copyright © 1997 Dan Brooks

"Ted, Ted’s Wife, Ted’s Dog"

TED’S LIFE enters. He is a middle-aged man wearing sunglasses and carrying a pack of cigarettes and a pocket tape recorder. He sits center stage and tries to toss a cigarette into his mouth by hitting the bottom of the pack. It doesn’t work. He tries again, hitting harder this time, and still finds no success. He tries a third time, hits the pack too hard and crushes it. With a look of mortification, he pulls a crumpled cigarette from the pack and puts it in his mouth. He feels in his pocket for a lighter and finds nothing. Hanging his head, he presses "play" on the tape recorder. It plays loungey jazz. Lots of piano, light on the horns.

Ted was a regular guy. He grew up in an appropriately-sized house in a regular town with regular streets that followed a regular method of numbering – first street, second street, third street – I’m sure you’re familiar with the system.

He had an intensely normal childhood: two parents, both present at his conception, one or the other conspicuously absent most of the time after that. He went to school and he had a very normal time of it; the other kids would occasionally call him names – Teddy Bear, Ted the Crud – there was one weird kid who called him Ted the Pulsating Cock and was shortly thereafter taken to a boys’ reformatory and never seen again – but apart from that he was treated well and his youth passed without event.

For a brief time in college Ted thought he might be a poet, but after six months, thirty bad love sonnets and two dirty limericks he decided he had been wrong about that. Then he began to think that he might be an accountant, so he enrolled himself in business school, drank a few domestic beers, and like most people who think they might be an accountant, Ted waited about four years and suddenly he was right.

He graduated, found himself a decent job with an average company, lived in the safe northern part of California, had a two story in suburbia, big lawn, three car garage with a rugged sport utility vehicle that Ted used to haul his laptop to the bagel store. He had a thoroughly modern wife – two arms, two legs, eyes – all the working parts. She kept her opinions to herself, rarely complained about Ted or his habits, mostly just sat in the kitchen and ate dry margarita mix with a spoon. Ted had two sons, and he really couldn’t complain about either of them. The oldest occasionally walked that fine line between athletic and stupid, most notably with the ill-fated Hamsterball experiment, and the youngest displayed a somewhat unsettling interest in fashion, but Ted had never caught either of them masturbating or drinking drain cleaner or, God forbid, masturbating while drinking drain cleaner, so as far as Ted was concerned they were OK. Ted had a dog – small, itchy, blind in one eye, lost its leg in some sort of argument with the lawn mower, had to wear one of those special white plastic satellite dish-type collars to keep it from trying to scratch through the back of its own skull – really the only askew element of Ted’s life. His mother-in-law gave it to them.

So one day Ted comes home with a dozen day old donuts and a jug of off-brand Hawaiian Punch – Indiana Punch, I don’t know – and his wife is gone. Not gone in a went-to-the-store kind of way, but Gone with a capital ‘G’ in a way that had previously been foreign to Ted’s life. There’s a letter from her on the table, mostly obscure adjectives peppered with the occasional Clint Black lyric. It makes the usual complaints – he’s too wrapped up in his work, he never really listens to what she’s saying, yadda yadda yadda – except for one bizarre section where she accuses him of going to the bathroom too much, it’spretty much your standard Dear John. Ted puts down the letter, looks around the house and notices that in addition to his wife his kids are also missing, and they’ve taken the spare set of house keys, which is unfortunate because it means that not only are his wife and kids gone, but they could come back at any time. Somehow Ted finds this even more unsettling. Ted thinks for awhile and then he looks around the house hopefully, but the dog is still home.

So Ted reads the letter through a couple more times, he circles some places were his wife misspelled "misogynist" and "idiosyncrasy" and then he sits down on his couch with his day old donuts and his fake Hawaiian Punch and he looks at his dog. Apparently it had somehow slipped off its plastic satellite dish safety collar and had been working pretty steadily on its head all afternoon, because by now it had a sizable patch of exposed skull and a little hole where it seemed to have almost gotten through to its brain, and Ted discovers that if he pokes a ballpoint pen into this hole the dog will jump wildly into the air and urinate all over itself.

After about an hour of this Ted gets tired and goes to sleep. He dreams of a normal house and a normal car and a normal stain on the carpet, but most of all he dreams of a man and his dog.

They were both doomed from the start.

TED’S LIFE looks triumphantly at the audience. There is a long, awkward pause as the tape continues to play. Without breaking eye contact with the audience, TED’S LIFE reaches down, fast forwards the tape to just before the end of the music, and presses play again. TED’S LIFE looks triumphantly at the audience while the last bars of the music fade out. Blackout.

"Frank, Frank's Wife, Frank's Dog" IS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AND MAY NOT BE DOWNLOADED, TRANSMITTED, PRINTED OR PERFORMED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

"Frank, Frank's Wife, Frank's Dog" debuted September 26, 1997.

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