The Prisoner of Vandam Street (6 page)

F
or the next several days a Mardi Gras–like atmosphere seemed to reign in the loft at 199B Vandam Street. Some of the lesbians from Winnie Katz’s dance class on the floor above even dropped in to join the festivities. You might think this rather outrageous behavior might not be in the better interests of a malaria patient, but you’d be wrong. Actually, it was just what the doctor ordered. For a while, at least, it lifted me out of my fevered and melancholy state and put me into very high spirits indeed. I wasn’t over the malaria. Even I understood that. But, just possibly, I was over feeling sorry for myself. And that, gentile reader, is a giant step for any man to take.

The cat, to be sure, was not as understanding. Cats never are. She longed for the days when I’d sit at my desk, cobwebs attaching themselves from cigar to my cowboy hat, waiting for a case to materialize. I could hardly remember these days myself. Solving a crime, staking out a building with Rambam, pounding the pavement in search of bad guys, pounding my penis in an effort at self-gratification—all these were now things of the past. Fighting crime was the furthest thing from my mind. I was currently fighting merely to retain what was left of my mind and to survive this stubborn and unforgiving malady. It was rather fortunate, indeed, that no investigation had recently come my way. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to deal with it.

Not only did the cat despise the party-making atmosphere that now often perpetrated itself upon the formerly peaceful confines of the loft, the loft itself looked like it’d taken a direct hit from a daisy-cutter. Beer cans and liquor bottles and plates containing half-eaten dinners were strewn all over the place. Mick Brennan kept promising he’d clean everything up, but so far very little progress appeared to have been made. To add to the clutter, the cat, perhaps understandably, had returned to her previous format of vindictively dumping upon practically every clean surface that my care-providers had somehow managed to miss. The result of all this was not a pleasant one to observe, much less to live amongst, but somehow the human spirit triumphed and we all managed. I managed to periodically even forget that I was a spiritual shut-in. I got out of bed fairly often now, puttered about the loft, looked for something or someone to do, found nothing, and often as not, returned to my bed in a surprisingly weakened state.

Malaria is a whore. Malaria is a tar baby. It is a noxious housepest, one of many, I might add, who stays and stays and stays. After periods of feeling relatively normal, I would suddenly find the fever and the shaking chills returning with a vengeance, demolishing my temporary good spirits, turning my world upside-down once again. I was, in general, certainly not myself. As Piers Akerman, I believe, observed: “The fact that the Kinkster is not himself is a silver lining for everybody else.” There may have been a small kernel of truth to this statement, but I’ve always believed friendship is overrated, just as taking a Nixon is often underrated. I also believe that no one can truly win friends and influence people; people who like you in spite of yourself will be called friends, and those are the ones upon whom you may someday have some trivial effect. People rarely, if ever, truly “influence” others. We are all too culture-bound, too much creatures of narrow habit, too influenced by “us” to ever be much influenced by “them.”

At least I wasn’t feeling like Kafka anymore. The world was not out to get me. It was out to get everybody and sooner or later, no doubt, it would. If I could’ve kept up in the drinking department with McGovern, Piers, and Brennan, I probably would’ve drunk myself to death, thereby at least curing the malaria. But I couldn’t keep up with them. Nobody currently living in the world could. Maybe Spencer Tracy or John Wayne or Ira Hayes or Edgar Allan Poe could but they had all been bugled to Jesus, no doubt, all with a bottle in their hands. The cat, of course, hated drunken behavior in humans and, quite irrationally, she maintained her hatred of Ratso, the only care-giver who drank in moderation. Ratso was Jewish, of course, and Jews are not often alcoholics. It’s simply not the way of their people. Jews may have many other obnoxious behaviors, but one of them is not drinking. The Jew is somewhat culturally deprived in this country, however, because, growing up as a child he almost never hears the three words that most Americans live by and have grown to love: “Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers!”

Late one night, while experiencing one of my more severe attacks of fever, I found myself mulling over the possibility that the cat was a Nazi. This would explain her hatred of Ratso. It would not, of course, explain why she continued to contentedly live in my loft. It was conceivable, I thought, that the cat could be a Nazi spy, fighting down her inherent anti-Semitic tendencies until her mission in America was completed. This might go a ways toward explaining her rather unsavory dumping behavior. Working against this theory, I reflected, was the indisputable fact that the cat had Jewish eyes that were, like all true Jewish eyes, sad, beautiful, and indefatigably distrustful of people. The cat as a Nazi, I had to admit, was somewhat far-fetched, but life, malaria, and—well—sometimes cats, will do that to you. In the end, as you might suspect, I didn’t buy the theory. For the cat was sleeping peacefully next to me on the pillow, her head resting lovingly on my shoulder. Clearly, she loved me as much as a cat can love a man and I, for my part, loved her as much as a man can love a cat. Between the two of us, I thought, we very probably were imbued with more love than all the Nazis in the world.

But loving someone, whether or not that someone happens to be a cat, does not necessarily mean that you can sleep. Malaria can be so debilitating, can so ravage the system, that you can’t sleep when you need to sleep, you can’t shit when you need to shit, you can’t laugh when you need to laugh, and you can’t say what you need to say. It’s a little bit, in fact, the way most of us live every day of our lives.

Since I couldn’t sleep, I got up and began rummaging restlessly through the drawers and cabinets and closets of the loft. I didn’t know what I was looking for but most people fall into that department most of their lives: the lost and never found. It helps to know what you’re looking for, but it’s no guarantee you’ll still want it once you find it. When I began puttering about the living room I discovered that none of my supposed care-givers were anywhere in sight. Far from disturbing my fragile constitution, this unusual occurrence caused a small wave of peace to billow over my heart. I had not been alone in the loft since the whole ordeal had begun, and now I was positively luxuriating in my solitude.

To borrow a colorful Aussie expression from Piers Akerman, the loft did look rather “shithouse,” but at least for the moment we now had the population explosion somewhat under control. Piers’s huge appetite for food, alcohol, and life did not have to be constantly attended to. There were no sounds of bickering between Brennan and McGovern or Brennan and Ratso. All in all, the place seemed pretty peaceful. This is not to say that I was ungrateful for the care and concern of the Village Irregulars. The medical practice well understands that malaria patients, like many other patients of many other disorders, tend to overdo things when they think they’re getting better. The result is invariably a discouraging and damaging relapse, placing the patient’s prognosis further in jeopardy than it previously had been. This is what the members of the medical practice believe, but they are only correct about half the time. That’s why the practice of medicine is called a practice.

I hadn’t smoked a cigar in a long time, so I thought I’d give it a try. I wandered over to my old desk, sat down heavily in the chair, and lifted the deerstalker cap off the top of Sherlock Holmes’s porcelain head. I carefully extracted one Epicure Number 2 Cuban cigar from the depths of Sherlock’s cranium, lopped off the butt with a silver butt-cutter given to me by Billy Joe Shaver on our most recent musical tour of Australia, and set fire to it with a kitchen match. The cat, who was now positioned on the desk perfectly equidistant between my two red telephones, watched with quiet encouragement. To her it seemed as if I were getting back to normal. To me, the two little Statue of Liberty torches that I saw reflected in the eyes of the cat reminded me of the wistful freedom I currently did not enjoy. I puffed peacefully on the cigar for a time and wished fervently that I could be my old self again. But deep in my soul I felt as ephemeral and insubstantial as the blue-gray smoke of my cigar, dissipating slowly into the lesbian sky. If my faculties, both physical and spiritual, did not return to me soon, I would not survive my confinement in this loft. Claustrophobia, not malaria, would eventually do me in.

“Will the game ever be afoot again?” I said to the plaster saint, the ceramic muse, the whatever-the-hell-he-was-made-of god that was Sherlock Holmes.

He did not answer. This was good. Maybe I was getting better.

“I hate to say it,” I said to the cat, “but I’m almost ready to tackle an investigation.”

The cat was conducting her own investigation at the moment. She was investigating her anus. Possibly, she was just trying to get the taste out of her mouth after sampling some of the plates of leftover food lying about. At any rate, she did not understand that smoking the cigar, at least momentarily, put me in touch with myself, brought me to my senses, made me realize that my life was nothing without a mystery.

Maybe this was why I soon found myself standing at the kitchen window, scanning the narrow horizons of Vandam Street, looking through a pair of old, not to say archaic, opera glasses. This museum relic had been given to me by my old friend, Aunt Anita. Aunt Anita had a little dog named Ipo, which means “sweet-heart” in Hawaiian. Both Aunt Anita and Ipo had long since gone to Jesus. Now, only I remained, looking at the world through her old opera glasses, searching, searching, for something I’d lost on yesterday street.

I
f I hadn’t have been in a state of malarial unfocusment, I probably never would have seen it in the first place. I also probably wouldn’t have been standing at the kitchen window with a pair of ancient opera glasses hovering just above my beezer. But there I was. And there it was. A small square of light in a world of darkness.

“I can’t believe it!” I shouted to the cat. “This little booger really works!”

The cat’s interest seemed mildly piqued. At least she seemed curious enough to jump off the desk and hop up beside me on the windowsill. Coming from a cat, that’s quite a vote of confidence.

The square of light was apparently an apartment or loft in the building across the street which I’d always taken to be just an old warehouse. People who looked at my building, I reflected, very possibly just took it to be an old warehouse. Yet, beneath the facades, behind the exteriors, under the waves, between the sheets, inside the hearts, where nobody looks is always where the real show is taking place. I had no idea what time it was or what day it was. All I knew was that it was dark outside and it was late and there was a small table inside the lighted square with a vase of flowers on it.

“Looks like
Still Life with Woodpecker,
” I hazarded, in a rather half-hearted effort to keep the cat in the game. Mentioning a bird usually helped, but I could see that her interest was rapidly waning.

The fact is, my interest was waning, as well, until the woman came into the frame. Indeed, before I saw her, I’d gotten bored and had shifted my attention to a cat going through a parked garbage truck. You’d think my cat, who lived, relatively speaking, in the very lap of luxury, might have some little degree of empathy for the stray cat poring over the garbage. This was not the case, however. The cat saw the other cat, gave a slight mew of distaste, hopped down from the windowsill, and immediately redirected her attention to her own anus. Socially speaking, I was somewhat disappointed in the cat. Maybe there were some Freudian aspects to the situation that I was missing. I didn’t want to go crazy thinking about it. Maybe a cat licking her own anus, another cat going through a garbage truck, and a vase of cut flowers in an empty apartment was all there was to life.

It was while I aimed the opera glasses one last time at the vase of flowers that I saw the woman enter the picture. She seemed to adjust the flowers slightly in the vase, then she walked over to the window and appeared to be gazing down on Vandam Street, possibly waiting for someone. She was not scantily clad or anything like that. She was wearing a dark house robe, or it could have been a kimono. Her hair was long and dark and cascaded down to her shoulders which, like the rest of her figure that I could see, seemed trim and lithe. She looked quite beautiful with her arms held together under her breasts in an attitude of wistful waitingness, almost the stoic pose of an island maiden standing on the shore, longing for her sailor to return. Maybe it was the malaria talking, but I had to tell someone what I felt for the girl, so I tried again to engage the cat.

“Look at this beautiful young woman,” I said. “She’s a modern-day Juliet waiting for her Romeo.”

The cat never had cared much for the classics. Nor did she appear to ever evince much sympathy for the underdog. For those reasons, and probably many others, she continued to callously lick her anus.

“Stop licking your anus!” I shouted.

The cat did not stop. The woman, I noticed, had given up, for the moment, looking for her lover. She walked back to the table, sat down in a chair, and put her head in her hands, remaining frozen there in what seemed a heartbreaking tableau.

“Young love in the city,” I said.

The cat evidently did not care a flea about the troubled lives of the people in the building across the street. She shamelessly continued her previous activity.

“Stop licking your anus!” I shouted.

The cat stopped briefly, then she started up again. I put down the opera glasses for a moment, puffed patiently on the cigar, and glanced down at an empty Vandam Street and the building across the way, which now stood almost entirely in darkness except for the light in the woman’s loft. Her place was apparently one floor below mine and it was backlit nicely, almost like a movie set, but I still couldn’t see much without the opera glasses. When I picked them up again and gave my malarial eyes a chance to focus, I saw that the girl was standing up again, gesturing with her hands in an agitated manner, seemingly arguing with someone else who’d evidently entered the room while I’d been watching the cat lick her anus. Life turns on a dime, they say.

As I watched, a dark shadow fell across the table. Then the dark figure of a man moved slowly—relentlessly, it seemed—across the room. The girl appeared to shrink away from him in fear. I could be wrong, I thought. Maybe she’s just upset with him for being late. Very possibly the same scenario was being enacted at that moment in a great many residences all across the city. I had no idea what time it was, of course. I had no way of knowing how late the guy was. I thought maybe he’d stop and they’d stand their ground and argue some more, but that didn’t happen. What happened was he kept moving toward her with an almost menacing grace, moving like nothing could stop him, like a maestro taking the stage to conduct a personal symphony of hate. For there was definitely hate and impending violence in that room and it traveled through the little opera glasses right down to my shivering bones. Sometimes malaria makes you shiver and sometimes it’s only life.

He hit her then, hard, in the face and her head snapped back and her hair flowed and billowed like in a TV shampoo commercial or a movie which this wasn’t and the cat stopped licking her anus and I felt like someone had hit me, too, and there wasn’t a fucking thing I could do about it.

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted and the guy hit her again and Jesus Christ looked sadly down from some little hill or other and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do either. It was just a small aspect of the human condition called domestic violence and the society was redolent of it and the whole world reeked of it and maybe Hank Williams was right and they did have a license to fight, but the night was cold and the windows were all down and it made no sound and that made the normal shitty human thing all the more horrible and unearthly. And he hit her again and I turned and ran to call 911 and I stepped on an empty bottle and I fell and I was down and I crawled back to the window and I grabbed the little opera glasses and I looked across the blameless night and she was down, too, and he hit her again and again and again and only me and the cat and Jesus could see and it made us all feel sad and lonely, but we keep hoping and we keep trying and we crawl to the desk and grab the blower and we call 911 and we tell the lady who is there who we are and where we are and why we are lonely and why we are sad.