He had never been able to tell if the Dead were singing “Said, I’m runnin’ but I’m takin’ my time” or “Set out runnin’.” Wasn’t that big a difference, but he rewound the song to that part and listened closely. Still couldn’t tell. Rewound again. Nope. A tiny mystery that shall remain, he thought. He was okay with that. As a writer, he aspired to abide some ambiguity, live in the gray. Keats had famously staked out such negative capability for Shakespeare, and Ted wished to claim a morsel of that generous capacity for himself. But the problem was that while negative capability for an author was genius, for an actual person, it was more often than not the cause of Hamlet-like hesitation, Oblomovian laziness, Bartlebyesque paralysis. Could he make a trade-off? A compromise? Be both? A slate of negative capability at the typewriter leavened with a healthy dose of sprezzatura and derring-do in the field? Both proclivities and talents were still as yet unproven, however. Gray. The color of Ted’s eyes.
He had no idea what he’d do once he got to his father’s house. He knew nothing about medicine, hated needles, didn’t like the sight of blood. What good could he be? What if something went wrong while he was there? He could drive his dad to the hospital. He could call 911. He could call that nurse. He popped in another cassette, Blues for Allah. The Dead sang “Franklin’s Tower”: “If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind / Roll away the dew…”
The old block, on Garfield Place, looked almost exactly the same as back when he was a kid, which just reinforced his own feeling of oddness and stuntedness. He kept his foot poised above the gas pedal to drive off and never come back again. But how far could he really get in the Corolla? He pulled into an open parking spot. On closer inspection, the neighborhood was certainly a bit better than he remembered, having gone through the sporadic “gentrification” process that New York endures in its American cycles of boom and bust. Ted hated this change, he even hated the word gentrification; it offended his Communist leanings and sounded medieval to him. Where the fuck was this “gentry”? He grabbed a couple of plastic bags of clothes and toiletries, and looked around to see if he recognized any indentured servants or serfs walking by.
He got out of the car and headed up to the house. He looked on the sidewalk where once he had scratched his name in the wet cement, but it was no longer there. It was smooth, like when a wave washes away initials in a heart someone drew in the sand. So many waves. Always more waves than words in hearts in the sand, it seemed.
He imagined what he as a boy would make of the man he was now, staring up at the window. As if in a Twilight Zone: “Consider Ted…” The beard, the belly, the aura of homelessness. He probably would’ve scared himself. The young him might’ve made fun of him now. I’m not letting you in, ya fat tie-dye fuck, not till my parents get home. He shook his head-that was a crappy thought. Ted ascended the reddish clay steps of the old brownstone and tried the door. The feeling he had was not quite déjà vu. He had the sensation that he had already done the things he was doing right now, walking the stairs, opening the big door, because he had done them thousands of times as he grew up. So while this day had never happened before, it felt like it had already happened over and over. But he felt no comfort and he felt no hope. He instinctively checked up in the sky to see if planes were falling to earth, worlds exploding. Nope. It all seemed pretty copacetic up there in the wild blue. He walked in.
The house was messy and didn’t smell right. A bad scent, but not one he could immediately identify; it smelled something like a frightened animal had been slaughtered. An unholy brew of menthol, egg, urine, and smoke. “Marty?” Ted called out for his father.
Marty appeared around a corner in an old, dark purple robe untied in the front, so Ted could see his tighty whities, so old and worn, you’d have to call them loosey grayies. “Teddy, you came,” the old man said, and the genuine surprise and thankfulness of his tone disarmed and moved Ted, gave him an unexpected hitch in his throat. Marty shuffled toward him and hugged him. He smelled terrible. Ted gagged, but held it down and covered it; he felt stuck, felt no agency, like he himself was not at home. His arms hung at his sides.
“Hug me, ya faggot,” Marty whispered mock-lovingly in Ted’s ear. Ted put his arms around his father, who was so thin, it was like hugging a child or a suit on a hanger. “You smell. Like the pot.”
“You smell like the shit.”
“Don’t squeeze so hard,” Marty said. “You tryin’ to hug me, fuck me, or kill me?”
“Ah yes, this is just how I pictured our reunion.”
Marty pulled away. “I think you broke a fucking bone. Let me help you with your bags,” he said. “Your plastic bags.”
Ted said, “I’m into recycling.”
They walked up to the second floor, Marty stopping several times to catch his breath. He put his hands on his knees and his head down after only a few steps. Ted got the image that the old man’s ruined lungs had the capacity of two empty envelopes to hold paper-thin volumes of air. That collapsible and sticky. “I gotta get one of those elevator seats for old fucks. By the way, if I ever talk about getting one of those elevators for old fucks seriously, shoot me in the head.” Slowly they made their way to Ted’s old room, the room he’d had as a child. Ted didn’t want to walk faster than his father. Their progress was so halting, he wasn’t sure if he was walking or standing still. He let Marty open the door to his old room. “The honeymoon suite,” he said, and held out his hand as if for a tip.
“Yes. Yes. This is where the magic never happened,” Ted said, and he walked into the small rectangle that was the world he had grown up in.
13.
The cliché of the unchanged childhood bedroom in movies and TV is usually shorthand for a parent who does not want to let the child grow up, or the child who refuses to grow up, or the parent in mourning for the dead child. A Miss Havisham thing without the sexual politics. If Ted had wanted to be extra hard on himself, he might’ve said that his room was pretty much as he had left it for Columbia because his father was mourning the death of what he thought Ted could have been. But that might be ascribing too much sentimentality to Marty; it was more like Marty was lazy as shit and a bad housekeeper. Seemed all four floors of the house were basically unchanged over the last ten or fifteen years, as the life that Marty had been living was collapsing in upon itself geographically, and the space he actually inhabited had shrunken more and more, until he really existed only in the living room downstairs, and in the kitchen and the bathroom. If the universe was constantly expanding, Marty’s universe was constantly contracting, its central sun losing touch with its outer planets and outer rooms, on its way to collapsing into one room, a small dot, a black hole, death.
“You should go take a shower or something, Marty, you reek.”
“Thanks for the tip, son. I’ll leave you to commune with memories of your salad days,” Marty said. “Ah, if these walls could talk.”
“I’d tell them to shut the fuck up.”
Marty shuffled off, leaving Ted alone. Ted stood frozen, looking at his single bed and its New York Yankee sheets, pillowcases, and blanket. Vinyl albums lining the walls-LPs and 45s. He picked up a 45-“(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.” Elvis. Elvis, America’s uncrowned king, had died just last summer. His death had felt like the end of something, but Ted didn’t know what. He wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Elvis these days, but he understood his presence in the room. There were a couple of Pat Boone albums. “Love Letters in the Sand.” Holy shit, that was embarrassing. Perry Como. Johnny Mathis. Gogi Grant? What’s a Gogi Grant? There was a Sam Cooke album. That was acceptable. On the wall above his bed was a Technicolor poster from the 1955 sci-fi nonclassic This Island Earth. He couldn’t remember if he’d put that up there ironically or if he really dug the kitsch of its tagline: “TWO MORTALS TRAPPED IN OUTER SPACE… CHALLENGING THE UNEARTHLY FURIES OF AN OUTLAW PLANET GONE MAD!” Two mortals trapped in an outer borough. Looking around his room at these artifacts, Ted had the feeling he was trying to decipher hieroglyphics. He grew up in the ’50s, which were really the ’40s, he’d have to give himself a break.