Part One: The Present Tense Chapter One
Call me Kinky.
It's not my true Christian name, of course, but then, I'm not a true Christian. If you don't believe me, maybe I can sell you the bridge of my nose. For, indeed, what true Christian, with Sunday-morning church bells ringing cacophonously all around him, would prefer sitting in a cold, drafty loft one floor below a lesbian dance class, puffing a cigar, sipping an espresso, and playing chess with a cat? It was a slow game, but I'd seen slower.
"Are you going to make a move," I said to the cat, "or are you just going to sit there?"
The cat, of course, said nothing. Nor did she deign to make a move. She was one of that maddening breed of finicky, meticulously conservative players who now and again cause you to want to reach across the table and yank their whiskers. There are, however, very few female chess players of merit in this world. If you have the good fortune to stumble across one, you always make allowances.
Outside the kitchen window winter had entirely enveloped the city, white as Rosinante, cold as the ashes of Jean Harlow's honeymoon. Harry Houdini's ghost, apparently, had placed Vandam Street under a trance. For a moment it seemed like it could be any other city block along the parade route of life's charade. For a moment it almost made a country singer-turned-private investigator wonder if he could solve the mystery of what in the hell he was doing here in the first place.
One of the many things New York City is not conducive to is a peaceful game of chess. Now, as the cat and I stared silently at the board, the small wooden pieces dissolving dreamily into dear, dead, dusty friends, a new and extremely unpleasant noise intruded itself upon the already tedious clamor of the church bells. A horn was honking in a somewhat irregular series of very loud, very long blasts. Like love, like trouble, like the extended stay of a hideous housepest, just when you thought it was over for good, it started up again.
"That tears it," I said to the cat. "I doubt whether even Van Gogh could masturbate under these conditions. However, through the power of Sherlockian deductive reasoning, I win now describe for you the nature of the villain who is creating such a repellent racket."
The cat looked at me with traffic-light eyes. Ever-changing. Now yellow. Now green. Now blinking, it seemed to me, somewhat doubtfully.
"The horn itself does not seem to have the dull, pedestrian timbre of the average horn on the average four-wheeled penis that speeds along the streets and sometimes the sidewalks of New York. Nor does it have the deep, resonant foghorn quality of a large vehicle -- for instance, a garbage truck. Today being Sunday, we can exclude garbage trucks altogether. You can't count on them to pick up the trash on any day, but on Sunday, like all good little church-workers, the garbage trucks rest. Unfortunately, most of them like to rest on Vandam Street."
The cat looked at me with pity in her eyes. I ignored her gaze and continued my calm, scientific analysis. Sherlockian deduction leaves no room for human emotions. Just as I was starting to speak the horn, an earsplitting, high-pitched, endless urban fart, sounded again.
"Twenty-seven seconds," I said. "Quite a singular occurrence if I'm not mistaken. The four-wheeled penis is no doubt new, expensive, and probably of foreign manufacture. Very likely driven by a detestable young person who obviously is not of a religious bent. The driver could not be incapacitated. Surely he'd have been mugged or assisted by this time, so an epileptic seizure or heart attack is out of the question. We can also rule out an electronic alarm on a parked four-wheeled penis. The fartings are too sustained and at intervals of too much irregularity. That last blast was thirteen seconds."
The cat stared at me very possibly in the same uncomprehending way Van Gogh's cat had stared at him during the last years of his life, when the two of them had shared the same padded cell in Dr. Gachet's mental hospital. Like Van Gogh's cat, my cat probably thought I belonged in wig city as well. He must be crazy, she no doubt figured. Why else would anybody become obsessed with a car honking out on the street when they could be playing chess with a cat? Sherlockian dicturn, of course, places very little stock in the whimsical wanderings of females or cats in general.
"Since it is Sunday and the traffic is light, the young woman in the foreign car is most likely trying to get the attention of someone in an upstairs loft or apartment not equipped with an intercom or buzzer to let her into the building."
At this point I got up from my chair and began pacing the living room of the loft. Back and forth I paced, puffing the cigar, studiously avoiding getting too close to the Vandam-side windows. My pacing was punctuated at intermittent intervals by extended, highly irritating horn blasts.
"How do I know it's a woman, you ask?" I said rhetorically to the cat, as I stopped pacing and turned dramatically toward the kitchen table.
Much to my Cheshire chagrin, the cat was now lying on its back on the table, sound asleep with all four paws in the air. When you blind the world with science there will always be those perverse enough to close their eyes. Nonetheless, I plodded on, shouting at the slumbering feline like a madman in a play.
"How do I know it's a woman behind the wheel? Because a man hits the horn in a threatening, rhythmic, staccato fashion, like a native of the Congo beating on his bongo. A similarly highly agitato woman takes a quite different approach. She leans on the horn with her whole neurotic, love-scarred life. So a young woman in an expensive foreign car is making this ungodly commotion on the very day that most of the world regards as God's day of rest. Fortunately, we are not most of the world."
Ready to test my powers of Sherlockian deductive reasoning, I gently scooped up the mildly protesting cat and together we walked to the kitchen window. I set the cat, who was now quite peeved, on the windowsill, and boldly gazed directly down on Vandam Street.
A shiny black Porsche with a vanity license plate that read EXCESS was parked just to the left of the building. As I opened the window, a young, blond, drop-dead-gorgeous woman unfolded her long legs and stepped out of the Porsche. I'd remembered reading in my National Enquirer that Jerry Seinfeld owned twelve Porsches. That was the definition of pathetic, I recalled thinking at the time. I didn't even like people who drove one Porsche. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and I was gawking at one of them now.
As the young woman disdainfully skirted a parked garbage truck, two small dogs on leashes became visible to the cat and myself. A brief moue of distaste crossed the countenance of the cat. I watched the dogs, the red high-heels, the expensive-looking leather briefcase she carried, and the cocksure, sensuous way she carried everything else about her. There was no mistaking it. She was very familiar-looking. Of course, you never completely forget someone who's broken your heart.
Now the dogs were yipping and yapping. Now the snowflakes were falling gently upon her red stilettoes. Now she was laughing carelessly and smiling a stunning snow-blind smile that sailed up four stories right into my unfurnished eyes. Now, like a man in a trance, I walked to the refrigerator, picked up the little Negro puppet head from its perch on top. It had a colorful parachute attached to it and the key to the building in its smiling, stoic mouth. I walked back to the window again and looked down at the beautiful woman below. A young girl, really. Almost kindred spirits we were. The only difference between us was that she loved a little black Porsche and I loved a little black puppet head.