1.
José Canucci. That’s what they called him at work. Like he was half Latin and half Italian. Apparently Italian on his father’s side. What part of the boot might the Canuccis hail from? No idea. Maybe his mother was a beautiful Puerto Rican woman from Spanish Harlem. Fuck, that would be funny. His father would have loved that. But was Canucci actually a real name? He didn’t know. They didn’t even pronounce it properly. The fans didn’t say it right up here. They said Can-you-see. The double c pronounced as s. It wasn’t his name anyway. His name was Ted Fullilove. Theodore Lord Fenway Fullilove. Talk about a fucked-up handle. Some frustrated poet at Ellis Island must have jotted down his Russian forebear’s Filinkov or Filipov or Filitov as Fullilove. He went by Ted. Except at work. At work, he was José. Or Mr. Peanut.
Maybe he should get a monocle. Like Mr. Peanut, the cartoon advertising mascot of the Planters peanut company. Ted’s dad had been an advertising man, and he wondered if his father had fathered Mr. Peanut as well. Maybe he and Mr. Peanut were half brothers. Mr. Peanut was a friendly stiff in a top hat, a hybrid with the body of a peanut, a walking stick, and a monocle. A sentient nut.
Mr. Peanut looked like a science experiment gone wrong from one of those cheap B movies that played during rain-out Chiller Theatre on WPIX, channel 11. You know, like The Fly? “Help me. Help me.” That was the big line from The Fly. Vincent Price with the body of a fly and the head of a Vincent Price. Was it Vincent Price’s head? He thought maybe not. Doesn’t really matter. Okay, probably matters to Vincent Price, but not to Ted. Something about “help me, help me” moved Ted, though. The sheer, naked need. The first thing a child learns to say, maybe. After “Mommy” and “Daddy” and “more.” Help me. Help me. Please somebody help me.
Mr. Peanut needed help. He had the dimpled gray-beige peanut torso, insect stick legs, and bad eyesight. In one eye, at least. No balls to speak of, sexless, a eunuch, and he couldn’t see or walk without the use of a cane. Help that dude. And why the top hat? He’s asking for it. Refile all these thoughts in another sleeve of index cards—inside joke filed under H for Help me. That could work. But it was already getting cross-referenced, cross-filed, and confusing. He wished he had a girlfriend. He did not have the body of a peanut and did have balls and needs, emotional, physical, whatever. All sorts of crazy conflicting needs sparking off in all directions, like when a tailpipe drops onto the road and makes fireworks and that bad sound. Girlfriend/Tailpipe. I should really have a pen with me at all times, he thought. Angry with himself because these things, these thoughts do get lost. His mother always told him that if it was important, he would remember it. But that’s not true. In fact, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the most important things we forget, or at least try to forget. What did Nietzsche say? We remember only that which gives us pain? That’s not quite the same thought, but same ballpark. Through the perilous fight.
A ballpark of thoughts. Yankee Stadium with a bunch of thinking on the field. And in the seats. Ted’s mind was a full stadium of half-baked notions during the seventh-inning stretch. Bob Sheppard’s transatlantic patrician voice—“Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to first base, now playing for the Yankees, replacing Chris Chambliss, the young German with the impressive mustaches, Friedrich Nietzsche.” Phil Rizzuto would have fun with that. How come when you’re trying to be universal and all, there’s usually a clause in the statement like “that which”? Clumsiness of diction was like an announcement of profundity. That’s not a bad thought, that is a thought which is not bad.
Ted often forgot he didn’t have a woman. And in those moments he was probably happier than in the moments he remembered that he didn’t. Girlfriend. File that under U for “Unlikely” or G for “Go fuck yourself, Ted.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been with a woman, and for that forgetfulness he was actually thankful. Gallantly streaming. But even though the thought was an empty placeholder for a card, the ache, the lack was inchoate, and real. Ted felt life passing him by. He was now into his thirties. He was nearing the all-star break in the season of his life. Spring training a distant memory. Ted felt the old panic start to rise in his gut like when a pitcher who had command the whole game suddenly gets wild, loses control, as they say. Somewhere in his mind, a manager made a gesture for time-out at the umpire and walked to the mound to calm his pitcher. Ted flexed his right shoulder. He would be throwing soon and he wanted to be loose.
And the rockets’ red glare. Ted laughed at himself and then looked around nervously. Laughing during the National Anthem was a no-no. You didn’t have to put your hand over your heart the way Ted was told he had to by management, like some kind of ROTC crazy, but you shouldn’t talk or laugh. It was disrespectful to the military, apparently. And the Founding Fathers. And Jimmy Carter. Who is Mr. Peanut in real life! The peanut farmer from Georgia. Ted loved a full circle like that. Who doesn’t, really? People liked circles, closure, the tiny mind making patterns against the big chaos. Mr. Peanut was now the president of his country. The malaise days. Help him. Help him.
You could start cheering during the last line—José, does that star-spangled ba-an-ner yet wa-ave. O’er the la-and of the freeeeeeeeee … But not before. Before was disrespectful. It was a fine line that everyone, 60,000 people when Boston was in town, just knew intuitively. Like don’t stare at other people in an elevator, look at the numbers flashing. No eye contact. The intuitive rules of the world that were a mystery only to retards, psycho killers, and children.
The old joke is that the last words of the national anthem are “play ball!” An oldie, but a goodie. The impossible-to-sing “song” came to an end, and the noise of the crowd swelled like it was one happily anxious beast. The game was about to begin, and it was Africa-hot up here in the cheap seats, the blue seats. It was 80 percent Latino in Ted’s peanut dominion, 55 percent Puerto Rican, 25 percent Dominican, and about 20 percent other. The other were mostly Irish and Italian. All his people. It was easy to think of these as the “cheap seats,” and, for sure, they were so far removed from the field of play that there was a discernible lag between the sight of a ball being hit and the crack of the bat. Like a badly dubbed Japanese film. But rather than removed, Ted liked to think of the vantage point as Olympian, that they were all gods on high watching the ant-sized humans play their silly games. So this is where he worked. Yankee Stadium throwing peanuts to mostly men who thought it was funny to call him “José” like the first words of the Spanglish version of the national anthem, or Mr. Peanut. Some even called him Ted.
He would rather not to be called Ted. Though he liked his job and it paid the bills, kinda, while he wrote, he was a little ashamed that a man his age, with his education, New York private school, Ivy League, had to throw legumes at people to make ends meet. Yet he actually preferred a job like this that was so far away from what he “should” be doing, falling so spectacularly short of any expectation, that people might think he was doing it ’cause he was a “character,” or ’cause he loved it, or that he was one of those genius, irreverent motherfuckers who thumbed his nose at the world and just generally didn’t give a shit. Rather than be thought of as a failure, which is how he thought of himself, he liked to be thought of as an eccentric. That quirky dude with a BA in English literature from Columbia who works as a peanut vendor in Yankee Stadium while he slaves away on the great American novel. He is so counterculture. He is so down with the workers and the proles. I love that guy. Wallace Stevens selling insurance. Nathaniel Hawthorne punching the clock at the customs house. Jack London among the great unwashed with a handful of nuts in his hand.
Even so, he took pride in his accuracy. He was not a good athlete, as his father used to remind him daily growing up. He threw “like a girl,” the old man said. And it was true, he did not have Reggie Jackson’s arm, or even Mickey Rivers’s chicken wing. If Ted was gonna get a candy bar named after him, it would probably be the Chunky. But over the years, he had honed his awkward throwing motion into a slapstick cannon of admirable accuracy. Even though he looked like he was doing a combo of waving goodbye and slapping frantically at a mosquito, he could consistently hit a raised hand from twenty rows away. The fans loved his uniquely ugly expertise and loved to give him a tough target and celebrate when he nailed it. He could go behind the back. He could go through the legs. His co-worker, Mungo, he of the Coke-bottle lenses and bowling forearm guard, who broke five feet only because of the orthopedic four-inch rubber heel on his left club foot black shoe, sold the not-always-so-cold beer in Ted’s section, and would always keep fantasy stats on Ted’s delivery percentage: 63 attempts, 40 hits, 57 within 3 feet. That kind of stuff. Like batting average, slugging percentage, and ERA for vendors.
Catfish Hunter was pitching today. Ted dug that name. Baseball had a rich tradition of ready-made awesome monikers. Van Lingle Mungo. Baby Doll Jacobson. Heinie Manush. Chief Bender. Enos Slaughter. Satchel Paige. Urban Shocker. Mickey Mantle. Art Shamsky. Piano Legs Hickman. Minnie Minoso. Cupid Childs. Willie Mays. Like a history of the United States told only through names, a true American arithmoi, a Book of Numbers. It was a strange year, though, because the Boston Red Sox, longtime Yankee rivals, but in effect more like a tragicomic foil to the reigning kings, the Washington Generals to the Yankees’ Harlem Globetrotters, were having a great year and looking like they would finally break the curse of the Babe. The Sox had traded Babe Ruth, already the best player in the game, in 1918 to the Yankees for cash. The owner of the Sox, Harry Frazee, wanted to bankroll a musical or something. Was it No, No, Nanette? Ruth went on to become an American hero, a hard-living, hot-dog-inhaling Paul Bunyan in pinstripes who led the Yankees to many a pennant and World Series victory, whose success had conjured Yankee Stadium out of the barren hinterlands of the Bronx: The House That Ruth Built in 1923, where Ted stood today. And the Sox had not won since. Not one pennant. Sixty years of futility looking up in the standings at the hairy ass of the Yankees.
It was mid-June, but already hotter than July. The peanuts did fly, the beer did flow, and the Catfish did hurl. During the few lulls in the game when people were not calling for him, Ted would usually grab the dull sawed-off pencil from behind his right ear and jot down stray thoughts. To be filed later. Alphabetically, of course. Thoughts for the novel he was presently working on, or the next one, or the one that he had all but given up on last year. Writing was not the problem, finishing was. Works in progress with titles like “Mr. Ne’er-Do-Well” (536 pages), “Wherever There Are Two” (660 pages of an outline), “Death by Now” (1,171 pages weighing over 12 pounds), or “Miss Subways” (402 pages and counting). All that would never see the light of day outside of Ted’s Bronx one-bedroom walk-up tenement apartment. Maybe today he would stumble upon a thought that would unleash the true word horde, that would unlock a puzzle, that would unblock him from himself, from his inability to compete and complete.
He remembered Coleridge, in the Vale of Chamouni, had written, “Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star…?” And that seemed to him the truest, saddest line in all of literature. Can you, man, find the poetry to keep the sun from rising, like a mountain, blocking its inevitable ascent for a few more moments? Can you, who call yourself a writer, find the words that will have an actual influence on the real and natural world? Magic passwords—shazzam, open sesame, scoddy waddy doo dah—warriors lurking in the Trojan horse of words. The implicit answer to Coleridge’s question was: Hell, no. If the answer were yes, he would never have asked the question. The writer will never make something happen in the world. In fact, the act of writing may be in itself the final admission that one is powerless in reality. Shit, that would surely suck.
Ted was thinking about his own powerlessness and ol’ S. T. Coleridge, that opium-toking, Xanadu-loving, Alps-hiking freakazoid, as he sat scribbling on a paper bag some names that might work as magic charms to make time or a woman stay, to spark a story, to make him the man he wanted to be—Napoleon Lajoie Vida Blue Thurman Munson Open Sesame …
The game passed by in its own sweet timelessness, and then it was over. Boston 5, New York 3. Another Yankee loss in this strange-feeling year.
2.
Like the actual Yankees, the men and women who worked the concession stands and the seats at the stadium had their own changing room. But it was not carpeted, there was no shower and no buffet, no place to chill the champagne. It resembled mostly a dingy locker room at your neighborhood Y. This was where Ted changed out of his uniform. He removed the shoulder strap that held his big cardboard box of peanut bags. Cardboard. Seemed so cheap and ephemeral, like an affront, and no good in the rain. Off came the dark blue visor, white short-sleeved shirt with Yankee insignia, and blue polyester pants that refused to breathe and left his thighs and ass chafed, pimply, and raw. A winning combination.
Mungo slid in next to Ted on the bench, removing his orthopedic shoe, so big and clunky it looked like he had stolen it from Fred “Herman” Gwynne off the set of The Munsters, with a serious moan. Mungo tossed the huge boot; its heel so weighted, Ted noticed it always landed upright, like a black cat. “You were on fire this afternoon, Teddy Ballgame. By my unofficial count: 83 tosses, 65 hits, 10 near misses, and just 8 whiffs. You were getting the chiquitas all hot, buttered, and bothered.” Mungo liked to imagine that a minimum-wage vending skill was attractive to females. As he removed his bowling forearm guard, he cooed, “Aye, Señor Peanut, ay Papi Peanut…” In his stockinged feet, Mungo stood barely above Ted’s sitting-down eyeline. It was impossible to tell what Mungo was—Italian, Dutch, Irish, Ukrainian, Hobbit, Bridge Troll? Indeterminate. So Ted had stopped trying to classify him. He thought of him as a human. A very small human.
“Yeah, Mungo,” Ted said as he put on his civilian clothes, “the ladies just can’t resist a peanut-throwing motherfucker.”
Ted’s sartorial niche was neo-hippie, which seemed more lazy than lame and out of date. Ted’s theory was that each decade in history was actually, spiritually, the decade before. It took more than ten years for a decade, like an organism, to fully become itself. Therefore, the ’40s were the ’30s, the ’50s were the ’40s, the ’60s were the ’50s—for proof of that he would always say, Look at the top 40. In the ’60s, you barely had the Beatles and the Stones, or even his beloved Grateful Dead, who never sold out and made the venal pop charts anyway, but rather floated independently through the years like a waft of pot smoke. What you got more of in the early ’60s were the Four Seasons, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Sinatra, Elvis. And now we are in the late ’70s, Ted would think, which are in actuality the late ’60s. We are basically in the summer of love, the time of free love. I am totally current, he thought, though Ted felt less free to love and more free from love.
All this by way of justifying why Ted’s life uniform outside his work uniform was basically unchanged over the last ten years. Tie-dye shirt, blue jeans, and sandals. In the winters, he splurged and wore white Adidas Superstars, three black stripes, low top. His weight had not remained unchanged over the years, so his purple-based swirl-of-color T pinched him under his man breasts and rode up to expose the coarse hairs above his soft belly. (He couldn’t stop thinking of his chest as breasts ever since he had read an alarming article about how chronic pot smoking increases estrogen in men and can lead to some subtle secondary feminine characteristics such as male teats.) Ted shook off the thought about his man tits, shook his long brown shoulder-length hair from underneath his visor, and tied it back into a ponytail.
Ted stood and slapped Mungo on the back. “Up the workers, Mungo.” Ted liked to think of himself as a Communist—it bolstered his image as not an underachiever, but as a calloused-handed man of the people. Though he was unaffiliated with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), headed by the quixotic Gus Hall, né Arvo Kustaa Halberg, of the 58,992 votes Hall and his vice-presidential running mate, Jarvis Tyner, had garnered in the last election, Ted’s was one. That’s 0.07 percent of the vote, people, up from 0.03 percent in ’72! That’s momentum, baby. Ted liked voting for a sure loser. It made him feel heard. At Columbia, he had fallen in love with a miraculous Marxist, a Russian-studies major from Baltimore. Rachel Sue Abramowitz. An adopted blond beauty with what must have been some sort of Scandinavian origins, she looked nothing like her name or her short, dark Eastern European adoptive parents. She was a stunning oxymoron, and Ted fell hard for her and her story that her biological father was a cop and her mother a prostitute.
Rachel Sue Abramowitz claimed to have once caught crabs from Mark Rudd, but refused to join SDS or the Columbia Citizenship Council because she thought their notions of praxis had perverted their grasp of perfect theory. She had been part of the successful Stickman filter uprising, but during the protest of the gym at Morningside Park, one of the other budding revolutionaries from a private high school in New Jersey had squeezed her boob in a scrum, whispering, “What do we want? Titty! When do we want it? Now!” And that had freaked her out. Understandably. Ted did some reconnaissance and learned that Rachel Sue had a poster of the one-dimensional man himself, Herbert Marcuse, in her dorm room like other underclass Barnard girls had posters of this passing English musical fad called the Beatles.
Even though Ted was quite happy teasing allegories and wordplay high up in his ivory tower, under the sway of writers like Joyce (he liked to say he preferred Finnegans Wake to Ulysses, but that was bullshit, library stud, provocative grandstanding), Stevens (even though Ted was not ready to “let be be the finale of seem”), Samuel “Fail again, fail better” Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon. And though Pynchon had as much connection to realpolitik as Popeye, Ted had run out, bought (he told people he stole it, pulled a Jerry Rubin, but he didn’t, he bought it, sheepishly) a copy of Das Kapital, underlined and dog-eared it to death, and tried to appear to be reading it conspicuously in all the campus spots Rachel Sue was known to haunt. (When Ted’s dad had seen him toting Das Kapital everywhere, he told Ted that Karl was the “lesser Marx, Groucho was the genius of the family. I rank Karl ahead of Zeppo and Gummo, but behind Chico and Harpo.”) Ted was relieved that the nerd-chic look of SDS members had made his thick corrective lenses (20/400 vision) acceptable, even desirable. He burned his blue-and-white Columbia freshman beanie and took to hanging out on the steps of Low Memorial Library, speaking, and trying hard to be overheard, of being entfremdet from his Gattungswesen. Ted’s ridiculous ploy worked and Rachel Sue Abramowitz had become his first love. He fell for her like Lenin fell for Marx. It lasted all four years of Columbia, but had quickly disintegrated after they graduated beyond the cocoon of campus. Out of school, he had set up to become a struggling writer, and had at least managed to pull off the struggling part, while Rachel Sue Abramowitz became perhaps the only Marxist supermodel in the history of the world. She left him for a male model temporarily, and then for a French hairstylist named Fabian.
Despite the male model and Fabian, Rachel and Ted sporadically tried to get back together for a few more years, like planets on elliptical orbits, Ted deciding one night after a long, drunk, expensive, echoing, beeping phone call from Paris from his former Marxist, former girlfriend that he would ask her to marry him. He told her he wanted to see her when she got back to the city, and they made plans to meet for Japanese food. Ted arrived dressed like an adult, in a dark blue suit, and when he spied Rachel at the table, her head down, reading the menu, his heart swelled with love, and he knew he was doing the right thing. When she looked up, he saw some new depth in her eyes and figured it was a shared vision of their future. He kissed her hello on the lips and felt himself getting hard. She had that effect on him just walking in the room. It was Pavlovian, they always joked, and called it Cocklovian. Ted ordered a big bottle of sake. He looked at her and swelled once more. Oh, how he loved making love to her, this genius offspring of cop and whore.
They both spoke at once as in the most clichéd of romantic comedies—“I have some news!” Jinx. Ha-ha. You go first, no you go first, no you, no you. Ted’s news would be a question: “Rachel, will you marry me?” But like the gentleman he hoped to be, he insisted Rachel go ahead of him. He could read the love and passion in her eyes. He saw their Communist future together. He felt that his species-being would be integrated and fulfilled by the simple things in life—good work, love, a fire in the hearth, family. It was all coming together. She parted her wet lips, showing her perfect white teeth, and said, “I’m pregnant and I’m getting married.”
Ted’s world collapsed like a dark star and turned inside out. His ears popped and it sounded to him as if he were underwater. He could see her on land, but could not reach her. She had tears in her eyes and was smiling or grimacing, he couldn’t tell. Ted had lost control of his own face, he had no idea what his expression was revealing to his beloved at the moment. Even though he was sinking beneath a sea of sorts, his mouth was dry. He heard her as if through liquid—what he hoped would soon be a tidal wave of alcohol—“What’s your news, baby?” Ted took a deep breath of what felt to his lungs like vomit, like he had given up to the idea of drowning, now and forever, and said, “Nothing important, baby. I’m so happy for you. A toast!”
And he raised a too-small cup of sake to her life to be lived with another man and her unborn children by him, and had never loved or been loved by a woman again. Most days went by without a single thought of Rachel Sue, whatever her last name might be now, and the alternative reality that might have been had he been more aggressive and spoken first. If you asked, he would say he’s completely over her, but still, a stray scent of patchouli on the sidewalk could dizzy him and turn his stomach, and make him a little hard.
3.
“Up the workers, Teddy Ballgame,” Mungo echoed. Ted turned on sandaled feet and strolled out into the June evening. The walk out into the parking lot was arguably Ted’s least favorite part of the job. After the game, fans would line up behind barricades, hoping for a glimpse of their favorite players. They could see figures walking toward them out of the shadows and would try to guess who was coming at them by their size and shape. “Louuuuuuuuu” they’d bellow if they thought Lou Piniella was coming. Or “Bucky!!!” for Bucky Dent, “Captain” for Thurman Munson, “Gooooooooose” for Rich “Goose” Gossage, or, improbably, “Reggie! Reggie! Reggie!” on the way to his Bentley Bentley Bentley. Invariably, they thought Ted was a Yankee coming toward them, and after shouting out names of players and realizing it was Ted, would then give voice to their disappointment. Ted hated that moment when they saw that it was only him. Like it was just a terrible mistake, like he himself was a mistake.
It was a walk of shame all right. “Oh, forget it,” some kid would say. “It’s just Mr. Peanut. Yo, Mr. Peanut, what’s up, peanut man? THE PEA-NUT!!!” And usually, this would turn into an ironic name game—“Grizzly Adams!” they yelled with barely contained derision as they rounded Ted off to the nearest celebrity, in this case the actor on the hit TV show. He guessed he looked a little like Dan Haggerty because of the heft and the full beard and long hair. “Haggerty!!!” The name-calling would morph behind him in the dead air before an actual Yankee refocused their attention, as Ted made his long way to the crappy parking spaces at the far end of the lot. “The Haggermeister!!! The Grizzler!!! Grizzelda!!! Captain Lou Albano!!!” and the occasional “Jerry Garcia!!!”—which he kinda didn’t mind at all. Ted would cast his head down and smile awkwardly, hiding his mortification, wishing he could be as solitary as the Grizzler, or be invisible for the few minutes it would take to get to his car, at least more invisible than he was.
The tall lamps got sparser as Ted made his way to the back of the lot, as if no one really cared to see what happened back there. Ted’s mighty steed, his puke-green aging Toyota Corolla, waited patiently, the plastic bags that had replaced the front windows broken in the theft of his car stereo flapping gently in the summer breeze. Ted no longer locked the car. Whoever it was who wanted whatever it was that they thought was in that piece of shit was welcome to it, without needing to cause any more damage. Not that there was anything of value in there. It was filthy. Dirty clothes, soda bottles, and peanut bags littered the back seat. To save money, and because he had never really cared about food, Ted mostly ate the bagged peanuts that he sold at the games. This monochrome diet explained his unhealthy swollen gut and greenish complexion. No one had spent as much time with the peanut since George Washington Carver. If this was close to bag lady or homeless or hoarder behavior, Ted wasn’t bothered. He was a Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyite/Marcusian Deadhead who did not buy into the late, dying capitalist animal that was the United States economy. He existed in and out of the world he wanted to observe. I am the Heisenberg principle, he thought. Or maybe, I am the Highsenberg principle, as he lit up a joint.
Ted exhaled a plume of smoke of which Jimmy Cliff could have been proud, took his portable cassette player out of his backpack, and slid it into the opening on the dashboard. He turned the key over and the Japanese import shuddered to life, as if startled out of sleep and annoyed at being asked to move. “C’mon, Big Bertha-san,” Ted coaxed, as he stepped on the clutch, thinking to himself I am Mr. Clutch as he shifted into reverse. “Mistuh Crutch-uh.” Sometimes he would just speak to his “Collola” in the terrible, racist Japanese accent of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—it was the bad, easy, faux-tough-guy type of racist stuff his father loved to say just to piss people off. Ted hated that shit, found it offensive. But sometimes, against his better judgment, Ted felt something like a ventriloquist’s dummy, involuntarily speaking his father’s words. He might adopt an attitude or phrase out of the blue, like some sort of paternal Tourette’s. The possessed moments would pass, and he would quickly become self-conscious again, looking around sheepishly to see if anyone overheard.
Music fought a losing battle through the tiny cheap speakers. The Dead. Almost always the Dead.
“Saint Stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes.”
Ted sang along with Bob Weir in a decently tuneful imitation of Jerry Garcia’s vulnerable, knowing whine: “Country garden in the wind and the rain, wherever he goes the people always complain.”
Ted pulled out of the lot and onto the darkening streets of the Bronx. Singing—“Did it matter, does it now? Stephen would answer if he only knew how.”
Copyright © 2016 by King Baby, Inc.
