Ten Little New Yorkers (4 page)

T
he first things I did after arriving at the airport in Austin were to rent a four-wheeled penis, stock up on provisions, and head out to the ranch, deep in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. The Utopia Rescue Ranch, a never-kill sanctuary for animals run by Cousin Nancy Parker and her husband, Tony Simons, had recently moved from Utopia to our ranch, Echo Hill, just outside of Medina. The Rescue Ranch would still be called Utopia, we had decided, because it was. Now it resided on a beautiful fifty-acre flat that had formerly been the dump, which Cousin Nancy found highly humorous. I pointed out to her that when the great archaeologist Schliemann had discovered the famous, fabled, historic city of Troy, he'd had to dig through eleven levels of shit from ensuing generations. Cousin Nancy still found it amusing that her doublewide trailer now resided directly on top of what had previously been the Echo Hill dump. I tried to explain to her about the deep philosophical implications, but all she kept saying was, “The deeper, the better.”

Now, under a full moon, I headed down the dusty country road to the ranch, as if under the inexorable power of that gentle magnet called home. Deer and jackrabbits gamboled and skittered by in the moonlight and one solitary porcupine trundled slowly across the road like a little old man. The porcupine was clearly not in a hurry and, now that I thought about it, neither was I. I was merely a human reflection in this ageless, bucolic moonlight sonata.

When I pulled up in front of the lodge, the dogs all came out to greet me. Cousin Nancy and Tony had thoughtfully brought them over from the Rescue Ranch so I wouldn't have to spend my first night in Texas alone. It was a rather amazing adjustment to make. I had traded being surrounded by millions of oblivious, uncaring two-legged animals for being embraced by a small, loving family of four-legged animals. So far, it seemed like a pretty good deal.

I slept that night in the old lodge with a shotgun under my bed and a cat on my head. The cat's name was Lady Argyle and she used to belong to my mother before Min stepped on a rainbow. It is not a pleasant situation when you have a cat who insists upon sleeping on your head like a hat and all night long putting her whiskers in your nostril at intervals of about twenty-seven minutes. I haven't actually timed this behavioral pattern, but it wouldn't surprise me if the intervals were precisely twenty-seven minutes. This precarious set of affairs could have easily resulted in a hostage situation or a suicide pact but, fortunately, neither occurred. The two reasons are because I love Lady as much as a man is capable of loving a cat, and Lady loves me as much as a cat is capable of loving a man. It's not terribly surprising that the two of us were that close. After all, Cuddles was her mother.

It is a blessing when an independent spirit like a cat loves you, and it's a common human failing to underestimate or trivialize such a bond. On the other hand, it's not a healthy thing to observe a man going to bed with a cat on his head. And, in the case of Lady and myself, there
were
observers.

The observers of this Van Gogh mental hospital scenario were five dogs, all of whom despise Lady—though not half as much as Lady despises them. The dogs sleep on the bed, too, and they find it unnerving, not to say unpleasant, to be in the presence of a man who has a cat on his head. I've tried to discuss this with them on innumerable occasions, but it isn't easy to state your case to five dogs who are looking at you with pity in their eyes.

Mr. Magoo is eight years old and highly skilled at how to be resigned to a sorry situation. He's a deadbeat dad, so his two sons, Brownie and Chumley, were so named after my sister Marcie's two imaginary childhood friends and fairly recently had been left in my care as she had been stationed in Vietnam with the International Red Cross, an assignment she correctly deduced might be harmful to the health, education, and welfare of Brownie and Chumley. The mother of Brownie and Chumley, and the matriarch of the entire Friedman Clan, was Perky. Perky was a small dog who, as so often happens, didn't know she was a small dog. Perky had long ears and a long tail and looked like she'd been put together by a committee. In her eyes, a thousand years of wisdom softly gleamed. Perky had been one of my father's last and closest companions on earth.

If you've been spiritually deprived as a child and are therefore not an animal lover, you may already be in a coma from reading all this. That's good, because I don't care a flea about people who don't love animals. I shall continue my impassioned tale and I shall not stop until the last dog is sleeping.

The last dog was Hank. He looked like one of the flying monkeys in
The Wizard of Oz,
and he didn't understand that the cat could and would hurt him and me and the entire Polish army if we got in her way. Lady was about twenty-two years old and had lived in this house on this ranch almost all of her life, and she didn't need to be growled at by a little dog with a death wish.

So I had the cat hanging down over one side of my face like a purring stalactite, with her whiskers poking into my left nostril, and Hank on the other side, who completely failed to grasp the mortal danger he was placing both of us in by playfully provoking the cat. It was 3:09 in the morning and suddenly a deafening cacophony of barking, hissing, and shrieking erupted, with Lady taking a murderous swat at Hank directly across my fluttering eyelids and Mr. Magoo stepping heavily upon my slumbering scrotum as all of the animals bolted off the bed simultaneously. This invariably signaled the arrival of Dilly, my pet armadillo.

For years Dilly had been showing up in my backyard with the punctuality of a German train. I fed him cat food, dog food, bacon grease—anything. He was a shy, crepuscular, oddly Christlike creature whose arrival brought a measure of comfort to me at the same time that it caused all five dogs to go into attack mode. It's not really necessary to describe what effect this always had on Lady.

After I slipped outside and fed Dilly, I gathered the animals about me like little pieces of my soul. I explained to them once again that Dilly was an old, spiritual friend of mine who was cursed with living in a state full of loud, brash Texans, and we didn't have to make things worse. Somewhere there is a planet, I told them, paraphrasing the great John D. MacDonald, which is inhabited principally by sentient armadillos who occasionally carve up dead human beings and sell them as baskets by the roadside. Perhaps not surprisingly, the animals seemed to relate to this peculiar vision.

Then we all went back to bed and dreamed of fields full of slow-moving rabbits and mice and cowboys and Indians and imaginary childhood friends and tail fins on Cadillacs and girls in the summertime and everything else that time has taken away.

W
henever you leave a given place, even if it's only on a temporary basis, in a great many practical ways you cease to exist in the minds of the people there. This is especially true if the place you leave is called New York City. Some of the people, of course, will stay in touch with you for a while after your departure. The truth is, however, that once you go, you are demoted or upgraded, depending on how you look at it, to the status of an imaginary childhood friend.

Since I firmly believed that e-mail was the work of Satan, I relied heavily upon the telephone to endeavor to maintain what residual threads of relationships remained between myself and my former fellow New Yorkers. None of them, interestingly enough, took the initiative to call me first. This was not terribly surprising. The work that each of them was doing in New York was probably far more important than anything that anyone else in the whole fucking world could possibly be involved with. So I didn't really expect to hear from them. In several cases, I didn't particularly want to hear from them.

So much for the Village Irregulars, I thought. So much for all my loyal Dr. Watsons. I had many friends, or at least some friends, in the beautiful Texas Hill Country, and now, with the cat no longer in charge of the loft, and no longer in the seductive hands of lesbians either, I could very possibly make a new life for myself right back here where I'd started. Ratso and the rest no doubt would not approve. They'd think I'd given up, gone home in defeat, had some kind of metropolis meltdown and returned to the sticks with my tail between my legs. If that's what they wanted to believe, let them, I figured. The opposite was actually true. I'd merely eaten an appropriate amount for my figure. I'd had enough of New York. I didn't expect them to understand this. Some of the most provincial people I'd ever met in my life lived in New York. Some of the most open-minded and progressive people lived in rural, bucolic, out-of-the-way places. How did they survive, I wondered, without art openings? Without Broadway? Without ridiculously overpriced, vertical food restaurants?

Such was my black attitude toward the city that I loved to hate as I walked through the dusty, drafty lodge that chilly Hill Country morning and found that it reminded me very much, and not without a note of fondness, of my loft in little old New York. The fireplace was burning bright as the Friedmans, five dogs and a cat, followed me around from room to room, happy to have me back with them once more. And when I thought about it, I was happy, too.

It was in that mood of happiness and serenity that I wandered into the little private investigator's room with my coffee, cigar, and portable phone and proceeded to blast a large Nixon. All of my adult life I've been consumed with the notion that cigar smoke masks the odor of a dump. That's not the only reason I smoke cigars, of course. It's just a perk. My sister, however, has long maintained that the combined odors of my dumps and my cigars are capable of creating a binary reaction that could blow the toilet lid off the world.

Anyway, it's my first morning back in Texas and I'm blasting a large Nixon and some of the Friedmans have gathered around me in the small, rather dank dumper, sort of like a spectator sport, and there's a huge photo of Amelia Earhart hanging over the dumper and a drawing by the late great cowboy cartoonist Ace Reid of two cowboys in a pickup truck with flood waters coming over the hood and one of them is saying, “I hate to be pessimistic but I've seen some bad droughts start out just like this.”

So I'm a Jewish cowboy, you see, and I always carry my large portable phone with me and I only ride two-legged animals. The phone hasn't rung since I've gotten to the ranch, but you never know when you're going to get the call that's going to change your life, or maybe even a call from Cousin Nancy and Tony at the nearby Utopia Rescue Ranch offering to bring breakfast over for the Friedmans and myself. The Friedmans like bacon. They're not really practicing Jews; they're good enough already. At the moment, four of them were watching me take a dump. It was quite a cosmic circumstance in that all four of my current spectators were black. I'm not a racist and I don't care who watches me dump, but it was rather uncanny that Brownie and Hank, the two brown Friedmans, were not in attendance. This phenomenon, the gathering of Gooey, Chumley, Perky, and Fly (our first Rescue Ranch charter member, now adopted by me), was not terribly unusual. My sister Marcie named this intrepid little group the BQS or Black Quadruped Society. Very often you would find all the black Friedmans congregating together, with the brown Friedmans nowhere to be seen. Apparently the Black Quadruped Society had determined at their last meeting that on this particular morning they would gather to watch me have a shit. It was fascinating really, if you thought about it. There are wonderful things to be learned about ourselves from the behavior of animals.

Some people have difficulty shitting if they're being watched, but it's never bothered me. As an entertainer, you get used to having large crowds of people scrutinizing your every move, and pretty soon whatever happens—dumping, fucking, vomiting, attempting suicide—all becomes part of that magical world we call show business. So, having the Friedmans monitor my efforts at stool propulsion was really just another show in my hip pocket. As Willie Nelson once told me, “Just do the best you can and never give 'em everything you've got.”

The Black Quadruped Society watched the blue smoke from my cigar drift almost wistfully to the ceiling of the shitter. Their eyes reflected the peace and love of the family primeval, the unconventional, underdog family of my heart. It was a God-made gathering as timeless as the rain; instead of a campfire, there stood a throne. Into this simple, serene, rustic tableau, this little group of solitary spirits sharing the shadows of their souls, came a jangling interruption from the world of modern technology. From its perch high on top of the toilet, the phone was ringing. The Black Quadruped Society looked at the phone and then looked back at me, sitting stolidly on the dumper smoking a cigar. There was nothing wrong with any of this. It was the birth of a nation. It was how the West was won. It was the creation of the heavens and the earth and all the wondrous shit therein.

I reached around to pick up the blower from the back of the dumper, mindful of the recent household accident that had occurred to Dylan Ferrero as he was obliviously wiping his ass. I was able to retrieve the receiver without doing myself physical harm. The Black Quadruped Society was impressed.

“Start talkin',” I said.

“What're you doin'?” said a female voice. I looked at the members of the BQS. The members of the BQS looked solemnly back at me.

“Who wants to know?” I said cautiously.

“How soon we forget,” said the voice.

Even individuals who are highly proficient at multitasking can find it fairly dicey sometimes to try to talk to someone on the blower while taking a Nixon. Often evasive procedures are required, at least until the identity of the caller is known, before vouchsafing one's precise locus and the nature of the activity in which one is currently involved.

“Who the fuck is this?” I said, trying for the casually appropriate conversational tone.

“Oh, Jesus. Aren't we the big detective.”

Reception on the portable blower was not the best in the dumper, and reception in my gray matter department was not the best in the morning. That having been said, it was a bit unsettling that I still didn't know for sure who the hell it was I was talking to. I have known many women over many years from many aspects of my life, and I have found that their telephone techniques are quite often maddeningly similar. The other problem is if you guess wrong you really look like an idiot. There was also the possibility that, like McGovern, I was going a bit deaf.

“Look, I'm rather busy right now,” I said. “I don't really have time to play games.”

“What're you doin'?”

“I'm not doing anything,” I said. “I'm
trying
to do something.”

By this time I was definitely getting a handle on the caller's identity. So many beauties had gone by the boards in my life, hapless victims of time and cocaine and geography. When somebody called me it could be anybody.

“You really
don't
know who I am? That's sad. I'll give you a few hints. I wear the pants in the family. Think Amelia Earhart.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the giant framed photo of Amelia standing in front of her plane, dressed in her mannish flight suit. A chill ran up my spine. Was somebody watching me? Was it just a cosmic circumstance or was it merely the routine perversity of life? Had the caller visited my dumper here on the ranch previously? Of course not. That was ridiculous. How could she have known about Amelia? And what did Amelia have to say about all this? That mischievous glint in her eye. That Mona Larry smile. Was she a tomboy? Was she a lesbian? And then, at long last, I had it. It was my upstairs New York neighbor, Winnie Katz.

“Why does your voice sound different?” I said.

“I've just got a cold or something. What
are
you doing? You sound very distracted.”

“I'm trying to take a Nixon.”

“Thanks for sharing. I had a little different image of you in mind.”

“What did you think I was doing? Masturbating like a monkey?”

“No, I just pictured you running around the ranch with your homo helmet on your head playing cowboy or something.”

It never failed to set my ears back a bit when I heard a New York lesbian belittling cowboys. It was something that probably shouldn't have bothered me, but it did. Everybody seemed to be picking on cowboys these days. The lesbians. The pointy-headed intellectuals. The goddamn Europeans. It was getting to be a fucking stompede of abuse and it was making me weary in the old spiritual saddle. The cowboy was a dying breed anyway. Why not let us die in peace? The answer is, because they never do. All a cowboy wants is a little bit of elbow room. That's why you don't find many of us in New York. We didn't need to have some lesbo calling cowboy hats “homo helmets.” It wasn't even very original. Jimmie Silman, aka Washington Ratso, had been calling cowboy hats homo helmets for at least two decades now. Of course, Ratso had a right to call them anything he wanted, because, like me, he wore one except when he was sleeping or fucking. There's a real cowboy for you, God bless him. But seriously folks, being a cowboy in your mind is as important as babies' heads exiting vaginas or should we say vaginae. The cowboy is one of the last universal shining symbols to the children of the world. Hell, ask Anne Frank. She is believed to have died at Bergen-Belsen at the hands of the people who gave us sauerkraut. Though her body was never found, Anne Frank put a face on the Holocaust by writing her little diary. Sergeant Silverbauer of the SS helped the cause quite obliviously by emptying the contents of the briefcase that contained the diary onto the floor of the secret annex to make room for a set of silver candlestick-holders which this proud SS officer would steal. That was how the diary was found after the war. But something else was found in the secret annex as well. In Anne's little corner of the room there were old photographs of American cowboy stars still fluttering from the walls where she'd left them. God bless the cowboy, I say! And goddamn any New York lesbians or Nazi Europeans who try to belittle him or tarnish his silver lariat of stars.

“What happened, Hopalong? You didn't shit out your brains, did you? I was just calling to tell you in your haste to beat it out of New York you forgot something.”

Everything I'd ever loved had already slipped through the slippery fingers of my life, I thought. What could I possibly have forgotten?

“What could I possibly have forgotten?”

“Your wallet,” she said. “I found it on the floor of your loft.”