io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “A Man Walks Into a Bar: In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done” by Scott Edelman. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on Lightspeed’s website. Enjoy!
My father was so honest, people often spoke of him in cliches. For example—you know the way someone will sometimes say so-and-so was so honest they’d walk five miles to return an extra nickel they’d been given in their change? Nobody means anybody actually did that kind of thing when they say it, of course—you and I both know they’re only exaggerating for effect.
Except in the case of my father.
My Dad had really done that.
Around the neighborhood, he was seen as so calm and understanding when compared to other fathers, other husbands—perhaps he’d arrived at his serenity due to those tai chi classes he’d sneak off to during his lunch hours a couple of times a week—some of the grownups jokingly referred to him as Saint Barney. One friend of my parents even had a one-of-a-kind T-shirt painted bearing that airbrushed nickname.
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My mother would dispute that title from time to time, though she’d smile when she’d protest. I get it. Spouses see each other far too clearly to ever consider their partners saints. But hey, I don’t hold it against either of them. That was between them. But as far as I was concerned growing up, the description always rang true.
And now that years have passed and he’s gone (they’re both long gone now) ... it still does. I never received a punishment which didn’t seem to hurt him more than it hurt me. Which come to think of it, is also a cliche, one you frequently see in movies and on TV whenever a Dad reaches for the belt. In those cases, you could tell—the guys never mean it. It was just a thing they were supposed to say.
My Dad meant it.
But before I tell you anything more about him, I should probably get to why I’m bothering to tell you about my father in the first place.
Though—come to think of it—to fully understand the night in question—which we’ll get to, I promise—it would be helpful for you to first know this—
Donald Trump, on the other hand—
I know, I know ... how did we get from there to here, you might be asking yourself. And why did we even have to? But trust me—it will all make sense soon enough, I hope.
Anyway, as I was saying, Donald Trump, in contrast to my father, was so dishonest back when the encounter I’ll shortly be telling you about occurred—and yes, ever since, but let’s leave the details of the intervening decades for others to describe, or else we’ll be here all night—he existed in a realm beyond cliche, entering previously unexplored territories of deception, which meant those who bore witness to his lies were required to invent new ways of describing their equivocating nature.
But as those of us who lived through those times know, we weren’t the only ones who resorted to invention, for Donald Trump—perhaps because his obfuscations were so numerous it was impossible to contain them within a single human form—would pretend to be a PR flack named John Baron and use that identity to phone reporters hoping to score good press for himself.
Baron, by the way, was a name you might recall he’d choose to reuse many years later, doubling that middle “r” before handing it off to his son, which forged an uneasy connection to that fictitious second self. But that naming, too, lies outside the scope of what I need you to hear.
And as for the man’s anger, his cruelty, his vindictiveness ... no amount of tai chi could have ever smoothed that temper over. I can’t imagine him even making the attempt in a midtown Manhattan pocket park the way my Dad did.
But the deception which disgusts me the most—well, save for the stochastic terrorism which was to come, of course, even though the two aren’t in the same league as far as the scales of the universe are concerned—that was centered on a spot I knew quite well. It was not that far away from the Marvel Comics offices on Madison Avenue where I’d once worked. And no, that tangential sacrilege isn’t the main event of this story, which I’m slowly approaching in a manner I hope will make sense.
Here’s the deal—in the process of replacing the Bonwit Teller Building with Trump Tower, that vulgar Fifth Avenue monument to himself, when it came time for him to deliver on his promise to turn over to the Metropolitan Museum historic sculptures which were part of the older structure’s facade before unleashing the wrecking balls, he instead jackhammered that promise, destroying his supposed gift and any trust I might have had in him, which was fairly insubstantial to begin with.
But destruction runs in that family, you see, though how that clan was also responsible for shattering part of my childhood I wasn’t to learn until I was an adult. For—are you ready for this?—Trump’s father Fred—about whom Woody Guthrie, composer of “This Land is Your Land,” wrote a blistering song about how he was spreading “racial hate”—once hosted a demolition party at Coney Island where he invited guests to hurl bricks through the stained glass of Steeplechase Park. Ah, Steeplechase Park, land of dreams! My eleven-year-old self mourned, not knowing then who was responsible for that desecration, or how much worse was to be inflicted on us by that family.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Or maybe behind?
It’s getting hard to tell.
Once upon a time (but no longer), there existed an establishment on the island of Manhattan by the name of Ye Olde Tripple Inn. That bar (inn, bar, what’s the difference?) on the north side of West 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue was known for many things—it was even a hangout for comedians for awhile—but the first I heard of it was when my father joined a darts club there which met once a week after work. He got quite good at the sport—I’d like to think the dartboard my brother and I chipped in to buy him one year for his birthday so he could practice at home helped—and eventually became the captain.
How and why he was made captain—whether it was earned through his ability alone or if he was elected more on the basis of his easy-going likability (which based on what I’ve told you already I hope you understand was truly a thing)—I will never know. And it’s far too late for finding out. But as the result of his reasonable leadership (I presume it was reasonable—I only saw him in action there once), the team took home several trophies from what he did there once a week, week after week, during the late seventies and into the early eighties.
Meanwhile, the other participant in the incident to come was from time to time spending his nights not that many yards away on the opposite side of 54th Street—at Studio 54, where behind a velvet rope the music was loud and the drugs flowed freely, where Halston and Jagger could be spotted alongside Warhol and Capote, all of them wanting to be hidden, all of them wanting to be seen.
Donald Trump wanted things, too, but they were things he could never have, for what he desired could not be bought. They couldn’t even be rented. Uncomfortable in his skin, the desperation for respect simmering, both of these conditions obvious to anyone who cared to look, he walked among the cool and was anything but. He was a visitor to a foreign land he could never truly inhabit.
When they danced, he did not, not really—he could not, though he tried—because whatever rhythms the universe beat out were beyond his hearing.
When they drank, when they drugged, he did neither, for the addiction he needed to feed was far more metaphysical.
So I’ll have you understand these were two very different men back then—and later as well—my father and Donald Trump.
One was accepting of life, and grateful for what he’d been given, even in the face of the many things he felt he had not. The other raged, feeling shortchanged even in the face of his privilege, deciding that for him to receive anything less than more than his share was to be cheated.
One, a surrendered and immoveable object; the other a petulant but irresistible force.
One, the accepted solidity of matter—the other, the anarchy of anti-matter.
One—to me, his son—an angel. The other—to the sons and daughters and many of the children of New York—a demon.
Some nights, after the team worked through a few rounds of darts and a few rounds of beer (though not my father for the latter, as he was not a drinking man), before Dad would take a late train back to Brooklyn, he and the rest of the guys would spill out of Ye Olde Tripple Inn to stare across 54th Street at the long line of hopefuls desperate to get into Studio 54. I never heard if they were able to gawk at anyone famous that way, as the In crowd was always let right in, but I was told many tales of how—mixed in with the usual leather- and leisure suit-wearing disco customers Dad was used to seeing back in Brooklyn—there’d be wild wigs and colorful face paint, young women with roller skates and angel wings, wiry men in sparkly swim trunks and gold body glitter. Those latter types—the ones w Source: Gizmodo