Rounding out the furnishings was a battery-operated mechanical fish that made rather uncannily realistic movements in its bowl by the sink. The faint smell of what could very well be mouse dung-actually, what Ted hoped was mouse dung, since the possible alternatives to that were way worse-hung over everything.
Ted glanced at his fake pet fish. “Hello, Goldfarb.” It amused him to think it was a Jewish goldfish, hence Goldfarb. An inside joke between Ted and a fake fish. That thing always cracked him up. He grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge and a bag of peanuts, and dragged his chair to the window. With considerable effort, he opened the window to the world, lit up another joint, and thus ate his dinner. His window faced the street, and Ted enjoyed being able to watch the life on the sidewalk without being seen. He leaned over, took a legal pad in hand, and began writing in his tiny longhand. He belched peanuts and beer and cannabis, and considered himself content. He stroked his beard, the few gray strands like indeterminate omens of a not so bright future. Many nights of his life were passed in just this exact fashion, Ted wrestling with his own mind, trying to answer a question he had yet to successfully pose. Sometime after midnight, well stoned and tired, he would slither off the windowsill to his bed and sleep properly.
5.
It’s the summer of 1953. A young middle-aged man sits silently, sullenly watching a baseball game on a black-and-white television. A young boy can be seen behind him, staring at his father, as if memorizing him, the lines on his neck, the way he holds himself, the way he smells, somehow knowing one day the old man will disappear, if in fact he already hasn’t. The presence of a woman hovers in the room, maybe you can see the shape of her dress in the background as she busies herself in the kitchen. She is not happy, she is mumbling under her breath, knowing that her husband can hear her. There is a feeling of low-level dread in the house, like the sickening electric hum near a power plant. The man sits like a gravestone. The teams playing on the TV are the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. When something positive happens for the Sox, the man lets out a short burst of celebration, but quickly reverts to stillness. The woman clatters dishes in the kitchen, louder than necessary. She wants to be heard. The boy is unhappy. The boy wants his parents to get along. The boy wants his father to look at him. The boy thinks, If I can make them laugh, if I can make them laugh…
The boy has seen his father laugh at Milton Berle in a dress. The boy is afraid of Berle and thinks he looks like a psychotic rabbit, but his father doesn’t. His father is brave and not afraid of Berle. His father laughs in Berle’s face. The boy positions himself to the side of his father’s impassive eyeline and dances like a ballerina from one end of the room to the other. He has never taken ballet. That’s the point. He freezes the static smile of the ballerina onto his face, flutters his feet, pirouettes. His father pays no attention.
Now the boy walks in front of his father and does a pratfall worthy of Chaplin or Keaton. A really good one. He hears his mother laugh in the kitchen. He is hopeful. But his father stares straight ahead, watching the ball game. The boy retreats to his parents’ bedroom and throws a dress of his mother’s over his head, steps into a pair of high heels, looks in the mirror and wonders if maybe this is a bad idea, and then totters awkwardly back into the living room, unsteady as a newborn foal. His father stares straight ahead.
The boy goes back to the closet and opens a big suitcase marked “Vacation” and puts on all the scuba equipment he can find-bathing suit, flippers, mask, snorkel. He walks in front of the TV. A frogman, a fish out of water. His father doesn’t blink. The Red Sox score. The man applauds and stares straight ahead. The mother stares at the boy, who stares at his father, who stares at the TV-their connected gazes would form a perfect triangle, if his father would look at either him or his mother. But he doesn’t, and the triangle remains imperfect and open, leaking and bleeding. A phone is ringing. The man yells for his wife to get it. She responds by breaking a dish. He finally looks at his son, still standing in front of him in full scuba gear, and says, “Answer the fucking phone, will ya?”
Ted is awakened suddenly from this dream, his stoned sleep, disoriented. He realizes the strange sound that has jarred him is his phone ringing. He checks his watch. It’s three-ish in the morning. He fumbles for the receiver and croaks at it, “Boiler room,” because that always amuses him.
A woman’s voice on the other line, palpable New York Puerto Rican aka Nuyorican accent (Ted was familiar with this particular patois from his patrons at work). “Is this Lord Fenway Fullilove?” Jesus, Ted thought. Only his father tortured him with that stupid middle name. He was named after a stadium. Ted had always wanted to, but never gotten around to, excising that ridiculous nomenclature from his life once and for all. He never used it, sometimes giving the initials LF when a middle name was demanded on an official form. And when pressed he would say the LF was Larry Francis or Left Field, never Lord Fenway.
“This is Ted Fullilove, yes. Who is this?”
“My name is Mariana Blades. I’m an RN here at Beth Israel…”
Ted felt words rush out of him before he thought them; it was like the words were thinking him, speaking him.
“My father,” he said without a doubt and without really knowing what he meant.
“Yes,” said the nurse, “your father.”
6.
Ted hadn’t spoken to Marty in about five years. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever really spoken to him at all in his life, had actually had an honest conversation, but the last five years had been complete and defined radio silence between the two. He had tried to forget what the precipitating event was; he had a vague memory of giving his dad a manuscript to read and having been hurt by the reaction. He remembered his father had said something constructive like “You write like an old man; you went straight past writing about fucking to writing about napping after nonexistent fucking-are you a homo? When I was your age…” or something like that. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Ted had asked. “I’m trying to hurt you into poetry, nitwit,” Marty had proclaimed like the oracle of Park Slope. All that was almost unimportant, and Ted stopped himself from rehearsing the particulars of the last breakup. The relationship between father and son was so weighted, fraught, and broken that it needed barely an inciting incident-a forgotten please or thank-you, a sideways glance, to put them at each other’s throats. Their relationship was a desert in a drought: one little match was all it took to ignite hellfire.
The nurse, Mariana, had not wanted to get into details on the phone, but Marty was at Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue and Sixteenth Street in Manhattan. Ted had grown up in Brooklyn, but never went back there, and rarely ventured from the Bronx into Manhattan. Manhattan, with its if-you-can-make-it-there-you-can-make-it-anywhere bullshit ethos, was an affront to Ted’s pseudo-Communist leanings. Its ostentatious money was a constant and unpleasant reminder that he had, in fact, not made it there or anywhere.
Riding in the Corolla toward the Lower East Side, Ted checked his insides, the what was he feeling. There was nothing definite. There was no fear or sadness, no love, there was only a kind of gray numbness. Marty was only sixty and Ted wondered what could be wrong with him. Hit by a car, maybe? Stabbed by a waitress? Only negative waves surfaced when he thought of the old man, a bolus of dread, resentment, unspoken expectation, and avoidance. He wondered if the old man was dying. Wondered if his death would set him free. Ted, that is. Wondered if his father’s death might be the catalyst to open up his word hoard, make him a real writer. Then he felt guilty for “using” his father’s no doubt real pain for his own potential gain. Then he said, Fuck that, aloud, and allowed himself to wonder some more at the events that push our minds into new terrain. As he toked on another spliff, Ted wondered at the temperature of his soul and of his mind, and deemed that it must be chilly in there.