Bucky F*cking Dent (11 page)

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 propaganda. 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.”

“‘A man in a Hathaway shirt' does.”

“You do ‘deserve a break today.'” Marty paused. “Then please, Ted, give me a break.”

Marty patted Ted on the head. “Burn it all,” he proclaimed. “The lifetime lack-of-achievement award for the first time this year goes to a duo, a father-son team from Brooklyn, New York…”

He threw some more magazines on and squirted lighter fluid and got quiet. Ted saw that Marty had a bag of marshmallows to whimsically complete the self-lacerating immolation. Marty spoke very softly now, his eyes never leaving the dancing flames. “You think I'm the only one who needs forgiveness, Ted? You get to have more life and you don't even know what to do with it. You better beg my forgiveness for that. I made you.” Savior. Accuser. Savior. Accuser.

“That's right, you did produce me, as well as, perhaps, ‘the one beer to have when you're having more than one.' Want me to get in the fire, too, with the rest of your crappy output?”

Ted went up to the fire and put his hand into the flames. Marty screamed, “No! Your hand, your beautiful little hand!” Ted pulled his hand back to show he'd only been lighting his joint, not performing a self-inflicted medieval punishment. He smiled and took a big hit, and, as he held in the smoke, offered a toke to his dad.

“The pot. No. Never. I have pills.”

“C'mon, Dad, a little doob'll do ya … this is what they call peer pressure, old man. All the cool dads are doing it. This is how parents and kids bond in the seventies.”

“Are you always high, son?”

“Not always, but that is my ambition, yes.”

Something sounded throughout the house, like an electric shock, like the wrong answer on a game show times ten. Ted jumped.

“What the fuck was that? Smoke alarm?”

“Doorbell.”

“That's the doorbell? Sounds like the end of the world.”

Ted left Marty there by the fire to go see what the end of the world was all about.

 

23.

When Ted opened the door to find Mariana there, his first thought was “I don't know what I'm wearing.” And he didn't look down; he had a bad feeling and didn't want to face it, kept his eyes on the girl, who said, “Hello, Theodore.” Ted thought he remembered a lengthy negotiation that had ended in an agreement to call him “Ted.” Maybe not.

“Hello, the death nurse.”

“Grief counselor.”

“Hello, the death counselor.”

She smiled patiently and would not be baited or charmed.

“Very nice of you to stay with your dad.”

“Very nice of you to … bring … death, you know, to the home, make housecalls, uh.”

“How long will you stay?”

Ted became aware of an overwhelming urge to impress this woman, like enter a hot-dog-eating contest for her, and he shook his head because he knew that thought had no business here at this time. Instead he said, “You know what, as long as it takes. That's the kind of who I am. I'm a giver. That's what I do. I give.”

“You're a giver.”

“Uh-huh.” He stared into her dark brown eyes and saw they were speckled with amber and hazel, like veins of precious stone hinting at what riches lay beneath. He still wanted to say he'd eat hot dogs for her till he could eat no more, but had the good sense to hold his tongue.

She said, “Hey, look at that. You have your dad's eyes.” Ted sensed that she liked Marty a lot, and that to be like him was perhaps a good thing, for once.

“Well, I am fifty percent him, I guess, you know, genitally speaking.”

Ted felt a shift in the air. Like he'd said something strange, but he didn't know what. He tried to replay what he'd just said in his mind, but couldn't hear it clearly.

“You mean, ‘genetically.'”

“Yes, that's what I said.”

“You said ‘genitally.'”

“No, I didn't.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“You did.”

God, that was stupid. What was he, four? Maybe. He caught a glimpse of the two of them in a hallway mirror. He saw her first and was taken that this opposite profile showed another person, still a beauty, but another dimension, a depth that concealed as much as it revealed. But then he saw himself. He was wearing his old New York Yankee pj's, the cuffs of which came to mid-calf, like culottes. Good look. His belly … he couldn't even deal with his belly at the moment, so he went to his hair, fuck. He gathered up handfuls and twisted and turned them into some kind of ponytail/chignon. Sweat announced itself at his hairline.