Bucky F*cking Dent (13 page)

“I and I Ted,” Ted finally said.

“Respect yourself.” Virg smiled.

Virgil and Ted sat on the bench to roll and smoke and eat jerk chicken and read and respect themselves. A perfect summer afternoon.

 

25.

Ted was awakened before his father by the
Times
banging off the front door. The kid who made the deliveries had a good arm, but wild. He reminded Ted of Sandy Koufax before he found control, or Nolan Ryan. Ted decided to go down to Benny's kiosk for the
Post
and the
Daily News
. From down the block, he could see the old men loitering and squawking like a bunch of crows. A voice called out of the ether from the direction of the kiosk, “Ted! Teddy boy!” Ted looked and saw the top of Benny's head.

“Morning, gentlemen,” Ted said.

“Mornin', Ted,” the old men said in ragged unison.

Tango Sam danced forward. “Ted, you look terrific, very handsome, loan me fifty.”

Benny pushed the
Post
and the
News
toward Ted. “Knew we wouldn't be seeing the old man today.”

Ivan added, “Not after the Sox lose, no.”

“And if we did, he'd be in the wheelchair,” Tango Sam said.

“Psychosomatic,” said Schtikker the Viennese. “Mind over matter.”

“Malaise days.”

“Am I the only one that cares about this Polanski thing?” asked Ivan, but that was apparently a nonstarter today. “Or the ozone?” Another nonstarter.

“One time,” said Benny, “as an experiment, when the Sox lost, I ripped out a page with an old box score from a day they won and replaced it in the paper. Your dad came in the wheelchair that morning.”

Tango Sam jumped in with some color commentary. “He'd fallen asleep when the Sox were down and assumed they'd lost.” The old men began and finished one another's stories like they were of one mind, a hive. Sometimes it was like watching an a cappella group sing in the round, or a team of broadcasters narrating the game of life. Rizzuto and White times two.

Benny took over again. “We lied to him and told him they'd made a comeback. And I handed him the phony box score. He didn't smell a fake. Guess what?”

“What?”

“Walked home,” said Ivan.

“Danced,” said Tango Sam.

They let Schtikker have the capper—

“Fuck you, wheelchair; fuck you, cane.”

 

26.

The young girl was named Christina, and she was dying. She knew that. Bone cancer. Leukemia. They called it first names like that, but she knew its last name was death. She felt it in her bones and accepted it. Everybody dies. Some would have many years. She would have just a few years. It made her sad to think she would never fall in love or make babies, but she didn't really even know what it was she would be missing. It was more like ideas of loss the adults and movies and stories put upon her. She knew she would marry Jesus. Handsome, blue-eyed Jesus. Death didn't worry her so much as her mom. She felt guilty about her mom. She could see what her sickness was doing to her. It was killing her, too. But her mom wasn't sick and didn't have to die. Her mom would live and keep them both alive, because Christina would stay alive in her mom's memory. But Christina was sad that her memory, what would remain after her spirit went to be with Jesus, would give her mother pain. She did not want her future life in her mom's mind to be a source of pain. She wanted Jesus to talk to her mom, to let her know Christina would be all right, that she would be there on his right hand, she'd heard. But Jesus hadn't done that yet. She could see in her mom's eyes that Jesus had not spoken to her. She wondered what could be keeping Jesus. Did he have so many people to console? Probably. What about Mother Mary? Was she busy, too? So much suffering in the world to help. I can wait for Jesus, but Mom can't. But she didn't quite have the words. The words to tell her mom to live and not feel guilty. What was guilt, even? Was it, like, gilded? Gold braided like on the dresses of her dolls? Could you pull it out of your life like stitching?

She heard the footsteps coming down the hospital corridor. Clip clop clip clop. She knew if the hurried steps stopped just outside her door, it would be her mother. The doctors came right in, but her mother paused just before the doorway, unseen. Clip clop clip. Composing herself, Christina knew. Knew her mom needed a few moments of being invisible to breathe and tamp down the wailing sobs that crouched every second just inside her throat. About five seconds of wait. One two three four five like clockwork. And here she is—the love of my life, Mommy. How do I set her free? How do I make her free like me? Mommy says my name and sits on the edge of the bed. She is making her mouth and face smile, but she can't make her eyes smile. Her eyes do not lie. She takes my hand and kisses it. That feels so good. I like to be touched. How can I set you free, Mommy? What are the words for that? The girl thinks and thinks and thinks and can't think of the good words. So why not try just those words as they appeared to me just now? Why not? Maybe Jesus put them there in a hurry and rushed off to some other place of sadness. Okay. She cleared her throat.

“Mommy?” she said.

“Yes, sweetheart,” her mother said.

“Don't die too. Okay? You live. Not guilty. You live.”

Her mother's eyes cleared; it seemed as if she could see right through into her. She was hoping her mom would now smile and laugh and be free. But her mom buried her head in the little girl's chest and gathered her up in her arms, crying like she never wanted to in front of her girl. “Baby, baby, baby,” she repeated over and over, “my sweet, sweet baby,” as she cried and heaved.

Well, whoops, Christina thought, opposite day. I guess those weren't the words. I'll keep praying for them. Jesus will whisper them in my ear. Et spiritus sancti. The spirit will thank thee. The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. But I do want, I do, I want those words. I'll keep looking. I'll find them soon. I'd better.

 

27.

“Yo yo yo! Mr. Peanut, ¿
por favor
?
Mira mira
, Señor Peanut!”

The Yankees were beginning a homestand that day, and Ted was working it. He brought “The Doublemint Man” with him to the stadium, and was able to read through it during the lulls in the sale of peanuts. He was impressed with his father's fiction and noticed certain stylistic tics that he shared, and figured it was genetic. Why would genes determine only physical traits, eye color and left-handedness? Why not other, more subtle, bodiless proclivities such as a love of the semicolon and a propensity to string modifying clauses ad infinitum? Reading Marty's writing made him feel more his father's son, biologically, than he had his entire life. He had always felt like a clone of his mother, and if she could have told the story her way, that's the way she would've told it. He was 100 percent hers. Marty saw it similarly. “I told your mother to go fuck herself,” he was fond of saying back in the day, “and nine months later there you were.” But the flow of words on these partially incinerated pages was like a positive paternity test for Ted, made him feel good and nauseated simultaneously. He read:

Baseball is the only game that death is jealous of. Baseball defeats time. All the other great sports are run by the clock, therefore under the dominion of death. Only baseball has the possibility of going on forever. As long as you don't get that third out in the ninth inning, there remains a chance that xxxxxxxxxx [something crossed out] you can keep plying [
sic
], a chance you can still win, a chance that you will never die. The Doublemint Man wondered these things as he kissed her, hoping that he could extend this day into extra innings.

Ted was reading this at his locker as Mungo put on his civvies nearby. “You seemed a tad distracted today, Teddy Ballgame. Didn't see you go behind the back once. Fifty-three percent hit rate. You haven't been that low since the dog days of '76 when you had that bladder infection, remember? What's the story, Jerry?”

“Nothing, Mungo. All is well. That's the sto-ry. Up the workers.”

“Up the workers,” Mungo replied. They bumped fists and Ted walked into the hallway on the way out of the stadium.

As he passed one of the training rooms where the players received physical therapy, Ted glanced in. He saw the backs of a couple of the coaches sitting in front of a TV, clipboards in their hands, taking notes. Ted noticed the TVs were hooked up to those new machines called VCRs, or video cassette recorders, and they were watching a game from earlier in the year, slowing it down and speeding it up. These machines were amazing. This was the new way, Ted thought, you could now slow down life and see the things that used to speed by unnoticed. They were watching Reggie Jackson at bat. Reggie swung so hard, he'd nearly fall on his ass. The man did not get cheated on his cuts. Ted thought he saw a little hitch right before Reggie began the swing, a little pumping of the hands, that might cause a millisecond delay, and might be the difference between a hard-hit ball and a strike-out. He wasn't sure if he felt this was cheating or not in sport, but he also speculated that if all of life could be slowed down, he might see it, and consequently play it, better.

Maybe that's what pot does for me, he thought, slows it all down so I can catch it. Maybe that's what writing does to life for me. Slows it down. Maybe my writing doesn't slow things down enough. He wondered if there was a way to slow writing down, or Marty, or women. Maybe cancer was slowing Marty down so he could be seen, perceived accurately, the hitch in his soul. Or women. They moved way too fast for Ted. He wondered if he could put Mariana on slow motion on a VCR, what secret might he see, what insight into her. What was her hitch?

Anyway, he thought he might share his thoughts with the coaches, not about Mariana, though, about Reggie. Like many who were unable to play the game, Ted had great insight into it. Perhaps being barred from success in a thing makes you overly perceptive of what makes success or failure in that thing, causes you to obsess on its technicalities and mysteries; whereas the gifted do not learn, they merely do, the less gifted stew, and ponder, and worry; they learn it the hard way and then they can teach it. The gifted can't teach what they never learned. It's why most great coaches were never great players, and the best coaches were always mediocre players—Billy Martin, the mercurial, brawling, recently fired Yankee manager, was a brilliant case in point. Just as Ted was opening his mouth to share what he saw of Reggie's hitch, one of the coaches became aware of his presence, shot him the hairy eyeball, and slammed the door in Mr. Peanut's face.

 

28.

Ted found himself rising earlier than he did at home, and he'd been awake a couple of hours when Marty came to. “I wanted you to get your rest,” he said.

Marty made an exaggerated show of sniffing the air. “Watch out for Ginsberg.”

Ted held up the notebook he had rescued from the fire. “I'm reading your novel, Dad. It's pretty good.”

Marty spat, “You were supposed to let that piece of shit burn.” He coughed and seemed seized by pain. “Goddamn Sox lost.”

“Did you ever try to publish it?”

“Writing crap novels didn't feed hungry mouths.”

“It's not like you had to quit your day job. Did you write at night?”

“Ted, will you throw that away, please?”

“It's got some excellent writing in it.”

“Sometimes when you take a shit, you admire it for a moment before flushing, right?”

“If you say so.”

“Okay, so now we've had our admiring moment, flush it.”

“No.”

Marty coughed harder. “Goddamn Sox and goddamn you. I'm going back to bed.”