And he raised a too-small cup of sake to her life to be lived with another man and her unborn children by him, and had never loved or been loved by a woman again. Most days went by without a single thought of Rachel Sue, whatever her last name might be now, and the alternative reality that might have been had he been more aggressive and spoken first. If you asked, he would say he’s completely over her, but still, a stray scent of patchouli on the sidewalk could dizzy him and turn his stomach, and make him a little hard.
3.
“Up the workers, Teddy Ballgame,” Mungo echoed. Ted turned on sandaled feet and strolled out into the June evening. The walk out into the parking lot was arguably Ted’s least favorite part of the job. After the game, fans would line up behind barricades, hoping for a glimpse of their favorite players. They could see figures walking toward them out of the shadows and would try to guess who was coming at them by their size and shape. “Louuuuuuuuu” they’d bellow if they thought Lou Piniella was coming. Or “Bucky!!!” for Bucky Dent, “Captain” for Thurman Munson, “Gooooooooose” for Rich “Goose” Gossage, or, improbably, “Reggie! Reggie! Reggie!” on the way to his Bentley Bentley Bentley. Invariably, they thought Ted was a Yankee coming toward them, and after shouting out names of players and realizing it was Ted, would then give voice to their disappointment. Ted hated that moment when they saw that it was only him. Like it was just a terrible mistake, like he himself was a mistake.
It was a walk of shame all right. “Oh, forget it,” some kid would say. “It’s just Mr. Peanut. Yo, Mr. Peanut, what’s up, peanut man? THE PEA-NUT!!!” And usually, this would turn into an ironic name game-“Grizzly Adams!” they yelled with barely contained derision as they rounded Ted off to the nearest celebrity, in this case the actor on the hit TV show. He guessed he looked a little like Dan Haggerty because of the heft and the full beard and long hair. “Haggerty!!!” The name-calling would morph behind him in the dead air before an actual Yankee refocused their attention, as Ted made his long way to the crappy parking spaces at the far end of the lot. “The Haggermeister!!! The Grizzler!!! Grizzelda!!! Captain Lou Albano!!!” and the occasional “Jerry Garcia!!!”-which he kinda didn’t mind at all. Ted would cast his head down and smile awkwardly, hiding his mortification, wishing he could be as solitary as the Grizzler, or be invisible for the few minutes it would take to get to his car, at least more invisible than he was.
The tall lamps got sparser as Ted made his way to the back of the lot, as if no one really cared to see what happened back there. Ted’s mighty steed, his puke-green aging Toyota Corolla, waited patiently, the plastic bags that had replaced the front windows broken in the theft of his car stereo flapping gently in the summer breeze. Ted no longer locked the car. Whoever it was who wanted whatever it was that they thought was in that piece of shit was welcome to it, without needing to cause any more damage. Not that there was anything of value in there. It was filthy. Dirty clothes, soda bottles, and peanut bags littered the back seat. To save money, and because he had never really cared about food, Ted mostly ate the bagged peanuts that he sold at the games. This monochrome diet explained his unhealthy swollen gut and greenish complexion. No one had spent as much time with the peanut since George Washington Carver. If this was close to bag lady or homeless or hoarder behavior, Ted wasn’t bothered. He was a Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyite/Marcusian Deadhead who did not buy into the late, dying capitalist animal that was the United States economy. He existed in and out of the world he wanted to observe. I am the Heisenberg principle, he thought. Or maybe, I am the Highsenberg principle, as he lit up a joint.
Ted exhaled a plume of smoke of which Jimmy Cliff could have been proud, took his portable cassette player out of his backpack, and slid it into the opening on the dashboard. He turned the key over and the Japanese import shuddered to life, as if startled out of sleep and annoyed at being asked to move. “C’mon, Big Bertha-san,” Ted coaxed, as he stepped on the clutch, thinking to himself I am Mr. Clutch as he shifted into reverse. “Mistuh Crutch-uh.” Sometimes he would just speak to his “Collola” in the terrible, racist Japanese accent of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s-it was the bad, easy, faux-tough-guy type of racist stuff his father loved to say just to piss people off. Ted hated that shit, found it offensive. But sometimes, against his better judgment, Ted felt something like a ventriloquist’s dummy, involuntarily speaking his father’s words. He might adopt an attitude or phrase out of the blue, like some sort of paternal Tourette’s. The possessed moments would pass, and he would quickly become self-conscious again, looking around sheepishly to see if anyone overheard.
Music fought a losing battle through the tiny cheap speakers. The Dead. Almost always the Dead.
“Saint Stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes.”
Ted sang along with Bob Weir in a decently tuneful imitation of Jerry Garcia’s vulnerable, knowing whine: “Country garden in the wind and the rain, wherever he goes the people always complain.”
Ted pulled out of the lot and onto the darkening streets of the Bronx. Singing-“Did it matter, does it now? Stephen would answer if he only knew how.”
4.
Ted’s fourth-floor walk-up was like a stationary version of Ted’s car. It was the Brokedown Palace Toyota Corolla of domiciles. Ceiling-high stacks of The New York Review of Books did a fine job of cutting down the draft in the old tenement during winter. A bare lightbulb swayed above the sink and there was an arsenic-green pleather Castro Convertibles couch/bed that you could say had seen better days, which would imply that it had once had better days, which was up for debate. Windows were blacked out, books strewn everywhere, and yellow legal pads covered in what looked to be the tiny, furious scrawl of a madman. A typewriter sat on a card table, no paper loaded. And of course the omnipresent bags of Yankee peanuts, some written on, some yet to be eaten. In truth, his place looked like it had been designed by whoever did the Kramdens’ apartment on The Honeymooners. You half expected Alice to come bustling out of the bathroom to polite applause and for the fun to begin. Though there were some muted colors, the world in here felt black and white. Filled with essentials for a man who had no needs.
The sole, whimsical nod to life outside this room was an old TV sitting on a chair facing the couch, a metal coat hanger tortured into a pyramidal shape as a replacement antenna. Because the TV was manufactured by Emerson, Ted called it the “Hobgoblin” (of small minds), and would never think of himself as watching the TV, but rather keeping an eye on the Hobgoblin. He rarely had it on. He’d grown up with Dragnet, Jack Benny, and the Milton Berle show and retained a certain nostalgic reverence for that bygone era, but he found that when he tried to watch the popular shows of today-Happy Days (Ted preferred the original Beckett version) or Laverne and Shirley-a great horror and sadness would wash over him that would seem to be at odds with those supposed “comedies.” He would watch the desperately unfunny antics of the appropriately named Jack Tripper (he told himself the creators must be aware of the LSD reference and not just the klutzy Dick Van Dykian furniture-tripping sense, but he wasn’t sure) of Three’s Company, America’s favorite show, and he would begin to sob uncontrollably, for his country and for himself. The only thing that soothed him from the boob tube was the local talk titan, Joe Franklin, whose low-rent set and sensibility, Streit’s matzo adverts, and nonsensical guest lists suffused Ted with a sense of surreal dislocation, warmth, and anarchic hope-like he got from looking at the Tanguys and de Chiricos sometimes at MoMA. De Chirico and Franklin, not Tripper, made him feel trippy without the trip. And sports. He watched sports.