Bucky F*cking Dent (15 page)

“Very funny, asshole. Wait till you get old.”

Ted thought it best to just lie on the ground and wait for the spasms to pass. He gingerly rolled onto his back like a dying cockroach, limbs twitching, thought fleetingly of Kafka's
Metamorphosis
, and chanted as the rigor mortis came and went in electric waves, “Om shanti shanti … om shanti … shit.”

 

30.

The next morning, Ted woke up early, his tendons in sharp recoil, with one thought in his mind: I'm gonna shave this fucking beard. It was slow going, though; the beard was wild and thick, and he'd had it for maybe five years. Took some hacking at it with poultry scissors before he could even attempt a razor. When he finally could, all he had was Marty's old single-edge razor, a lethal weapon. Ted was just lucky he didn't hit a vein, and before he was halfway done, his face was dotted with toilet paper to stanch the bleeding. Marty appeared behind him in the mirror like a ghost in a horror film. All of a sudden, Ted saw this vision over his shoulder—his father with a red rubber Boston Red Sox swim cap tight on his head like a second skin.

“Shavin' for his lady,” Marty said.

“What? Where did you get this razor, Dad, the village smithy? How old is this fucking thing?”

“An hour of yoga and the Splinter's a trout on a hook.”

“Don't call me ‘Splinter.'”

“That's your namesake. Ted Williams, also known as the Splendid Splinter. You are just the Splinter, no Splendid.”

“I know. It's a weird nickname.”

“It's affectionate. I'm being affectionate. ‘The Splinter shavin' for his lady.' That's affection.”

“Do you know the difference between affection and affliction?”

“There's a difference?”

“Stop. I'm not shavin' for any ‘lady,' I was getting tired of it.” Ted pointed to a significant amount of gray in the shorn hair on the floor. “Can you believe how much blond I have in my beard?”

But Marty wouldn't be thrown off the scent. He was just smiling and nodding. “If the Splinter cuts that stupid hippie hair as well, then I know the Splinter's a goner. I remember when the Splinter didn't even have hair under the Splinter's arms.”

“Stop with the third person.”

“You seen my bathing cap?”

“It's on your head.”

“Fuck me, you're right. I've been looking for it for an hour.”

“What's with the lid, Captain, you going lugeing or something?”

“When the Sox hit a skid, I go get a swim at the Y. Wash away their sins. Does the Splinter want to come with?”

“Does the Splinter have a choice?”

“The Splinter does not. The Splinter must drive his father.”

“Ah, but the Splinter doesn't have a bathing costume.”

“I'll lend you an old Speedo of mine.”

“Sweet. The Splinter is fucked.”

 

31.

The old Y was like a time machine. When you stepped through its doors, you were transported to the late '50s/early '60s. That's how long everybody had worked there, and that's the last time they ever got any new equipment. The same huge old woman, Pearl, checked IDs. She had been there since Ted was a boy. She looked to be about four feet eleven, 250, like Aunt Bee from Mayberry gone bad, but Ted had actually never seen her standing. It was like she was a sedentary centaur, half old Jewish lady, half chair. She smelled like nothing and no one else. A tainted musk, a head-spinning force field of airless nylon crotch, cabbage, pierogi, and coffee—like perfume spritzed above the place where perfume went to die. When Ted and his friends had gotten older, they called her “Pearl the Earl,” in honor of the great basketball player Earl the Pearl Monroe, aka Black Jesus. Ted had never even seen the lesser Pearl move, let alone spin and shake like her namesake, nor had he ever seen anyone sneak by her. She was the original immovable object. She was fierce. A bemoled Medusa, a Hebraic Cerberus in a muumuu with a schtetl accent, checking membership status.

“Pearl the Earl, what's shakin', mama?” Ted whispered respectfully as he passed.

“Card,” she demanded.

“Get down with your bad self,” Ted said admiringly, and produced Marty's card.

Things were no different in the locker room or the gym. Ted passed the ancient sauna where his father used to take him as he sat and kibitzed with the other men, naked in the dry heat. Ted remembered being awed by the size and low hang of the old men's balls as they sat with their towels open, and he sat with his towel closed, trying not to pass out from the heat. How are mine gonna get like that and do I want them to? he remembered thinking.

They also still had those “exercise” machines that worked on the principle of attacking the fat parts of the body only. There was the “vibrating belt” with the seat-belt type of apparatus that went around your waist and, when turned on, held you in a spastic embrace, forcing you to do a speeded-up twist, supposedly shaking the pounds off your waistline. And there was the wooden fat roller thing that spun like a rotisserie, with swiveling thick wooden dowels you sat on, that was supposed to badger and knead your ass fat into nothingness. Like Joe Weider and Rube Goldberg had a baby. Jack LaLanne must have had a good sense of humor.

Ted changed into his father's old Speedo. The elastic was nearly all gone, little holes where the chlorine had eaten at it like chemical moths gave it an almost fishnet allure, and only the string, the original replaced by an old shoelace, kept Ted from exposing himself to all the septuagenarians.

Things were no more present day in the water. Marty went in the lane designated “slow,” but “slow” was aspirational. The eighty-year-olds in that lane appeared stationary, moving with the tide from side to side, like human jellyfish. The “medium” lane was “slow” by any standards, and oddly the “fast” lane was slower than the “medium.” Ted chose the fast lane, because it was probably the first and only time in his life he could. He thought, I should move into an old-age community right now, 'cause I would dominate athletically. I would rule.

As the sign said
NO SWIMMING WITHOUT A BATHING CAP
, Ted wore a Red Sox cap that Marty had lent him. He looked like an angry sperm. He dipped his toes in the water. Fucking freezing. He remembered that his great-grandmother Baccha had been a “polar bear” at Coney Island, one of those old-country Eastern Europeans who joined together in the new world to swim in the frigid Atlantic during Brooklyn's dead of winter. She'd go out there off the boardwalk with a bunch of other hearty Poles and Russians, and wade into water barely above freezing. “You get used to it,” they'd say. And they might as well have been talking about the pain of life itself—you get used to it. These were tough people. And possibly collectively insane. Now Ted respected Baccha's fearlessness in the face of frostbite, but as a child, when told that she was a polar bear, Ted had of course thought she was an actual big, white, quite dangerous bear, and that the four-foot-ten shrunken crone that slipped a dollar bill into his palm every time he saw her was some sort of shape-shifter. It was something he told only close friends when he was in third grade.

“My father's mother's mother is a polar bear,” he would say. “Don't tell anyone.”

Maybe some of those old-country, cold-defying genes had been passed down to Ted, because after a lap or two, he found himself getting “used to it.” Ted was by fifty years the youngest person in his lane, probably the lightest person in his lane, and the only male as far as he could tell, though he didn't feel like looking too closely. He did the unfortunately named breaststroke. When his head dipped under the water, and he looked forward to see if he could pass, the huge limbs of the yentas propelling them forward reminded him of the scene in
Fantasia
where the hippos dance in tutus. Was that it? Hippos in tutus?
Fantasia
—the acid trip that Uncle Walt, America's kingpin dealer of dangerous saccharine fantasy, bequeathed to the world's children like a gateway drug. The sweet tasty hash brownie that is Mickey mousse. How many pierogis were ingested to make this scene possible? He laughed at the image, inhaling some water chlorinated a touch below actual bleach. The fumes off the water pricked at his lungs as he ducked in and out of his lane to pass like a race car driver, like the slowest race car driver in the universe. He found himself constantly trapped behind someone's fluttering feet, in the middle of this underwater stampede, taking a few plump white toes in the face now and then.

Much was unpleasant. He stopped at one end of the pool, and looked under the water again at the swimming hippos, oddly hypnotized by their weightless bulk. Bless them, he thought, bless the hippos. There was a tap on his shoulder, and he came up for air. It was one of the Hippowitzes staring him down. He remembered reading somewhere that in Africa, the hippos were the ones to look out for, more dangerous to man and meaner than lions. Ted smiled at this one.

“Pervert,” she said with a mixture of disgust and vanity that was truly unique, and pushed off, displacing as much water as a small boat.

Ted showered until the feeling came tingling back to his fingers and toes. When he padded out to the lockers, Marty was already there, naked, toweling off, with his back to him. Ted was amazed at the number of moles and age spots on his father's back, like the stars of a dying galaxy. Ted took that moment to pull down his Speedo with a modicum of privacy, but just as he did, Marty turned, so Ted pulled his suit back up.

“Good swim?” Marty asked.

“Yeah,” answered Ted. “You?”

“Not bad. Not bad.”

Marty turned his back again, Ted pulled down his suit, Marty turned back to Ted, Ted pulled up his suit.

“You all right there?” Marty asked.

“Yeah,” Ted answered.

This little dance happened a few more times, Ted not getting enough time to pull his suit off before Marty turned around again, until Marty finally said, “You gonna get dressed?”

“Yeah.”

“You gotta get undressed first.”

“The Splinter is aware of that.”

Marty turned fully to face Ted now, a towel around his waist.

“You uptight naked in front of me?”

“What? No. I'm thinking.”

“Are you kidding? I changed your diapers. I've seen that thing.”

“I don't recall.”

“Okay, I watched your mother change your diapers. Jesus, you're serious.”

“I can't. Just look away.”

Marty dropped his towel to the floor, standing facing Ted now and naked.

“Can't be any worse than me. I look like an old woman with a dead sparrow where my cock should be.
Ecce homo
…” Marty made a magnanimous gesture toward his crotch, reminiscent of Carol Merrill on
Let's Make a Deal.

“I prefer not to.”

“Check it out, Bartleby. Get naked with me, you fucker.”

“No.”

“Take 'em off or I'll take 'em off.” Marty made a grab at Ted's Speedo. Ted leaned back as he brushed his hands away, losing his balance and slipping hard and flat on his back on the wet floor.

Marty laughed. “That was fantastic. Positively Chaplinesque. Keatonesque. Ten from the Russian judge.”

Now Ted was just pissed.

“All right,” he said, and stood back up, ripping the bathing suit down to his ankles in one violent motion. And there they stood, father and son naked, man to man, a couple of feet apart.

Marty's eyes went down to Ted's manhood and stayed there. He scrutinized the area inscrutably, tilting his head this way and that, appraising, as one would a precious stone.

“Happy?” Ted asked angrily. “And just for the record, and this goes without saying, but I was swimming, you know.”

Ted grabbed for his towel, but Marty stopped him.

“Look at me, Teddy, look at this shit.” Marty spread his arms out to be inspected like a man about to be patted down for weapons.

“It's okay, Dad, I don't need to…”

“Look, Ted, look. Please. I need you to see.”

Ted did as his father said. He took him in. He beheld the damage done by time and cancer. His eyes found the new angry scar from a recent surgery on his father's chest, glistening wet and red. It looked raw, like it still hurt, and Ted flinched, instinctively feeling the hurt in his own chest. He beheld the dying animal in front of him that was his father, and he felt his eyes fill with tears.

“Fucking chlorine,” he said.

Marty shifted his open arms toward Ted now and stepped forward to hug him. Ted received him and hugged back. There they were, father and son, naked and wet, embracing in the bowels of a YM-YWHA in Brooklyn, late summer 1978.

Marty was crying too. He whispered in Ted's ear, “That's a perfectly respectable prick you got there, son.” That particular phrase felt better to Ted than he would have ever imagined, and he didn't care to unpack why just then. As Marty was speaking, another old man entered the locker room from the pool to change, and saw the two men holding each other.

“
Faygelehs
…” the intruder muttered under his breath as he walked away. Marty and Ted held on.

 

32.

The Doublemint Man is shiny with sweat and slumming it up in Spanish Harlem. He is not alone. Maria lies next to him. Maria. He just met a girl named Maria. And suddenly it's summer. The curtains flutter. He strokes the fine forest of dark hairs on her arms and above her knee. He can't get enough of her. Her smell, her feel, her her. He's a goner. He takes a swig off a can of Budweiser and puts it to Maria's lips. She sips. Even the way she sips turns him on and leaves him on. Maria takes an ice cube from the cooler by the bed and puts it on his forehead, where it melts as quickly as if on a stove.