The Prisoner of Vandam Street

by Kinky Friedman

  Brennan had been through about a case of Guinness that afternoon and it hadn’t seemed to slow him down a bit. If anything, he seemed slightly more dignified than usual. This was saying a lot for Mick because he did not suffer dignity gladly.

  “The real question, Mick, is whether you care to get to the bottom of this mess or not?”

  “You mean the flat, mate? It’s a true no-hoper. You’d have to dig through twelve archaeological layers of cat shite to get to the bottom of it. You’d probably find Troy and Atlantis on the way.”

  “I always kind of liked Hector and the Trojans. I would’ve liked to have fought with the Myrmidons. They were ants transformed into soldiers. I’d like to have hosed Helen. I don’t know if I’d have enjoyed listening to Achilles always complaining about his heel.”

  “Bet the Trojans would be proud to know they have a gumboot named after ’em.”

  “But what about Helen of New York? What’s happening to her may be a crime that goes unnoticed by history. And she lives right across the street.”

  “So you still believe in your fair lady, mate? Maybe the little treacle really exists. I’ll give you that, mate. Let’s say she does. Not much we can do about it, is there?”

  “Maybe there is, Mick.”

  “Like what, mate?”

  “If nothing else, my dear Watson, we can rescue her from Troy.”

  “Sod the Trojans, mate. I thought we were speaking about Helen of New York, weren’t we?”

  “There’s only one Helen, Watson. She represents all womankind and it is the job of mankind to see she is not forever left to twist in the wind on some archaic tenement clothesline, strung out like a medieval banner, hanging there helpless between the sooty alleyways of truth and vermouth.”

  “Cut the rubbish, Kink. When you start spouting all this Watson shite, it always worries me.”

  “Et tu, Watson?”

  “Sod Watson, I said! You’re crook, mate. We’re trying to get you well, aren’t we? Your bloke better pop in soon or you’ll find yourself back in hospital. And this time your room may have rubber walls.”

  “If it’s good enough for van Gogh, it’s good enough for the Kinkster.”

  But Brennan wasn’t listening. He’d already placed a fresh can of Guinness in his coat pocket and was headed for the door. The cat and I received his parting words in stoic silence.

  “If your cowboy bloke doesn’t get here soon,” he said from the doorway, “he may as well not come at all. I owe it to you to tell you, Ratso and Akerman have been scheming with that sawbones Skinnipipi. I’d say your days here are numbered, mate. Just a word to the wise, innit?”

  After the door closed behind Brennan’s low-to-the-ground, wise Irish ass, the cat and I looked at each other. We’d been expecting something like this, so it was no surprise to either of us really.

  “Too bad they don’t make Gourmet Last Supper cat food,” I said.

  The cat, of course, said nothing. Cats do not like to be doublecrossed by people they thought were their friends and they see no humor in this traitorous behavior whatsoever. Indeed, they see no humor in anything whatsoever. That’s why we call them cats. That’s why they don’t trust anybody. That’s why they never laugh at their own jokes.

  Darkness was falling on the city and it seemed to be falling on my life as well. I glanced over at the ragged old davenport and I noticed that McGovern had left the building. It was almost uncanny how a large human being like McGovern could slip away like a thief in the night and not be observed by a great detective like myself. Maybe I was missing something. Maybe I was not seeing things clearly. Maybe I was already crazier than the guy who thinks he’s Napoleon.

  “What if I am Napoleon?” I said to the cat.

  The cat did not respond. Or maybe she did respond. However you chose to look at it, the question was barely out of my mouth when she launched herself almost violently into a new campaign of licking her anus.

  “Stop licking your anus!” I shouted. The cat, of course, said nothing. This did not terribly surprise me. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to speak when you’re busy licking your anus.

  “Why?” I cried. “Why are you doing it? Is it because you don’t like rhetorical questions or because you don’t like dictators?”

  The cat now stretched and began walking rather dismissively away from me and toward the kitchen window. I got out of the chair and followed, continuing to try to reason with her. There was already enough misunderstanding in the loft and the world, I felt.

  “Why can’t we all just get along?” I asked.

  It was, of course, another rhetorical question. It wasn’t even original. What was the matter with me, I wondered? Why did I continue to constantly hector the cat with rhetorical questions when I knew very well how much she despised them? It wasn’t easy being a cat, I reflected. Dead dictators hated you for being independent. Sanctimonious Buddhists refused to include you in religious paintings of the animal kingdom. Delirious, wild-eyed cowboy Jews from Texas followed you around badgering you with rhetorical questions. Dogs barked, cars roared, garbage trucks grumbled. Large mammals came into your home and never left. Hell, whatever happened to playing with a ball of yarn?

  I stood at the kitchen window, looking down at another narrow, lonely Vandam Street night, while dawning in my troubled mind was the realization that anyone who spends his time futilely attempting to empathize with an antisocial cat must, indeed, be sicker than he thinks. It was just about at that moment that I saw her. She was running down the middle of the street toward Hudson. She was running like a crazy woman. I didn’t need the opera glasses to know, perhaps instinctively, that she was the same one I’d seen before.

  I glanced quickly at the building across the street. The light was on again in the apartment. Inside, I could see a dark, ill-defined figure pacing back and forth like a man in a cage, like the Wild Man from Borneo, doomed, determined, desperate to break out into the smoky night.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  They say an apple a day keeps a doctor away. Sometimes in life, however, it takes a little bit more than that. I was well enough to realize that leaving the loft would be against the doctor’s orders and would further exacerbate my condition, not to mention my relationship with officious bastards like Ratso, McGovern, Brennan, and Piers Akerman. Nevertheless, I was sick enough to instinctively recognize when another soul was in trouble like myself. The girl on the street was obviously not running to catch a bus. She was clearly, to my mind, running for her very life.

  I rummaged through the closet, found my old brightly colored Indian jacket and my cowboy hat and boots. The cat stared at me rather quizzically as I hurriedly put on these disparate articles. It was an ensemble that the cat evidently did not appreciate, for she gave a slight, dismissive mew of distaste and walked off in the direction of Ratso’s backpack, which, for all practical purposes, had become her happy dumping ground. Cats, as a rule, do not like cowboys. They do, however, heavily empathize with Indians. I’ve often said, in fact, that all cats are Indians and all dogs are cowboys. Whenever I say this, people usually look at me like I’ve got a nail in my head. People don’t often have big spirits, but most cowboys, Indians, dogs, and cats do. Jerry Lewis, small spirit; Dean Martin, big spirit. The smallest spirits of all, of course, belong to the throngs of German tourists who congregate around American Indian reservations, possibly attempting to heal their psychic wound and suck out the soul they don’t inherently possess. If they really knew anything about Indians they’d no doubt realize that Indians do not believe much in ownership or possession. Indians, for instance, do not believe you can own land, or a river, or a dog, or a horse. The only things Indians truly believe you can own are casinos.

  You might think that all the above is a fairly involved and convoluted thought process for one to be going through while attempting to get dressed quickly in order to attempt the rescue of a damsel in distress. You’d be wrong again. The busier one is, the busier is one’s mind. And
though one’s movements may be frantic, one’s mind may sail true as an arrow. And the unaimed arrow never misses. Especially when it’s flying through one’s brain at one hundred miles an hour and one has malaria. Too many ones, innit? “You” is better than “one,” innit? Let’s all go back to you. It’s all about you anyway, innit? It’s never about me. It’s always about you. And at least I realized that I was crazy.

  To stand at a window dressed in an Indian jacket and a cowboy hat was crazy. To see a lighted apartment across the street and believe some form of evil was emanating from the place was crazy. To grab a cigar out of Sherlock Holmes’s head was crazy. To leave the cat in charge was crazy. To have care-givers who were all out getting drunk because they couldn’t take care of themselves was crazy. To go against your doctor’s orders when you’re seriously ill was crazy. And at last I realized that I was not crazy. I was, I now believed, quite sane, indeed.

  “I’m the only sane man on this train!” I shouted to the cat from the doorway.

  The cat, of course, said nothing at all. She knew I was crazy.

  All of this took only a matter of moments, and in a few moments more, I was out of the loft, down the stairs, and out of the building for what seemed like the first time since Christ was a cowboy. The cold outside air hit me about the same time as I glanced up at the building across the street. The woman had not been gone long at all, yet the lighted window now seemed to be calling to her through my brain. “Come back, you rotten cunt!” it screamed, seeming to pulsate horror into a world already pregnant with the stuff. I caught myself walking almost robotically toward the building with the intent in mind evidently to throttle the bastard on the third floor. Before I got there, my rational mind convinced my malarial sensibilities that this strategy at this time was probably not best foot forward.

  “Go after the girl,” said a voice in my head.

  “Get back here you fucking bitch!” said another voice.

  “You’re doing fine, sonny boy,” said the voice of my father.

  “Kiiinnnnk,” said the voice of Kent Perkins.

  I ran then, like the wind I was married to. I ran right down the middle of the street toward Hudson, the same direction the girl had run. As I ran I felt the fever running through my soul, carrying me along toward delirium or destiny, or maybe these two imposters inhabited the same scruffy corner of the nighttime street. As I ran I saw dogs and cats and Indians and cowboys and angels. But I could not see the girl.

  I ran for miles through a fog-shrouded uncrowded nocturnal valley where newspaper pages blew around the sky like giant tropical leaves that had fallen from trees made of steel. I searched and searched for a woman and saw only gutters and trash and neon lights and windows behind which lived possible people. I saw a black man walk a white dog. I saw a cake someone had left out in the rain. I saw a rat running next to me and I asked the rat if he’d seen a woman and he said he never could see a woman and if they didn’t have pussies there’d be a bounty on them and he said I looked like I could use a good meal would I like some spare cheese and I said no thanks I had an apple on the train. Then the rat got into a Mercedes and drove away and I was alone again running, falling, looking for eyes in the city of night.

  “Taxi!” said a woman with roulette eyes and a necklace of garbage cans. “Taxi!”

  But there was no taxi. Only lights and wheels and pain and a woman.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  Her face had blood. Her eyes had tears. Her voice had sadness.

  “Why are you following me?” she said.

  “I saw you,” I said, feeling pain in my heart and in my head. “I saw you in the window.”

  She was the same woman. A different night. A different street. A different man. But she was the same woman. Her eyes remembered.

  “Let me help you,” I said, reaching for her arm.

  “Go away,” she said. “Everything’s fine. I don’t need your help.”

  “If you go back,” I said, “he’ll only hurt you worse.”

  She ran away from me then and I ran and I fell and it started to rain and everything was fine.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A wise old man named Slim, who wore a paper Rainbow Bread cap, drank warm Jax beer in infinite quantities, listened faithfully on the radio to the hapless Houston Astros, and washed dishes at our family’s ranch, once told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said: “You’re born alone and you die alone so you might as well get used to it.” It didn’t mean much to me then, but over the years I’ve come to believe that old Slim might have been on to something.

  I live alone now in the lodge my late parents once lived in, and I’m getting used to it. Being a member of the Orphan Club is not so bad. Sooner or later, fate will pluck us all up by our pretty necks. If you have a family of your own, maybe you won’t feel it quite as much. Or maybe you will. I’m married to the wind and my children are my animals and the books I’ve written, and I love them all. I don’t play favorites. But I miss my mom and dad. In the past fifty years, thousands of kids have known them as Uncle Tom and Aunt Min. They bought our ranch in 1952, named it Echo Hill, and made it into a camp for boys and girls. Echo Hill will be open again this summer, but though the kids will ride horses, swim in the river, and explore the hills and canyons, they will not get to meet Uncle Tom and Aunt Min.

  My mother died in May 1985, just a few weeks before camp started, and my father died in August 2002, just a few weeks after camp was over. I can still see my mother at her desk, going over her cluttered clipboard filled with all the camp rosters, schedules, and menus. I can see her at the Navajo campfire, at the big hoe-down on the tennis courts, at the friendship circle under the stars. I can see my dad wearing a pith helmet and waving to the kids in the charter buses through the dust of the years. I can see him raising the flag in the morning, slicing the watermelon at picnic suppers, sitting in a lawn chair out in front of the lodge, and talking patiently with a kid having problems with his bunkmates. If you saw him sitting quietly there, you’d think he was talking to one of his old friends. Many of them became just that.

  I don’t know how many baby fawns ago it was, how many stray dogs and cats ago, or how many homesick kids ago who came to see Echo Hill as their home, but fifty years is a long time in camp years. Yet time, as they say, is the money of love. And Tom and Min put a lot of all those things into Echo Hill. Most of their adult lives were given over to children, daddy-long-legs, arrowheads, songs, and stars. They lived in a little green valley surrounded by gentle hills, where the sky was as blue as the river, the river ran pure, the waterfalls sparkled clear in the summer sun, and the campfire embers seemed to never really die. I was just a kid then, but looking back, that’s the way I remember it.

  But what I remember most of all are the hummingbirds. It might have been in 1953 when my mother hung out the first hummingbird feeder on the front porch of the lodge. The grown-up, outside world liked Ike that year and loved Lucy, and Hank Williams died, as did Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I believe now that I might have been vaguely aware of these things occurring even back then, but it was those tiny wondrous rainbows of flying color that really caught my eye. Those first few brave hummingbirds had come thousands of miles, all the way from Mexico and Central America, just to be with us at Echo Hill. Every year the hummers would make this long migration, arriving almost precisely on March 15, the Ides of March. They would leave late in the summer, their departure date usually depending upon how much fun they had at camp.

  For those first few years, in the early fifties, the hummingbird population, as well as the number of campers, was fairly sparse, but as the green summers flashed by, more and more kids and hummingbirds came to Echo Hill. The hummingbirds nested every year in the same juniper tree next to the lodge. Decades later, after my mother’s death, the tree began to die as well. Yet even when there were only a few green branches left, the hummers continued to make that tree their summer home. Some of the staff thought the tree was an e
yesore and more than once offered to cut it down, but Tom wouldn’t hear of it. I think he regarded the hummingbirds as little pieces of my mother’s soul.

  My father and I more or less took over the hummingbird program together in 1985. As time went by, we grew into the job. It was amazing how creatures so tiny could have such a profound influence upon your peace of mind and the way you looked at the world. My father, of course, did many other things besides feeding the hummingbirds. I, unfortunately, did not. That was how I gradually came to be known as the Hummingbird Man of Echo Hill.

  Tom and I disagreed, sometimes almost violently, about the feeding methods for these fragile little creatures. He measured exactly four scoops of sugar and two drops of red food coloring into the water for each feeder. I eyeballed the whole process, using much more sugar and blending many weird colors into the mix. Whatever our disagreements over methodology, the hummer population grew. This past summer, it registered more than a hundred birds at “happy hour.” Tom confided in me that once long ago he mixed a little gin in with the hummers’ formula and they seemed to have a particularly lively happy hour. Min was not happy about it, however, and firmly put a stop to this practice.

  Some bright cold mornings I stand in front of the old lodge, squinting into the brittle Hill Country sunlight, hoping, I suppose, for an impossible glimpse of a hummingbird or of my father or mother. They’ve all migrated far away, and the conventional wisdom is that only the hummingbirds are ever coming back. Yet I still see my mother hanging up that first feeder. The juniper tree blew down in a storm two winters ago, but the hummers have found other places to nest. One of them is in my heart.

  And I still see my dad sitting under the dead juniper tree, only the tree doesn’t seem dead, and neither does he. It takes a big man to sit there with a little hummingbird book, taking the time to talk to a group of small boys. He’s telling them that there are over three hundred species of hummingbirds. They are the smallest of all birds, he says, and also the fastest. They’re also, he tells the kids, the only birds who can fly backward. The little boys seem very excited about the notion of flying backward. They’d like to try that themselves, they say. So would I.