Ted sat outside on a bench, smoking ganja by Brooklyn Jerk. New York was a good city to be alone in a crowd. The Rastas would prefer not to talk to him. The brotherhood of the blunt was not blunt. That’s what he needed. He’d brought one of his old journals from when he was eleven and read:
Terrible day! Bad bowling league—124, 108(!), 116! Bringing my year average down to 134.7538658. Couldn’t do anything outside cause it rained so I went over to Walt’s we played cards APBA football and watched football. [Drawing of a football] I didn’t feel bad when I lost 54c in cards but I did feel good when I beat Walt 10–7 in football. I was in a silly mood. I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed at any [sic] but I felt great. I have no right to feel great because there’s school tomorrow. Over the vacation I didn’t do much I was pretty idol [sic]. I feel very bad about being idol, so bad even to the point of wanting to go to school (don’t take it personally)
It was a pretty bad vacation.
Ted wondered at the boy he had been. It seemed like an entirely different person, yet it was him. Who was this child who reported the loss of 54 cents? He loved the specificity of that 54, and he remembered that almost paranoid concern about money that his mother had instilled in him. And he thought, yeah, that’s good writing, good writing is specific. I knew that then. I relearn it right now from myself. A friend of his, a grown man, once told Ted that he practiced his guitar so much because he wanted one day to be able to play “like when I was fourteen.” The child is father to the man. And the bowling average? The obsession with statistics, the purity and power of the number worked to the seventh decimal place, as if some truth were hidden in the golden mean. He could feel his young self grasping for solidity in those numbers, keys to himself—I am this concrete, numerical thing. I am 134.7538658. The unassailable “I am.” Numbers had made the boy real, but the man now still didn’t feel quite real. Where were his numbers now? The exfoliation of his DNA? What mathematical sequence could reveal him to himself, pull off this veil of illusion and skin to uncover the bowling average of his soul? He flipped through the book and came upon page after page filled with autographs of famous baseball players. These were forgeries, all in young Ted’s mimetic hand. He leaned back with a smile and remembered this phase of spending hours and days practicing autographs, almost like trying on other identities for size. Big identities—Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Jimmy Foxx. Writing the double xx a thousand times. As if being able to write like these heroic men would transform him, transport him to Olympus. Clues in numbers. Clues in letters. Clues. Page after page filled with forgeries, not because he wanted to sell them, but because he wanted to be them.
Was he still this soul forger? This grasping, quicksand boy? This kid who didn’t feel he could be “silly,” who felt bad about being idol/idle? That’s not a boy’s word. That’s a Bible word. That’s a boy parroting an adult. Young Ted the ventriloquist’s dummy. Was he still the boy who wrote this, only with a better vocabulary, longer words to lead him farther away from and efface his simple feelings? His core shame and his silliness. Was he himself or was he the kid or was he himself and the kid? Who was piloting the plane? Moreover, who would make a better pilot?