Ten Little New Yorkers Read online

  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 o
ld 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.”

  Nine

  As I coaxed Winnie into remaining on the line, I vowed never again to bring the blower into the dumper. It was only asking for trouble. My attempts at laying some decent cable had been totally thwarted by the call, and now, with the phone to my ear and with my jeans still around my ankles, I hopped like Hopalong Cassidy into the nearby Indian Ghost Room to determine if my wallet happened to be residing in a previously worn pant. Once I had the answer, I planned to hop right back to the dumper and resume the congressional hearing. What complicated this plan a bit was that the Black Quadruped Society, now joined by Brownie, Hank, and Lady, were all following my white luminous buttocks in single file into the Indian Ghost Room.

  “What the hell do you think this is?” I shouted. “The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade?”

  “What’re you doin’?” asked Winnie.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “No!”

  I couldn’t really blame the Friedmans. They hadn’t seen me in a long time and they wanted to be with me. For that matter, I wanted to be with them. I just didn’t want to be hopping around with my pants down, talking to a lesbian in New York, with all of them following me like the Pied Piper of Medina. That’s Texas, not Saudi Arabia.

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m in the Ghost Room—”

  “The what?”

  “Indian Ghost Room. It’s a long stultifyingly dull story. I’m searching for my previously worn pant. Ah-ha! There it is. Give me some room, will you?”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “Never end a sentence in a preposition. The grammatically correct way to say that is, ‘Who are you talking to, asshole?’ ”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth. Who are you talking to, asshole?”

  “I’m talking to a Russian peasant with a withered arm.”

  “You sure you’re not masturbating?”

  “I’m looking for my goddamn wallet.”

  “I already told you. I found it on the floor of your loft when I was bringing in your mail. I put it on your desk. You want me to FedEx it to you?”

  “It’s not my wallet.”

  “Whose wallet do you think it is?”

  “I’m holding my wallet in my hand! You see? It’s right here. Right, everybody?”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “I’m talking to a large, extended Pakistani family that came over to borrow some nuclear weapons. You see, everybody? There’s my driver’s license. No, that’s not Sirhan Sirhan. That’s me. That’s my name. I did not forget my wallet!”

  “So what’s a strange wallet doing in your loft? Hey! This could be a big case for a private dick like you. ‘The Mystery of the Missing Wallet.’ Your fans will stay away in droves.”

  By this time I was hopping back into the dumper with many of the Friedmans mistakenly thinking it was some new kind of game, leaping up into the air, blocking my path, and pawing playfully at my scrotum. Finally, I sat back down on the throne and politely asked Winnie if she’d go back down to my loft and get the mystery wallet and call me back. She agreed, I thought, rather grudgingly, hanging up as I was still speaking to her. Moments later, I had completed my morning ablutions. Amelia Earhart appeared to be leering malevolently at me as I goose-stepped out of the dumper.

  Winnie took her sweet Sapphic time to call me back. This gave me the opportunity to do a little quick deductive reasoning regarding this curious situation. There had been several rather rowdy farewell parties at the loft in the days preceding my departure. McGovern had brought what had looked like a Gray Line Tour of individuals into my place, none of whom I had ever seen before in my life. Could McGovern or one of his drunken acquaintances have dropped his wallet? Of course. That had to be the answer.

  I put the matter out of my mind, made a pot of Kona coffee, and fired up my second cigar of the morning, an Epicure Number 2. What would I do without the Hawaiians and the Cubans? I thought. Probably miss out on a lot of the flavor and the smoke of life, I figured. I took the cup of steaming coffee and the cigar and walked outside the lodge with the Friedmans into the bright, frosty Hill Country morning. Now that I wasn’t in New York, I reflected, having nothing to do wasn’t so bad.

  Yet, almost like a locked-room puzzle, the affair of the strange, intrusive wallet kept niggling at the corner of my consciousness. Was I so scattered when I left the city that I hadn’t noticed it? Very possibly. Well, we’d know the answer soon. Hell, I thought, it probably belonged to McGovern. He could lose his wallet for several years and never be aware of it. That was one of the beautiful things about McGovern.

  I was sitting on the old round picnic table with the Friedmans, just looking at the hills surrounding me, when the blower made its presence known again. Why did I even have a blower anymore? As Groucho Marx told me once by way of introduction, “I’ve already met everybody I want to meet.” He also gave me this sage advice when I met him, grudgingly as it was, in New York: “Go back to Texas.” It had taken me a while, but I now agreed with Groucho on both counts.

  “Start talkin’,” I said.

  “Okay, I’m in your loft. It smells like a cigar died in here. But you’re right. It’s not your wallet.”

  “Good. For a moment I was afraid I was living in a parallel universe.”

  “It belongs to a guy named Robert Scalopini. Know him?”

  “I think I met him once on a chafing dish. Of course I don’t know him. I don’t even want to know him. He’s probably one of those guys McGovern dragged in before I left town. Things got a little crazy.”

  “So what do you want me to do with the wallet?”

  “Look, Winnie, I know you’re busy, but I’m in Texas right now. Just handle it, will you? Call the guy. Call the cops. Call the Missing Wallet Bureau.”

  “Sure, Sherlock,” she said scornfully. “What are neighbors for?”

  Ten

  That afternoon I took the six Friedmans for a long walk around the ranch, leaving Lady by herself at the lodge to enjoy a little peace and quiet. I don’t know whether or not you’ve noticed this interesting phenomenon, but it’s been my observation that cats always seem to be outnumbered in this world. Cats are Indians. Cats are Jews. Cats are Negroes with the blues. Cats are poets when they choose. Of course, sometimes cats just like to snooze. We left Lady lying on a warm chair by the fire, looking like a lovely piece of living architecture.

  I took the Friedmans out on the South Flat and over to Big Foot Falls, so named after Big Foot Wallace, a frontier scout who lived with the Indians. I took the Friedmans down Armadillo Canyon, so named because God saw his first armadillos there. He e-mailed Noah just in time to get the little boogers aboard the ark. Then God took a power nap for about five thousand years and woke up just in time to speak to Pat Robertson.

  The Friedmans loved to go on walks. They even loved the word “walk.” I liked to go on walks, too. Sometimes they almost gave you a chance to think. After all these years, I didn’t have my name on pebbled glass. I didn’t have a beautiful, leggy secretary. Ratso was right. There was good reason to be depressed. Without a case to work on, I had very little to justify my existence on this planet. Ratso, to be fair, had tried his best to bolster my self-confidence by extolling the glories of the past. But I didn’t reall
y believe in yesterday. It was just another small town too far off the superhighway to bother with.

  The only wisp of a mystery in the air, I reflected as we hiked up the back side of Echo Hill toward the crystal beds, was how that wallet had gotten into my loft. Was I slipping? In my haste to bugout for the dugout could I have missed something like that? It had to have been accidentally dropped by one of McGovern’s buddies from the Corner Bistro. They had been fairly heavily monstered that night. For that matter, so had I. What the hell, I thought. Let Winnie handle it. Now that she was taking a sabbatical from her dance classes, she had plenty of time on her hands. She wasn’t busy like me, watching the Friedmans pore over the site of the old dump. More than fifty years, shit had been crammed into that hole in the ground and burned repeatedly. The Friedmans ran back and forth over the dump excitedly like they knew something they weren’t telling me, which was very possible. Mr. Magoo hiked his leg and whizzed on an old archery target. Perky was sniffing curiously at the remains of an ancient tennis shoe. Somewhere down there were half-burned relics of a bygone age, camp newspapers, menus, letters from home, written by those whose names were now written in the stars. This is how all of civilization was built, I thought. The shining city rises from the old Echo Hill dump.

  “Gentlemen,” I said to the Friedmans. “And ladies, of course. Behold the future of man!”

  The Friedmans looked at me rather quizzically. Then Mr. Magoo hiked his leg and whizzed on what was left of a bright-red plastic kayak.

  By the time we got back to the lodge, all of us were exhausted. I made the Friedmans some bones and I made myself some coffee and, so she wouldn’t feel left out, I opened a can of tuna for Lady, which she stared at briefly with a slightly bemused expression on her face before following something near the ceiling with her eyes that neither the dogs nor I could see. This was a recent and fairly unnerving habit of Lady’s and, to my mind, it invariably brought on the notion of impending doom. How accurate an assessment this was I will leave to you, gentile reader, to decide. I’m a fatalist. I’m ready for anything. That’s probably why it never happens.