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  The Kinkster finally answers the burning question, "Where the hell did those weird characters come from anyway?" Kinky has searched his failing memory and come up witha yarn about his early days in New York -- how Kinky Friedman, the down-and-out, sleazeball country music performer, became Kinky Friedman, the down-and-out, sleazeball ace detective. It explains where those Village Irregulars -- Ratso, Rambam, and McGovern -- came from, and why. And it asks the question, Was Stephanie Dupont ever really, a little girl, a five-year-old nymphet in patent leather spikes? Blast from the PastBy Kinky Friedman Ballantine BooksCopyright © 1999 Kinky FriedmanAll right reserved. ISBN: 0345416309
Chapter One
Call me Kinky. It's not my true Christian name, of course, but then, I'm not at 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 will 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 dictum, 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. "Come on, hummingbird dick!" she screamed. "Throw down that sick little puppet head." "Someday you'll eat those words," I shouted, continuing to hold the cheerful little puppet head in the palm of my hand. "And, by the way, it's Mister Hummingbird Dick to you." "Okay," she said, starting to shiver a bit, "Mister Hummingbird Dick." She'd gotten rid of the smile, I noticed, and the snowflakes were building little castles in her long blond hair. Later, I would remember her that way. Standing there like an angry statue waiting for me to throw her the key to my heart. I threw down the puppet head, she caught it in a rapacious grip, and soon the lady and the two little dogs had disappeared inside the building. I shut the window and puffed on the cigar thoughtfully. I watched a purple plume of cigar smoke traveling tentatively upward toward the lesbian dance class. I watched a careless canopy of snowflakes drifting downward onto the little black Porsche. The cat sat on the windowsill watching the snow. I stood a little behind her, watching the cat watching the snow. Without touching any pieces we both knew that another chess game had begun. "Actually," I said, "it's Lord Hummingbird Dick." The cat, of course, said nothing.
Chapter Two
The freight elevator in the lonely little lobby was slow, but after about an hour I was starting to get worried. For one thing, I didn't want her running off with the puppet head. Many a time it'd provided that special little smile that's sometimes just enough to keep you from hanging yourself from the shower rod. Quite often, when your spirits are low, a little head is all you really need. But there was nothing to worry about, I figured. More than likely she was just taking her time moving back into her old apartment upstairs. I didn't want to give her the satisfaction of calling her or knocking on her door just to find out that she was across the hall trading recipes with Winnie Katz and her lesbian dance class. She could write, she could call, she could just forget it all. I hadn't heard a word from her in many months, so an hour or two more wasn't going to take another little piece out of Janis Joplin's heart. "You remember Stephanie DuPont, of course," I said to the cat. "Of course, of course, my kingdom for a Porsche. About three or four lives ago she went down to Florida with me and a treasure map, searching for Al Capone's hidden fortune. She and the map decided to stay down there. I decided to come back." The cat made a little show of stretching and yawning but at least managed this time to stay awake. After all, it was an old story. Boy meets girl. Girl uses boy to help lead her to buried treasure. When treasure isn't found girl tells boy to bug out for the dugout. Happens every day in America and even some developing countries. "You may not remember Stephanie too well, but I know you remember her two adorable little dogs, Pyramus and Thisbe. Now let me see, Pyramus was the cuddly little Yorkshire terrier, I think. Or was Thisbe the Yorkie? No, Thisbe was the precious little Maltese. I'm pretty sure of that--" I'd been watching the cat's eyes, and something in there had definitely changed. They'd gone from wishing wells to fires of hell in less than the time it takes to catch a rat in New York. "I thought you'd remember the time those two little boogers visited us here at our humble loft. As I recall there was a bit of a tension convention between Pyramus and Thisbe and yourself. You were a little weak in the horsepitality department, I believe. But I can understand that. Sometimes I feel that way about Stephanie DuPont." I walked over to the counter and poured a strong bolt of Jameson Irish Whiskey into the old bull's horn. Time for brunch. I started to give a silent toast to the puppet head, but then I realized it wasn't there. The top of the refrigerator looked as empty as Wall Street on Yom Kippur. I offered a little salute to the puppet head anyway. "To fallen comrades," I said. Then I killed the shot. Drinking in the morning, according to the experts, is a sure sign of depression in a person. I understand their narrow logic, of course, but I see having a drink in the morning as a necessary medicinal bridge. In other words, before you can need something to help you make it through the night you've got to get there first. The psychological term we like to use for this type of depression is African-American Puppet Head Post-Partum. Well, I figured, I'd just have to deal with it. Without the puppet head, there just wouldn't be anyone ever coming into the loft again. That was fine with me and probably even finer with the cat. No more fair-weather friends vampirizing your spirits and your spirit. No more housepests hanging around through the eight nights of Chanukah, exchanging nothing but their unwanted presence. No more lovers breaking your heart, busting your balls, bitching about your belching, and letting down your toilet seats and your dreams. It'd be a lonely, monastic existence, of course, for the cat and myself. But somehow, I suspected, we'd manage. After all, it was hardly the functionality of the puppet head I would miss; it was its humanity. I only hoped that if I had to go puppet headless for a while it wouldn't threaten my growing success as a private investigator. The past few years particularly, while certainly not a major financial pleasure for the Kinkster, had at least established my reputation in the city as a canny, crepuscular, cat-loving crime-solver. I'd found a few cats and a few people and a few skeletons in the closet and now I was trying to find a way not to turn into a skeleton myself, because none of my last three cases had brought in any bucks. My erstwhile Dr. Watson, Larry "Ratso" Sloman, still waiting to inherit slightly under fifty-seven million dollars from his birth mother's estate, which I helped him locate, had steadfastly kept me still waiting to inherit his bill. Likewise, in a case my reporter friend Mike McGovern had dubbed "The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover," a chain of cowboy logic had led Stephanie DuPont and myself to Florida where we almost discovered Al Capone's long-lusted-after buried treasure. But the deeper we dug the shallower became our trust in each other, until at last we'd managed to bury what was left of our friendship in a similarly shallow grave. In the brokenhearted, dispirited down time that followed Florida, my PI pal Rambam and I rounded up the culprit in a fairly murderous little matter surrounding Americas last living folk hero, Willie Nelson. Subsequently, I was able to locate the reclusive redhead who himself had gone into hiding for reasons that I cannot divulge in this family newspaper. Nelson did not especially appreciate being found and, though he's back on the road again, the two of us, while remaining spiritually close, have maintained a somewhat lesser degree of social intercourse and certainly no sexual intercourse. Indeed, I haven't been involved in sexual intercourse with anyone for quite a while now and I hate to think of all that hummingbird semen going to waste. If the truth be told, because of a rather fortunate gene pool, I have a large penis like Ernest Hemingway, not a small penis like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now the only matter I still have to resolve is whether I want to blow my fucking brains out or merely drink myself to death. So, the net result of several years of difficult and daunting detective work has been that Ratso's hardly speaking to me, Willie's barely singing to me, and my rather rocky, acerbic relationship with Stephanie has gone from a romantic, quixotic dream to a tedious, ubiquitous nightmare. The field of amateur detective work, however, is often fallow, often fraught with frightfully forbidden fruit from which the detective himself often reaps a harvest of hatred. This is because everyone says they want the truth, but once the truth is known, few, if any, want to deal with it. Sometimes not even the investigator himself. A couple more successes like the ones I'd recently had, I figured, and the cat and I would be about ready for a time-share arrangement in Van Gogh's old padded cell. Such were my deep, metaphysical thoughts as Sunday morning scuttled along into Sunday afternoon much in the manner of a wayward, oblivious dung beetle. I was smoking another cigar, drinking another shot of Jameson's, and watching the black and white football players tump over on my old black and white television set when the lesbian dance class kicked into high gear overhead and the two red telephones on opposite sides of the desk sprang to life at the same time. This was not surprising, really, because they were both connected to the same line. It was also not surprising to see the cat do a double back flip because she was sleeping precisely midway between the two phones. "My, my," I said, "suddenly the loft has become an Africanized beehive of activity." The cat, of course, said nothing. She sat on the desk and licked lazily at her paw, pretending the embarrassing incident hadn't happened at all. The ability to laugh at one's self is noticeably absent in virtually all cats and also in the vast majority of adult human beings. In human beings, we call this condition by its clinical name: late-blooming serious. In cats, of course, it is not a condition at all; it is merely the way of their people. I took a few peaceful puffs on the cigar to settle my nerves and then picked up the blower on the left. "Start talkin'," I said. "Hummingbird dick." "Ah, my frail little five-foot-eleven Aryan flower. So nice of you to call now that you're back in the city." "I've lost my key to the building, Hebe. Otherwise, I would've--Pyramus! Thisbe! Stop chewing on that puppet head--" "What?" "Relax, nerd. I've taken it away from them." "Well, drop it off sometime on your way down. By the way, sorry things didn't work out for you in Florida." "What makes you think things didn't work out, fuckbrain?" "Well, I mean, you came back--" "So did John Travolta, but of course, he owes it all to Scientology. And I don't recall him bringing you any bucks." "Bucks?" "No, not the little deer with the little antlers that you big, brave Texans blow away every year--" "Not all Texans--" "I'm talkin' cash, dickhead. Your share of the cash. A deal's a deal. I'm a girl who keeps her word." "Well--" "What's the matter with you? Are you brain dead? This is the part where you're supposed to say `How much?'" "Okay. How much?" "Your take is seven." "Seven dollars doesn't go as far as it used to." "Try seven million dollars."
Chapter Three
It isn't every day you can leap sideways out of bed, play a little chess with the cat, then walk upstairs and come back down with seven million dollars. This is the kind of experience, in fact, that can ruin a man's life. I was very eager to give it a try. Of course, before you ruin your life it goes without saying that first you have to have one. And you don't want to waste your life, if, indeed, you think you may have one, by endlessly wondering whether or not you do. You can just let all the youthful moralistic nerds of the world figure it out for you, most of whom, no doubt, are too young and too chockfull of life to realize that Lenny Bruce died for their sins. They probably think Jesus played racquetball. They don't understand that while all of us wonderful Americans are entitled to the pursuit of happiness, none of us is ever going to catch up with it. We of Nike Village are destined to discover one day that the only shards of true happiness we are ever likely to find shall lie in the pursuit and not in the happiness. Knowing all this crap, why in the hell should I run up and down a flight of stairs just to collect seven million dollars from some youthful moralistic nerd who took three showers a day and thought I should get a life? Of course, if you stopped to think about it, you could live pretty good on seven million dollars. You could move to Beverly Hills, buy one of those big Hum-Vee Desert Storm vehicles, and drive to get cappuccino every morning. But that's been done. Any way you looked at it, walking up the stairs would certainly be an expensive proposition. You also just might find yourself belly-up in the coin of the spirit department. "Money may buy you a fine dog," I said to the cat, "but only love can make it wag its tail." For a myriad of reasons, the cat did not appear to appreciate this bit of folksy sentiment. For one thing, she'd heard it many times. For another, she didn't want anyone buying any kind of dog, whether it wagged its tail or bit John Steinbeck in the ass. Probably more important, the cat somehow cosmically knew that biting the bullet now wasn't going to keep you from putting it in your head later, like Richard Cory, and she managed to convey this abstract, existential notion cats have done throughout history by merely looking at the human being with pity in her eyes. There are a myriad of reasons, of course, for any cat to look at any human being with pity in its eyes, but first and foremost amongst these would be if the person is a posturing, pontificating, middle-aged, amateur private investigator who's known from the very beginning that nothing's going to stop him from passing GO and collecting seven million dollars. Thus it was, that fateful Sunday afternoon in the year of our Lord 1997, that I closed the door of the loft, leaving the cat in charge, and with mildly metaphysical tread began the step-by-step odyssey, quite simultaneously, both into the future and into the past. My interest was to come back down the stairs with seven million dollars and a little Negro puppet head, but unfortunately, as I was rounding the turn heading for the Valhalla that was Stephanie DuPont's upstairs apartment, something unpleasant happened to my own head. It felt like someone had stepped out of an old grainy black and white movie and sapped me. Then Ted Turner had colorized the movie and a rainbow coalition of pain went reeling out of control across the landscape of my gray matter department. Then, as they say in Hollywood, everything happened at once. Suddenly, I was Alice falling through the looking glass. Suddenly, I was Dorothy falling through the Oz-hole of Kansas. Suddenly, I was everyone who'd ever been mugged in New York. I had the strange sensation of traveling through space and time, falling backward, backward, through O-rings and hula hoops and Richard Nixon's eyes. How far backward I could not say. All I knew was that somebody'd done a pretty damn thorough job of punching my ticket. Just before I closed my eyes a door opened. In the doorway, dressed in radiant white, stood Stephanie DuPont. Next to her was the little black puppet head, but this time an entire human body seemed attached. And the last thing I remember was the very strangest thing of all.
The puppet head was not smiling.
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