Ted hadn’t been to Brooklyn since his mom died. He had never once made the drive from the Bronx to Brooklyn, had never traced backward the flow of his life till now—Brooklyn to the Bronx, the Bronx to Brooklyn. Didn’t matter to the Cololla, he meant Corolla. Bertha didn’t like to go anywhere. Ted slid the Dead into his car stereo. “Friend of the Devil,” the second track off American Beauty, released in 1970. He laughed at the thought that his car was a homebody. An old Japanese guy who had just had enough of this fucking country and wasn’t gonna come out of his small backyard garden.
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.