When the Cat's Away

by Kinky Friedman

There was a stunned silence on the line. It was followed by hearty, incredulous Irish laughter. McGovern was one of the few people in the world who, even when being incredulous, could be hearty. He was always Irish.

  I figured I’d rush him with the ad copy while he was still laughing. “Okay,” I said, “it runs like this: ‘Fred Katz— all is forgiven. Return Rocky and no questions will be asked. Call Kinky—555-3717.”’

  “You know,” said McGovern, “I’m a little disappointed in you. Just a little disappointed.” He laughed again.

  “What’s the big deal?” I asked. “I’m busy this morning and I thought—”

  “I’ve covered every beat there is,” said McGovern with some intensity. “I got the exclusive on the Richard Speck murders in Chicago. I spent six weeks covering Charles Manson. I got the most in-depth story ever on Lieutenant Calley. …”

  “Rusty?”

  “Yeah,” said McGovern, “good ol’ Rusty. I’ve spent over two decades covering major news stories. My whole career—my whole life—has been building, building up to this moment, when a country singer I know calls me to place a want ad for a lost cat. Kind of makes it all worthwhile.”

  Dealing with McGovern had turned out to be at least as tedious as calling Daily News advertising and placing the ad myself, which I should have done in the first place. But you dance with who brung you.

  “So you’ll do it,” I said. I waited.

  “Sure, ol’ pal,” said McGovern a bit wistfully.

  “Thanks, pal,” I said. “You’re a great American.”

  “You could do me a little favor, too,” said McGovern.

  “Sure,” I said, “what is it?”

  “You can tell the Pulitzer committee they can go back to bed now,” he said.

  15

  That afternoon Ratso and I went to the Garden to weed out a killer. Ratso had taken a renewed interest, indeed a fascination, in the case from the moment he’d seen the stiff. Death is a hot ticket. For rubberneckers on an expressway viewing a tragic accident or for would-be Watsons, the specter of death is compelling. It requires the subtlety of a more Sherlockian mind to appreciate the finding of a lost cat.

  That morning, before I’d left the loft, I’d spoken to Eugene in Jane Meara’s office, described the people I planned to interview at the Garden, and discovered, not to my total wonderment, that the cat show visitors to Jane’s office bore a strong similarity to Marilyn and Stanley Park and their spokesperson, Hilton Head. Of course, they could’ve been Marilyn and Stanley Park and Hilton Head impersonators, but somehow I rather doubted it.

  I assigned Ratso to plague the three of them with his presence. I told him to insinuate himself into their lives and find out all there was to know. For myself, I had other ideas.

  I figured I would start in the area of Rocky’s disappearance, talk to people and cats, absorb the ambience of the place. Where was Rocky? What made the Cheshire Cat smile? What made some people kill? I wanted to know more about cats in general. More about God and man. Less about William Buckley.

  The Garden looked spectral as Ratso and I got out of the cab, almost evil. The afternoon was cold as blue eyes that didn’t love you anymore. It was starting to rain.

  I grudgingly paid the driver, who was allergic to cigar smoke and probably a number of other things. Pretty smart to get a job driving a hack in New York City if you’re allergic to cigar smoke. Of course, as a child, the driver probably hadn’t wanted to be an allergy-prone cab driver. No child wants to be that. Just as no child wants to grow up to be a critic for The New York Times. Children want to be something good and meaningful in life. Like the fire chief of Spokane.

  I lit a cigar and Ratso and I walked silently through the gray day like two mothmen drawn to the bright flames of death.

  * * *

  I walked around in the Garden for a while, focusing on the vague area where Rocky’d disappeared two days earlier. I combed the area thoroughly and didn’t come up with as much as an ear mite. Every time I saw a receptive face I’d take out the snapshot I’d liberated from Jane Meara’s office and ask the person, “Ever seen this cat?”

  None of them recognized Rocky. However, once I identified the cat as Rocky, many of them commented on her abduction. No one seemed to think the cat could have wandered off. No one had seen anyone strange hanging around.

  Of course, the cat owners themselves were such a strange-looking lot it would’ve been hard to notice anyone who had looked strange.

  I was about ready to call in the dogs as it were, piss on the fire, and go find Ratso, when I saw her.

  She was wearing a David Copperfield cap and between her hands she was stretching what appeared to be a large white rat. Beneath the cap her face looked beautiful and vaguely ethnic in a childlike, poignant, American kind of way, like a parade in New York for a country that, for all practical purposes, no longer existed.

  She looked half of something pretty weird and I just hoped it wasn’t Turkish. Their only major export was knives that went around corners.

  “Sexy weather we’re havin’,” I said. I’d gotten that one from a male cab driver one rainy evening at the Vancouver Airport.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Well, I don’t want what’s between your hands,” I said.

  She smiled a mischievous smile and turned a beautiful, cold shoulder on me. She carried the large white rat over to a table and placed him on it. Like a confused Pied Piper, I followed the rat.

  I stopped a little distance away and looked at the two of them. The rat still looked like a rat, but the broad looked like a killer. What the hell, I thought, I was looking for a killer.

  We carried on a rather strained cocktail conversation without the cocktails and I learned a number of things. Her name was Leila. She was half Palestinian. She was a judge at the cat show. She had not been holding a large white rat. She’d been holding a purebred hairless Sphynx. She’d heard of Rocky’s disappearance and she’d read about the murder in the newspaper, but she could offer no new information about either. The last thing I learned was that she did not wish to join me for a drink.

  I caught up with Ratso right in front of a veterinarian giving a slide show on diarrhea. Ratso was having a rather animated discussion with Hilton Head. I walked up just in time to hear Head say “I hope you’re satisfied!” and to see him prance away.

  “There goes a very unhappy young man,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Ratso, “and he’s gonna miss the rest of the slide show.”

  “So are we,” I said.

  * * *

  I would like to be able to say that I felt a slight prickling effect on the back of my neck as Ratso and I started to leave the Garden. It would’ve been nice if I’d noticed the hairs on the backs of my hands standing up like little San-dinista soldiers. Unfortunately, all I noticed was that I’d spent several hours asking people about some cat many of them had never heard of and daydreaming about a sensitive relationship with a Palestinian harem girl. I didn’t know if I’d be seeing Leila again or under what circumstances that event was to occur. I only knew that if I succeeded in tearing away the veil from her heart, the two of us might have a decent chance of erasing six thousand years of bad karma.

  “Well, what’d you get, Rats?” I asked as we walked down the hallway from the Felt Forum to the Garden proper.

  “Hilton Head is a born-again Christian.”

  “Mildly unpleasant.”

  “Yeah, and it’s kind of funny, too.”

  “Why is that?”

  “’Cause he doesn’t look like a born-again Christian.” I stopped briefly to light a cigar. “What about Marilyn Park?” I asked.

  “She’s a vegetarian.”

  “Good detective work,” I said as I blew on the end of the cigar. “Were you able to learn what her favorite color is?”

  “No,” said Ratso, “but I did find out something rather strange about Stanley Park. His wife and Head say that the three of them went by Jane Meara
’s office yesterday.”

  “So?”

  “Park says it’s the first he’s heard of it. Claims he was here supervising the judging all afternoon.”

  “Interesting discrepancy.”

  “Yeah,” said Ratso. “So who was the third man? Maybe our old friend Fred Katz?” The only times I’d ever seen Ratso that animated were when somebody else was paying for his lunch.

  “Well, you might have something there,” I said. “Or …”

  “Or—what?”

  “Or … nothing.”

  “Terrific, Sherlock. I’ve just discovered what could be a vital clue. What’ve you turned up?”

  We walked out the front doors of the Garden and down the walkway toward Seventh Avenue. I thought about it for a moment. Then I told Ratso about Leila.

  “I don’t see how your wanting to jump the bones of a female camel jockey is relevant to the case,” he said.

  I shrugged. “She and I could be the last hope for peace in the Middle East,” I said. Ratso was not impressed and responded with a fairly ethnic hand gesture.

  We were nearing the end of the walkway when a figure stepped out from behind a portico. It was wearing a garish mask not dissimilar to the ones worn in the Broadway show Cats. There was something rather frightening in its manner—like catching a Jekyll entering the on-ramp to Mr. Hyde. There was also something rather frightening in its right hand.

  It was a gun and it was pointed at my heart.

  16

  Everybody dies an early death sooner or later. I’d always hoped mine could’ve been a little later. Dying’s not what it’s cracked up to be. But in all fairness, very few things are. Body surfing, for one.

  The figure adjusted the mask and I adjusted to the notion that I might’ve gotten linen for the last time. The Jamaican cigar I was holding like a lifeline in my right hand might be the last Jamaican cigar I’d ever smoke. I’d probably never go to Jamaica now. I’d probably never even go to Big Wong.

  Funny the things you think about when your life hangs like a stray gray thread on Ratso’s Hadassah Thrift Shop coat. Maybe it continues to cling there and you continue to live. Or maybe some well-meaning, neurotic broad puts down her plastic cup of white wine at a SoHo gallery opening and says, “Just a minute, Ratso, honey, you’ve got a thread hanging on your coat.” She picks off the thread and you die. The landlord finds a new tenant and raises the rent. The cat goes to the city pound. The girl in the peach-colored dress calls, hears your voice still on the machine, leaves a message, and wonders why you never got back to her. Serves her right for waiting so damn long to call.

  Answering machines tend to take on a life of their own. I remember the time the pope called Mother Teresa and told her she was needed in Los Angeles. Mother Teresa thought it was an unusual assignment, but the pope told her there were many poor people in the barrios there who needed her help. So, about three months later, the pope called Mother Teresa in L.A. She wasn’t home but he got her answering machine. The message said, “Hi. This is Terri. I’m away from the phone right now …”

  It’s amazing how much time you have when you’re out of time. Strangled images struggled through Kentucky Fried synapses under my cowboy hat. What used to be. What might have been. A dark and beautiful girl in a little blue car—the prettiest girl in the world with a flower in her hair …

  And there was Leila. Brown eyes sharing sweet and sour secrets of Semitism. Fragile Arabian ankles I would never be familiar with. I hated to pass the Middle East peace baton back to the Henry Kissingers of the world. Let them try to sleep- counting tiny little Cambodians. Soon I would probably be a tiny little Cambodian, too. Any moment now … Leila again … Brown eyes … as my friend Chinga Chavin says … that look like handcuffs … And the espresso machine I leave to Ratso …

  Suddenly the cat behind the mask gave forth with a sharp, chilling sound—half feline, half fiendish—somewhere between a cynical, human meow and the noise a cat would make if it could laugh.

  Then it pulled the trigger.

  17

  When I came to there were two green garden snakes coming out of my stomach and three Ratsos sitting by my bedside. All of them looked hungry. The three Ratsos were eating bagels, and whatever the green garden snakes were eating I didn’t want to know, so I went back to sleep.

  When I woke up the second time, there was only one Ratso and he was eating a large slice of pizza from John’s of Bleecker Street, the best in New York. Ratso ate like a starving boar-hog but he had taste.

  “Where are the other two Ratsos?” I asked. I didn’t know if it was night or day, but it was beginning to dawn on me that I was in a hospital. Hell would have to wait.

  “The other two Ratsos?” he said uncertainly. “Maybe they’re out playing with the other two Kinkys.”

  I thought about it for a moment. My mind was clearing a little more slowly than my vision. It took a while to think about the other two Kinkys and the other two Ratsos. “Maybe they’re working on a case,” I said.

  “Could be,” said Ratso, nodding his head. “What kind of case do you think they’re working on?”

  “Maybe they’re finding the little missing children on the milk cartons,” I said.

  “Maybe,” said Ratso. I could tell he was worried, because he’d stopped eating his pizza. “Look, Kinkster,” he said, “you just rest here a minute. I’m going to go find the doctor.”

  Ratso walked out into the hall and I looked around the room. Everything came back to me like a buzzard on the highway. Obviously I’d been shot. Obviously I wasn’t dead. Obviously I was in a hospital room. Obviously my friends hadn’t sent a hell of a lot of flowers.

  The tendrils of my brain were becoming a little less fuzzy and they were damn close to grasping onto something important. I tried to think again and this time I connected. Whoever’d shot me must’ve known I was at the Garden and must’ve known what I was looking for. That brought it down to a very small group of people. The Parks. Hilton Head. Leila?

  I credited myself with enough native sensitivity to rule out the people I’d shown the Rocky pictures to. I’d seen nothing in their eyes beyond the pale of innocence, sympathy, admiration, boredom—each a normal cat fancier, if such an animal existed. I’d learned to beware of “normal” and “harmless” types. It was the “normal” and “harmless” types that usually did you in. And the women.

  My spirits sagged a bit as I enlarged the field of suspects to practically everybody I’d shown the photograph to and his kid sister. And God knew what Ratso had stirred up interviewing the Parks and Head. It was hopeless. For all I knew the veterinarian could’ve shot me for walking out on his slide show on diarrhea. Men have been shot for less.

  I shook my head, cleared a couple cobwebs, and my spirits lifted again. There had been something familiar about the figure behind the cat mask. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. I wasn’t even certain whether it’d been a man or a woman. But whoever it was, I was very conscious of one thing. It had seemed to know me. That narrowed the field.

  I was trying to remember what it was that had been familiar when the doctor came into the room briskly with Ratso tailing after him like a large jet stream. The doctor looked like Robert Young on a bad day. He adjusted a few knobs on something that looked like a sound system, put a stethoscope to what I’m pleased to call my heart, fondled one of the garden snakes, and smiled.

  “You had a close call,” he said. “A very close call. I’m going to keep you here for a few more days.”

  “Well,” I said, “at least we’ll find out if my Blue Cross has wheels on it.”

  Robert Young laughed the same friendly, hollow laugh that he always used to tag the Sanka commercials with. The nervous window-washer who works on the ninety-seventh floor has just switched to Sanka. Robert Young asks how he’s feeling now. He says, “Great, now that I’ve switched to Sanka.” Robert Young laughs, ha-ha-ha. You didn’t exactly trust that laugh, but it was comforting.

  “You know,”
he said, coming nicely off the laugh, “you’ve been unconscious for over twelve hours.” Of course I hadn’t known it. I would’ve had to be the Three Faces of Kinky to have known it.

  “Yeah,” said Ratso, “you were almost the Rip Van fucking Winkle of the Village.”

  I looked at Robert Young. “Did you get the bullet out?” I asked.

  Robert Young looked at me. Then he gave forth with another friendly, indulgent little chuckle. “There was no bullet,” he said. “You were shot with a tranquilizer dart.”

  “A tranquilizer dart?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “A tranquilizer dart,” said Robert Young. “The kind they use on the big cats.”

  18

  I spent Friday afternoon in a hospital bed dreaming of cigars. But I took a little time out to empathize with a dead literary agent whom nobody had liked and to overidentify with a lost cat whom one person loved.

  But then, I was more sensitive than most Americans. In fact, most Americans were more sensitive than most Americans.

  I’d had a phone hooked up in the room and I’d been working it like a hyperactive croupier most of the morning. I like telephones. On some occasions, I love telephones. They sometimes make it possible to travel cross the darkness in the distance of a dream. I like cats better than agents but I wanted to be fairly scientific about the thing, so I’d begun my calls in alphabetical order; that is, I made the calls pertaining to the dead agent prior to those pertaining to the lost cat. An organized mind solves an organized crime.

  I called Esther “Lobster” Newberg, an agent I knew, and learned the worst. Everybody had hated Rick “Slick” Goldberg. Lobster didn’t wish to speak ill of the dead, and she didn’t wish to speak ill of other agents (many disgruntled writers would consider this to be the same thing), but even she had not much liked Rick “Slick” Goldberg. If I could’ve paged his mother at the Shalom Retirement Village, she probably wouldn’t’ve liked Rick “Slick” Goldberg. Well, it was a murder case, not a popularity contest.