“Nevertheless,” he said, “I’ve spoken to Ratso here and he’s going to be keeping a close eye on you for the first week. You can go tomorrow, but Ratso will stay with you for a while.”
The idea of my being Ratso’s ward was not a pleasant one, but it looked like the only way Robert Young was going to let me out of the hospital. Ratso had moved into the loft with me for a few weeks several years before, when I had been trying to help McGovern out of a hideous snarl he’d gotten himself into. I’d had a little urban hunting accident. Ratso had been dedicated at that time, even devoted. He’d stood up well in the face of death threats, my incapacitation, and harassment from the police. But he was still pretty far down on the list of people on this planet that I’d like to have for a roommate.
To put it kindly, Ratso lacked certain social graces. In fact, he lacked all social graces. And people who lack social graces are the very ones who don’t know what you’re talking about when you tell them they lack social graces. Anyway, it’s not very polite to tell somebody he’s a gluttonous, niggardly, unhygienic animal. About all you can say is what a dowdy, humorless woman once told Ratso when he was burping rather loudly in an Indian restaurant: “Pardon the pig.”
“This could be the end of a beautiful friendship,” I said. “We’ve done this before and it was most unpleasant.”
“Well, we’re doing it again,” said Ratso.
“Pardon the pig,” I said.
22
It was Sunday night, my last night in the hospital, and Ratso had gone home to pack his Gucci luggage for the big slumber party. Maybe I was being too hard on him, but at least I knew I was being an asshole and that meant that I wasn’t an asshole.
I’d had a few more visitors by this time. Jane Meara had come by. She was still pining for Rocky and she said what had happened to me was her fault. I said it wasn’t her fault. Cooperman came by and asked a few questions. I said I felt like hell and he said he’d see me there. He left. Unfortunately, Leila did not return.
I gazed lovingly at the unsmoked cigars in my toilet kit on the nearby table. There had already been one rather ugly altercation involving myself, the nurse, and the nurse’s supervisor over smoking cigars in the hospital room. I argued that cigars smell better than hospitals, but they disagreed. That’s what makes for horseracing. In my weakened state, I was hardly a match for them and I lived in fear that they might tell Robert Young and he might keep me at St. Vincent’s till the Fourth of July. I decided if I just played my cards right and practiced a certain Gandhi-like abstention, in twelve short hours I would be home smoking like a factory in New Jersey.
I was persevering as best I could when the last call of the day came in. It was Rambam.
“The girl, Leila—the one who’s half Palestinian—I checked her out.”
“Great,” I said.
“Not so great,” said Rambam.
“What is she?” I asked. “Yessir You’re-a-Fart’s aerobics instructor?”
“The fact that she’s half Palestinian is nothing. It’s the other half that’s the problem.”
“What could be worse?”
“Think about it.”
“Kraut,” I said.
“Worse.”
“Frog.”
“Worse.”
“What could be worse?”
“Try Colombian,” said Rambam. “She comes from a big, wealthy, powerful Colombian family, with the emphasis on the word family. And believe me, they don’t get their money growing coffee beans.”
By the time I hung up, I could see the red flag standing up like a small erection in the parking meter of my mind. I didn’t know if it meant “danger” or “your time is up,” but either possibility seemed sufficiently unpleasant.
I thought of Leila and a chill came over me. It started hot and ended cold. If I knew myself at all, like Ferdinand the Bull, I would probably soon be charging that little flag. And that, on top of everything else, could be very dangerous indeed.
It was a long time before I got to sleep that night. I kept hearing Rambam’s last words over and over again: “… they don’t get their money growing coffee beans. …” Where was Robert Young when I needed a cup of Sanka?
23
For a fairly large, cold place, the loft seemed surprisingly cozy. After a stint in the hospital, of course, Houston International Airport would have seemed cozy. But I was glad to be back. And the cat was glad I was back. But the cat was not pleased to see Ratso moving his luggage into the loft.
Cats are a fairly right-wing group politically. They are lovers of the status quo. They don’t like anything that might represent change. They hate marriages, divorces, moving days, graduations, bar mitzvahs, bill collectors, rug shampooers, painters, plumbers, electricians, television repairmen, out-call masseuses, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and just about everything else, most of which I agree with them about.
Ratso, possibly for the first time in his life, was an agent of change.
The trouble began innocently enough on the first night we were back, with the cat taking a Nixon in one of Ratso’s red antique shoes. This is the kind of behavior that, while it may be rather incommoding to the guest, is usually seen as mildly amusing by the cat fancier. It makes the guest feel uncomfortable but it makes the host feel, in a somewhat peculiar, roundabout way, wanted.
“It’s just the cat’s way of saying, ‘Welcome, Ratso,’” I said, as Ratso threw open the kitchen window to the grim February morning and dumped frozen feline detritus onto the heads of a mother and her two children down on the sidewalk. The sidewalks of New York are famous for many reasons, and one of them is that people have been dumping frozen cat shit onto them for over a hundred years. Pedestrians think it’s sleet or some new kind of weather condition. They find it bracing and invigorating.
Ratso’s comments will not be recorded here as they do not further the narrative or much of anything else. It is enough to note that they were the kind of ill-humored, unfortunate remarks that one often regrets no sooner than one has uttered them.
By nightfall things were getting back to what passes for normal in New York. Ratso, operating in a rather pioneer mind-set, was under the impression that we might be snowed in for months. Food was his number one priority and I heard him putting in large to-go orders with Joe at Big Wong and with my friend Herb at the Carnegie Deli.
I did not feel that the moment was quite right to tell Ratso we were running low on cat food.
Ratso screened all incoming calls and in general treated me, to my extreme displeasure, like a convalescing maiden aunt.
“You’d make a very good male social secretary, Ratso,” I said. “Have you ever thought about that line of work?”
“Not really,” said Ratso. He was busy unpacking large books about the life of Jesus as an adolescent and other arcane subjects. Ratso was ignoring my comments and complaints in much the manner that he ignored the presence of the cat. The cat and I were merely two large, troublesome gnats in Ratso’s life. For all practical purposes, the cat and I no longer existed. Ratso’s domineering manner created a certain resentment in me and I could tell the cat wasn’t too keen on it either.
Ratso went to the kitchen and began moving pots and pans and plates around—something the cat disliked intensely—like a predatory insect laying up supplies for the winter. The to-go orders from the Carnegie and Big Wong were due any moment and Ratso was becoming increasingly animated.
He turned to me with a frying pan in his hand and said, “I’m not just staying here until you’re well. I’m staying here until we discover who it was that shot you.”
It was a frustrating but somehow poignant sentiment. I looked at Ratso and shrugged.
“You’re going to make somebody a fine homosexual pancake chef,” I said.
* * *
The food Ratso had ordered took longer to arrive than you’d think. It always does. The guys at the Carnegie were probably still shaking the matzo ball tree, and the guys from Big Wong were probably st
ill scouring the neighborhood for a small black dog. Matzo ball trees do not fare well in this country, but the small black dog is a Chinese delicacy.
Ratso stood by the window staring gloomily into the gloom. In his hands he nervously juggled the little Negro puppet head with the key to the building in its mouth and the brightly colored parachute attached. I sat in the chair by my desk, puffing on a cigar.
“Careful with that,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” said Ratso. “It’s the best little head I’ve had in a while.”
As it happened, both deliverymen arrived at almost precisely the same time. I don’t know who was first, but they came up on the same puppet head. With the two delivery guys standing in the doorway, Ratso came over to me and spoke in a voice he thought was a whisper.
“Give me about eighty bucks for the slope food,” he said.
“That’s pretty steep,” I said. “Where’s it from—Mr. Chow of Beverly Hills?”
“Just give me the cash … Look, I’m pitching in, too. I’ve got to tip these guys. You’ll get something coming back.”
“Sure.”
The truth was that every time Ratso and I had ever split a check, I’d gotten hosed. Then Ratso would always demand the receipt, which he maintained was necessary for his taxes. Once, I tore up the receipt rather than give it to him, and it made Ratso so sad that I vowed never to do it again. So, with the two deliverymen doing an impatient jitterbug in the doorway, I christianed Ratso down to sixty-five bucks and let it go.
Ratso tipped the deliverymen, they left, and he started sorting packages all over the kitchen. “I think,” said Ratso, “we’ll hold the Jew food till the morning and go with the slope food tonight. Or we could mix the two and have sort of a bicultural smorgasbord. Anyway, there’s enough here to last us awhile.”
“Wait a minute. How’d you pay for the food from the Carnegie?”
“I worked out a deal with Herb,” Ratso said shiftily. “What was the deal?”
“He put it on your tab.”
“Good work, Fatso.”
“Don’t mention it, Shylock.”
24
At two o’clock in the morning, the cat jumped on Ratso’s balls. I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, and when it happened, I didn’t have any trouble recognizing what it was. I didn’t see it happen, but hearing a cat jump on somebody’s balls is about as down-home an experience as you can have, next to having a cat jump on your own balls.
I leaped sideways out of bed, went into the living room, and saw Ratso holding his testicles and looking around for a weapon. The cat, quite wisely, was nowhere to be seen. So, without the cat, I just had to deal with the Rat.
I had to calm him down first. “Don’t personalize it,” I said. “It’s a territorial situation; it has nothing to do with what the cat thinks of you.” This, of course, was blatantly false, but when a cat jumps on your houseguest’s balls you don’t rub it in.
“If I find him I’ll kill him.”
“It’s a female.”
“Might’ve known.”
“Sanka?”
“Piss off.”
Ratso was understandably upset. He’d given up his bed and his ten thousand books relating to Bob Dylan, Jesus, and Hitler. He’d sacrificed his cable television set, which included forgoing the thing he loved most in life next to food, watching hockey games in a disreputable pair of woolen pajamas. He’d taken a few days off work, moved into a rather strange locus, and possibly put his own life at risk. He’d done all this to help a convalescent country-singer-turned-amateur-detective. And what thanks had he gotten?
But that didn’t make things any better for me. I was still weak and subject to periodic dizzy spells. I was trying to locate a killer and a cat before somebody drowned me in a bag. And now I had to cope with a petulant and somewhat torpedolike houseguest.
Being an urban hermit is not the easiest thing in the world to be when you grow up. You feel either crowded or lonely as hell. But at least you feel something. I was feeling like a shot of Jameson.
I walked over to the counter and poured a medicinal portion into the old bull’s horn. Ratso was already back on the couch. I noticed he was sleeping on his stomach.
I downed the shot and thought about Jane Meara, whom I ought to check on. I thought of Fred Katz, whom I ought to find before he found me again. I thought of Sergeant Cooperman, whom I ought to talk to but didn’t want to. I thought of Leila, whom I wanted to see. I wasn’t better but I was ready. I thought of lots of things, lots of people, lots of reasons why I was me. Maybe someday I’d fall victim to marriage, suburbia, puttering with my lawn, but I couldn’t really see it. I’d long ago come to the conclusion that you’re born alone, you die alone, and you might as well get used to it. Nothing that Thoreau or Kerouac hadn’t already found out, but it was comforting to realize that nothing had changed.
I took another shot and looked over at my boots standing by the desk. They were long and narrow, like my mind. I visualized a person standing in them. Another Kinky, but not like the other Kinkys I’d seen when I first came to in the hospital. It was the Kinky that I could be with a little bit of luck and a hell of a lot of guts. He was a little weatherbeaten but he looked all right. You could tell that he didn’t have time to be lonely.
There’s not that much time left, I thought. There never had been that much time. Never enough to spend the rest of your life looking at the bland face of a child in a yellow station wagon.
The road could’ve ended anywhere, but it didn’t. So you keep driving life’s lonely DeSoto, looking ahead into the rain and darkness with the windshield wipers coming down like reaper’s blades just missing your dreams. And you don’t stop till you’re damn well ready. Till you come to the right place. Till you come to the right face. The place may be New York or Texas or it may be somewhere painted with the colors Negroes use in their neon lights.
The face will be smiling. So you take the key out of the ignition and you see if it opens her heart.
25
The phone call from Eugene came at about 6:15 A.M. It was a trifle early and it was also a trifle unpleasant. “Our little friend,” according to Eugene, had not been idle during the night. Whoever he was, he was continuing his campaign of terror against Jane Meara. Eugene was at Jane’s place now because she was frightened to be alone. They wanted to meet me. They had something for me.
I didn’t want anything. Maybe another twelve hours of sleep.
I agreed to meet them in an hour at a little Greek coffee shop on Twenty-eighth Street around the corner from Jane’s office. I hung up, got dressed, found and fed the cat, and found and lit a cigar. I put on my old hunting vest, my hat, and my coat and I tiptoed across the living room like a guy sneaking out of the house for a poker game. It was my house—I could sneak out of it if I wanted. I locked the door to the loft behind me.
One rule I always follow in life is “Let sleeping rats lie.”
* * *
Vandam Street was windy, cold, and empty in the early morning. There was just a little old lady trying to hold on to a little pink hat and me trying to hold on to my cowboy hat. Deserted as it was, the place had an aura of urban prairie to it. Of course, these days I usually rode two-legged animals.
I drifted up Hudson and hailed a hack. Through a frosty window that wouldn’t quite close, I watched the city waken. A stout woman with a shawl unlocks an iron gate. A man in a woolen cap unloads a crate of oranges from a truck. Down the street another man sits by the gutter next to a whiskey bottle and blows on his hands. Two little children in mackerel-snapper uniforms come out of a building with a doorman. A man wearing a coat walks a dog wearing a sweater.
People walk dogs in Dallas. People walk dogs in California. But in New York sometimes you can see a real man walking a real dog, and there’s something timeless and rather beautiful about it. It’s performance art.
My mind was starting to wake up a little bit, too. A lot of things were happening to Ja
ne Meara and she wasn’t the kind of person things always happened to. She wasn’t the kind of person whose junkie boyfriend beat her up or who didn’t know that her apartment was being used as a crack kitchen or who found a serial killer in her shredded wheat. She was normal as a blueberry blintze.
So why had somebody kidnapped her cat? Why had somebody left her a crank note at the Roosevelt Hotel? Why had somebody put a bloody butcher knife on her desk? I didn’t have any hard answers, but a garish mosaic was coming together in my mind’s eye and it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d want to hang in your sitting room.
The cab screeched to a halt at Twenty-eighth Street next to a man who was vomiting on a police car. The police car was empty and pretty soon so was the man. Make a nice picture postcard. I paid the driver, got out of the hack, and started walking up the street.
Halfway up the block I found the little Greek coffee shop. It wasn’t hard to find the place. You seen one Greek coffee shop, you’ve seen ’em all. Life imitates John Belushi.
It was a little after seven but the place was already crowded. Eugene and Jane were sitting at a table by the window and waved me over. Jane looked fragile. Eugene looked nervous. The waitress came to the table, Frisbeed a menu at me, and said, “Whad’ll you have?”
I said, “Coffee.”
She took the menu and went away faster than a dream you weren’t sure you had.
“I’m glad you were able to come,” said Jane.
“Let’s not get personal,” I said. As a rule, I tried never to appear too sophisticated until the coffee arrived. Jane looked like she was practicing her smile for the first time and Eugene made a let’s-get-on-with-the-show gesture.
The waitress brought my coffee. I took a sip and waited. Eugene looked at Jane and Jane looked at Eugene. I looked into my coffee cup and wished I were on a little Greek island instead of in a little Greek coffee shop.
“All right,” I said finally, “spit it.”
When the Cat's Away Page 6