The Prisoner of Vandam Street (4 page)

U
nfortunately, Jim the Ferry Boatman on Vancouver Island refused to punch my ticket to the Grateful Dead concert. My number wasn’t up yet, apparently, so I had to go on living whether I wanted to or not. Reflecting back on those close moments, I don’t think I really wanted to die. I just wanted a little time away from Ratso and McGovern. That’s not asking so fucking much, is it? I mean I wouldn’t have minded dying, and I probably will die some day, but at the time I had a few projects I was working on and frankly I was getting damn tired of leaving the cat with the lesbians upstairs. If I kept doing that, the cat was going to turn into a lesbian, and if there’s one thing everybody hates it’s a lesbian cat.

Yet the health, education, and welfare of the cat had been nagging at me quite a bit lately. People tend not to be too concerned about other people’s pets unless they vomit in your shoes or bite you in the ass. I’d already been in the horsepital for several days, and there was no sign I could detect that I was improving or about to be discharged, and if I left it up to Ratso and McGovern to remember to take care of the cat, there’d be a small set of skeletal remains to greet me when and if I ever returned to 199B Vandam Street.

I vowed that if I ever opened my eyes again and returned to what we like to think of as consciousness, I’d make sure in no uncertain terms that either Ratso or McGovern went right over to the loft and fed the cat. Whether the cat should be taken upstairs to Winnie Katz’s was an open question. Would it be better to have the cat neglected by the Village Irregulars or corrupted by Winnie? That’s what it all came down to. And I could just imagine what the loft looked like. The cat by this time would be setting about in a feline fugue, vindictively dumping on everything I held dear. There would no doubt be cat shit on my pillow, cat shit on the espresso machine, cat shit on the two blowers, cat shit on the puppethead, cat shit on Sherlock Holmes’s head. Some day scientists would probably discover that the world was made of cat shit. Probably the moon was made of cat shit. Pâté was made of cat shit. Einstein was made of cat shit. Princess Di was made of cat shit. Mother Teresa was made of cat shit. Jerry Lewis was made of cat shit. Gibraltar was made of cat shit. Mt. Everest was made of cat shit. Palestine was made of cat shit. The pope was made of cat shit. Jesus was made of cat shit. God was made of cat shit. Peter Jennings was made of cat shit. Scientists will some day discover that all of mankind is made of cat shit except for one man. That man is John Ashcroft. Scientists will some day discover that John Ashcroft is made of horseshit. Just another reason not to open your eyes.

“Kinkstah! Kinkstah!” shouted Ratso. “Leap sideways, Kinkstah!”

I opened my eyes. Ratso’s large head darted away from me, soon to be magically replaced by McGovern’s even larger head. It looked like a very bad puppet show.

“Kink!” said McGovern, with all the excitement of a small child at Christmastime. “Dr. Pickaninny’s here!”

“Audrey Hepburn’s made of cat shit,” I said.

Like two pistons in the engine of humanity, McGovern’s head disappeared again, only to be replaced once more by Ratso’s head, his frightening face smiling like an idiot.

“Dr. Skinnipipi’s got something to tell you, Kinkstah!” he shouted.

“John Wayne’s made of cat shit,” I said.

“Poor fellow’s obviously delirious,” said Dr. Skinnipipi, “but that’s to be expected with malarrrrria—”

“Eleanor Roosevelt’s made of cat shit,” I said.

“We’re sending you home, Mr. Friedman,” said the doctor smoothly. “These two gentlemen have graciously agreed to take turns being your primary care-givers. If you cooperate with them, you will be fine. But there are two conditions under which I am discharging you: Number one is that you must not under any circumstances exert yourself; number two is that you are to be confined to your quarters for a period of approximately six weeks.”

“Don’t worry, Kinkstah!” said Ratso. “The time will fly by.”

“I really must emphasize,” said Skinnipipi, “that you remain in your flat until the
Plasmodium falciparum
has entirely departed your system.”

“You can do it, Kink!” put in McGovern. “And we’ll be there to help you.”

I looked up at two big white faces and one skinny brown one. Like martinets, they turned briefly sideways to each other, then all three gazed back down at me hopefully.

“Do I have your word, Mr. Friedman?” intoned the doctor.

“Spike Lee’s made of cat shit,” I said.

N
o horsepital in America will let a patient leave the building on his own steam, which was just as well because I doubt if I could’ve made it. The vehicle of choice, of course, is the wheelchair, which gives you an opportunity to find out what it’s like to be The Invisible Man. Outside of the few nurses and professionals who deal with this sort of thing every day, almost everyone else you meet instinctively prefers to talk to you—if they talk to you at all—through the mouthpiece of the more ambulatory person who’s pushing the chair. Inside the horsepital, the wheelchair-bound virtually don’t exist because they are such a common commodity. It’s almost like seeing somebody pushing around a sack of potatoes. This is as it should be. The guys who put accident victims in the meat-wagon usually don’t say, “Oh, God! Look at all the blood!” More likely, once the situation’s under control, they’ll be talking baseball or football, or, if they happen to be homosexuals, they’ll be talking about Celine Dion’s new CD. Likewise, a horsepital orderly is not likely to say: “Look at the poor man in the wheelchair. I wonder what’s wrong with him?” They see this shit all the time. In fact, if you’re not careful, in a horsepital you can get your ass run over by a wheelchair.

But when dealing with the tourists, the visitors, the families, and the wide world outside the horsepital, you rapidly find yourself transmogrified from a familiar commodity whom everyone ignores to an oddity whom everyone ignores. In other words, being wheelchair-bound means that everyone relates to you as if you were a dog or cat or infant, and it’s not so bad once you get used to it. People ask the person pushing the chair, in this case McGovern, “How’s he doing?” or “What happened to him?” or “Did you notice that his nose is falling off?” It takes a brave soul to talk directly to somebody in a wheelchair, and in the rare event that it happens, it’s usually accomplished in nauseatingly patronizing tones. “Did we get some good rest at the hospital?” or, once they’ve spoken a bit to McGovern, “Are we going to follow the doctor’s orders?” My response to any and all questions like this was uniformly the same: “Piss off, mate.” It worked remarkably well. Even young, inquisitive children seemed to almost viscerally understand where I was coming from, and I don’t mean the horsepital.

McGovern, for his part, seemed to enjoy pushing the wheelchair and answering questions for me. McGovern, of course, was the man who once combed his hair before meeting a racehorse. He was also the man who, several years earlier, had chosen to have elective surgery at the VA hospital in New York on Yom Kippur. He would not have been my first choice in the world of people I wanted to be pushing my wheelchair, but when you’re in a wheelchair, there’s nothing you can do about that either. Eventually, inevitably, you come to hate the person pushing your wheelchair. Even a big, kind-hearted, devoted McGovern-type will begin to get up your sleeve by the time you’ve rolled your pathetic way down a few of life’s long, crowded, smelly corridors. The person pushing the chair can never know what it’s like until he’s rolled a mile on your wheels. That’s why he’s so friendly and fucking cheerful all the time. It makes you want to kill him, or at least hurt him enough to put him in the horsepital so he can see what it’s like to be in this stupid fucking wheelchair with some high-minded asshole who probably thinks he’s saving the world pushing you down the fucking street. Most people in wheelchairs are, I believe, pretty much thinking thoughts along these lines. Fortunately, they’re in wheelchairs, so they can’t hurt us. It’s when they get better and become ambulatory again that the rest of us pedestrians have to be careful. Happily, by then they’ve usually forgotten their bitter, twisted, vengeful wheelchair thoughts, and they go about their normal activities, which are often composed of cheerfully pushing the rest of us around in wheelchairs. People who are permanently confined to wheelchairs are a still more dangerous animal, of course. They resent you for your ambulatory abilities which you take totally for granted and they would definitely kill you in a heartbeat if their physical impairments didn’t preclude them from doing so. They’ve had a lot of time to think about it, time to stew in their own juices, so to speak, and if given the slightest opportunity, with or without provocation, they will attempt to trick you, or trip you, or poison you, or kill you by some extremely well-thought-out and viciously nefarious means, such as unscrewing the rotor on your new Sharper Image nose-hair clipper.

“How in the hell am I supposed to hail a taxi at the same time I’m pushing this wheelchair?” said McGovern in a tone of deep frustration.

“Tom Hanks is made of cat shit,” I said.

“That’s enough of that cat shit shit,” said McGovern rather peevishly. “You’re not delirious anymore. It’s just an attention-getting device. You’re doing this to irritate people.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked rationally.

“Nothing,” said McGovern, “except in this case the people you’re irritating is me and I’m pushing the fucking wheelchair and you’re pushing me to the point where I just might push it into the goddamn street!”

“C’mon, McGovern, you don’t have to feel this way. Go to the happy place.”

“Fuck you and the wheelchair you rode in on,” said McGovern.

While McGovern and I were dealing with our logistical and interpersonal problems, Ratso, who might have provided a fairly adequate buffer, was nowhere in sight. I soon was to learn that he’d taken the key to the loft and headed down to Big Wong’s in Chinatown where he’d stocked up on approximately six weeks’ worth of takeout Chinese food. I like Big Wong’s almost as much as Ratso, but I thought this to be somewhat excessive, especially when I realized that he’d billed all of it to me. But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself in my wheelchair here.

McGovern and I were now seriously involved in the business of finding a taxi. Taxis are plentiful in New York. If, indeed, you’re crazy enough to drive a vehicle in the city, you’ve probably noticed yellowish scratches and indentations on the car’s finish which we often refer to as “taxi juice.” There are times when you can see whole fleets of yellow taxicabs moving inexorably down the avenues like Panzers into Poland. There are only two occasions when it’s impossible to find a cab in New York: when it’s raining and when you’re in a wheelchair.

“Shit,” said McGovern. “It’s starting to rain.”

I
won’t go into the tedium, ennui, and pure hell we experienced, first merely finding a cab, and then trying to fit a large Irishman, a malaria patient, and a collapsible wheelchair that wouldn’t collapse all into a tiny yellow cab that was driven by a man whose appearance and behavior bore an almost uncanny resemblance to that of Robert Mugabe. Somehow, we managed. But arriving at 199B Vandam Street, apparently, was only to be the beginning of our problems.

“We’ll never get that wheelchair up four flights of stairs,” said McGovern. “What about using that old freight elevator in your building?”

“That hasn’t worked in years,” I said, opening the door and almost falling out of the cab.

“Neither have you,” said McGovern lightheartedly.

He laughed his loud, infectious Irish laugh, which was always most effective when there wasn’t really anything to laugh about. That was a pretty good description of the current situation. The driver had driven off in a snit, the wheelchair was lying in the gutter looking for all the world like a large collapsed Bohemian accordion, and we didn’t have a key to the building because Ratso had taken it when he went to Big Wong’s. At the moment he was probably shoveling down a large meal up there in my loft, totally oblivious to McGovern’s persistent shouts for him to throw down the puppethead. The little wooden puppethead, of course, held the key to the building in its perpetually smiling mouth. The key to happiness, I’d noticed, could almost never be found in anybody’s perpetually smiling mouth. At this juncture, however, I’d have been happy to settle for the key to the building.

“It’s not true that I’ve never worked,” I said to McGovern. “I’ve just never held a real job.”

“What?” said McGovern. “Say again? Bob?”

“That’s right. Bob. Bob Dylan’s coming over to help us get the wheelchair up the stairs.”

“I heard you,” said McGovern petulantly.

Maybe it was just the ying and yang of the everyday world, but as McGovern’s hearing seemed to fall into periods of inefficiency, so my fever seemed to rise and with it I quite naturally rose into heights of delirium. So we had a deaf man trying to communicate with a delusional man regarding getting into a building in which at this very moment a man with large Jewish buttocks was probably sitting on the davenport eating the cheeks—and they are regarded as delicacies—out of a large, braised fish head.

“Let’s go with plan B,” I said.

“Good as can be!” said McGovern, giving me the thumbs up.

“Plan B!” I shouted. “We get help to get us in the building from a passing lesbian.”

“What? Say again? Thespian? There’s a new play coming to town?”

“There’s always a new play coming to town, McGovern,” I said angrily. “We live in New York.”

“I know that,” he shouted. “You don’t have to bite my head off! You don’t have to talk to me like I’m a child!”

While very little light was produced by this particular tension convention, enough heat was generated apparently to attract the ear of one Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who promptly threw open my fourth-floor kitchen window and shouted down: “It’s about time! I was getting worried about you guys.”

“He’s worried about getting
flies?
” asked McGovern.

“That’s right,” I said, feeling a swoon coming on. “The loft’s probably about knee-deep by now in cat shit.”

“Don’t start that cat shit shit again! I’ll tell Dr. Pickaninny.”

“That’s Dr. Skinnipipi,” I said.

“Same to you,” said McGovern.

During this last bleak effort at social intercourse, Ratso had thrown down the puppethead with the key in its mouth, and it now sailed like a schooner, its American flag parachute billowing beautifully over the garbage trucks, garbage cans, miscellaneous detritus, and, well—cat shit—that were endemic to Vandam Street. McGovern caught up with the puppethead just as it grazed the cab of a slow-moving garbage truck. The driver of the garbage truck was mildly amused at seeing such a large Irishman in hot pursuit of such a small puppethead, but the incident did not deter him from his duties. When you drive a garbage truck in New York, sooner or later you see everything. I remember back in Texas people often used to ask my old friend Slim, who was bugled to Jesus long before the term “African-American” was invented, why his cats always got into their garbage cans. Slim invariably gave them the same answer: “They wants to see the world.”

McGovern got the key and opened the front door of the building, then Ratso came down the stairs to help walk me up to the loft. With an arm around each of their shoulders, I slowly, painfully, made it up all four flights, a journey I never would have accomplished on my own steam. God bless the Village Irregulars, I thought. On the one arm I had the niggardly, slovenly, ever loyal Ratso. On the other I had the irritating gentile optimism of McGovern. They were two towers of strength for me then, in many ways like the two no longer there, consigned for always and ever to the hearts of anyone who calls himself New Yorker. God bless the Village Irregulars, I thought. All the millions of them.