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.
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.