Chapter One The cat was looking at me again with pity in her eyes.
"My heart isn't broken," I said. "I'm just mourning the passing of Thousand Island dressing."
The cat, of course, said nothing. There was nothing much to say. It was the dead of winter in New York and for the first time in my memory all of the Village Irregulars had fled the city. It's not something you'd want to try at home, but it is possible to be alone in New York. As my dearly departed brother Tom Baker once said: "There are worse things in life than being alone." One of them was looking at a cat who was looking at you with pity in her eyes.
"Well, let's see," I said. "Stephanie's on some traditional vacation trip with her family on some private island in the Caribbean where rich people go to laugh. Ratso's out somewhere in Montauk with his black girlfriend Christy who writes for the Globe. He's probably busily ghostwriting another autobiography for Howard Stern, which very possibly won't rise to the literary level of the Globe but will definitely sell as well."
A slight moue of distaste crossed the countenance of the cat. She did not like Howard Stern. She did not like Don Imus. She did not like Rush Limbaugh. She had no respect for anyone that millions of people listened to. I wasn't sure if she had a point there or not. I was having enough trouble just carrying on a conversation with a cat.
"McGovern's off in Hawaii someplace frenetically gathering recipes for his new book Eat, Drink, and Be Kinky. I'm not kidding you. That's the name of the book. And keeping to a literary theme, believe it or not, Rambam's in Israel going over the manuscript for his new book entitled Nice Jewish Boy (How a Kid from Brooklyn Chased Nazis, Terrorized Terrorists, Made the Russians Nervous, and Had a Good Time). Hell, even Chinga's out of town. He majored in poetry in college and now he's opening up a new branch of his advertising agency in Miami. He'd better not go too far because he's the only one who can afford to buy any of these books. It just goes to show, you be careful what you wish for, because you're probably not going to get it."
The cat had nodded off somewhere in the middle of my recitation of Rambam's book title, so I contented myself with trying to fire up a half-smoked cigar with a childhood lighter, while staring down at the gathering gloom of Vandam Street. The truth is, of course, you can never really tell whether a cat's asleep or not. It could be merely feigning sleep. It could be dead. Then again, you could be dead. I continued my rambling narrative in the sad, reckless fashion of a man striving vainly to win back a lost lover.
"I ran away once myself," I said. "But you know what happened?"
The cat, who was now lying upside-down on the counter, half-opened one green rather jaded eye. It was obvious that she didn't give a damn what had happened.
"I'll tell you what happened," I said, undeterred by my feline companion's apparent dearth of empathy. "I ran away and then about two weeks later I looked in the rearview mirror and there I was."
And here I was still, I reflected, vaguely becoming aware of my own shadowy image on the windowpane. Here I was, trying to converse with a cat who appeared as if she'd recently returned from a visit to the taxidermist. Here I was, endeavoring to operate a plastic pocket device designed to protect little children and irritate middle-aged amateur private investigators who lived alone in their lofts with their cats, and who, whilst between cases, desired to ignite their half-smoked cigars not to mention their half-dead spirits. Here I was, as Stephanie DuPont had so well put it, "hangin' by spit." She'd been referring, of course, to my relationship with her, but hangin' by spit pretty well described my current relationship with the world. Man cannot live by little Negro puppet heads alone, I thought.
The little black puppet head on the mantel smiled gaily down at me. The fire burned gaily in the fireplace. The world spun gaily around the sun. Maybe I was gay. Maybe that was why most of my friends were men, while women merely scurried rapidly through the crawl space of my existence. Then I thought once again of Stephanie DuPont -- that young, five-alarm, acid-tongued Grace Kelly of a woman -- and I realized I wasn't gay. I was merely mentally ill to think I had a chance with her. Why would she be interested in an amateur private investigator who was more than twice her age, lived in a dusty, drafty loft with an antisocial cat, and once in a while solved a mystery or two, which usually earned him just enough money to keep him in gourmet cat food and Cuban cigars?
"How often do we find in life," I said to the cat, "that talent is its own reward?"
Since it was a rhetorical question I did not expect the cat to answer and she didn't let me down. Why would any self-respecting cat care about the wonderings and wanderings of a feckless human being anyway? According to the 1999 Calendar and Datebook of the Animal Protection Institute, a slim document I'd been busily poring over lately, "only two out of ten kittens born in the U.S. ever find a lifelong home."
"Maybe we're both lucky," I said to the cat. "Who cares if we're a little lonely sometimes? Maybe we're lucky to be lonely."
The cat opened both eyes widely. She seemed to be studying me carefully, as if she'd never seen me before in her life. It was not a pleasant sensation.
Now, as the chilly shades of evening fell across the city like a sad little man in an old hotel lowering the venetian blinds, I lowered myself into McGovern's old hand-me-down, overstuffed chair, and poured a strong bolt of Jameson Irish Whiskey into the old bull's horn. I threw a silent salute to the smiling puppet head and threw the contents of the bull's horn down my neck. The cat looked on in mild disgust.
"Friendship's basically overrated," I said. "The Village Irregulars are usually more trouble than they're worth. And women, they're fools, God bless 'em. Anyway, it's down to just the two of us now. We'll get by in this city and this world. They say it's going to snow tonight."
The cat's eyes seemed to melt like old Jewish candles. With that native sensitivity that all cats possess -- and all people think they possess -- the cat once again surprised me with the inexplicable: she crawled over to me and curled up in my lap.
"And now," I said, "if you could help me figure out how to work this goddamn childhood lighter."
Copyright © 2001 by Kinky Friedman
Continues...
Excerpted from Steppin' on a Rainbowby Kinky Friedman Copyright © 2004 by Kinky Friedman. Excerpted by permission.
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