Ten Little New Yorkers

by Kinky Friedman

  By the Same Author

  The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic

  ’Scuse Me While I Whip This Out

  The Prisoner of Vandam Street

  Curse of the Missing Puppethead

  Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned

  Guide to Texas Etiquette

  Meanwhile Back at the Ranch

  Steppin’ on a Rainbow

  The Mile High Club

  Spanking Watson

  Blast from the Past

  Roadkill

  The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover

  God Bless John Wayne

  Armadillos & Old Lace

  Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola

  Musical Chairs

  Frequent Flyer

  When the Cat’s Away

  A Case of Lone Star

  Greenwich Killing Time

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Kinky Friedman

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Friedman, Kinky.

  Ten little New Yorkers : a novel / Kinky Friedman.

  p. cm.

  1. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.R527T45 2005

  813’.54—dc22 2004059158

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7190-5

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-7190-4

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Prologue

  Dear Reader,

  This may not make much sense to you. I’m still in kind of a state of shock myself. So I’ll let Kinky tell the story in his own words. I went over to his place on Vandam Street, you see, a few days after the tragedy. In the bottom lefthand drawer of his old desk, I found the notes he’d written concerning his last adventure, which comprise the manuscript you are about to read. I have not changed or edited the story in any way.

  I’ll tell you something else. That loft of Kinky’s seemed so sad and lonely it broke my heart. The memories were as thick as the dust. I took the manuscript, scooped up the puppethead, then cleaned out the refrigerator. Didn’t want anything to spoil. Then I said a little prayer for Kinky’s soul and I got the hell out of there.

  The Kinkster was more than just my best friend. I believe he was, as he often claimed, a true mender of destinies. It’s just too bad there was no one around with the ability to help him mend his own. As for me, I will never forget him. For as long as I live, Kinky will be alive as well. I hope our little adventures will be read for many years to come. They were odd, at times quirky, and some of them were resolved in quite unconventional ways, but all of them were fun, enlightening, colorful, and hopelessly human. And we lived them all together.

  He was a great friend. He was a great detective. In fact, if Sherlock Holmes had come from Texas, his name would be Kinky Friedman.

  Larry “Ratso” Sloman

  New York, New York

  One

  The cat had been gone and the lesbian dance had been silent for some time now. It had been a fairly rough patch for the Kinkster. Ratso was really starting to irritate me as well. “Starting,” I suppose, would be the wrong word to use. Ratso had been doing a pretty thorough job of getting up my sleeve ever since the first day I’d met him. Maybe it was part of his charm. Maybe I never used to let it get to me. Maybe with the cat gone and no one around to really talk to, the full brunt of Ratso’s personality was finally weighing down upon me. But Ratso was a guy you just couldn’t hate, so you might as well love him. And when I think of all the shit the two of us have been through together, I see him as a natural and inevitable part of my own existence. The cat never liked him, of course, and that would be putting it mildly. The truth was the cat fucking hated him, and I believe you should never mistrust the instincts of a cat. But what the hell, the cat by now was no doubt safely across the rainbow bridge and I was standing at my window, waiting for Ratso, and watching the rain.

  It was a hard rain, as Bob Dylan might say, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I didn’t really give a damn if the whole city floated away. Well, maybe it’d be nice to keep Chinatown. When it’s raining cats and dogs I miss the animals and people I’ve loved in my life and I feel closer to them and farther away from today. Today is just a garbage-man in his yellow raincoat. Today is the wet woman with the wild hair walking willfully into the white wall. Today’s a goddamn vase without any flowers. Hell, give me a passably decent tomorrow, I said. Give me a handful of scrappy yesterdays. Give me liberty or give me death or give me life on the Mississippi.

  Since my cat had disappeared I found I was talking to myself a great deal, and myself, unfortunately, had never taken the time or effort to bother developing her listening skills. Without the cat I was a starfish on the sand. A lesbian dance class without the music. A Japanese tourist wandering the world without a camera. I was lost in a swirling gray fog of grief and self-pity. What the hell, I thought. Being alone provides an opportunity few of us ever have in life, the opportunity to get to know ourselves. I mean you might as well get to know yourself. You’re going to have to live together.

  I watched the rain some more. It felt like it was raining all over the world. Everywhere but Georgia. I heard some rumbling sounds from upstairs. Lesbian thunder no doubt. Then from further upstairs I heard the rumbling sounds of just plain thunder. After listening for a while it was hard to tell which was which. Ask me if I cared. Large dogs often seem to be afraid of thunder, but small dogs usually remain unfazed by it. What does this tell us? Not too much. These are the kinds of fragmented thoughts that quite commonly pop into the heads of private investigators who’ve gone too long with nothing to investigate. If this situation persists for a while, said investigators may even lose their powers of observation. When this occurs, about all they can do is watch the rain.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” I said to the cat who wasn’t there, “I hear the call of a blue-buttocked tropical loon.”

  It is not uncommon, psychologists say, for a person to speak to a loved one after the loved one has passed away. The force of habit is often stronger than the force of gravity. The force of wishful thinking, I would submit, may even be stronger than the other two. Psychologists probably wouldn’t agree with me. Like that red-bearded baboon who got me deselected from the Peace Corps. Because I was honest with him I never got to meet a blonde driving a jeep in Africa and make her the future ex–Mrs. Kinky Friedman. I had to wander the country aimlessly for many moons, retrain in Hawaii, then go to Borneo where I helped people who’d been farming successfully for over two thousand years. It was during my stint in Borneo that my penis sloughed off in the jungle. I didn’t blame God. I didn’t blame the psychologist. I didn’t even blame the naked little brown children who laughed and pointed to my penis lying there on the jungle floor and shouted Pisang! Pisang means “banana” in Malay. No, I don’t blame any of these people. I just blame my editor for leaving this shit out of the book.

  The blue-buttocked tropical loon called out again, giving forth with what sounded like another, somewhat more impassioned, mating call. What, I wondered, was a blue-buttocked tropical loon doing in the middle of a rainstorm in the West Village? The blue-buttocked tropical loon
belonged in a rain forest, not a rainstorm. Of course I could understand it making an occasional appearance in the East Village, but it was highly unusual for this rare bird to migrate to the more civilized West Village. Another unsettling irregularity was that it was the middle of winter, certainly not the normal mating season for the blue-buttocked tropical loon. Possibly, like everybody else in the world, the loon was merely out to fuck me. I opened the kitchen window ever so slightly. I looked down into a monolithic gray wall of rain but could see nothing. Then I heard the strange sound again.

  “Kinkstah!” it seemed to say. “Kinkstah, I’m fucking drowning out here!”

  I walked over to the roaring fireplace and picked up the little black puppethead from off the mantel. The key to the building was still wedged firmly in its smiling mouth. It seemed it was the only secure thing I had in the world these days. The puppethead had been lost, but now it was found, and it held the key, I felt, to my last remaining chance for happiness in life. If you’re happy, of course, this probably won’t make much sense to you. If you’re not, you probably already realize how the world turns on a dime. Or a key. Or a memory.

  I opened the window a little further and threw poor Yorick out into the cold curtain of rain. Somewhere below that curtain stood either Ratso or an extremely articulate blue-buttocked tropical loon. Moments later all doubt was erased as Ratso came stumbling into the loft like a carnival tent coming in from the rain. He was wearing a fire-engine-red hooded rain slicker that flapped and dripped all the way to the refrigerator.

  “My floors will be a mess,” I said.

  “Your floors have always been a mess,” said Ratso. “Why change now? At least you’ve gotten rid of all those cat turds—”

  Realizing his own unpremeditated insensitivity, perhaps, he pulled his head out of the refrigerator long enough to walk the puppethead back to its customary perch on top of the mantel. Then, with one arm resting on the mantel, he warmed himself before the fire.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Forget it,” I told him. And I meant it. The loss of one cat, one man, one woman, one child, one dream, signifies very little either in the city or in the world. Everybody knows there’s plenty more where that one came from. Nobody cares or everybody does—it’s all the same thing. We mourn for ourselves, I thought. So get on with your life or become a fucking Buddhist or something, but don’t just sit around moping about it. Simply make a point in the future of never letting yourself get involved with anything that eats or dies.

  “Cheer up, Kinkstah!” said Ratso. “Let’s go to Chinatown.”

  “That would constitute eating.”

  “Eating’s important, Kinkstah! So’s dumping. When you stop eating, you stop dumping. When you stop dumping, you stop living. The Jewish people have been assuaging their grief and their guilt for over two thousand years—hell, maybe more—by eating Chinese food. Why stop now? We have a great tradition to uphold!”

  “Ratso, it’s raining.”

  “That’s what they told Noah! And what’d he do? He built himself an ark!”

  “Maybe I’ll build myself something like this,” I said.

  With impeccable timing, I blasted a loud fart that seemed to reverberate in the loft, echoing like footsteps in the tomb of the mummy of the Pharaoh Esophagus. Ratso was impressed.

  “That was a bell-ringer,” he said. “Did you touch cloth?”

  “That would be unlikely, Watson. As you well know, I’ve worn no underwear since my years in the tropics. I prefer to go commando-style.”

  “Right you are, Sherlock. How could I forget a thing like that?”

  “Ah, my dear Watson! But it is exactly the trivial little matter like that that the criminal mind often forgets. And it is exactly ‘a thing like that,’ as you say, that arouses the rational, scientific mind of the detective and leads him to the sure resolution of the most puzzling and convoluted matter.”

  “That’s brilliant, Sherlock. But there are also health ramifications to not wearing underwear. Your pee-pee could catch a cold.”

  “Ah, Watson! How I have missed your witty banter and camaraderie by the fireside! You never fail to bring a delightful, if somewhat earthy, humor to an investigation.”

  “We have an investigation?”

  “Alas, Watson, the answer is no.”

  “When will we have an investigation, Sherlock?”

  “We’ll never have one if you keep going around in that ridiculous Little Red Riding Hood outfit. But don’t you fear, Watson. Investigations are like cats. They are fated to come into and go out of our lives. One way or another, they will come around again.”

  Two

  To lose a cat in a big city is one of the greatest tragedies God can throw at you. Some, who’ve been spiritually deprived since childhood, don’t have a clue what it means to have a cat, lose a cat, love a cat, or be a cat. When a child is lost or runs away, or a spouse goes out for cigarettes and never comes back, part of the sadness comes with the realization, heavily laced with guilt, that they don’t want to return. Even if the cat, man, woman, child is a total asshole, you always tend to blame yourself. Maybe if I’d only cut his little grapefruit up in neat segments the way he liked, he wouldn’t have left me. Maybe if I’d been stronger, maybe if I’d been gentler, maybe if I’d been green or black or blue or whatever it is that I’m not and could never be, then this shit wouldn’t have happened. People of good conscience always tend to blame themselves but the truth is that the fucking cat just wanted to see the world. Or the lover got tired of you or didn’t like the way you ate bagels or thought he was king of the gypsies. He or she was very much like the cat. They all wanted out.

  But when a human wants to come back, all he has to do is come back. Even a small child can tell somebody, “I want to go home.” A cat can never do this, even if it wants to. The cat must depend upon the humanity of a cold world. Of course, I suppose there are times when so must we all.

  Ratso finally succeeded in his efforts to suck, fuck, or cajole me out of the loft. The rain, I noticed, had abated somewhat. It was no longer a biblical downpour. Now it was merely a fine mist with an occasional teardrop ladled in to keep it honest. Ratso and I decided it might be bracing to walk to Chinatown, so we ankled it up Vandam and across to SoHo. As fate would have it, we passed a building on Prince Street with a cat watching us carefully from a large bay window. Possibly the cat’s interest was piqued by Ratso’s bright-red hooded outfit.

  “You know,” I said, “whenever I used to see a cat in a window before, I used to say to myself, ‘I have my cat and that’s somebody else’s cat.’ ”

  “That’s a brilliant fucking observation, Sherlock.”

  “Now that my cat is gone, I don’t say that anymore. Now I say, ‘Every cat is my cat.’ Especially the strays.”

  “Cuddles was a stray,” said Ratso. “I still remember the night we found her.”

  I remembered it, too. It was so cold Jesus was pissing icicles. We found Cuddles in a shoebox in an alley off Mott Street. The U.S. Olympic hockey team had just beaten the Russians. Ratso had been ecstatic. I’d been moderately pleased myself. Cuddles had merely been cold. Of course, her name wasn’t Cuddles yet. She was just a tiny black-and-white kitten, all alone, freezing to death in a shoebox in Chinatown. We named her Cuddles after Kacey Cohen. It’d been her nickname in school. I picked up the little kitten and put her in the warm pocket of my coat and took her home. I wished I could’ve done the same for Kacey, but it was too late for that.

  “I just hope heaven looks like Chinatown in the rain,” I said.

  A soft comforting pillow of raindrops had started to fall past the neon walls of Mott Street as Ratso and I marched determinedly onward into the oblivious night. When we came to 67 Mott Street, we ankled a sharp right into Big Wong’s. Just before we entered the establishment, however, we both partook of a little tradition that had grown up between us over the years. We stood out on the sidewalk like two Depression-era shivering souls watching the fr
iendly Chinese cooks ladling noodles into the huge steaming pots of soup. The cooks, indeed, were so familiar with Ratso and myself that they would occasionally dash a ladle of soup against the window to playfully startle us out of our mesmerized state. This, it seemed, was a very big joke to them. Ratso and I, I now believe, very possibly knew something they didn’t. We knew that life was the joke.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Ratso, as the waiter showed us to our customary table right next to the stairs that led down to the dumper. Was it possible, I wondered, that for the first time all day, Ratso had noticed my fragile, world-weary demeanor? Maybe I was being too hard on myself. Hell, I’d already tried blaming everybody else for the apparent shipwreck that was my life. My sister Marcie had told me an old Vietnamese saying that very possibly applied here. “Whenever you point the finger of blame at somebody else, just remember there are three fingers pointing back at you.”

  “The truth is,” Ratso was saying, “that no amateur private investigator in the city has solved as many high-profile cases as you, Sherlock. It’s a little boring for both of us when you don’t have a case. That’s because neither of us has a day job. Or a life, for that matter.”

  “If those are intended as words of comfort, Watson,” I said, “your bedside manner may require a trip to the cleaners.”

  “What would you rather hear, Sherlock? Some bullshit bedside manner, or the truth? The truth is you’re the greatest detective in New York and you don’t even seem to know it. You’ve cracked cases that the NYPD and the FBI only wished they could’ve solved. You’re just coming off one of your biggest years and you’re singin’ the blues. Okay, so your cat ran away—”

  “The cat did not run away.”

  “Okay. The cat booked reservations on the QE2 and took a sabbatical to the south of France. What’s the difference? The cat’s gone but you’re still here, and you’ve got some pretty impressive notches on your cigar this year. You found the missing puppethead, or rather, the cat found it. What the hell?”