“Now you’re gonna stay? Thought you had to run.”
“No, ‘namaste’-it’s Sanskrit for peace, it’s the yoga ‘later, alligator, over and out.’”
“I knew that.” Ted didn’t know shit. “I was joshin’.”
“You want a hand?”
Ted could not even move to take her hand if he wanted to. He was locked up from neck to toe.
“No, I’m not done. I’m gonna grab another hour or two. Once I get going, I can’t get enough of the yoga.” Mariana threw her things together.
“Okay, do five minutes of shavasana at the end, corpse pose.”
“I think I can manage that.”
“And chant ‘om shanti shanti’ when you’re done, okay?”
“Copy that. I mean, nama, you know, nama, nama, rama-lama-ding-dong…”
Mariana smiled. “Namaste.”
“That.”
Ted flashed a smile that was a grimace in drag. As soon as he heard the door slam behind Mariana, Ted howled in pain and rolled on his side, his ankles still locked one under the other. He looked liked a turtle on its back. He grabbed his ankles and pulled, but could not free himself from the clutches of the lotus. Marty, alerted by Ted’s animal yowl of distress, came shuffling into view. He looked at Ted, narrowing his eyes. “You stoned again?”
“Dad, gimme a hand.”
“You should take better care of your lungs.”
“Help me.”
“How?”
“Kick me.”
“Where?”
“In the ass.”
“You want me to kick you in the ass?”
“Please.”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
Marty came up behind Ted and kicked him in the rear, finally freeing Ted’s legs. But the torture was not yet over. Ted’s legs were so stiff from being immobile for twenty minutes, he was unable to straighten them, and each time he tried to stand up, his lower back went into spasm and sent him back down to the floor again. He was hunched over like Tricky Dick Nixon and looked much like Quasimodo unsuccessfully learning to roller-skate.
“This is quite amusing,” said Marty. “You have a flair for physical comedy.”
Ted finally straightened and tried to walk but he was stiff-legged, like the Mummy, arms blocked straight out for Marty’s chair, like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, hoping to steady himself. Marty moved back a few inches out of reach. “That’s a little over the top now. You went from Peter Sellers to Jerry Lewis. You making fun of me, Ted?”
“No.”
But Marty didn’t believe him, thought he was imitating his disability, his old-man walk. Marty shuffled away to the next room. “Asshole,” he said in parting, just as Ted’s legs shot out from under him as if they had a mind of their own. Ted landed hard, shaking all the furniture in the house. Marty, thinking he was still being mocked, yelled from another room.
“Very funny, asshole. Wait till you get old.”
Ted thought it best to just lie on the ground and wait for the spasms to pass. He gingerly rolled onto his back like a dying cockroach, limbs twitching, thought fleetingly of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and chanted as the rigor mortis came and went in electric waves, “Om shanti shanti… om shanti… shit.”
30.
The next morning, Ted woke up early, his tendons in sharp recoil, with one thought in his mind: I’m gonna shave this fucking beard. It was slow going, though; the beard was wild and thick, and he’d had it for maybe five years. Took some hacking at it with poultry scissors before he could even attempt a razor. When he finally could, all he had was Marty’s old single-edge razor, a lethal weapon. Ted was just lucky he didn’t hit a vein, and before he was halfway done, his face was dotted with toilet paper to stanch the bleeding. Marty appeared behind him in the mirror like a ghost in a horror film. All of a sudden, Ted saw this vision over his shoulder-his father with a red rubber Boston Red Sox swim cap tight on his head like a second skin.
“Shavin’ for his lady,” Marty said.
“What? Where did you get this razor, Dad, the village smithy? How old is this fucking thing?”
“An hour of yoga and the Splinter’s a trout on a hook.”
“Don’t call me ‘Splinter.’”
“That’s your namesake. Ted Williams, also known as the Splendid Splinter. You are just the Splinter, no Splendid.”
“I know. It’s a weird nickname.”
“It’s affectionate. I’m being affectionate. ‘The Splinter shavin’ for his lady.’ That’s affection.”
“Do you know the difference between affection and affliction?”
“There’s a difference?”
“Stop. I’m not shavin’ for any ‘lady,’ I was getting tired of it.” Ted pointed to a significant amount of gray in the shorn hair on the floor. “Can you believe how much blond I have in my beard?”
But Marty wouldn’t be thrown off the scent. He was just smiling and nodding. “If the Splinter cuts that stupid hippie hair as well, then I know the Splinter’s a goner. I remember when the Splinter didn’t even have hair under the Splinter’s arms.”
“Stop with the third person.”
“You seen my bathing cap?”
“It’s on your head.”
“Fuck me, you’re right. I’ve been looking for it for an hour.”
“What’s with the lid, Captain, you going lugeing or something?”
“When the Sox hit a skid, I go get a swim at the Y. Wash away their sins. Does the Splinter want to come with?”
“Does the Splinter have a choice?”
“The Splinter does not. The Splinter must drive his father.”
“Ah, but the Splinter doesn’t have a bathing costume.”
“I’ll lend you an old Speedo of mine.”
“Sweet. The Splinter is fucked.”
31.
The old Y was like a time machine. When you stepped through its doors, you were transported to the late ’50s/early ’60s. That’s how long everybody had worked there, and that’s the last time they ever got any new equipment. The same huge old woman, Pearl, checked IDs. She had been there since Ted was a boy. She looked to be about four feet eleven, 250, like Aunt Bee from Mayberry gone bad, but Ted had actually never seen her standing. It was like she was a sedentary centaur, half old Jewish lady, half chair. She smelled like nothing and no one else. A tainted musk, a head-spinning force field of airless nylon crotch, cabbage, pierogi, and coffee-like perfume spritzed above the place where perfume went to die. When Ted and his friends had gotten older, they called her “Pearl the Earl,” in honor of the great basketball player Earl the Pearl Monroe, aka Black Jesus. Ted had never even seen the lesser Pearl move, let alone spin and shake like her namesake, nor had he ever seen anyone sneak by her. She was the original immovable object. She was fierce. A bemoled Medusa, a Hebraic Cerberus in a muumuu with a schtetl accent, checking membership status.
“Pearl the Earl, what’s shakin’, mama?” Ted whispered respectfully as he passed.
“Card,” she demanded.
“Get down with your bad self,” Ted said admiringly, and produced Marty’s card.
Things were no different in the locker room or the gym. Ted passed the ancient sauna where his father used to take him as he sat and kibitzed with the other men, naked in the dry heat. Ted remembered being awed by the size and low hang of the old men’s balls as they sat with their towels open, and he sat with his towel closed, trying not to pass out from the heat. How are mine gonna get like that and do I want them to? he remembered thinking.
They also still had those “exercise” machines that worked on the principle of attacking the fat parts of the body only. There was the “vibrating belt” with the seat-belt type of apparatus that went around your waist and, when turned on, held you in a spastic embrace, forcing you to do a speeded-up twist, supposedly shaking the pounds off your waistline. And there was the wooden fat roller thing that spun like a rotisserie, with swiveling thick wooden dowels you sat on, that was supposed to badger and knead your ass fat into nothingness. Like Joe Weider and Rube Goldberg had a baby. Jack LaLanne must have had a good sense of humor.