When the Cat's Away

by Kinky Friedman

  At the next table were some opera buffs. One guy was pretty friendly and gave me periodic little nods when a song was performed particularly well. I could kind of cue off of him so I knew how much enthusiasm to applaud and bravo with. He probably took me for an eccentric but willing-to-learn non-opera buff in my cowboy hat, for we exchanged knowing little nods throughout the course of the evening.

  There existed, of course, the possibility that he was a homosexual. But opera buffs, like cowboys, are probably a dying breed in this busy world and whatever they choose to do is okay with me. If you ever had to sleep with one of them in the same bed, it might be smart, however, to put a cello case between you.

  Augie came by the table. “Would you gentlemen like a round of drinks on the house?” he asked.

  It was an offer McGovern couldn’t refuse and he appeared as happy as a young gentile on Christmas morning. None of us refused the offer, actually, but some of us were more subdued in our enthusiasm. In a world of empty gestures, coming from Augie at Asti’s, this was a real one.

  “Shall I check that briefcase for you?” he asked Rambam.

  “No, he’ll keep it,” Ratso said delightedly. “It’s his Uzi submachine gun.”

  Augie laughed. Rambam laughed. McGovern laughed. Even the opera buff at the next table laughed. I went to the men’s room to grab a Republican by the neck and watch Arturo Toscanini sail to America.

  When I returned to the table, Rambam was on the subject of South American hit men. “Dixie cup kids,” he said. “That’s what they call them. Completely expendable. Anything happens to ’em, they buy their family a few acres and a couple of pigs and everybody’s happy.”

  “This conversation’s off the record, of course,” I said to McGovern.

  “Of course,” said McGovern, his eyes twinkling.

  Before we left, we said goodbye to the opera buffs, the piano player, Vittorio, Pasquale, several bartenders and waiters, and, of course, Augie. It was like leaving home. And, unlike Gallagher’s Steak House, Asti’s lets you wear your hat indoors if you’re a cowboy. One of the few things cowboys and Jews have in common is that they both wear their hats indoors and attach a certain amount of importance to it. Hank Williams wore his hat indoors. So did Davy Crockett. A friend of mine, Bob McLane, who was the former chairman of the Gay Texans for Bush Committee, told me that George Bush always took his hat off when he came inside a place. That’s another good reason for wearing a hat indoors.

  Ratso and McGovern, having already hosed me on the check, were up front getting their coats. I was still dealing with the check, paying the guy at the other cash register, the one that didn’t play “Dixie” but just took your money. Ratso circled back briefly, requested and received a receipt for the meal I was paying for, and walked back to the door. Sometimes Ratso could take the word chutzpah to a whole other level.

  Rambam was having a last drink at the bar as I walked by to get my coat.

  “Have one with me for the road,” he said.

  As I ordered a shot of Jameson, I noticed his attaché case resting on the barstool next to him. “What is in the attaché case?” I asked.

  In the background a man and woman were dancing together on the stage and singing a duet of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” Rambam watched the stage with a faraway expression. When he spoke he had all the even-mindedness of the Mahatma.

  “An Uzi submachine gun,” said Rambam.

  50

  We were standing outside Asti’s on the sidewalk. McGovern, Ratso, myself, Rambam, and Rambam’s attaché case. Either the music and the magic of Asti’s was staying with me or it was the red clam sauce.

  We drifted with the snow down toward Fifth Avenue. My thoughts skittered like snowflakes through all the cold nights and all the winters of the past. I was wearing my old blue David Copperfield greatcoat that I’d had forever and that Ratso’d always coveted. I’d bought it down the street from the Greyhound station in Albany, New York, shortly after I’d been de-selected from my first Peace Corps program. I thought of Leila with her David Copperfield cap. Maybe someday, if we both lived long enough, we’d take off our David Copperfield clothes and put them together in a warm closet somewhere. Then we could twist away the summer. Be happy Americans. Raise cute, gypsylike children who’d grow up realizing that their parents loved each other. I put my hands down into the big pockets of the coat.

  There was something in the right pocket that hadn’t been there when I’d left 199B Vandam. It was a package of some sort, but I didn’t like surprises and I didn’t think it was my birthday.

  I took the parcel out and looked at it. It was the size of a thin brick or maybe a somewhat undernourished videocassette. It was wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with twine. Scrawled in pencil on the butcher paper were the words PERLA YI-YO.

  “Maybe it’s a valentine present that’s a little slow out of the chute,” said Ratso. He grabbed the package out of my hand.

  “Gimme that,” said Rambam. He took the package from Ratso and headed back in the direction of Asti’s with it. About halfway there, he found a doorway with steps leading down below ground level. Rambam took out a knife and disappeared from sight.

  Ratso, McGovern, and I stood around the little doorway watching Rambam down on the ground fooling with the package. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “this could be a bomb.”

  “Why don’t you see if it’s ticking?” Ratso said.

  “That big-alarm-clock shit went out with the Russian Revolution, Ratso,” said Rambam. “Today, they use a little Timex or something—you couldn’t even hear it until it’s too late.”

  “If it’s our guys,” I said, “they probably used a Rolex.”

  “Very funny,” said Rambam, as he gingerly poked the knife into the side of the package. “You want to be very careful, you see, not to mess with the twine. We’ll know in a minute … one way or another.”

  I looked over at Ratso and he wasn’t there. One moment he was standing between McGovern and myself, and the next moment there was nothing but McGovern’s large head blocking out Fifth Avenue.

  “Maybe you should call the bomb squad,” came a voice from about forty feet away. Ratso was standing in the street on the other side of a parked car.

  “Hate cops,” said Rambam.

  “Maybe you should put those feelings aside,” said McGovern, “till this whole thing blows over.”

  “An unfortunate use of words,” I said. “I’m concerned about your use of the language, McGovern. You know what Hemingway said about journalism, don’t you?”

  “What’d he say?” asked McGovern as both of us backed slightly away from the doorway.

  “He said, ‘It blunts your instrument.’”

  “And hanging around a bullring can sap your semen,” said McGovern.

  “Holy shit,” said Rambam. McGovern and I moved a little farther away. Rambam might be right or he might be off the wall, but it’d be pretty ugly if all of us were to wind up literally off the wall.

  “What is it?” called Ratso.

  “Come over here and find out,” I said.

  McGovern and I inched a little closer to the doorway. Rambam had cut a small hole in the side of the package. He’d cut through the butcher paper and through a thick layer of plastic, revealing what looked like a white chemical substance.

  “What the hell is it?” asked McGovern.

  “Could be potassium chlorate,” said Rambam, “a very popular ingredient in explosives today.”

  It was about at this time that I put my hand back into my coat pocket and found the little card that had apparently fallen off the package.

  “Hold the weddin’,” I said. “It ain’t a bomb. Take a look at this. It’s a note that came with the package.”

  Rambam, knife in hand, came over to me. So did McGovern. Even Ratso found his way back from the street and looked over my shoulder at the little card. It read as follows:

  I hope you enjoy this little token of my gratitude. I ha
ve great admiration for what you have done. Soon I shall meet you.

  The Jaguar

  “Nice-looking business card,” I said.

  51

  I was standing on a sidewalk in the Village at 11:30 P.M. on a Saturday night, holding in my hands a brick of cocaine whose street value, when cut, would probably exceed a quarter of a million dollars. Want a toot?

  I’d been in the presence of that much cocaine before on several occasions, though I doubted if the quality had been commensurate with the current batch. Once in L.A., I’d been sort of house-sitting for a rather shady friend who was off somewhere in the Caribbean. I knew the guy had a few too many Tiffany lamps but I didn’t figure it out until I stumbled on a large briefcase full of off-white rocks the size of puppet heads.

  Years later, I’d related this story to a well-traveled, coke-dealing Brit in my hotel room in New York and he had not been too impressed. “I’ve seen the factory, mate,” he said.

  “Let Ratso hold that shit,” said Rambam. The two of them whispered back and forth as my hands trembled.

  “Obviously, the Jaguar is Carlos’s bitter enemy and believes what he reads in the Daily News” I said, looking pointedly at McGovern.

  “I’m not Deep Throat,” said McGovern.

  Fortunately, the weather was keeping sidewalk traffic to a minimum, but it was still a very strange feeling holding what could surely be my certain death and destruction in my hands. Of course, I’d have some fun before I’d go.

  “Better let one of us keep it,” said Rambam, like he was talking to a child.

  “C’mon,” I said. “I haven’t touched the stuff in almost seventy-two hours now. I had to quit when Bob Marley fell out of my left nostril.” I was breaking out in a sweat.

  I had tom off some more of the butcher paper and the plastic and run a little taste test to establish that it wasn’t potassium chlorate. It wasn’t.

  I gripped the packet tightly until Ratso took it away from me. But I remember gazing at it under the streetlamp. It looked as beautiful as fish scales in the moonlight.

  And memories came back to me like snow falling on snow.

  52

  Sunday started as a busy day on the blower and ended with my almost getting blown away. But first things first.

  I got up, fought back a desire to strangle Ratso to find where he’d hid the cocaine, thought better of it, and made some espresso. No point in having hot chocolate. It wasn’t raining.

  I fed the cat. Tuna in any weather.

  I walked over to the desk with the espresso and sat down. When I took the top off Sherlock Holmes’s head to get a cigar, I looked inside to see if Ratso had stashed the cocaine in there. Of course, it was a ridiculous notion, but there you are. It wasn’t there. Neither were Sherlock’s brains and I had the feeling I was going to be needing them before this mess was over. I would deal with the Jaguar when he came. I would deal with Carlos when he came. I would deal with Leila when she came. A man’s not a man until he’s given multiple orgasms to a Palestinian terrorist. Of course, Leila wasn’t a real terrorist, but she had done some things under a comforter that damn near scared me. I’d been the comforter, of course.

  The first call I made was to a colorful, mysterious friend of mine named Dangerous Dan, who was an authority on powders, the Latin American import-export business, and just about everything else that nobody really knows about. Since I spoke to Dangerous, he has left us and gone to Jesus, and I hope and trust that he’s made heaven a happier place since he’s arrived. But if somehow he got de-selected from heaven, I’ve always felt I could do a lot worse than waking up in hell next to Dangerous Dan.

  Dangerous said that perla meant “pearl” and yi-yo was an Indian word that did not compute into the white man’s mind. Taken together, he said, they meant “the best of the best.” Where had I seen that phrase? he wanted to know. I told him the men’s room at the Lone Star Cafe. Which stall? he wanted to know. There was only one stall, I told him. He told me to be careful. I told him I’d do my best.

  I miss Dangerous Dan and I think of him, in human terms, as perla yi-yo.

  I didn’t know what Dangerous Dan thought of cats, but Slick Goldberg had liked cats and Estelle Beekman had hated cats and someone had killed them both. So what did that tell us? Not a damn thing. Or maybe it did.

  For the next half hour I made a series of calls to information operators in Connecticut, finally hit pay dirt, and called my party. Things were just about what I’d expected. We talked for a while and arranged to get together in the city soon for a drink.

  Forty-five minutes is a long time to be on the blower but I was used to hard work. Anyway, the alternative was to look around the loft for some perla yi-yo that I didn’t really want to find, because it would fry my remaining synapses in about four seconds and then they would be holding memorial services for my brain in New York and Los Angeles. I got another cigar and another espresso and I made my last call of the day to Jane Meara.

  I told her she wouldn’t be having lunch with Estelle Beekman anymore. I gave it to her pretty straight. She held up as well as could be expected. In fact, she was starting to show a toughness I didn’t know she had.

  I told her if the cops called her, and I didn’t think they would, she never talked to me about Estelle Beekman. She said she understood.

  I asked her if there’d been any news on Rocky from her end. She ticked off an extensive list of everything she’d done to find her. Net result: no Rocky.

  I was reading Jane a story from the National Enquirer about a cat named Tom who’d walked 773 miles from Harrison, Arkansas, to his home in Detroit, when I noticed that Sleeping Beauty had awakened from the couch and was walking toward the television set with a screwdriver in his hand. I told Jane to be very careful. I had a few little problems of my own right now, but we’d wrap this whole business up quite soon, I was sure. There wasn’t much else to say, and it wouldn’t have been very easy anyway because Ratso had, by this time, turned the set up quite loud.

  I walked over to where Ratso was sitting and looked at the screen. Many men carrying long sticks were moving rapidly across a great expanse of frozen tundra. At either end, there was a large figure wearing a Wachíchi mask.

  “Ranger game!” Ratso shouted.

  53

  By Sunday afternoon at four-thirty, Ratso, myself, Rambam, and Rambam’s attaché case were having lunch at Big Wong on Mott Street in Chinatown. Just before I’d left the loft, Leila had called. She had not heard from her brother Carlos as she had expected, and she was worried. She knew the feds had not picked him up in the bust and she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t contacted her. I told her if I saw him I’d tell him to call her.

  There followed a conversation of a rather sweet and personal nature that was rudely punctuated by Ratso’s loud and prolonged curses as the Rangers lost the hockey game. Apparently Ratso’d taped the game at his apartment the previous evening and brought his VCR over to the loft. Nice to see him staying on top of things.

  Big Wong was like dying and going to heaven at this time of the day. It wasn’t crowded, the food was great, and the waiters treated us like old friends, doing humorous things like bringing Ratso one chopstick. Ratso never found this to be very funny, but I always got a good chuckle out of it. Rambam thought it was pretty funny, too. I don’t know what Rambam’s attaché case thought. It was sitting in its own chair, not saying anything. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be talking a blue streak before the night was over.

  Big Wong is a little different from most places in Chinatown. It isn’t fancy and the menu is not very extensive and not very expensive. The food could be equated to that at a very good all-night truck stop, if the Chinese culture had such things as truck stops, country music jukeboxes, and rubber machines, which of course it does not. It does have Big Wong.

  But occasional honky faces are beginning to pop up among the clientèle these days. Soon some guy with a bow tie from The New York Times will stumble on
to the place, write a trendy little piece on it, give it a couple of stars, and it’ll all be over. When that happens, you might as well order out from Eggroll King in Columbus, Ohio.

  It was starting to get dark by the time we got out of Big Wong. We walked down the sidewalks of Chinatown past ducks hanging upside down in the shop windows, past the Chinese dwarf painting pastel pictures of a distant homeland, past the fish markets along the sidewalk, past stalls selling strange-looking vegetables that appeared as if they’d been grown on another planet.

  At this time of day and at this time of year the city was gray. But there was something very vital about things that were East. You could see, hear, and smell them, and they renewed the senses and the spirit. The whole scene was reminiscent of the time I’d spent in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak in Borneo. Kuching was a Malay word, I reflected as we crossed Canal Street, that, interestingly enough, meant “cat.”

  We walked up Mulberry Street, bought a few cigars at Louie’s. Louie said, “Hey, it’s Buffalo Bill. Look, there he is,” he said to the other customers in the little shop, mostly elderly Chinese buying lottery tickets, “the Gene Autry of Canal Street.” I wasn’t sure if Rambam appreciated Louie as much as Ratso and I did. Rambam was half Italian and Louie was about as close to home as you could get without somebody telling you to take out the trash.

  We had cappuccino, espresso, and cannoli at a little sidewalk cafe next to a store that sold Mussolini T-shirts.

  “One thing I have very little use for,” I said, “is a Mussolini T-shirt.”

  “Neither does Mussolini,” said Ratso, as he took a rather large bite of cannoli.

  * * *

  In the growing dark we walked through SoHo past stores that sold nothing but pillows, and a ghost town of galleries and industrial lofts taken over by narrow-tied, suspendered New Wave artists. A small group of musicians played chamber music inside a restaurant that served Art Deco chicken-fried steak. SoHo was one of the last places on earth where a break dancer could still draw a crowd.