Bucky F*cking Dent (4 page)

It reminded him of a meeting he'd had with his erstwhile agent, Andrew Blaugrund. The only reason Blaugrund was his agent was because Ted had gone to Columbia with Blaugrund's cousin, and Blaugrund agreed to take him on as a “pocket client.” Which is just another way of saying, I'm doing a friend or relative a favor and you can tell people I'm your agent, but I will never be your agent or answer your phone call and will generally do fuck-all for you. Ted thought maybe Blaugrund should put that job description on a business card.

It had been a good three years since his last meeting with Blaugrund. It had taken Ted six months to get a fifteen-minute, prelunch window of opportunity to gauge Blaugrund's reaction to a novel Ted had sent him eleven months earlier. Scumbag. The novel was postmodern. Ted was under the sway of Pynchon and Barthelme and Ishmael Reed at the time. Not much happened in the novel, and it happened very slowly. There were sudden shifts in point of view, and a general disdain for emotion and plot, which Ted saw as bourgeois and outdated—ass kissing and pandering to story needs, now satisfied and superseded by TV and film. He had read that Samuel Beckett said that the perfect play would have no actors in it. Ted thought that the perfect novel would have nothing happen in it.

So Ted was complimented, neither surprised nor insulted, when Blaugrund let the 667 pages of Ted's manuscript, a Derridean deconstructionist romp titled “Magnum Opie,” drop with some impressive gravity onto his desk and say, “What the fuck happens in this shit? Nothing happens. At least when you watch paint dry, the paint dries, that happens, the transformation of paint from wet to dry happens. No such luck here, buddy boy. It feels fake French New Wave to me. Alain Robbe-Grillet wants his money back. I feel like I was hit over the head with a baguette for five hours.”

“You're welcome,” Ted said.

“Oh, that's what you were going for, is it? A prostate exam on a page? Well, then, mission accomplished.”

“It's in the surrealist tradition.”

“You mean the narcoleptic tradition. That's fine and dandy, Professor Morpheus, but before you get to surreal, you have to get real. Do you know what I mean?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Sit down, Ted.”

Ted sat down, maintaining eye contact pridefully, settling in for what looked to be an angry monologue from Blaugrund, who was straightening his stupid-ass, preppy bow tie. “I'm gonna tell you this one time, 'cause to be honest, life is too fucking short to read books like this. This tome is for the fifteen pimply grad students in New Haven sitting at a round table fingering their blackheads and wondering about tenure. And this will surprise you. Ted? Are you listening? I see you nodding, but I wanna make sure you're listening.”

“Listening.”

“You're a fucking writer.”

“What?”

“You can write, but you're a pretentious brat, and you've suffered two tragedies thus far.”

“What? Divorce?”

“Divorce? Fuck, no. Divorce is nothing, a zit on the ass of life. Divorce is a bad thing for a kid, sure, but it's good for a writer. I wish you had more divorces. I wish your mother was a whore, an actual prostitute, and your father was a serial killer.”

“Thank you.”

“No, your problem is that you only had the one divorce and you went to a fucking Ivy League school. Where'd you go again? Princeton? Yale?”

“Columbia.”

“I'm Harvard.”

“Go Crimson.”

“Columbia's not really Ivy League, though, is it? Let's be honest. But whatever, you got too fucking smart for your own good. And you didn't go to 'Nam, did you?”

Ted removed his glasses and waved them at Blaugrund.

“Twenty/four hundred vision. One-Y deferment.”

“Well played.”

“Blind as a bat wins you the genetic lottery in the American century, courtesy of Tricky Dick.”

“Were you SDS?”

“No. Flirted with it, but no.”

“STD?”

“Ha-ha. Also a no. Unfortunately.”

“Columbia was on fire when you were there. I've been looking for a memoir out of there at that time.”

“It ain't me, babe.”

“You were one of those kids that were mad when the students took over Low Library, 'cause you couldn't do your homework?”

“Precisely. You are hitting nails on heads all over the damn place.”

“Your eyesight was borderline. You shoulda gone to war.”

“I never had no beef with the yellow man.”

“Who is that, Joe Frazier?”

“Ali.”

“Right. I knew it was a
schvartze.
No, war would've been good for you if you didn't get killed, would've given you a subject, a fucking plot. Think of Hemingway and Mailer. Without WW Two, Mailer is nothing but a genius momma's boy who wants to hang with made guys and boxers, and poor Hemingway, even with the war, he's really only known as another wannabe tough-guy boxer bullfighter backstage Johnny with a smoking-hot granddaughter in a soon-to-be-released Woody Allen film. But war is good for art. War is good for industry and fiction. My point is that maybe you haven't lived. You write like you haven't lived. You write well. About nothing. Your words are searching for a subject, looking around for something to hold on to, but they don't find anything, only other words. You need some kind of fucking event in your life—the war between the races, the war between the sexes, I don't care, anything. I got it! I know what you should do.”

“What?”

“Commit a crime and go to prison and get fucked in the ass. That's what you need. A good jailhouse ass fucking. That should loosen you up, but good. Please don't send me another beautifully written book about sweet bugger-all, or I'll kill myself and then you, in that order. Now get the fuck out of here, I'm hungry. I'll see you in five years.”

Ted left Blaugrund's office floating on air. Through all of that harangue, all that really landed was “you're a fucking writer.” All the rest was benighted opinion and bullshit. Ted was lucky to find a parking space on the Stuyvesant Town side of First Avenue. He touched his tongue to the ember of the joint, dousing the burn with saliva, put the roach in his pocket, checked for uptown traffic, and jogged toward the hospital entrance.

 

7.

Hospitals and ice cream parlors have the same lighting. Why? Why so fucking bright? Ted wondered at that as he took the elevator to the seventh floor. He wandered down a long hallway, checking numbers, catching glimpses of people quietly sleeping in their beds, only the machines keeping them alive making noise. Just a glance as he walked by. Looking at sick people was somehow like surprising someone naked; it was like you didn't want to get caught doing it, but there was something fascinating there, a pull, the vulnerability, maybe, the universality. He felt suddenly vulnerable himself. He put his hand in his pocket and fingered the roach. Just knowing it was there was a comfort of sorts. The one girl he could always count on—Mary Jane. He turned a corner, and at the end of a long, deserted hallway, he saw a dark-haired woman rise from a seat and start toward him. That must be the nurse, Ted thought, the one who called me—Marian or Maria, was it? I hope it's that nurse. It was past four a.m.

“Lord Fenway?” the dark woman said, as she approached. Of course the lifelong joke of a name irked Ted, but he wasn't irked at the moment, because this nurse was seriously otherworldly. She was definitely Latina, he speculated, but around her dark eyes he could see Asia—China or Korea—and a deep but attractive sadness he may or may not have been projecting. He became aware that he had stopped breathing, and also that he was very, very high.

“Theodore,” Ted finally corrected her—and immediately thought, Like a fucking chipmunk, Alvin's bespectacled brother—and then set about correcting and recorrecting himself. “Or Ted. Ted. Theodore. Whatever. Theodore's fine, but Ted. Ted.”

“Okay, I think we've reached a definitive conclusion. Ted it is. I'm Mariana. We spoke on the phone,” she said, smiling; her mouth was large, but perfectly in proportion to her pretty face, which was not large. How's that possible, Ted wondered as the Dead's “Sugar Magnolia” played in his head, distracting him, so he banished the band to a back room in his mind to jam without him. Sssh for now, Jerry, I need to focus. Her beautiful mouth moved:

“Your father's gonna be fine for now, we had to pump his stomach, but he's gonna be okay in a bit.” That Puerto Rican accent. Shit. That hard lilt fucked with his computer. Ted felt his autonomic system had maybe shut off, and he was afraid he had to breathe consciously or he would forget and suffocate himself. And one and two and three and four. He couldn't remember where he'd gotten this bud from, but fuck. He mustered, “The old bastard tried to kill himself?”

The nurse's head pulled back a micron, imperceptible if you weren't as stoned as Ted, but he saw that he had offended her with the callousness of his tone. He often forgot that it was unusual or unnatural for a son to hate his father, and even more unusual to express that in polite society.

“Your father's got lung cancer, squamous. Terminal,” she said.

Lung cancer. Squamous. Ted told his own lungs to breathe. How is a natural person who has love for his father supposed to react to this news? he wondered. I have to act like that guy. I'd like to do that for this woman, he thought. And as he composed his face to approximate sadness, he felt an actual deep and horrible sadness fall over him, and he stopped it.

“It's only a matter of months,” she said. “You didn't know?”

“I just found out recently,” Ted said.

“How recently?”

“Very recently.”

“When?”

“Just now when you said it.”

She nodded. “He's been sick for about three years.”

“We're a close family,” he said.

He'd been sick for three years? Jesus Christ. He'd been given a couple years to live, three years ago. How scared had he been? How lonely? Had he had one of his young girlfriends to hold his hand? The nurse kept talking to him, at him. He heard that Marty had had “reductive surgery” that had been “minimally successful” two years ago. He heard the phrase “small cell,” and that chemotherapy had bought some time. He found himself quite unable to concentrate, so words such as “carcinoma” and “cytotoxic” started floating up at him untethered and meaningless, but full of evil import. More and more words like “cyclophosphamide,” “VP-16-123,” “1-ME-1-nitrosourea.” Ted had the sensation he was listening to a poem in another language, a poem about death. All the “-mides” and “-mines” even sight-rhymed in his mind's eye. The nurse must have seen the curtain fall over his eyes.

“You okay? I'm sorry. I'm dumping a lot on you all at once. We can talk more later. Here…”

The nurse ran her long fingers down her white nurse's skirt and put her hands in her pockets. She pulled on the top of her shirt, revealing momentarily a bra that was perhaps too nice, too lacey, and too red for this work and this place. She pulled out a small business card. Ted told himself to breathe again. “Always run out. Mariana Blades,” she said, extending her hand. “Grief Counselor.”

What? Grief. Counselor. Ted immediately thought of Charlie Brown and “good grief.” Was there a grief that was good, a good grief? Peanuts! But Marty was alive. She was a prematurely grieving counselor. She was more like a Death Counselor. So she consults with Death and tells Him who to take next? Ted felt a smile take over his face and did his best to reverse it. “Grief Counselor. Death Counselor,” he repeated, looking at the card. “That's charming. Like ‘Phlegm Specialist,' or ‘Wound Facilitator,' or ‘Ambassador of Pus.'”

Ted felt pretty good about coming up with those three on the spur.

“I work with the dying through their final stages. From shock to denial to anger to bargaining and depression to acceptance and peace.”

“Sounds like a normal day for me. Except the peace part.” That joke landed nearby, but not quite where he wanted it to. He became aware of trying to be too funny in the circumstances.

“Specifically, what I am doing with your father is trying to help him, in his final days, to reach a state of acceptance, to seize the narrative of his life.”

“Oh, this is that Kübler-Ross stuff? James Hillman Jungian jive?” Ted said, trying to join with her, and display his erudition, but realizing immediately that he sounded like a condescending shithead. He felt deeply angry, angry at cancer, and she was there in front of him, and he was in danger of taking it out on her. He didn't want to.

“You've read Kübler-Ross?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“Well, I haven't actually
read it
read it, more like I've read about it, read it.”

“‘Read about it, read it.' I see.”

If this conversation were a ball game, Ted would be 0–3 so far, with two strikeouts and a tapper back to the mound.

“This is a letter.” She offered him a leaf of yellow legal pad. “A letter he wrote to the universe.”

“This universe?” asked Ted, realizing that if he could not stop sounding condescending, he might as well own it. Seize in the now the narrative of being an asshole. Maybe she'd misread condescension as strength and intelligence. Fingers crossed. “The universe you and I appear to be in? He wrote it to this universe?”

She nodded and pointed at the letter. Ted didn't want to read it; he continued riffing as he turned the letter over in his hand. “Do you need to address a letter to the universe? Dear Universe. Probably not, right? I mean, no need for the cosmic mailman, it's already there in the universe that it's addressed to.”

The nurse sighed and eyed the letter. Ted might have been beginning to try her patience. He began to read aloud.