Bucky F*cking Dent (3 page)

It was a walk of shame all right. “Oh, forget it,” some kid would say. “It's just Mr. Peanut. Yo, Mr. Peanut, what's up, peanut man? THE PEA-NUT!!!” And usually, this would turn into an ironic name game—“Grizzly Adams!” they yelled with barely contained derision as they rounded Ted off to the nearest celebrity, in this case the actor on the hit TV show. He guessed he looked a little like Dan Haggerty because of the heft and the full beard and long hair. “Haggerty!!!” The name-calling would morph behind him in the dead air before an actual Yankee refocused their attention, as Ted made his long way to the crappy parking spaces at the far end of the lot. “The Haggermeister!!! The Grizzler!!! Grizzelda!!! Captain Lou Albano!!!” and the occasional “Jerry Garcia!!!”—which he kinda didn't mind at all. Ted would cast his head down and smile awkwardly, hiding his mortification, wishing he could be as solitary as the Grizzler, or be invisible for the few minutes it would take to get to his car, at least more invisible than he was.

The tall lamps got sparser as Ted made his way to the back of the lot, as if no one really cared to see what happened back there. Ted's mighty steed, his puke-green aging Toyota Corolla, waited patiently, the plastic bags that had replaced the front windows broken in the theft of his car stereo flapping gently in the summer breeze. Ted no longer locked the car. Whoever it was who wanted whatever it was that they thought was in that piece of shit was welcome to it, without needing to cause any more damage. Not that there was anything of value in there. It was filthy. Dirty clothes, soda bottles, and peanut bags littered the back seat. To save money, and because he had never really cared about food, Ted mostly ate the bagged peanuts that he sold at the games. This monochrome diet explained his unhealthy swollen gut and greenish complexion. No one had spent as much time with the peanut since George Washington Carver. If this was close to bag lady or homeless or hoarder behavior, Ted wasn't bothered. He was a Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyite/Marcusian Deadhead who did not buy into the late, dying capitalist animal that was the United States economy. He existed in and out of the world he wanted to observe.
I am the Heisenberg principle
, he thought. Or maybe,
I am the Highsenberg principle
, as he lit up a joint.

Ted exhaled a plume of smoke of which Jimmy Cliff could have been proud, took his portable cassette player out of his backpack, and slid it into the opening on the dashboard. He turned the key over and the Japanese import shuddered to life, as if startled out of sleep and annoyed at being asked to move. “C'mon, Big Bertha-san,” Ted coaxed, as he stepped on the clutch, thinking to himself
I am Mr. Clutch
as he shifted into reverse. “Mistuh Crutch-uh.” Sometimes he would just speak to his “Collola” in the terrible, racist Japanese accent of Mickey Rooney in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
—it was the bad, easy, faux-tough-guy type of racist stuff his father loved to say just to piss people off. Ted hated that shit, found it offensive. But sometimes, against his better judgment, Ted felt something like a ventriloquist's dummy, involuntarily speaking his father's words. He might adopt an attitude or phrase out of the blue, like some sort of paternal Tourette's. The possessed moments would pass, and he would quickly become self-conscious again, looking around sheepishly to see if anyone overheard.

Music fought a losing battle through the tiny cheap speakers. The Dead. Almost always the Dead.

“Saint Stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes.”

Ted sang along with Bob Weir in a decently tuneful imitation of Jerry Garcia's vulnerable, knowing whine: “Country garden in the wind and the rain, wherever he goes the people always complain.”

Ted pulled out of the lot and onto the darkening streets of the Bronx. Singing—“Did it matter, does it now? Stephen would answer if he only knew how.”

 

4.

Ted's fourth-floor walk-up was like a stationary version of Ted's car. It was the Brokedown Palace Toyota Corolla of domiciles. Ceiling-high stacks of
The New York Review of Books
did a fine job of cutting down the draft in the old tenement during winter. A bare lightbulb swayed above the sink and there was an arsenic-green pleather Castro Convertibles couch/bed that you could say had seen better days, which would imply that it had once had better days, which was up for debate. Windows were blacked out, books strewn everywhere, and yellow legal pads covered in what looked to be the tiny, furious scrawl of a madman. A typewriter sat on a card table, no paper loaded. And of course the omnipresent bags of Yankee peanuts, some written on, some yet to be eaten. In truth, his place looked like it had been designed by whoever did the Kramdens' apartment on
The Honeymooners.
You half expected Alice to come bustling out of the bathroom to polite applause and for the fun to begin. Though there were some muted colors, the world in here felt black and white. Filled with essentials for a man who had no needs.

The sole, whimsical nod to life outside this room was an old TV sitting on a chair facing the couch, a metal coat hanger tortured into a pyramidal shape as a replacement antenna. Because the TV was manufactured by Emerson, Ted called it the “Hobgoblin” (of small minds), and would never think of himself as watching the TV, but rather keeping an eye on the Hobgoblin. He rarely had it on. He'd grown up with
Dragnet
, Jack Benny, and the Milton Berle show and retained a certain nostalgic reverence for that bygone era, but he found that when he tried to watch the popular shows of today—
Happy Days
(Ted preferred the original Beckett version) or
Laverne and Shirley
—a great horror and sadness would wash over him that would seem to be at odds with those supposed “comedies.” He would watch the desperately unfunny antics of the appropriately named Jack Tripper (he told himself the creators must be aware of the LSD reference and not just the klutzy Dick Van Dykian furniture-tripping sense, but he wasn't sure) of
Three's Company
, America's favorite show, and he would begin to sob uncontrollably, for his country and for himself. The only thing that soothed him from the boob tube was the local talk titan, Joe Franklin, whose low-rent set and sensibility, Streit's matzo adverts, and nonsensical guest lists suffused Ted with a sense of surreal dislocation, warmth, and anarchic hope—like he got from looking at the Tanguys and de Chiricos sometimes at MoMA. De Chirico and Franklin, not Tripper, made him feel trippy without the trip. And sports. He watched sports.

Rounding out the furnishings was a battery-operated mechanical fish that made rather uncannily realistic movements in its bowl by the sink. The faint smell of what could very well be mouse dung—actually, what Ted hoped was mouse dung, since the possible alternatives to that were way worse—hung over everything.

Ted glanced at his fake pet fish. “Hello, Goldfarb.” It amused him to think it was a Jewish goldfish, hence Goldfarb. An inside joke between Ted and a fake fish. That thing always cracked him up. He grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge and a bag of peanuts, and dragged his chair to the window. With considerable effort, he opened the window to the world, lit up another joint, and thus ate his dinner. His window faced the street, and Ted enjoyed being able to watch the life on the sidewalk without being seen. He leaned over, took a legal pad in hand, and began writing in his tiny longhand. He belched peanuts and beer and cannabis, and considered himself content. He stroked his beard, the few gray strands like indeterminate omens of a not so bright future. Many nights of his life were passed in just this exact fashion, Ted wrestling with his own mind, trying to answer a question he had yet to successfully pose. Sometime after midnight, well stoned and tired, he would slither off the windowsill to his bed and sleep properly.

 

5.

It's the summer of 1953. A young middle-aged man sits silently, sullenly watching a baseball game on a black-and-white television. A young boy can be seen behind him, staring at his father, as if memorizing him, the lines on his neck, the way he holds himself, the way he smells, somehow knowing one day the old man will disappear, if in fact he already hasn't. The presence of a woman hovers in the room, maybe you can see the shape of her dress in the background as she busies herself in the kitchen. She is not happy, she is mumbling under her breath, knowing that her husband can hear her. There is a feeling of low-level dread in the house, like the sickening electric hum near a power plant. The man sits like a gravestone. The teams playing on the TV are the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. When something positive happens for the Sox, the man lets out a short burst of celebration, but quickly reverts to stillness. The woman clatters dishes in the kitchen, louder than necessary. She wants to be heard. The boy is unhappy. The boy wants his parents to get along. The boy wants his father to look at him. The boy thinks, If I can make them laugh, if I can make them laugh …

The boy has seen his father laugh at Milton Berle in a dress. The boy is afraid of Berle and thinks he looks like a psychotic rabbit, but his father doesn't. His father is brave and not afraid of Berle. His father laughs in Berle's face. The boy positions himself to the side of his father's impassive eyeline and dances like a ballerina from one end of the room to the other. He has never taken ballet. That's the point. He freezes the static smile of the ballerina onto his face, flutters his feet, pirouettes. His father pays no attention.

Now the boy walks in front of his father and does a pratfall worthy of Chaplin or Keaton. A really good one. He hears his mother laugh in the kitchen. He is hopeful. But his father stares straight ahead, watching the ball game. The boy retreats to his parents' bedroom and throws a dress of his mother's over his head, steps into a pair of high heels, looks in the mirror and wonders if maybe this is a bad idea, and then totters awkwardly back into the living room, unsteady as a newborn foal. His father stares straight ahead.

The boy goes back to the closet and opens a big suitcase marked “Vacation” and puts on all the scuba equipment he can find—bathing suit, flippers, mask, snorkel. He walks in front of the TV. A frogman, a fish out of water. His father doesn't blink. The Red Sox score. The man applauds and stares straight ahead. The mother stares at the boy, who stares at his father, who stares at the TV—their connected gazes would form a perfect triangle, if his father would look at either him or his mother. But he doesn't, and the triangle remains imperfect and open, leaking and bleeding. A phone is ringing. The man yells for his wife to get it. She responds by breaking a dish. He finally looks at his son, still standing in front of him in full scuba gear, and says, “Answer the fucking phone, will ya?”

Ted is awakened suddenly from this dream, his stoned sleep, disoriented. He realizes the strange sound that has jarred him is his phone ringing. He checks his watch. It's three-ish in the morning. He fumbles for the receiver and croaks at it, “Boiler room,” because that always amuses him.

A woman's voice on the other line, palpable New York Puerto Rican aka Nuyorican accent (Ted was familiar with this particular patois from his patrons at work). “Is this Lord Fenway Fullilove?” Jesus, Ted thought. Only his father tortured him with that stupid middle name. He was named after a stadium. Ted had always wanted to, but never gotten around to, excising that ridiculous nomenclature from his life once and for all. He never used it, sometimes giving the initials LF when a middle name was demanded on an official form. And when pressed he would say the LF was Larry Francis or Left Field, never Lord Fenway.

“This is Ted Fullilove, yes. Who is this?”

“My name is Mariana Blades. I'm an RN here at Beth Israel…”

Ted felt words rush out of him before he thought them; it was like the words were thinking him, speaking him.

“My father,” he said without a doubt and without really knowing what he meant.

“Yes,” said the nurse, “your father.”

 

6.

Ted hadn't spoken to Marty in about five years. He wasn't sure if he'd ever really spoken to him at all in his life, had actually had an honest conversation, but the last five years had been complete and defined radio silence between the two. He had tried to forget what the precipitating event was; he had a vague memory of giving his dad a manuscript to read and having been hurt by the reaction. He remembered his father had said something constructive like “You write like an old man; you went straight past writing about fucking to writing about napping after nonexistent fucking—are you a homo? When I was your age…” or something like that. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Ted had asked. “I'm trying to hurt you into poetry, nitwit,” Marty had proclaimed like the oracle of Park Slope. All that was almost unimportant, and Ted stopped himself from rehearsing the particulars of the last breakup. The relationship between father and son was so weighted, fraught, and broken that it needed barely an inciting incident—a forgotten please or thank-you, a sideways glance, to put them at each other's throats. Their relationship was a desert in a drought: one little match was all it took to ignite hellfire.

The nurse, Mariana, had not wanted to get into details on the phone, but Marty was at Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue and Sixteenth Street in Manhattan. Ted had grown up in Brooklyn, but never went back there, and rarely ventured from the Bronx into Manhattan. Manhattan, with its if-you-can-make-it-there-you-can-make-it-anywhere bullshit ethos, was an affront to Ted's pseudo-Communist leanings. Its ostentatious money was a constant and unpleasant reminder that he had, in fact, not made it there or anywhere.

Riding in the Corolla toward the Lower East Side, Ted checked his insides, the what was he feeling. There was nothing definite. There was no fear or sadness, no love, there was only a kind of gray numbness. Marty was only sixty and Ted wondered what could be wrong with him. Hit by a car, maybe? Stabbed by a waitress? Only negative waves surfaced when he thought of the old man, a bolus of dread, resentment, unspoken expectation, and avoidance. He wondered if the old man was dying. Wondered if his death would set him free. Ted, that is. Wondered if his father's death might be the catalyst to open up his word hoard, make him a real writer. Then he felt guilty for “using” his father's no doubt real pain for his own potential gain. Then he said, Fuck that, aloud, and allowed himself to wonder some more at the events that push our minds into new terrain. As he toked on another spliff, Ted wondered at the temperature of his soul and of his mind, and deemed that it must be chilly in there.