Bucky F*cking Dent (5 page)

“‘Dear Ted, I got the lung cancer. Which is fucked 'cause I always only bought the cigarettes that were harmful to pregnant women and babies, of which I am neither so I figured I was safe. Silly me. This just in—Tareyton ad account exec hoisted by his own tarry petard.'”

Ted looked up and said, “Funny. Sorta.”

“Get to the Red Sox stuff,” Mariana said.

Ted looked back at the letter. “Blah blah blah. Here—‘I was conceived in 1918, on the night the Sox last won the Series. An illegitmate son of an illegitmate woman, a different curse of the Babe.' Clever quasi-historical pun. Illegitimate spelled wrong.”

Mariana smiled.

“What?” said Ted.

“Your father told me you wasted a first-class mind to throw peanuts at philistines.” Ted couldn't decide whether he was happy that his father had described him like that to this woman, or unhappy. He went back to the letter, scanning down with his finger: “Blah blah blah … I think he's lost his mind … here: ‘It's June fifteenth and the Sox have a five-and-a-half-game lead. Surely they will finally win this year and then surely I will die, the prophecy of my miraculous birth coming full caduceous circle.' Caduceous—go, Dad, with your thesaurus. That's rather flowery and overwrought. ‘Until October, I am dying but cannot die. Until October, I can leap from tall buildings, catch bullets in my teeth, and shit silver dollars.' Didn't see that coming. ‘Until October, I am a god.' Okay, well, I'd say there's been definitely successful seizing of narrative happening here, and, wow, what drugs do you have him on and may I have some?”

Mariana said simply, “He needs you. He needs you to help him finish his life's work, a healing fiction.” Mariana took his arm in hers and began to steer him toward one of the rooms.

“Fuck fiction,” Ted said. “I would think now is the time to face the facts.”

“Not a novel he's actually writing down. He's rewriting it in his mind, the novel of his life.”

“Yeah, that doesn't sound too insane.”

“There are a million ways to tell a life story, Theodore.” Chipmunk ref? Let it pass … “As a tragedy or a comedy or as a fairy tale with baseball teams that can keep you alive like magical warlocks. He is trying to tell you his story his way.”

“I'm trying to appreciate what you're saying, but you can't just rewrite history,” Ted protested. “You can't just rewrite the past. There are such things as facts that get in the way. Pesky facts.”

She stopped him in front of room 714, Babe Ruth's career home run total. She pulled him a little closer, dropping her voice to a whisper, fixing him with her deep brown eyes. He felt her breath land on his face and ear. He lost his mind momentarily. This was probably as close to a woman he'd been in three years without paying for it. The Dead sang something again from “Sugar Magnolia” about coming up for air, trying to tell him something. Keep it down, Bob, Jerry, guys …

“The way your dad sees it,” she spoke, “he's been the villain, he's been the victim, and he's been the goat. Now he wants to die a hero.” A man's voice, ruined and harsh, vibrating on its few remaining vocal cords, came from within the room.

“Ask for her card, you moron!” was what his father called out.

 

8.

“Hello, Marty,” Ted said as he entered. He hadn't seen his dad in some years, and this was bad. It was a shock how skinny and gray he was. He had been an athletic and handsome man, and he now seemed to glow, but not in a healthy way, like he'd been irradiated. He had tubes going up and around his withered arms and legs. His skin looked thin as a greyhound's, like it might tear. “And you are?” his dad said.

“Good one.”

They immediately fell into an old toxic rhythm.

“You look like shit, Lord Fenway.”

“Thank you. You, too.”

“No shit. Yankees win?”

“Yeah, they did.”

“Fuck me running. Twelve Seconal. Ten Quaalude. And yet here I am. Immortal till October.”

“Yeah, you're the new Mr. October, I'm told.”

Marty nodded at Mariana. “Mariana's a spic, Teddy.” Oh boy. Ted looked apologetically at Mariana. “Like Luis Tiant, like Juan Marichal and Roberto Clemente. Spics got more juice than whitey.”

Ted shook his head. “Don't say that word.”

“What word? ‘Juice'?”

“No, not ‘juice.'”

“‘Whitey'? You prefer ‘honky'?”

“No. Not ‘whitey.' You know what word.”

“Oh, ‘spic,' that's just an abbreviation for Hispanic. If you say it fast, that's what you get—hspnic, hsspic, spic…”

“That's not how, that's not an abbreviation. It's a racial epithet. Am I right, Mariana, it's offensive, right?” Ted was aware that he had just rolled the
r
in Mariana like he was trying to honor the Spanish, and how stupid that must've sounded.

“Well,” Mariana said, baring her white teeth again, “asking me if the word's offensive is more offensive than the word itself. Being oversensitive betrays a hidden bias and underlying insensitivity.”

“Preach,” Marty said.

“‘This city is crawling with spics.' That would be offensive. But, say, ‘Mariana—
mira mira
, my beautiful spic,' can be nice to hear from a charming man like your father. Among friends, words take on private meaning. You're a writer, right? Context. Tone.”

“All in the way you tell the story?” Ted anticipated.

“Yes,” she said, “all in the way you tell the story, that's right. That's exactly right.” And then she added, for good measure, “Whitey.”

“Whitey! Snap! Dass it! Game set match—the glorious spic,” Marty shouted, then laughed, then groaned. “Ow, shit. Laughing's a motherfucker.”

 

9.

Ted spent another hour or two in his father's room as the drugs made their way through Marty's body and he drifted in and out of a troubled sleep. Mariana filled him in on what to expect in the coming months and infused him with the hope and wish that the inevitable end would come sooner rather than later because of the considerable pain and suffering involved. She expressed no real hope for a cure, as Marty had decided against any more surgery or chemo. She mentioned “pain management” and went over Marty's pill regimen, which she half joked did not include ten Quaaludes a night. She outlined the faintly quacky, last-ditch alternative methods that she, unbeknownst to the doctors, was allowing Marty to engage in on the side. He'd be taking Laetrile experimentally, eating vitamin C tablets like candy courtesy of Dr. Linus Pauling's protocol, and might even try some chelation therapy. Whatever the fuck that was. Ted got tired of asking, “What's that?” and just started nodding after a while, his eyes fixed on the floor. The whole thing was doomed, daunting, confusing, and a huge bummer. What Ted really wanted was to smoke a joint.

Behind the wheel of the Corolla, on the way back up to the Bronx, as the sun began to ascend to his right, Ted pulled the roach out of his pocket, and along with it came his father's letter to the universe. He managed to coax a couple more tokes out of the stub, then popped what was left in his mouth and swallowed. He unfolded the yellow letter and read aloud to himself as he rode on the easy early-morning traffic in the rising light. “‘I was thinking why you are like me. A writer who does not write. Or a writer who writes compulsively, but from outside himself, not from inside. You are not self-inhabiting, kid. And it occurred to me that you haven't yet found your subject.'” O shades of Blaugrund, Ted thought, here we go again. Another treatise on the artistic merits of prison ass rape, perhaps. “‘I have a subject for you. I am unable to die until the Boston Red Sox win it all. Even if it takes another sixty years, I will live those sixty years. Do you think that might inspire you to some F. Scott redux, or maybe some Americanized Borgesian fever dream, or, at the least, some minor-league Pynchon? Think upon it, Teddy Ballgame. Think upon it.'”

Ted thought upon it, then crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it out the window. He saw the yellow speck land in his rearview mirror, and then the wind took it away.

 

10.

Ted slept through the light of the day. It was so loud from the street in his apartment, but Ted could sleep through anything. His senses had been numbed over the years by the full-on, 24/7 sensual assault that is New York City. Ted finally awoke in the noisy dark and stirred; an ambulance cried, moving closer, then seemingly under his bed, then moved on. Ted switched on a light, grabbed a pen and a legal pad, and poised to write. Nothing came. He put the pad down, went to the fridge, and pulled out a can of Budweiser and half a hero sandwich of indeterminate age and makeup. Ted cracked the beer, sniffed the sandwich and grimaced, then sniffed the sandwich again and grimaced less, and bit into the bread soggy from whatever yellowish condiment it had been marinating in. Ted waited to barf or choke or die as he chewed, but none of those things happened. He walked to the TV and turned it on. It did not come to life immediately; first, a small, bright circle of gray light appeared in the center of the screen, like the first energy before the big bang, Ted thought. Then suddenly, after a minute or so, the light exploded to fill the screen, and sounds and images came on. That TV was a dinosaur piece of shit.

Ted got seven channels and UHF. UHF was only good for the Spanish stations and the Spanish fake wresting,
lucha libre
, and you dialed in the stations like a radio trying to pick up life in outer space. They spoke Spanish in outer space, apparently. So basically his entertainment universe had seven planets, that's it. There was 2-CBS, 4-NBC, 5-WNEW (local), 7-ABC, 9-WOR (local)—home of the Mets—11-WPIX (local)—home of the Yankees—and 13-PBS—home of
Sesame Street
and
Masterpiece Theatre
. The plastic channel-changing dial had long ago splintered off from age and use, so Ted had clamped pliers onto the remaining metal dowel that had once held it in place. There were no corresponding numbers to tell you what channel you were on anymore, so Ted just turned the pliers slowly clockwise till he landed on what he thought was channel 11.

A Yankee game, playing Boston at Fenway. The Sox were up. Ted drank his beer as he listened to the commentators Phil Rizzuto and Bill White fill the dead time in the pauses in action that make up the vast majority of a baseball game. Rizzuto was like an absurdist genius, a performance artist whose mind moseyed off in non sequiturs like a kindly uncle would wander away from a family picnic to join another family of complete strangers and eat their food. With the count 2–1 on Graig Nettles, Rizzuto meditated on the past, as he name-checked friends, all Italian, that had had birthdays or cooked macaroni for him last week, and how bad the traffic was on the George Washington Bridge. Legend had it that Rizzuto would habitually leave after the seventh inning to beat that traffic, and it seemed like he tried to fit nine innings' worth of words—folksy schtick, ancient baseball lore, and delightful nonsense—into those seven. Bill White was his straight man, feigning occasional impatience, but just as charmed by the “Scooter,” Rizzuto's nickname from his playing days as a Hall of Fame Yankee shortstop, as everyone else. The Dean Martin to Rizzuto's Jerry Lewis. Bill White called Rizzuto “Scooter,” and Rizzuto called White, who was black, “White.”

Ted reached into his pocket and pulled out Mariana's card, turned it in the light, brought it close, and inhaled. It smelled of woman and perfume and goodness, and his stomach flinched involuntarily. The phone rang and Ted started guiltily as if busted sniffing the woman's underwear. He stared at the phone and let it ring five or six times before answering. “Hello?”

“The Yanks can't beat the Sox at Fenway.”

“I think you have the wrong number.”

“You should do stand-up.”

“Where are you, Marty?”

“I'm home. I had to move after three days. Like Jesus Christ. You watching the game?”

“No,” Ted lied, “I was just kinda working, writing.” Ted leaned over to his typewriter and clacked a few keys on the bare platen for verisimilitude.

“Don't let me disturb you.”

Click. Marty hung up. Ted stared at the receiver, then hung up and went back to staring at the ball game. He shook his head and picked up the phone again and dialed. Marty answered:

“Speak.”

“How come you never say goodbye, Marty? You just hang up. It's hostile. You're like an animal. Never once in my life when we talk on the phone have you ended the conversation civilly, never said goodbye; it's just mid-conversation, then when you're done, it's click and…” Ted did a droning imitation of a dial tone.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Oh. Huh. Goodbye.”

Click. Dial tone. Ted redialed and Marty answered after waiting about ten rings. Ornery motherfucker. “Who is this?”

“I am that I am.”

“Popeye, the sailor man?”

“I was hoping more Yahweh. You got the game on?”

“Yeah.”

They sat silently and watched the game in their respective homes. Marty lived in Brooklyn, in the house Ted had grown up in. Park Slope. Brooklyn, of course, was technically part of New York City since 1898, but in actuality, Manhattan was New York City, and Brooklyn was Brooklyn. It even had its own accent. This geographical apartheid had lent the first whiff of outsider and not-quite-good-enough to young Ted's consciousness, and still contributed to his unease with Manhattan and all it stood for. No man is an island, he thought, except Manhattan. On December 16, 1960, when Ted was fourteen, two planes, a United Airlines DC-8 carrying 84 people and a TWA Constellation carrying 44 people, crashed in midair above Staten Island and fell on his home in Park Slope. The poor bodies from the DC-8 fell to earth near his house, the sky rained fire, and everyone was killed. An unimaginable, surreal horror. Ever since then, from the age of fourteen, Ted would nervously, involuntarily check the sky in Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, Ted felt that, literally, the sky was falling. In Manhattan, the sky was the limit. Ted was comfortable in neither of those realms, so he had settled in the Bronx.