The Prisoner of Vandam Street

by Kinky Friedman

  Chapter Twenty-three

  To feed a hummingbird,” I said softly to the cat. I was back in my bed, I supposed. The cat said nothing, I supposed. Pretty much what I’d expected, I supposed.

  It was very similar to being a child again, I thought. Waking up in the middle of the night and maybe you’d done something wrong or maybe you hadn’t. You weren’t sure. But you could hear the adults talking in the next room. And every word they spoke seemed to be so important, falling like a raindrop through the long dark night of childhood onto the window of your heart.

  “So how’d you get him into the soddin’ building, mate?”

  “I carried him,” said the confident voice with the warm, friendly Texas drawl. “I found him down the block lying in the gutter in the rain. I carried him back here and put him in bed. The best thing to do now is let him sleep.”

  “But how’d you get into the soddin’ building, mate? How’d you get into the soddin’ flat?”

  “Your security system’s a bit lax, and I don’t mean the airport. But there was really nothing to it. I don’t usually make a practice of breaking and entering, but I am a licensed detective and, in fact, I have my own agency in California. That’s the long, sort of banana-shaped state on the left coast of America. You’ve heard of America, haven’t you?”

  “We settled you, mate. Back several hundred years ago when we were all puritanical pilgrims just tryin’ to plow some Indian maidens.”

  “You didn’t do a very good job, mate,” said Piers Akerman’s booming voice. “Settling or plowing. You mucked up Australia as well.”

  “And don’t be fucking our maidens,” said McGovern loudly. “I’m part Indian, too.”

  “Which part, mate?” said Brennan.

  “This part,” said McGovern.

  The sounds of a large drunken Irishman and a small, scrappy, and equally drunken Brit scuffling in a loft beneath the pounding feet of a recently activated lesbian dance class could clearly be heard. After a few moments, however, cooler heads apparently prevailed. I could hear Kent Perkins’s calming voice bringing everything under control.

  “Fellas,” he said. “Fellas. This isn’t getting us anywhere. We all want the same thing, don’t we? To help the Kinkster get well and help him resolve his latest investigation and determine if, indeed, a crime has occurred. To do that we’ll have to all work together.”

  Kent, I knew, had several rules of investigation and interrogation and one of them he’d borrowed from my father. That was to always treat children like adults and adults like children, and it seemed to be working very well on this particular occasion. Listening to Kent from the bedroom, you might have thought he was speaking to a kindergarten class.

  “McGovern will fuck things up, mate,” piped up Mick Brennan.

  “No, I won’t, you poison dwarf!” responded McGovern. “You will!”

  “Bollocks!”

  “Now, now,” said Perkins soothingly. “This won’t get us anywhere. Let me tell you what Kinky was mumbling to me about as I carried him in from the rain.”

  “I wouldn’t put too much stock in it,” said Ratso. “The Kinkstah’s been mumbling weird shit ever since the day he got out of the hospital.”

  “Joan of Arc heard voices in her head,” said Kent. “As a result, she was able to save the entire nation of France.”

  “Pity,” said Ratso.

  “All right now,” said Kent. “Let’s focus in on the investigation. Since I met Piers years ago with Kinky in L.A., I’m going to make him second in command.”

  “That’s a mistake,” said McGovern. “He’s blind as a kangaroo.”

  “He’s one of those anti-Aussie bigots,” said Piers. “He can’t hear a word that’s been said.”

  “What?” said McGovern. “What about tickets to the Grateful Dead?”

  “See what I mean?” said Piers. “He’s a true no-hoper.”

  “All right now,” said Kent. “Piers will be second in command and Kinky’s told me wonderful things about you other Village Irregulars.”

  “Bollocks!” said Brennan. “You haven’t even talked to Kinky about us.”

  “Yes I have,” said Kent. “Kinky said you guys can can piss off a Good Humor Man. He says you’re the original gang who can’t shoot straight. He also says you’re the best, most loyal friends he’s got in the world and he wouldn’t hesitate to trust you with his life.”

  There was a long silence in the loft. Even the lesbian dance class seemed to stop in its tracks. The cat looked at me rather quizzically. I shrugged.

  “We’re doing this investigation for three reasons,” said Kent. “One is for Kinky. At a time when he’s so weak and delirious, he needs to have evidence that something of a criminal nature really is occurring across the street. In other words, his mental health and his own self-worth require some kind of proof that he’s not insane.”

  “What if he is, mate?” asked Brennan, not unreasonably.

  “Well,” said Kent, “does anyone here have any background in psychology?”

  “I do,” said Ratso. “I’ve got a master’s in psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.”

  “Why didn’t you go ahead and get your Ph.D.?” asked Kent.

  “A spider bit me on the scrotum,” said Ratso.

  “I see,” said Kent. “Well, you still have the most training of anyone here. We’ll certify you as house shrink. Do you think at this moment that Kinky’s insane?”

  There was silence for a longer time than I would have wished as Ratso evidently grappled with the question. At last, he came up with an answer that was not a strong vote of confidence for the general state of my mental hygiene.

  “No, I don’t think he’s really insane,” said Ratso, rather uncertainly. “At least not yet.”

  “Okay,” said Kent. “You watch him closely, Ratso. If you think we need to call in a shrink, we will. In the meantime, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Now the second reason for the investigation is that if there really is an abused woman across the street, her life may be in mortal danger. Sometimes you just have to have a knack for knowing if something’s worth doing, if someone’s worth loving, if an investigation’s worth taking on. I’ve brought a spotter scope and some other equipment out here with me, so obviously I believe this one is. Sometimes you can see things clearly in life and sometimes you just have to go with your gut instinct.

  “There was a guy I knew over thirty years ago named Joe back in Azle, Texas, outside of Fort Worth. He could lie on his back on the floor of a bar and spit chewin’ tobacco high enough to hit the ceiling. Joe was in the septic tank business and on his truck he had a sign that read: ‘Your Shit Is My Bread and Butter.’ ”

  “Where’s this going, mate?” asked Piers.

  “Yeah,” said McGovern, “what’s a slit who’s a ball-cutter got to do with this?”

  “ ‘Your Shit Is My Bread and Butter,’ ” repeated Kent.

  “Your clit runs a bed and breakfast?” asked McGovern, who was not only not hearing very well, but was also, apparently, drinking rather heavily.

  “Now another friend of mine back then,” continued Kent smoothly, “was a guy named Gary Lynn who started a printing business and on his truck he had a sign that said: ‘We Print Everything But Money.’ Well, the printing business was going a little slow so Gary thought he’d try his hand at printing twenty-dollar bills. And he got pretty good at it so one day he thought he’d see if he could pass them off for the real thing. He got in his truck and drove over a hundred miles up into Oklahoma and found this little gas station in this little town up there. He bought gas from the old man at the little station and bought some other stuff and paid for it all with one of the twenties. Then he got back in his truck and drove back to Azle where the cops were waiting to arrest him. What he didn’t know was that the old man had only recently bought that gas station because he’d gotten bored after retiring from his other job. His other job, to which he’d devoted most of his adult life,
was as a counterfeit investigator for the U.S. Treasury Department.”

  “What’s the moral of the story, mate?” said Brennan.

  “I told you this was a hard room to work,” said Piers.

  “The moral is,” said Kent with a bit of irritation, “some things are written on trucks so they can even be seen by shmucks.”

  “Hey!” shouted McGovern. “You said there were three reasons for the investigation. What’s the third?”

  “The third reason for the investigation is that you guys have made me so mad I’ll do it all by myself if I have to.”

  I could hear the murmur of the Village Irregulars as they consulted, chided, sucked, fucked, and cajoled each other. Finally, they spoke in turn.

  “I’ll help you,” said Ratso.

  “I’m with you, mate,” said Brennan.

  “I’m always with you, mate,” said Piers.

  “What fucking little leprechaun took the Jameson?” said McGovern.

  “All right,” said Kent. “We’ll spread out some sleeping bags and get some sleep tonight. But we hit the ground running tomorrow. You never know what’s going to happen when you get into an investigation. So what we do, we do with all our hearts.”

  A small cheer went up from the living room. It was rather poignant but very heartening for me to hear and it lifted my spirits considerably. Only the cat looked at me with doubt in her eyes.

  “So give it all you’ve got,” said Kent. “Remember what my daddy back in Texas used to say?”

  “What was that, mate?” said Brennan.

  “Never save your best shirt for Sunday,” said Kent.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The next morning Ratso brought me coffee, juice, and a few of my medications. He carried them into the bedroom on a tray, like a child might serve breakfast in bed to his mother on mother’s day. There was something so sad, so poignant about this act that it almost made me cry. Ratso never knew his birth mother, and his adoptive mother, Lilyan, was currently in a Florida nursing home. My mother had flown off with the hummingbirds in 1985. If the cat found anything touching about this little scenario of Ratso bringing in the coffee on a tray, she wasn’t showing any of her cards. She merely sat on the pillow next to me, glaring at Ratso as if he were a dog from hell.

  “Great news!” said Ratso. “Guess who’s setting up in the kitchen?”

  “Martha Stewart?”

  “Pete Myers! Myers of Keswick, Kinkstah! Brought about a month’s supply of British gourmet shit! Scones! Those little rolls with sausage in them! A whole side of beef! That hot British mustard you like!”

  “I’m not hungry, Ratso.”

  “Well, you should be, after that great escape you pulled last night. You weren’t really thinking—running out in the rain like that, were you, Kinkstah?”

  “I saw the girl. I saw the girl running. And her face was all bloody.”

  “Of course you did. Then apparently you must have passed out in the gutter. That’s where Kent Perkins found you.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “Hold the weddin’, Kinkstah. Kent said you were unconscious from the time he found you until the time he put you to bed. How’d you know about that?”

  “I happened to overhear your little war council last night.”

  “No one likes an eavesdropper, Kinkstah.”

  “I’m not a fucking eavesdropper! It’s my fucking loft!”

  “And you’re going to stay the fuck in it from now on until you’re well!”

  “We’ll see,” I said, winking broadly to the cat.

  The cat, of course, said nothing. But her baleful glare could have withered Ratso’s entire flea market wardrobe. Cats sometimes seem to forget their friends. But they never forget their enemies. And they might just be on to something there.

  “Just take it easy, Kinkstah,” said Ratso, in his best psychological, conciliatory tone. “Have some coffee. It’s not good to get too excited in your condition.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What’s all the racket in the living room?”

  “Kent and Mick are setting up the spottah scope, Pete’s grinding sausage, Piers is taking a shower, and McGovern’s snoring on the couch.”

  “Kent and Mick are setting up what?”

  “Some dingus Kent brought with him. The spottah scope.”

  “Oh. The spotter scope.”

  “That’s what I said, Kinkstah. The spottah scope.”

  “And here’s what I have to say, Ratso. At last, we’ll see.”

  It was later that morning when Kent Perkins came into my invalid’s quarters and told me that he thought it might be necessary to attempt to hypnotize me. I didn’t really have any strong religious opposition to the idea and, at this point, anything that might further the investigation was fine with me. Any personal risk or sacrifice would be fine, I told him. Anything for the team.

  Kent told me that he appreciated my attitude and that it was just barely possible that this particular rag-tag group of jaded, degenerate individuals might actually turn into a team. Either that, he said, or things were going to turn pretty ugly. Pretty ugly, indeed.

  “You know, Kent,” I said, as I shivered under several layers of comforters, “all of us working together on this investigation reminds me of a story our friend Ted Mann told me once. It’s about the famous ancient Greek sculptor Polyclitus.”

  “Polyclitus? Never heard of him.”

  “Neither had I. Only Ted Mann has heard of him. Anyway, he decided once that he’d create two statues at the same time, one of which he’d let the public watch and—interactively you might say—participate in its construction. The other, however, was a private affair, and he kept it wrapped in tarpaulins, and only worked on it late at night when he was alone.”

  “This sounds like a Ted Mann story.”

  “Anyway, as Polyclitus was working on the first statue, people would look at it and say: ‘You know, that thigh seems a little too short.’ And Polyclitus would dutifully lengthen the thigh of the statue. And people would say: ‘You know, you don’t have the eyes quite right.’ And Polyclitus would go to work on the statue’s eyes. And so on. Then, late at night, he’d work on the second statue all by himself. At any rate, he finished work on both pieces at about the same time and he took them out to the public square in Athens and mounted them, not sexually, of course, in the square for everybody to see.

  “When the public saw the first statue, the one he’d permitted them to have a hand in creating, they openly mocked and ridiculed it as an inferior piece of sculpture. But, ah, the second statue, the one he’d done on his own, this they hailed as a masterpiece, as a great transcendental work of art. And they asked Polyclitus, ‘How could it be that one statue was so good and the other was so bad?’ And Polyclitus answered: ‘Because I did this one, and you did that one.’ ”

  “And that’s why,” said Kent, “you’ll never see a statue erected to a committee.”

  “That’s also why,” I said, “you’ll never see a penis erected to a committee.”

  “Kiiinnnnnk.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  And thus it was, swaddled like the Baby Jesus, with my two disciples, Ratso and McGovern, supporting me in my weakened state, that I was ushered into the living room of the loft later that afternoon and placed rather delicately in a warm chair beside the roaring fire in the fireplace. I hadn’t been in the front room in a while and now I found the place to be humming with activity and kind of homey as well. Pete Myers was busily slicing thin, delicious-looking pieces of rare roast beef. Brennan was assiduously adjusting the tripod of the spotter scope, which now stood like a sentinel at the kitchen window. Kent Perkins was typing some information into his laptop at my desk. Almost as soon as I was placed in the chair, the cat jumped up in my lap and curled up and made herself comfortable there. I hated to say it, but I almost felt like I was at home.

  “Well,” said Piers, walking over with a large can of Foster’s in his large hand, “what’s
our next amusement?”

  “Our next amusement,” said Kent, “is I’m going to attempt to hypnotize Kinky and draw out a little more information about the battered woman he chased down on the street last night.”

  “That’s rich,” laughed Brennan. “Some bloke pounds the shite out of her and then she tries to run away and she sees this wild-eyed bloke in a black cowboy hat and red Indian blanket chasin’ after her in the rain.”

  “This wild-eyed bloke sitting peacefully by the fire here,” said Kent, “might just unknowingly hold the key to saving that poor woman’s life.”

  “Garrison Keillor’s made of cat shit,” I said.

  “Holds the key to saving her life?” said Brennan. “Not likely, mate.”

  “Give the man a chance, lad,” said Pete Myers, as he arranged the counter into a sumptuous buffet worthy of an English manor house. “The human mind holds secrets within secrets.”

  “The only secrets the Kinkstah’s ever kept,” said Ratso, “are the ones he’s forgotten.”

  “Those are precisely the ones we’re going to try to find,” said Kent, as he got out from behind the desk and advanced confidently toward the fireplace. “Are you ready, Kink, to do a little bit of time traveling?”

  “Orson Welles is made of cat shit,” I said.

  “He means H. G. Wells,” said Piers. “He wrote The Time Machine. George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, which this loft is rapidly coming to resemble.”

  “At least he got the ‘Wells’ part right,” said Kent. “Let’s see what else he remembers.”

  With that, Kent reached over to the fireplace mantel and smoothly removed the little wooden puppethead. He swung it back and forth a few times like a pendulum, holding the parachute between his thumb and index finger.