The Prisoner of Vandam Street

by Kinky Friedman

  “I heard you,” said McGovern petulantly.

  Maybe it was just the ying and yang of the everyday world, but as McGovern’s hearing seemed to fall into periods of inefficiency, so my fever seemed to rise and with it I quite naturally rose into heights of delirium. So we had a deaf man trying to communicate with a delusional man regarding getting into a building in which at this very moment a man with large Jewish buttocks was probably sitting on the davenport eating the cheeks—and they are regarded as delicacies—out of a large, braised fish head.

  “Let’s go with plan B,” I said.

  “Good as can be!” said McGovern, giving me the thumbs up.

  “Plan B!” I shouted. “We get help to get us in the building from a passing lesbian.”

  “What? Say again? Thespian? There’s a new play coming to town?”

  “There’s always a new play coming to town, McGovern,” I said angrily. “We live in New York.”

  “I know that,” he shouted. “You don’t have to bite my head off! You don’t have to talk to me like I’m a child!”

  While very little light was produced by this particular tension convention, enough heat was generated apparently to attract the ear of one Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who promptly threw open my fourth-floor kitchen window and shouted down: “It’s about time! I was getting worried about you guys.”

  “He’s worried about getting flies?” asked McGovern.

  “That’s right,” I said, feeling a swoon coming on. “The loft’s probably about knee-deep by now in cat shit.”

  “Don’t start that cat shit shit again! I’ll tell Dr. Pickaninny.”

  “That’s Dr. Skinnipipi,” I said.

  “Same to you,” said McGovern.

  During this last bleak effort at social intercourse, Ratso had thrown down the puppethead with the key in its mouth, and it now sailed like a schooner, its American flag parachute billowing beautifully over the garbage trucks, garbage cans, miscellaneous detritus, and, well—cat shit—that were endemic to Vandam Street. McGovern caught up with the puppethead just as it grazed the cab of a slow-moving garbage truck. The driver of the garbage truck was mildly amused at seeing such a large Irishman in hot pursuit of such a small puppethead, but the incident did not deter him from his duties. When you drive a garbage truck in New York, sooner or later you see everything. I remember back in Texas people often used to ask my old friend Slim, who was bugled to Jesus long before the term “African-American” was invented, why his cats always got into their garbage cans. Slim invariably gave them the same answer: “They wants to see the world.”

  McGovern got the key and opened the front door of the building, then Ratso came down the stairs to help walk me up to the loft. With an arm around each of their shoulders, I slowly, painfully, made it up all four flights, a journey I never would have accomplished on my own steam. God bless the Village Irregulars, I thought. On the one arm I had the niggardly, slovenly, ever loyal Ratso. On the other I had the irritating gentile optimism of McGovern. They were two towers of strength for me then, in many ways like the two no longer there, consigned for always and ever to the hearts of anyone who calls himself New Yorker. God bless the Village Irregulars, I thought. All the millions of them.

  Chapter Nine

  As I had feared, the sights and smells and sounds that greeted us as we entered the loft were not pleasant. Ratso had run ahead of McGovern and myself as we’d reached the fourth landing just to, as he said, “straighten up a bit.” Even in my fevered, delirious state I could easily see that Ratso was himself either very deeply deluded or he was greatly exaggerating his ability to put lipstick on the pig. Before I could even see past McGovern’s large body, I could hear that all was not well.

  “Get away! Get away!” screamed Ratso. “Get away, you noxious vapor!”

  The cat howled and scurried somewhere deeper into the bowels of the loft. An angry, out-of-breath Ratso appeared almost magically in the doorway.

  “Your fucking cat just vomited in my new fucking backpack!” he shouted in exasperated rage.

  I didn’t need this. I was swaying on my feet as it was and I’d forgotten or repressed the rather ugly, acrimonious relationship that had long existed between Ratso and the cat. For reasons beyond mortal ken, the cat had always resented and despised Ratso. Ratso did not handle this situation particularly well, and his venomous outbursts invariably only served, if possible, to further irritate the cat. Animals may not understand the words you say to them, but they instinctively understand the tone, and they never forget. They also know a snitch when they see one. Over the years I’d done my best not to pick sides between Ratso and the cat, and now, it seemed, in my weakened state, I was about to reap an almost biblical harvest of hatred. Since the cat was nowhere in sight, I clung to the base of the espresso machine for support and tried to reason with Ratso.

  “When a cat vomits in your backpack,” I began patiently, “it is rarely an indication of malice or rancor on the part of the animal. It merely means that the cat is sick or nervous or distressed by circumstances beyond her control, which I’m certain merit the empathy and understanding of everyone in this room.”

  “What happened to the bottle of Jameson’s?” said McGovern, rummaging wildly through the cupboard.

  “The cat,” said Ratso, barely concealing the note of triumph in his voice, “deliberately knocked over the bottle and it broke.”

  “What?” shouted McGovern. “Say again? We’re out of coke?”

  “Now, had the cat,” I continued, “taken a Nixon in your backpack—”

  “The cat shit in my red antique shoe when I stayed here before!”

  “Yes, yes, Watson,” I said, feeling feverish as Sherlock on a 7 percent solution. “The shoe in question once having belonged to a dead man, as I recall.”

  “His whole wardrobe once belonged to dead people,” said McGovern, demonstrating once more a degree of selective hearing.

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “if the cat had shit in Ratso’s backpack, a personal vendetta might have been in play, but vomiting hardly ever can be construed a spiteful act. Let it go, my dear Watson. It’s cat piss under the bridge, as we used to say at the old Diogenes Club.”

  “Look, Kinkstah,” said Ratso, “Dr. Skinnipipi made it quite clear that you’re not to exert yourself. He says that bed rest is the only—”

  “Fuck Dr. Skinnipipi and the stethoscope he rode in on,” I said. “Turn on the lights, will you?”

  “They’re already on, Kinkstah,” said Ratso. “And now I think it’s time for you to get some rest. Come on, Kinkstah. Let us help you to the bedroom.”

  As both red phones on either side of my desk began violently clamoring, Ratso and McGovern assisted my journey to the bedroom. Without their help, I believe it surely would have been impossible. When we reached the doorway, I almost collapsed. I’d apparently underestimated just how very weak I was. I was so weak, indeed, that I forgot the instinctive Jewish reaction to always answer a telephone no matter what else I was doing at the time.

  The only blight on the horizon, I now saw, was a fairly dry-looking cat turd perfectly centered upon my pillow. This rather unsavory vision stopped the three of us in our tracks and gave us, as it were, food for thought.

  “Looks like the cat’s an equal opportunity defecator,” said Ratso, with grim disapproval in his tone.

  “It’s about time they fixed the elevator,” responded McGovern. “It’s hell always having to walk up four flights.”

  Ratso winked at me broadly, removed the offending pillowcase, and went in search of a fresh one. Even a person in my condition, or possibly especially a person in my condition, is aware of the importance of the little things in life. A cat turd perfectly positioned on a pillow, I suppose, is not often regarded as very important in the general scheme of the world. It does, however, undeniably indicate that somewhere, somehow, some way, someone misses you.

  Chapter Ten

  I had a lot of time on my hands and I was
not afraid to use it. Unfortunately, the only thing I could use most of it for was sleeping, but I have long ago determined that sleeping may be one of the best uses of time any of us ever find during our brief sublet on this planet. Hours went by, days, weeks, possibly years. I was not well. Merely being discharged from a horsepital does not guarantee health and happiness. Quite the contrary, in fact. I still had all manner of sensory delusions. When the phones rang, for instance, which seemed to occur just about every three minutes, the whole loft appeared to become engulfed with the vibrations of a giant oriental gong. I had no idea, of course, who was calling, why they were calling, or if they were ever answered. I was too busy sleeping to be bothered much by external details. Indeed, it is quite true that often I was totally unable to discern whether or not I was truly sleeping, or possibly dreaming, or merely experiencing what, in a healthier, more normal state, I might have blithely called reality.

  Reality. I recalled in lucid flashes what an old British ex-pat once told me when I was in the Peace Corps in the jungles of Borneo. He’d experienced a long and lingering case of malaria, a disease that seemed as foreign to me then as eating monkey brains, a delicacy I was soon to acquiesce to, so as not to be rude to my hosts, a nomadic tribe of pygmies called the Punans. Now I was experiencing malaria myself, albeit many years after my return from the jungle, and, amidst fever and shaking chills, I was trying desperately to remember exactly what the Brit had told me regarding malaria and reality. I could hear his voice, or maybe it was just Ratso speaking slowly, articulating each syllable with a thick British accent. What had the Brit said to me so many years ago as we sat beside a coffee-colored river near the little town of Long Lama? I had it for a moment, then I lost it, then I grasped it desperately with the gnarled fingers of my mind and I knew I’d gotten it right. “Malaria,” the Brit had said, “is the only way one can see the world as it really is.”

  And I saw it, all right. A ghastly procession of friends passing by my bedside like half-human phantoms in a dream. Were they real? Was anything real? Were they Kayan witches in wooden canoes called prahus rowing up the Baram River like a deadly tidal bore where the water level rises suddenly and sweeps away everything in its path? Witches had ahold of me now with their icy fingers, and I pulled the great purple comforter up over my head and still I felt a great wave of shaking chills and the loft was filled with ice and evil and I could see that their hair was all Medusalike and their eyes were those of wild animals in the deepest ulu looking past my dreams to the place I would drop off the ruai of the world and die. And the witches smile their cold, crooked little smiles as if they knew all the while that your heart would shiver and break like a frozen shadow falling into the eternal emptiness of the sun-dappled ulu. And the witches’ ears stretch down, past their heads and faces, pulled down by many hoops of ornamental iron, and the ears begin to flap, and the witches drop their oars and begin to fly right out of their prahus, right out of their coffee-colored river, and they fly into your mouth and nostrils and ears and anus and up the little hole at the business end of your pee-pee, and they bore into your soul and you realize at the end of your struggle that every witch is a shiver and every shiver is a witch.

  “Well, fuck me dead, mate!”

  Clear as a bell I heard the familiar Australian accent flowing across my ravaged body and sweat-soaked sheets like balm from a gum tree on a warm night under the Southern Cross. The loud stentorian voice could only belong to one human being on the entire planet, and that was impossible. My old friend Piers Akerman should’ve been ten thousand miles away in Sydney. Was I just dead or just dreaming? What was he doing right here in my bedroom?

  “Piers!” I shouted deliriously. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Drinking, of course, mate.”

  I looked over and I saw that Piers was not speaking idly. In his hands were a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey and two glasses, which he promptly filled, placing one into my trembling hand and the other to his large, smiling lips. He drained the glass, belched with satisfaction, and poured himself another hefty shot.

  “I don’t like to say anything, mate,” said Piers, “but who’s in charge of this operation? Your primary care-giver, as I understood from Brennan, is McGovern, and he appears to be passed out on your living room floor.”

  “How’d you get in?” I asked, the Jameson’s already seeming to have a positive medicinal effect upon my malady. “What are you doing in New York?”

  “Actually, I was in Colorado on a top secret mission for Rupert Murdoch when I got a message from Brennan that you were gravely ill. Are you, mate?”

  “How the hell should I know? I’ve got malaria, I’ve been confined to the loft on the doctor’s orders, and I’ve been dreaming of witches.”

  “And McGovern’s your primary care-giver. I fed the cat, by the way. She seems to have deposited a large Nixon upon somebody’s backpack. It’s within the realm of possibility, of course, that McGovern himself was the Nixon depositor, but it appears most likely that it was the cat. Who does the backpack belong to?”

  “Ratso. He said he was going to play hockey.”

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning, mate.”

  “That’s when he plays hockey. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s the way of his people.”

  “Look, mate,” said Piers, with a worried expression on his face. He didn’t say anything else for a moment or two and it gave me just time enough to realize that I’d never seen Piers with a worried expression on his face. In my life, he was the first person I’d ever heard say, “No worries, mate.” He could be abrasive, domineering, and, as a woman in Perth once told me at a cocktail party: “I find Piers Akerman quite tiresome.” But he was also brilliant, loyal, kind, and extremely funny. Now, he just looked plain worried. And this, of course, had me rather worried as well.

  “Ah, look, mate,” said Piers again, “I’ll just get my things from the hotel and camp out here with you for a few days. With McGovern, Brennan, and Ratso looking after you, I reckon the situation might require a spot of outside help. The Village Irregulars, I’m afraid, are once again demonstrating their innate abilities to be, for want of a better word, irregular.”

  After Piers had left to collect his stuff from the hotel, I found myself feeling surprisingly better and I left my bed for my first unaccompanied trip to the dumper. I had to step over McGovern, who, as Piers had averred, was snoring away on the floor of the living room. The cat followed me to the dumper just to be sure I could make it on my own. It felt good to know that Piers would be “camping out” at the loft. As much as I loved McGovern, Ratso, and Brennan, I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to trust that terrible trio with my life. Coming back to the bedroom after a successful urinary effort, the cat following faithfully behind, I began to have my first doubts about what might possibly lie ahead. I did not like the feeling of being almost totally dependent upon others. I knew also that Piers was a party animal practically at the McGovern level himself. I could imagine some interesting times ahead. But never in my wildest dreams could I have anticipated what was about to occur in my loft and in my life.

  “Well,” I said to the cat, as I got back under the comforter, “I suppose a little company isn’t going to hurt us.”

  The trip to the dumper had weakened me considerably, but I was able to gaze down and observe the cat sitting stoically on the foot of the bed. She was looking at me with pity in her eyes. “Poor human beings,” she seemed to say. “They never do quite get it right.”

  Chapter Eleven

  One of the interesting things about an illness like malaria, in which you float from altered state to altered state, is that you never know if something that has just happened is really something that has just happened. As the fever overtook me again, I found myself deeply troubled by the practical unlikelihood of Piers’s visit. I wondered if my old friend from down under had actually been in my loft at all. The only witness other than the cat, of course, was McGovern, and he d
idn’t seem to be revealing too many cards at the moment. I would, apparently, be forced to wait to see if Piers returned, no doubt carrying a large tucker bag and many bottles of grog. Or maybe, even now, he was peacefully sailing on a yacht somewhere off the Great Barrier Reef. Maybe he hadn’t really been in my bedroom at all.

  These are the kinds of thoughts that will drive a sane man crazy and sometimes cause a crazy man to see a world that even a sailor never gets the chance to see. It is a world of the mind, a world of the restless, troubled spirit, a world every bit as real as any other that man has yet been able to invent. It is there for the asking, in fact. All you have to do is acquire a severe case of lurid, lingering, lonely malaria. Fevered thoughts of any manner can be interrupted, however, when a large, half-Irish, half-Indian, drunk and incoherent journalist comes reeling in the most dangerous and disoriented fashion into one’s little sickroom screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “I had a dream!” shouted McGovern. The cat bolted for the living room and the relative safety of the davenport.

  “Kayan witches?” I inquired, shivering at the thought.

  “Say again?” said McGovern, leaning forward and almost falling on top of me. “Lyin’ bitches?”

  “Forget it, McGovern,” I said, losing all patience with him. “What the hell did you have a dream about? Did you dream of Jeannie with the light tan folks? Did you dream you saw Joe Hill last night? Did you dream of little white children and little black children playing together?”

  “You don’t have to make fun of me,” said McGovern with growing belligerence. “My dreams are just as important as anybody else’s.”

  “Fine. So what the hell did you dream about?”

  “I dreamed a large kangaroo came hopping into the loft.”

  “That’s not so far off the mark,” I said.