Bucky F*cking Dent (2 page)

Catfish Hunter was pitching today. Ted dug that name. Baseball had a rich tradition of ready-made awesome monikers. Van Lingle Mungo. Baby Doll Jacobson. Heinie Manush. Chief Bender. Enos Slaughter. Satchel Paige. Urban Shocker. Mickey Mantle. Art Shamsky. Piano Legs Hickman. Minnie Minoso. Cupid Childs. Willie Mays. Like a history of the United States told only through names, a true American arithmoi, a Book of Numbers. It was a strange year, though, because the Boston Red Sox, longtime Yankee rivals, but in effect more like a tragicomic foil to the reigning kings, the Washington Generals to the Yankees' Harlem Globetrotters, were having a great year and looking like they would finally break the curse of the Babe. The Sox had traded Babe Ruth, already the best player in the game, in 1918 to the Yankees for cash. The owner of the Sox, Harry Frazee, wanted to bankroll a musical or something. Was it
No, No, Nanette
? Ruth went on to become an American hero, a hard-living, hot-dog-inhaling Paul Bunyan in pinstripes who led the Yankees to many a pennant and World Series victory, whose success had conjured Yankee Stadium out of the barren hinterlands of the Bronx: The House That Ruth Built in 1923, where Ted stood today. And the Sox had not won since. Not one pennant. Sixty years of futility looking up in the standings at the hairy ass of the Yankees.

It was mid-June, but already hotter than July. The peanuts did fly, the beer did flow, and the Catfish did hurl. During the few lulls in the game when people were not calling for him, Ted would usually grab the dull sawed-off pencil from behind his right ear and jot down stray thoughts. To be filed later. Alphabetically, of course. Thoughts for the novel he was presently working on, or the next one, or the one that he had all but given up on last year. Writing was not the problem, finishing was. Works in progress with titles like “Mr. Ne'er-Do-Well” (536 pages), “Wherever There Are Two” (660 pages of an outline), “Death by Now” (1,171 pages weighing over 12 pounds), or “Miss Subways” (402 pages and counting). All that would never see the light of day outside of Ted's Bronx one-bedroom walk-up tenement apartment. Maybe today he would stumble upon a thought that would unleash the true word horde, that would unlock a puzzle, that would unblock him from himself, from his inability to compete and complete.

He remembered Coleridge, in the Vale of Chamouni, had written, “Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star…?” And that seemed to him the truest, saddest line in all of literature. Can you, man, find the poetry to keep the sun from rising, like a mountain, blocking its inevitable ascent for a few more moments? Can you, who call yourself a writer, find the words that will have an actual influence on the real and natural world? Magic passwords—shazzam, open sesame, scoddy waddy doo dah—warriors lurking in the Trojan horse of words. The implicit answer to Coleridge's question was: Hell, no. If the answer were yes, he would never have asked the question. The writer will never make something happen in the world. In fact, the act of writing may be in itself the final admission that one is powerless in reality. Shit, that would surely suck.

Ted was thinking about his own powerlessness and ol' S. T. Coleridge, that opium-toking, Xanadu-loving, Alps-hiking freakazoid, as he sat scribbling on a paper bag some names that might work as magic charms to make time or a woman stay, to spark a story, to make him the man he wanted to be—Napoleon Lajoie Vida Blue Thurman Munson Open Sesame …

The game passed by in its own sweet timelessness, and then it was over. Boston 5, New York 3. Another Yankee loss in this strange-feeling year.

 

2.

Like the actual Yankees, the men and women who worked the concession stands and the seats at the stadium had their own changing room. But it was not carpeted, there was no shower and no buffet, no place to chill the champagne. It resembled mostly a dingy locker room at your neighborhood Y. This was where Ted changed out of his uniform. He removed the shoulder strap that held his big cardboard box of peanut bags. Cardboard. Seemed so cheap and ephemeral, like an affront, and no good in the rain. Off came the dark blue visor, white short-sleeved shirt with Yankee insignia, and blue polyester pants that refused to breathe and left his thighs and ass chafed, pimply, and raw. A winning combination.

Mungo slid in next to Ted on the bench, removing his orthopedic shoe, so big and clunky it looked like he had stolen it from Fred “Herman” Gwynne off the set of
The Munsters
, with a serious moan. Mungo tossed the huge boot; its heel so weighted, Ted noticed it always landed upright, like a black cat. “You were on fire this afternoon, Teddy Ballgame. By my unofficial count: 83 tosses, 65 hits, 10 near misses, and just 8 whiffs. You were getting the chiquitas all hot, buttered, and bothered.” Mungo liked to imagine that a minimum-wage vending skill was attractive to females. As he removed his bowling forearm guard, he cooed, “Aye, Señor Peanut, ay Papi Peanut…” In his stockinged feet, Mungo stood barely above Ted's sitting-down eyeline. It was impossible to tell what Mungo was—Italian, Dutch, Irish, Ukrainian, Hobbit, Bridge Troll? Indeterminate. So Ted had stopped trying to classify him. He thought of him as a human. A very small human.

“Yeah, Mungo,” Ted said as he put on his civilian clothes, “the ladies just can't resist a peanut-throwing motherfucker.”

Ted's sartorial niche was neo-hippie, which seemed more lazy than lame and out of date. Ted's theory was that each decade in history was actually, spiritually, the decade before. It took more than ten years for a decade, like an organism, to fully become itself. Therefore, the '40s were the '30s, the '50s were the '40s, the '60s were the '50s—for proof of that he would always say, Look at the top 40. In the '60s, you barely had the Beatles and the Stones, or even his beloved Grateful Dead, who never sold out and made the venal pop charts anyway, but rather floated independently through the years like a waft of pot smoke. What you got more of in the early '60s were the Four Seasons, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Sinatra, Elvis. And now we are in the late '70s, Ted would think, which are in actuality the late '60s. We are basically in the summer of love, the time of free love. I am totally current, he thought, though Ted felt less free to love and more free from love.

All this by way of justifying why Ted's life uniform outside his work uniform was basically unchanged over the last ten years. Tie-dye shirt, blue jeans, and sandals. In the winters, he splurged and wore white Adidas Superstars, three black stripes, low top. His weight had not remained unchanged over the years, so his purple-based swirl-of-color T pinched him under his man breasts and rode up to expose the coarse hairs above his soft belly. (He couldn't stop thinking of his chest as breasts ever since he had read an alarming article about how chronic pot smoking increases estrogen in men and can lead to some subtle secondary feminine characteristics such as male teats.) Ted shook off the thought about his man tits, shook his long brown shoulder-length hair from underneath his visor, and tied it back into a ponytail.

Ted stood and slapped Mungo on the back. “Up the workers, Mungo.” Ted liked to think of himself as a Communist—it bolstered his image as not an underachiever, but as a calloused-handed man of the people. Though he was unaffiliated with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), headed by the quixotic Gus Hall, né Arvo Kustaa Halberg, of the 58,992 votes Hall and his vice-presidential running mate, Jarvis Tyner, had garnered in the last election, Ted's was one. That's 0.07 percent of the vote, people, up from 0.03 percent in '72! That's momentum, baby. Ted liked voting for a sure loser. It made him feel heard. At Columbia, he had fallen in love with a miraculous Marxist, a Russian-studies major from Baltimore. Rachel Sue Abramowitz. An adopted blond beauty with what must have been some sort of Scandinavian origins, she looked nothing like her name or her short, dark Eastern European adoptive parents. She was a stunning oxymoron, and Ted fell hard for her and her story that her biological father was a cop and her mother a prostitute.

Rachel Sue Abramowitz claimed to have once caught crabs from Mark Rudd, but refused to join SDS or the Columbia Citizenship Council because she thought their notions of praxis had perverted their grasp of perfect theory. She had been part of the successful Stickman filter uprising, but during the protest of the gym at Morningside Park, one of the other budding revolutionaries from a private high school in New Jersey had squeezed her boob in a scrum, whispering, “What do we want? Titty! When do we want it? Now!” And that had freaked her out. Understandably. Ted did some reconnaissance and learned that Rachel Sue had a poster of the one-dimensional man himself, Herbert Marcuse, in her dorm room like other underclass Barnard girls had posters of this passing English musical fad called the Beatles.

Even though Ted was quite happy teasing allegories and wordplay high up in his ivory tower, under the sway of writers like Joyce (he liked to say he preferred
Finnegans Wake
to
Ulysses
, but that was bullshit, library stud, provocative grandstanding), Stevens (even though Ted was not ready to “let be be the finale of seem”), Samuel “Fail again, fail better” Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon. And though Pynchon had as much connection to realpolitik as Popeye, Ted had run out, bought (he told people he stole it, pulled a Jerry Rubin, but he didn't, he bought it, sheepishly) a copy of
Das Kapital
, underlined and dog-eared it to death, and tried to appear to be reading it conspicuously in all the campus spots Rachel Sue was known to haunt. (When Ted's dad had seen him toting
Das Kapital
everywhere, he told Ted that Karl was the “lesser Marx, Groucho was the genius of the family. I rank Karl ahead of Zeppo and Gummo, but behind Chico and Harpo.”) Ted was relieved that the nerd-chic look of SDS members had made his thick corrective lenses (20/400 vision) acceptable, even desirable. He burned his blue-and-white Columbia freshman beanie and took to hanging out on the steps of Low Memorial Library, speaking, and trying hard to be overheard, of being
entfremdet
from his
Gattungswesen
. Ted's ridiculous ploy worked and Rachel Sue Abramowitz had become his first love. He fell for her like Lenin fell for Marx. It lasted all four years of Columbia, but had quickly disintegrated after they graduated beyond the cocoon of campus. Out of school, he had set up to become a struggling writer, and had at least managed to pull off the struggling part, while Rachel Sue Abramowitz became perhaps the only Marxist supermodel in the history of the world. She left him for a male model temporarily, and then for a French hairstylist named Fabian.

Despite the male model and Fabian, Rachel and Ted sporadically tried to get back together for a few more years, like planets on elliptical orbits, Ted deciding one night after a long, drunk, expensive, echoing, beeping phone call from Paris from his former Marxist, former girlfriend that he would ask her to marry him. He told her he wanted to see her when she got back to the city, and they made plans to meet for Japanese food. Ted arrived dressed like an adult, in a dark blue suit, and when he spied Rachel at the table, her head down, reading the menu, his heart swelled with love, and he knew he was doing the right thing. When she looked up, he saw some new depth in her eyes and figured it was a shared vision of their future. He kissed her hello on the lips and felt himself getting hard. She had that effect on him just walking in the room. It was Pavlovian, they always joked, and called it Cocklovian. Ted ordered a big bottle of sake. He looked at her and swelled once more. Oh, how he loved making love to her, this genius offspring of cop and whore.

They both spoke at once as in the most clichéd of romantic comedies—“I have some news!” Jinx. Ha-ha. You go first, no you go first, no you, no you. Ted's news would be a question: “Rachel, will you marry me?” But like the gentleman he hoped to be, he insisted Rachel go ahead of him. He could read the love and passion in her eyes. He saw their Communist future together. He felt that his species-being would be integrated and fulfilled by the simple things in life—good work, love, a fire in the hearth, family. It was all coming together. She parted her wet lips, showing her perfect white teeth, and said, “I'm pregnant and I'm getting married.”

Ted's world collapsed like a dark star and turned inside out. His ears popped and it sounded to him as if he were underwater. He could see her on land, but could not reach her. She had tears in her eyes and was smiling or grimacing, he couldn't tell. Ted had lost control of his own face, he had no idea what his expression was revealing to his beloved at the moment. Even though he was sinking beneath a sea of sorts, his mouth was dry. He heard her as if through liquid—what he hoped would soon be a tidal wave of alcohol—“What's your news, baby?” Ted took a deep breath of what felt to his lungs like vomit, like he had given up to the idea of drowning, now and forever, and said, “Nothing important, baby. I'm so happy for you. A toast!”

And he raised a too-small cup of sake to her life to be lived with another man and her unborn children by him, and had never loved or been loved by a woman again. Most days went by without a single thought of Rachel Sue, whatever her last name might be now, and the alternative reality that might have been had he been more aggressive and spoken first. If you asked, he would say he's completely over her, but still, a stray scent of patchouli on the sidewalk could dizzy him and turn his stomach, and make him a little hard.

 

3.

“Up the workers, Teddy Ballgame,” Mungo echoed. Ted turned on sandaled feet and strolled out into the June evening. The walk out into the parking lot was arguably Ted's least favorite part of the job. After the game, fans would line up behind barricades, hoping for a glimpse of their favorite players. They could see figures walking toward them out of the shadows and would try to guess who was coming at them by their size and shape. “Louuuuuuuuu” they'd bellow if they thought Lou Piniella was coming. Or “Bucky!!!” for Bucky Dent, “Captain” for Thurman Munson, “Gooooooooose” for Rich “Goose” Gossage, or, improbably, “Reggie! Reggie! Reggie!” on the way to his Bentley Bentley Bentley. Invariably, they thought Ted was a Yankee coming toward them, and after shouting out names of players and realizing it was Ted, would then give voice to their disappointment. Ted hated that moment when they saw that it was only him. Like it was just a terrible mistake, like he himself was a mistake.