Lunatics

by Dave Barry

  So I put on my blinker and turned in.

  CHAPTER 3

  Philip

  I heard him before I saw him.

  It was the day after that game, and I was in the back room of The Wine Shop counting canaries. A shipment had just arrived, and it was important that there were exactly twenty-four of the little tweeters, because that’s how many I was donating to the kids in the obesity clinic over at Children’s Hospital. It was the annual drive, and local merchants were asked to contribute to the department of their choice. And since one of our children has a propensity for being overweight, I am particularly sensitive to the plight of those boys and girls in the midst of that heartbreaking battle. So I planned on sending them a check as well as those canaries to hopefully cheer them up.

  Counting birds of any kind is a challenge, but canaries are more active and tend to flit about the crates they’re shipped in more so than others. So it requires total focus as you transfer them into individual boxes, at the same time making sure that none of them have watery eyes, puffed bellies, or any other telltale signs of disease.

  One bird concerned me. A multi-colored Spanish Timbrado that appeared to be too thin and nowhere as lively as the others. I picked the little fellow up and held him to my ear. The Spanish Timbrado belongs to a species commonly referred to as “song canaries” for their unique chattering sounds and metallic tones. But when this bird opened his little mouth, I heard nothing—either because it was unable to sing or because his chirps were drowned out by the outburst coming from the front of the store.

  “Are you fucking kidding me!”

  I had left Hyo, a sixteen-year-old Korean American who worked for me after school and on weekends, to mind the register and assist customers. And while Hyo, who was saving up to buy a car when he got his driver’s license the following year, was an affable lad capable of handling even the most difficult pet buyers, what came next turned my head.

  “Please don’t yell, sir. It scares the animals,” said Hyo.

  “And I wouldn’t be yelling if these fucking animals weren’t here and you sold what your sign says you’re selling, or is ‘wine shop’ the way you say ‘pet shop’ in China or Japan or whatever rice-gobbling country you swam here from!”

  While I couldn’t place it at first, that voice was familiar. I knew I’d heard it. Recently. And when I stepped into the doorway that separated the back room from the front of the store to see what the commotion was about, I recognized the belligerent customer as the belligerent parent who dressed me down the day before at the soccer field. Once again, his rage was palpable. Red face, heaving chest, eyes bulging like a sick Yorkshire Canary. So I opted to remain calm and try to defuse things without incident.

  “There’s a liquor store about a mile from here. Would you like me to call to see if they’re still open?”

  He turned in my direction and immediately remembered me.

  “You? This is your place?”

  “It is,” I nodded.

  “Makes perfect sense.”

  “What does?”

  “That the same idiot who can’t see that a player is not offside also can’t see why this is a ridiculous store. You can’t see anything, can you?”

  “I guess not,” I answered, shaking my head. “Pretty much like Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.”

  Hyo, who’d been silent up to this point, chose this moment to speak up.

  “That’s a pretty racist remark,” he said, looking at me with a combination of surprise and disappointment.

  “I know it is. I was just quoting what he said to me yesterday.”

  “I knew you’d never say such a thing,” said Hyo, visibly relieved.

  “It’s not racist, goddammit! I only mentioned them because there are no famous blind white people!” shouted you-know-who.

  “Oh, really?” I countered. “How about Helen Keller? And Galileo? And Joseph Pulitzer who created the Pulitzer Prize? Or Brian McKeever, the Olympic cross-country skier? Or Louis Braille, the man who invented Braille? Would you like me to continue?”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? Your blind white people couldn’t shine my blind black people’s shoes. My God, look at the joy Ray Charles’s and Stevie Wonder’s music have brought to millions of people. These are great men who just so happened to be blind. Not like your guys who made a fucking business out of it. The only reason Braille invented Braille was so he could read because other people got tired of telling him what he was missing. And what the hell did Helen Keller do except be blind? And she’s on a stamp? Why would they put a person who couldn’t even find the post office on a stamp?”

  “She was also deaf and mute,” I told him.

  “Which means that even if she did find the post office, she couldn’t tell the clerk she wanted to buy her own stamps or hear how much they cost. What bullshit!”

  I was going to respond. Was going to explain that overcoming her handicaps was a laudable achievement itself and an inspiration to so many others similarly afflicted. But before I had a chance, the silence was broken by a faint chirp from the sickly Spanish Timbrado I’d been holding since I came in from the back room. So I looked down and started to gently stroke its head.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked.

  “A canary,” I answered.

  “We’re donating two dozen of them to Children’s Hospital,” Hyo added. “As incentives for the boys and girls in the obesity program.”

  “That’s very nice,” he said.

  It caught me off guard. Those were the first humane words he’d uttered in the two days he’d been a new, unwanted entry into my life.

  “That’s very, very nice,” he continued.

  Perhaps this is the real person, I wondered. Maybe this is who the guy really is and the maniac I’d been dealing with was merely him acting out other frustrations in his life. Understandable. Repulsive, but understandable. I’m wired to instinctively give people the benefit of the doubt. To focus on their inherent good. My wife Daisy has always claimed that was what attracted her to me. My desire to stress the positive. So I decided that I’d focus on the man who stood before me now and start anew.

  “Yes,” I said, with a smile. “They’ll get them as rewards for reaching certain goal weights.”

  “That’s wonderful,” he said, nodding. “But if they don’t reach their goal weights, how much you want to bet that those fat turds eat those fucking canaries?”

  As I reached for the broken pole from a birdcage stand I kept behind the counter to fend off dangerous intruders, flashes of my own child’s weight struggle—the tears, the object of name-calling, and the Saturday nights spent in a bedroom, uninvited to parties—I prayed I’d get in one good swing before he was out the door.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jeffrey

  It was totally self-defense.

  I know how it might look in hindsight. But as the saying goes, hindsight is in the eye of the beholder. And at that moment, what I was beholding was an asshole—a large asshole—holding a broken pole from a birdcage stand, which can be a lethal weapon, in a threatening manner.

  I had no way of knowing what this asshole was going to do. But I had reason to believe that he was mentally unstable, because, Exhibit A, he calls his store “The Wine Shop” and he’s selling fucking parakeets in there, him and his little Jap sidekick, calling me a racist because I can’t off the top of my head name seventeen famous blind white people. And for the record, how famous is a cross-country skier? Even if he is famous, which I doubt, I bet he has people skiing behind him yelling “Turn left! Turn right!” or else he’s going to ski into a fucking tree. So while I admire his determination, no way is he in the same blindness league as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, who never had anybody standing behind them at the keyboard shouting, “Move your right hand to the left a little! Make a
n F-sharp!” Or whatever.

  But my point is, this fucking unstable lunatic is coming at me in a threatening manner with a Louisville Slugger, and in that situation, legally—and bear in mind that I have spent many hours in a court of law—you have the right to defend yourself by whatever means necessary. So I grabbed the first thing I saw, which it turned out was a cage. My plan was to hold it between me and the lunatic while I backed out the door.

  You should have seen his face when I picked up the cage. Jesus. His face turned the color of Hawaiian Punch, and his eyeballs got the size of fried eggs, and he’s waving his broken pole from a birdcage stand and yelling “PUT DOWN THAT LEMUR!!”

  I’ll be honest: At the time I didn’t know what a lemur was. Later I found out from Wikipedia that they were the little furry animals with the big eyes in Madagascar, which I have on DVD, but at the time all I knew was, I was not going to put down the cage and have nothing between me and the lunatic with the broken pole from a birdcage stand. So I backed up, got the door open, and took off running.

  Fortunately I parked close by, and I was in the car and got the doors locked before the lunatic reached me. He was waving the broken pole from a birdcage stand and screaming, and all I wanted to do was get out of there, so I started the car, threw it into gear and stomped on the gas. Maybe I brushed him a little going past, but as I said earlier, this was clearly a self-defense situation.

  Looking back, maybe I should have dropped the cage before I got into the car. But everything was happening so fast, plus if I dropped the cage it might have injured the lemur, which I later found out was endangered. So the argument could be made from an ecology standpoint that I actually rescued this valuable animal, which the unstable lunatic had placed in a potentially hazardous situation vis-à-vis he was swinging a broken pole from a birdcage stand in its vicinity. I’m not saying that is my main legal position. My main legal position is that I was totally within my rights to defend myself.

  As you can imagine, by this point I was pretty upset, so I drove straight home. I have to say, as a person who just almost got his skull crushed, I was disappointed in Donna’s reaction.

  “A lemur?” she said. “I ask you to bring home wine and you BRING HOME A LEMUR?”

  “It was self-defense,” I said.

  “Can we keep it?” said Taylor.

  “NO WE CANNOT KEEP IT!” said Donna, who gets excited (she is Italian). “I have SEVENTEEN WOMEN coming here in a half hour to discuss Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and they will be expecting to drink WINE, so your father is going to TAKE THE LEMUR BACK TO WHEREVER HE GOT IT FROM and BRING HOME SOME WINE LIKE I ASKED HIM TO or he is going to spend the REST OF HIS LIFE SLEEPING IN THE GARAGE.”

  “Mom, you’re scaring the lemur,” said Taylor.

  “I can’t take it back,” I said.

  “Yay!” said Taylor.

  “Why not?” said Donna.

  “Because the guy it belongs to tried to kill me,” I said.

  “And why would he do that?” said Donna.

  “Well, partly because I took his lemur.”

  Donna rubbed her face with her hands, starting high and then pulling down, so her mouth got all stretched out. It’s not an attractive look for her, but I have learned over the years not to point this out.

  “All right,” she said. “Taylor, you will put the lemur in the basement . . .”

  “Yay!” said Taylor.

  “. . . for now. Tomorrow your father will get rid of the lemur.”

  “But Mom . . .”

  “Your father will GET RID OF THE LEMUR, and I do not care how he does it. But right now he will GO GET SOME WINE. He will get a LOT of wine.”

  Which is what I did. There is no point arguing with Donna when she is being that Italian. I thought about mentioning to her that the lemur owner was the same asshole who called the offside, but I decided it was probably better if she didn’t know that. I figured she was never going to find out, because I had no intention of ever coming into contact with that lunatic again.

  CHAPTER 5

  Philip

  I loved that lemur more than I loved my father-in-law.

  I try my best not to get emotionally involved with the animals in my pet shop. Through the years, I’ve learned that it will only lead to heartbreak due to the inevitability that sooner or later they will leave the store—either by way of a sale or (as in the case of that sickly Spanish Timbrado that I accidentally dropped and crushed with my heel when I grabbed the broken pole from a birdcage stand and took off after that racist maniac) feet first.

  So try as I may to maintain a purely professional relationship with all that crawl, hop, fly, lope, slither, or swim and regard them as mere inventory, there was something about that lemur that made me break my own rule. Why? Because it was endangered? Well, yes and no. Of course my heart goes out to any species that borders on extinction. I feel that way about polar bears, giant pandas, sunset frogs, Bengal tigers, Hawaiian monk seals, Egyptian vultures, Serpent Island centipedes, and Malagasy Giant Jumping Rats. But since I’ve never forged a personal relationship with any of them, I regret their impending demise but lose little or no sleep over it.

  With that baby lemur, however, from the moment it came into The Wine Shop, I felt an immediate connection. Perhaps it was his size (just 2.1 oz.) or the fact that its thumbs were only pseudo-opposable, which made its hands less than perfect at grasping objects, that I felt the desire to care for it. Feed it. Nurse it. It was delivered about an hour before closing on a Saturday evening and, because of its special needs, I was reluctant to leave it unattended until the store reopened Monday morning. So I took it home, brought it downstairs to our finished basement, put it in a corner next to a heat lamp and hand-fed it dry leaves, which I left in a bowl next to the cage for his next feeding.

  Daisy’s folks were in town and I found her note saying that she, her mom, and the kids had gone to a movie. And that my father-in-law, who’d opted not to join them, was napping in the downstairs spare bedroom in the finished basement—about fifteen feet away from the lemur. Wanting to take full advantage of the quiet, I went upstairs to the family room to watch a game I’d TiVoed (Wheel of Fortune) when, not ten minutes later, the smell of something burning was followed by the sound of our smoke detector, which was followed by the sound of my father-in-law’s incessant pounding of his fists on the door to the downstairs bedroom that he’d accidentally locked himself in. Apparently, I’d put the heat lamp too close to the dry leaves, so when I got down to the basement, I grabbed the cage and brought the frightened lemur up to the safety of our kitchen and cuddled it before grabbing the small fire extinguisher we kept inside the pantry, went back downstairs to the now smoke-filled basement, put the fire out, heard the sounds of my father-in-law’s somewhat softer pounding on the spare bedroom door, went back upstairs, grabbed the spare key we kept inside a kitchen drawer, went back downstairs, opened the door to the spare bedroom, and carried my unconscious father-in-law up the stairs and outside for fresh air, where he was revived by oxygen-toting firemen who’d pulled up just as I was laying him down on our front lawn.

  And now this very same lemur had been stolen. Kidnapped. Endangered in the hands of someone oblivious to or, even worse, uncaring about its delicacy. So I told the policeman that I knew who the perpetrator was and that I wanted him arrested and punished to the fullest extent of a law. I said “a” law and not “the” law because I really didn’t care which law it was, just as long as its punishment was cruel and unusual. I told him this in the emergency room at Children’s Hospital—where Hyo had driven me after that lunatic’s car knocked me down and ran over my ankle as he sped away.

  “What’s his name?” asked the humorless policeman whose nameplate identified him as Officer H. Pepper from the local Fort Lee precinct.

  “I have no idea,” I answered.

  “Bu
t you just told me that you know who this guy is.”

  “I do. But I don’t know his name. All I can tell you is that he’s number fourteen’s father.”

  “Excuse me?” asked Officer Pepper, who was now looking at me with the same expression traditionally seen on the faces of people who are talking to idiots. “What could that possibly mean?”

  “His daughter plays in the AYSO league that I’m a referee in. So all you have to do is get your hands on the roster for the Princess Daffodils in the ten-and-under division, see which player is number fourteen, then arrest her father and prosecute the bastard to the fullest extent of a law. Any law.”

  “No,” said Officer Pepper, who was now looking at me with the same expression traditionally seen on the faces of people who want to beat the daylights out of another person. “How it works is you get a hold of the roster, see who number fourteen is, then call me with the information and then I’ll go deal with her father, okay?” before handing me his card, which I quickly glanced at to see and happened to notice his rank.

  “You’re a sergeant?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re Sgt. Pepper?”

  “Don’t start, okay?”

  “You must get a lot of teasing.”

  “I said don’t start, okay?”

  “Fine.”

  So while the good folks at Children’s Hospital taped my chest in deference to two cracked ribs and fitted my left ankle with a soft walking cast, Hyo went online and found the Princess Daffodils roster on the AYSO website. The player who wore number 14 was Taylor Peckerman. Her parents were Donna and Jeffrey Peckerman, and because the listed address was only about a half mile away from ours, I felt compelled to drive past their house on my way home.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jeffrey

  There is an old legal principle, which I forget the technical Latin name of, but it comes from English common law, and the gist of it is: If you go to a man’s home, he can, legally, kill you.