Bucky F*cking Dent

 

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About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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For Miller and West always.

And for Ami and Jules, gringos number one and two, and young Matty Warshaw.

And for Meg, who taught me more about writing than she knows.

 

The honey of heaven may or may not come,

But that of earth both comes and goes at once.

—
WALLACE STEVENS
, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”

Hate. Love. Those are names, Rudi. Soon I am old.

—
JAMES JOYCE,
Ulysses

Life a funny thang.

—
SONNY LISTON

i tell ya,

did you take notice of the flag?

i couldn't believe it.

just as jim rice came to the plate,

the wind started blowing to left field.

it not only helped yastrzemski's homer,

but it hurt jackson's,

the wind was blowing to right field

when jackson hit the fly ball,

when yaz hit the homer

the wind was blowing to left field,

kept it from going foul.

strike one to piniella.

somebody told me

the red sox control the elements up here

i didn't believe 'em until today

—
PHIL RIZZUTO
, “They Own the Wind,”
O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto

 

1.

Jose Canucci. That's what they called him at work. Like he was half Latin and half Italian. Apparently Italian on his father's side. What part of the boot might the Canuccis hail from? No idea. Maybe his mother was a beautiful Puerto Rican woman from Spanish Harlem. Fuck, that would be funny. His father would have loved that. But was Canucci actually a real name? He didn't know. They didn't even pronounce it properly. The fans didn't say it right up here. They said
Can-you-see
. The double
c
pronounced as
s
. It wasn't his name anyway. His name was Ted Fullilove. Theodore Lord Fenway Fullilove. Talk about a fucked-up handle. Some frustrated poet at Ellis Island must have jotted down his Russian forebear's Filinkov or Filipov or Filitov as Fullilove. He went by Ted. Except at work. At work, he was Jose. Or Mr. Peanut.

Maybe he should get a monocle. Like Mr. Peanut, the cartoon advertising mascot of the Planters peanut company. Ted's dad had been an advertising man, and he wondered if his father had fathered Mr. Peanut as well. Maybe he and Mr. Peanut were half brothers. Mr. Peanut was a friendly stiff in a top hat, a hybrid with the body of a peanut, a walking stick, and a monocle. A sentient nut.

Mr. Peanut looked like a science experiment gone wrong from one of those cheap B movies that played during rain-out Chiller Theatre on WPIX, channel 11. You know, like
The Fly
? “Help me. Help me.” That was the big line from
The Fly
. Vincent Price with the body of a fly and the head of a Vincent Price. Was it Vincent Price's head? He thought maybe not. Doesn't really matter. Okay, probably matters to Vincent Price, but not to Ted. Something about “help me, help me” moved Ted, though. The sheer, naked need. The first thing a child learns to say, maybe. After “Mommy” and “Daddy” and “more.” Help me. Help me. Please somebody help me.

Mr. Peanut needed help. He had the dimpled gray-beige peanut torso, insect stick legs, and bad eyesight. In one eye, at least. No balls to speak of, sexless, a eunuch, and he couldn't see or walk without the use of a cane. Help that dude. And why the top hat? He's asking for it. Refile all these thoughts in another sleeve of index cards—inside joke filed under H for
Help me
. That could work. But it was already getting cross-referenced, cross-filed, and confusing. He wished he had a girlfriend. He did not have the body of a peanut and did have balls and needs, emotional, physical, whatever. All sorts of crazy conflicting needs sparking off in all directions, like when a tailpipe drops onto the road and makes fireworks and that bad sound. Girlfriend/Tailpipe. I should really have a pen with me at all times, he thought. Angry with himself because these things, these thoughts do get lost. His mother always told him that if it was important, he would remember it. But that's not true. In fact, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the most important things we forget, or at least try to forget. What did Nietzsche say? We remember only that which gives us pain? That's not quite the same thought, but same ballpark.
Through the perilous fight.

A ballpark of thoughts. Yankee Stadium with a bunch of thinking on the field. And in the seats. Ted's mind was a full stadium of half-baked notions during the seventh-inning stretch. Bob Sheppard's transatlantic patrician voice—“Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to first base, now playing for the Yankees, replacing Chris Chambliss, the young German with the impressive mustaches, Friedrich Nietzsche.” Phil Rizzuto would have fun with that. How come when you're trying to be universal and all, there's usually a clause in the statement like “that which”? Clumsiness of diction was like an announcement of profundity. That's not a bad thought, that is a thought which is not bad.

Ted often forgot he didn't have a woman. And in those moments he was probably happier than in the moments he remembered that he didn't. Girlfriend. File that under U for “Unlikely” or G for “Go fuck yourself, Ted.” He couldn't remember the last time he'd been with a woman, and for that forgetfulness he was actually thankful.
Gallantly streaming.
But even though the thought was an empty placeholder for a card, the ache, the lack was inchoate, and real. Ted felt life passing him by. He was now into his thirties. He was nearing the all-star break in the season of his life. Spring training a distant memory. Ted felt the old panic start to rise in his gut like when a pitcher who had command the whole game suddenly gets wild, loses control, as they say. Somewhere in his mind, a manager made a gesture for time-out at the umpire and walked to the mound to calm his pitcher. Ted flexed his right shoulder. He would be throwing soon and he wanted to be loose.

And the rockets' red glare.
Ted laughed at himself and then looked around nervously. Laughing during the National Anthem was a no-no. You didn't have to put your hand over your heart the way Ted was told he had to by management, like some kind of ROTC crazy, but you shouldn't talk or laugh. It was disrespectful to the military, apparently. And the Founding Fathers. And Jimmy Carter. Who is Mr. Peanut in real life! The peanut farmer from Georgia. Ted loved a full circle like that. Who doesn't, really? People liked circles, closure, the tiny mind making patterns against the big chaos. Mr. Peanut was now the president of his country. The malaise days. Help him. Help him.

You could start cheering during the last line—Jose,
does that star-spangled ba-an-ner yet wa-ave. O'er the la-and of the freeeeeeeeee …
But not before. Before was disrespectful. It was a fine line that everyone, 60,000 people when Boston was in town, just knew intuitively. Like don't stare at other people in an elevator, look at the numbers flashing. No eye contact. The intuitive rules of the world that were a mystery only to retards, psycho killers, and children.

The old joke is that the last words of the national anthem are “play ball!” An oldie, but a goodie. The impossible-to-sing “song” came to an end, and the noise of the crowd swelled like it was one happily anxious beast. The game was about to begin, and it was Africa-hot up here in the cheap seats, the blue seats. It was 80 percent Latino in Ted's peanut dominion, 55 percent Puerto Rican, 25 percent Dominican, and about 20 percent other. The other were mostly Irish and Italian. All his people. It was easy to think of these as the “cheap seats,” and, for sure, they were so far removed from the field of play that there was a discernible lag between the sight of a ball being hit and the crack of the bat. Like a badly dubbed Japanese film. But rather than removed, Ted liked to think of the vantage point as Olympian, that they were all gods on high watching the ant-sized humans play their silly games. So this is where he worked. Yankee Stadium throwing peanuts to mostly men who thought it was funny to call him “Jose” like the first words of the Spanglish version of the national anthem, or Mr. Peanut. Some even called him Ted.

He would rather not to be called Ted. Though he liked his job and it paid the bills, kinda, while he wrote, he was a little ashamed that a man his age, with his education, New York private school, Ivy League, had to throw legumes at people to make ends meet. Yet he actually preferred a job like this that was so far away from what he “should” be doing, falling so spectacularly short of any expectation, that people might think he was doing it 'cause he was a “character,” or 'cause he loved it, or that he was one of those genius, irreverent motherfuckers who thumbed his nose at the world and just generally didn't give a shit. Rather than be thought of as a failure, which is how he thought of himself, he liked to be thought of as an eccentric. That quirky dude with a BA in English literature from Columbia who works as a peanut vendor in Yankee Stadium while he slaves away on the great American novel. He is so counterculture. He is so down with the workers and the proles. I love that guy. Wallace Stevens selling insurance. Nathaniel Hawthorne punching the clock at the customs house. Jack London among the great unwashed with a handful of nuts in his hand.

Even so, he took pride in his accuracy. He was not a good athlete, as his father used to remind him daily growing up. He threw “like a girl,” the old man said. And it was true, he did not have Reggie Jackson's arm, or even Mickey Rivers's chicken wing. If Ted was gonna get a candy bar named after him, it would probably be the Chunky. But over the years, he had honed his awkward throwing motion into a slapstick cannon of admirable accuracy. Even though he looked like he was doing a combo of waving goodbye and slapping frantically at a mosquito, he could consistently hit a raised hand from twenty rows away. The fans loved his uniquely ugly expertise and loved to give him a tough target and celebrate when he nailed it. He could go behind the back. He could go through the legs. His co-worker, Mungo, he of the Coke-bottle lenses and bowling forearm guard, who broke five feet only because of the orthopedic four-inch rubber heel on his left club foot black shoe, sold the not-always-so-cold beer in Ted's section, and would always keep fantasy stats on Ted's delivery percentage: 63 attempts, 40 hits, 57 within 3 feet. That kind of stuff. Like batting average, slugging percentage, and ERA for vendors.