The Prisoner of Vandam Street (2 page)

W
here the hell’s Saint Peter?” I said. “I’m not going to sit here on this cloud playing a harp for all eternity! I didn’t sign up for this shit!”

“Settle down, Kinkster,” said a familiar voice. “You’re not in heaven nor are you ever bloody likely to be. But don’t you fret yourself. I’ll save you a seat down there, mate.”

The voice sounded either Irish or cockney, and to my tin American ear it seemed as if it must have been emanating from the kind of person Professor Higgins might be fascinated with. It was oddly calming, however, because I was on the edge of panic thinking about what I might or might not see when I opened my eyes.

I opened my eyes.

What a joke. I wasn’t in heaven or hell, just in the same mortal limbo most of us have experienced all our lives as we crawl toward the stars, inch forward in traffic, circle a bug light with weather-beaten wings, love someone who does not love us in return.

“Bollocks!” shouted the voice again. “I’ve spilt the fuckin’ coffee!”

I was lying on a small bed in a pool of my own sweat in a small white room. The lighting appeared to be set at a level of high interrogation.

“What a fuckin’ load of cobblers!” shouted the voice angrily. “Dress me up in ermine.”

I looked over and saw the friendly, if somewhat aggravated features of my friend Mick Brennan. Mick was one of the best photographers in the world. He was also one of the best troublemakers.

“There was no reason for McGovern to have done that,” I said evenly.

“McGovern’s a total wanker,” said Brennan. “Bloke like that could’ve done anything.”

“Not this.”

“What’d he do?”

I thought about it for a moment. I still couldn’t believe it. But it was the most obvious possible explanation for the unpleasant circumstances in which I now found myself. I did not want to tell Brennan what I suspected, so I answered his question, in Talmudic fashion, with another question. Maybe, like many Talmudic scholars, I was just a little confused myself. It sometimes happens to you when you think you’re getting close to God.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” said Brennan.

“You would’ve made a good Talmudic scholar yourself if you hadn’t been raised an Irish Protestant.”

“I was working under cover for the Catholics, mate.”

“There’s only one Catholic I’d like you to work on for me: McGovern. I’d like you to kill him.”

“The McGoverns are a dodgy lot, mate, aren’t they? But why’d you want to kill the tosser? After all, it was McGovern who called me and asked me to come here to the hospital to look after you.”

“It all fits,” I said.

“You’re talkin’ rubbish, mate. McGovern was—well, he was walkin’ on his knuckles, mate. He’d been on the piss for six days and he must’ve thought it was a week. I mean, I’m not defending McGovern—”

“Good, because he tried to kill me.”

“Mate, it’s not logical, is it? If he’d wanted to croak you, why’d he bring you here to St. Vincent’s? Why’d he call me to come look after you? He was just lookin’ out for you, mate. That’s the way it is, innit?”

“I think he was just covering his tracks. I think he slipped me a mickey at the Corner Bistro.”

“Now why would he want to do that, mate? Besides, McGovern’s so big he’d need a bleedin’ domed stadium to cover his tracks. You’re just a wee bit crook, mate. That’s the way it is, innit? That’s why I’m here, aren’t I? I talked to the head sawbones. Caught up with him in the hallway. Says they’re runnin’ tests on your blood. We’ll soon know what the problem is, won’t we?”

“So you seem to think McGovern’s innocent?”

“ ‘Course he is, mate. The only thing he’s guilty of is being a total wanker.”

“You’re right. McGovern and I were drinking in the Corner Bistro and we had some rather tedious tension convention—I can’t remember what it was about—and I started shivering and sweating and feeling like I was going to begin squirtin’ out of both ends—”

“Well, you’re in the right place now, aren’t you?”

There was something irritating about the cockney custom of tacking the little question to the end of every sentence. It was also beginning to sound rather patronizing, as if Brennan were speaking to a child or an idiot or a grievously ill person. Was I any of the above, I wondered? Of course not. Whatever anybody said about McGovern, he didn’t have a mean bone in his large body. No way would he have done anything so dastardly and devious as to land me in the horsepital. I told Mick Brennan as much.

“You know, Mick,” I said, “now that I think about it, there’s no way McGovern would’ve ever slipped me a mickey.”

“You’re right, mate. You want to know what I think?”

“Do I have a choice? I’m here, trapped in this horsepital bed, freezing my ass off, drowning in sweat—”

“We haven’t had a wet dream, have we?”

“—listening to you natter away about what
you
think. I want to know what the hell’s wrong with me! What does the head sawbones, as you call him, think?”

“He’s probably on the golf course by now, mate. We have to be patient, don’t we? Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey, innit?”

I was really starting to not feel well again. The fever and the chills and the nausea seemed to be coming in waves, taking me far out into a dark and turbulent sea, floating me in and out of consciousness. Whatever affliction was afflicting me, I figured it wasn’t going to be any walk in Central Park. Just judging from the way I felt, whatever I had, had me better than I had it. It felt like I’d just gone ten rounds with death’s little sister, to paraphrase Hemingway who I think was talking about fame, which, of course, is always a death of a sort. If my fans could only see me now, I thought. I could use some fans, actually, the propeller type. The fucking place was burning up.

I must’ve nodded out, ’cause when I woke up Brennan was gone. This did not surprise me terribly. Mick was not the most reliable of the Village Irregulars. He was certainly one of the most charming, though, but when you’re lying at death’s door, alternately freezing your ass off or burning to death, charm has its limitations. I knew instinctively now that what was wrong with me was more than someone slipping me a mickey. People lie to you when you’re sick. Your friends tend to sugarcoat things. Doctors often tell you what they think you want to hear. The best gauge of how well you are or how sick you are, whether you’re in a horsepital or out of one, is always yourself. Myself was grudgingly, yet ruthlessly telling me that I was an extremely sick chicken. I did not take the news very well.

A nurse came in a couple of times and each time I asked her what I had, what was wrong with me. Each time she said she didn’t know. She said when the tests came back from the lab the doctor would tell me. I asked her when that would be. She said she didn’t know.

I tried to sleep, but it’s not easy when your forehead feels hotter than the third ring of Saturn. Or was it Jupiter that had the rings? When you’re delirious, it’s hard to remember these things. When you’re healthy, they may assume a certain degree of importance in a game of trivia or a college exam or some other exercise in vapidity. But when you’re dying, you really don’t give a damn. Dr. Seuss may be painting rings on Joan of Arc’s anus and it’d work for you. When you’re dying, as my friend Speed Vogel says, your heart attack is everybody else’s hangnail. This applies even if you only think you’re dying. Sometimes that’s enough to enlighten you if you ever had any doubts about the fragility of the spider webs of friendship and the fatuous, superficial, pathetic nature of human beings in general. Most of the time we’re not even good enough to be evil. We do things, even good and great things, almost always because, consciously or unconsciously, it suits us to do them. Not that I was expecting Mick Brennan to donate his kidney to me. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted Mick Brennan’s kidney. I was sure I didn’t want his liver. Anyway, when you’re dying or think you’re dying, it’s the people and the animals and the places long ago and far away that always seem the closest to your heart. Everybody and everything else around you sucks hind teat compared with them. And the closer your dearest distant dreams become, the closer you are to death. I was dreaming of the time when my eleven-year-old nephew, David, sneezed on the entire left side of the beautifully presented lox and bagel buffet. Into this cherished moment the sounds of an altercation intruded themselves quite cacophonously. Whatever was happening appeared to be happening right in my horsepital room.

“Sir!” said a stern female voice. “You can’t bring that in here.”

“Shite!” said a voice I recognized as Brennan’s. “I’m behavin’ meself, aren’t I? This is America, innit?”

“There is
no
alcohol allowed in the hospital, sir!”

“What about rubbing alcohol, you silly cow? I was here before, wasn’t I? Just popped over to the pub, didn’t I? What is this? A poofter operation? Scratch the word ‘operation,’ luv. I misspoke meself. Don’t want to disturb a dyin’ bloke—I mean a
sick
bloke—”

“Nurse,” I said, shivering under several blankets, “are the tests back from the lab yet?”

“What tests?” said the nurse.

“The bleedin’ blood tests!” shouted Brennan. “The sawbones is supposed to come tell us, innit he?”

“The doctor has gone home for the day,” said the nurse coldly.

“He will be here at seven o’clock in the morning by which time I trust this gentleman will be gone.”

“Now wait a minute, you ol’ boiler!” shouted Brennan belligerently. “Just who you callin’ a gentleman?”

Sometime later, after the nurse had driven off in a 1937 snit, I started feeling hot again, kicked the blankets off, then tried to get up and find my pants. As I sat up in bed, the room began swirling around me like a galaxy that had taken mescaline. I lay back down in the hell of my sweaty bed, waiting for a doctor who might or might not show up with test results or no test results at seven in the morning. I had no idea if it was night or day, but seven in the morning seemed an eternity away.

The fever, if anything, appeared to be getting worse. Wildly contemplating what was wrong with me was pushing me to the edge of panic. It was at that point that I heard Brennan’s words wash over me. They were spoken from his chair beside my bed, sadly, softly, and sincerely, almost, indeed, as if he were speaking to himself.

“No, McGovern didn’t slip you a mickey,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I think happened.”

“What?” I said weakly.

“I think somebody put a curse on you, mate.”

“Why don’t we wait for the lab tests?”

“Why don’t we wait for the pubs to open?”

We waited. I looked at Brennan. He tried to smile, but I could see that he was a deeply worried man. That made two of us. Before I passed out again I saw a grove of banana trees, a sacred hornbill bird, and a group of little brown children playing beside a coffee-colored river.

B
y all rights and all wrongs, I should’ve died that night, and there’ve been times, gentile reader, when I wish I had. Does it make that much difference to the world when another bright little spark goes out in the eye of a stray on the busy corner of truth and vermouth? I’m wearing the shirt my father died in and his arm is coming out of my sleeve. Is there anyone awake tonight in this little town or was it already dead before the virus hit? In that calm, reflective rage that inevitably comes to us all, I think we can agree that our lives are works of fiction, and that it hardly matters in what manner you lived or died or shat through a typewriter. Just assume, gentile reader, that we are walking in single file through the united nations of hell and you are walking slightly ahead of the character but slightly behind the author and then the author conks on page fifty-seven leaving only you and the character to fight it out over a few scraps of imagination. “But what happened to the mystery?” some discerning reader may no doubt remark. “What happened to the mystery of life?” We’ll get to that in a moment. Right now we have a dead author on our hands, and like all dead authors he gets better with time. And like all living authors, he knew that all he really wanted was fame and immortality, and like all dead authors he knows that it’s a trade-off and that the less you usually get of the former the more you often receive of the latter, if you follow meeeeeee, which you probably don’t. Not that I’m Jesus or anybody; I’m just another dead author looking for the right place to use a semicolon and aspiring to inspire before I expire which happily is never too late for a dead author. But now the editor who has just returned from a busy night of air-kissing Michael Jackson’s publicist at a cocktail party is scanning this shit and thinks he detects a slight change in the tonality which could either be a literary cry for help or a trendy new writing style that the casual critic might mistake for serious writing. It’s kind of a refreshing change from the formulaic mystery format, and what the hell, it’s only mildly insulting to the reader who might conceivably realize that he may have a dead author on his hands and sure as shit doesn’t want to see the fictional character killed off as well, so the editor e-mails the publisher, and while the dead author and his fucking typewriter are drifting off to hell through the torporous Texas night, he brings in a cold nephew from a blue prison or a well-intentioned highly alliterative asshole to complete the work after the fashion that a respectable cult of readers around the world has come to know and love. Like all good editors, the editor resents the author, and the publisher doesn’t care about the editor or the author, both of whom resent the publisher, and the author, like all good authors, writes with a total disregard for the reader, who, like all good lovers, loves the heart who doesn’t love him, and everybody hates Hollywood. The publisher thinks he owns all this shit, but he doesn’t. It’s a borrowed campfire.

Most Americans should’ve probably skipped this chapter, anyway, but fortunately we’re too busy driving vehicles, taking dumps, whacking off all at the same time, and we’re afraid we missed something in the back-story. Or we might be sharper than that, and we might jump through our asshole and shout, “What asshole published this shit? What asshole edited this shit? What asshole wrote this shit?” And the dead author would probably say, “Me and my fucking typewriter are saving you a seat in hell because you’re the asshole who’s reading this shit.” And, you know, they’d all be right. That’s the way it is, innit?