17.
Ted decided that the random image of his mother on the detergent box was a sign to clean up Marty’s house, so that’s what he did all night. It was years-long überfilthy, and Ted quickly got well acquainted with the smells and putrid rejectamenta of his dad’s encroaching disease. He did laundry for hours and hours, filled trash bags with ancient Kleenex crusted by god knows what. He didn’t want to know. Animal mineral vegetable-all three in one? He half expected to find Jimmy Hoffa. But he plowed on. Just because he was a lousy housekeeper for himself didn’t mean he couldn’t be a decent housekeeper for his father. It gave Ted something to do, and made the strained silences between father and son less glaring. If he couldn’t identify something, he tossed it in a trash bag without looking too closely.
When Ted could take no more, they reheated the Chinese and ate in front of the TV, watching the sports news. Father and son both favored the “Amazin’” Bill Mazer on WNEW. The Amazin’ informed the men that the Yankees had won up at Fenway. The loss seemed to make Marty cough. Ted stuffed his own mouth with an orange gelatinous piece of fried something that the mostly unilingual folks over at Jade Mountain identified as sweet-and-sour pork. He had his suspicions. Growing up, there had always been rumors of the dog over at Jade Mountain. Every year was possibly the Year of the Rat or Dog over there. He had no idea what meat was at the center of the sweet, crunchy orange goo, or if it was meat at all, and he stopped himself from wondering how they got it so fucking orange, but it was good chow.
“Stop gloating,” Marty said.
“Do I have to?”
Marty didn’t have much of an appetite. But Ted used his chopsticks to swirl the chicken lo mein, fried rice, and sweet-and-sour orange glue into one insane mass on his plate and ate at it that way as a seamless whole, like a shark might worry at a dead whale. Aside from the chewing and the sound from the TV, it was quiet. Ted took a sip of beer.
“Hey, what’s that nurse’s story anyway? That, what was her name-Maria, was it? Maria-Somethingspanishy?”
Marty laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Ted asked.
“‘What was it?’ You been thinking about her since you met her, checked her card a thousand times, probably sniffed it, you damn well know her name. Probably the only reason you’re here with me right now. The off chance she might show up. You’re transparent.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And she’s mine. She’s outta your league. She’s a spic, ya know?”
“Yes, we established that she’s Hispanic, yes.”
“You don’t have enough juice for her, not enough sap.”
“That’s fucking gross.”
“You understand Latin, son, but you don’t understand Latina, if you catch my drift.”
“You’re on a roll.”
“I wish I hadn’t let your mother dilute your good, Old Testament blood with that Mayflower Wasp weakness. I thought the mix might lend you mongrel vigor, but…”
“Fine, Dad. I get it.”
“My cock used to get so hard I could see my reflection in it. Like a mirror.”
“That’s kind of a non sequitur.”
“My cock. What happened to it?”
“You lost your penis?”
“Can’t remember where I put it.”
“I bet you can’t.”
“Fuck you.”
“Here we go.”
“Where did it go?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Dad, and I’m sure I don’t wanna know.”
“Your mother…”
“Stop! No!”
“Okay, you don’t wanna talk, pass me the remote.”
“The remote? Where is it?”
Marty pointed at his shoe. Ted shrugged. Marty pointed at the shoe again, Ted picked it up, looked underneath it. Marty held out his hand. Ted gave him the shoe. Marty threw the shoe at the TV, expertly turning it off. The remote.
“I used to be able to change channels with my cock.”
“Oh bullshit, Marty, but you could change families with it.”
“Finally, a real person speaks. Why don’t you shut the fuck up? You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You always were your mother’s spy.”
“That kind of cock-talk shit, that can be traumatizing to a kid.”
“Traumatizing-what a bullshit word. I feel sorry for you, you belong to Generation Pussy. Everything’s a fucking trauma now.”
“To a kid, yeah.”
“You’re a kid?”
“No. I was a kid, back when you fucking knew me, I was a kid.”
“Maybe you still are.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“I’m guessing yours?”
They were both breathing heavily by now. Ted got up to go. Marty tried to stay him:
“Okay, I could never really see myself in my cock. At best the image was blurry. Feel better? All grown up now?”
“Yeah, Dad, all grown up now.”
Ted stormed out of the house.
Marty called after Ted’s back as he left, “And it was just getting good.”
18.
Ted sat outside on a bench, smoking ganja by Brooklyn Jerk. New York was a good city to be alone in a crowd. The Rastas would prefer not to talk to him. The brotherhood of the blunt was not blunt. That’s what he needed. He’d brought one of his old journals from when he was eleven and read:
Terrible day! Bad bowling league-124, 108(!), 116! Bringing my year average down to 134.7538658. Couldn’t do anything outside cause it rained so I went over to Walt’s we played cards APBA football and watched football. [Drawing of a football] I didn’t feel bad when I lost 54c in cards but I did feel good when I beat Walt 10-7 in football. I was in a silly mood. I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed at any [sic] but I felt great. I have no right to feel great because there’s school tomorrow. Over the vacation I didn’t do much I was pretty idol [sic]. I feel very bad about being idol, so bad even to the point of wanting to go to school (don’t take it personally)
It was a pretty bad vacation.
Ted wondered at the boy he had been. It seemed like an entirely different person, yet it was him. Who was this child who reported the loss of 54 cents? He loved the specificity of that 54, and he remembered that almost paranoid concern about money that his mother had instilled in him. And he thought, yeah, that’s good writing, good writing is specific. I knew that then. I relearn it right now from myself. A friend of his, a grown man, once told Ted that he practiced his guitar so much because he wanted one day to be able to play “like when I was fourteen.” The child is father to the man. And the bowling average? The obsession with statistics, the purity and power of the number worked to the seventh decimal place, as if some truth were hidden in the golden mean. He could feel his young self grasping for solidity in those numbers, keys to himself-I am this concrete, numerical thing. I am 134.7538658. The unassailable “I am.” Numbers had made the boy real, but the man now still didn’t feel quite real. Where were his numbers now? The exfoliation of his DNA? What mathematical sequence could reveal him to himself, pull off this veil of illusion and skin to uncover the bowling average of his soul? He flipped through the book and came upon page after page filled with autographs of famous baseball players. These were forgeries, all in young Ted’s mimetic hand. He leaned back with a smile and remembered this phase of spending hours and days practicing autographs, almost like trying on other identities for size. Big identities-Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Jimmy Foxx. Writing the double xx a thousand times. As if being able to write like these heroic men would transform him, transport him to Olympus. Clues in numbers. Clues in letters. Clues. Page after page filled with forgeries, not because he wanted to sell them, but because he wanted to be them.