Bucky F*cking Dent Read Online Free Page A

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.

 
    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