When the Cat's Away (12 page)

Leila lived in a fairly modern building named after a French painter who’d once been fairly modern himself. That was over a hundred years ago and now he was dead and famous enough to have a wino urinating on a building named after him. A nice touch, if you belonged to the Impressionist school.

I walked into a small lobby with a large doorman. He planted himself directly in my path.

“Can I help you?” he asked. His eyes looked like little locked glass doors.

“Twelve-K,” I said.

“Name of the person you wish to see?” he asked, looking at my hat.

“Leila.”

“And your name is—?”

“Kinky.”

He went to the house phone, dialed a couple numbers, and said, “Mr. Kinky is here.”

He listened, nodded, put down the phone, and motioned me in. I bootlegged my cigar into the elevator and pushed twelve. I stood back to enjoy the ride. Took a few puffs on the cigar. Thought neutral elevator thoughts.

I took a left on twelve, found 12K at the end of the hall, and knocked on the door. After a moment the door opened. It wasn’t Leila. It was a stockily built, swarthy man with a large mustache. Looked like an organ grinder who’d just stomped his monkey to death.

“Come in,” he said.

32

I peered around Jerry Colonna and saw a red sparkle-topped tennis shoe resting casually on a glass coffee table. A bare Arabian ankle was growing luxuriantly out of the tennis shoe like the stalk of a sexy tropical plant. I’d have to look it up in
National Geographic
sometime and find out if it was a man-eater. The guy backed up a little and I stepped into the room.

The place looked like a whorehouse in
Architectural Digest
. There was a lot of glass, a lot of metal, mirrors everywhere, and a forty-foot couch done up entirely in bullfight-poster red.

“Understated,” I said to the man with the mustache.

He didn’t say anything. His eyes looked hot and distant. Staring at his face was like flying over a forest fire in the middle of the night at thirty-seven thousand feet. You knew it couldn’t bum you, but you also knew that one of these days they were going to have to land the plane.

“It’s okay, Hector,” said a familiar feminine voice. The guy stepped to the side and I saw that the bare ankle was attached to an equally bare, slightly thin, sinuously gorgeous leg. Leila was attached to the leg.

“Kinky’s harmless,” she said with a smile. She was wearing a pair of faded, delicious-looking cutoffs and a tight pink T-shirt that said something in one of the Romance languages. I gave her a harmless wink.

I walked a little closer to the couch. “What’s a Hector?” I said.

She gave a little papal sign with her right hand and Hector nodded once and left the room. “Hector works for my brother,” Leila said.

“Maybe your brother’s taking being an equal opportunity employer a step too far.”

She smiled a top-drawer mischievous smile, crooked her finger, and beckoned me around the coffee table.

“Maybe I’ve got a job for you,” she said.

“Like what?” I asked as I sat down next to her.

“I don’t know,” said Leila, “but you’d look pretty cute handing me a dry towel.”

* * *

You might say that a forty-foot-long couch isn’t very cozy and you’d be right. But given a spiritually horny American and a rather randy Palestinian, it can be just about everything else.

Leila had turned the lights down to low interrogation. She had turned me on to the point where I was one step away from making water wings out of her cutoffs. We were both trying to chew the same piece of Dentyne when a slender, vaguely sinister figure appeared in the hall doorway. When the lights came up we hardly noticed. Dentyne can be a very sexy gum.

Leila recovered first. “Kinky,” she said, “… this is my brother, Carlos.”

“Carlos?” I said. I sat up. It was a chore to get my breath back.

“Carlos,” said Carlos. His expression hadn’t changed since I’d first seen him standing there. His face looked like a sweet, evil puppet that enjoyed pulling all the strings itself. I didn’t know if Colombians liked guys practically hosing their sisters on forty-foot couches but I doubted it, so I tried to leaven the situation.

“Carlos,” I said. “Carlos … wait a minute … not Carlos the international terrorist?”

His eyes took on the unmistakable glint of primitive obsidian tools used to bring death to small animals. A rather unpleasant hissing noise came from Carlos’s mouth. Then he was gone.

“I don’t think he considers me a prospective brother-in-law,” I said.

“He’ll get over it,” said Leila. “Wait right here.”

I waited. Leila got up and walked out of the room into the hallway. Nice bucket, all right. I heard a door open and close. I took out a cigar and lit it and looked at a picture of the sad, lonely face of a bull in the ring. I didn’t like Spanish-speaking peoples because they were mean to bulls. Of course, maybe if the Krauts, Turks, and Communists had had some bulls around they would’ve left the Jews, Gypsies, Armenians, Cambodians, and everybody else alone. I puffed on the cigar and watched the reflections of smoke disappearing in one of the mirrors across the room. Life is but a dream.

I waited. You’d think Hector would’ve come in and asked me if I’d like a nice cup of Colombian coffee. I waited.

The next time I looked up I saw a vision coming toward me in a light-pink afghan coat with a red-and-black-checked Italian tablecloth on its head.

“Nice gefilte,” I said.

“Kaffiyeh,” said Leila.

She put a rectangular cloth bag on the glass tabletop. It looked like a Gucci shoeshine kit. She opened it and began taking out some of the most ornate drug paraphernalia I’d seen this side of the East Village. A two-pronged silver coke spoon in the form of a sacrificial maiden with arms outstretched. A large seashell container with a mirror on one side and an inch of what looked like diplomatic-pouch-quality snow on the other. Finally, she took one end of a tubelike device that branched into two silver globes and handed it to me. The other end remained in the Gucci shoeshine kit.

“This is for you, Kinkster. Do you know what it is?”

“Looks like a stethoscope for a pinhead.”

Unfortunately, I did not need a great deal of coaxing. I put one silver globe against each nostril, inhaled sharply, and simultaneously blew my brains out.

It was so good it was very dangerous. Just like all the other good things in life.

33

I don’t remember how I got out of that room. Maybe I flew by Jewish radar. Maybe the faces of John Belushi and Lowell George guided me like Sherlock Holmes carriage lamps shining through the mist. Whatever it was that got me there, I was glad to be outside.

It was America. It was 1988. I didn’t know it, of course. The right lobe of my brain was just beginning to recouple with the left lobe. I could feel the clumsy, gloved hands of Russian cosmonauts slowly piecing the machinery together somewhere in space.

I could hear Leila’s voice, soft and intimate, somewhere next to me. Cocaine always sends men and women to different planets. “I could go for a man who doesn’t wear running shoes,” she said.

I did a few impromptu deep-breathing exercises and looked around to get my bearings. Incredibly, we were still on Leila’s block, just a few houses down from where she lived. It was hard to believe that I’d felt brain-dead for what seemed like an eternity. How could I have almost allowed my childhood dreams, my dearest hopes for the future, my very existence on this planet to be reduced to a mere fossil record on the dusty, forgotten desk of some mildly interested, science-oriented graduate student who’d gone out for a pizza without anchovies?

The wind began to blow a little harder and a lot colder. I began to notice a few things. Two of them were Leila’s legs. As the wind whipped up her coat I saw she was still wearing the cutoffs underneath. Her legs looked as pink as the house where The Band used to practice with Bob Dylan.

“Your legs look cold,” I said. I took her hand and we walked a little farther. She didn’t say anything.

“Maybe I could blow on them,” I said.

“Maybe.”

We were each lost in our own thoughts on our own different planets when we came face to face with Sergeant Mort Cooperman and Sergeant Buddy Fox. They appeared to be in a hurry.

“One side, Tex,” said Cooperman brusquely. Fox looked appreciatively at Leila, we both stepped aside, and they continued at a brisk pace up the sidewalk.

Standing in the gutter I turned and saw cops getting out of several unmarked cars and heading in the same direction as Cooperman and Fox. Four of them were carrying a long metal pole with a sort of phallic knob on the end of it. There were two handles on each side. It was a battering ram.

They all went into Leila’s building and they didn’t seem to be having any trouble with the doorman. I took Leila’s arm and hurried her farther down the street and around the corner.

“What do you think’s happening?” she asked a little too coolly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe somebody tore the tag off their mattress.”

34

Thursday morning broke cold, grim, and gray in New York. My hangover and I stepped gingerly around the cat litter box, which was blocking the doorway to the bathroom. I usually kept the cat litter box in the shower, except, of course, when I was taking a shower. The reason for the cat litter box displacement soon became evident.

Ratso was taking his biannual shower. It was sort of a purification rite with Ratso and he followed it almost religiously whether he felt he needed it or not.

And he was singing.

Because of my years on the road as a country singer, I had come to hate the sound of the human voice singing. To make matters worse, Ratso was singing some half-punk, halfrap song by his favorite new group, Smoking/No Smoking.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you looked at it, both the song and the band would be passe before Ratso stepped out of the rainroom, a visual experience I did not wish to have at that hour of the morning.

I went to the sink, wiped some steam away from the mirror, and saw that my hair was standing straight up in the shape of a rocket ship. It was a fairly current New York hairstyle but it didn’t blow my skirt up too much. I got a brush and ran it through my moss a few times, brushed my choppers, drew a bye on shaving. My eyes would’ve looked good in a stuffed rabbit’s head.

Ratso showed no signs of departing the rainroom, so I opted for a little trick I’d picked up on the road. It was known widely in country music as the Way Ion Jennings Bus Shower. You stand close to a sink and splash water on your face and your armpits. If there’s soap around you can use it, but then you have to splash a lot of water on your armpits to get it off.

There was soap and I used it. The results left my sarong and the bathroom floor pretty wet, but when you thought about it, it was a small price to pay for being well groomed.

I went back into the kitchen and looked out the window at the bleak warehouse walls and rusty fire escapes across Vandam Street. The hangover was starting to go, but I still didn’t feel like putting hotcakes on the griddle and taking down the ol’ fiddle.

I stoked up the espresso machine and fed the cat.