Ten Little New Yorkers (3 page)

A
ccording to my friend, Dylan Ferrero, guys our age are in the seventh-inning stretch. I'm well aware that this rather arcane sports analogy may be lost upon Iranian mullahs and non–baseball fans, so let's just say that most of the game is over. Perhaps everybody does know what the seventh-inning stretch implies, it's just that most of the world is too young or too busy to take the time to care about what it means to baseball or to life. A lot of important and wonderful things can happen, of course, after the seventh-inning stretch, but statistically speaking, it's pretty fucking late in the game.

More evidence of just how late it was could probably be elucidated from knowing that Dylan Ferrero pulled a muscle in his back recently while wiping his ass. This may seem a moderately repellent tidbit of information, but it's true. None of us are getting any younger and none of us are getting any smarter. About all we can hope for is wise or lucky. We're old enough to realize and young enough to know that when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window.

Still, I missed the cat. And I missed the trials and the tribulations and the joys and the sorrows of Yesterday Street. And I even missed Winnie Katz and the lesbian dance class. As irritating and unpleasant as the peripatetic pounding on the ceiling had always seemed in the past, now that the whole place was silent I somehow missed it. What the hell, I thought, even lesbians need to take a vacation sometimes. Maybe the Kinkster needed one as well. Except it's kind of hard to go on a vacation when your whole life's already a vacation. Everybody goes on a vacation from something. You can't really go on a vacation from nothing, can you? But this was the very thing that Ratso could never understand. A mender of destinies cannot conjure up cases and adventures and damsels in distress and investigations of sordid natures out of the whole cloth of life as we know it. Even a mender of destinies must await his destiny. And mine, in this high-tech, jet-set world, appeared to be arriving by Pony Express.

Anyway, it wasn't my job to fulfill Ratso's fantasies about being Dr. Watson with the game afoot. If he wanted a game he could turn on his television set. All the Irregulars in the world couldn't be of any use if you didn't have a case. And I didn't have a case. I didn't even have a cat. All I really had was a great urge to kill myself by jumping through a ceiling fan. But I didn't have a ceiling fan.

So here I was in the seventh-inning stretch, no cat, no case, no ceiling fan, trying to decide where to go for my fucking vacation. What the hell, I thought. Maybe I'd just take Jim Morrison's advice: “The West is the best.” He died, of course, in a bathtub in Paris. He had a dog named Sage, however. Sage grows in the West. In New York nothing grows, unless you want to count a rotating crop of tedious. So in the West you had Texas, Vegas, and Hawaii. They were all magical places but they were so far away. Yet as the gypsy said, “From where?”

And as I kicked around ideas for my supposed vacation, an evil festered in the city, an evil the likes of which I had not encountered in many years. It pulsed through the heart and coursed through the veins of the gray familiar architecture that was New York. It was not a case yet. It was not an investigation yet. It was not murder. Yet.

It was not my nature to imbue myself with a prescience I did not possess. For no man, no matter how intuitive or how wise, could see the future. All I can tell you is that I felt this nameless, faceless evil in my bones. As it formed in the mind of another, I could feel it quiver in my soul.

T
hings do seem a little dead tonight,” said McGovern from the barstool on my left at the Monkey's Paw.

“Dead?” I said. “This town was dead before the virus hit.”

“New York's a bit like Vegas. It never really sleeps. It just nods out every once in a while.”

“Is that why we're the only two people in the bar?”

McGovern looked around at the drab, seedy ambience of the Monkey's Paw. The sheer emptiness of the place was stunning.

“Do you think we should take this personally?” he asked.

“Hell no,” I said. “I never take anything personally.”

“That's not what I hear,” said McGovern. “I hear you're miserable and you're blaming everybody but yourself.”

“Who told you that?” I said. “Mother Teresa?”

“She's dead.”

“You're kidding. Maybe she died of ennui on a visit to New York.”

“I don't know why you're whining about New York, Kink. This old town has been fucking great to you. You came up here from Texas like some cowboy off a trail ride and the whole place has embraced you like one of its own. In fact, it's done a hell of a lot more than that. This city's made you a fucking hero.”

I signaled Tommy the bartender for another pint of Guinness. I watched McGovern drain his tall Vodka McGovern and motion to Tommy as well. I didn't feel like a fucking hero. I felt, to paraphrase Adlai Stevenson when he lost to Eisenhower, like a little kid who'd stubbed his toe in the dark. I felt too big to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.

“I mean it, Kink,” McGovern was yammering on. “You've gotten more ink recently than a goddamn giant squid. There was a time when I was the Lone Ranger, the only guy in town who was bothering to chronicle your successes. Now the media's all over you. Every time you solve a case they just about have a ticker-tape parade for you. You're the Sherlock Holmes of Manhattan! Millions of people read about your exploits! They love to see you catch the criminals that elude the cops. And don't forget, Sherlock Holmes was only a fictional character. You're a real human being.”

It was a long speech for McGovern, and, indeed, it was an impassioned one. It was so impassioned in fact that his fresh Vodka McGovern stood virtually untouched on the mahogany, an occurrence that I'd only seen happen once before many years ago when McGovern's attention had been entirely focused upon the sirenlike embrace of a certain auburn-haired woman. The exhortation itself carried echoes of Ratso's pep talk to me earlier in the day. Both were extremely well intentioned, if somewhat misguided. Both had the unfortunate effect of falling upon deaf ears. Both were rather poignant in their way, like the words of a child attempting to lift the spirit of an adult friend. Yet McGovern had managed to place his large Irish finger on what I'm sorry to say was precisely the problem. I was not a fictional character. I was a human being. And I was getting tired of this shit.

“All of these exploits, as you call them,” I said, as McGovern took a deep, deserved drink of his Vodka McGovern, “might finally make a thick scrapbook some day, if anybody in this modern age still keeps scrapbooks. That's all our adventures have been good for, McGovern. A fucking scrapbook. And you know what happens to all scrapbooks sooner or later? Cats piss on them. Jesus, I miss the cat.”

McGovern took another drink from his tall glass. He was a tall man, I thought darkly, let him drink from a tall glass. He could drink from the fucking Holy Grail for all I cared. If he wanted to end his days drinking at the Monkey's Paw, so be it. As for me, it was half-past time for my body and soul to find a healthier environment. Some place like Texas where people still believed in Santa Claus and many of them looked like Santa Claus and crime was not so subtle and fiendishly convoluted and mentally taxing upon the investigator. On the other hand, crime down there was possibly even more violent. Like that lady in Houston who gave her kids a Texas bath.

“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.

T
hat 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 architecture, 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.