Lunatics

by Dave Barry

  And when we say a man’s home, we can legally interpret that to include the man’s property, meaning his yard, his sidewalk, and—you will see later why this is important—his swale. A man’s swale is his castle, especially if he mows it and fertilizes it, which I do. My swale would not be out of place at Augusta National.

  So here is what happened:

  I was upstairs, lying on my bed watching SportsCenter. (This is off topic, but: Has there been an NBA highlight in the past seventeen years where a player scored a basket and he didn’t travel? I mean, since these are professional basketball players getting paid millions of dollars, shouldn’t they have to dribble the fucking basketball once in a while? Whereas in your modern NBA, a guy can be nowhere near the basket, he’s basically still in the locker room, and suddenly he runs to the basket carrying the ball like it’s a ham sandwich, and after three hundred steps he dunks it, and instead of getting whistled for traveling, he gets on SportsCenter. And before you think what I think you’re going to think, I’m saying they all do this, including the white guys.)

  Suddenly I heard this shout from Taylor’s room: “Buddy! No!!”

  Taylor named the lemur Buddy. She thinks it’s a male, even though there’s no way to tell by looking at it. I did not give her permission to keep Buddy because Donna would kill us both (I mean me and Buddy). But I did say Taylor could have Buddy in her room until the next day, when I would figure out how to get rid of him. Donna, after Category 5 whining from Taylor, had agreed that okay, Buddy could stay one night in Taylor’s room, but Taylor was to keep him up there and not let him get anywhere near the Oprah book-and-wine group.

  So I jumped off the bed and hustled down to Taylor’s room, where she was freaking out in the direction of her canopy. Back when Taylor was in her princess phase, what she really really wanted, more than anything in the whole wide world, was for her bed to have a canopy. It cost $450, and ten minutes after we got it, Taylor was done with the princess phase and on to the next phase, which I think was Hannah Montana. But she still has the canopy, and Buddy had climbed up on it for the purpose of taking a dump. It turns out that lemurs, in their native environment, are tree dwellers; they like to have some altitude when they relieve themselves. So Buddy was perched up there, dropping long, droopy squirts of lemur shit onto Taylor’s bedspread, which is currently a Justin Bieber model.

  “Why did you let it out of the cage?” I asked Taylor.

  “Because he wanted out!” she said.

  “He wanted out so he could go to the bathroom!”

  “Well, I didn’t know that!” She said this with that voice that women develop at a very early age, the one where whatever happens—the cable goes out, they have a headache, a lemur is shitting on the bed—it’s your fault.

  I went to grab Buddy, but here’s the thing: A lemur is basically a monkey. It has, like, ten million years of experience with not being captured. So I’m lunging around Taylor’s room, trying to grab this thing, but it’s skittering around like a big hairy mosquito, up on the light fixture, down on the floor, up on the bureau, back up on the canopy, and every time I go to grab it, it’s gone.

  One mistake I made, and this is something you should bear in mind if you ever find yourself in this situation: You should close the door. I realized this when Buddy skittered into the hall and headed for the stairs. I was right behind him, but I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you’re Randy Moss. (Or some equally fast white guy.) You’re not going to catch a fucking lemur.

  Here was the situation downstairs, as it was later explained to me by Donna after she had calmed down a little and stopped talking about removing my balls with a corkscrew:

  The women were no longer discussing Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. It turned out that, of the seventeen of them, exactly one, Jeanette Keebler, actually read the entire book, and she wasn’t sure what it was about. So after several minutes, the ladies had dropped literature and switched over to the topic of breast enhancement. At some point, this became a general discussion of the human body, and at some further point diabetes came up, and Denise Rodecker, who had had several, maybe four, glasses of wine, decided she would show everybody her insulin pump. This is a little gadget that looks kind of like a beeper, which pumps insulin into a person, in this case Denise Rodecker. She unhooked it from herself and, as it happened, was showing it to the Freedom discussion group at the exact moment when Buddy skittered down the stairs.

  Here’s another fact about lemurs: They are very curious. When they see something interesting, they want to check it out. Don’t ask me why, but of all the things in the living room at that particular moment, including a wide range of hors d’oeuvres, the thing that was most interesting to Buddy was Denise’s insulin pump. It was like a magic trick: Denise is holding her pump up in front of everybody, and there’s this blur, and, bam, Denise is holding nothing, and there’s Buddy up on the window fixture with the pump in those little hands he has, studying it like it’s a Crown Jewel.

  At that point, a lot of things were happening at once. Denise was screaming, and some of the other women were screaming, and Taylor was crying, and Donna was yelling at me to—easy for her to say—get the insulin pump back from Buddy. I knew I couldn’t catch him bare-handed, so I was looking for something to trap him with, and I grabbed the first thing I saw, which was this carved wood mask Donna got when our cruise ship stopped in Jamaica that depicts the face of an African-American male with the words “YA MON” on his forehead. So I’m holding this mask, moving toward Buddy on the window fixture, and I would have had him except that at that exact moment, Jeanette Keebler, who has never been a rocket scientist, decides to escape, and opens the front door.

  Buddy sees the opening and leaps off the window like a little furry batman, still holding the pump, and skitters out the door. Denise is now screaming so loud, my teeth ache. I’m after Buddy, holding the mask, pushing through the women. By the time I get outside, Buddy is standing in the middle of the lawn, looking at me. He still has the pump. I slow down and start creeping forward, saying “Good boy, Buddy, good boy, there’s a good boy,” in a calm tone. He’s watching me getting closer, not moving, like he’s sincerely considering what I am saying, and I’m thinking another two steps I will have the little shitter.

  Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I see this Prius come gliding up the street. I take another step forward, and I’m slowly raising the YA MON mask into attack position, when suddenly this Prius swerves up onto my swale, and the window goes down, and this voice, which I immediately recognize, yells, “GET AWAY FROM THAT LEMUR!”

  An asshole like that, you know he drives a Prius.

  “GET THE FUCK OFF MY SWALE!” I yelled.

  “THAT LEMUR IS MY PROPERTY AND YOU STOLE IT,” he yelled.

  I was going to point out that it was self-defense, but suddenly Buddy took off running toward the Prius, still holding Denise’s insulin pump. I took off after him, but before I got there, he jumped through the window into the car. The asshole threw the Prius into gear, and I was yelling at him to stop, but he stomped on the accelerator. The car swerved sideways, and I felt this pain in my hip, and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back with dirt landing on me as this lunatic Prius asshole wrecked my swale peeling out of there. I rolled over and got up on my knees, and I have to say in all modesty that for a guy who had just been legally assaulted by a vehicle and was not in a proper throwing stance, I got a lot of mustard onto the YA MON mask. It went through the window clean, and I know I heard a yelp.

  By now the Prius was back on the street, tires squealing. Donna and Taylor were out of the house now, running toward me. I was still on my knees, watching the Prius. Just as it turned the corner, under the streetlight, a shape jumped out the driver’s-side window.

  “Buddy!” yelled Taylor.

  The little shitter ran straight to her.

  He wasn’t ho
lding the pump.

  CHAPTER 7

  Philip

  When I arrived home, Daisy was waiting in the driveway with something less than the greeting I needed, considering all that had happened. There wasn’t a “Hi, honey. How was your day?” Or an “Oh my God, why are your ribs taped and your foot in a cast?” And nothing that even resembled the much preferred “I just read that the American Medical Association says the best cure for cracked ribs and a sprained left ankle is a sympathetic wife who cooks her husband his favorite meal (SpaghettiOs!) and afterward dims the lights in his den while he leans back in his favorite chair, closes his eyes, and listens to The Very Best of Michael Bolton.” Instead, what I got was a growl about how we were going to be late for the recital if we didn’t hurry.

  Both of our children were supposed to dance that night. Heidi, sixteen, was a star. Lithe. Heavenly graced. Poetry in fluid motion. Every season, Miss Grambs, the owner of Dancing For Fun, the studio where the kids took lessons, featured Heidi in as many numbers as possible. But our eight-year-old, despite boundless enthusiasm, had a slight weight problem, was a dreadful dancer, and the target of ruthless snickering. As a result, these recitals were always an odd duality for us because, on one hand, we were there to accept praise and congratulations for Heidi, while on the other hand, we were there to support and very possibly defend our son, Trace, the only boy ballerina in the twenty-six-year history of Dancing For Fun.

  And though I was still furious that the lemur had somehow wriggled free and jumped from my car, I found some comfort in knowing exactly where it was. And that all it would take was a simple call to Sgt. Pepper in the morning, and justice would be served. So I opened the door to the Prius (forty-three miles per gallon!), Daisy got in, and we drove to the recital.

  “What’s the theme this year?” I asked her. These programs usually had a motif that loosely connected all the individual numbers.

  “Music from the movies,” Daisy answered.

  “That could be good.”

  “Heidi has a big solo during ‘The Way We Were.’”

  “That’s wonderful!” I said.

  We drove in silence for a minute or so, knowing that there was another question to be asked, but we both needed a little time to brace ourselves. Finally, I took the plunge.

  “And Trace?”

  “Trace also has a solo,” she told me.

  “Uh-oh . . .”

  “During the theme to The Godfather.”

  “Hey, that’s great!” I shouted, figuring The Godfather was one of the most masculine movies ever made and that, well, maybe it would sort of, you know, change a thing or two.

  “Well, yes and no,” Daisy answered.

  “Which means what?”

  “He’s going to play Sonny Corleone tap dancing through the tollbooth and getting mowed down by Barzini’s gunmen.”

  “And that would be the ‘yes’ part?” I surmised.

  “That’s right.”

  “And the ‘no’ part?”

  “The gunmen will be doing pirouettes while lobbing pink carnation bullets at him.”

  Those were the last sounds uttered by either of us for the rest of that drive.

  Perhaps now would be a good time to say a few words about a woman in our community who’ll soon play a part in this story. An alcoholic named Denise Rodecker. When her husband was still alive, she was a thin, very attractive, very sensual-looking blonde (think Kathleen Turner in Body Heat) for whom most of the men harbored a secret crush. But, generally speaking, the wives in Fort Lee were not jealous of this object of their husbands’ nocturnal secretions, as they knew about Denise’s unwavering devotion to Jerry and the solidity of their marriage.

  But then things took an unforeseen turn during what became known in the tri-state area as the Blizzard of ’06, when Jerry, a do-it-yourself type with a tendency to overexert himself, suffered a heart attack while buying a snow shovel, and died two days later. After that, Denise started to drink, packed on about sixty pounds (think Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure), contracted diabetes attributable to that weight gain, and began hitting on those same husbands who were no longer attracted to her. She became a conversation piece around town whom I hadn’t seen until the night of that recital.

  Daisy and I found seats in the third row of the Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School auditorium. We liked sitting close to the stage to provide visual support should our kids glance in our direction during their performances. These evenings always ran in age order—starting with the youngest kids and ending with the oldest. This was bad news for me and Daisy. Whereas most parents could discreetly leave after watching their child dance, this year we did not have that luxury and would have to sit through the six performances before Trace’s and then fifteen more until it was Heidi’s turn.

  “You know, if Trace played Little League like most boys his age, we could be at a movie right now, then grab a bite to eat, return some calls, take a nap, and still get here in time to see Heidi,” I whispered to Daisy.

  Then the lights went down, the recital began, and we sat through everything ranging from triumphant four-year-olds dancing up steps to Rocky, to drenched six-year-olds dancing in water to Titanic, to frightened seven-year-olds dancing away from Nazis in Schindler’s List, and now it was Trace’s turn. A slightly overweight Sonny Corleone in a silver suit, tapping his way through the cardboard tollbooth, the emergence of at least a dozen twirling mobsters pelting him with a fusillade of colorful petals, and him crying out as he staggers against its force.

  Enter Denise Rodecker. Probably through a backstage door and then onto the set to the astonishment of everyone.

  “I’ve watched this film maybe fifty times,” said the guy on the other side of me, “and I’ve never noticed a fat blond lady in this scene before.”

  She, too, was staggering. Reeling, in fact. As I found out later, from the bottle of red wine she polished off at a book club meeting at that idiot Peckerman’s house. But she knew that the glucose from that merlot would eventually metabolize and she’d need another infusion. So while my slightly overweight son had finally succumbed to the torrent of flowers and was now writhing on the stage in spastic memories of movement, Denise Rodecker pointed directly at me in the third row, reached inside her coat, pulled out the lemur by its endangered tail, and began swinging it overhead as she shouted at the top of her lungs, “Hey, dickweed, if you want to see this monkey alive again, give me back my fucking insulin pump!” before throwing the now dazed lemur straight up into the air, catching it over her shoulder like Willie Mays did in the 1954 World Series against the Cleveland Indians, stepping over my slightly overweight son, and exiting into the New Jersey night through the backstage door.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jeffrey

  I hate dance. Ballet, tap, that modern shit where they all look like crack addicts—I hate it all. I’m not saying dance is gay. It is gay, but that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is it’s boring. I had to watch a live ballet once, when Donna dragged me because her cousin’s daughter was in it, and it was the most boring thing I ever sat through, except the time I went to a NASCAR race and there was not one fucking crash.

  So it was definitely not my plan to drive to a dance recital. When the lunatic asshole Horkman drove away from my house, I had no plan to follow him anywhere. I was planning to go back into my house, pour myself a drink, and get on the phone. Because that lunatic asshole had just nearly run me over in front of witnesses, on my own swale. This kind of situation is exactly why the good Lord created Jewish litigation attorneys named Cohn, of whom I personally know four.

  I also know, from experience as an expert forensic plumbing witness in courts of law, that pain and suffering can be very difficult to disprove. Even without visible injuries, I could very well be suffering from chronic Prius-related neck and back ailments th
at could cost me potentially millions of dollars in missed income, not to mention loss of consortium with my wife. It crossed my mind, as I watched the asshole’s taillights disappear, that I could be on the road to boat ownership.

  So that was one point for me. Point two, I still had Buddy. I didn’t want Buddy, but the lunatic obviously did, a lot, so that was in my favor, as leverage. Plus I was pretty sure I nailed the lunatic with the YA MON mask. Three points for me, versus bupkus for the asshole, unless you count that he got the YA MON mask, which I hated anyway. (But not because it was African-American.)

  So I was feeling pretty good, as I got back onto my feet. That feeling lasted maybe eleven seconds, which is how long it took for Denise Rodecker, who is the size of a fire rescue truck but louder, to wobble across the lawn to me, screaming about her insulin pump.

  “Denise,” I said, “calm down.”

  This was a mistake. Telling a batshit crazy woman to calm down only makes her more batshit crazy.

  “DON’T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN!” she said.

  “Fine,” I said, “don’t calm down.”

  This also was a mistake. Fortunately, Donna had arrived and was attempting to hug Denise, and even though she could only get her arms about halfway around, Denise finally stopped screaming, though she was still blubbering about her pump. She’d had a lot of wine.

  “Jeffrey will get your pump back, won’t you, Jeffrey?” Donna said, giving me a look that said unless I got the pump back, the only consortium I was ever going to have again would be with my right hand.

  “Okay,” I said. “I know where the guy works. I’ll call the police and tomorrow they can . . .”

  “NO!” said Denise, back in Batshit Mode. “I need it right now!”

  “But I don’t know where the guy lives.”

  “Well, I do,” said Denise.

  “You do?” Donna and I both said.