“It’s not just the cat that you miss, although I know you two were very close. I think right now you’re missing the excitement of the hunt. There haven’t really been any challenging investigations lately for you to practice your deductive reasoning or whatever you like to call it. Three men were murdered in the Village this week, but their deaths were apparently unrelated so I doubt if you’d care to get involved.”
“Each man’s death diminishes me, McGovern,” I said. “But you’re essentially correct. They may diminish me, but they just don’t interest me. It’s kind of sad really.”
“So it is,” said McGovern.
We drank a few more rounds, but there was no joy in it. As we left the place and walked into the night to go our separate ways, I was struck once again by the intelligence and the humanity in McGovern’s eyes. They were like a dog’s eyes. You can always spot intelligence and humanity in a dog’s eyes easier than you can in the eyes of a human being. There it was again. I couldn’t get away from it. I was a human being.
As I legged it over to Vandam Street and McGovern wandered off to God knows where, I felt the sadness one feels when parting from the company of a true friend. He didn’t know it yet, I thought, but we probably wouldn’t be seeing each other again for a very long time.
Six
That night I dreamed of my dearly departed parents, of campfire embers burning bright, of green hills, of shady canyons, of sparkling rivers running in the summer sun. My heart had traveled as far away from the city as it could get and I’d always believed you should follow your heart. I took the dream as a sign—a sign that pointed to Texas.
In the morning I knew what I had to do, which wasn’t much. I made some espresso, fired up my first cigar of the morning, and booked a flight that night to Texas, which cost about nine million dollars but was a bargain at twice the price. Simon and Garfunkel were right about New York City winters bleeding you. Ratso, Rambam, and McGovern had been right, too. Get out while I still could, while the gettin’ was good, while I still had a shard of a reputation left as a successful private investigator. Get out before the golden door hit me on the ass.
Would I ever return? I wondered, as I sat at my lonely desk, sipping the hot, bitter espresso. That remained to be seen. I walked my cigar and espresso over to the kitchen window and gazed down fondly at Vandam Street. In spite of it all, I would miss this place. For many months I’d stood at this very window and watched for a sign of the cat. Now I no longer believed I’d see her again. She was a lost love now. She was part of me and part of the brick and mortar of New York. Part of the morning and garbage cans and nights and light rain. Part of where I’d come from and part of where I was going.
Since I had no idea how long I’d be gone, and I could no longer leave the cat in charge, I figured I’d call Winnie Katz and ask her to kind of keep an eye on the place. In the past, I’d left the cat and the key to the loft with her whenever I’d left town. She’d proved herself to be fairly responsible, in spite of my private belief that she was trying to spiritually indoctrinate the cat into the wonderful world of lesbianism. Well, it didn’t matter now. If Winnie’d drop the mail on my desk once in a while and make sure that teenage satanic cults weren’t conducting rituals in the loft during my absence, I felt sure that Sherlock and Yorick could get by on their own for a while. At least they wouldn’t be lonely. Two heads are better than one.
I called Winnie and she agreed, I thought somewhat grudgingly, to allow me to ascend to her Sapphic retreat to drop off the key. What had happened to people these days, I wondered? Whatever became of being a good neighbor? All I was doing was dropping off a fucking key. How hard was it to occasionally keep an eye on an empty loft? Hell, I’d been doing that for years.
But maybe there was another explanation for Winnie’s seeming lack of graciousness. Perhaps things were going as slowly for her as they were for me. Maybe McGovern was right—the city was taking a little power nap, and its denizens would just have to deal with it. If you were a single person with an unconventional lifestyle, no family, no regular work, you just felt it more than others who probably welcomed a break from the rat race. That was all it was, I figured. If Winnie had had a Texas to go to, she probably would’ve gone there. Unfortunately, if you lived in New York long enough, you began to believe there was nowhere else to go.
It was about three espressos and two cigars later that I trudged stolidly up the stairs to Winnie’s loft. It didn’t really bother me that my last act, before packing and leaving town, was to give my key to a lesbian. If the truth be told, I was starting to like lesbians a bit in my twilight years. They didn’t like me much, of course, but you can’t have everything. I knocked assertively upon Winnie’s door.
There was no answer. I knocked louder, identifying myself. Was there a precise etiquette for visiting a lesbian? I pounded on the door. At last, there came a shout from inside the loft. Moments later, I heard a chain being removed. Then another. Then another. Just a typical New Yorker preparing to greet a caller.
“Hang on, cowboy!” she shouted. “The stage ain’t leavin’ yet!”
Finally the knob turned and the door swung open to reveal a radiant Winnie Katz wrapped almost entirely in a red-and-blue Navajo rug. Her eyes shined. Her hair shined. Her face shined. There was just something about her you, perhaps quite literally, couldn’t put your finger on. If I hadn’t known she was a lesbian, I would have said that she was pregnant.
“You look great,” I said. “Nice rug.”
“Navajo rug,” she said. “It’s a song by Jerry Jeff Walker, as you probably know. Written by Ian Tyson.”
“I didn’t know you were a music lover.”
“I’m a discerning music lover,” she said, looking at me rather dismissively. “Where’s the key, cowboy?”
I handed her the key. She started to tuck it into her bra, and then realized that it wasn’t there.
“I mean it, Winnie,” I said. “You look absolutely terrific. What’s your secret?”
“My secret is I told all the girls in the dance class to take five.”
“As in five minutes?”
“As in five months. Now I can do what I want to do. What about you, you big private dick? Why are you leaving town this time?”
“Like yourself, I’m doing what I want to do. I’m going back to Texas for a while. I told Ratso and the other Village Irregulars to keep a lid on crime until I get back.”
“Ratso is a disgusting worm,” said Winnie, pulling her Navajo rug more tightly around her body. “He disrupted my dance classes for about four months trying to get into everybody’s leotards. Finally I threw him out.”
“You were only with him for four months. I’ve been with him for twenty-five years.”
“Why do you do it?”
“I took pity on him. I figure any heterosexual man who gets tossed out of a lesbian dance class, I mean, where’s he going to go from there?”
Winnie smirked. Then she lit a Pall Mall. Then she smiled, waved, and closed the door. I stood in the hallway thinking back to when relations between Winnie and myself were bordering on sexual. Like any normal heterosexual man, I deluded myself with the notion that I could turn Winnie and make her forgo the lesbian faith. Like any fool, I tried and failed. Like any lesbian, she hated men all the more for their infernal meddling with her sexuality. Like any man, I was left wondering in dark hallways about the details of lesbian honeymoons.
Three hours later I was in a Checker cab flying through the cold concrete canyons of the city on my way to La Guardia. Outside my window it was dark and wet and miserable. Inside the cab I felt safe and warm and glad to be on my way to anywhere. I thought fleetingly of Ratso and Rambam and Winnie and McGovern and all the other characters I’d known over the years in New York. Though they most assuredly would continue to populate my heart, here they would stay forever.
I looked out the cab window, staring at block after block, building after building, brick after brick of desperate, dying archit
ecture, inhabited almost incidentally by broken, bewildered souls, and I thought maybe I’m projecting, but right now I’d like to give it all back to the Indians because it wasn’t worth the twenty-four dollars and it definitely wasn’t worth the handful of colored beads.
Seven
The first things I did after arriving at the airport in Austin were to rent a four-wheeled penis, stock up on provisions, and head out to the ranch, deep in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. The Utopia Rescue Ranch, a never-kill sanctuary for animals run by Cousin Nancy Parker and her husband, Tony Simons, had recently moved from Utopia to our ranch, Echo Hill, just outside of Medina. The Rescue Ranch would still be called Utopia, we had decided, because it was. Now it resided on a beautiful fifty-acre flat that had formerly been the dump, which Cousin Nancy found highly humorous. I pointed out to her that when the great archaeologist Schliemann had discovered the famous, fabled, historic city of Troy, he’d had to dig through eleven levels of shit from ensuing generations. Cousin Nancy still found it amusing that her doublewide trailer now resided directly on top of what had previously been the Echo Hill dump. I tried to explain to her about the deep philosophical implications, but all she kept saying was, “The deeper, the better.”
Now, under a full moon, I headed down the dusty country road to the ranch, as if under the inexorable power of that gentle magnet called home. Deer and jackrabbits gamboled and skittered by in the moonlight and one solitary porcupine trundled slowly across the road like a little old man. The porcupine was clearly not in a hurry and, now that I thought about it, neither was I. I was merely a human reflection in this ageless, bucolic moonlight sonata.
When I pulled up in front of the lodge, the dogs all came out to greet me. Cousin Nancy and Tony had thoughtfully brought them over from the Rescue Ranch so I wouldn’t have to spend my first night in Texas alone. It was a rather amazing adjustment to make. I had traded being surrounded by millions of oblivious, uncaring two-legged animals for being embraced by a small, loving family of four-legged animals. So far, it seemed like a pretty good deal.
I slept that night in the old lodge with a shotgun under my bed and a cat on my head. The cat’s name was Lady Argyle and she used to belong to my mother before Min stepped on a rainbow. It is not a pleasant situation when you have a cat who insists upon sleeping on your head like a hat and all night long putting her whiskers in your nostril at intervals of about twenty-seven minutes. I haven’t actually timed this behavioral pattern, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the intervals were precisely twenty-seven minutes. This precarious set of affairs could have easily resulted in a hostage situation or a suicide pact but, fortunately, neither occurred. The two reasons are because I love Lady as much as a man is capable of loving a cat, and Lady loves me as much as a cat is capable of loving a man. It’s not terribly surprising that the two of us were that close. After all, Cuddles was her mother.
It is a blessing when an independent spirit like a cat loves you, and it’s a common human failing to underestimate or trivialize such a bond. On the other hand, it’s not a healthy thing to observe a man going to bed with a cat on his head. And, in the case of Lady and myself, there were observers.
The observers of this Van Gogh mental hospital scenario were five dogs, all of whom despise Lady—though not half as much as Lady despises them. The dogs sleep on the bed, too, and they find it unnerving, not to say unpleasant, to be in the presence of a man who has a cat on his head. I’ve tried to discuss this with them on innumerable occasions, but it isn’t easy to state your case to five dogs who are looking at you with pity in their eyes.
Mr. Magoo is eight years old and highly skilled at how to be resigned to a sorry situation. He’s a deadbeat dad, so his two sons, Brownie and Chumley, were so named after my sister Marcie’s two imaginary childhood friends and fairly recently had been left in my care as she had been stationed in Vietnam with the International Red Cross, an assignment she correctly deduced might be harmful to the health, education, and welfare of Brownie and Chumley. The mother of Brownie and Chumley, and the matriarch of the entire Friedman Clan, was Perky. Perky was a small dog who, as so often happens, didn’t know she was a small dog. Perky had long ears and a long tail and looked like she’d been put together by a committee. In her eyes, a thousand years of wisdom softly gleamed. Perky had been one of my father’s last and closest companions on earth.
If you’ve been spiritually deprived as a child and are therefore not an animal lover, you may already be in a coma from reading all this. That’s good, because I don’t care a flea about people who don’t love animals. I shall continue my impassioned tale and I shall not stop until the last dog is sleeping.
The last dog was Hank. He looked like one of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, and he didn’t understand that the cat could and would hurt him and me and the entire Polish army if we got in her way. Lady was about twenty-two years old and had lived in this house on this ranch almost all of her life, and she didn’t need to be growled at by a little dog with a death wish.
So I had the cat hanging down over one side of my face like a purring stalactite, with her whiskers poking into my left nostril, and Hank on the other side, who completely failed to grasp the mortal danger he was placing both of us in by playfully provoking the cat. It was 3:09 in the morning and suddenly a deafening cacophony of barking, hissing, and shrieking erupted, with Lady taking a murderous swat at Hank directly across my fluttering eyelids and Mr. Magoo stepping heavily upon my slumbering scrotum as all of the animals bolted off the bed simultaneously. This invariably signaled the arrival of Dilly, my pet armadillo.
For years Dilly had been showing up in my backyard with the punctuality of a German train. I fed him cat food, dog food, bacon grease—anything. He was a shy, crepuscular, oddly Christlike creature whose arrival brought a measure of comfort to me at the same time that it caused all five dogs to go into attack mode. It’s not really necessary to describe what effect this always had on Lady.
After I slipped outside and fed Dilly, I gathered the animals about me like little pieces of my soul. I explained to them once again that Dilly was an old, spiritual friend of mine who was cursed with living in a state full of loud, brash Texans, and we didn’t have to make things worse. Somewhere there is a planet, I told them, paraphrasing the great John D. MacDonald, which is inhabited principally by sentient armadillos who occasionally carve up dead human beings and sell them as baskets by the roadside. Perhaps not surprisingly, the animals seemed to relate to this peculiar vision.
Then we all went back to bed and dreamed of fields full of slow-moving rabbits and mice and cowboys and Indians and imaginary childhood friends and tail fins on Cadillacs and girls in the summertime and everything else that time has taken away.
Eight
Whenever you leave a given place, even if it’s only on a temporary basis, in a great many practical ways you cease to exist in the minds of the people there. This is especially true if the place you leave is called New York City. Some of the people, of course, will stay in touch with you for a while after your departure. The truth is, however, that once you go, you are demoted or upgraded, depending on how you look at it, to the status of an imaginary childhood friend.
Since I firmly believed that e-mail was the work of Satan, I relied heavily upon the telephone to endeavor to maintain what residual threads of relationships remained between myself and my former fellow New Yorkers. None of them, interestingly enough, took the initiative to call me first. This was not terribly surprising. The work that each of them was doing in New York was probably far more important than anything that anyone else in the whole fucking world could possibly be involved with. So I didn’t really expect to hear from them. In several cases, I didn’t particularly want to hear from them.
So much for the Village Irregulars, I thought. So much for all my loyal Dr. Watsons. I had many friends, or at least some friends, in the beautiful Texas Hill Country, and now, with the cat no longer in charge of the loft, and no lo
nger in the seductive hands of lesbians either, I could very possibly make a new life for myself right back here where I’d started. Ratso and the rest no doubt would not approve. They’d think I’d given up, gone home in defeat, had some kind of metropolis meltdown and returned to the sticks with my tail between my legs. If that’s what they wanted to believe, let them, I figured. The opposite was actually true. I’d merely eaten an appropriate amount for my figure. I’d had enough of New York. I didn’t expect them to understand this. Some of the most provincial people I’d ever met in my life lived in New York. Some of the most open-minded and progressive people lived in rural, bucolic, out-of-the-way places. How did they survive, I wondered, without art openings? Without Broadway? Without ridiculously overpriced, vertical food restaurants?
Such was my black attitude toward the city that I loved to hate as I walked through the dusty, drafty lodge that chilly Hill Country morning and found that it reminded me very much, and not without a note of fondness, of my loft in little old New York. The fireplace was burning bright as the Friedmans, five dogs and a cat, followed me around from room to room, happy to have me back with them once more. And when I thought about it, I was happy, too.
It was in that mood of happiness and serenity that I wandered into the little private investigator’s room with my coffee, cigar, and portable phone and proceeded to blast a large Nixon. All of my adult life I’ve been consumed with the notion that cigar smoke masks the odor of a dump. That’s not the only reason I smoke cigars, of course. It’s just a perk. My sister, however, has long maintained that the combined odors of my dumps and my cigars are capable of creating a binary reaction that could blow the toilet lid off the world.
Ten Little New Yorkers Page 3
