’s case was about forty-five seconds.
And when College Boy did not politely lecture his uncle on the merits of sitting comfortably, when he would wordlessly come over for the fifth or sixth time that day and fulcrum the respected journalist and author right side up, Morton Martin Spell would use whatever strength he thought he had to jostle him emotionally. “Don’t handle me like I’m in some Mexican jail,” he’d say. “Let me get up and we’ll settle this like we did in the service.” Sometimes it was “Mexican jail,” sometimes it was “Don’t handle me, like you’re looking for Bruno Hauptmann’s phone number.” But Mort was always offering to settle things “like we did in the service.”