Better Baseball by Tommy Heinrich
The Beginning of this book is about Tommy Heinrich telling about baseball and offense and defense are in almost all games. in baseball offense is up and defense is in the field.
Perhaps this particular bit of acute baseball knowledge and literary criticism was not the magical key Ted was looking for. He flipped through pages and read another entry, dated 3/27:
I took Walt to Peter Cooper and as [“I” crossed out] usual I regret it. He is such a bore he didn’t want to do anything at all. [“When” crossed out] I hate when somebody does that I can’t explain it but I just hate it. I met Richie Grossman and Chris Modell (Bow-Wow) and Chris is the kind of guy that when you say something he’ll rank you out. You can imagine what he did to Walt. Other than that I just played basketball.
Ted was wondering about the “you” addressed in these thoughts. Who did he think was listening to what happened in the postwar middle-class housing projects of Peter Cooper and Stuyvesant Town? Who did he think gave a flying fuck about what he thought or who Chris Modell was ranking out that spring? He heard his father calling him from downstairs. He put the composition books back in their hiding place for another time.
Ted walked downstairs and found his father on a recliner in front of the TV.
“How you been, Marty?” he asked.
“Aside from the squamous lung cancer, terrific.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I piss vermouth and shit silver dollars.”
“That sounds lucrative. But painful. Maybe you should have that checked.”
“Why do you call me Marty?”
“’Cause that’s your name.”
“Why don’t you call me Dad?”
“Why don’t you call me Son?”
“I think I do sometimes. Don’t I?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Then: “You want me to call you Dad?”
“I don’t give a fuck, really.”
Ted sighed and took a seat on the couch. They stared at the TV for some time, even though it wasn’t on.
“That color?”
“It’s not on.”
“I know that. When it’s on, it’s color?”
“Yup. Technicolor. I don’t like it. Japanese. Soulless.”
“A purist.”
Silence.
“Some people watch TV, but I’d say that you look at the TV. You ever turn it on?”
“I lose the remote a lot. Game tonight?”
“I think so?”
“You workin’ it?”
“No, they’re still away.”
Back to staring at the TV. A full minute crawled by. Marty began to whistle an indistinct tune, then said, “We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“Yeah, we’ve done fine the past few years without it.”
“Has it been a year?”
“More.”
“But oh, how I’ve missed this, this father-son rapport. Can’t beat it.”
“No, you can’t,” said Ted.
Another interminable minute passed.
“Do you wanna talk?” asked Ted.
“Sure.”
But then nothing else. Ted imagined he heard the tick of that very loud stopwatch they always play on the TV program 60 Minutes.
Marty spoke up. “Do you not wanna talk?”
“Do you?”
“I’m asking.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Well, it seems we are talking.”
“Are we?”
“My lips and tongue are moving and I am forcing air through my teeth.”
“That is talking. You’re right.”
“Or talking about talking. Feels good, don’t it?”
“Sure do.”
“Why did we stop talking?”
“You wanna know how we could give this up?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I sent you a book. You called me a name.”
“I called you a name?”
“I sent you a book, you called me a homo.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Oh.” Marty laughed at the memory. “Is that bad, Dr. Brothers? Should I say ‘homosexual,’ not ‘homo’? I can’t keep up with the fucking word police.”
“I don’t care what you say.”
“Apparently you do. Very much.”
“It didn’t bother me. It’s neither here nor there. You bothered me. I sent you a novel for your opinion and you called me a name.”
“I didn’t call you a ‘homo.’ I said you write like you might be a homo.”
“Oh, well, that clears it up.”
“Come on, I was just trying to say you need to live a little.”
“What does that have to do with being homosexual? Homosexuals don’t live?”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“Bullshit. It’s like any sexism or racism or whatever. It’s not important.”
“It’s something like a figure of speech, Joe College. You’ll never be a writer if you worry about the word police. Your mind can’t be Singapore, your mind has to be Times Square.”
“Fine.”
“Would you have preferred if I quoted your beloved Berryman and said your life is a fucking ‘handkerchief sandwich’? More palatable? Same fucking thing.”
Ted exhaled hard and audibly, his breath and lips almost forming a word, but not quite, and that seemed to be the end of that, but then he just could not let it be.
“Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that your last three girlfriends were younger than me. And that made me a tad…”
“Jealous?”
“Disgusted. Totally fucking skeeved out.”
“Bonnie!”
“Was that her name? I knew her only as ‘the infanta.’”
“Bonnie. Bonnie, and before her, Amber.”
“Stripper name.”
“She was a stripper.”
“Thank you.”
“And a PhD candidate in African dance, FYI.”
“You can’t get a PhD in that.”
“Says you.”
“Twenty-five?”
“Who cares? Twenty-three. Her smell, Ted, her smell gave me health.”
“Jesus.”
“Monica. I should call her.”
“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
“Asshole.”
“Can we not?”
“Oh, oh, yes, we can not. We can not all day.”
Ted couldn’t take this, he felt the anxiety rise in his chest. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a joint. Marty looked disapprovingly at him, but then reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out vials of pain pills—an escalation in the drug war. He shot Ted a sideways glance: My shit is better than your shit, I win.
“What is that, Valium?”
“Maybe. I don’t know if I’m feeling Valium or feeling Quaalude. You know, sometimes I feel like daffodils and sometimes like daisies.”
“Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Quaalude’s a good Scrabble word, gets rid of an overabundance of low-scoring vowels.”
“I hate Scrabble. ’Lude it shall be.”
Ted shrugged and fired up a laughing bone. Marty popped the Rorer 714 along with some horse-pill-sized vitamin Cs and said, “Don’t worry about the smoke, I just have lung cancer.”
“Shit,” Ted said, and blew the smoke in the other direction, waving it away. He snuffed out the joint carefully and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”
They sat in silence again for a while.
“Hey, Dad?”
Marty checked to see if Ted was being wholly ironic with the Dad thing. Maybe he wasn’t.
“Yes, son?”
“Wanna go for a walk?”
“No, not really.”
Ted flowed back into himself a little, like a wave receding. He felt he had just extended himself a mile, though he knew it wasn’t that far. More like an inch, but it felt like more than it was. Marty sensed this recoil, and bridged a little of the psychic distance.
“I’m not a great walker anymore. I’ll go for a shuffle, though. You wanna take me for a shuffle?”