The connoisseur of pain: a novel; and, A new and sharper vision: sensuous aesthetics as theological immersion in Terrence Malick's The tree of life, Thomas Kinkade's landscapes, and Ron Hansen's ...

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Content The Connoisseur of Pain: A Novel
AND
“A New and Sharper Vision”:
Sensuous Aesthetics as Theological Immersion in
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,
Thomas Kinkade’s Landscapes, and Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy

A Dissertation in English Literature
Submitted by Michael Reid Busk
Presented to the Faculty of the University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
December 2013

Dissertation Committee:
Aimee Bender
William Handley
Percival Everett
David Treuer
Ellis Page

2

Table of Contents
The Connoisseur of Pain: A Novel………………………………………………………..……3

“A New and Sharper Vision”: Sensuous Aesthetics as Theological Immersion in Terrence
Malick’s The Tree of Life, Thomas Kinkade’s Landscapes, and Ron Hansen’s Mariette in
Ecstasy………………………………………………………………………………..…. 562
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………...….562
Chapter One: The Immanent Transcendence of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life …..577
Chapter Two: Ecstasy Every Day: Monastic and Jesuit Devotion in Ron Hansen’s Mariette
in Ecstasy……………………………………………………………….605

Chapter Three: In Defense of Thomas Kinkade……………………………………...630
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...658
Notes………………………………………………………………………………...662
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………664

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The Connoisseur of Pain
Michael Reid Busk

if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

~ Nick Flynn, “Cartoon Physics, part 1”

4

1.

It was me alone at Cuffy's, swilling corn beer and waiting for the mouse. I was
underwhelmed and oversexed, woeful and old, and not half as drunk as I wanted to be.
Football was over, Castro had shut down the Tropicana, and cops and hobos were finding
friends of mine crushed and shredded and burned in places never mentioned in Variety: the
bilgy beaches of South Bay, Rancho Cucamonga, the El Segundo onramp to the 405. The
TV above the bar was as dead as the moon, and in the corner lounged the Looney Tunes
crew, tittering like hussies and sipping their bitty cones of gimlet and sloe gin fizz. It was
just the rabbit sitting, two-legging a stool against the wall, his big rabbit feet propped up on
the rim of the pool table, the pig and the duck and the bald hunter laughing at everything
that came out his mouth. About my head a zeppelin of a fly was circuiting lackadaisically,
and I swatted at it with my splinted paw, which had swelled up big into a soft club.
“Thomas,” the rabbit called to me. “Thomas, come nostaligize with an old man.” The
others goggled my way, and the pig gave me a white-gloved thumbs-up. I scanned the bar
for an excuse, found the morning edition already opened to the crossword, and waved it
towards them: “Scopes Attn. Driving me crazy.”
“Darrow,” said Cuffy, who’d been talking Koufax vs. Drysdale with a twitchy Korea vet
regular at the other end of the bar. “Clarence Darrow. You of all people should know
that.”
Thanks I mouthed as the rabbit said, “But Thomas, it’s my birthday.” I glanced up at the
nudie calendar tacked above the bourbon shelf, where about half the days were X’d off.
“The eyes,” he continued. “The eyes of March.”

5

I shuffled across the clapboard’s peanut shells in the dishwater blonde light, setting
myself down on the edge of the pool table by the rabbit’s feet. He didn’t take them down.
The pig blew a kazoo and offered me a party hat. He was the only one wearing one. I told
him thanks but no thanks.
“You were der my first Hollywood birthday,” Bugs said, jiggling his wrist and its Mickey
Mouse watch at me. “Remember this? Mick’s still ticking. You were d best roomie ever.”
At the name of the Disney poster child, Daff heaved an empty Tom Collins glass at the
wall opposite, almost braining a raccoon playing darts, Pork took the kazoo out of his mouth
to cup his hand around his snout and boo, and Elmer muttered, in the King’s own English,
“I loathe that man.” Obliged, I slammed my bandaged paw on the table, and through the
pain grunted, “May his mother rot in hell.”
“Hey T-t-t-t-tom,” said Pork, “Is it true you were the one who p-p-p-p-p-painted the
devil horns on, on, on …” He was treading water, not wanting to say the name. “On that
jerk?” he said, raising a stubby white-gloved finger at Bugs’s watch and the faint red
crescents behind Mickey’s ears.
“Just trying to be accurate,” I said.
“Hey Tom,” said Daffy, eying me but raising his hands toward the hissing raccoon by
way of apology, “What he get you for your first LA birthday?”
“Arrested.” All I remembered of that night, the summer of ’37, was a motorcycle with a
sidecar, a gun-toting priest, a truckload of rotting bananas, and four very angry Chinamen
throwing me off Santa Monica pier. But the Looney Tunes crew tossed their heads back and
cackled like hatchlings waiting for the worm.
“Bugs Bunny,” said Elmer in his tea-and-crumpets accent, “a man with a criminal past,
but not a criminal future.”

6

Bugs shook his fist. “To the moon, Elmeh,” he said. I wasn’t sure if it was an
impression or not: if you closed your eyes, Bugs Bunny sounded just like Ralph Kramden.
When I asked if he’d gotten any presents, he said, “Jack Warner sent roses and carrots this
morning. And Daff here got me a tie bar, which I'll be wearing on the red carpet after those
Oscar nomerations come out. And I bought myself a Studebaker.”
“Don't you already own a Studebaker?”
“That one's green. This one's blue. Besides, it’s a new kind. Avanti.”
“Hey, T-t-t-t-t-t-tom,” jackhammered Porky, that sweet sausage of a lackey, “what
happened to the p-p-p-p-p-p-p … what happened to the slapper?”
“Grand piano. Three stories up.” The paw felt like cheap meat, pummeled to hell then
set to simmer in a Crockpot.
They all puckered at me like my words were made of lemon juice – the Looney Tunes
bunch risked life and limb on set less than Lucille Ball, and the worst thing probably ever
happened to any of them was a fleck of carrot in the eye from all Bugs’s munching.
“We were in Barbados on a shoot,” said Daff. “Two weeks. Just got back last night.”
“Don't talk to me of Barbados,” said Elmer, who took off his flap-eared hunter's hat to
show a cap of skin so red he looked like a Roman cardinal. “The place was nothing but
mosquitoes, heat stroke, and the clap.”
“You were just palling with the wrong crowd,” Daff said to Elmer as he rolled a cigarette.
“I had a great time.”
“You were the crowd,” said Elmer, throwing his hat at Daff.
“I bought a shrunken head from a medicine man,” said Bugs. “I hung it from de
rearview udda new Studebaker.”
“You heard about Igby,” I said.

7

“What about Igby?” Bugs asked.
“Found him legless in a storm drain in Hawthorne.”
“D-d-d-dead?” asked Porky.
“No, just peachy.” I should’ve taken it as a omen not to come to the set that morning
when instead of Gracie next to me there was the early edition of the Hollywood Reporter, with a
front page headline IGBY BERT BINDLE MURDERED, and an accompanying photo of
Igby, who looked less like a frog and more like hash. Gracie’d underlined the grisliest parts
with an eyebrow pencil.
“I blame de French,” said Bugs.
“Don’t joke,” I said, grabbing one of the pool cues and poking Bugs in the neck. “He
was one of us.” The cue chalk left a blue polka dot in Bugs’s white fur.
“Guess I’ll have to get it dry-cleaned,” he said, trying to brush the powder off his fur.
Bugs always had trouble feeling bad for pain that wasn’t his own.
“What did Igby ever d-d-d-d-d-d-do to anybody?” asked Pork, his egg-shaped eyes
gleaming in the dimness.
“What did any of them ever do to anybody?” I said.
Daff stuck his sloppily rolled cigarette into Elmer’s mouth, set his flap-eared hat on his
head, and started high-kicking back toward the bar, opening his bill wide to belt: “Hello, my
baby! Hello my honey! Hello my ragtime gal! Send me a kiss by wire. Honey, my heart’s
on fire.”
“They set Igby on fire,” I said, “whoever ‘they’ is.”
“His p-p-p-poor mother,” said Pork. “Agnes.”
Bugs pointed at Daff, still playing vaudeville for the drunken squad of the bar’s patrons.
“See, what Igby had was he had a shtick. When all the young actors come to me and say,

8

‘Bugs, Bugs, what do I got to do to make it?’ I always tells him they need to find a shtick.”
He returned to crunching his carrot. “Miracle I made it this far in my career without one.”
“One murder is a tragedy, but two is a spree,” said Elmer, absent-mindedly removing his
hat and scratching his head. “Christ,” he shouted, jerking his hand up from the burn.
“Three,” I said. “Beaks. No one’s seen him in two weeks.”
For the first time since I’d seen him that day, Bugs’s feet touched the floor. “Beaks?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Thought you heard.” Pork’s face was plastered over with his white
gloves. Daffy stopped his chorus girl kicks. Beaks used to have a regular poker game at his
place, a shoebox in a pagoda in Chinatown; he said he lived there because the Chinese made
the best jerky, and since Beaks was a vulture, I guess that made sense, but we always
suspected it was more Oriental powders and not Oriental meats that kept him there. He
spoke slowly, perfectly, and his sense of humor was a meat cleaver – unserrated, sharp,
heavy. He was the best poker player I’d ever met.
Bugs’s egg-shaped eyes were pooling with tears. “What did Beaks ever do to anybody?”
“What did any of them ever do to anybody?” I said.
“What about Jericho?” asked Bugs, gripping the edge of the pool table, eyes bouncing
around the room in search of further signs of the End Times.
“Jerry's fine,” I said. “Jerry's always fine.”
One hour, two beers, and no painkillers later, the bar was picking up and me and Cuffy
were deep into a game of German whist, talking wounds. He pointed to his left pinkie,
forever button-hooked and the color of a screaming baby. “Stalag-17. Tire iron.”
I lifted my tail, thrice-kinked near the tip. “Two mouse traps, one three-wood. Cameras
weren’t even rolling for that last one. Jerry just thought it’d be fun.”
Cuffy pulled down the neck of his A-shirt. Below his collarbone was a patch of raised

9

pink skin that looked like Jersey. “Twelve O’clock High. Steam burn from an engine on the
fuselage.”
I nodded. Steam burns were the worst.
Bad luck good luck bad luck man, Cuffy, kraut-type bruiser, like me born orphan in
Baltimore, went west, ate eggs, bench-pressed on Muscle Beach, gained some small fame on
the silver screen in the rah-jingo flicks of the late Forties and Fifties, a natural Nazi thug with
his chrome dome and blonde handlebar, but shit out of luck when World War II epics gave
way to teenie bopper dreck and faggy beatnik mopers. His was the usual decline: littler and
littler dirt bag Venice bungalows, rotgut rye, diner waitress whore wife, Mexican tar, the
orchard wars, porn acting, bear-baiting, arson, until one night when he blacked out, woke up
in a schoolyard in Watts, quit the bottle, found Jesus, sweated and shook himself cold turkey
off the smack, cut ties with his own personal Jezebel, begged up the money to buy a bar and
started turning a decent profit with the Tinseltown crowd. Judging from the stock floor
chatter, the big burger of smoke clinging to the ceiling, the menagerie of boys and badgers
and ladies and lemurs all tossing back whiskey like water, I’d say he was doing all right.
I played a spade, removed my wingtip and flexed my wonky back left foot at him.
“Steamroller.”
He lifted his head to reveal a collar of rope burn around his coffee can neck. “Rough
love.”
“Speaking of,” I said, “any news about the ex?”
He jerked his noggin at the nudie calendar and grunted.
“Ah,” I said. I took my foot off the bar. “Miss March. I see.”
The first sign of Jerry was a thonking at the base of the front door, and when it finally
opened a crack, my partner squeezed in with an industrial bolt slung under his arm.

10

“The bolt is mightier than the door!” I roared, and the crowd of bigger beings parted.
After swinging the thing above his head like some mad Viking, Jerry charged through the
gauntlet of wingtips and pumps, then into the clapboard floor he braced pole-vaulter-like the
end of the bolt, which bent a hair then flung him barward. I stuck up my tail and he
springboarded off of it, somersaulting toward Miss March, who he kissed on the tit before
kicking off and backflipping down onto the bar. He bellowed, a burning trail of vowels that
lit into the air and singed the frivolity of the bigger creatures, except for Cuffy, who beamed
with his hockey player's mouth, gave Jerry a splay-fingered clap, and in a silver jigger glass
poured him a rum-and-grenadine. Jerry always liked it sweet. He had a name for the drink,
but it couldn’t be repeated in polite company. I reached over the bar, yanked out the LA
phone book, and told the windburnt surfer on the next stool to scram.
“Walls,” I said, sliding the phone book onto the stool as Jerry stepped off the bar, just as
smooth as Aladdin onto his magic carpet. He started slurping the jigger through a coffee
straw.
“Hoss,” he said, tipping an imaginary cap at me.
“Half past five beers, Walls.”
“Don't scold. You sound like a schoolmarm. I was out.” “Out” meant whores. “How's
the peacemaker?” he asked, poking the coffee straw at my paw.
“About how you’d think after a one-ton thing fell forty feet on it. But you should see the
other guy.”
“That’s right,” he said, miming a piano scale. “Other guy’s firewood.”
“Doc got me morphine. Gracie picked it up this afternoon.”
“Pills or drops?” he coughed, finishing up his rum-and-grenadine.
“Drops.”

11

“Good,” he said, waving Cuffy away for another drink. “Drops hits you faster.”
“What's that on your ear?” I said to him, licking my good paw then wiping at a patch of
dark crusted hair.
“Smidge of this, maybes,” he said, jiggling the jigger glass, his whiskers bristling at my
touch.
“Can’t be. It’s already dried.”
“If I’d wanted a bath, I’d a asked for one.” He squinted over at the corner of the room.
“Why's Pork wearing a hat?”
“Forty-four years ago today, Mama brought a buck-toothed bundle of joy into the
world.”
“First time I met Bugs, I said to myself: there is somebody would lick glass off the pavement if he
thought it would make people like him.”
“I have met people with a steadier hand at the emotional tiller.”
“You know he can’t read?” asked Jerry.
“What? Bugs?”
“Couldn't make out the directions on a box of shampoo.”
“Who said that? I lived with him nigh on two years.”
“Grip buddy of mine at Warner. Anyway, think about it. He never looks at menus – it’s
always either the spaghetti-and-meatball, or he just asks the waiter what his favorite is.”
“What about his lines?”
He grabbed the coffee straw, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and pretended to chew.
“What’s up, doc?” he asked in a good impression of Bugs’s yiddy Flatbush drone. He threw
the straw back into the jigger glass. “The rest is off the cuff. I’m not saying he’s stupid. I’m
saying he’s illiterate.”

12

It had been a puzzler why Bugs always used to wave the Times away and say newspaper
people were all Commies. Or why he hated maps. Or why every book in his Malibu
mansion was one of those hollow ones with a gun or a sex toy inside.
“How’s the ball and chain?” Jerry said, still looking over my shoulder at the Looney
Tunes crew.
“Get this: I come home early couple days ago and she’s in the shower, but there’s all this
tracing paper and charcoal on the dining table, from Hollywood Forever.”
“I think that’s kind of foxy.”
“That’s because you’re a creep. Plus yesterday I was trying to find some scissors and in
one of the drawers were all these clippings about the murders. She even drew little stick
figures of the victims.’”
“Like Igby? What’s a stick-figure frog look like?”
“Think you’re missing my overall sort of point here.”
“You should be grateful she’s not like most wives with the shopping and the what have
you.”
Cuffy parked me another corn beer, and an r-and-g for Jerry. I trailed my good paw over
the bar, which now over the burls of the original walnut had an artificial grain cut by knives,
glass, fake nails, battery acid, the diamond of Errol Flynn’s wife’s engagement ring, the Host-
like watermarks of a million men. My good paw felt it all.
Monty Clift wandered over with Jerry’s bolt-vault and set it next to Jerry's jigger glass.
He’d been standing alone for half an hour. “For you,” he said.
“Rusty screw,” Jerry said, fingering its groove.
Monty smiled the way you smile when you don't want someone to pistol-whip you. He
smelled like apricot brandy and frou-frou cologne. “So, Monty,” I said, “saw that Misfits

13

flick. Sure as hell make a whamdinger of a bronco buster.”
“Thanks,” he said, rimming the lip of the brandy glass with his finger. He coughed and
backed away. “I need to use the men’s.” His fingers made a slow cat’s cradle in front of his
chest. “Thanks for the … thanks.”
“He looks so old now,” said Jerry, who was doing a first-rate job catching up with me in
the drink tally.
“We all look old now.” But it was a lie: Jerry’s coat was still an ungrayed sable, his eyes
like two-tone bucks. They were right to call him the Mickey Rooney of the animal kingdom.
“Marilyn once told me Monty was the only person she knew in worse shape than she
was.”
“When was that?”
“One time, she, uh, let me hide in her cleavage when some pimp was chasing me.”
“I call bullshit.”
“Well, okay,” he said. He shrugged, and his whiskers followed suit, rising then falling.
“But I did dream it once.”

On the doorstep of midnight, I was on the doorstep of Cuffy’s, Jerry swung baby-like over
my shoulder and the winds whooping down from the hills. When I’d told him to slow it
down on the rum, Jerry’d said me he’d wrap me in barbwire and throw me in a trash
compactor. Then he blacked out and fell off the bar onto his face.
The day had been warm for March, and now, parched under drafts as hot as exhaust,
with my paw boiling inside its wrappings, the prospect of hauling my best friend best man
best mouse a drunk mile up La Brea was enough to make me cry. By my lonesome I’d have
called a cab, but cabbies blab, and the suits at MGM had warned Jerry to keep his hijinks out

14

of the Hollywood Reporter. So I stepped off the curb, my paw over my head like an overeager
school brat, Jerry muttering foul, foul words to the imaginary whores of his head.
Gracie and me lived in the little eyelet of Hollywood that stuck up into Runyon Canyon,
and by the time I was crossing Sunset uphill half a mile from home, I hurt so much I
thought I might have to bang a stranger's door till I found someone who’d call me an
ambulance. Instead I pressed on, cursing Leo Shampoo, the doctor MGM kept on call at
the studio – him, his mother and father, siblings, bridge partners, lodge brothers, his present
and future psychics. Rumor was he lost his license after a back alley abortion went south
and now he worked off the books for MGM. I’ll say this much: he got there fast after that
baby grand pancaked my paw, but all the half-sized nitwit did was check my pulse, shove a
thermometer in my mouth, and ask me what my sign was. I told him I was on the cusp of
Gemini and fuck you, then yanked him down to me by his tie and told him to drive me to
Cedars, but he chuffed, telling me the angry pain in my paw was nothing morphine and
ylang-ylang tea couldn’t cure. As I staggered to my front door, I distracted myself imagining
all manner of heavy things falling from great heights onto that goddamned hack.
The darkness of the living room was the blue-black of Superman's hair, and I only saved
myself from falling over a stack of Gracie's magazines by hooking a leg of the coffee table
with my tail. Before picking my way to the bedroom, I did my best to swaddle Jerry in an
armrest cover, then laid him as gently as a Magi onto the ottoman while he mumbled to no
one that if she didn’t take off her stockings, he’d do it for her.
The bedroom door was open. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard Gracie was the
inspiration for the phrase “sex kitten,” and there she was, in my bed, white queen tangled in
lavender sheets, thrashing through the heat lightning of her dreamlife, through the scorched
plains and shimmering salt flats of the wordless night. My wife. My nightstand was bare but

15

for the phone and the alarm clock and, thank God, a dark little vial with MORFEEN
scrawled on the white label. That homunculus of a doctor told me to take two drops when I
got home, so I dropped six, wishing him deep pain as each one splashed on my tongue,
tasting of maraschino juice left months too long outside the icebox. Easing myself
horizontal, I rested my paw on the nightstand, and after a minute, I didn't think I was going
to die, and after three, I felt like a soap bubble floating atop another soap bubble, and after
ten, I thought I might name my first child after that dapper little physician.
But before I could board the train of sweet drugged sleep, the phone rang, and I almost
knocked it off the nightstand. From the living room Jerry yelled, “Balls!” and Gracie
moaned and rolled over, the heat pouring off her like musk. I picked it off the cradle before
it could ring again.
“Yallo.”
“Where’s Thomas? Dear holy mudder a God, I need to speak to Thomas.”
“Bugs, it’s me. You’d think after twenty odd years you’d recognize my voice.”
“I can’t take it any more, Thomas. This world is too much for me. I’m going to end it.
This time, I’m really going to end it. I’m standing beyond the pool looking out over the
goige, and I must say, it’s a pretty nice night to die.”
“Two things, Bugs. First, you don’t have a phone out by the deck, so you can’t be
looking out –”
“I could be there in five seconds, ten seconds tops.”
“And second, it’s a slope, not a gorge, so if you threw yourself off, the worst you could
do is break a leg.”
“Harsh, Thomas. Harsh. You might just have blood on your hands tonight.”
In the years since I'd first met him, Bugs had built around himself a carnival of a life, big

16

and bright and boisterous, but being a Coney Island boy, he'd started with the Cyclone, right
smack dab in the middle, and instead of wandering around enjoying what he’d made, I don’t
think he’d ever got down from that rickety old roller coaster. Someday a bolt would come
loose and he’d go flying right off. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t tonight: normal friends
would sometimes send singing telegrams, drop off trinkets and oddities for me at the studio,
but Bugs’s way of saying he was thinking of me was to call me at 4 a.m. with a gun pointed
at his head.
For Edison, genius was one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration; for
Bugs Bunny it was one per cent desperation and ninety-nine per cent affectation.
“What’s yanking you around, Bugs?” As I adjusted to the darkness, the mirror Gracie
had screwed to the ceiling some months back had been uncloudying itself from a dark pool
into the two of us sprawled limbs akimbo like some Japanese word, and damned if she
wasn't slinkier than when I'd married her, while my fur was stiff with dirt and sweat and rum
and beer, my eyes an impasto of blood vessel and phlegm.
“The suits at Warner are talking retirement, Thomas.”
I inch-wormed myself up until I was shoved back against the headboard. “Balderdash.
You’re Bugs Bunny. You’re like our George Washington.” Then I heard a bunch of weepy
hiccupy nose and mouth sounds on the other end.
“Thomas, dat might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Why’re they doing it?”
“Money’s tight. And the kids don't like the newer ones as much. Figure they'll make
more re-running the old ones on TV. Syndimication.”
“How’s the money work?”
“Warner gets eighty, the writers and directors get ten, I get four.”

17

“How big’s the pie you’re cutting from?” Gracie’s dream whimpers were starting to
make me grind my teeth in lust, and her tail, a charmed snake, began dancing up and down
my leg.
“Big as a manhole cover.”
“So you’re telling me you’re getting big money to sit on your ass?”
“I liked seeing myself at the movies.”
“No more jumping out of a hole for fifty takes? No more shit-for-brains director? It’s a
dream is what it is, Bugs. A dream.” My tongue felt unruly and fat and lost, like the
retarded kid in class you throw trash at.
“I have a nightmare, Thomas: me sitting at Trader Vic’s on a Tuesday afternoon, already
drunk, watching the shadows get longer and praying Daff calls up with something to do.
That’s not just boring, Thomas. That’s apopoclipse.”
“Bugs, I’m too doped up to be subtle: can you read?”
There was a pause. “Thomas, I like to think of myself as a man who can come to his
own opinions.”
“Bugs, once in a while I miss having you around, and I’ll lay this one-time offer out there:
what’s say I come to your place sometime, and if you like, I teach you how to read.”
More of the hiccupy, mouthy noises, and then Bugs snuffling, “Dat’d be just aces,
Thomas.”
“All right, Bugs. Call you tomorrow. My good paw settled the phone back in the cradle
and my bad paw I stuck behind the wood pineapple that screwed into each end of the
headboard. Even though my eyes were gritty with tired, the brain behind it was idling like
the keys had got stuck in the ignition. So I used the trick I always did to help me go to sleep:
imagining myself beating the shit out of Mickey Mouse with a Louisville Slugger.

18

Next morning, the sun through the undrawn Venetians woke me to a landmine of a
hangover. Gracie was gone, but so was the pain in my paw, which made me so happy I
almost didn’t mind retching as I three-legged it out into the living room, past Gracie's
spaceman chairs and the graham-cracker-on-toothpicks coffee table, which I’d told Gracie
was too plain to be expensive until she told me it was made in Denmark, by Denmark people.
All that was left of Jerry was a mouse-shaped dent on the ottoman.
In the kitchen I mixed a Bloody Mary, equal parts vodka, tomato juice, and Tabasco: after
years of Jerry pranking me, spiking my drinks with everything from pickle juice to iodine to
radiator fluid, I mixed my Marys strong and I mixed my Marys hot, strong and hot enough
to kill the flavor of the morphine I squirted in to top it off. I tossed in a pawful of salt,
stirred it with a steak knife, and downed it like I was being timed.
In the bathroom I faced the john, set the hurt paw on the sink, which was as clean and
green as an after-dinner mint, and fished myself out of my drawers. Gracie had taped the
articles about Beaks and Igby and Screwy to the mirror, and I almost tore them down. I
didn’t want to start my day with that. Six weeks, three cartoon stars, zero leads.
I finished, shook off the last drips, flushed, slid into a sweat suit, and when I saw the
Caddy was gone, I shrugged and sighed, jogged the downhill half mile to Hollywood
Boulevard and caught the 109 to Pasadena.
The bus was lousy with gentle, cautious creatures – mothers out for Saturday morning
specials, a family of gray squirrels, a couple sleepy hounds probably just off the night shift,
children who sat facing forward with their knees together, a glum frog reading his
horoscope. A few seemed to recognize me as I shuffled back until I found enough real
estate on the overhead bar, gawking because I was like the painting that Brit dandy kept up

19

in the attic so he could look young forever, except in reverse: it was the me on the bus that
looked like something we’d drag in, and the 2D version that was all everlastingly bright and
perky.
That eternal life we called cartooning and the way it worked was this: they’d shoot our
episodes on 16mm, then a stable of artists and illustrators would blow up each frame and
recreate it with pencils and watercolors, simplifying the lines, flattening the surfaces, mixing
variegations of hue into one consistent color, and just generally making it more visually
digestible to the average ten-year-old in Kenosha, and more importantly, his parents, who
were more likely to let Junior watch a cat and mouse beat the shit out of each other if they
could tell him it wasn’t real. Then the illustrators and artists would arrange the stills like a
giant flip book and run them in every theater across the country. Then they give us sacks of
money.
I stepped off a few blocks from the set into the bobby-pinned world of Pasadena, a
suburban hell of trikes and elms and fathers pushing mowers and waving to each other as
they slipped mindlessly into middle age. It was the sort of place freedom went to die.
Outside the Cape Cod MGM used for many of its domestic sets, the grips and gaffers and
best boys and cameramen were sorting their gear, and from their crazy-legged walks and
faces more slack than pained, I could tell they were drunk, not hung over, which was
troublesome for both their future marital prospects and for me: their sloppiness meant
forgetting to cushion walls and dull fork tines, meant retakes of me falling down stairs and
sitting on pins. Because even though they fudged things here and there, what the cartooners
didn’t do was make up something that hadn’t happened. The lump sprouting from my
noggin was always real.
Spike was out back by the pool, his white coat gleaming, shadowboxing as he mumbled,

20

“Take that ... and that ... and that ...” until he spotted me and hustled over. Jogging in place,
he beamed and smacked me on the shoulder and asked how Death was doing. I narrowed
my eyes, then remembered joking with him the week before that my fists were named Death
and Pestilence.
“I named mine, too,” he said, putting up his dukes. “St. Michael,” he said, shaking the
right, “And St. Patrick,” squeezing the left into a coconut-sized ball.
“That's good,” I said. “That's good.”
“Hey, you going to Igby’s funeral?” he asked, uppercutting, dancing around me in a way
that was not helping my headache one bit.
“Didn’t know about it.”
“It’s in Sherman Oaks. Our Lady of Perpetual Help.”
“Didn’t know Igby was Catholic.”
“Lot of frogs are,” he said, ducking under an invisible punch. His breath smelled of
mint-flavored bone – even though they would get bleached in cartooning, Spike liked to
make sure his teeth looked clean on camera. “I think I’m going to take the kids,” he added.
“It’s important for them to understand that life is short, and precious.”
“Right,” I said, wandering toward a starburst of palm-shade near the pool, feeling like I
was wading through thickening aspic.
We were finishing up an episode in which I auditioned to be an ivories man at a swanky
club, hence the falling baby grand, but in order to pay for the tux I needed to perform, I had
to steal the birthday money Jerry had given Spike. With most of the scene done, the only big
sequence left was a long chase ending at the pool, which they’d just drained. Blotches of
water at the bottom were shrinking down to nothing, and the air above was sashaying,
stinging my nose with its heat and chlorine. While I was eying possible maneuvers, angles,

21

and exit strategies, our director Headley St. John came striding around the corner in his tight
black suit and Barry Goldwater glasses, clasping his hands together and calling me by my
Christian name. Because our episodes were seven-minute shorts that had almost no
dialogue, little need for direction, starred a hardscrabble tomcat and psychotic mouse, and
eventually got cartooned over anyway, the show over the years had had a carousel of sparkly-
eyed expat directors wanting a starter job with an established brand. Headley, who’d
directed the last four, was the latest. But at least he was British, not French or South
American, which meant I could understand him, and he didn't try to kiss me on the cheek
every time he saw me. Plus he didn’t pushing boring novels on me or try to convince me to
see a shrink about what the last director called my “abandonment issues.”
“Thomas!” Headley called out, even though I was about five feet away. “Thomas! How
is your paw?”
“Better,” I said, waving it around like a tennis racket. “Morphine. Hell of a drug.”
“Oh, Thomas,” he chuckled.
“Any word from Jerry?” I asked, checking the watch I wasn't wearing.
“I was just about to ask you that.”
Just then Spike jogged over, still shadowboxing.
“Saint John,” he said, letting loose a little jab that landed inches short of Headley's long
nose.
“Oh, my,” Headley said, stepping back.
“Ooh, sorry,” said Spike, grimacing. Besides never remembering that Headley”s last
name rhymed with Rin-Tin, Spike thought that the St. meant Headley was a clergyman of
some type, and that he was a direct descendant of author of the fourth Gospel; being a daily
mass Catholic, that was big rocks for Spike, and he treated the director like a walking saint.

22

“Spike, you seen Jerry?”
“Nope.”
I peered into the pool, where one of the grunts was flopping down a pale blue pad,
smaller than a beach blanket, thinner than a trashy novel.
“You still planning to jump?” Spike asked. “What with the paw and all?”
“Thomas, do you think we ought to have looksee?”
I motor-boated the air and unwrapped the gauze from about the splint. The plywood
boards fell out, and there was my paw, twice as big as usual. The skin showing through the
fur looked like undercooked hash.
“Smeg,” said Headley, rippling his upper lip.
“My sentiments exactly,” I sighed as a limo idled up to the curb outside the house.
“Somebody die?” asked Spike.
“Just my dreams,” I said, as we all three shuffled toward it like zombies in the heat. The
chauffeur opened the door, and out stepped Mr. Noggles Schmear, the MGM VP for
cartoons, a man we all joked was half Jew, half lobster. Behind him was a lackey humping a
case of what looked like genuwine French champagne. His face red as a hothouse tomato,
beaming like we were his sons returned from the war, Mr. Schmear grabbed a bottle from
the case and from behind his back pulled a saber. I was about to turn tail and shove Spike
out at him when in his Delancey accent Mr. Schmear yelled, “Boys! The Academy just
announced its nominees, and guess what cat-and-mouse combo are up for one?” He tossed
me the chilled bottle, which my rubbery morphined fingers almost dropped, and although
I’m sure he wanted the bared teeth in his head to look more exhilarated than raging, I was
not too keen when he swung the saber toward me and hewed half the bottle's neck right off,
missing my finger by a dime’s width. Then he squeezed my bad paw, and I could have

23

clocked him with the jizzing bottle right then.
“I know, Tom,” he said, mistaking my tears of pain for joy, “it's been too long. But we
are back now. Goddamn it but we are back.”
“Huzzah!” said Headley Spike’s headlock.
Mr. Schmear wrapped on the bottle with his fat pink knuckles. “Veuve Clicquot. Only
the best for – hey, where's my favorite rodent?” he said, just as Jerry out from nowhere
popped over the lackey's back, stuck a landing on the case of champagne, and threw his arms
into the air like Mae West.
“Har!” shouted Mr. Schmear, doing a weird high-kneed hillbilly dance over to Jerry and
the struggling minion as I glugged down the bubbly, which stung my throat with its cold and
its fizz. The humans did love Jerry. Mr. Schmear rubbed my partner’s ear like he was testing
a bolt of cloth at the tailor's and took the bottle from me and tilted the sundered neck
toward Jerry, who although he wasn’t much taller than the Veuve, drank most of it in one
long draught. I was beginning to regret the full squirt of morphine: my body felt like an
unruly puppet that my mind was failing to marionette properly, and everything was so bright
and smooth it was like a cartoon come to life.
"Hope you've all left April ninth open on your social calendars," said Mr. Schmear as the
crew gathered about, cursing happily and clamoring at the lackey for the dewy bottles. The
cork explosions were bringing back a bad childhood memory of being chased by a gang of
kids with popguns.
We’d had a streak of Oscars in the Fifties, a decade as sweet as Coca-Cola, but for years,
not even a nomination, and the voice in the back of my head whispered we’d lost the magic.
I hoped the news would make Gracie proud. Certainly the crew seemed pleased as punch to
know me and Jerry, sidling over, giving their pointer fingers for Jerry to shake and telling me

24

they were real sorry about the baby grand.
“Dust off your tuxedoes, boys, and shine your spats - they best be gleaming on the red
carpet,” cackled Mr. Schmear, showing off his molars, which were flashing with the faces of
all the people I’d ever betrayed. I closed my eyes and breathed deep, trying to stand in the
way of morphine fantasia rolling downhill, concentrating on the smell of fresh-cut grass.
My eyelids retracted to the sight of Schmear shoving his chin – which really was just the
bottommost part of his flaming face – toward the backyard, and asked no one in particular if
he could kick the tires a little. Even though Headley was a newbie who’d spent most of his
life in schools that made you wear ties with shields on them, he was still the director, but
before he could stammer anything out, Jerry said that his casa was Mr. Schmear’s anytime he
liked. I rubbed my eyebrows and locked my jaw: I’d been planning on telling Headley how
about we save the end of the chase for another day or two, for the paw’s sake. Since
Headley was terrified of Jerry – with every day on set like Yalta, with me playing Roosevelt
to Headley’s Churchill and Jerry’s Stalin – Headley’d would have agreed to the delay without
a second thought. But Mr. Schmear, that artless tycoon, that blubbery beet, decided he
wanted to be a firsthand witness to my pain.
In the backyard, me and Spike and Jerry limbered up: first we got down on all fours a few
feet apart and started hopping over and sliding under each other like God was playing three
card monte with us. After a couple panting minutes of that, I jumped onto Spike's
shoulders, then Jerry jumped onto mine, then Spike lifted his paw and I hopped up, then
Jerry did the same with me, then with a timing we’d honed over the years, Spike and I
squatted deep and pushed in unison, which flung me ten feet up but Jerry so high he became
a black coin hovering toward the yolky sun, before shooting back down onto my good paw.
“That is Oscar-worthy action!” hooted Mr. Schmear, whose girth was straining the diving

25

board, his 6EEE monkstraps dangling above the chlorine fumes, his lackey standing behind
holding a parasol over his overripe strawberry of a head. Headley stood off near the shallow
end, thumbing an unlit Chesterfield and trying to look useful.
Jerry rolled a medicine ball from out behind the shed, and after he clambered up, Spike
and I tossed it back and forth, the mouse balanced on top. The paw was ginger, but not so
bad I couldn’t catch the medicine ball, so I decided to strike while the morphine was hot:
“Spike, Walls, let's go and put on a show.”
We picked up the episode where we’d left off: Jerry speeding inside after hoisting the
baby grand with a crane and almost killing me with it in the front drive. Now, with a camera
near the stairs catching everything, Headley called Action and I wheeled after Jerry across the
living room, forever on his heels, then slid face first toward the mouse hole cut into the
room's baseboard, the carpet burning across my chest, finally accordioning into the wall just
as Jerry slipped inside. I’d done it a thousand times and each time hurt a little worse than the
last. I scampered toward the closet and came back with a fumigator pump that read Mustard
Gas on the side. After emptying the harmless green fumes into Jerry’s hole, I stepped back
with a death's head grin and stretched myself out on the sofa. When Jerry emerged a second
later wearing a miniature gas mask, I hurled the pump at him and the chase began again, first
over the upright piano’s keys in a back-and-forth boogie-woogie duet we’d perfected over
the years (along with a couple of Sousa marches, “In the Mood,” and the introitus to
Mozart's Requiem, too slow and deathy for anything but fooling around off-camera). With
three functional limbs instead of four and a head drifting in morphine vapor, I was a bit
behind the beat, but the Oscar news had jacked my spirits, so I flashed Jerry a finger-
moustache too quick for the cameras to catch as we finished the last notes of the twelve bar,
redirecting us into the “The Ride of the Valkyries,” which seemed appropriate considering

26

Jerry’s gas mask, and as Jerry hopscotched that Nazi leitmotif, he sang “Kill the wab-bit, kill
the wab-bit,” then while I took over the main theme, he hit the first flute part's high F trill
with a machine gunning of his tiny feet before hopping off and hustling into the kitchen. By
the time I’d pushed past the swinging door, Jerry'd secured the high ground atop the counter
by the knife rack, and he hurled them all at me – steak knives and bread knives, butcher
knives and boning knives, oyster knives and carving knives, and from the way I had to dodge
them as they whiffed past and skittered onto the tile, it didn't seem like he was trying to miss.
When the knives ran out, I reached for a cast iron skillet hanging from a peg, to line drive
him into the fridge, forgetting for a terrible moment that first lesson of boxing: never leave
your body open, a canvas for your opponent to paint with pain. The knife stand was indeed
empty, but an innocuous wedge of Parmesan was leaning against it coquettishly. With a flick
of his toe, Jerry chipped it into the air, caught it, and whipped it at my head with a full leg-
kick follow through. But if I could dodge a steak knife, I could sure as hell dodge a piece of
cheese, so I started to duck, knowing the worse the Parmesan would do is give me a crew
cut. Leaning forward on one leg, Jerry winked, and my eyes dropped to his fingers, which
were curled up like a claw. Knuckleball.
In mid-flight, the wedge dropped, righted itself, and started corkscrewing, shaking off so
much smell I felt like I was being assaulted by an Italian restaurant. Trying to track it was
dizzying, but as it flew toward me, I knew I had to guess, so I jumped spread-legged like a
cheerleader, hoping it would slide beneath me, but just as I left the ground, the cheese was
buoyed by some unseen force, and it rose, spearing me in the crotch.
In my line of work, you learn to be a connoisseur of pain – knowing the tinsel of
regained circulation and the throb behind a tourniquet, distinguishing the flash of flame-
burn from the sizzling parasitic seep of acid, sniffing out the difference between the sear of a

27

dislocated shoulder from the bone-grind of a joint that’s spent its lifelong allowance of
cartilage. You learn to distance yourself through analysis. But as any boy who’s ever picked
up a mitt can tell you, that’s impossible when you’ve taken one to the balls. You don’t just
hurt, you feel evacuated, manhood surrendered, your self slurped out through yourself, the
interior hollowed until you’re only an outside. I crumbled to my knees, mouth snatching for
air, while Jerry leaped toward the ceiling, grabbed one of the overhead fan blades, and timed
his letting-go well enough that it shot him out through the open window. Behind me the
cameramen were chuckling. I stood, gasping. The constitutional horror I felt was resolving
into its component parts: the background void, a single sting in the family jewels, and a pull
along the veiny underside, like a rubber band yanked until its elasticity is spirited away. That
was a new one.
I coughed, listing to starboard, and stumbled into the paparazzi flash of sunlight.
My attention was directed by bad fake-snoring to Spike, pretending to sleep by his
doghouse, which had been painted with a drippy Happy Birthday and brightened with a whole
bouquet of red balloons. Fortunately Headley’d had the sense to eighty-six Mr. Schmear
from the board, and the two were watching the action from behind the white picket fence,
Noggles goggling as Jerry stuck his landing on the other side of the pool and I tried to
remember what I was supposed to do next.
Headley looked like he always did during takes, doubled up in his head about the fact that
the better the episodes went, the longer he’d direct them, and the longer he directed them,
the less likely he’d ever create something like Breathless, something with skinny boys with very
purposeful hairdos reading philosophy and complaining about the pointlessness of the
universe to their girlfriends, who were always improbably curvy and saucer-eyed and eager to
take off their tight sweaters to relieve their beaus’ existential crises.

28

My groin was having an existential crisis of its own, the fumes of the injury rising up into
my guts, threatening to shove my Bloody Mary up my gullet. The basic blocking we’d done
the day before had vanished from my head. So I did what any cat worth his salt does when
he sees a mouse: I started chasing, some ancient cattishness reasserting itself inside me: while
I was as bipedal as not, two-leggers were thinkers, not killers, and if you want to catch
something, you need a cheetah, not a chimp. I leapt into my ancestry and onto all fours,
racing after my sprinting partner, his body shrinking through the pastel universe of a
Pasadena backyard. I clenched my jaw at the pain the hard ground shot through my bad
paw, trying to distract myself by thinking about something besides my crotch, paw, and
stomach. As I galloped around the pool, I remembered the Oscars, the competing bouquets
of the starlets’ perfumes, the kaleidoscope of satin dresses, the loose smiles of beautiful
drunk people who would get lucky whether they won or lost that night. It was like an orgy
in Macy’s. I couldn’t wait.
I was catching up to Jerry, on a wheel route toward the California Fan Palm that towered
over the yard, a tree the cartooners hated because they always had to redraw it into a many-
branched oak. He was flying toward the trunk, and any other creature I knew would’ve
crashed, but Jerry pushed off on his right foot, translating his momentum with all the grace
of Del Shofner into an inside turn, grabbing his crotch at me with a wink then accelerating
toward the doghouse. I was not Jerry, and a second later, when I reached the tree, I had to
loop wide around it, feeling my paws flap at the ground to gain purchase, whipping up the
grass in waves as though it were a bunched carpet.
Spike was still fake-sleeping, a furry Alp, and Jerry hopped over him at the last second,
while I, remembering my duty, my role – the earthbound clod, the creature of dirt always
flailing at the creature of air, failing to grasp him – I obligingly crashed into the starboard

29

flank of Spike’s ribcage, bouncing off as though he were a trampoline set on its side. Earlier
in the episode I’d not only stolen Spike’s money, I’d eaten Spike's pork chops and stuffed
dynamite into his birthday cake to try to blow Jerry up, and as Jerry watched behind the
doghouse with the glee of the devil on your shoulder, I gave Spike my toothiest, most
apologetic grin, trying not to let on that I was having a hard time standing up. But for the
Spike of the show, far meaner than the real Spike who’d internalized the Gospel message to
forgive your brother seventy times seven, it was a clear case of three strikes and you’re out.
So that linebacker of a bulldog started after me as I chased Jerry toward the pool while
breathing slow, trying to keep the stars out of my eyes that portended a blackout. I couldn’t
do a re-take.
Offscreen one tech untethered the birthday balloons and another blew them toward us
with an industrial fan. We three made three passes around the pool, and each time new
constellations appeared in my vision, like an evening fading into night. Finally on the fourth
circuit, Jerry screeched to a halt at the board, just as the balloons were lazing by, and raced
down the blue runway, springing off the edge to catch some of the low-floating ones. Spike
stopped at the edge but I followed, Tom the Persistent, leaping off the lip of the board,
grasping at the pretty tails of the bright red balloons, missing them all as Jerry waved to me
wickedly, a stowaway on a flotilla of red dirigibles. For a moment, suspended twenty feet
above the bottom of the dry pool, I ran in place, before that bitch gravity got me for the
second day in a row, my happy red world jump-cutting to a cruel chemical blue, but as I
spread my arms into the Iron Cross and prepared to take my licking like a man, I could not
but smile, taking the nomination as a harbinger that my world would redden again soon, the
deep lipsticky vermillion of the red carpet, the same color as the bow my Grace wore that
first day I met her, at this very set, the blooming red of our deepest insides, of glory and

30

terror and lust. Pain I could handle. What startled me was the opposite – as I flew down
toward the bottom of a pool the color of a cartoon sky, wind brushing past the fur of my
face, my paw felt like a grilled bratwurst about to burst, my nicotined lungs were scorched
from the running, and my head was a shrieking teakettle. But in my groin, the seat of myself,
I felt something scarier than hurt. Nothing. I didn’t feel a damn thing.

2.

I was old enough to remember the Oscars before Bob Hope became the perennial
emcee, when they were shorter than the movies they were promoting, a more modest age
when the only thighs in sight were chicken, the only racks lamb. When the war came, the
Academy decided it wouldn’t be right to chomp on Beef Wellington while our boys were
gnawing C Rations, so we nixed dinner, which meant I no longer had to try to hear
acceptance speeches over Hitchcock slurping his soup. But slowly flesh of another sort
creeped in: the gowns began shrinking, and by the year of our Lord 1962, the fairer sex had
embraced the maxim of that sage Sophia Loren: A woman’s dress should be like a barbed-wire
fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.
Part of me wanted to believe I hadn’t witnessed the annual Polandizaiton of those dresses
since ’55 only because Tom and Jerry had been the victim of its own success. Prior to the
drought, T & J had been nominated every year for more than a decade, and we’d won more
than half. If people voted for the World Series, the Yankees would never win either. We’d
also suffered a boycott by a coven of “modern” mothers who thought T&J was too violent
for their little Bobbies and Susies. Instead they chose the wholesome entertainment of a

31

rabbit who’d been in therapy for sex addiction and a divorced mouse with his own theme
park who liked to piss down on tourists from the penthouse balcony of the Beverly Hills
Hilton. At least during the drought I had the comfort of knowing that Mickey wasn’t getting
nominated either. In a gesture that perhaps was meant as a sign of solidarity, Mick had sent
me a dozen black roses every Oscar night since our last nomination.
But even I had to admit T & J had grown a bit moth-eaten. There were only so many
possible iterations of a cat chasing a mouse around a house, even if the house was a golf
course or a pyramid or Bach’s organ. Besides, Spike and I each entered into matrimony, a
state that girds the gut in flab and turns your shoes to iron. Jerry, whose only steady was
Captain Morgan, was as sharp as he’d been at twenty-four. By the time I was twenty-four,
I’d been to so many Oscars, it felt automatic. I couldn’t remember half the kittens who’d
strolled the red carpet on my arm, but my best date didn’t even have fur: in ‘48, I flew Sister
Constance out from St. Francis, where she’d taught me music, and put her up for three
nights at the Chateau Marmont. We went to the symphony, and the cathedral, which I
confessed I hadn’t yet visited, and on Oscar night, she wore I high-necked gray dress I had
my buddy Oleg make for her, long before Jackie Kennedy was floating around 1600
Pennsylvania in his gowns. After talking to Spencer Tracy for ten minutes at the after-party,
Sister Constance had him in tears, and a month later he told me there wouldn’t be as many
Catholics like him if there were more nuns like her. But I would’ve traded all those gold
statuettes for one stroll up the red carpet with Gracie.
To prepare, Gracie’d spent a week in Palm Springs, at a spa run by a pair of Bichon
Frises from Paris, and she returned the night before the Oscars to find me already in bed,
her coat bleached by the desert sun to a sugary white, her manicured nails looking like
nothing so much as Red Hots.

32

“I bought you a good-luck charm, Tommy.” From behind her back she ta-da’d a framed
portrait I couldn’t make out in the darkness. All I saw was a round dark head.
“Thanks,” I said. “Uh, is it Joe Louis?”
She laughed. “No silly,” she said, swinging around to my side of the bed. “It’s Gandhi.
I told you you needed glasses.”
I wanted to ask her why she was giving me as a good luck charm the picture of a guy
who’d been assassinated, but instead I leaned up to give her a kiss then positioned the photo
on my nightstand between the fifth of rye and the vial of morphine.
“Do I have any messages?”
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing at my eyes. “I wrote them out. Uh – Barbara Lawrence and
Minnie, dry cleaners, Lady Dear, some other ones. They’re by the phone.”
“Lady Dear? What did she want?”
I rubbed at my muzzle. “She was three sheets. Didn’t exactly make sense. She said she
was happy for you, then asked if you wanted to meet for drinks next week.”
Gracie’s head was bobbing, then stopped. She tried to put a good face on it. “You know
what they say about spaniels: they’ll spread their legs for three cocktails and a smile.”
She turned back toward the living room. Her skirt was a size too small. She bought
them that way on purpose. Her tail was curling through the air in a self-satisfied standing
wave. Over her shoulder she asked, “Would you ever screw a dog?”
“Not that dog.”
She smirked, making sure I was watching as she dropped her keys. “I dropped my
keys.”
“I suppose you’ll have to pick them up.”
“I suppose I will,” she replied, bending at the waist in a Betty Boop pose to pick them off

33

the hardwood. Usually the mere sight of Grace in a skirt set my groin to boiling. With my
good paw, I reached under my boxers, but what I felt was as cold and slack the catch of the
day. “Did you do that while I was gone?” she asked, eying my crotch as she stood up.
“Yeah,” I fibbed. After the last episode wrapped, I’d spent a week icing my groin and
pissing blood, even after Gracie had left for Palm Springs.
“One afternoon last week I was laying naked in a hammock. It was a hundred and fifteen
degrees. I remembered the time you took me from behind by the campfire in Yosemite. We
were too close to the fire and the heat was burning my face.”
I closed my eyes. “You told me to back up,” I said. “I told you I didn’t care if it
burned.”
“And then I came,” she said. “I remember that, lazing in the hammock, and I touched
myself.”
My heart was pounding as though I’d been running wind sprints, but still my gelid loins
were not cooperating. Now Gracie was telling me she wanted to try on something for me
that she’d picked up at Oooh La La in the Springs.
“Great,” I wheezed. I bit down on my knuckle as she left the room. Trying and failing
would’ve jinxed me, so I slid beneath the sheets, pulling them up high for cover.
When I woke, Gracie was snoring beside me and the only light outside was the milky
yellow of the streetlamp. My paw was unbandaged but fat, and even though the pain was
nothing a couple aspirins mashed into my coffee couldn’t patch, I still dropped some drops
on the back of my tongue, my mouth curdling at the taste.
In the living room, the television was replaying the five o’clock news, so I slumped down
onto the sofa and drank a finger of rye to wash away the rotten cherry taste. After some
chatter about West Side Story, the anchor said that the sheriff’s department had found a body

34

police believed to be Lady Dear.
I let my head flop back on its neck, and in the blank canvas of the ceiling saw the
cartooned spaniel violated by each of the newscaster’s subsequent descriptions:
strangulation, stab wounds, crushed skull, hideous burns. Gracie and Lady Dear had taken
acting classes together, and after them, Lady Dear had let Gracie buy her Grand Marnier on
Old Man White’s dime. After Gracie and I got hitched, I tried to keep Lady Dear on the
fringe of our life, mostly because she was a spaniel through and through – neurotic,
preening, fickle. I hadn’t told Gracie the half of my conversation with Lady Dear earlier in
the week; after the usual chitchat, drunk on her end and morphine-sunk on mine, she began
asking leading questions about what Dr. Kinsey might’ve called Gracie’s conjugal
preferences, and when I brushed those off, she asked me about mine. I told her more than I
should have, then hung up.
Now whatever parts of her were left were cooling to forty degrees in the coroner’s office.
The last time I’d seen her was Pongo Credenza’s Christmas bash, one of the dozen
holiday parties Gracie dragged me by the tail to every year. Gracie had arranged the guests
in a double line in the living room to do The Stroll, but Lady Dear and I demurred, me
because the only dances I liked were waltzes written by dead Europeans, Lady Dear because
she’d had a quart of rum-heavy nog and couldn’t stand. I was feeling expansive, watching
my wife tipsily direct the show, and in the presence of Lady Dear – who was sliding from the
B-list to the D – suddenly grateful for my regular paycheck, a Wells Fargo account big
enough I didn’t have to call the bank every time before writing my unsmall mortgage check.
I asked Lady Dear what she wanted for Christmas, expecting her to say pearls or a tiny Dior
ball gown. Instead, she said: “A baby.” I coughed, lit a cigarette, and paroled myself to the
men’s room.

35

The newscaster had already bounce-passed to sports, who was almost pissing himself he
was so excited about the Dodgers’ opening day game, the first at the new Dodger Stadium,
appropriately enough one day after the Oscars. When the telephone ring tore into the room,
I turned my head to stare at shimmying receiver. After a while its seizure came to an end.
Don’t answer the phone after midnight. The news is never good.
I poured a couple jiggers of rye into the tumbler and balanced it on my chest, lapping at
the booze without picking it up, still staring at the gray eye of the television. As somebody
who hadn’t grown up with the devil box, its charms would probably always be a wonder to
me. We had talkies, and for the bad kids like me, they were as regular every week as the
Mass – the previews, the serial, the adventure, the shorts, the comedy, the cartoon, the music
bit, the romance – but watching the TV by yourself was a shadowier sort of sacrament.
Those sour-stomached hours passed slow, Mort Sahl interviewing Peter Ustinov, or
maybe Peter Sellers – I squinted at the screen but still wasn’t sure. It would’ve been easier to
tell but whichever Peter it was was doing voices: County Cork, Nehru, Cagney, Brezhnev,
Maine lobsterman, Lamont Cranston. Maybe I did need glasses.
“Oh Peter,” said Mort, cackling. I squinted again. “Jack had Nehru on once,” he added.
Jack Paar had quit the month before, and Mort Sahl and Groucho and a few other comics
were pinch-hitting until NBC found a replacement.
“I love his cap,” said Peter.
“I kid you not,” said Mort, pointing. “In that very chair. Unless we got a new chair.”
The people clapped, Peter left, then it was a microwave commercial.
Back on the show, Peggy Cass came on to kibitz with Mort about the Oscars, about
Natalie Wood and Paul Newman, about Sophia Loren and Sophia Loren. I would get to see
Sophia Loren tomorrow. In a cocktail dress.

36

More Oscar chatter. No mention of the cartoon nominees. I’d always wanted to go on
The Tonight show, but none of the studios wanted their cartoon stars on primetime in the fur.
The only cartoon nominee I hadn’t seen was The Substitute, from some Ruskie-type country.
Nobody had seen it, and everybody thought it was really funny.
Near sunrise Gracie padded in, masking a yawn with her paw. “Tommy, I had a dream I
was flying. Do you ever fly in your dreams, Tommy? Do you?” She was wearing a pair of
my old boxers, so big they kept slipping down her hip, and a ratty Stanford sweatshirt. Old
Man White was a donor.
“Most of my dreams I’m lucky enough if I can walk.”
“I suppose that’s the difference between us,” she said, curling up into one of the
spaceman chairs opposite the sofa.
“The difference between us right now is that you slept last night and I didn’t.”
She rolled down her lower lip, as pink as an eraser. “You’ve got to take care of yourself,”
she said, her head rolling down to her shoulder. “It’s no fair to the wives when cradle-
robbers die young.”
I smiled and glanced down at my chest, to offer her a sip of rye, but the glass wasn’t
there. I shrugged. “At least when I climb the Golden Stair, you’ll be able to take my money
and marry somebody your own age.”
“What money?”
“Your lingerie money, which I’m glad to see you’re making use of,” I replied, pointing at
my boxers, so holey they looked buckshot.
Her sleep-napped coat was platinum in the gleam of the TV. “Tommy, you don’t wear
lacy under things because they’re comfortable. You wear them because you want to feel like a
woman.”

37

When I couldn’t find the tumbler, I scooted up the sofa and leaned over to grab the
bottle of rye that had rolled away.
She asked: “Are you not sleeping because you’re afraid the Russians will attack the
Auditorium tonight?”
“What?” I uncorked the bottle with my teeth and handed it across the coffee table to
her. “Who said anything about the Russians?”
She studied the label. “Is there any wheat in this?”
“It’s rye.”
“I know it’s rye.”
“Rye is the grain. They don’t use wheat in booze.”
She stared at the little cameo of Old Overholt himself, as though to test his
trustworthiness. “Kim said she stopped eating wheat and lost ten pounds.”
The cuckoo clock clicked on the wall, and out came little a pint-sized Jerry, cuckooing
one-two-three-four-five-six times, each one a little shock to my achy head. She took a swig
and coughed.
On the TV two kids were dancing around a giant pack of Chesterfields.
“Kim Novak doesn’t need to diet and neither do you. Only wash-ups diet,” I concluded
as she passed the bottle back to me.
“Lady Dear weighs fifty-eight pounds,” she said by way of agreement.
“Yeah,” I said. I wondered how much she weighed now. “So, who said the Russians are
going to bomb the Auditorium?”
“Minnie said that Special Smelter told her. He read it in the Bible.”
“Gracie, Special Smelter read in the Bible that Mickey Mouse Ears are the Mark of the
Beast.”

38

“Aren’t they?”
“LA’s the furthest from Russia you can get and still be in the US. They’d smoke New
York and Philly and Chicago first. We’d have plenty of times to get to a bomb shelter.”
“Wouldn’t they want to dismoralize the Free World by killing all of its entertainment?”
She reached her paws palm side up across the coffee table. Gracie loved the slap game. I
reached my paws across, letting them hover atop hers in the séance glow of the TV.
Something outside caught her attention and she bob-and-rolled her head the better to see
around me. “It’s Paul Newman!” she said.
“What, where?” I asked, turning my head just as I felt a sting atop my good paw, and a
flaming shock atop the bad one too. I whipped my head back to see Gracie leaning over the
stacks of Variety and Vogue, tongue poking between her lips.
“The Ruskies could sneak attack that fast.”
“Damn it, Grace,” I said, waving my bad paw in the air.
“Aren’t you on drugs for that?” she asked, staring at it as though it were a week-old roast
she wanted to throw out.
“A painkiller is not a local anesthetic.”
“Think about it: if the Ruskies really wanted to damage America, to lower the national
morale, to strike at our soul, what could possibly do more damage than blowing up the
Oscars?” I didn’t know what was crazier – that everyone I knew would believe this, or that
the Russians might too.
My slapper was Jacuzziing angry blood from my wrist to the tips of my fingers and back
again, but Gracie had already pulled out a from the coffee table’s undershelf a giant map of
LA pinned to a corkboard, pimpled with scores of red tacks, dozens of whites, a few blues.
I scanned the pins’ scrambled bunting, searching for a pattern in the chaos: even the

39

most random scattering of data could eventually be bent towards meaning. The
constellations were all in our heads.
“Okay,” I said, wagering a guess. “Reds are places you’ve bought something. Whites are
places we’ve done the dirty. Blues are places you’ve gotten speeding tickets.”
“No, silly,” she said. “What’s there to buy in the mountains?” She pointed at a red tack
up in the hinterlands of the San Gabriels.
“True. Wait, that’s –”
“It’s where Sly and Tweety live.”
“All right,” I said. “What’s the key?”
“Reds are friends, whites are enemies, blues are the AASAs.”
I nodded, eying the map. “Alcoholics Anonymous Sex Addicts Anonymous.”
“Be a lot more blues if that was true,” she smiled. “There’d be a couple at our house.”
Our house appeared untacked.
“Lay it on me.”
“Animal Actor Slayings and Abductions,” she said.
“You have a lot of enemies in Hancock Park. Do we know anybody in Hancock Park?”
Her hands floated over the map as though it was a Ouija board.
“So, what exactly are we looking for?”
“The nearest bomb shelter, Tommy.”
“John Wayne,” I said, trailing a finger south east of the bottom-right corner of the map.
“Orange County? We’ll already be growing extra limbs by the time we get to Orange
County.”
“Gracie, if the Russians are actually aiming at Santa Monica Auditorium, radiation is the
least our worries.”

40

“They’ll miss, Tommy. They’re Russians.”
“Bugs has a bomb shelter, although I would imagine there are probably half a dozen
hookers and a couple of pinball machines that have spots in line ahead of us.”
“Malibu?” Gracie asked, spreading thumb and pinkie wide from the Auditorium up the
coast, as though reaching for a Rachmaninoff chord. “That could work.”
“Gracie, if you’re that worried, why don’t you just skip the Oscars.”
“No I can’t,” she said, turning to face me with wide, pool-blue eyes, heartening me for a
moment with her devil-may-care loyalty. “Sophia Loren will be there.”
I sighed. “She’s got a better shot of winning than we do.”
“Is that what we’re worrying about?” She was as white as the spaceman chair she crawled
out of. “Do you want to take your mind of it?” she asked, mounting the coffee table, kissing
up my thigh.
Dread sank me like an anchor on a balloon. “Gracie, not now. I’m still sore. Plus, with
the drops the doc’s got me on, I can’t feel anything.”
She nodded, her eyes wide. “Last time I had morphine, I didn’t have sex for a week …
Did you see a urologist like I told you?”
“Doc Shampoo said I didn’t need to.”
“I wouldn’t trust him to take care of a goldfish, Tommy.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“He told Rock Hudson that if he read Playboy he would stop being a queer.”
“Wait, Rock Hudson is queer?”
“Oh, Tommy, always behind the times,” she chuckled, skipping off to the kitchen for a
midnight snack of crackers and cream, clutching the band of my boxers to her hip.

41

As our limo snaked into the line outside Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Grace slouched
in the opposite banquette, pouring the last bit of pink champagne foam past her pink lips.
She’d popped the cork as we hit Hollywood Boulevard, not half an hour before. In her low-
cut blue gown, her triangle of cleavage looked like a shark tooth. The last time I’d worn my
tux, Eisenhower had been President, but now I felt like Taft – my vest was as snug as a
corset, and I worried my trousers would split along the tail slit. In my prime, I’d weighed
eighty-seven pounds. I was no longer in my prime.
Thirty feet ahead, the valet opened the door for the limo in front of us, and out hopped
Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. Even through the tinted windows, the sudden blaze of
the camera flashes made it look like the Fourth of July. I would never feel as good as
Warren Beatty looked. Of all the couples we had to follow. Gracie sighed. I couldn’t blame
her. You might think years in Hollywood would numb your awe toward beauty, but really,
the opposite was true. Glamour was our currency, and we envied the rich. As our limo
inched ahead, Gracie stared at me desperately.
“How do I look?”
“Like a furry Natalie Wood.”
The limo stopped, the valet opened the door, and Gracie stepped out, short enough she
didn’t have to hunch, but her eyes were on Warren and Natalie, and she tripped over her
dress and began to fall twirling to the curb. I sprang out in front of her, caught her in mid-
spin, dipped her as suave as Gene Kelly and planted one on her little bow of a mouth. The
improvised little routine brought the snappers and jabberers like flies to meat. The cameras
said: Cha-cha-cha.
They asked Gracie about her dress, and she said Dior, and me about my tux, and I said,
Sal Parisi, Skid Row, next to that all-night Chinese place. That got a laugh.

42

Through the chatter I heard: “Right here, Tom!” “Grace, could I see a profile?” Being
smaller than everyone there, we were about to enter the canyon of the tall.
A cameraman asked for Gracie solo, so I unrolled my hands at her and backed away
toward the crowd. Although she’d had so much champagne her blood was probably
effervescent, Gracie was snapping into poses like a pro – paw on hip, puckering, rolling her
shoulder down and blowing a kiss over it. A few paws stretched towards me across the
velvet rope. An otter in a long skirt told me I was the animal Cary Grant, but the human
fans were warier: they always seemed surprised, alarmed, disappointed when they saw me
three-dimensional and furry and talking, but they still asked me to sign things, which I did.
The photographers beckoned me to my bride, so we slid back together as somebody
asked about how it felt being back at the Oscars after so many years away. I said Good, then
took Gracie by the arm, and strolled her down the red carpet.
“Everything is better live,” she said.
Inside the foyer, the patent leather shoes and high heels were ticking against the tile like
the work of a hundred telegraph operators, echoing off the gilt walls and cathedral ceiling.
My sixth, animal sense was awash in something I’d felt all my life but only recently heard
named – pheromones, an experience hard to describe except by analogy. Oscar Night of
1955 everything was a sprightly yellow-orange, as light as Satie, a cloud of daisies. This year
felt different. The millions of invisible particles swirling around were electric with
anticipation, but they sparked in a storm cloud, thick and steely red. Maybe Special Smelter
had told them about the Russians missiling us. Maybe they all thought their employers were
going to go belly up. Maybe both were true.
At least Bugs was chipper, smiling at me from the bar. Only Bugs’s own immediate
circumstances could affect his mood, and he’d been nominated for an Oscar, and his date

43

was a Playboy Bunny of a bunny. When he saw us, he hustled over.
“Congrats,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“And to you, Bugs,” I said, shaking.
“It was just a first-rate picture, Thomas. Absolutely first-rate. Your man here’s a golden
boy,” he said to Gracie.
Her voice bubbled up out of her throat. “Yes he is, Bugs. Yes he is.” She squeezed my
bad paw. I didn’t care.
“You look just aces, Grace, aces,” said Bugs.
“Do I?” she said, twirling, her whiskers a-quiver, her mouth trying many shapes before
settling on a shy smile. Bugs crouched and rolled the fabric above the hem between finger
and thumb.
“It’s the color of de ocean below Malibu when at dusk,” he said.
Gracie purred. She hated swimming, but loved the water.
“That’s why I have cushions around the railing,” he said, “so that when I’m pounding a
dame from behind, we can both watch the ocean without hurting our knees. Ask Belinda,”
he said, pointing at his date, who was grimacing as Goofy read her horoscope.
“Cushions. Very thoughtful of you,” I said.
“I thought so.” He took a sip of orange goo from his highball. “Where’s Jerry?”
I pointed across the foyer to the banister where Jerry was perched eye to eye with Sophia
Loren, who was laughing to the rafters, gripping his bowtie. Her dress did not obstruct the
view.
“She’s so pretty,” said Gracie. Seeing Sophia Loren in that dress made me wish I’d
liberated Italy.
“Go introduce yourself,” I said. “I’ll go over with you.”

44

“I can’t. I’ve been …tippling. I’ll just gush.” She mewled pitiably. “Lady Dear has
pictures of her taped up all over her bedroom. She’s so much prettier in person.”
“Terrible shame about Lady Dear,” Bugs said, staring at his spats and swishing his
whiskers back and forth.
“What?” asked Gracie. “What happened to Lady?”
Bugs looked at her like he’d just had braces put in. He was never one for saying hard
things to somebody. “Dey found her body last night.”
Gracie’s pool-blue eyes dampened. “Excuse me,” she said, “I have to, have to …” She
skittered away, through the forest of humans, head bobbing around their waists and hips,
her tail fluffed and falling.
“Huh,” said Bugs, cocking his head. He turned back to me. “You ever …” He derricked
his finger up and down into his highball glass.
“Lady Dear? She’s a dog, Bugs. Was a dog.”
He nodded. “She cried after –”
“Bugs –”
“Den again, she cried before, too. And during.”
“I don’t want to know, Bugs,” I said, wandering away, letting my eyes follow my feet. I
should’ve told Gracie in private. I shuffled over what looked like a giant eye, and then, a few
steps later, another one. I turned back to see the long ridge of a peach-colored nose
terminating in lips that would’ve made Veronica Lake jealous. Puzzling the mosaic together,
I wound my way around some Italians laughing under thin moustaches. Adjacent to the face
was the back of a brown-haired head, equally big. I followed neck to broad shoulders
covered by a white toga down a foreshortened back to Captain Marvel glutes, an island of
white in a sea of green. But the crowd kept me from taking in the whole picture at once, so

45

I raced up to the balcony, skirting around Monty Clift and edging my way to the railing.
Gazing down, it all came together: it was that Greek pretty boy, staring at his reflection in
the pond.
“Narcissus,” Monty said. I turned from the mosaic face to his, the puffy skin taffied
over bones mangled by the accident, his Humpty-Dumpty head never to be put back
together again. I caught my breath and nodded. “Just stared at himself until he wasted
away, right?”
“I was reading somewhere that these scholars found a new version. Two new versions.
In one, Narcissus manages to break away, but only when he sees his twin sister. Sees his
twin sister, just as beautiful. They fall in love, but the catch is they’re cast out of society.”
“What happens in the other?”
“He kills himself.” He cradled his drink, staring down at me. “Why can’t people be free
to love who they want?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. I should go find my seat.”
“Good luck tonight,” he said. “I thought yours was the best.”
I found Headley sitting with his date, who was built like a pair of tops stacked tip to tip,
shrink-wrapped into a green dress. Her waist was nipped, her bust straight out of a comic
book, and atop her columnar neck was an impish face – an impish face I thought I knew, so
I said, “Da –”
“Deirdre,” she interrupted, yoking our faces with her green eyes. She extended a hand,
which like the rest of her skin was marshmallowy soft, marshmallowy white. Above her
head had been erected an orange beehive large enough to house a football. She looked like
the Irish flag.
“Tom,” I said.

46

“Play-sure,” she purred. “Heed-ly’s tulled me soooo much about you.”
The last time I’d seen the face that might’ve been hers, we were fighting a war in Korea
and I was on speaking terms with Mickey Mouse. This face was rounder, this body more
familiar with all the pleasures of the mouth. But the eyes, the undiluted burr, the nostrils
permanently flared – these plucked a familiar tune inside me, a minor key serenade, all fear
and desire, mournful and manic at the same time.
Behind her Jerry was passed out in his seat, a bead of unblotted grenadine on the collar of
his tux shirt. “Yer fraind is tookered out,” she said, petting Jerry’s sable head.
“My friend is an alcoholic,” I said, scissoring past Headley. When she rose to let me by,
her motion mushroomed up a dozen scents: moss, bruised peach, the grain alcohol bite of
drying nail polish, leather and lavender, Jordan almonds, new sweat, skin scoured with Dove,
Spray Net, the naphtha of shoe polish, lily-scented hand lotion, and the salty-sour funk that
is the smell of sex across all species. I took my time as I sidestepped past her, my eyes
drifting within inches of her chest.
She laughed, and Jerry, still dreaming, bucked up and shouted “Crapper!” Then he
shivered, settled back down, and burrowed his head into his seat.
“First time across the pond?” I asked her, my eyes swinging up from her silver jaguar
sachet to her face.
“Ferst toime in a long toime,” she smiled. “I’d meant to stay, but things … fell through.
Best laid plans of moice ‘n’ men.”
I nodded as Headley asked her if she’d seen Sophia Loren, and I tried to empty my mind,
stared down into the black pit of the stage, where the flutes were piffling in warm-up, the
violinists sawing while they adjusted, a cellist trying and failing to tune to a true low G. My
good paw’s pinkie involuntarily hit it for him on an invisible piano. I wondered if we’d have

47

any warning before the missile hit. Maybe they wouldn’t bomb us because Sophia Loren
was here. You couldn’t set fire to a house if you knew the Mona Lisa was inside. Could you?
Cigarette smog was settling above my head, portending the start of the show and making me
jones for one of my own, but my pack was in my jacket pocket, cuddling with the morphine,
and Jerry’s face was mashed into that side’s lapel. Maybe it was the Commies killing all my
friends. Maybe a missile would be too obvious and they were trying to pick us off one by
one.
“Smacks,” said Headley, standing, clapping his hands together, “I suppose we should get
a round before Mr. Hope takes the stage. Can I get you something, sweet cheeks?”
“As much rye as you can pour into a water glass,” I said. “And don’t call me sweet
cheeks.”
“Oh Tom, Tom, Tom,” he chuckled, good cheer stamped on his pie slice of a face.
“Red wine if they have it,” said Deidre. “Otherwoise, martaney. Derrrty. Verrry
derrrty.”
He nodded, then bounded up the aisle, taking the stairs three at a time.
Deirdre took a pack from her sequined clutch and lit up.
“I have one of those?”
“O’course,” she said, lighting one and passing it over Jerry’s head. I took a long drag. I
could smell the lipstick on the filter. Deirdre lit her own and started sucking on it like she
was siphoning gasoline. “Hay’s been jittery all wake. Pacing the flat. Tried to distract him,
but I can only blow his horn so many toimes a day. Drives me mad. I’m shore you and yer
wife are more adventurous.”
I coughed, gasped on smoke, coughed again. She smiled.
The smell of her sex was still tingling in my nostrils. “Then you and Headley had a little

48

pre-game mattress dance?”
One orange eyebrow jumped, the other curling low for cover.
It was my turn to smile. “Cats have a very good sense of smell. And nothing else smells
like that.”
Her eyes probed mine. An oboe was humming a B flat. At the other end of our row,
Gracie was tiptoeing toward us.
In a whisper, Deirdre said, “He was at the tailor ull afternoon. Gets lonely when yer
padding aboot a flat in the nude, and when ya pass a mirror …” She walked her first two
fingers up her thigh. “A garl can’t help it.” She stood up, beaming at Gracie. “You moost
be Grace. Deirdre,” she said, reaching a hand out over me and Jerry. Red-eyed, Gracie
squeezed her fingers then slumped next to me.
“Yer verrrry beautiful,” Deirdre said.
“Thank you.”
With a manicured nail, Deirdre circled her own eye, the color of a Pasadena lawn. “Soom
of us hafta work to get the cat eye look.” She glanced at me, then back to Gracie. “Hours in
front of the mirror.”
Gracie’s eyes were stuck on the empty stage. Wherever her head was, it wasn’t there with
me. “Hey,” I whispered, setting my paw on her knee, “you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “You know. It was just a surprise. That’s all.”
She reached over my lap, shaking her head at Jerry, collecting the dollop of grenadine on
his lapel with a deft curl of her pinky. When she told me to open wide, I did.

Bob Hope was emceeing, and with the smile of a rake, the nose of a duck, and the head
of a hardboiled egg, he began his opening monologue in silence, shielding his eyes from the

49

stage lights, peering out into the crowd. For a moment he seemed to be staring at us, and I
prayed to God that he wouldn’t make a comment about Jerry snoring on my arm. But his
eyes swept over our furry cadre and landed on Sophia Loren, sitting a few rows below us.
He gave a finger-waggling wave, his eyebrows doing pushups, and as the crowd roared, he
did a slow samba in place then licked his finger and pulled it along his hairline, at which Mr.
Schmear – sitting upwind in what both smelled and looked like a suit made of bacon –
yelled, “Har! He’s coming on to Sophia Loren!” Bob licked a finger from his other hand and
flicked it over his temple. He winked and made kissy lips, she blushed and laughed her
silvery Italian laugh.
Bob was a maestro – he hadn’t said anything in close to a minute, he didn’t have a camera
to give him a close-up, and yet he had everyone from Leonard Bernstein to George C. Scott
choking for breath. It made me proud of Tom and Jerry, validating my belief that the best
comedy didn’t need words.
Bob pirouetted out of character and back toward the mic, telling us that he had the
pleasure of being married onscreen to an Italian woman a few pictures back. “But, since
there were no love scenes, I haven’t yet experienced La Dolce Vita” – hoots as the crowd
searched itself for where Fellini was sitting – “but I would like to be initiated.”
After whistles and roars subsided, after Gracie shook her head and chuckled, “Oh Bob,”
he continued, “My pal Jimmy was in that Little Foys picture, too” – a few claps for the absent
Cagney – “and he had a few love scenes in his day too.” He paused for two, three beats,
scanning the puzzled tuxes, then making eye contact with me for a brief moment before
bringing the joke home: “A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live.”
The needle of the Laugh-O-Meter sprang toward the boiling range. Ten seats down,
Spencer Tracy was doubled over, and I thought me might cough up his lunch. Bob noticed:

50

“Spence, you need to be careful, we’re not so young anymore,” he said, gingerly patting his
white waistcoat. To the audience he said, “Middle age is when your age starts to show
around your middle.” I glanced down at my long cat stomach, ungirded by vest or
cummerbund. My torso used to look like a cucumber. Now it looked like a gourd.
I was hooting along with everyone, but most of my mind was occupied by what would
happen after the monologue, and terrified anticipation began rattling around my ribcage. I
didn’t want to drink too fast, my morphine was still inaccessible, and I could only smoke one
cigarette at a time, but I was trying to resist the psychic salve I needed.
Just like the human kids in the orphanage each got an orange for Christmas, the nuns
against their better judgment slipped into our stockings gauzy little pouches of catnip, and
the saints they were, they only laughed as we barrel-rolled around the orphanage until
Epiphany. Grown-up, catnip hit me different – now it was Vapo Rub for the soul, a balm
against the hurt of the world. Out from my tux jacket I secreted a baggie, opened it between
my knees, and rubbed some under my collar, taking a deep breath.
“Oh Tommy,” said Gracie, rolling the back of her neck across my bowtie, “you know
what that does to me.” Her ears were flicking against my suddenly slack whiskers, her purr
was growing, and people were starting to turn and look, when Tweety, sitting with Sly on the
other side of the auditorium, decided it would be a good time to interrupt the monologue.
He hopped out of his chair and twittered his way over the macassar’d and dolled-up heads,
crash-landing on Bob Hope’s shoulder. “Well hello there,” said our emcee, giving his
signature jumpy eyes. “Last time something hit me that hard during my act, it was a rotten
tomato.” The humans roared. The furry and feathered did not: Daffy was covering his eyes
with his hand and even Goofy was grimacing, burying his face back into his horoscope.
“I like cashews,” yelped Tweety. “And walnuts. But not rotten tomatoes.”

51

“I’ve always wanted to eat him,” Gracie mewled. “But, I suppose that would be murder.”
“My father told me all about the birds and the bees,” said Bob, offering his forearm for
Tweety to hop down on, which the yellow bird did. Bob nodded at him, then shook his
head at the audience. “But my old man was a liar … I went steady with a woodpecker until I
was twenty-one.”
The laughter came spitting out of the humans, who pointed and slapped their knees and
clutched their heaving chests. For those who didn’t think we were people, Tweety was a
case-in-point: dumb as a beer bottle, pretty much all he could tell you was what he liked and
disliked, and hell, even a pet parrot can talk. But think about it this way: it ain’t Tweet’s fault
his brain’s smaller than a human’s eye. And to all the furless laughing smoke at the silly little
creature, I say: Fuck you. He can fly.
One beautiful human after another swept in from the wings to read five names and then
one, one beautiful human after another stood in the sea of claps, scooted down the rows,
cantered down the stairs, kissed and cried and laughed and whooped. Rita Moreno cha-
cha’d to the podium and screamed “I can’t believe it” so loud it woke up Jerry, who popped
an eye up at the ceiling, yelled, “I need a mop for all this blood” and slumped forward like a
tuxedoed capital C.
It was before my time, but I’ve heard Clark Gable when he won that little gold dildo just
said, “Thank You.” That’s my kind of acceptance speech. At the rate we were going, the
high-class circle-jerk would take two hours, and I had a table waiting at Chasen’s.
Schmear told me the cartoons would be about three-quarters of the way through, after
Best Song. Hank Mancini – the only Italian I liked besides Sophia Loren – won it for
“Moon River,” which months before I’d hummed into Gracie’s ear as we left Breakfast at
Tiffany’s. We’d slow-danced down Hollywood Boulevard.

52

Hank strode off as Brigadier General James Stewart shambled on, impossibly tall,
impossibly sober, that god of the sky, that Presbyterian saint, the first actor to don a military
uniform after Pearl Harbor. I hadn’t known he was going to be our presenter. I slid my rye
under my seat and sat up. My heart felt like a kernel in a popcorn maker. Brigadier General
James Stewart said that cartoons were more than just children’s entertainment, that they
represented the whimsy and hope of our best selves, that they were art in a hurry, Cezanne
on the run. Gracie squeezed my arm and Deirdre petted the back of my head. I blinked
back tears. Then Brigadier General James Stewart read the nominees: Bugs’s little bullfighter
number; the Ruskie picture, which the clip revealed to be an arty, badly drawn scribble about
a dwarf who goes to the beach and inflates little colored shapes into a tent, a grill, and a babe
in a bikini; something with Speedy G and Sylvester, that foul-mouthed thug whose never-
ending chase of Tweety was a poor man’s Tom and Jerry; and a Disney Goofy bit about the
recent waterskiing craze, a short I liked especially because the Mouse did not appear once, a
cartoon that featured a scripted collision with a loop-de-loop, and an unscripted lightning
strike. The Disney execs were delighted at the slapstick Mother Nature had given them
gratis. Goof’s fillings tingled for a week.
Jerry and I invented the bonk-thwack, the chase-and-flee, but I wasn’t sure how much
longer I could keep it up, even if I’d wanted to. Months back, I’d told Headley I wanted to
try something different, and together we wrote “Four Hundred Meows,” which was realer,
sadder, rooted in a pain that didn’t leave bruises or lumps. It was the only episode I’d ever
been really proud of, the best thing we’d ever done. The Academy thought so to.
Brigadier General James Stewart read “Four Hundred Meows” and I nodded and sighed,
suddenly convinced that it was too real, too sad. The calm of the catnip had ebbed, and I
felt numb. When I heard him repeat our title, I thought it was just an uncharacteristic

53

stutter, but then everyone started clapping and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was grasping me on the
shoulder from behind and I turned, inquisitive. “Bravo, Tom,” he said. He was a very
handsome man.
I turned back and everyone was staring at me, Deirdre was kissing Headley on the mouth
and reaching over to Jerry to feel up my thigh, my wife was staring up at me like I’d done
something right for the first time in my life, and Jerry was jumping up and down on his seat,
shrieking, “Go kick it in the ass, Hoss! Kick it in the ass!”
As I stepped down into the valley of stairs, I was having a hard time breathing, knowing
that Brigadier General James Stewart would be presenting an Oscar to me, shake my hand. I
had the sudden impulse to check my fly. At the podium, he was clapping as best as you can
with an eight-pound statue in one hand, smiling like I was one of his bomber pilots stepping
out of my B-27 after landing the beast with a pair of flakked-out engines. There was nothing
more American than the sound of Jimmy Stewart’s voice, and he was congratulating me,
calling me by my name. Seeing my bound and wounded right paw, that compassionate
leader of men offered me his left hand, which I shook and had to restrain myself from
kissing. The tips of my ears came to the bottom button of his tux jacket.
“Thank you,” I said into the mic as the applause cooled and Jerry finally stopped
shouting, “A-woo-ga, a-woo-ga, a-woo-ga.” I had the speech in my jacket pocket, and I’d
planned to droll a couple lines about how I was planning to pin a tail on my Oscar, then
thank the Academy, the poobahs, Headley, Jerry, Spike, then save the last half minute for
Gracie. Instead what came out was: “I never had the opportunity to serve in our, our
nation’s struggles, the Free World’s struggles against fascism and Japanese, uh, imperializing,
and against Communism, like Brigadier General Stewart and so many other of our less
fortunate boys did, and without them, we’d all be speaking German and Japanese and Italian

54

today, so let’s just give all of them, all those heroes, a real big hand.” With my paw and
statue, I couldn’t clap at all, so I just stepped back and swung both arms toward Jimmy
Stewart, whose nod was gracious if a bit pained.
“But our struggle against evil isn’t over,” I spouted, my head rolling over the crowd, the
combination of morphine, rye, and catnip turning black-and-white tuxes on red seats into a
bloodied page of the L.A. Times editorial section, which had ignored the animal murders
completely. “And while I wish, dear God I wish I could’ve been there at Normandy or Iwo,
we can all fight against the killing, the murder of so many of our animal actor friends. Igby
Bert Bindle” – the microphone was popping at my B’s, and I stepped back for a moment,
then continued: “Screwy Morgoon, Beaks McGee. Lady Dear. None of us are safe …” I
didn’t quite know where to go with that. “… Until all of us are safe. If we don’t hang
together, we’ll certainly hang …” I couldn’t quite remember the rest, and the barometer of
the room was falling, the audience embarrassed at my haphazard impromptu, but then I saw
Grace, who was nodding along with my heart-gush. “But it’s not all scary,” I said. “We still
have love, and it’s for my love I want to dedicate this, my Gracie, the finest woman in the
world.” Word for word, the closing lines I’d penned clicked into my head. “My only regret
for you, dear friends, is that you won’t have the chance to know her like I know her. I’d
been chasing grace all my life, from the confessionals of Baltimore to the dives of Sunset
Boulevard, from one ocean to another. Then I found her. Gracie, I’ll never let you go.”

Chasen’s was aswirl with bodies flouncing in the smoke, the brown of its panel wood and
the red of its booths all mixed up to the color of the chili I was bearing in a bowl to sober
Gracie up. The heat was cooing through the bowl and wrappings down into my paw as I
eased through toward a spot in back where Gracie was doing the twist with Deirdre and Kim

55

Novak, not spilling a drop of the bubbly she’d noosed with her tail. I hated rock and roll, I
hated dancing that didn’t require a male lead, and not even two and a half years in, I was
afraid I was going to hate the 60s. But God, I did love Gracie.
The sappier sort of boys liked to call their girl “heart”: sweetheart, my heart, dear heart, but
Gracie wasn’t my heart, that puny fist of muscle, so weak and fluttery and easily stopped.
Grace was my liver, my kidney, my stomach, my intestines, so much of her crammed inside
me they had to fold it back on itself, so much that if you cut me open and pulled her out of
me you could walk miles before I’d feel a tug at the other end. Already at Chasen’s she’d
downed a bathtub full of French champagne, a volume I knew: once I came home to find
her in a tub of glittery pink liquid, the bubbles hissing up at me, and I couldn’t see the
bathroom tile for all the bottles. I hopped in, shivering with the sudden chill, and we slurped
the bath empty then licked each other down like debauched otters.
Ten feet behind them on the dance floor was Leo Shampoo, snapping his fingers, his
head turning around on his neck like he had some wobbly bolts holding his spine together,
and the rest of him was swaying in the Hawaiian shirt he wore under his tux. Eyes snapping
open behind glasses as round as Gandhi’s, he hustled over to me, past Gracie and Kim and
Deirdre and the rest of the dancers, and pointed a finger-pistol at me. Or, more accurately, a
finger Derringer. I had a hard time trusting any human who wasn’t bigger than me.
“Isn’t that cannibalism?” he asked.
“It’s not cat chili,” I said, wondering who invited him.
He started snapping again, not in sync with Chubby Checker. “No, not cat, but I believe
there is some pork in that.”
“Cats and pigs aren’t related.”
“You both have paws,” he said, holding up his dinky right hand as though about to

56

testify. The other took from a lingering waiter a highball glass of what looked like lemonade.
I goggled at him as “Peppermint Twist” shifted to “Jailhouse Rock.’” It was
embarrassing that I knew the names of the songs, but Gracie played them constantly. I saw
Rita Moreno leave a brick-colored lipstick bow on Natalie Wood’s forehead, while a mischief
of Italians ogled them from the closest booth, crammed up on each other like rats, all nose
and sewage-slick hair and teeth they showed when they laughed their skittery foreign laughs.
I wanted to tell them off, but then Leo Shampoo was patting my nose with the tip of his
finger.
“Step off,” I barked.
“I just wanted to see if it was cold, like a dog’s.”
“How can you possibly be a real doctor?”
“Chief Dull Knife School of Medicine, Lame Deer, Montana, Class of Forty-five.”
“You just made that up.”
“Lame Deer, Montana, Northern Cheyenne Reservation. At least for my last year. The
first six I took correspondence courses.” With his pageboy hairdo, he looked like Louise
Brooks’s ugly brother. “I’ve discovered that Indian medicine is much more effective than
white medicine. Chanting, peach-leaf poultices, eating pine bark. The world of the flesh and
the world of the spirits are one. Sometimes you get gonorrhea because the bank teller
snipped at you last week … Uh-oh, looks like you lost a finger. Did the piano do that?”
“Only ever had four fingers, doc.”
“If you keep taking morphine, you might grow another one. He took a sip of his
lemonade, puckering. “Morphine is made from the dreams of hummingbirds.” Deirdre
spied us across the floor and winked and blew a kiss as Gracie’s cobra tail butlered her
champagne all the way to her lips. “I need to get one of those,” Kim Novak laughed,

57

pointing at the tail.
“What are you drinking?” I said to him.
“Lemon juice. I got scurvy last year.” He sniffed at my hand with his terrier nose.
“Your cat hand smells like SpaghettiOs.”
“Think that’s the chili.”
“Is that your feline friend doing the mashed potato with Janet Leigh?”
“That’s my wife doing the twist with Kim Novak. Janet Leigh’s a brunette.”
“You say tomato, I say tomato.”
“Doc, I got bigger problems I think than the slapper. Speaking of my feline friend, the
old manhood …”
“Hey, did you win an Oscar tonight?”
“What? Doc, yeah … the moment for congratulations was –”
“I thought I remembered a cat giving an acceptance speech. Didn’t you cry?”
“So, doc,” I said, tapping him on the cheek with the tip of my tail, “my Johnson &
Johnson, my Roman Candle, my Jesse James, it’s been a little slow to respond lately.” The
words lingered as the song faded, as Jimmy Stewart strode through the hive of waiters,
nodding at me as one settler must’ve nodded to another when they’d just felled a buffalo.
“Real fine job tonight, Tom, real fine,” he lipped in his preacher’s warble. “Heck of a
film, heck of a speech. From the heart,” he said.
“So are you saying you’re unable to achieve an erection with your wife?” said Leo
Shampoo said to me. “Or is it that you’re unable to please her sexually for other reasons?”
“Well,” said Jimmy Stewart, with a lemon juice pucker of his own, “I best be moving
along. Wanted to congratulate Miss Moreno, you see.” He knifed into the crowd and all I
saw were highball glasses, pepper grinders, the carrot Bugs was dicing while he was

58

propositioning Judy Garland, the Italian eggplants the restaurant used as centerpieces, the
tall bowl of Gracie’s flute, a kosher pickle between the teeth of Barbara Payton, kielbasa on
the plates of the Italians, George Burns’s cigar, a baguette gripped cutlass-style by Douglas
Fairbanks Jr. The chili was beginning to cool.
But then I felt Jerry’s entrance with the fanfare of waiters gasping, their platters of
champagne and shrimp cocktail teetering on their shoulders as my favorite rodent bounded
from one to the next in his toddler’s tuxedo, scooping a prawn into a dish of cocktail sauce
and leaping off and onto my shoulder. “Hey, Hoss,” he said, settling himself down, his face
brindled with lipstick, “want a prawn?” I slurped it into my mouth, sucked out the meat,
and spit the tail at the table of Italians, spearing one of them in the cheek. Back when we
were young and poor, I’d sneak Jerry under my trench into Hollywood Stars games, and the
friendly heft of him on top of me reminded me of the seventh inning stretch when he’d
straddle my shoulders to perform calisthenics. If I told Jerry his Parmesan knuckleball had
left me unable to get it up, his prescription would’ve been two hookers and enough rope to
outfit a schooner. He’d once told me there was no problem a $10 blowjob couldn’t solve.
“We were just talking to Gary Cooper,” said Leo Shampoo.
“That was Brigadier General James Stewart,” I said. “Gary Cooper’s dead.”
Twisting around Kim Novak, Gracie spotted us and frazzled her face up like a freckled
kid watching a funny cartoon. Without looking her tail dropped off her empty glass on a
passing platter and lassoed the next round. “Oh Tommy,” she said, padding over, “you two
are so adorable. It’s just like the old times, when we’d go downtown and have rooftop
picnics and throw rocks at the coolies.” She started lapping the chili and I told Leo
Shampoo to get some spoons.
“Are ya single, Mr. Mouse?” asked Deirdre.

59

“Take your dress off and you’ll find out,” he said.
“Tommy,” said Grace, nuzzling up into me, “why are those I-ties yelling at you in I-tie?”
“Because they lost the war,” I said, guessing they were part of the La Dolce Vita
production crew.
“Wasn’t Tommy just so patriotic tonight? And saying all those nice things about Igby
and the rest?”
“I heard Darryl Zanuck say you should star in a feature,” said Kim Novak.
“Really?” I said, looking up past the tiny cleft of her chin to see if she was serious.
“Where’s my favorite animals?” called Mr. Noggles Schmear in his broken music box of a
voice. He was reclining on a crewe galumphing over like a mechanical mastodon. Six
shirtless men who were probably at some point Ben-Hur extras were bearing him toward us
on a solid wood litter, with a giant walking beside holding up a parasol to cover Mr.
Schmear’s face: Mr. Schmear believed the wicked sun was always out to broil him, even at
night, even indoors. On closer inspection, the bacon of his suit appeared ersatz, but he was
eating a plateful of the real thing. Mr. Schmear wasn’t a very good Jew. One of his feet was
covered in a plush Porky Pig slipper, and the other was in a cast. Apparently a wheelchair
wasn’t dramatic enough. Kim Novak looked like she didn’t know if she should laugh or run
away, while Deirdre leaned behind me and whispered, “Mr. Schmear kapes sending me
suggestive telegrams.” I smiled, spotting Headley across the room, kabobed to the bar by
Joe Vogel, the latest Metro president, talking with Headley about directing a swords-and-
sandals flick, although I guessed the only sword Headley’d ever touched was the glorified
flyswatter of his boarding school fencing class.
“So the rumor’s true,” said Jerry from my other shoulder. “You broke your foot on
Charlton Heston’s brass balls.”

60

“Har,” Schmear said, sitting up, upsetting the balance of the bodybuilders, who nearly
dropped him. “MGM’s got a lotta moolah riding on those balls, so I don’t kick ‘em less I
have to.” He was so high above us I felt like I was speaking to a judge. “Congrats on the
Oscar. I wasn’t worried. We were a shoe-in. You swung for the fences on this one, Tom,
and I always had your back.” That was malarkey. He almost canned the project after he saw
the first couple rounds of dailies. “I got your tab covered tonight,” he said. “All of you,” he
added, waving lardy arms under fake larded sleeves at me, Jerry, Gracie, Kim Novak, Leo
Shampoo returning with a bouquet of spoons in each hand. “Miss Cluny, if I remember
right, you like your martinis dirty – HEY!” he screamed at a passing waiter, whipping what
looked like a pepperoni cufflink at the poor guy’s head. “A triple rye and a corn beer, plus a
rum-and-grenadine in a shot glass. Chilled champagne for Gracie and Ms. Novak. Extra-
dirty martini for Red here.” The waiter nodded as Schmear added, “And a lemon juice for
Dr. Shampoo … That barbiturate drink you gave me is working wonders for the toe,” he
told Leo.
“You should talk to your toe, too,” replied Leo Shampoo. “Sing it nursery rhymes,” he
added as “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” switched to “Tossin’ and
Turnin.’”
“I’ve been playing this in my office all week,” yelled Mr. Schmear, “and I want to dance!”
He barrel-rolled off the litter, and but for the second basemen reflexes of the nearest
strongman, he would’ve crushed Leo Shampoo into a latke. “Dance with me, Miss Cluny,”
he said, jumping out of the man’s arms and hopping over to her. “It was the middle of the niii-
ght” he sang, badly, doing a sort of Captain Ahab take on the twist as a bemused Deirdre
swiveled her generous hips. Sighing in relief, the musclemen set down the litter by the table
of Italians and began rubbing their shoulders. The tuxedoed giant held the lacy umbrella

61

high over Deirdre and Mr. Schmear’s head.
“Yer suit is making me hungry,” smiled Deirdre.
“I like a woman with a healthy appetite,” said Schmear, holding onto her waist for
balance.
“Do you ever dance, Jerry?” Kim Novak asked.
“Don’t like getting stepped on,” he said.
As I lapped chili and watched Deirdre shimmy, Monty Clift teetered over, boozed and
lost-looking. He plucked one of Leo’s spoons. “Tom, Tom, Tom, there is just someone ….
Mmmm,” he said, dipping the spoon and eating a hunk of soft red meat. “Someone you
must …”
“Stab?” asked Jerry.
“Defenestrate?” offered Leo Shampoo. He started lapping at the bowl of chili.
“Meet,” said Monty, blindly groping around the rat’s den of his mind. “He is … delicious,”
he said, taking another bite. He was vertical the way the leaning Tower of Pisa is vertical.
“Hot hot hot,” said Leo Shampoo, fanning his tongue.
The twist ended, giving way to “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.” Mr. Schmear
patted Deirdre on the cheek, she excused herself to the powder room, winking at me as
Spike and Mary Martha bounded out.
“It’s our song,” Spike said. They began slow dancing as elegantly as three hundred
pounds of bulldog could. It hadn’t ever surprised me Spike had ended up with a girl from
his old neighborhood. Jerry and had suggested numerous Afghans, Dalmatians, whippets,
and one knockout of a black poodle, but he married someone with a face like, well, a
bulldog, someone who had her First Holy Communion at the same mass he did, and even
though her satin dress bunched weird around her haunches and clung too much about the

62

stomach that had brought Spike’s brood into the world, when I saw the way she looked at
him, something out of a fairy tale ended right, some part of me thought Spike had done the
best of all of us.
“Director,” Monty spit out. “The giant,” he added, nodding at the man still holding the
parasol above Mr. Schmear’s head.
“The giant is a director?” Jerry asked.
“Nooooooo,” he said.
Gracie had been watching Spike and Mary Martha sweetly, and now she was eeling over.
“Tommy, I want to dance.” I nodded and handed the bowl of chili to Monty.
Jerry whistled at the musclemen, loud enough to make my ears ring.
“Hey, Hercules!” I bellowed, hopping up as a waiter passed, snatching his empty tray,
Frisbee-ing it toward the shirtless men, who were flexing for Rita Moreno. Just as one of
them caught it, Jerry sprang off my shoulder and landed on it. “Lift me high,” Jerry said. “I
wanna watch ‘em dance.” I took Gracie by the hand and cradled her back with my bound
paw.
“Tommy,” she said. “I am proud of you, so proud.”
“I’m trying, Gracie,” I said. “I’m trying.”
“It’s important, you know, it’s important what you do. Acting. I know it might seem like
fun and games, but we didn’t have that growing up. It was all humans. I’d always wanted to
be Audrey Hepburn, but I didn’t think I could be.” She’d never said this before. “Then I
saw Mickey Mouse,” she said, and spat, accidentally watering one of the Italians’
boutonnières. “And Bugs, and then you. A cat.” In the air, humours no human could smell
were rising out from our fur, intertwining, doing a dance of their own above our heads.
Turning with Gracie as slow as a clock’s second hand, I spotted a waiter laboring under a

63

mountain of spaghetti and meatballs plattered on his shoulder, and as it passed Jerry, my
partner pulled a pen knife from God knows where and speared three of them, each the size
of a tennis ball. The Italians only inches from Gracie and me started yowling in their
vowelly tongue, making gestures at Jerry I assumed were vulgar. Jerry didn’t even like
meatballs.
“Don’t let me go,” she whispered in my ear.
I spun her free toward Spike and Mary Martha as the Italians scrambled over themselves
to get at Jerry. I slid sideways between them and Jerry, brandishing a spoon. From the
breast pockets of their ridiculous tuxedoes, the Italians were pulling combs, letter openers,
nail files. “Just toss me to the giant,” said Jerry to the strongman holding him.
“Hey, Too-Tall Jones,” the strongman called across the dance floor, where Mr. Schmear
was admiring the couples under the canopy of the umbrella, and whipped the platter across
the dance floor, almost guillotining J. Lee Thompson. Jerry was sailing through, spinning
like a 33 on a 45, and when the giant took the platter in the solar plexus, Jerry pancaked into
his chest and slid all the way down his hip and leg to the floor. The Italians were sprinting
over, but Monty flung my bowl of chili out in front of them, and in their slick spats they
went splat, their fake musky perfumes mixing awfully with the tomatoes and meat of the
chili. From afar, Gracie was hooting, looking for something to throw.
Spike excused himself apologetically from Mary Martha, kissed his fists, invoked St.
Patrick and St. Michael, and stomped toward the Italians as I dove in, elbows first. But there
were more of them than I’d thought, and I felt hands clenching my arms, heard the
unmistakable snicker of a switchblade. My cheek was mashed into the floor, chili soaking
into the fur of my face. I couldn’t see Spike, but all at once, very close to my muzzle, I saw a
blade. Whoever was holding me was behind me, and I remembered a trick Wile E. Coyote

64

taught me: I turned my tail into a whip and cracked it. The shriek in my ear and the release
of my arms told me that my aim had been true. I rolled over just as the knife neared, and
somehow I escaped with only a butterflied bowtie and one nicked whisker.
“The hell are you waiting for, Volton,” shouted Mr. Schmear, shoving the giant toward
us. “We gotta protect Metro’s property. The giant started windmilling his arms at the
Italians, sometimes getting lucky and clopping one in the chin.
Spike was more efficient. “We share the same faith,” he said to them, “but not the same
values,” and with that, did his best John L. Sullivan, laying low half the Italians, who were
left cradling their beaky bloody noses. One managed to leg-sweep the giant, who crashed
like a falling crane, but when another swashbuckled over with a nail file, Gracie lassoed his
other wrist with her tail, spun him toward herself and slapped him so hard his olive-farming
grandfather felt it.
I offered my good paw to the flattened giant. “Call me Tom,” I said over the moans of
the fallen Italians, who apparently hadn’t learned their lesson after two World Wars.
“My name is Volton Ivanovich,” he said, raising an arm almost as long as I was tall and
swallowing my paw in his hand. “I think you’re a genius, and I love your country.”

3.

What happened after Chasen’s was an unreconstructable series of flashes. Or, to put it
another way, I was drunk:
Mr. Schmear stripping off his ersatz bacon suit in someone’s kitchen, stuffing it into the
oven and setting it to broil –

65

The shattering of Doris Day’s martini glass onto Kirk Douglas’s star when Gracie told
her about Lady Dear –
Trying to keep my eyes open as Vincente Minnelli asked me if there would be a follow-up
to “Four Hundred Meows” –
Floating around on doughnut raft with a champagne bottle between my knees at Mr.
Vogel’s, playing pool in his pool, while the help dropped sardines and lemon cake into my
mouth –
Smiling to see Bugs weep on a Hollywood Boulevard bus bench as we passed in our limo
at dawn, his fly unzipped, his date long gone –
And then Gracie and I were home, stumbling out of the limo in our borrowed bathing
suits, fancy clothes bunched under our arms, fur still damp, giggling like kids at a sleepover
because we’d decided the word pants was funny.
“Pants,” I said, stumbling toward the door through the hostas, frisking myself for the
key.
“Pants,” she said.
“Pants.”
“Pants.”
“Pants.”
“Pants.”
“Pants.”
“Pants.”
I dropped my tux onto plants whose name I didn’t know, then kissed Gracie. I could
taste the abalone on her tongue.
“Hi Tomsy,” she whispered, planting the fuchsia of her nose against the black of mine.

66

“Hi Gracie.” Her eyes were china blue plate on pink placemats: she never remembered
to close her eyes underwater.
“Hey Tommy, what’s that?” she asked, looking over my shoulder. On the welcome mat
that read Tooth and Claw, Foot and Paw was a fancy envelope.
“Who the hell is Constatin Zykov?” she asked, picking it up and reading the return
address.
“What did I do with the Oscar?” I said.
“You gave the Oscar to Jerry for safe keeping.”
“Really? What a terrible idea,” I said, thumbing at my whiskers, trying to remember.
“It was right before you pushed Richard Widmark into the pool.”
“I definitely don’t remember that.”
“Who’s Zykov?” she yawned, magically finding my key in my pants on her paw’s first
dive.
I opened the envelope to find a brief letter handwritten in script that reminded me of the
Declaration of Independence. The letter and envelope were ivory bond and smelled of dried
lavender. It read:

Mr. Grimalkin:

Count Constatin Zykov requests your presence today, April 10
th
, the year of Our Lord nineteen sixty-two, at
eleven o’clock in the morning, at the Los Angeles Zoo.

VI

67

“Constantin Zykov,” Gracie said, chewing the syllables. “Sounds like a vampire.”
Five hours later my alarm clock was jackhammering, and so was my head.
My ablutions were Colgate and morphine, catnip and cream. I grabbed a couple cans of
tuna, shoved my JFK shades onto my face, and sharked up Franklin in my blue El Dorado,
ricocheting around duller cars, listening to KHJ and opening my cans of tuna with a single
canine, a single turn of the wrist. “Protein,” I yelled at the dashboard, slapping myself to
keep awake. “What you need is protein.”
Since with the paw I had to downshift with my left, and since I was hungover, and since I
was thinking on Lady Dear and zoos, I almost blew my transmission outside on Los Feliz.
The zoo was where the meaner nuns said we’d get sent if we were bad. I’d never been to
one before.
“One ticket,” I said to the kid behind the counter, a caged badger of a boy, teeth like a
split-rail fence after a cyclone’s come through, grizzled black hair that started mid-brow and
looked like it had been brushed back at gunpoint. The clock behind him read quarter to
eleven.
“No one here knows your name,” he said, and the eyes that wanted to start a fight with
me were stuck way too close together. Without looking down, he pulled out a copy of that
morning’s Reporter and held it up to me. Near the bottom was a coaster-sized photo of me
holding up my Oscar, but not holding it together. I looked like I was having a seizure. I
snatched the paper away. “You being a fancy star doesn’t matter here,” the kid said. “You’re
one of them,” he said, jerking his thumb backward toward the caged beasts, “and just
because you can parrot words at me doesn’t mean you’re a person.”
“Thanks, Aristotle,” I said, pushing two bits at him while he tore off my ticket and flicked

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it at me. “Think your mom missed a little bit of monkey shit when she was cleaning your
collar,” I added. He licked a thumb and rubbed at nothing on his grubby collar, and as I
made my merry way over to the turnstile, I turned my palm back to him and gave a toodle-
ye-ooo wave. Riding this riptide of courage, I meandered out to the monkey house, which
looked like a respectable enough establishment, a bunch of tree fort flophouses webbed
together by sturdy rope, Tarzan’s dream. The chimps were taking a siesta in the growing
heat, sprawled across logs, picking bugs off each other’s heads, occasionally taking a half-
hearted swing from rope to rope. The place smelled like black bananas, but there were
worse smells. As a life, it didn’t seem so rough – other people bring you food, clean up after
you, and you get to lay around all day. It was Palm Springs with rope swings. I waved and
one of them capered over, waving back, giving me one of those impossibly big monkey
smiles.
When humans talk about animal perception, they like to toss around “sixth sense,” that
deflated football of a phrase, but some clichés are clichés for a reason, and when that chimp
started playing xylophone with a stick against the bars that kept him in and me out, big
burgundy clouds of fear rolled off of him like dime store cologne.
“How’s this afternoon treating you, fella?” I asked. He said ack and his smile snapped
shut. Hoofing through the splintery forts, he kept whooping, point at his mouth and then at
me. The whole barrel of them began sidling over to me just as a blonde mother strollered
her blonde toddler over. “Look, little Linda,” she said. “Monkeys.”
“Monkeys,” said little Linda.
“Monkeys,” laughed the mother.
“Monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys.”
The chimps were crawling all over each other to get a better look at me. They pointed –

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quizzical, bemused – and chattered at each other, still ogling. It made me wish I’d picked a
cleaner pair of slacks that morning.
“Look, little Linda,” said the mother. “They monkeys are looking at the talking cat who’s
looking at them.”
“Good observation, Miss Marple,” I said, turning to glare at her, still gripping one of the
rusty crossbars, feeling my tail unfurl and flex in the dead air, at which the monkeys backed
away. Monkeys have a sixth sense too. A few started snarling, and the burgundy clouds
darkened, condensed to bilge water. One pebble hit me in the shoulder, another sailed
between my ears, and I turned back to the cage just as something dark grew in my peripheral
vision. I’d spent the last twenty years dodging a mouse who could practically fly, so
involuntarily I let go of the bar, settling into a defensive crouch just as a monkey crashed
teeth first into the bar. He grunted, grabbing at his mouth, and when Little Linda pointed
and said, “The monkey made a funny,” he turned to her, blood spilling onto his chin, and
hissed, spitting vermillion. The girl’s face exploded red and wet like a lanced boil, the
housewife retreated with her pram, and even though my writhing, aggravated tail betrayed
me, I winked at her, then pulled a Lucky from my pack along with my lighter, and in a neat
trick Bugs had taught me years before, lit it one-handed and faced the monkeys square.
They were gawking, stomping, garbling nonsense at me. Smirking, I smoked the whole
Lucky down to its nub, then flicked it into the cage and watched the monkeys fight over the
butt.
I wasn’t quite ready for the next exhibit, so I thought I’d read about myself to steel my
soul, but when I opened up the Reporter, my eyes drifted south from my photo to a shot of
Tweety, half blackened and missing feathers. The article said he was in critical condition at
Hollywood Presbyterian, that he’d been attacked by unknown assailants outside an Oscar

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party at Trader Vic’s. So much for steeling my soul.
I was angling for creatures smaller and stupider – fish, toucans, rabbits – but my aimless
paws led me toward the savannah smells that were my ancestors’ first memories, sun-baked
grasses and mesquite and overripe prickly pear, acacia bark and the marrow of the cloven-
hoofed. The tight scribble of path opened onto a plain edged by a cliff, beyond which I
could see the rows and columns of Glendale domesticity, but nearer was a nobler and more
ancient family, a pride of lions eying the lowly zoo-goers from the other side of the cliff. I’d
never seen a lion in the flesh before, and they brooded with all the sad wisdom of slaves
more dignified than their masters. One of the men noticed me, gathering me in eyes the
color of the rushes woven together to bear the baby Moses to safety. Cantering down
toward me from his berm, he did not look away. I did look away, noticing the human snail
trail of waste: thought-bubbles of gum slowing decaying from pink to gray, corndog sticks
with nipples of fried cornbread still barnacled near the bottom, the flytrap stick of Coca-Cola
everywhere. When I looked up, he was there. No fence separated us, only a dead moat for
an exiled king. I whiffed into the wind, and his feelings were resin, a myrrh too complicated
to parse or name, the sort of natural ganache that could snare a beetle, harden to amber,
survive intact for ten million years only to be sold for ten cents as a drug store curiosity.
I am tired, said the lion, although his mouth was closed. My muscles are soft for want of use. I
sleep poorly. The meat they give me is bloodless and stale. I don’t want to be given meat. I want to eat the
children. I want to be let loose upon the rhinoceros and the elk. I can smell them. Maddening. But once I
was young. You are still young, and I smell the warrior in you. But you have become debauched. Your body
will betray you. You must care for it. You must train it. Stop relying upon the empty praise of men. We
were devouring them long before they caged us. We will eat their remains long after they destroy each other.
Where will you be on that day?

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“Vhat is he saying to you, To-mas,” said a commie voice from behind me.
“He’s telling me to watch out,” I said, “make sure I have things arranged when you and
America blow up the world.”
With no farewell, the lion padded back to his women.
I turned to see the Russian giant and at his side a besuited man whose profile was a
drawn bow, stiff-backed, with a perfect curve of a paunch beginning under his chin,
extending over his tycoon’s belly, and ending at the narrow cuffs of his pants. The suit was
tailored, but ancient, the wool shiny around the collar and wrist. The giant and his
companion wore matching tortoiseshell sunglasses. “What do you think when you see one
of your own treated this way?” asked the fat man, still gazing at the pride. “How does it
make you feel?”
Thrill and sadness and shame was the real answer, but no creepy Ruskie was going to find
that out. It was a good moment for another Parliament, so I slapped on my own shades –
black – and stared at the side of his face. He looked like Churchill and talked like Dracula.
Soldiering on, he said, “What do you think when you see a housecat?”
“That I have a better dental plan.”
“Ha. Yes. A joke. Excellent. You are a jokester extraordinaire. I have been told about
the …”
“Episodes,” said the giant.
“Yes, episodes,” said the man. “Yes, very humorous. Quite. What is the word for it,
Volton?”
“Slapstick,” said the giant, waving at me.
“Yes. Slapping. Sticking. That seems apt. Do you enjoy sticking and slapping,
Thomas?”

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“Want a demonstration?” I asked, waving my hand in front of his face.
“I am afraid I cannot take a look at it, or anything else.”
I dropped my hand. I’d just taunted a blind guy.
“Your comic talents I do not doubt,” he went on, finally turning to my voice. “And were
we staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I would cast you as Puck without a second thought.”
A balloon of pride was inflating inside my hungover head. Shakespeare? They wanted me
for Shakespeare? But across the moat I saw the lion. The empty praise of men.
“But I am not staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I need to know that you can feel.
You are an orphan. Your early childhood was a string of desolations.” The pride rushed out
of me with the farting noise of a balloon neck pulled wide. I never talked about life before
age six, and the only people who knew everything were Gracie, Jerry, Spike, and Bugs.
“The ignorant do not believe you are sentient, and the better-informed consider you and
oddity rather than a person. The dumb beasts distrust you and the talking animals envy your
success while mocking your reliance on humans. My question, sir, is this,” he said, his voice
growing to a roar, “DO YOU FEEL PAIN?”
I pulled the rodney from my mouth and extinguished it against the back of my wrist. The
gray fur sizzled and blackened in a stink, the embers scorching the skin beneath. I shoved
my wrist under his blubbery honker. “Try this perfume,” I said.
He snorted so hard the vacuum tugged at my fur. “Marvelous.” He extended a hand
more or less in my direction. I shook it awkwardly with my left paw. “My name is
Constantin Zykov. I am your director and rehearsal begins in two days. Begin memorizing
Hamlet’s lines as soon as possible.”
“What?”
“What what? Did not Montgomery explain? We are staging an all-animal Hamlet at the

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Hollywood Bowl. October. You will play the eponymous character, I will direct, and
Volton –”
“Wait, you’re blind.”
“Sight is trivial in the direction of stagecraft.”
“I’ve heard a lot of theories,” I said, still not sure if the obese loon was pulling my leg.
“But I can safely say: not that one.”
“Volton my dramaturge will be my eyes. We would like to cast your wife as Ophelia.”
“Thanks for the typecasting.”
He took his cane from Volton and started tapping along the asphalt path. “Tomorrow,
two p.m. The Hollywood Bowl.”

“What, has this thing appear’d again to-night?”
“Well, Bugs, appears it has,” I mumbled into the receiver, rubbing my eyes. “You know,
the phones work at hours other than the ones betwixt midnight and six.”
“Most like it harrows me with fear and wonder.”
“Okay, Bugs,” I said. “What the hell?”
“I’m Horatio,” he said.
“Whore what?” I’d been dreaming of the Serengeti, the sun baking my pelt.
“Horatio. Hamlet’s more handsome friend and mentor. Or at least that’s what Mr. Z
said.”
“Great. Okay, Bugs, I gotta sleep.”
“But you’re Hamlet.”
“I’ll still be Hamlet in the morning.”
“I underlined all my lines, but then I had to ask the cigarette girl to read ‘em to me.”

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In the background, I heard someone call out what sounded like Bingo numbers. “Bugs,
where are you?”
“Hey Tom, do you think Mr. Z’s going to use his commie mind tricks to brainwash me
and turn me into a KGB spy?”
“Probably,” I said. “But that’s the price we pay for our art.”
“How true,” he said. “How very true.”
I’d promised the lion’s absent spirit I wouldn’t have another drink that day, which wasn’t
so hard: after a squirt of morphine, what was the point of scotch? But it wasn’t Monday
anymore, so I unscrewed the fancy cognac Headley’d given me as an Oscar present. It
smelled suspiciously good. Three years before, Gracie’s father had given us snifters for our
anniversary, and trying not to think of what Jerry would say if he saw me drinking Frenchy
stuff out of Italian cut crystal, I poured myself a few fingers, cycloned it around the glass,
inhaled with my mouth, and took a sip. Then another. I didn’t know anything tasted that
good.
I’d been a simple son, with wharfish taste for mackerel and milk, the warm sun and a dry
pair of socks, Felix cartoons Saturday morning and the smell of incense at the cathedral on
Sunday, riding in the back of a truck with the wind blowing my whiskers back to my ears.
Growing up was a long series of realizing: I can’t believe I’ve never had this before. Lucky Strikes.
Bach. Scallops. Second base. Walt Whitman. Motor boats. Beer. Silk boxers. Sex parties.
Chopin. Champagne. And now morphine. And now cognac. I didn’t know if the list of
pleasures ran out, and what happened when it did. I shrugged, took a sip, liberated that
night’s chops from the fridge. I sat at the sparkly blue table with a knife, a bottle, and the
copy of Hamlet Zykov had sent over after our meeting. Despite the nuns’ best efforts, I
didn’t audition for my senior-year production of Hamlet at St. Francis, and didn’t read it in

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English class two years before that. Twelve hours before the first rehearsal seemed like a
good time to start.
The ghost was a good hook, and if I wondered if we could get James Mason to do the
voice – but everyone was so chatty. But I had no idea what chatty was until Claudius came
around. I hated him from the moment he started spewing that ass-backward six-line
sentence. I had to read it three times before I had any idea what the hell it meant.
I liked Hamlet’s snark, but he was too smart for his own good. And I couldn’t believe his
mom just dropped him when his dad died. He was a sweet enough kid, but halfway through
the second scene I knew he wasn’t leading man material. I think I would’ve liked the dad
more. Out the window I saw a ghouly cattish shape in yard, but when I rubbed my eyes, it
was gone. To clear my head, I set my cheek down on the glittery moon-blue table, and next
thing I knew, light the color of a young banana was bleeding through the blinds, Gracie was
schlepping cream in from the porch, and the radio was piping in Dino. “Ain’t that a kick in
the head,” Gracie sang, her alto the appealing grain of ultra-fine sandpaper.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Was I dreaming, or did Bugs call again last night?”
“How often you dream about Bugs Bunny?”
She coiled herself around my back and grabbed one of the chop bones, going to town on
the marrow. I could smell the cream on the fur of her mouth. “Big ears … buck teeth …
long belly,” she said between raspy nibbles. “No thank you. But I like that it made you
jealous, Tommy.”
“Bugs can’t read,” I said.
“I know that,” she said, setting the cream between us, “Everybody knows that.” We
began lapping, skulls pressed together over the moon-blue table. “I can’t believe you’d

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never been to a zoo before, Tommy. The critters are all so funny.”
“One of the chimps tried to bite off my hand.”
She giggled, blowing bubbles into the cream. “See, that’s what I mean. Funny.”
“You ever read Hamlet before?”
“At Wilson,” she said. Woodrow Wilson High, way up in the San Joaquin, was one of
the earliest schools to integrate talking animals and humans. Far as I could tell, they’d spent
most of the time planting tomatoes, reading fairy tales, playing soccer – all sorts of
suspicious, commie-like activities.
“What happens?”
“I can’t remember. Nothing? Everybody dies?”
“Nothing happens and everybody dies?”
“I think Hamlet’s supposed to be crazy.”
“I thought the dame –”
“Ophelia –”
“I thought Ophelia was supposed to be crazy.”
“Maybe they’re both crazy.”
“Is anybody not crazy?”
“Yeah. Everybody else is either evil or confused.”
“Hell of a way to spend our summer,” I said.
“But Tommy, we’ll be able to work together again,” she said, beaming across the empty
bowl. The reason Gracie hadn’t been in an episode since Kennedy’s inauguration was the
relentless logic of inter-studio escalation: the kid in Kenosha got bored with shotguns, so
give Wile E. an Acme Gatling gun, but then Elmer needs a bazooka, which means Sylvester
finds himself magically in possession of an ICBM. In the paper-rock-scissors of

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entertainment, violence trumped romance, which meant Gracie’s appearances had grown
rare and my injuries had grown frequent. The bowl we’d been drinking cream from was
T&J merchandise, and the bottom of this one featured Jerry pounding my foot with a ball
peen hammer.
“Yeah, Grace, course. It’s going to be great.”
“Just like Frank and Ava,” she said, then caught herself. “Except we’re making it …
We’re making it, aren’t we, Tommy?” Our faces mirrored, hers white and callow, mine I
knew grizzled and gray.
“Yeah, Gracie,” I said. “We’re making it.”
She licked the pool of cream from my pained cartooned face and took the bowl to the
sink. “When do you want to leave for rehearsal?” she asked.
“I’m going to visit Tweety at Hollywood Presbyterian. I can walk over to the Bowl after
that.”
“He’s going to be okay, right, Tommy?”
“Yeah, he’ll be good as new soon. Buzzing around our heads, annoying the hell out of
us.”
“You don’t think it happened to him because I said I wanted to eat him, do you?”
“No, Grace. It happened because …” I sighed, tossing the chop bones into the garbage.
“I don’t know why it happened.”
“I can’t go with you,” she said.
“I know, Gracie.” She hated hospitals. She couldn’t stand the thought that anyone
could ever get sick and old and die.
I dressed and ambled down to the Boulevard, which that night would glitter with teeth
and miniskirts, but in the hard light of morning it was an empty bunker on the outpost of a

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crumbled empire. The Hills above were green and restless, and the sidewalks churned with
copies of the Reporter in the malingering wind.

“It’s the fucking skins, shitball cock-sucking snake-raping tuftheads,” said Sylvester,
flinging a vase of Deborah Kerr’s lilies out the open window. They fluttered like angels in
the updraft as the porcelain splatted against the trunk of a palm tree.
“I don’t like snakes,” murmured Tweety from his ottoman-sized hospital bed. With a
wriggle he turned onto his non-blackened side and pecked another of the cashews I’d piled
on his pillow.
“I know, snumblebum,” said Sylvester, petting Tweet’s claw.
Dissertations could’ve been written on the relationships between the great chasers and
the great chasees: Publicly, Elmer only tolerated Bugs, but every Michaelmas he sent the
rabbit a case of port and an original, hand-penned sonnet musing on the passage of time and
the cyclical nature of history, and while Bugs mocked his accent, he secretly whispered
Elmer’s witticisms under his breath, trying to remember the humdingers; me and Jerry
thought of ourselves as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, respectively; Buzz Buzzard
and Woody Woodpecker golfed together every Friday in Pasadena and every Hanukah
joined their families for a feast of roasted nuts and dried fruit; as for Wile and Roadrunner,
they weren’t acting – they’d been discovered in the late Forties in the Mojave, Wile speeding
on a motorcycle throwing lit sticks of dynamite at RR, and while now they understood they
were being filmed, they hadn’t changed, and thus could never appear in public together,
because they would kill each other; but there was no pair like Sylvester and Tweet: they lived
together in a cabin on Mt. Wilson in the animal kingdom’s strangest Boston marriage, rarely
scampering/flying down into the city, preferring their Ouija boards and Agatha Christie

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books, listening to the player piano under the dozens of UFO photos Sylvester had shot and
developed himself over the years, and even though no one believed me, I’d seen their
bedroom with my own eyes, and I swear to God they slept in matching sleigh beds, one a
third the size of the other, and every evening before turning in, Sylvester tucked in Tweety
Bird and whispered Good night, sweet prince.
It was hard to imagine such sentiments flowering from the mouth of the creature now
tearing up a signed photo of Sammy Davis Jr. and stamping on it in a petulant kid’s double-
footed stomp. No surprise for a tuxedo cat, Sly had a black-and-white soul, his attitude us-
versus-them. Me, I was a gray cat.
“Take it easy, Sly,” I said, lighting a Lucky. “If anybody understands what it’s like to be
us, it’s Sammy Davis Jr.”
He stopped hopping, considering this, as Tweety began whistling “The Candy Man.”
The room was a jungle of lilies and carnations, and I sniffed at a bouquet while Sly stared
down at the torn bits of Sammy D’s photo, now as jumbled as a Picasso.
Sly shrugged. “I am half black myself.” I raised what little tuft of eyebrow I had, but
decided not to say anything.
Tweet coughed from what the doctors had said was smoke damage to his pinkie-sized
lungs.
“Ach!” cawed Sly, excavating a hairball from his deepest core and spitting it down at
Sammy D. Shoulders slumping, he plucked a cashew from the pillow and dropped it into
Tweet’s mouth. “There there, wifflepurse, it will be all right.”
“I like pisghetti,” said Tweety. “I don’t like motor oil.”
“What did you say to the police, Tweet?” I asked, rolling over.
“I like water. I don’t like water.”

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“They don’t understand the poetry of his language,” said Sly. “Even that raccoon cop
just smirked.”
“Didn’t see you at Chasen’s.”
“Mobsters run Chasen’s. And the big-assed waiters always screw up my order. How
hard can it be: one raw trout, butterflied and unsalted, with a squeeze of lemon juice?”
The nurse clipped in, a sun bear with a gorgeous gold necklace of fur peeking out from her
over-starched uniform.
“Ma’am,” said Sly, half-bowing.
“How is my little parsnip?” she said in a voice like a mix of hot sauce and honey. Malaya,
I guessed. Her claws were something out of the Spanish Inquisition, and I was afraid she’d
fillet Tweet by accident, but the touch of her finger along his throat was as light as a blown
kiss.
“So, who do you think is behind it?” I asked.
Sly eased onto the foot of the bed and whispered: “I didn’t know about any of them until
the Oscars.”
“Really?”
“We don’t get out much. I didn’t know about Lady Dear until your speech.”
“So where were you when …” I pointed up the bed at Tweet.
“Poolside, Trader Vic’s, me and Tweety and the Looney Tunes crew, Joey Bishop, Percy
Borhnolm, some scribblers, Donald Duck, but there were these Ruskie-type people
everywhere, real ugly and hairy, and in the middle of them’s this midget with a huge planet
of an ass, made me feel like I was back at Chasen’s again.” I didn’t recall the waiters at
Chasen’s being particularly hippo-butted, but there was no arguing with Sly.
“Was it the guy from that cartoon? The Croatian one?”

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He shrugged. “Anyway, I’m drinking my pineapple juice and Tweet’s doing like he does
flapping over the pool, telling each and every one of the girls that he likes their hair –”
“I like Jayne Mansfield,” said Tweet. “I like two-piece bathing suits.”
“I know, parsnip,” said the nurse, sliding a blood pressure cuff the size of a cigar ring
around Tweet’s lower leg.
“Jayne Mansfield was there?” I said, sitting up to light my second Lucky. “You mention
Donald Duck was with you, but not Jayne Mansfield in a bikini?”
“She wasn’t exactly with us, plus human chicks don’t do anything for me – all that skin,
no fur. Like those Sphinx cats.” My lip quivered in revulsion. It was hard not to gag when
you saw a hairless. “You should understand. You got the prettiest wife in Hollywood.”
“I know,” I said, picturing Gracie at our red table, memorizing her lines, face scrunched
up like a kid counting down in hide-and-go-seek.
“Gracie’s kind of a b dash dash dash dash, though.” Sly didn’t swear around women.
“Not with me she isn’t,” I said, then wondered if it was true.
“We were having a nice time. Howie Hughes even came out from one of his bungalows
to say hello.”
“It’s Howie, is it?”
He shrugged. “Some years back before RKO exploded he said he was interested in
making a movie with me and little Sugar Plum here. Then RKO exploded.”
“I haven’t seen him in years. How did he look?”
“Coulda used a hamburger. And a haircut. Said we should have won the Oscar and not
you.”
“Never liked Howard Hughes.”
“He was friendly. Had the missus with him. Talked to Percy for a while.”

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“How’s Percy?”
“Bought a lot of drinks for all of us, real considerate, specially since he’s a teetotaler. Real
nice. Bugs kept daring him to jump in and swim the length underwater. Had an Oriental-
type lady with him. Real young. Real pretty. Tweet was having a field day, between her and
Jayne Mansfield. Anyway, this Commie midget, he decides he wants to swim, so changes
out of his tux in one of those little A-rab tents they have there, then jumps back out in these
trunks so tight it looks like he stuck a couple of beach balls under there, but then his buddies
grab him by the arms and legs and throw him in. He’s just flapping around, and I don’t
know if it’s he can’t swim or the trunks are too tight for him to move his legs, but a second
later, he just sinks. His friends start yabbering and waving their arms and shaking their heads
and a couple people in the pool who saw tried to dive down, but the pool’s deep and they’re
drunk. Bugs thinks it’s hysterical, and I’m the only one in trunks, because a tuxedo cat in a
tuxedo is ridiculous by the pool, and I was just planning to wade later on, since fur’s so
heavy.”
“I always wear a lifejacket.”
The nurse’s tasks seemed completed, but she was still there, nosing around the flowers.
Tweet was trying to whistle “Moon River.”
“I knew I’d have to touch his giant ass to rescue him, and I was standing at the edge,
thinking, but then Percy was taking off his tie, kicking off his shoes, which made me feel
dumb since I was already in trunks, so I dove down to where the midget was on the bottom,
guess what? The suit had split and fallen off completely.”
“Naked?”
“He was like a bear, no offense to your fine genus and species,” he added to the nurse,
who with her spatula tongue was licking at a honeycomb some conscientious soul had sent

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Tweet. “His ass was like a couple of watermelons with a throw rug glued to them. He’s
burbling and thrashing, but I manage to grab him by the foot and just start kicking up as
hard as I could. Finally we make it to the surface, I shove him over the edge, then I roll out
after him, and he starts dancing around, naked, like the whole thing was a joke. Everyone’s
laughing and laughing, I can’t even move because my fur must weigh a hundred pounds, but
then Jayne Mansfield dog-paddled over and put her hand on my leg and said she thought we
should’ve won the Oscar and not you.”
“I’m detecting a pattern here.”
“She kept her hand right there, on my knee,” he said, pointing at his pant leg. “But then
I couldn’t find Tweety. I tried to sit up, but with all the water in my fur it was like I was
wearing ten flak jackets. Percy helped me up, gave me a towel, and we started looking,
calling Tweety’s name, wandering toward the dumpsters, then off behind some hedge I hear
this poor muddlepup crying, so I’m running over, but it’s like a bad dream because I’m
running so slow what with the wet fur. Percy’s sprinting ahead of me when I hear a match
and there’s a whoosh and then Tweety’s flying around in these crazy circles, covered in
black, half on fire, flapping in the wind, and there are these camera flashes I can see through
the hedge, and I’m jumping over the hedge –”
“Pretty lady,” cooed Tweety. “Pretty lady.”
“But then I heard a truck start and they zoomed away, and their laughs sounded like
Ruskie laughs, and I thought: The midget faked drowning just to distract me.”
“Tweet was flapping through the air, still on fire, and I told him to come down, but he
couldn’t understand, so I climbed a tree and jumped and caught him, and put the fire out
and started wiping him down as best I could with the towel Percy’d –”
But the sun bear had wheeled, roaring, clawing air, and I thought for a sec she was going

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to eat all of us. Only Tweety was calm. Turning back to us, purple-black rage was sparking
off of her, and she said pointed at claw at me and said, “You find them, Tom,” her voice still
rumbling with her roar. A human nurse peeked in and the sun bear whipped an empty
bedpan at her. “You find them and you do to those humans what they did to this little
parsnip.”

The Hollywood Bowl always seemed as likely a place as any for the Second Coming, and
every time I’d ever left a concert there, as happy as the crowd was, they always seemed
disappointed that the rapture hadn’t happened, or if it had, that they’d been left behind. But
at two o’clock on a Monday afternoon it was a tarmac of a parking lot and in the distance a
bomb shelter of a stage. I saw a green Studebaker. I saw a tin lizzy scrawled over in white
paint with the signs of the Zodiac. I saw a pink Fiat with plates that said MM Loves MM. I
saw Porky Pig pop out of a rusty Ranch Wagon, the skin of his head a sprinkler under the
sun, his hankie was no match. But he kept on wiping anyway. He’d bought the car ten years
prior, when he expected by the Sixties he’d be able to field a baseball team with his brood of
piglets, but there were no piglets, no Mrs. Pig, just an ailing set of parents in St. Louis whose
hospital bills stole even more of his salary than Uncle Sam did.
“Pork,” I called.
He spun around in his tight waistcoat, almost falling onto the gravel. “T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-
tom, congrats on the Oscar. But we’re l-l-l-ate.”
“The hell we are,” I said, my paws rising into the air like some Indian god’s. “The play’s
named after me. They won’t start till we get there.”
“You’re …”
“H-A-M-L-E-T. The man himself. What about you, Pork?”

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“P-p-p-p-p-p-polonius.”
“Right,” I said. “He’s the, uh …”
“The wise old counselor to the c-c-c-court. And the father of Laertes and Ophelia.”
“Hey,” I said, clapping him on the back as we shuffled toward the gates. “That means
you’re my father-in-law. Although how you could ever be Gracie’s –”
“You never get married,” he said. “Ophelia –”
“Whoa whoa,” I said. “Don’t spoil it for me.”
Inside the usual suspects were occupying the first rows, scanning well-marked scripts and
waiting for Zykov with the nervousness of kids on the first day of school. Grace was hip-to-
hip with Minnie in the third row, and they were sharing pralines and an Arnold Palmer,
Minnie’s favorite drink since 1949, when Mickey left her and she left behind the celluloid
empire and its vices for the wider world.
Way up in the corner, forty rows back, Mick was alone, picking through a sack of fan
mail. His modus o I’d seen before: slice open the letter with a stiletto, read it with a smirk,
return it to its envelope, light it with a match, and toss the smoldering paper into the air. A
few rows back of Gracie, Bugs was sneaking looks at a comic book, while at his side, John
Special Smelter – that drunk, that prophet, that bloodhound holy roller – was murmuring
over the stained pages of his battered King James, weeping. A cancerous panda I didn’t
know was sitting in the first row scratching at his eyes, and directly behind was a pair of
flamingos, pinky-swearing with their necks, jabbering in Spanish: I’d heard about them, twin
brothers who’d been headliners at the Tropicana and Batista loyalists until the Battle of
Santa Clara, after which they swam/flew the hundred miles to Key West to seek political
asylum. Apparently they spoke no English and thought Jerry Lewis should run for
President.

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In a pilot’s tinted goggles, Goofy was checking his personal horoscope against the
professional wisdom of half a dozen papers, while poor typecast Eeyore was sprawled on his
back on the concrete stairs, his muzzle bloodied with raspberry jam. Slumped at the edge of
an orchestra pit was a hungover giraffe, eyes closed, pelt napped. Wile had brought his own
card table, which he’d set on the edge of the orchestra pit, and he was playing a game of
blackjack against himself while slurping the marrow from a dirigible of ribs that looked way
too close to human. A green porkpie and a pointy brown head was all I needed to ID Yogi,
although the porkpie was currently cocked on the rack of the shrimpy moose slumped next
to him. Bullwinkle. We were all there, and I felt like the starting pitcher in the All-Star
game.
“It’s like I walked into Hamlet’s funeral!” I shouted, bounding down the stairs ahead of
Porky. “I’m right out if this ain’t fun.” Besides the sharp dill tang of nervousness, the air
was scented with a deeper fear. Everyone was imagining what it was like to be kidnapped
and set on fire. Eeyore flung a glance back at me then covered his face with his hooves.
Mickey chuffed, then tossed another slip of burning love into the air.
“Tommy,” said Gracie, wiping crumbs from her pink lips, “Minnie’s just got back from
Korea. USO.” As usual, Minnie was in polka dots, and she blew me a one-fingered kiss as I
sidled down the aisle. Sultans had built fiefdoms with less treasure than her alimony, and
from what I’d heard, she’d thrown all of it into Kodak and Avon and was now so rich Getty
came to her for investment advice.
“Tom,” Minnie said, standing, “it’s good to see you.” I kissed her cheek. She smelled
like roses and baby powder.
“Tommy,” said Grace as I took a seat next to her, “did Tweety look very bad?”
“He could talk but he was coughing, and the feathers on one of his wings was pretty

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black.”
“Once I went on a date with Lady Dear,” said Goofy. “It didn’t go so well.”
“It’s the end of us,” said Eeyore.
“Buck up, Eeyore,” said Bugs, closing his book, which had a crude brown paper bag
cover.
“None of you remember,” said Eeyore, rolling over, raising his stumpy arms at the cruel
heavens. “But when that man shot the Archduke, lots of us ended up dead. They lynched a
terrier I knew in the middle of the day in Trafalgar Square. Lots of good rabbits died that
year. But none of you know. You weren’t there.”
“I was,” said Mickey, striding down the stairs, behind him a cape of burning paper
turning veronicas in the breeze. “A fox I knew who had his own burlesque show in
Washington Square Park was skinned and found a week later in the East River. You’re such
children. These murders are nothing more than the flimflam of Soviet hysteria,” he
concluded in his fake aristocratic accent. His eyes were all iris, black as grenades. “What
you should really fear is the bombs the Russians will drop on us before the year is out.” A
few rows down, Special Smelter whimpered, nodding.
Bugs’s ears were drooping and I could tell Gracie was about to cry, but I wasn’t going to
let Mickey win, so I said, “Who is this Zykov guy anyway? And how the hell did he get all
the studios to sign off? And does everyone understand we’re about to do the longest play in
the English language with a director who’s blind?”
A water balloon of chatter burst. “The greatest theater director in Europe.” “Brando
calls him every night before he goes to bed to thank him.” “Plays tennis with Daryl Zanuck
every Tuesday, and Zykov always wins even though he’s blind.” “An ex-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-
priest.” “The last of the Romanovs.” “He assassinated Stalin.” “His eyes were put out by

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the czar.” “His eyes were put out by Trotsky.” “He stared at the sun too long.” That last
one was Bugs, and I had to smile as the barrage continued. “He invented the Method.” “He
is the Method.” “He doesn’t use a script.” “He made Burt Lancaster cry.” “He tells you your
dad raped you.” “My dad did raise me” – Bugs again – “and he did a hell of a job too.” “He
can karate-chop you with his mind.”
I put my arm around Gracie, who whispered that she thought she might be able to visit
Tweety as long as the doctors were sure he wasn’t going to die. Bugs and Goof and Pork
had clambered down into the orchestra pit and then up onto the stage, and were tossing a
baseball, arguing whether Zykov was the real reason James Dean was dead. Bugs always
threw too hard, and Porky couldn’t catch anything.
This Method I didn’t know much about, but any kind of wah-wah shrink mumbo-jumbo
was snake oil. My method was chase after a mouse with a Hitler complex and try not to die.
My method was run from a well-intentioned bulldog who still broke my bones sometimes.
My method was repetition. My method was pain.
Bugs wound up and threw a slider that tipped off Pork’s waiter’s glove, sailed over the
orchestra pit, and rolled to the feet of the itchy panda, so stiff he looked taxidermied.
Dazed, the panda pawed at the ground until he found the ball, scooped it up with both
paws, and in voice rasping from an unmoving mouth, he said, “Be assured I cannot karate-
chop you with my mind.” Cradling the ball like an egg, he waddled toward the stage and
said, “Mr. Bunny, catch.” But before he could toss the ball to a stricken Bugs, he crashed
into the pit’s guardrail and pinwheeled down, landing after a long second with a thunk.
“Must be a Gemini,” said Goofy. “Four out of six newspapers say Geminis will suffer a
great fall today.”
The hungover giraffe was falling over himself standing up, shouting in Russian. His neck

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was wobbling in the wind, and his legs were bending half a foot above the knee. Buckling
over the railing, the giraffe man flopped his useless arms down toward his fallen comrade.
Wile was shaking his head at this, less I guessed because the turn of events surprised him
than because he couldn’t believe bumbling humans ran the world. With a scientist’s
detachment, he approached the giraffe man from behind, snatched him up by the ankles and
dangled him over the edge of the pit, bracing himself with his foot against the railing. Wile
never talked, but his face owling around to us was question mark enough.
“Drop him,” called Yogi in between bites of a hotdog. At his side, Bullwinkle nodded
while the giraffe man shrieked. Goof gave a thumbs-down. Minnie sighed.
“Ask him who his handler is,” said Bugs. “Ask him what his codename is. Ask him why
he hates America so much.”
With a shrug, Wile dropped him.
We all gave it an ear. It occurred to me that we might’ve just killed our director. The
silence that followed was long enough you could’ve made a sandwich. Then groans began
grinding against each other, followed by the bristly swish of fake fur on fake fur, what
sounded like worried questions and reassurances in Russian, and finally a crescendoing
cackle that echoed off the Bowl’s bowl: with the help of his trusty giraffe, Konstantin Zykov
clambered out of the pit, the panda head jettisoned, his mouth big with laughter. But he was
still blind, and he directed his comments more downstage left than toward the gallery:
“Being a beast is a hot, scratchy, marvelous business! With these claws,” he said, shaking his
panda paws while his giraffe tried to yank his own neck off, “I could tear a tiger limb from
limb!”
“You’re a moron,” said Mickey. “Pandas eat bamboo.”
“And they’re really lazy,” added Bugs. “And dumb.”

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“What’s next?” I said, less angry than disappointed. “Are you going to tell us that
hanging out in a shaggy polyester jumpsuit for an hour has taught you how to empathy with
the animal kingdom?”
Twisting toward my voice, he said, “Quite right, Mr. Grimalkin. Quite right. I make a
poor animal, I am sure. But the question for you, the question for all of you,” he added,
sweeping his hands at us, the most famous animals in the world, “is: can you make a good
human? I am not the only person curious to know the answer.” His posture was terrible,
and fifty pounds of panda suit weren’t helping, but he now straightened himself erect as a
British brigadier general, and his voice, an unlively potatoes-and-borscht bass, took wing:
“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and
moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a
god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals …”
Goof removed his goggles to eye the man more closely. Wile’s mouth was puckered over
the end of the marrow in mid-suck. Judging from the silence above us, even Mickey had
stopped setting afire the admiration of his fans. I felt my own heart adjusting its beat to the
rhythm of the lines.
“And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”
“Wish I could talk like that,” said Bullwinkle, rubbing his rack’s velvet against the
seatback of the chair in front of him.
“And you shall, Mr. Moose,” replied the director. “By mid-summer, you will be Olivier,
Booth, Webster, Disraeli, Demosthenes. But first we must examine the text itself. What is
Hamlet?”
Gracie said, “A love story.”
“I don’t think it means anything,” said Goof. “It’s a bloodbath with pretty speeches.”

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“Amor,” cawed one of the flamingos. “Loco,” said the other.
“It’s about a guy trying to do right by his dad,” said Bugs.
“Apocalypse,” shouted Mickey, releasing another dove of fire into the air, as the giant
managed to free himself from the giraffe head, pale eyes blinking against the hard light of
day.
“What about you, Mr. Grimalkin? What do you make of Hamlet?” I always hated it
when the nuns called on me in class – if I’d had something to say, I would’ve said it. I
shrugged, then realized he couldn’t see that, so I mumbled, “I don’t know.” I was hoping it
would make sense once I finished it, a nice cut-and-dried ending, Hamlet and Ophelia living
happily ever after.
“Who is Hamlet?” Zykov asked again. “Hamlet is the first modern man. He is the first
person with the luxury to worry more about what happens between his ears than outside of
them. Who is Hamlet? Hamlet is all of us.”
With a yawn, Wile pushed the giant over the railing and back into the orchestra pit.

“Who do you imagine, Tommy?” Gracie asked, pulling the trigger, a grace note before
the shattering a hundred yards uphill of a Coke bottle no human could’ve seen in the
darkness.
“Your father. Nazis. Mickey Mouse,” I said, then shot, winging my bottle but not
breaking it. Really, I thought of the Coke bottles as just plain Coke bottles.
Gracie dropped her guard hand and smiled at me, turning her PPK blindly toward the
hill. It coughed, and my Coke bottle exploded in the distance. Showoff.
Stars sizzled above us, but down in the city the smog was so thick it looked like God was
trying to drown LA in Campbell’s Chicken Soup. It was nice living so close to Griffith Park.

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Less nice to have a wife who was a better shot than me, the wharf cat whose only weapon
growing up had been slingshots I’d use to whip lug nuts into the hulls of crabbing deadrises.
The first gun I’d ever fired had been with Bugs Bunny in Topanga Canyon. It was an eight-
gauge he’d bought from a Okie Pentecostal pastor who sold fireworks and heavy ordnance
out of the back of his storefront church. Bugs told me he wanted me to try it first, and
because I didn’t know about shouldering, the butt had just about cracked my collarbone.
“Shoot papa? Not papa,” she giggled, then whirled uphill and emptied the rest of her clip
into a cactus, ripping its paddly arms to puzzle pieces. She was hiccupping toward our bottle
of gin, chilled in a conquistador’s helmet we’d filled with ice. She’d given me the helmet for
my birthday the first year we dated. Last year she’d given me a shoetree. But that didn’t
matter: the gifts of hers I’d cherished most had been the ones made from words, and over
our years together, I’d come up with a top-ten list of Gracie’s proclamations, which I’d
written down in one of the blank pages in the back of our King James (needlessly, since I
had them memorized) booster shots for the ego I’d recall tenderly in moments of crisis or
self-loathing.

1. Great artists never make as much money as hacks.
2. We don’t have to wake up before ten.
3. Now that you’ve got me, you’ll never be an orphan again.
4. I love the taste of your come.
5. Someday MGM will realize what a genius you are.
6. Let’s buy both!
7. Papa doesn’t understand me like you do.
8. You’re an incredibly good-looking man.

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9. Mickey and Bugs will never be happy.
10. There’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering – unless it’s the fun kind.

I spun, cocked the lever of the rifle, and sighted down the barrel at the Hollywood sign,
which from our angle looked more like HELLWED. Pulling the trigger, I said, “I feel like a
monsignor throwing rocks at his own stained-glass windows.”
“I couldn’t imagine being a priest and not breaking the stained glass windows.” Old Man
White had raised Gracie Unitarian Universalist. Her idea of God was Milton Berle in a toga.
Her dad was the meanest Unitarian I’d ever met. She pirouetted unsteadily, righting herself
against a stump. “Do you think I should start carrying this around in my purse?” she said,
examining her snub-nosed pistol.
“Would it make you feel safer?”
“I don’t know. It might put me on pins and needles all the –”
“I understand, it’s a dangerous little –”
“I’d always be worried about getting peeved and shooting a traffic cop,” she sighed.
“Are you that anxious about … well, you know.”
“Getting kidnapped and raped and getting my face burned off with a hot iron, about
having my nails ripped out and my legs hacked off?”
“So you clip the obits to feel less anxious?”
She bit her lip. “If I keep studying it, I’ll be able to detect a pattern.”
“Besides that they’re all has-beens?”
“Don’t say that about Lady Dear. She was making a comeback.” She flopped onto her
side, tossing her PPK behind her head. “It’s still beautiful, though, isn’t it Tommy?” she
asked, one hand reaching down toward the city, the other was gripping the gin as her tail

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unscrewed the cap, spiraling in around itself. I couldn’t do that with my tail.
I wanted to say: No, it isn’t beautiful.
She patted the ground and I eased down onto the scrub. I stared into her eyes, gleaming
like tiny TVs in the dark. “Gorgeous,” I said. She was wearing flannel and dusty James
Dean trousers – she always said that she liked to dress like a man when she went shooting.
“Oh Tommy,” she smiled, brushing the backs of her knuckles over the tips of my
whiskers, just about the most intimate thing one cat can do to another. It pricked my ears
and fluffed my fur and tightened my skin like a stretched canvas. I’d never let anyone do
that to me before Gracie. Then she hiccupped and laughed and handed me the gin. It was
Old Tom, great British stuff we’d gotten nine cases of after I’d done some ads for them
around ten years ago. One case for each of my lives. The bottle Gracie was slurping was
from the last case.
“Delish,” she said, smacking her tiny bow lips. “You’re driving, right?”
I felt a hiss ricocheting up my vocal cords. “Gracie, we talked about this. Not half an
hour ago you said you’d drive. You said you were trying not to drink so much on
Tuesdays.”
“But it tastes so good on my tongue,” she said, sticking it out like a kid at the doctor. A
couple inches were all that was left at the bottom of the bottle. We’d only been there an
hour.
“Gracie,” I said, filliping my middle finger against the conquistador’s helmet, “there is no
way I can drive.”
“You’ll be fine,” she said, pouting. Her lips were like the last great pasta shape yet to be
discovered. “We could walk.”
“Gracie,” I said, “I can barely stand.”

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“I know,” she said, “me too. That’s why I want you to drive.” She pulled my chin down
and poured a jigger-ful in.
“If you’da let me know, we could’ve called a cab before we left.”
“I know,” she said, dropping the bottle into the conquistador’s helmet and rolling on top
of me. “I know something we could do to sober up,” she added, unbuttoning my button-
down, swinging a leg over my knees to straddle me. I had enough gin in my stomach for a
goldfish to swim freely, but when we were first dating, we’d drink a handle and still go at it
like rabbits. She lowered herself onto me, her hips circling like a hula-hooper’s, and I closed
my eyes and in the over-bright Super 8 of my mind I saw Deirdre Cluny standing in front of
a full-length mirror in the nude, eyes closed, head back, fingers kneading beneath her red
loin-fur into the redder folds of her deepest self. Electricity whinged through the base of my
stick shift, Gracie’s hand drifted south to my Levi’s, but when I opened my eyes to the only
wife I’d ever wanted, everything beneath softened to pâté. We hadn’t had sex in six weeks.
I sighed as she yowled and reared up off of me. The lust on her was like overripe cantaloupe
about to split apart, almost fatty, so sweet it stunk.
“But I want you now!” she roared. “You’re my husband. It’s your job.” She polished
off the gin while I mumbled Captain Whiskey Dick, wondering if it was true. She stamped her
feet, smashed the bottle against the rifle bore, and fell reeling into a bramble bush.
Jumping up, the blood drained from my head. Gracie was cursing, twisting against the
bush that had snared her, but she only sank further in. “Gracie, Jesus, Gracie, you’ll tear out
your fur.”
“You’re not telling me what’s going on,” she screamed, jerking against the thorns. I
remember the nuns telling us that when St. Francis was tempted to lust, he threw himself
into thorn bushes to drive the desire away. It didn’t seem to be having that effect on Gracie.

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“I can’t help you if you don’t calm down.”
With another hiccup, her body shuddered to a stop. She cried, but the bush had pinned
her hands and she couldn’t wipe her tears away. I daubed at her baby blues with my hankie.
“Thank you.”
“Let’s get you out of here,” I said, sliding a thorn out from under the fur and flannel of
her shoulder, willing steady my gin-slackened hands. At least I was wearing my driving
gloves. “That’s one,” I said, then repeated the slow withdrawal with a briar behind her ear.
“Two,” I said. I said and did three and four and eight and nineteen and thirty-seven and
sixty-two. It had been months since I’d taken such a slow tour of Gracie’s body. She was
very beautiful. After her head and arms were released, she petted me as I knelt at her feet
and tried to free the rest of her. After I finished, she collapsed, pooling into me like a
puddle of cream.
“I think you’re going to need a new shirt,” I said, my muscles quivering.
“It isn’t …” She licked a paw and wiped down the thorn-napped fur at the back of her
neck.
“What? What isn’t?”
“It isn’t, it isn’t … me, is it?” The tip of her tail was circling the square of my belt buckle.
“No Gracie, God no,” I said. I gulped, and it felt like swallowing an apple whole. I
waggled the still-achy fingers of my bad paw. “Morphine and gin. I’ll be off the drops
soon.” I was too embarrassed to admit my manhood had been overcome by cheese.
“Well what are you going to do about it?” she yelled, pounding the ground with her fist
until tiny mushroom clouds unfurled around us.
“It’s going to heal. That’s what the body does.”
“Daddy gave me a basinet for my birthday.”

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“What? No, he gave you that cowboy painting.”
“He sent the Remington and a basinet. I just gave the basinet to Minnie for safekeeping.
I want her to be our kitten’s godmother.”
At kitten, my flat body seemed to jump a foot off the ground, like a revivified mummy,
before landing again with a thud. “Kitten, you’re having –”
“The kitten we will have. Someday. Someday soon I was hoping.” She set her paw in
mine, and my cranky knuckles curled around her perfect fingers.
“Who were you thinking about for the godfather?” I asked.
“Jerry. Who else?”
“Yeah. Of course. We pick anybody else and Jerry probably stabs me in the eye.”
“And you’d deserve it.” She leaned back into the dusty earth, squinting up at the stars.
“You have names, you know, names you like?”
“Odin. For a boy.” Odin was her father’s name. I believed the name you were given
helped make you who you were: Spike killed more than his fair share of Nazis, Bugs was
annoying as hell, Jericho Mouse was ready to explode at any moment, Grace could have no
more apt name, and I was indeed a doubter. I didn’t want the baby to be the god of death.
I lit a Lucky and held it above Grace’s mouth. She took a girlish puff. I wished I knew
the names of the stars.
“Constance,” said Gracie. That’s what I was thinking for a girl. Constance. I thought
you’d like that.”
“I do.”
She rose as light as a prayer and grabbed the rifle, her father’s ancient Winchester.
Punctuating her sentence with bullets, she shot down into Hollywood. “You – did – this –
to – us.”

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4.

Election Night, 1952. My tail was unkinked and my ring finger unoccupied by a wedding
band. Hours before, all the Eisenhower Beavers had been shaking beer bottles and spraying
them at each other, and now the floor was as sticky as a tongue and Jerry was snoring against
my arm. In the corner, scribblers and mid-level execs were playing ring toss with their
fedoras and Bullwinkle’s rack, and nearer, Donald Duck was shooting drunk pool against
himself, tearing up the felt like he was trying to aerate it. Hours earlier, Adlai’d conceded,
Eisenhower had blustered through his acceptance speech, and the only conscious people at
my table were me and Bugs, ears deep in gin. My eyes drifted through the smoke for a less
catatonic conversation partner and stopped at the first patch of color they saw: a beehive the
color of a maple leaf in October and beneath it a face as fragile and demure as a stained-glass
window Madonna. Further observation was cut short by a sudden sting in my cheek, which
brought my head round to Bugs, leaning over the table toward me, the offending paw still
only inches away from my nose.
“Hey,” he said, “pay attention to me.”
The girl was giggling at our slapstick, white fingers covering a red mouth, and although
the humans were beginning to shark around her, she strode through them all and slid into
the booth next to Bugs.
“Hell-o Gin-ger,” said Bugs. After about five drinks, Bugs couldn’t keep both eyes open
at the same time, and he kept switching back and forth to keep the itch down. She must’ve
thought he was winking battily at her.
“Daphne,” she said. “A play-sure.” I imagined her ten years before in an air raid shelter,
reading fat naughty books by candlelight, surviving off weak tea, old madeleines, cigarettes

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jerry-rigged from pipe tobacco and newsprint.
“Daffy?” said Bugs. “Daffy’s in my crew. They call us the Rat Pack. Bogie and Bacall
and Judy Garland stole the name from us.”
“Daphne,” I said to him. “And no one calls you the Rat Pack.”
She smiled. “Bugs Bunny, I presume?” She filled her vowels the same way I couldn’t
help but notice her chest filled her trench coat.
“In the fur,” he said, offering her his long rabbit paw. “But my friends call me Bugsy.”
“No one calls you Bugsy, Bugs,” I said as they shook.
“I’ve been trying to start it,” he said, shrugging. “You know, a sumonym. It makes me
seem tough.” In a town whose citizens went to great lengths to fake indifference, I’d come
almost to admire the nakedness of Bugs’s desire for you to like him.
“And y’must be Tum, and that darrrrling lil’ loomp Jerry.” She reached across the table
and stroked his whiskers with all the delicacy of a rare books librarian, which made Jerry
twitch and sneeze, mumble then hack up some deep contagion that spit onto the floor,
landing just shy of Donald’s 8EEE wingtip. Then he nuzzled into my suit sleeve and
reentered his dream of leather, fire, shadows, screams. Bemused, she pursed her lips,
tightening the hollows of her cheeks. Hers was a mouth that savored every bite of rationed
meat.
“My pride and joy,” I said.
“Rumor has it John Ford wants ya fer his next cowboy picture,” she said.
I shrugged, trying not to show my surprise. “It is a possibility.” In fact, it was a done
deal, and I’d be signing on the dotted line Friday.
“What?” asked Bugs, ears popping up. “Ford’s doing a cartoon?”
“No, it’s going to be live.”

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“Talking animals don’t get live.”
“Ford said he wanted to break new ground.”
“So you?” he asked.
“Said he needed an athlete who could ride a horse.”
“I’m a a-tha-lete.”
“Bugs, you have a ‘No Jumping’ clause in your contract.”
“If you jump you might fall. Besides,” he added, “you don’t know how to ride a horse.”
“I’ll learn.” His ears drooped like unwatered plants as his eyes took succor in the bosom
of our new companion. “Daphne, what kind of name is Daphne?” he asked. He had
completely closed his right eye, accordioning that side of his face so much he looked like the
Penguin from Batman.
“She was a goddess or something,” I said. “Apollo got wasted and chased after her, so
she turned into a tree.”
“I’ve always thought I would’ve just taken the balling, if I were her,” Daphne said. “How
bad could it be? And who wants to be a tree?”
Trying to keep my eyebrows low, I coughed into my paw to check my breath. Shrimp
and gin. Not so bad, but next to me Jerry smelled like by-the-hour motel, a stink she
might’ve mistaken for mine.
“What brings you across the pond?” I asked. “Besides the charming celebrities,” I added,
turning to Bugs, whose yawn showed off long curving beaverish teeth. It amazed me any
woman had slept with him voluntarily.
“Scrain tests,” she chuckled, then asked if either of us had a light, her Camel 100
quivering like a hummingbird between two chewed fingernails. I patted myself down, and so
did Bugs, but we couldn’t find matches. “Here,” she said, plucking mine from my mouth,

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“we can butt-fuck.”
The lit end of mine kissed hers, and when it began to burn, she handed mine back and
started puffing. Bugs opened both eyes. He and I were unattached, and not half an hour
before Bugs had told me he hadn’t marked an X on his sex calendar (a church calendar from
Spike) since the last game of the World Series, which Bugs had informed me was the Feast
of Our Lady of the Rosary. I’d never had sex with a creature who wasn’t a cat, I was
reasonably sure Mickey had never had sex with anyone who wasn’t Minnie, and I was
positive Porky had never unzipped his trousers but to piss. Bugs, on the other hand,
regularly had sex with creatures who weren’t mammals.
“You need a drink?” I asked Daphne. Her face was armored in makeup, but her green
eyes were bloodshot, and I could see her pulse in her throat. She had the affect of a pre-
Code femme fatale, tough as a rock until she shatters into a million teary pieces.
She nodded. “Whatever French red they have,” she said as Bugs waved a paw at Sidney
Lumet, mistaking him for a waiter. “Gin,” Bugs yelled, “and a bottle of bordello.” Sidney
ambled on.
The old-timeyness of “The Old Lamplighter” on the radio was belied by the grab-ass at
the bar, the ersatz musk of the men parodying the real thing. Ask any animal his honest
opinion of perfume, and he’d mime gagging. Opposite the bar, fedoras were sprouting on
poor Bullwinkle’s antlers, and to make the humans laugh, Igby was hopping around, trying
to balance a highball glass on the end of his tongue.
Bugs had a gift for filling dead air, so he lifted his empty Tom Collins glass and shouted,
“To Dwight David Eisenhower!”
A few hands at the bar lifted tumblers while Donald skreighed out some cheer,
brandishing his warped cue. Daphne lifted her glass of American swill as I filliped my

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tumbler.
“What is it, Thomas?” asked Bugs. “The was a night of victory for the forces of
goodness and democracy. Ike. The Savior of Europe. The Savior of America … Wait,
don’t tell me …”
“I voted for Stevenson,” I said. “Is that a crime?”
“Stevenson? That patsy? That egghead? How can you be in a movie with John Wayne if
you vote Democrat?”
“Stevenson wants to look out for the little guy. We are the little guy.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Bugs, all 97 pounds of him. “Stevenson?”
“He’s going to get us out of Korea.” I sighed, remembering the events of the past few
hours. “He was going to get us out of Korea.”
“Don’t ta think America should close all its bases oversays, focus on the homefront,” she
said.
“Well, maybe,” I hedged.
“Whoa, we don’t need to get out of Korea. We need to get into Korea, drive the Chinks
back to Beijing. They Commies are spreading, Thomas. They’re spreading everywhere.”
“There’s always going to be a bad guy, Bugs. The USA can’t defend every poor little
country from every bully.”
“Corn hole!” Jerry yelled in his sleep.
Bugs’s half-drooped ears sprung up like boners. “Yes we can!” he shouted, slamming his
Tom Collins glass on the table. “The Commies’ll come get us. They’ll take our shows away.
They’ll put us in camps. They’ll put us in zoos. They won’t let us talk anymore. They’ll cut
out our tongues!”
“Bugs,” I said, reaching across the table to pat his quivering hand, “there’s no way they’re

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going to invade us. They’re an ocean away, and they can’t even invade a tiny little
shrimpboat country next door. And even then no one’s going to put us in zoos.”
“Eeyore said the Chinks put all the talking Pandas in zoos, but that they cut out their
tongues.”
“Bugs, that’s just Eeyore. He thinks every day is the worst day of his life.”
“Thomas, the Chinks fear what they don’t understand.”
“Bugs, everybody fears what they don’t understand.”
Miraculously, Sidney Lumet swung back by the table with a fifth of gin and a wine bottle
with lots of French cursive on it. He slid it onto the table. “Tell Jerry hello for me when he
wakes up,” he said, winking.
“You’re a beautiful man,” said Bugs as the young director walked away, adjusting his
thick specs.
“America doesn’t need saving, Bugs. Don’t be paranoid.”
“This is Burgundy,” said Daphne, inspecting the bottle. “Grand Cru.” She poured
herself a splash as Bugs refilled his with gin.
“Paranoia is the only answer to the modern dilemma,” said Bugs.
“You hear that line from Joe McCarthy?”
Bugs pointed down at his lap and winked at Daphne. “I named my second-in-command
Joseph McCarthy.” I rolled my eyes as he made a speaking-trumpet with his hand and
whispered, “Ask me why.”
“Why?”
“Both are relentless in their pursuit of the pink.”
Instead of smiling, she brought the Burgundy to her burgundy lips, inhaled through long
nostrils and purred, smiled.

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Bugs shrugged and mumbled, “No taste in comedy.” He removed her cigarette from the
pile, and put it in the side of his mouth, since his front teeth were too long to part
comfortably for a rodney. “All right,” he said, waving Daphne down to the end of the
booth. “I gotta go piss.” He bopped down the booth on his ass, squinting through his one
good eye, first at me, then at her. “When I get back, we scram back to Malibu, put on a
Christmas record, and skinny dip in my pool.”
He trotted away, already starting to unbutton his fly. “Dear Christ, he’s insufferable,” she
said, swiping the bottle by the neck. “We should goo. Can y’carry yer partner ute?”
“Jerry will be fine.”
“You should ask.”
I rolled my head down and whispered into Jerry’s ear: “Hey Walls, we’re going to make
like a tree. What do you think? Want to come?”
He winced in his sleep. “Titties,” he moaned. “Hit me. Sandpaper. Vaccination.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” she said.
I balled all the napkins from the table’s dispenser into a pillow for him and eased away as
Daphne corked the bottle and stuffed it into her bag. “Double down,” Jerry muttered. As
we left, Igby waved from inside a forest of men with ties around their heads betting to see if
he could jump high enough to bang his noggin on the tin ceiling.
Outside the sky was lisping drizzle, burnishing the streetlamps, blackening the pavement.
“Damn,” I said. “I don’t have an umbrella. It’s not supposed to rain in LA.”
“A Scotch garl is ullways prepared for the elements,” she said, removing an umbrella
from her bag and popping it open. She handed it to me, took my arm, and crooked me
close. A thread of gold chain dove beneath the topmost button of her trenchcoat to a sachet
nestled between her breasts, a sachet I could smell but not see, a scent-heart pulsing out

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lavender and leather. I wanted those breasts, to see them, to feel their buoyancy as they
cantilevered out over her body, to taste their rime of evaporated sweat, to vacuum them with
my nostrils, to tickle their pudding softness with my rasp of a tongue.
“Is Santa Monica Pair cloose?”
“Sure,” I said, “but there are warmer, drier destinations.”
“Oi don’t moind discomfort.”
“I”ll lead the way,” I said, guiding her north along the unbroken sidewalk.
“Why did Bugs want to play a Christmas record?”
“Bugs Bunny is the most nostalgic person I’ve ever known,” I said, and when she
laughed, I added, “I’m serious. The man gets teary at the National Anthem, the smell of
pastrami, the mention of Jackie Robinson. And did they show that It’s a Wonderful Life across
the pond?”
“Yes,” she coughed through a laugh.
“We had to leave the theater – he was blubbering so loud people were throwing popcorn
at us.”
With every quip she kept ratcheting herself closer, so I kept it up: “I once saw Bugs
Bunny give twenty bucks to a bum on Pico, and every Christmas he volunteers to be a bell-
ringing Santa for the Salvation Army.”
“If hay’s so generous, how can he loike McCarthy?”
“Because he’s a rabbit – skittish, easily frightened. Bugs has a resting heart rate of a
hundred and ten – it doesn’t take much to rile him up.”
“Doesn’t McCarthy make ya furious?”
“The Dodgers blowing a lead makes me furious. McCarthy just makes me sad.”
She pushed her fingertips down the bones of my paw. “Are there claws in there?”

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I nodded. “Mostly decorative.”
“Have y’ever made someone blade?”
“It’s been a long time.”
Three Bugs Bunny anecdotes later, latched together and trading the Burgundy back and
forth, we turned onto Pacific Avenue, the Ferris Wheel in sight, but we were intercepted by
a chipmunk in a newsboy cap, hustling over to us with a sheaf of pamphlets. “Amyl
Peppermint Sigh,” he said, no spacing between the words, pushing a tract into my hands.
“What?”
He gulped a shot of air, then said, slightly more slowly: “Animal Betterment Society.
Meeting tonight ten o’clock right now five speakers improving our lot and the condition of
the furry and scaled clawed tailed everywhere talking animals of the world unite.” He lifted
his face – mostly cheek – to Daphne. “All are welcome.” He was huffing, jittering, high on
something more than liberation. Peppermint Amyl indeed. “Please,” he said, turning his
tiny paw at the unmarked storefront to his right, “right this way.”
“Thanks but no thanks, pal,” I said, turning to cross the street. “She wants to check out
the Ferris wheel.”
“I’d luff to know the inner werkings of the animal mind,” she said, peering through the
door.
The only inner workings I was interested in were hers, but I shrugged and said, “Sure, a
little local color.”
Inside, animals were kvetching everywhere. A tall badger in a three-piece suit scowled at
a sheaf of notebook papers. A Dalmatian argued about workman’s comp with a blue newt.
A baboon in a fez was taking up a collection in a shoebox. A parakeet and a Chihuahua
were singing “La Marseillaise” atop a rack with slanted shelving, as a chimp banged out the

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percussion with a pair of foot-size-measurers. My nose was wrinkling at the sweet rot of
athlete’s foot and the innumerable other podiatric ailments of creatures without fur.
Animals tended to have their own shoe stores.
“Comrade, welcome.” said an eager beaver who was actually a beaver, trundling toward
us in flannel, his giant pancake of a tail fwapping behind. “My name is Steve,” he added,
gripping me by the forearm. His breath smelled of oak. I wondered where beavers found
hardwood in Southern California.
“I’m Marlowe,” I said. “This is Daphne. First time in the land of the free.”
“Not so free,” he said, releasing my arm, snapping into a spiel, the words tatted out as
fast as a telegraph. Were all these lefties on Benzedrine? “Animals aren’t allowed to vote in
Alabama or New Mexico, and did you know that in Texas, Georgia, and Arizona, they have
to be accompanied by a human? In South Carolina they have to take a civics test, in six
states we’re banned from driving, and Arkansas, animals can own property only if a human
acts as co-signatory. In Mississippi they have to demonstrate proficiency in speaking
English. In fourteen states you have to register as a talking animal, and in some of those
states, they put you through a battery of psychological examinations, IQ exams, Rorschachs.
In three of those states, talking animals must pay a fee to register. In Alabama, the fee is one
hundred dollars, and every year, animals must register and re-pay the fee.”
“Fucking Alabama,” I said.
“But it’s not just a state issue. The IRS doesn’t allow taxpayers to claim exemptions for
donations to non-profit organizations run by talking animals. There’s a tacit policy against
hiring talking animals in the Defense, State, and Treasury Departments. Only the
Department of the Interior encourages talking animals to apply.”
“For obvious reasons,” I said.

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“For obvious reasons.”
“Soooo, what are we going to do about it?” asked Daphne. “Revolution?”
We don’t believe in revolution,” he said, “but we do believe in evolution.”
Daphne squeezed my hand. I was rummaging my memory for a clever line about Darwin
– I didn’t often feel the need to clever – but before I could, a lab as yellow as a tape measure
was crowding into me, offering us pins. I took a couple to be polite. The lab was scratching
around his ear, mouth-breathing, his thin tongue bobbing, in danger of flopping out of his
mouth. Spend a decade in Hollywood and you forget most animals haven’t trained
themselves to seem less animal. In the early years, Mickey Mouse would have us over to his
house to lead us in lemon sessions where we’d impale each other on spikes of our own
beastiness. I remember a particular night that ended with Porky weeping for the better part
of an hour. I never saw him without gloves after that.
The lab handing out pins could’ve used a dozen lemon sessions – his egg yolk coat was
speckled with what I was hoping was mud not flees, and either his cologne was eau
d’anchovy or he’d recently rolled in a dumpster. I could understand why somebody in
Alabama wouldn’t want him to vote. “C’mon, feline,” he said, his gun barrel of the snout
pointing at the pins I’d taken, “put it on. In solidarity.”
On the pin was a drawing of animal appendages of various sorts – a talon, a dog paw, a
monkey hand, a feathery fin – all shoved from unseen bodies toward the center of the pin, a
compass of the animal kingdom.
“Sure, pal,” I said, pinning one to my lapel and other to Daphne’s.
“About to start, take your seats,” he said, pointing at a prim tabby in hornrims chatting
with the spectators in the first row of dinged folding chairs – mice, most of them, plus a
couple brindled guinea pigs and a Jackie Gleason-sized rat. Rodents. They were always sat

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in the front row at school. No surprise they’d do the same here.
“Let’s take off,” I whispered up to Daphne when he trotted away. “They’re just a bunch
of crybabies.”
She leaned in close, her chest pressed into mine, and to my sixth sense she was
mulberries, sweet summer mulberries pulled hot from the tree and eaten by the pawful.
“Good things come to those who white.”
I shuffled after her, slumping down into a mangled chair next to hers. The beaver
waddled past us, his leather snowshoe of a tail dragging through a puddle, streaking the dirty
linoleum with a wet ogee. With a yellow smile, he greeted the tabby at the podium, then
fake-coughed and began calling everything to order, turning the burner off on the bubbling
conversations. To reward me, Daphne unbuttoned her Macintosh. All her body fat seemed
to have migrated to her breasts, which swelled under a tiny shark pendant, with real slits for
gills that exhaled all that earthy perfume. She draped the coat over our laps as the beaver
introduced the tabby, Professor Milton Brickle of the University of California-Berkeley, then
touted his various publications and credentials. I didn’t know there were any animal
professors.
In a plummy voice that sounded like it could use a little WD-40, the tabby asked, “Why
are we all here?” as Daphne’s hand moled under her Macintosh coat, her fingers tip-toeing
over the pleats of my pants to my crotch.
“Because we believe in justice!” shouted the yellow lab, sitting a few spots down from
me. Apparently at the pound they hadn’t taught him what a rhetorical question was.
“Ah, Brother Labrador” smiled Professor Brickle, “but how do we even know what
justice is?” he added, and before the yellow lab or any other yokels could answer, Professor
Brickle continued, “Because we are sentient animals. We have minds. One of the most

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obvious manifestations of this is that we can speak. Why can we speak?”
“Because we’re no dummies,” said the lab, who would’ve been driving me to my flask if
not for Daphne’s hand, which was introducing itself to my groin quite cordially.
“Without a doubt,” said the speaker, who if he was annoyed didn’t show it.
“Oi want to cut his arms uff,” Daphne’s voice dribbled into my pricked ear. “But instaid
Oi’ll redirect my ener-jaze,” she added, unzipping my fly.
Twenty feet away, Professor Bickle writing on a chalkboard that had appeared from
somewhere. MORE PROTEIN? was written at the top left. INDUSTRIAL SPILLAGE?
trailed off below and to the right. The good professor had just finished writing the N on
RADIOACTIVE ATMOSPHERIC DIFFUSION, and I was forcing my lungs to accept the
long slow draught of air, in an effort to hold off a spillage of my own. This was not
Daphne’s first hand job.
“But of course,” the professor was saying, “the relatively minor amount of radioactive
particulate in the atmosphere, combined with westerly winds that would push said particulate
from test sites in the New Mexico desert into West Texas – which has a very low incidence
of talking animals – suggests this commonly accepted premise is dubious. No, my friends,”
he added. “What we are witnessing, what the world has been witnessing for the past
hundred years, is something much more benign, much more natural; in fact, perhaps the
most natural thing of all: evolution.”
The good professor rolled it out for us: for hundreds of thousands of years, various
proto-homininds (the lab sniggered at the various homo species the professor listed)
interbred, choosing their partners based on sexual selection, as he put it, at which Daphne’s
finger ran a red stripe up my barber pole. But I was aroused in more ways than one: I liked
facts, and my collection had been dwindling since moving to California. Even more, I’d

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wondered like any curious creature why I could speak when most cats couldn’t. As a child,
I’d always wanted justification that I was a real person, and the bland assurances of the nuns
were never enough. I wanted science, and the professor was handing it out like it was new
dollar bills. He said that way back, at the tail end of the Miocene era and the beginning of
the Pliocene – out the corners of my eyes, I looked around to see everyone seemed settled
into a baffled state of academic hypnosis – some monkeys started walking on their hind legs,
and their descendents started strutting around with their hands free to pick fruit, make tools,
build primitive dwellings. Hands-free, these early hominids also began to hunt and fish, and
the increasing protein of their diets swelled the size of their brains. The cycle continued
over tens of thousands of years, bigger brains making them smarter and more able to obtain
the foods they wanted, which in turn gave them bigger brains. “At some point,” the
professor concluded, “the creatures became human, whatever that means.”
“Yer barbed,” Daphne whispered in my ear, plucking at one of my Johnson & Johnson’s
spines. “The pain fer the woman must be terrific.”
I tried to focus on Professor Brickle, who was saying that humans tended to think that
their development was special, that the sentience they eventually picked up along the way
was unique to them as higher primates. He countered that postulate by ticking off the
famous examples the nuns had taught us at St. Francis: Maston of Lyme Hall, the mastiff
who’d fought with Henry V at Agincourt; the monitor kings of ancient China, inspiration for
the mythical dragon; the Nebibis, the feline counselors to the pharaohs, who advised
Cleopatra to cozy up to Caesar and a thousand years earlier recommended Ramses listen to
the Jew in the multi-colored cloak.
“During the middle ages, thousands of human women were burned alive because they
claimed to be able to transmogrify into ravens or deer. Even more tellingly, according to the

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Canon Episcopi of 900, such women claimed to commune with the beasts of the fields and the birds of
the air, speaking to them and being spoken to. Some of this can of course be attributed to hysteria,
but surely some of these women happened upon our forebears and befriended them.”
“That would make me a witch,” whispered Daphne. “Pay-ple ullways persecute what
they doon’t understand.” Overwhelming my hearing and my vision was my sixth sense of
her: an alarm bell, liver sizzling on the griddle, the sublime vertigo just before you sneeze.
The professor said that instances of sentient animals were still rare until the modern era,
when increased domestication led to higher levels of protein in the diets of many creatures,
and also freed them to consider more than daily survival. “Not that I approve of owning
pets,” said the professor, “which is just another form of slavery, but if leisure is indeed the
basis of culture, it is also the basis of sentience,” he said. This was why the majority of
talking animals were creatures who traditionally lived in human homes: dogs, cats, rodents,
etc.
Steve the beaver was waving a paw in the air.
“Yes?” asked the professor.
“Thank you, yes, well, I’m not an expert, and it was a long time ago in school and all that,
but when we learned about human evolution in school, weren’t there lots of different kinds
of hominids between the monkeys and humans like they are now? So, if that’s true,
shouldn’t there be animals who are somewhere between us talking animals and animals that
can’t talk at all? A missing link, if you will?” A few spots down, the yellow lab twitched, the
tendons on the right side of his mouth pulling back his face into the tortured grimace any
dog owner would recognize as a sudden itch. With a whining cough, his paw swung up to
his neck, scratching under his collar with enough vigor to cut grass. Maybe the lab – now
panting, groaning, sighing – wasn’t just unmannered. Maybe he was an evolutionary dead

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end.
“We don’t yet know,” said the professor. “That’s the current focus of my research in
fact. There are rumors of yaks in Outer Mongolia with a vocabulary of a few hundred words
who still roam on all fours. Apparently most of their words are synonyms for grass.”
I raised my hand in an attempt to distract my mind from my groin. “So, Doc, what about
hands?” I asked, clicking invisible castanets to demonstrate. “These yaks bench-pressing at
the Y?”
Chitters and barks and coos at that, the beastiary’s full spectrum of laughter. The lab in
particular seemed to think it was hysterical, pantomiming a bench press, slapping both knees
at the same time, elbowing an adjacent beagle and saying, “The Y – d’ja here that? The Y!
Classic!”
“Ha, yes,” said the professor, with the anxious chuff people with letters after their names
substituted for real laughing. “As I’ve been told, these yaks have cloven hooves like any
other.”
“But, Doc, I guess what I’m asking is if you have to hands that are … functional or
whatever term you want to use, you know, in order to be classified as a person?”
“Good thing I’m not a yak,” Daphne murmured.
“Ah,” smiled the professor, nodding. “What makes a person a person? Whether you’re
able to deal cards, the shade of your skin, whether you have skin at all, your cranial capacity
relative to your mass, your values and views. That’s a marvelous question … for a
philosopher. As a biologist, all I can say is that we’re paid to parse differences, not bridge
them. As an animal who’s also a person, I’ll say this: You know it when you are it.”
The next sentence seemed to plant tacks on every chair, sending everyone in the room to
their feet, except Daphne and me. Steve the beaver trundled up through the herd of people

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who’d stuck their cigarettes into the corner of their mouths for easier clapping. He thanked
the good professor with many nods, a two-paw shake. Steve the beaver said they’d been
hoping to find a speaker from the Socialist Party of America, or the Regional Council of
Negro Leadership – to show how we were all in it together – but unfortunately, with it being
Election Day, they were pinned to earlier commitments. Mention of the Socialists made me
turn my head to see what the other reactions were, but no one else seemed fazed. No one
else there was liable to get blacklisted if they went to a Socialist Party meeting. I was ready
to disentangle Daphne’s hand and lead her out when Steve the beaver opened the floor,
which sent the yellow lab jumping as though dinner scraps were dangling from the ceiling.
He shuffled laterally like we used to do at basketball practice, stepping on my feet, his
wagging tail swatting my face – left cheek, right cheek, left cheek, Stooges-style – as he
passed. “Sorry, brother,” he apologized over his shoulder as he tripped into the aisle and
hustled to the front of the room.
Gripping the lectern with his big paws, he said, “My name’s Bobby. Bobby Waffles.
Good name for me, I guess. Always loved waffles.” A few chuckles. Behind him, his
blonde tail was still playing paddleball with the air. “Grew up in Denver,” he said. “A
mountain boy, me. Snow and skiing and what have you. Came out to Tinseltown for to try
the movie business. But it wasn’t always so good. I was an orphan and the runt of the litter,
a little slow to, you know, develop and what have you. Actually,” he added, swallowing so
hard his head bobbed, “My first memories are the pound.” A couple people gasped at that.
“My first memory is looking out through bars at another cage full of puppies. I remember a
Rottweiler chewing on my leg, a German Shepherd on top of me, and somebody pissing
everywhere – pardon my French. I knew I wasn’t like the other ones, or at least I was pretty
sure. But I couldn’t talk yet, and I was sickly, so I could barely walk on all fours, never mind

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the back two. I remember being bored, being hungry, and thinking that the Rottweiler –
who they called Lovey – would eat my paws off.”
I was trembling, and not only from lust. I was mad, I was sad, and his story was yanking
at one end of a wire long-coiled inside me. “It was the Thirties, and most folks didn’t have
enough for the brood they had, let alone some pound pup. Sometimes the human kids
would visit, pick me up and talk to me, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out what they
were saying, and I wanted so bad to tell them that I didn’t belong there, and I’d get so
worked up doing it that I’d end up barking and yelping and scaring them so that they put me
back in and never picked me. The girls who worked at the pound didn’t understand why I
was getting so big, why my paws were growing out, why I liked sitting up like a human baby.
Then one day a couple of the girls were passing around a magazine, and I saw a spread for
Angels with Dirty Faces and I shouted out ‘Bogie!’”
Some real laughs at this. The lab smiled, and it was hard not to smile back. “The girls
looked over at me, then went back to their magazine, so I just kept shouting ‘Bogie! Bogie!
Bogie!’ They pulled me out and set me on the counter with the magazine. I patted Bogart’s
face and kept shouting ‘Bogie!’ and the girls started chuckling. But I thought they thought it
was just some kind of trick, and man oh man, I was so scared they’d put me back in the
cage, but I saw a picture of Cagney in the spread. I didn’t know his name then, but I’d seen
people pass around magazines with him in it before, doing impressions, so I started pawing
his face in the magazine on the counter and twisted my throat around and as best as I could
I shouted out, “You dirty rat!”
Everyone was laughing now, except Daphne, who was stroking me as you would a baby’s
cheek and whispering in my ear, “That doesn’t make him a par-son.”
The next day little Bobby Waffles was whisked off to an orphanage, but the pound was

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getting shut down for lack of funds, and he was driven away just as the pound owner started
lining up the puppies against the alley wall, a pistol in his hand. It was that moment that
pulled whatever slack I had in the wire coiled up inside me, tugging it tight as a violin string.
I stood up, barely giving Daphne time to let go of me. For the briefest moment I stood
cock to nose with a matronly beagle at my side, who covered her mouth with both paws as I
wrangled myself back inside my trousers and stumbled into the aisle and up toward the
front. I wasn’t sure if the lab was done or had hours more of biography he wanted to share,
but as I neared, he nodded and opened his arms to me, wrapping me in himself and his
smell, the saline funk of the first creatures to crawl from sea to land all those millions of
years before. “Share it, Brother Cat, share it.”
“I always say that I was born an orphan in Baltimore,” I said to the furry watchful faces
assembled before me, “But it’s a lie. My mother died to make me born, and my father raised
me, but neither of them talked. Don’t judge them – don’t judge them, you bastards!” I
shouted at the accusation that hung only in my mind. “My father was a brilliant man. We
were wharf cats, and we lived in the supply closet of a crab shack when we could. It was
warm, and I ate fish. Weren’t long before I got bigger than my pops, and I could do things
he couldn’t: use a can opener, climb a ladder. He knew the milk truck routes, and he showed
me, even if he couldn’t tell me. I could grab the milk off porches, and take it back to the
alley where he was waiting for me. I figured out how to talk, but I don’t think I really
understood he couldn’t, so I would try to say things to him and he would just smile and pat
my head.
“I’d play stickball in the park with the other kids, an egret who sort of hovered in the
outfield, a toad named Shelby, a couple mutts” – a couple of dogs chuffed and tsked at this,
preferring the term mixed breed – but I went on: “One day my pops came to watch, slinking

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around the fire escape, but I didn’t really pay any attention. Then after the end of the inning,
Shelby, who was a mean heavy-bellied squatty thing, Shelby noticed him and scooped gravel.
‘Ge’owwa kee-at,’ is what he said, then he tossed handfuls of pebbles at my pops. I told him
to cut it out, but then a couple of the other kids started throwing the gravel too. I couple
pieces hit him. I told them to stop, but I didn’t make them, not really – I didn’t try to start a
fight or nothing like that, and I sure as hell didn’t tell them it was my father. I tried as best
as I could not to look at him. So pops hustled off, but just before he did, he looked at me,
and if any face ever said anything, it was that, a whole blue plate special of sad. After dinner,
I wandered down to the docks.
“The dogcatcher van was parked outside the crab shack. I bet one of the busboys tattled.
I raced over to the parking lot just as they brought my pops out in a cage. He was hissing,
then he saw me and started whimpering. I rushed over to the manager, the fat dogcatcher,
the skinny dogcatcher, I told all of them that he was my father, that I was his son. ‘He’s my
pops!’ I yelled, grabbing at the cage. ‘I’m his boy!’ But the fat dogcatcher and the skinny
dogcatcher pulled me off, laughing at me. The manager told me it was nice that I was trying
to cover for him, but everybody knew that only talking animals had talking animal kids.” I
looked out into the crowd, the down-at-the-heel lefties looking stricken, nodding along. The
matronly beagle was sniffling. Bobby Waffles couldn’t even look at me as he shook his head
and gnawed one of his thick nails. Daphne’s expression was fascination unmuddled by
compassion.
“Of course, now we know it happens all the time … But what could I say to them then?
I was bawling, kicking, screaming that he was my father, but the fat dogcatcher and the
manager held me down while the skinny dogcatcher opened up the van and tossed the cage
in. They drove off, and I chased after as long as I could, and the manager chased after me.

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That night, he called the nuns at St. Francis, and I never saw my pops again. The
dogcatchers were wearing nametags, and I memorized their names. Charles Moody and
Horace Kirschoffer. I promised that day that if I ever met them again, I’d kill them. If I do,
I will,” I said, banging on the podium so hard the top cracked. “But until then, I can – you
can – we must – we will – we shall overcome!” I found myself with fists overhead, kicking the
splintering podium into the center aisle, over the long rust-colored capital-I’s left by the shoe
racks, staring at a crowd that seemed equal parts exhilarated, terrified, and angry, like
someone had just mugged us all but left us with our lives. They were on their feet, and Steve
the Beaver was already hustling up to me as fast as a beaver can hustle, but Bobby Waffles
was clapping his giant paws together. “There’s a glue factory a couple blocks away!” he
yelled.
“Free the stallions!” shouted Daphne.
“No!” yelled Steve the Beaver, jibbering about nonviolence and brotherhood, Medgar
Evers and Gandhi, but it was too late for the peaceniks: a gecko in overalls was claiming he
could pick locks, and a California condor was already beginning to beat his wings.
I smelled Daphne before I saw her, her lips in my ear: “Let’s bairn the place to the gray-
ound. Oi’ll dance naked fer you in the flames.”
We were rushing out the door hand-in-hand, along with half a dozen other furry and
feathered creatures, each borne toward the glue factory by their own separate pain.
For minutes we stormed through the night like a posse of comic book heroes. Drizzle
and shadow and smog conspired to increase the effect, but the factory we eventually caught
sight of wasn’t the looming Victorian gaol I was picturing in my mind, but rather a huge
nondescript box of corrugated steel, protected by the usual metal guardsmen: chains,
padlocks, window bars, jailhouse fencing, concertina wire. The placard above the door read

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JONES ADHESIVES. We all stood before it huffing, eying a wall shaped like the world’s
largest sheet of lasagna. I could feel the blood in my ears.
As we stood dumb before the high slick grid of the fence, the California condor took
flight with the rumbling whoosh of a car’s ignition. I’d never seen a such a big bird so close.
With wings like kayaks, he pounded the air, sailing over the concertina, gliding behind the
corner of the building, making a circuit of the factory’s perimeter in the time it took Bobby
Waffles to rummage his dirty trench coat for a bottle of peach schnapps and ask if anyone
knew how to make a Molotov cocktail. In two, three, four bats of his wings, the condor
cleared the fence again and spiraled down onto the wet asphalt as soft as a blimp. “High
window on the back end,” he honked with the nasal drone typical of the larger fowl.
“Unbarred. But no ledge for me to perch.”
“Huh,” I said, feeling the anger and accompanying eagerness to commit a felony draining
from me. I was hoping Daphne would still dance naked for me even without flames. “Well
…”
“Could ya carry someone?” asked Daphne, prompting the condor’s red face to drop to
his white toes. I’d seen shorter claws. “I mean, wi’out stabbing ‘im?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Never tried.”
I glanced around. The other animals – Bobby Waffles, a badger with no neck, two
collies, the aardvark who’d been transcribing – were all bigger than me. Then the furry
creatures parted, to glance down at the flyweight gecko. He was short enough I’m not sure
he could’ve pedaled a trike.
“What?” he said, shrugging, long green palms facing the low sky. He examined the
condor’s toes. “Noooooo,” he said. “No no no. I’m all for this, but those things will gut
me.”

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The condor swung his schnoz to me. “You look like you’ve broken windows before.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“How much you weigh?”
“Eight pounds. Eighty-five.” Daphne gave my paw a squeeze.
The condor considered this a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I can do that.”
I sighed. “What do you think about letting me ride on top, instead of you …”
Grimacing, I mimed talons shredding meat. “You know, carrying me.”
“I don’t want you to pull my feathers.”
“I don’t want you to rip open my internal organs.”
“You have a point.”
“I’ll be gentle.”
“No one’s ever ridden me before.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’ve never ridden a bird either.”
Bobby Waffles chuckled.
“Fuck off, Waffles,” I said.
“Let’s fly,” said the condor, kneeling in the gravel as much as a bird can kneel. Letting go
of Daphne’s hand, I swung onto his back as if he were a motorbike, but I couldn’t gain
purchase on his wet feathers, so I gripped as best as I could while the condor unfurled his
wings and started jogging parallel to the fence. I felt the force of his wings flap as much as I
saw it, the mirror muscles of his back rising and falling like buoys in a storm. I ducked low
as we left the ground.
We were rising up to meet the rain, the condor said, “The name is Clanks.”
“Mr. Clanks?”
“Just Clanks. What about you?”

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“Tom,” I said. “Just Tom.”
He was pummeling the air with his wings, huffing, but our ascent was slow. A few
months before Spike had invited me out to Muscle Beach to train, and a couple minutes
after knocking off thirty pull-ups, he told me to hop on his back, which I did. Then he tried
some more. He got to two.
“How you doin’, champ?” I asked as we floated above the concertina wire.
“Winded,” he said, then after another second, he added, “Hey, Tom, you look just like –”
“Get that all the time,” I said. “No relation,” I added, just as Clanks started banking
without warning. I’d never thought much about how birds flew, but of course, like planes,
they couldn’t turn without rolling, which meant that I was about to roll too, down the great
bird’s wing, when my not-dying instinct kicked in, and I squeezed his back with my knees
and threw my arms around his neck.
“Krrannnnererererkkk,” he shouted, for a moment ceasing to flap and falling like a piano.
I heard Daphne yell Swate Jaysus and the various other assembled creatures yelp, shriek, caw
and moan as Clanks started pounding back against gravity. I felt his heart kicking like an
anti-aircraft gun. Wet crabgrass neared, and then slowly retreated as I felt the wind push
against my back and not my face.
“Sorry about that, Clanks,” I said.
“Ease off the windpipe,” he squeaked, so I did, but I still kept my arms in a loose knot
around the long cone of his neck.
As we swung round the corner, he said, “Good speech. Powerful stuff, that.”
“Thanks. Why, uh, why were you there?”
“Poachers,” he said.
“Right,” I said. That was a damn good answer.

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I was breathing hard to calm my paddleball heart, and into my lungs seeped the smell of
the factory, an All-Star team of noxious odors natural and man-made. Fresh shit, ammonia,
the graveyard smell of hungry moss on old stone, and most of all a steamy horse stock –
hooves and bones and mane and hide boiled down to a wicked gum.
What the hell was I doing? For Jerry or Yosemite Sam, breaking-and-entering was just
another Tuesday, but I’d been the Vice President of SAG. I had a reputation to hold up, but
then we were turning another corner and Clanks was saying, “So there’s the window.”
From two hundred feet, it was the size of a stamp.
“Okay, so you’re going to fly over and hover while I kick in the glass and check out
what’s inside?”
“I’m not a hummingbird. I don’t hover.”
“So what was the plan?”
“I thought you had a plan.”
“My plan prominently featured you hovering.”
“Well.”
At a hundred feet, the window was now a blank black business card. The fur above my
lips was dripping rainwater into my mouth.
“How close can you get before you have to swerve?”
“I can fly along the wall. You can get as close as you like.”
“You’re flying pretty fast,” I said. “I’d have to time it perfect, but even if I do break
through, the glass might cut me, and what if I fall into a meat grinder or a bubbling vat of
hot goo.”
The window was now the size of the scripts I didn’t need because my show didn’t
involve talking. For a few beats, the only sound was the tickle of rain, the great whapping of

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Clanks’s wings. “So,” he finally said, “are you going to keep whining, or are you going to put
on your big boy pants and suck it up?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, at which Clanks curved close enough to the corrugated wall his long
fingery feathers almost brushed it. Primaries, they were called – the nuns thought animal
anatomy was important for us to learn, and the word came back to me from some eighth
grade quiz. A foot of primaries, five more feet of wing, then me. I would need a real jump.
I scooted my way onto my knees, gaining a newfound appreciation for tightrope walkers.
“Coming up,” said Clanks.
Wobbling atop his back, I launched myself as we came even with the window, forgetting
my twelfth-grade physics and the laws of relative velocity: I was propelled by my legs, which
shot me toward the wall, but also Clanks’s forward motion. That side of the equation was
complex. The other side was simple: I hit the wall beyond the window, with the clang of
bone on steel. I heard a gong and the tear of fabric along the seam, felt a cold fire shiver up
my arm, spun and flipped, caught a raindrop up my nose, coughed it back up in freefall and
realized I had two blinks to keep from biting the big one. But in the face of imminent death,
my bipedal body was reclaimed by some ancient cattishness. It lengthened my spine then
bent it, tucked my arms and stretched my legs. My upper body corkscrewed, my arms and
legs shot out like Superman, and all at once, I was facing scrubby grass. I was still terrified,
but some injection of catavistic wisdom slackened my muscles to Miracle Whip. While my
speed was tremendous, I was no longer accelerating, and as I landed, my limbs accordioned
without my telling them to, living shock absorbers.
I stood up, reeling on my back heels, cracked my neck, dusted myself off, which had
always seemed ridiculous when I’d seen it in the movies, but now made perfect sense, and
eyed my surroundings. In front of me was a door, and it was ajar.

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The reek was as thick as peanut butter, as bright as Oz, and it rolled up my stomach like
an empty toothpaste tube. But all that trickled out my mouth was piney gruel.
Worse yet were the invisible brambles of dumb fear strung about the place like Satan’s
Christmas lights. As soon as I could stand, I stumbled ahead, covering my nose with a
handkerchief stained only with a little of Jerry’s sleep drool, feeling my eyes click until they
were all pupil.
The cement floor sloped in great shallow cones to drains haloed by colonies of moss,
mounds of dank fuzz that glowed a faint chartreuse in some parts, in others garnet, canary,
Liz Taylor eye. High above was the unbarred window I’d tried to break through, with
nothing but dead air between it and a pick-up-sticks of broken copper piping on the floor. I
looked at my paws and told them to be grateful.
Hung like championship banners from the rafters were posters that read A Line is Better
than a Curve, pH Matters, Horses like Vivaldi. The word horse pressed me ahead, past sleeping
conveyor belts, hissing boilers carbuncled with meters and gauges, a machine that looked an
awful lot like a naked V8 with a spear jerry-rigged to each piston. The reek was shading
from the chemical to the feral as I neared an interior wall of concrete blocks, bare but for a
clock reading midnight and a low door beneath, too short for a horse to pass through.
Daphne was somewhere on the other side of the wall, the other side of a padlocked door,
the other side of the world’s tallest fence, her chest heaving for me. Or at least I hoped so –
what if a squad car had driven by? What if they’d gotten bored? What if Bobby Waffles had
started putting the moves on her and she’d decided one furry was as good as another? The
factory was a giant Petri dish growing fear, and I felt it pricking me as I plunged ahead,
through the doorway.
On the other side, a dozen nags were creaking around in an open-ceilinged cell, with

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fluorescent lights crowding the walls, as bright as an interrogation room. A voice from
somewhere was asking, “Okay so they’ll probably look like talking animals, but with shiny
outfits. There could be lasers. Communicating to you with their minds.”
The small man wore brothel creepers, tight Levi’s, and an Abraham Lincoln mask,
padding around the horses, holding up a sheet of paper. He peered out at me from under
one of the horses. “Something tells me you’re not the night shift,” he said.
“Could say the same of you.”
“Fair enough.” He took me in behind Abe’s sunken face. He wouldn’t have been taller
than me but for his creepers. “The LAPD doesn’t hire animals, and as far as I know, neither
does the CIA.”
“What’s the CIA?” I asked.
“Can you talk to horses?”
“I – I came for – because – this meeting I was at …” I sighed, closing my eyes, which
were tearing up from all the chemicals in the air. “I’m here for a jailbreak.”
“How’d you get over the fence?”
“California condor.”
He nodded approvingly. “That’s good. How’d you get through the door?”
“You left it open.”
“Ah.” The nearest horse started nibbling at the Abraham Lincoln mask, prompting the
little man to reach into his jacket and hand the nag a sugar cube.
“No one sent you here?”
“The girl I’m with told me she wants to burn the place down and dance naked for me in
the flames.”
“That’s beautiful,” he said, reaching up to pet the horse’s plough of a jaw.

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“How’d you get through the door?”
“Picks,” he said, pulling what looked like bobby pins from the back of his Levi’s.
“How’d you get over the fence? And what’s on that piece of paper?”
Because of the mask, I couldn’t read his face, so his pause was equally indecipherable.
Finally he wormed the paper back into his jeans and said, “I’ve been told one of the horses
here is demi-vocal, semi-sentient.”
But before I could respond, a horse in the corner of the pen started whinnying, “I can I
can I can I can I can I can I can I can.” Or maybe it was “I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t …”
Scrambling under and around the horses, the little man retrieved the piece of paper and held
it up to the nag’s nose.
“I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t,” said the horse.
“You can’t put it there,” I said. “Horses can’t see what’s directly in front of them.”
I grabbed the paper and flipped it over to see a sketch of a huge talking cat in a spaceman
suit. I shifted it to the side of the horse’s face. His eye was swirled with red like a shooter –
you could almost see all of the factory’s alkalis and acids singeing the surface. I sighed. It
was a shitty world. “It’s all right, Charlie,” I said, reaching up to stroke his snarled mane.
“We’ll get you outta here.” I hadn’t expected to be in the building long enough to be
jonesing for a cigarette. At least my nose was now numbing to the smell.
Eying the sketch, horse seemed to be struggling with his words. “Ssssssss….”
“Spy?” asked the little rabblerouser. “Uncle Sam? Sabotage?”
The horse shook his head. “Ssssssssss …” A grunt cannoned in the back of his throat.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Ssssscaaaarrrrred.” Poor guy. If you could talk, you could talk, and if you couldn’t, you
didn’t know any better. The horse knew what it was to communicate, but couldn’t make his

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mouth do it, stuck in an evolutionary limbo.
“What about this?” the asked, holding up the sheet he’d rummaged from his jacket, a
schematic of a discus-shaped something.
“We need to get them out of here,” I said. “There are a bunch of angry talking animals
outside the fence. A cop’s going to notice something soon.”
The horses were shivering, bucking invisible riders. They knew something I didn’t. I
dashed through to the back of the room to a steel door of normal height, but it was locked,
and didn’t have a keyhole. Something was moving on the other side. I had a vision of a cat
alien, ready to take me back to my true home.
“Did you hear that?” called the little man. “Disney! He said Disney!”
“Dzzzz ..” said the horse.
The door handle trembled, clicked, and turned. I told myself I was ready to be taken.
Instead, I got Bobby Waffles holding a keyring fit for a jailer, with Daphne standing behind,
both blinking against the sudden light.
“Tom,” she said, stepping through the doorway, covering her nose against the smell.
“We were so worried. How dy’ever survoive that full? How’d ya get through the door?”
The gecko had skittered beside her, holding a pair of wire cutters. “I broke into a
hardware store through the dog-door.”
“This kook over here,” I said, waving my arm toward the far side of the cell. I didn’t
hear anything from him. I peered around the nearest horse, but the little man in the Lincoln
mask was gone. “Uh, I mean … y’know,” I said, taking a breath and letting the swagger sink
back in. “Guess I only have eight lives left.”
While they laughed, I bent over, swiped off the floor the papers the man dropped and
stuffed them into my pocket. I stood up with a hundred cracks in my back, like a sheaf of

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spaghetti snapped in half. It was going to hurt tomorrow. I patted Charlie on the neck.
“This fella here, he can speak.”
“I can I can I can I can I can I can I can I can,” the horse said. Daphne’s lips retracted in
a grimace. Her teeth were slightly crooked and very white.
“We need to get them out of here,” said Clanks, nosing his beak toward the darkness on
the other side of the door.
“Right,” I said, ushering Daphne, on the heels of the rest. Still facing away, she reached
around behind herself and gave my crotch a squeeze.
“C’mon,” I told the horses, waving for them to follow. The almost-talking horse
chittered, nosing the mane of the nearest nag, then clattered away on weak legs into the
cavern of conveyor belts, tanks, and greasy tubing. With the rest of the herd cantering
behind, the horse was galloping through to the pearly glow that was the open entrance of
Jones Adhesive; it was like a beer commercial, at least until Bobby Waffles tried to mount
one as it ran past, only to bounce off its flank and back to the floor. The other talking
animals got out of the way, congratulating each other nervously, accomplices in a prank that
had become a felony. Rubbing his hip, Bobby Waffles grabbed the wire-cutter from the
gecko and swung it at a knob on one of the larger tanks, a steely summer sausage the size of
a truck. It popped off like a cork from a bottle of champagne.
“Oh, that’s not a good idea,” I said, but Daphne had me leashed by the tie, yanking me
toward a small upper-storey office built atop stilts, accessible via a zigzag of stairs. Rising off
her skin like fog off melting snow were more emotions than I could name. “I want ya
there,” she said, then kissed me, more sweetly, more tentatively than I would’ve expected
from someone with a Lenny Bruce mouth. The only bit of her tongue I felt was the tip.
“I want to fale the rasp o’ yer tongue on my clit,” she whispered, her eyes as green as a

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glade. She tugged me noosed up the stairs into the office, a cube barely big enough for the
desk and file cabinets that occupied its floors, the hundreds of news clippings mostly in
languages I didn’t recognize, the maps of places I didn’t know, the pen-and-ink drawings of
everything from spacesuits to Minotaurs to diagrams of what looked like airplanes without
wings. Daphne’s gaze swept hither and yon – making a constellation from what to my eyes
was only a hodge-podge of fantasy and paranoia – then dropped my tie, breathed deep and
wheeled to me. She inserted a smile into her face like it was a mouthguard. “Not here. I
fale like we’re baying watched.” She uncinched her trench coat, slid out of it, and retreated
backward toward the door. Her dress was as dark as a cassock, and like a witch at a black
mass, she swung the chain of her shark sachet at me, censing the tiny room with her leather
and dried wildflowers.
“Stay up there,” she said as she tiptoed backward down the fire-escape-style stairs, still
leashing me with her eyes. “Yer the only one who gets to watch.” I stood on the landing
thirty feet above her as she unzipped her dress and pulled it down over her bra. “D’ya want
me to kape going?”
I nodded, light-headed from the gin, the ammonia fumes, the desire, but more than that,
the voices of the nuns crowding my skull who’d told me that creatures were supposed to
pair off with their own kind – two by two on Noah’s Ark and all – and that it was an
abomination to lust after other creatures. That was easy enough when the only human
women around were septuagenarian sisters, not so much when it was a nineteen-year-old
Scottish girl pulling a dress past a waist so slim it seemed impossible that it housed all the
necessary organs, over wide bony hips the black band of her panties bit into, down gartered
legs barely thicker than baseball bats. She was either very poor or had the discipline to
deprive herself of food everyday.

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“You could use a burger, red,” I called down to her as she swung her foot up onto a
stopped conveyor belt.
“I have food to ate you know not of,” she said, unlatching her garter. The blasphemy
sent a shiver down my tail and I gripped the landing’s railing against vertigo. She began
pushing her stocking down her thigh, then slid her palm down the red spade of her tongue
and rolled the hose to her ankle and off her foot. She held it in the air for my perusal then
dropped it to the gritty floor. She did the same with the other stocking, which rolled down
the slight incline until it was stopped by a comet tail of red moss that widened down toward
a small grate. Her eyes narrowed as she eyed the line of moss her legs were straddling, and
she bent at the waist and let her torso fall, her face diving toward the ground in a slow wave,
her hands pressing into the cement like a dog stretching as her long nostrils sniffed at the
radioactive muff of moss. I wondered if hers was the same color.
For a moment she paused, breathing in the unnaturally phosphorescent lichen. Above
her panties, twin dimples mirrored each other on either side of her spine. I didn’t know there
were such things as lower back dimples. My eyes were tearing up, and I daubed them to see
her wipe her fingertips through the glistening red furze. As she stood up, she held them up
to me, and they were as red as if she’d stuck them in raspberry pie. At first I thought she
might lick them, but instead she wiped them in a sort of sunburst radiating from her mouth.
It was only when she said, “Mrrrreeeeennnnooowwwww” that I realized they were whiskers.
She returned to all fours and began crawling around, meowing, snarling. I thought I might
have a heart attack as I leaned out over the railing to watch her scamper under the stairs,
then I felt myself somersault, seeing the rusty columns that supported the stairs, the rafters
overhead, the banner that read A Line Is Better Than a Curve.
Whatever cattishness had saved me before had been short-circuited, and as I spun and

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fell, my mind was elsewhere. I wondered if Bugs had taken Jerry home. I wondered if Rita
Hayworth had ever stripteased for Orson Welles. I wondered where the little man in the
mask had gone. I wondered what Stevenson was doing that night. I wondered if
Eisenhower would send troops into East Germany. I wondered why anyone would want to
ride a Ferris wheel in the rain.
Far away, I heard a slow hiss like a kettle coming to boil.

I woke to an eclipse, a lumpy orb haloed in cold white light. I blinked, coughed, closed
my eyes, coughed again. My lungs felt scoured, my head hollow, and I smelled smoke on my
fur. When I coughed again, I tried lifting my arm only to find it handcuffed to a rail, so I
lifted the other one, free but plugged with a tube at the wrist.
“Tom?” said the silhouette. “Tom? Thank God. Don’t worry, son, Walt Disney hasn’t
captured you for his secret underground lab. That hoodoo Mason puppeteer isn’t going to
sodomize you with a magic wand tonight, no sirree. Not MGM’s number-one feline.”
“Oh good,” I coughed, as the angry Buddha that was Noggles Schmear slowly came into
focus. His face floated down toward mine, a moon with rosacea, close enough I could make
out the tiny black hairs sprouting from the pores of his gherkin nose.
“Yeah,” said a welcome voice from the corner of the room, “I turned Walt away at the
door.”
“But we are in bit of trouble,” said Schmear.
“By ‘we’, he means ‘you,’” Jerry said, pulling up a stool beside what I now realized was a
hospital bed, clambering up the rungs and settling down atop it.
“Wait,” I said, having to unstick my tongue from my mouth to talk, “what happened?”
“You burned down a glue factory,” said Jerry, lighting up.

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“Well, at least gunked it up pretty bad before the fire trucks got there,” said Schmear.
“Thank God that retard horse when they caught him managed to say ‘cat inside,’ even if he
couldn’t say much else.”
“Wait, what happened to Daphne?”
“Daphne? All they found at the scene was you.”
After taking a puff, Jerry told me to open wide then set the Lucky between my lips.
“What were you doing there?” Jerry said as I took a long drag. “And why were you with
those Commies?”
“Wait – Commies? What happened?”
“After you sabotaged the place, the glue started running everywhere, melting piping,” said
Schmear, his face finally retreating from mine. “Safety release valves got clogged, tanks
exploded.”
“Shit got ugly,” said Jerry, “and the cops say they know the Commies did it.”
“Commies?”
“Eyewitnesses put you at that animal liberation meeting.” Schmear turned his back to
face the window. The sun was rising – or setting. I had no idea. “Some of them were card-
carrying socialists.”
“That ain’t illegal,” I said.
“But it will fuck up your career,” snarled Schmear, wheeling, his patience withered.
“And you know what is illegal? Breaking into a building and setting loose a bunch of horses
and then busting up the machinery. Crimes is what those are,” he said.
“That one horse could talk, sort of,” I said. “Killing him would’ve been murder.”
Schmear exhaled, deflating. “I know. Believe me, that’s more or less all that’s keeping
you from jail. That and the fact that Mr. Mayer likes you very much.”

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“Don’t forget the USO,” said Jerry, returning the Lucky to his own mouth. “Mr. Mayer
called Bob Hope, and he said Bob said he’d chew his hat if anything happened to you.”
“But why did you have to say all those un-American things?” moaned Schmear, gripping
the satin lapels of his suit.
“What un-American things?” I said, trying without much success to remember anything
before flying on the California condor. “Wait, what day is it?”
“Thursday,” said Schmear. “You’ve been out for a day and a half.”
“That’s why they stuck a hose into your Jiminy Cricket,” said Jerry, ashing on the floor
and pointing at my crotch. “They found you naked with three bruised ribs and a broken toe.
You’re lucky you didn’t crack your head open. What the hell were you doing?”
“You said you wanted to shoot Eisenhower with a cannon,” said Schmear. “You said you
wanted to flush the American flag down the toilet of a brothel. You said you wanted to take
a crap on a draft card.”
“No I didn’t. Who the hell said that?”
“Bugs Bunny!” shouted Schmear. Curving over his belly was a Tom and Jerry tie. “He
claims to be the only witness from earlier that evening at that bar.”
“Well, then it’s his word against mine,” I said.
“Not even,” said Jerry. “I told the Assistant D.A. it was horseshit.”
“Weren’t you passed out?” I whispered.
“You don’t have to be conscious to know that whatever Bugs says will be nonsense.” He
winked at me and took a long drag.
“They found some heavy drugs inside you, and not the kind you’d take for kicks,” said
Schmear. “Just tell them you found out there was a talking horse that was about to be killed,
and that you made a mistake in the heat of the moment, and that you weren’t responsible for

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any of the sabotage, and they won’t put you on the blacklist.”
“Blacklist?” I said. What I’d done two nights before was sprint off a cliff, and after a few
seconds of pedaling in midair, that one word was pulling me to the bottom of the abyss.
Jerry looked away. “They wanted to pull you from the show,” he said. “They made a
couple calls. Sylvester, Felix.” He looked back at me, and for the first time I’d seen since V-
J Day, there were tears in his eyes. “I told ‘em that unless you croaked, if they put another
cat on the show, I’d accidentally stab him in the chest on the first day.”
“They’re not putting you on the blacklist,” said Schmear. “At least we’re pretty sure. But
that John Ford flick, Ford put the kibosh on you doing that.”
“What?!?” I said. John Wayne, Natalie Wood, Thomas Grimalkin. I was going to play a
young whelp the Duke would take under his wing. The first live-action movie with a talking
animal actor. It was going to launch me into the real Hollywood, and I was going to pull the
rest of the animal kingdom up with me. Somebody’d already called me the Jackie Robinson
of the talking animals. I would’ve melted my three Oscars down to a puddle for that part.
“You just need to lay low for a little while,” said Schmear. “A couple months and this’ll
all be behind you. You can audition for other live movies then.”
The news was like ipecac – I found my stomach clenching like I was about to take a
punch. I gagged. If there’d been a thing in my stomach, it would’ve been on my lap. But
there wasn’t.
“Don’t sweat it,” said Jerry. “We’ll get this sorted out, and I’ll take you out for a steak
dinner with a bottle of rye and two whores each.”
I swallowed, my eyes burning. Jerry’d never seen me like this. “Sounds good, Walls,
sounds real good.”
“Who are they going to get for the Ford picture?” I asked.

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“Bugs,” said Schmear, not looking me in the eye. “Least that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Bugs? Bugs doesn’t have the chops for The Three Stooges. He can’t do manliness. He
can’t do heartache.
“They need a big name,” said Schmear. “And Mickey’s too old.”
“Did somebody make you do it, Hoss?
“Dame named Daphne,” I said. “She got down on all fours and started meowing for me.
Redhead.”
Schmear looked out the window to a sun rouged by smog to a bloody vermillion, to a
dreamland of Rita Hayworth, Moira Shearer, Clara Bow, Deborah Kerr, the pantheon of
Hollywood flames. Finally he looked back to me, his own face flushed red with lust and
regret. “I understand, Tom. Redheads. They make you fly too close to the sun.”

5.

Bugs always looked the most rabbitish when his feelings were hurt, his short upper lip
encroaching into his pink pea of a nose, his whole lower face trembling, ears drooping like
untended houseplants. It was a look I knew well when I saw it onstage, after Zykov asked
my first California friend how he experienced Horatio’s emotions.
“What I’m feeling Horatio feeling here is him thinking Hamlet’s thinking he’s too good
for him,” said Bugs, staring past Zykov at me. “What I’m feeling is that Hamlet is spending
too much time with his ladyfriend, and what he really needs to do is to let bygones be
bygones and go out to Musso and the Roosevelt more with his old bestest pal Horatio, just
like old times.”

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“Fascinating,” said Zykov, nodding at nothing.
The stage at the Bowl was a circus with a blind ringmaster:
To my left the flamingos had roosted in Bullwinkle’s rack and were fighting with wooden
cutlasses, shouting En Garde at each other over and over and over again.
“En Garde!”
“En Garde!”
“En Garde!”
“En Garde!”
It was not the first time I felt pleased I’d be able to kill them onstage.
Stage right Gracie was encouraging Porky him as he stammered his lines to bits. She was
nicer to Pork than most people, and sometimes she baked him rhubarb pies for no other
reason than the kindness of it.
Upstage, Wile and Yogi were digging in make-believe dirt. “Uh,” muttered Yogi, flicking
imaginary dirt over his shoulder, “is she uh, to be buried in Christian burial with, you know,
that thing and uh, that other thing?” Wile shrugged, then planted his feet atop the spade of
his shovel and started pogo-ing around on it.
“Well, uh, fuck you too.” Yogi squinted up at the sun, then retreated deeper into the
shadows of the stage. Old Yogi was a straight-up Staten Island guido, and while he loved his
job – he’d spent most of his youth as a longshoreman and he still couldn’t believe people
would pay him to scamper around in a porkpie and say, “Yabba-dabba-do” – he hated the
outdoors more than any animal I’d ever met, and he said those occasions when the uppity-
ups at MGM decided they should actually shoot at Yosemite were the worst weeks of his life
were. And he’d spent two years in Sing-Sing for racketeering.
While none of us were in costume nor would we be for at least another three months,

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Mickey Mouse had stolen a real crown and an ermine stole from Disney’s costume shop and
was wearing them despite the heat, shouting Claudius’s lines to the heavens.
I wasn’t sure who Goof and Eeyore were supposed to be, but Eeyore was splayed at the
edge of the orchestra pit, looking like he was ready for the abattoir, and Goofy was seated
beside him, smoking menthols though a cigarette holder, scanning a dozen dailies and
tabloids through tinted pilot’s goggles. “You’re a Pisces?” asked Goof. “Whoa. I am sorry,
brother: ‘Best not to leave the house today’ … ‘Avoid busy city streets’ … ‘A dear friend will
betray you before sunset’ … ‘The universe is fundamentally senseless and cruel, but it
especially hates you.’ I’ve never heard a horoscope that bad before. That is some heavy shit,
right there, my brother.” Eeyore’s pink-bowed tail drooped.
“Figures,” he said. “But thanks for checking.”
“But Mr. Grimalkin,” said Zykov, snapping me back to Bugs’s needy Horatio, “how do
you read the scene?” I wanted to tell him I could read, but instead I said, “I don’t know. His
dad’s dead, his girl’s crazy, and his mom is sleeping with Mickey Mouse. How the hell would
you feel?”
“Oh, very good Mr. Grimalkin,” he said, chuckling.
“I think you need to tap into that emotional pain, Thomas,” said Bugs. “Find that place
of abandonment and speak from it.”
“‘Place of abandonment’? Bugs, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Been going to a shrink,” he said, tapping his temple. “I’m becoming a geographer of my
own mind.”
“Mr. Grimalkin, Mr. Bunny is quite right. This is a scene of rage and mourning and
terror. You are impotent!” he shouted, pointing a finger not quite at me, but close enough.
“The world is buffeting you about, and it seems like you have no control over your fate.

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How do you feel about it?”
He wasn’t my confessor, or my wife. Not that I went to confession, or, for that matter,
confided in my wife. “You gonna use Volton for the ghost?” I asked, nodding at the giant
chasing after the pogo-ing Wile. “Put him in a sheet and have him float around after me?”
“No, Mr. Grimalkin,” said Zykov, smiling as some beasty backstage rumbled. “I had
something else in mind altogether.”
“Vaminos!” shouted the flamingos, at the sound, dropping the cutlasses from their beaks
onto Bullwinkle’s head and flapping away.
Padding out from behind the curtain was an ancient lion, his eyes drooping, ribs exposed,
his mane dulled to the color of old hay. He was what the lion from the zoo would look like
in ten years. Bugs dropped into a karate stance.
“Hello, sir,” I said. “Is there something I can do for you?” The lion smiled, flexed his
front paws, and arched his back downward like a sleepy housecat.
“I admire your work,” he said in a bass so raspy I felt it as much as heard it. Even so, I
wanted to hear the music of the savannah beneath it. Maybe I did.
“I wish I could say I knew yours.”
“Oh but you do, Mr. Grimalkin,” said Zykov. “He appears before each of your episodes,
or so I’ve been told. Mr. Rodrigo?”
The lion inhaled, filling lungs that must have been the size of golf bags, and roared so
loud it knocked Wil off his shovel.
“The M-j-j-j-j-j-j-gee-M lion!” shouted Pork.
Speaking without thinking, I said, “I didn’t know …” then let the sentence die.
“That I was one of you?”
Gracie shyly sidled beside me and whispered in my ear, “He sounds like Harry

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Belafonte.”
He wore homespun dungarees, a dun tunic wrapped around his torso: the clothes of
someone who’d grown up without them. The clothes of someone who was still all animal.
“Where are you from?” I asked as Wile dusted himself off.
“Kenya,” he said. “Not an easy place to be a talking beast. But I am glad to be here,
with all of you,” he said, rising to his back legs feet, as tall as a man, and sweeping a mighty
forepaw across the stage. “And I am glad to be your father,” he added. I felt a sting deep in
my nostrils. He swung his noble head around the stage, pausing for a moment at Mickey
before cradling my eyes in his. “Regardless of what the usurpers do, remember: you are the
real king.”
“Do you know kung-fu?” Bugs asked the lion, trying out a roundhouse. “I know kung-
fu.”
But Zykov was already consulting with Rodrigo about his lines, so Bugs shrugged and
started repeating to himself Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers while Wile rummaged
through his rucksack until he pulled out a slimy hunk of meat the size of a bowling ball. It
bore a striking resemblance to a heart. He pointed at Bullwinkle, and began gnawing on it as
though it were an apple.
“He’s pulled a heart from his bag,” said Bugs, taking Zykov’s hand and tapping fake
Braille onto his palm. “I think it’s Bullwinkle’s.”
“No, that can’t be,” said Bullwinkle, feeling at his chest under his powder blue suit. “It
was just here a minute ago.”
Shaking his head, Wile turned upstage, waving for me to follow.
“Union break!” I called. I patted myself down for cigarettes and stole into the shade
behind the great velvet curtain. But Wile was already jogging past dressing rooms and

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storage closets, down steep concrete stairways that seemed to have no bottom, further into
the mildewy intestinal tract of the Hollywood Bowl. He was indeed wilier and wilder than
the rest of us, and as he disappeared into what looked like a drainage tunnel, part of me
wondered if he wasn’t luring me away only to tear me apart. After all, he was chewing on a
moose heart. He hung a louie at a red exit sign glowing as bright as Mickey Mouse’s onesie,
then waited for me in an even smaller side tunnel, munching as I panted toward him.
“I cannot believe I signed on for this production, Tom,” he said. “The fat bear does
nothing but flub the few lines he has, flub his lines and talk about what sexual positions he
would like to employ with Gina Lollabrigida.” In the Gotham darkness I could only see his
unmoving silhouette, cast by a prick of light at the nether end of the tunnel.
“To be honest with you, William, I was a little surprised you signed on too. You realize
your character has to talk, right?”
Like so many of us, Wile E. Coyote was not born Wile E Coyote. Instead, as he tells it,
he came into this world on Black Tuesday during a meteor shower in the New Mexican
desert and was christened William World’s End by the Navajo grandmother who adopted
him a few months later. His convenient not-talking shtick actually came about by accident:
on the now legendary day Schmear’s limo pulled even with him on New Mexico State Road
60, Wile was flying after RR on a motorbike, driving with his knees, holding a Bunsen burner
in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other. What the exec couldn’t know was that
Wile had been suffering from the lupine equivalent of strep and hadn’t been able to swallow
in a week. When Schmear flagged him down with promises of meat and money, then
questioned him about his life and his relationship to his nemesis, all he could do was shrug
and gesture – I imagined it involved lots of finger pistols, air grenades, mimed lynching. His
silent expressiveness seemed to seal the deal, and that night he was sleeping in the Biltmore,

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sucking on elmwood lozenges and dreaming of ever more complicated Rube Goldberg
devices with which to kill Road Runner.
“Milt believed the production would be a boon for my career. Besides, I am in some
need of funds.” Despite his roots, Wile talked with the verbose, roundabout specificity of a
low-level crime boss – the running joke was that he’d learn to speak English from the caper
shows on the radio, but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t true.
“Milt? Milt’s in Peru, or Australia, or Alaska, or someplace.”
“I believe his latest junket was the Korean peninsula,” said Wile, finishing off the heart,
sucking his fingertips one by one. “He is convinced pandas are going to be the next big
thing, vis-à-vis entertainment. He says this to me at the Brown Derby, not five days ago.”
“Fuck pandas,” I said. “All they do is snarl and eat bamboo. Fuck Milt too.”
“The man to whom you send ten per cent – ten per cent – of your hard-earned green –”
“Takes off for six months, doesn’t return my telegrams, sends me nothing when we win
the Oscar, shows up in L.A., and calls you for lunch? No offense, but we all know who
butters Milt Macintoddy’s bread.”
“I do believe I told him I would eat him if he did not take me to lunch.” He started
picking at his gums with his letter-opener of a claw-nail.
“Oh. Well. What did he do?”
“He gave to me an ivory cigarette case engraved with lovely Oriental writing, met my
gustatory needs at the Brown Derby, and gave me a ten thousand dollar advance against
future earnings. I was pleased.”
Milton Michael Macintoddy had in the Twenties developed a reputation as quite literally
the worst vaudevillian in the world, and I doubt anyone will ever have as many mushy pieces
of spoiled fruit thrown at them by the relatively easy-to-please crowds of Sheboygan,

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Duluth, Rochester, Sault Ste. Marie, and any of the other Snow Belt hamlets in which Milt’s
act failed so spectacularly. His jokes didn’t flop so much as not even make sense those few
times he could correctly recall the punch lines, his bowling pin juggling tended to bean half
the first row, and as for the ventriloquism, he wouldn’t even try to hide his lip movement, he
didn’t change his voice when speaking as the dummy, and sometimes he even forgot to
move Lil Dan’s mouth. But he was a schmooze-master, and somehow he wormed his way
onto Ed Sullivan, where the slightly more sophisticated crowd assumed his incompetence was
part of the act. Realizing they would not be duped forever, and liking the climate of the
Golden State better than that of his home base of Moorhead, MN, he jumped career tracks
into agenting, and with his signature combination of six-martini lunches, wild promises, and
an unmatched ability to efface himself for his clients’ sake, he started collecting the neglected
and unsigned animal talent, beginning with me and Spike and Jerry. He could’ve retired
before Truman left office, but he still lived in an attic studio in Downey, still ate beans and
Saltines for most of his non-client meals, still wore the suit he’d been wearing when I met
him, a double-breasted plaid number that looked moth-eaten in 1941.
“Maybe I should try to muscle Milt up,” I offered, flexing my biceps in the dark.
“You’ve never killed a man. He would ascertain – quite quickly – that you were
bluffing.”
“I could tell him I was going over to Dandy Morton.”
“My intuition is telling me that lion is in fact a charlatan. A phony. A fraud.”
“I know what a charlatan is, Wile.”
“The roar, I admit, is impressive. But the safari accent: I doubt.”
“You don’t think he’s the MGM lion?”
“To me, he has that low-rent reek of the circus. I’ve known carnies, and I’ve known

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carnivores, and reminds me more of the former.”
“Are you concerned?”
“He will be not be playing the part of my father, therefore I am not concerned for myself,
but for you, my friend.
“You suspect him of something?”
“I suspect everyone of everything.”
My eyes had adjusted, but I wished they hadn’t: the tiny tunnel was shiny with what
looked like slug slime, and teensy unidentifiable critters kept half-piping from one side to the
other. It smelled like the outhouse Yosemite Sam claimed to have been born in. The silence
was the only assuring part of the whole experience until some distant whimpering began
chipping away at it. Crooking a long ear, Wil said, “It is probably too much to hope that the
sound is emanating from the mealy lips of one Mickey Mouse.”
I spat. “It’s a dog. Mice squeak.” Lighting a Lucky, I asked him since when he’d been
short on cash.
“I made a few unfortunate real estate investments with friends who are no longer friends,
who are no longer welcome this side of the Nevada state line.”
“The world is a shittier place than it used to be.”
“It is for that reason I now vote Republican,” Wile said. “Please do tell me you did vote
for Nixon and not that daddy’s boy whose feminine odors are currently befouling the White
House.”
“Yeah.” I said. “But Gracie voted for Kennedy because she always votes for whichever
candidate she’d rather sleep with. Spike voted for Kennedy because he’s Catholic. Bugs
voted Herbert Hoover on a write-in.”
“Have you ever aspired to higher office yourself?”

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Any response was aborted by the whimper flaring into shrieks of undiluted pain.
“It appears not to be Mr. Mouse,” Wile said with his characteristic shrug. I stared out
toward the light at the end of the tunnel, a distant dying star. Panther-like, we stalked
toward it. Its quavering eventually resolved itself into moving images that appeared to be
coming from some kind of projector screen on the other side of the grate. The shriek cut
out, and as we stared through, all we could see was the screen, the movie backtracking at 10x
speed, then starting again.
It was Lady Dear in a red tango dress strutting down what looked like a sleazy
Hollywood alley late at night, holding a wicker basket and whistling innocently to herself.
The soundtrack was Dracula strings, the wail of a distant squad car.
“Once I had the pleasure of taking her on a date,” said Wile. “It did not end well.”
Lady Dear knocked on the door of a row house, soon answered by a man in CHP
sunglasses and a beard that looked as though it had been shorn from static on the TV. Lady
Dear mouthed an O of mock surprise – her grandmother this was not – and with his cane,
the man directed her inside to the front room, whose walls were covered in a jigsaw of
framed photos, mostly nudie pictures, plus a couple shots of a hyena smoking a cigarette.
Burly shadows jostled in the hallway leading to the kitchen as Lady Dear excavated from the
basket a whip, a rope, a candelabra. With Betty Boop eyes, she studied an old sepia of a
woman trussed and hung by her ankles from the rafters. She covered her mouth with her
fingers, glancing at bearded man for direction. My blood was tingling.
The man twirled his cane at her dress, and when she yipped “Could you help me out of
it?” he shook his head. She unzipped it herself and stepped out, wearing only her fur
beneath. He directed her down the narrow hall, and the camera followed in the half-dark to
a kitchen, where a hyena, a wolverine, a malamute, and a cruiserweight human were waiting

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around a kitchen table dandruffy with cigarette ash, bare but for large roast, half eaten and
very rare. She was so much smaller than the rest of them.
The light overhead was weak and red, as though it was a hotel bathroom with the heat
lamp turned on, and it made the men’s leers all the more diabolical. The range was
congested with dirty dishes, so the roast was removed to the yellowing linoleum. The tip of
the cane pointed at Lady Dear, then at the table. Gracie was right – she was skinny, the sort
of skinny that comes from a decade of wedge salad dinners with half a pack of Newports for
dessert, so thin any of the men could’ve grabbed her by the waist one-handed and set her on
the table. But they didn’t have to. She was obedient, hopping atop it, her feet dangling like
a kid’s, then easing back, batting her long long lashes. She was the star, and in her own
mind, the rickety table was a feather bed, the red glow was a pearly soft focus white, and the
thug approaching with the coil of rope and the St. Christopher metal ensnared in his chest
hair was Cary Grant bringing a rose. They roped her down, and I hated that I wanted to
know what would happen next.
I’d long roped down the sex part of my own brain, cordoning everything outside Felix
silvestris catus, but when he began unbuckling his heavy belt, it didn’t seem so strange but for
the fact that bestiality was a crime. But she didn’t seem to mind, and in fact, what had made
her an annoying conversationalist made her an ideal sex object: the whiny voice, the vanity,
the nonstop vocalization of her own feelings, the inferiority complex. As the man gripped
the sides of the table, his face reddening slowly from salmon to cranberry sauce, his hips
swinging in a horizontal derrick, the sounds she made came from her nose as much as her
mouth, and her expression was an alchemist’s blend of trepidation, pain, and adoration – an
expression I’d never seen on Gracie’s face, on the face of anyone I’d ever slept with. My
Johnson & Johnson was hardening against the back of my fly.

146

“Harder please,” she moaned. “Please.”
I wondered if she was faking it. I wondered if Gracie had ever faked it.
On the other side of the table was the hyena, so ragged you could almost smell the offal
on him, and when he pulled a carving knife from the floor, half of me was transfixed and
half of me wanted to scream through the bars for her to run. At first the knife was just a
tickle under the chin, and Lady Dear kept her attention on the man who was inside her, his
body rattling like a car with no shocks. Then he went still and gasped, staring wide-eyed past
the peeling wallpaper of the kitchen as Lady Dear said, “More, more.”
Next was the malamute, who was as big as Spike and as white as table salt, except around
his eyes, which were circled with big black washers. The mouth-breathing hyena pressed the
tip of the knife into Lady Dear’s neck. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, be careful.”
Jelly-legged, the first man huffed over to the corner of the room, where atop a packing
crate sat a flat iron. He plugged it in.
The camera zoomed in on her face, then panned to the malamute, whose shaggy white
johnson was pointing in her direction. It looked less like a sex organ than a table leg. “Oh
my,” she said, trying to appraise the foreshortened thing pointing at her face.
“Please be gentle …” But then the hyena slid the knife down her arm, slicing shallow
above the elbow. “Aaahhhh,” she shrieked, her coquettishness evaporating. “Stop, this isn’t
…” The camera held her upper body as she took a few calming breaths and examined her
arm, bloodying her golden fur to cordovan, then she gasped, throat clenching. The camera
swung down to the malamute, pumping away.
“Please,” she said. “It hurts. The connoisseur never said anything about big dogs, about
knives.” She tried to peer around the malamute to the man with the beard. “Stop, please,”
she whined. It felt like all my blood was draining into my crotch. I couldn’t look away.

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Re-entering the frame was first man, with the hot iron, glowing in the reddish light. He
glanced at the bearded man, who nodded. “No,” said Lady Dear, “No!” But the grinning
hyena mouthed the word yes as the man brought the iron toward her stomach. But just
before she screamed, Wile roared with a force that would have put the MGM lion to shame,
and immediately the movie stopped, a close-up of Lady Dear’s face, eyes squeezing out tears
that were melting her eyeliner, mouth left forever in mid-scream. Wile strangled the grate’s
bars as a grubby little human who had been watching from the wings squeaked and grabbed
the projector and fled out of sight. After a few Herculean yanks from Wile, the bolts started
to creak, then finally gave with the happy New Year’s sound of popping corks. Wil flung the
grate behind us and hopped inside the tiny office. He tried the door the perv had used to
escape. It was locked from the other side. Wil’s ropy arms strained against the handle, and
he huffed and puffed like the big bad wolf he was, but to no avail.
He released the handle with a mumbling stream of curses a comic strip would’ve
expressed as #!%*$!&$%#*#@#! The ratty sofa where the man had been sitting still had
his butt imprint. I didn’t see any other film cartridges, books, dirty photos. Wile stepped
back, wound up his leg on the socket of his hip, and just as I said “Wile, that’s not a good
…” he charged and kicked, denting the door and then grunting, grimacing. He sat on the
floor and examined his foot. A couple of his toes were bent in ways that toes should not
bend. Heat was rising from my collar. In the back of my mind I saw Lady Dear. I
wondered what they did with the iron. I wished I’d looked away. Feeling the sort worry
that’s mostly guilt, I pointed to the ceiling and said, “We don’t tell anyone up there.”
Wile stared up at me with his jaundiced eyes. “Tell me, then. What is our course of
action?”
“We take it to the professionals.”

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A boil of blue and gray embedded into the skin of Bunker Hill, LAPD Headquarters was
buzzing with reporters who looked like they lived off cheap cigarettes, cheaper coffee, and
whiskey that would’ve burned through pavement, scribblers who were fastballing questions
at the cops, who were hiking belts further up their bellies and shaking their square heads at
everything. Checking their fobs and reading the morning edition was a line of squirrely kike
lawyers waiting for their clients in brown suits with lapels like scimitars.
It wasn’t yet nine, and I was the only animal around. I’d fallen into Gracie’s late-sleeping
habits, and it had been a while since I’d been up to see three digits in the a.m., but despite
the circumstances of my visit, the sunlight off the steps seemed more hopeful than the one I
was used to, cleaner and yellowier, but I could feel wet heat under my arms. The wind was
dead, the Pacific as remote as a thought in the mind of God, and everything surface
smoldered with radiant heat. It was going to be a blistering summer. But I hadn’t touched a
drop of morphine since the previous day’s rehearsal, and I wasn’t hung over: since meeting
the lion at the zoo, I’d been trying to limit myself to four drinks a night and squirts of
narcotic only when the paw demanded it. Standing on the steps of the LAPD building, I
was sober and I didn’t care who knew it.
Wile was supposed to meet me at nine, but he hated clocks, slept rarely, and sometimes
disappeared for days stalking condors in Angeles National Forest. He was probably passed
out on a rock somewhere past Burbank, bloated with fowl, feathers and gore matted to the
fur around his muzzle, so I shrugged, rubbed my eyes, cracked my back, and took the
shallow stairs two at a time, past the lawyers, cops, scribblers. Too used to the studios, I
expected to be met by some corn-fed secretary, with skin like a vanilla milkshake and a
blouse that would’ve been two sizes too small in middle school, but there was no one to act

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as gatekeeper and guide to the madness that lay beyond.
It was a hundred humans trotting from one desk to another, a de Kooning constructed
from over-starched navy and under-cleaned linoleum, and smeared over it all a fog of sour
tobacco that had been there so long it had leeched into the walls only to over-saturate them
and bibble back out again. A one-eyed colored man was clutching the receiver of a phone
with both hands, hopping up and down and shouting, “Ralph! Ralph! Ralph!” over and over
again. An Okie in handcuffs was whistling Hank Williams while a woman I guessed was his
grandmother was trying to pare his nails. A talking lemur was clinging to the fluorescent
light overhead, squawking curses at his captors. A Mexican kid slumped shackled to a swivel
chair while a white cop at his side was stammering into a phone in Spanish, muddling the
language like it was a cocktail and he was an overeager bartender.
I pulled a Lucky from my jacket pocket and waved it up at the lemur. “Hey Bonz,” I
said, “how bout you take the Lenny Bruce down a couple notches?”
“Fuck you, they took my pecans,” he said, somehow crooking his tail around the light’s
screen and dropping down to grab the rodney and whisper in my ear, “they don’t know I hid
the rest in my shoe.” He rattled his wingtip at me. It was the size of a Gideon Bible.
“C’mon, Mr. Chuckles,” said a small cop swiping at the lemur as he swung back up.
“You don’t have to stop playing the trombone.” He sighed and plopped on a desk
whitewashed with piles of papers. He had a face like an Easter ham – sweet, pink, inert.
“You just have to stop playing it naked.”
“Trombone, eh, Bonz?” I asked, looking up at the little sir lighting up and smoking
upside down. The growing quiet suggested people were paying attention to our routine.
“Fuck you,” he said. “I’m in a jazz trio.”
“So, Mac,” I said, lighting a Lucky of my own, “what’s he in for? A naked monkey’s

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nothing you can’t see at the zoo.”
“Lemur!” shouted Mr. Chuckles. Everybody – even the Mexican who probably didn’t
speak English – laughed at that.
The cop rubbed at his jaw. “He exposed himself to a Girl Scout troop out for a morning
hike up to Griffith Observatory.”
“I was there first!” said Mr. Chuckles. “Not my fault they stumbled onto me while I was
communing with the muse.” The Okie smiled at that, although his grandmother clearly did
not approve.
“Is that what they call it these days?” I said.
“Fuck you,” he said. “I like the feel of the sun on my fur.”
“Ever thought about cartoons?” I said, pulling my a pen and my card from my breast
pocket and writing Mr. Schmear’s number on it. He was one of those creatures who got
even more adorable when he was angry. Schmear loved that.
“Call this guy up,” I said, handing it up.
“No way no how,” Mr. Chuckles said, shaking his head. “I don’t want to end up
mincemeat pie like Igby and all the rest of ‘em.”
“Right,” I said, retracting the card, stuffing it into my pants pocket. I could tell the
room’s interest was waning, so I turned to the cop and said, “That’s why I’m here. My name
is Thomas Grimalkin.”
Grizzled stares from the room. Shrugs. Furrowed brows.
After a sigh I said, “I’m Tom from Tom and Jerry.” The locker room chatter at the edge of
the big room sputtered to a halt, heads swanned around open doors, cops hopped up from
their desks and in their haste to see me dropped files, knocked coffee mugs to the floor.
The door of a corner office opened only for the doorway to be filled with a rawboned

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surfboard of a man whose collar stars suggested he was Chief Bartholomew Donovan, as
calm as a thin sheet of ice on a lake. “Can I help you, son?” he asked. His eyes were the
gray of late February slush.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, trying to chisel my indignation into something that resembled
language. “It’s about the animal murders –”
“We’re handling that, son,” said Chief Donovan.
“You’re doing a fine job,” I said, feeling the pleasant, Vick’s-like heat of righteous anger.
If he detected my sarcasm, he didn’t show it. “Thank you. Now, son, if you could leave
the detective work to the detectives …” He gestured toward me like he was brushing away
table crumbs, then turned back to his office.
“I saw Lady Dear murdered on film,” I said, which yanked him back toward me, wrinkles
spider-webbing across his face. He glanced quizzically at the other officers, but the
questioning look rebounded off their faces and back to him.
After a deep breath, he pointed over my head, and I thought he was going to tell me to
scram. Instead, he said, “Inform Commander Speck.”
A minute later I was sitting across a stainless steel desk from a man who’d introduced
himself as Commander Aaron Speck, who looked more like an accountant than a street beat
man, with dry brown eyes that lasered the office from behind wireless specs. He had the
disconcerting habit of pressing his fingertips together then bringing his palms nearer to each
other, then retracting them – nearer, then farther, nearer, farther, nearer, farther. It looked
like a heart beating too slow.
“Mr. Grimalkin,” he was saying, “my girls truly enjoy your cartoons.”
“Yeah, work,” I said, wincing over the mug of motor oil coffee the ham-faced cop had
given me. “That’s uh, that’s great.”

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“Oh,” he said, raising thin eyebrows above the tops of his glasses, “you should not drink
that.” With the unbroken motions of a ferret, he rose from his desk, curved over to his
French Press, and poured its brew into a double-sized mug with writing on it in a language I
didn’t know. “Cream and sugar?”
“Cream,” I said. “Lots of cream.”
The coffee was the color of Rita Hayworth’s thigh, and it tasted just as good. My
whiskers twitched above the steam.
“My parents are Viennese,” he said by way of explanation.
“Really,” I said, glancing at the mug. “I didn’t know they spoke Swahili that far north.”
“Hebrew,” he said. “It says Yeshiva University. My alma mater.”
“They say Mr. Schmear, my producer, is half Jewish, but I think he prefers the golden calf
to the Ten Commandments.”
“Ah, the Bacon Jew,” Speck chuckled. “Of course, you can’t be half Jewish, anymore
than you can be half Catholic. If your mother is Jewish, so are you.”
“I disagree about the Catholic thing,” I said. “I think half is about exactly what part
Catholic I am.”
I glancing around the room until my eyes latched onto a print of a colorful painting made
by some dreamy, talented little kid.
“I am sorry for the recent deaths of your … associates. I know what you’re feeling.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
He pointed at a pair of old-timey photos on the wall, portraits, a bearded man, a matronly
woman, both enveloped in so much black cloth it made me itchy to look at it. “My
grandparents,” Speck said. “Buchenwald … I know what persecution is.” Persecution. Was
that what was going on? “At least the state is on your side, the police,” he said. “You have

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the vote. You have rights.”
He was right, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it. Only after the passage of
the 23
rd
Amendment in 1931 were “those animals who could demonstrate verbosity”
allowed to follow in the footsteps of blacks and women, and only after numerous heroes
fought tooth and claw for it for years. I was thirteen, and in celebration, the nuns gave us
the day off, and even though we were still within spitting distance of Black Tuesday, they
managed to throw a feast, with hamburgers and whole cod and candied nuts. It was the first
time I could remember crying for something other than sadness.
“Tell that to Lady Dear,” I said.
He grimaced, scanning a file. “Yes, it would appear Detective Conrad was handling her
case. Unfortunately, he was suspended …” His eyes dove down the page. “Suspended two
weeks ago, and it does not appear the Lady Dear case was reassigned.”
“Weeks?”
“I apologize. We’ve had a number of shakeups –”
I hopped up, slamming my mug on the table, sloshing a brown amoeba across it.
“Apologize? Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to the Lady Dear. I saw her die.”
“Yes,” he said, snatching up the file in advance of the coffee, pulling a napkin from the
drawer and mopping up the spill. “You mentioned that outside. The movie. The
Hollywood Bowl. That is quite helpful, but without the film, I’m afraid we are no further
along. And we are seriously understaffed.”
“Yeah, I heard. Your goons have been racketeering. Good work if you can get it.”
“I’m legally obligated not to speak about pending cases.” He sighed, removed his glasses,
and rubbed at the delicate blue veinage along his eyelids. “Believe me,” he said, “it’s not for
lack of effort. I’ve been putting in twelve-hour days for a month, and I want to do all I can,

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but realistically –”
But outside his office, the white noise of the strung-out, the bedraggled, the truculent
masses was split by a yowl that silenced the static like a perfect adjustment of the rabbit ears
on the TV. After a pause, a few voices said: there, over there, not here, there, with the Commander,
with Commander Speck, in the corner office. Then Wile was kicking in the locked door, pulling
behind some moaning schmuck he’d hogtied, a bleeding blindfolded mole of a man who
looked like he’d been dragged backwards up a hundred stone steps, which he probably had.
Speck stood, expressionless, but did not say anything. Wile tied his end of the rope to the
Lieutenant’s desk and removed a deckful of posterboard from his satchel. In the perfect
block capitals of an architect, Wile nodded at me then wrote: PERV FROM THE BOWL.
Although pain and heat and fear were purpling his face, it clearly was.
“How’d you find him?” I said.
“Please help me,” said the man.
“No,” I said.
“Take off his blindfold,” sighed the Lieutenant.
Wile raised a finger at him, then wrote: H’WOOD BOWL STAFF DIRECTORY. JOE
ZONKA. LIVES BY LAX. MICKEY MOUSE BEDSHEETS. Wil spat, then grinned his
feral dog grin. HE’S A LATE SLEEPER. Joe whimpered. Wile kicked him until he
stopped.
“You dragged him from Hawthorne?” asked the Lieutenant, kneeling beside the man.
He tried to untie his blindfold, but as soon he neared, the man jerked his head away and
screamed. “Don’t hurt me!”
NO. WE TOOK A CAB. TRAFFIC, he wrote, shaking his head. TERRIBLE.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” said Speck. “You’re at police headquarters,” he added,

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unknotting the blindfold.
“I was kidnapped,” the man snarled.
“You’re an accomplice after the fact,” I said, not exactly sure what that meant, let alone if
it was true.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said to the Lieutenant.
“You were watching a movie in which another creature was murdered and you didn’t
report it to the police,” I said.
“They were just animals,” he said.
If the mind is a machine, all pistons and levers and crankshafts, that statement was a steel
pole jammed into my gears, torquing the force all the wrong ways, snapping arms, launching
huge coiling springs out into the night. I grabbed the French Press and poured a boiling
brown stream down onto him, but almost before he could yell, Speck, surprisingly quick,
yanked my wrist back, so with my unencumbered foot, I kicked the perv in the stomach: this
troll was every person who’d ever told me I wasn’t a person, who made me ashamed of my
fur.
Just as the tip of my wingtip connected with the man’s soft gut, into the room shuffled a
man with the hunched, exaggerated motions of a vaudevillian. He had crazed beady eyes
straddling the bridge of a brief beaked nose, a mouth that couldn’t stay in one place for long,
dark hair that rose up from his brow into a hedge as thick as a phonebook. “Hey boss, hate
to interrupt your little soiree, but it’s slow today, and I was wondering if I could cut out
early.” He couldn’t have been a day older than twenty-five, but his voice had been crafted in
a crappy crucible of menthol, bathtub gin, mesquite, TB, sand, and the prophety parts of the
Bible.
We were all staring at him, even Joe from Hawthorne. Behind his back his hands were

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clutching a ravaged trilby in only slightly better condition than his suit, and his head was
bowed toward Speck, as though in supplication. If he’d noticed Joe from Pasadena, he
didn’t give any indication.
“Willie,” said Speck, “this isn’t a shoe store. You’re a detective. You have cases. You
can’t just leave because it’s a slow day, which it isn’t. Two weeks ago your caseload was
twenty miles long. What about the double homicide in Bel Air?”
“The gardener did it. Off his meds. We arrested him Thursday.” Although he was
standing still, Willie’s body never stopped moving, shoulders and knees cresting on an
irregular ebb and flow to clanky old-time music only he seemed to hear.
“The boy who burned in the fire in Bell?”
“Arson. The tenement owner torched it for the insurance money.”
“The stabbing in Echo Park?”
“Former lover. Can’t say I blame him. She was a cold-hearted bitch for leaving him for
that hack producer. Who even watches I Love Lucy anymore?”
Shaking his head, Wile pulled out a turkey leg from his satchel and began gnawing on it.
Hungry? Why wait?
For a few moments, I could see the gears piffling in Speck’s own mind, not a runaway
factory, but a Swiss watch. He pointed at Willie. “That union boss, shot to death in his
Caddie. That only came in Tuesday.”
“Ah,” smiled Willie through his underbite. “That was tricky. The wife made it look like
it was a political rival who did it, drive-by tommy guns and everything. But she was just
jealous he was on the down low with every Fourth Street hustler.”
“Aces Giambi? The down-low?”
“Figured that one out yesterday. Do you know how much those hustlers make for a

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trick? Buy ‘em a ham sandwich and a cup of joe and they’ll tell you anything. Mrs. Giambi
caught wind somehow and has fled to points east. My guess is they catch her hiding out in
Palm Springs tomorrow.”
“Bravo,” I said.
“Well thank you very much, Mr. Cat,” he said, tipping the hat he’d precariously returned
to the top of his hair. He glanced from Wile to Hawthorne Joe and back to Wil. “The
animal hogtying the person,” he said. “Ironic … so boss, can I make tracks?”
“No,” Speck said, staring back, letting his tongue roll around the inside of his cheek as he
turned his hand in my direction. “These gentlemen could use your assistance.”

5.

It’s a universal truth that life seems better when you’re taking the PCH to Malibu in a
blue Cadillac convertible.
I’d been at the kitchen table reading the homicide blotters Willie had given me, my
opinion of human nature sinking like a nickel in a pool, when Bugs called, and after a bunch
of name-dropping palaver – oysters with Rock Hudson, something about Nixon – he finally
got around to it: “So, Thomas, I – I’d like to begin my adventures in reading.” The breeze
through the open window was as soft and rosy as a newborn. I told him I’d be right over.
I was cruising past crab shacks and tiki bars, breaking for a pair of Gidgets, already tan
the week before Memorial Day. One of them was wearing heart-shaped sunglasses. It was a
Tuesday morning and the world seemed empty but for us and the jealous gulls overhead.
When I waved, the one in heart-shaped glasses blew me a kiss.

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“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I said as they rounded the hood.
“Aren’t you playin’ hookie too, mister?” said the girl in with the heart-shaped glasses. I
put the Caddy in park as they moseyed over to my side, as I turned down the radio’s
Schubert. They smelled like coconut oil and spritzes of perfumes they’d snuck from their
mothers’ vanities.
“Wait,” said the second girl, the skinnier, with purple eye shadow and a swimsuit the
color of lemon meringue. “You’re Tom, from Tom and Jerry.”
I smiled, surprised. “Guilty as charged.”
“Yeah,” said skinny girl, “I saw you in Variety. There were photos. They’re doing Hamlet
with just talking animals. “You’re Hamlet.”
I smiled. “What a piece of work … is woman,” I said, turning my paw at them. It was
the sort of joke only teenagers would laugh at, and they did.
“We read it in English class,” said the skinny girl.
“So which school’s truant officer gets to chase after you?”
“Hollywood High,” said the girl in the heart-shaped glasses. She was leaning over,
elbows propped up on the door, in a red and white check cowboy shirt with the sleeves cut
off and the long tails cinched up beneath her bust. Hollywood High. I was born on the
wrong coast, in the wrong decade.
“We’re going to USC next year.”
“Of course,” I said. “You’ll fit in well.”
A honk interrupted our banter, and in the rearview I caught a whey-faced matron. I
waved her around and she idled past, shaking her head. I felt somehow implicated, but the
girls didn’t even turn around: to the young, the old are invisible.
“Where do you live?” said the skinny girl, who’d taken the towel from her broad

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shoulders and unfurled it over the backseat door, so as to lean against the car without
burning her hip.
“Runyon Canyon,” I said.
“So whatcha doing in Malibu?” asked the girl in the heart-shaped glasses. “You gonna
practice your lines with Bugs Bunny?”
“Going to, Janey,” said the skinny girl, rolling her hazel eyes. “Going to.”
“As a matter of fact,” I said. “I am.”
“You’re pulling our legs,” said the skinny girl.
“I wish,” I said, winking behind my shades. She chuckled and I opened the glove
compartment and tossed her my spine-cracked copy of Hamlet.
I had a vision of Bugs and me out on his deck, the girls watching poolside as I read my
lines then told him to go ahead and read his, watching them watch him squirm and stammer
out some nonsense. I cleared my throat and lifted my shades to my forehead. “Since you’re
already playing hookie, what say you hop in and drive up with me?”
The skinny one’s jaw seemed to come unhinged. For a moment, the girl in the red heart-
shaped sunglasses didn’t say or do a thing. Then, after two, three beats, she reached out a
red lacquered fingernail and tapped my wedding band. “What’ll the missus say? What’ll our
parents say?”
“Janey,” hissed the skinny girl, who’d already laid her blanket over the backseat.
Growing up, I’d never imagined romance with a human, and while we all admired in the
abstract Garbo’s face and Mae West’s cleavage, the girls I tried to make it with were always
as furry as me. I didn’t know if it was California, or the Sixties, or what, but no one seemed
to have these qualms anymore. Even hinting at the possibility sent a thrill down my thrice-
kinked tail.

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“My wife isn’t the jealous type,” I said. “And Bugs Bunny is a gentleman.” I’d never said
two less true things in my life. If I’d been my old buddy Pinocchio, my nose would’ve
broken the windshield.
“Okay,” said Janey, sashaying around the hood to the passenger seat, which the skinny
one did not contest.
“So who do I have the pleasure of chauffeuring this morning?” I asked as we wended our
way upward, the beach on our left, the hills on our right.
“She’s Janey, Janey Jones,” said the skinny girl from the back seat, “and I’m Babs Syzygy
… So, what’s Bugs Bunny like?” asked Babs, leaning forward between the front seats.
“Does he really eat all those carrots?”
I chuckled. “When Bugs first started, he didn’t know what to do with his hands, kept
wringing ‘em, waving ‘em around, messing up all the shots, so finally one of the cameramen
gave him a carrot and told him to concentrate on that. He started chomping, which seemed
to settle him down. The rest is history.”
“What character is Bugs Bunny portraying in the production of Hamlet?” asked Babs.
“Horatio.”
“What is this?” said Janey, pointing to the radio.
I turned up the knob. “Brahms,” I said. “Piano Sonata in …” I stared out at the
chaparral clinging to the side of the mountain, trying to remember. “In F Minor. Do you
like it?”
“It’s Dullsville,” she said. “No one gnarly listens to classical music.”
“Janey,” said Babs from the backseat. Janey adjusted the tuner to bland white-boy doo-
wop.
“What’s this garbage?” I said.

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“The Beach Boys,” said Babs. “They’re from Hawthorne. They’re our age.”
Leaning against the sign for Will Rogers Park was a teenage boy with a blonde side part
and a stomach so muscular it looked corrugated. He winked, pointed a finger pistol at me,
and pulled the trigger.
“It’s so sad what happens to Horatio,” said Babs after half a minute of silence.
“Right,” I said. “Real sad.” I hadn’t read to the end yet. Some part of me felt bad that
Bugs wouldn’t make it. He probably didn’t know he was going to bite it, either.
“I always pictured Hamlet as James Dean,” said Janey, her hand outside the car, making
waves in the wind.
“I cried when he died,” said Peggy.
“What, were you eight when he died?”
“Ten,” said the girl with the heart-shaped glasses. I tried to remember when James died.
Six, seven years ago, plus ten, was what?
“I went to his funeral,” I said, turning off the PCH.
“Wow,” said Babs.
“When I was a kid,” said Janey, “and my mom took me to the movies, your show was
always my favorite part.” Under the sun, her strawberry blonde hair shone like yolk.
“Definitely,” said Babs.
“Does Bugs Bunny have a pool?” asked Janey.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s in the shape of his face.”
They laughed. “You think I’m kidding. Wait and see. The ears are the shallow end.”
When we pulled up to the gate, I pushed the buzzer. Crackling through the intercom was
Bugs: “Gimme ya name, and what’sa password?” In the rearview, Babs was goggling at his
unmistakable, pinched-nose drone.

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“It’s me, Bugs, Tom. And there is no password.”
“Yeah, der is. I just haven’t told anybody yet.”
“I brought some friends,” I said. “They’re fans of your work.”
“Are they French? I’m huge in Paris.”
Janey leaned over my lap. Her earrings were tiny strawberries. “Oui, monsieur,” she
breathed. The gate opened.
The rabbit met us on the grand front steps of the manse, the ocean breeze billowing
inside his untied robe, all he wore but for an orange Speedo monogrammed with a white BB.
The steps were lined with enormous earthenware planters, growing to the untrained eye
might’ve looked like parsley. As Bugs descended to meet us, he grabbed a handful of shoots
without looking and tugged, pulling out a bunch of carrots. “Bonjour!” he said, wiping the
dirt off the carrots and handing them to the girls, who had raced out of the El Dorado to
meet him.
“They’re not actually French, Bugs,” I said, bringing up the rear.
Babs started crunching. “Delicious!” she said.
“It’s the Malibu air,” said Bugs, puffing out his chest. “Does wonders for the veggie-
dables.”
It was baloney. I’d been there when Bugs’s gardener had told him that carrots were only
in season a few months of out the year, at which Bugs had asked what in season meant, and
when he found out, he moaned, his dream of being a gentleman farmer dashed, until the
intrepid gardener told Bugs that every week he, the gardener, would go to the Safeway, buy
fifty pounds of carrots, and “plant” them in the soil, discarding the older ones, thus allowing
Bugs to fool the world 365 days a year.
He was telling them a yarn about Sinatra, and they were chuckling, nibbling away, but I

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knew how filthy it was about to get so I said, “Hey Bugs, it’s not getting any cooler out here,
so how’s about you give us the private tour?”
“Of course,” he said, casting his arms toward his house like a furry P.T. Barnum. “Right
this way.”
When the fans started clogging up his daily life in Santa Monica, Bugs knew exactly where
he wanted to move and what he wanted the house to be, and he figured further that such
wild popularity must’ve been making Warner Bros. bucketfuls of green, so one morning he
marched into Jack Warner’s office they were going to build him a mansion above Zuma
overlooking the Pacific. And they did.
I hated to admit it, but the place was incredible – when you can’t read, visuals are all that
matter. At a time when stars were building knockoff palazzos straight off the set of Don
Giovanni, Bugs said he had no time for I-tie frippery. He said he wanted his house to look
like heaven, and if heaven looked like Bugs Bunny’s mansion, I needed to return to the fold.
Everything was white and airy, a prayer of glass and steel, and when they walked inside, the
chittering girls were as silent as if they’d wandered into vespers. Bugs wandered to the white
marble bar for drinks, savvy enough to let them gape in silence. The outside was a three-
dimensional jigsaw of white cubes, and the inside was like an art gallery with very
comfortable white couches. The girls wandered around the simple white tables among the
white porcelain sculptures, curvaceous suggestions of hawks and gulls. Against the white,
they were as ruddy, glistening, and for the first time, I took a long look at them. At the other
end of the room Babs was nodding at the enormous canvases that occupied the room’s only
real wall, clicking her tongue at the huge shimmery blocks of yellowy orange. Her face was
pleasant, with eyes that missed nothing and a mouth built to laugh and show off teeth as
perfect as piano keys, a mouth she used more for talking than eating: her stomach was

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concave, and her hips were like tea saucers. But no matter how smart the words that came
out of her mouth, no matter how little food went in, she would always be trailing around
girls like Janey, which seemed so unfair. Yet it was to Janey – draped over the white velvet
sofa – that my attention kept drifting. Her glasses took up half her face, but the other half
was enough. I’d known Veronica Lake when she was a teenager, and Janey had the same
slow charm. Some girls you could look at five seconds and know what they sounded like in
bed. Janey was one of those.
“Your hair fits the color scheme,” Bugs said to Janey as he wandered back from the bar
with a silver tray of gin and tumblers. Her messy bob glowed rose gold in the light. She
shrugged, rolling over onto her elbow. “My mom’s Irish.” The soles of her feet were filthy,
and the part of me that was a homeowner wanted to warn them off the white sofa, but I
didn’t, and they hovered dangerously above the velvet.
“Den be careful widda gin,” said Bugs with a wink, settling the platter on a glass coffee
table shaped like an arrowhead. He still poured triples, and after passing them out, he lifted
his tumbler then clinked glasses with the girls. “To Richard Nixon,” he said, and they
nodded along. Babs brought it to her chapped lips with her other hand cupped poised near
the base of the tumbler, as though she were afraid she might drop it. She sipped, then
coughed, then sipped again. Still more horizontal than vertical, Janey turned the crystal in
the light until a rainbow was dancing on the thick glass of the table. Setting it down, she
yawned, her tied-off shirt riding higher. She reminded me of Brando, the only evening I
ever spent with him; he said almost nothing but didn’t need to: his face was a sonnet,
guttural and unrhyming, his body a novel without punctuation or plot. He made you think
humanity had lost something when the Neanderthals died out. Janey scratched at the hair
on the back of her neck. “Is the pool really shaped like your face?”

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“Why don’t you see for yourself,” said Bugs, pointing toward the sliding glass door and
the infinite expanse of blue beyond, the edge of the pool melting into Pacific with barely a
horizon line.
“Oh my gosh,” said Babs, pattering outside.
“It does look like you,” said Babs, dipping her toe in what would have been Bugs’s cheek.
“Some days, I think I can almost see Peking,” said Bugs. I smiled and took a sip of the
gin. I used to spend a lot of afternoons lazing in Bugs’s chlorinated face, drinking gin. As
Janey unbuttoned her shirt and tossed it blindly over her shoulder, Bugs blinked and looked
ready to teeter. All that stood between her bust and the wind was a bandeau no bigger than
a handkerchief. If it had been a cartoon, Bug’s eyes would’ve been projected a foot beyond
his skull, with the awooga awooga awooga sound effect of a sub about to be torpedoed.
“So,” said Babs, stepping in between us, “are you going to practice your lines?” From
out of nowhere, she pulled my copy of Hamlet. “I’ve never seen real actors rehearse.”
“Uh,” said Bugs, his whiskers aflutter, his lust-glazed eyes snapping open with fear.
“Well, uh, memoralation is uh …” It would’ve been so easy to take the book from Babs,
open up to Act I, Scene One, hand it to Bugs and tell him to let it rip. But I didn’t. Instead,
I set my paw on Babs’s shoulder and said, “Mr. Zykov has forbid public rehearsal. We must
like a lion … with a broom tied to its tail.”
“Oh, of course,” said Babs, as I took the book from her and led Bugs back inside. “Have
fun, girls,” I said over my shoulder.
“Yeah, and if you need any help with the coconut oil, let me know,” said Bugs. As we
returned to the great room, his body was with me, but his mind was clearly still poolside. He
flopped out on the white velvet sofa and stared out at them. I coughed and tossed the book
on the table, but Bugs didn’t get the cue. His soul was infertile soul for growing gratitude.

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“So, Nixon?” I said. His eyes drifted from the girls to me, and he sighed as painfully as
someone with bruised ribs. He still didn’t seem to hear my question, and he bit his knuckle
with his overlong incisors, shaking his head an inch from side to side. Finally, he said,
“Mickey told me once that age slows your libido.” He stared me down. “It’s a goddamn lie,
Thomas.”
I nodded. We got gray in the muzzle, yellow in the eye, long in the tooth, wretches
rotting away from the inside. The girls – they stayed the same.
“Nixon?” he said, his brain catching up with his ears. His chest buoyed, his ears re-
pricked. “Yes, yes, Nixon. Gave me a call yesterday. Me and Dick Nixon. Cut from the
same cloth. Did you know he’s running for governor?”
“Yeah, Bugs,” I said, refilling my gin. “The billboards are everywhere.”
He shrugged. “He asked for my vote. I was touched he thought of me, and we started
talking donors, and I said to him, I said, ‘Dick, may I call you Dick?’ And he said yeah, and
then I said, ‘Dick, the richest man I know is quite consoivative.”
“Jack Warner?”
He shook his head. “Richer.”
“John Wayne.”
“Way richer … Give up?”
“Go right ahead.”
“Percy Bornholm.”
“I didn’t think Percy was that conservative. Anyway, he’s not an American citizen.”
“Valentine’s Day I saw him with a goigeous slant-eye dame, and she was wearing necklace
with an emerald the size of a quail egg. I thought to myself: If Percy can buy a rock that big,
surely he could write a generous check to Richard Nixon, esquire. Den Dick said if he’s

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elected, he’s going to start a California board of animal affairs, to monitor civil rights for
talking animals. Guess who he wants to be on the board?”
“Donald?” I said.
“No! Me,” he said, jabbing his thumb into the middle of the white oval of his chest.
“Why would he ask you?”
His whiskers drooped. “What’s that supposed to mean? Why wouldn’t he ask me? I’m
the most famous cartoon who’s not mean, like Mickey, or a commie, like you.”
“I’m not a commie, Bugs. Never was.”
He rolled his head away from me and whispered, “Voted for Stephenson.”
“Bugs, do you realize there’s a difference between Communists and Democrats?”
He scanned his white room, as though the answer had been scribbled somewhere in tiny
cursive, then swung his head around to me. “Is that a trick question?”
“No, Bugs.”
He shrugged, huffed, rolled his eyes, a mime of adolescent frustration. No wonder he
liked his girls so young. “I’m getting some carrots,” he said, hopping to his enormous rabbit
feet. Outside, the girls were giggling, splashing, sliding in and out of the water like javelins.
Their yipping reminded me of Lady Dear. I still hadn’t told anybody I knew about the
movie, not even Gracie.
Bugs came back with a punchbowl full of carrots that he set on his lap and commenced
munching one while pointing another at me. “You didn’t support the war in Korea. You
didn’t deserve to be in a John Ford movie.”
I let my gaze sink from the shimmery orange paintings to Bugs’s twitchy face. “Bugs, let
me ask you this. Did you call John Ford before you talked to the cops, or after?”
“Never called Ford,” he mumbled, his head drooping down. “My agent did.”

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“Why –”
“Because it wasn’t fair!” he yelled. “I was perfect for a cowboy. I was perfect for John
Wayne.”
It felt good to hear him admit it, some long-rusted barnacle on my heart finally breaking
free and falling away. “But Bugs, you knew you couldn’t read.”
He licked a bit of orange mush off his lip. “I thought it would be easier to learn.” He
reached into the bowl and broke one of the carrots in half. “I didn’t know it would make
things so hard for us.” Bugs had been such a disaster – spouting lines half-remembered
from the chorus girls who’d read them to him – that Ford had almost canned the whole
thing, but instead canned Bugs and replaced him with Rick Nelson. In the years since, no
talking animal had been offered a role in a live film.
He looked sadly at me and shrugged. That was the closest to an apology as he could get.
“Well,” I said, reaching toward Hamlet, “you’re going to learn now.”
“Not with that,” he said, shaking his head. “Way too hard.” From an unseen drawer
under the coffee table he pulled out a copy of Playboy. “You don’t jump from arithmetic to
algerbra.”
I came around the table and scooted in next to him on the overstuffed chair. Miss May
had a messy blonde bob and a white bikini that was no match for her curves. I flipped it
open. “Okay,” I said, “here’s a story. ‘Girls for the Slime God.’ That’s got potential.”
He stared at the black bricks of text, breathing in and out hard and quick, as if he was
about to skin dive. “Bugs, calm down,” I said, sidling around the table and sinking next to
him on his overstuffed white leather chair.
“That’s a whole lot of words, Thomas,” he gasped.
“One at a time, Bugs, one at a time. What’s that one. Spell it out.”

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“Uh, T-H-E: the.”
“Good. What about the next one.”
“That’s a long one. C-O-N-C-U-B-I-N-E … Con, cue … cucumber?”
“Concubine.”
“I don’t even know that is.” His eyes started pinballing around, looking for an escape.
“You’d like one. It’s a sex slave.”
But he was already racing down the fire escape. “I can’t, I can’t do this, Thomas. Do
you have some morphine you could give me?”
“What?”
“Didn’t Doc Shampoo give you morphine? I heard Daffy say so.”
“Bugs, it’s a prescription.” I waved my paw at him. By now it didn’t look any different
than they other one. “Remember? The grand piano?”
“It’s a salve, Thomas,” he said, his tiny nose quavering inches from mine. He patted his
chest. “A salve for the uneducated soul.”
I pulled it out of my coat pocket. “Here,” I said, handing it to him, “but don’t take
too –”
But he’d already unscrewed it and squeezed a stream into the back of his throat.
“Ugghh,” he said, “Gross.” He nibbled some carrots, gargled gin, swallowed. “That’s better
… Okay, now when does it hit you? How long does it – oh,” he interrupted himself, eyelids
drooping, whiskers slackening, “that is … very … nice.” He patted my cheek. “I’ve always
liked you, Thomas.” I looked down to the various multisyllabic words, then back to him.
We were doomed.
The sidebar ads were substantially more interesting than the jokes: Roger Maris smiling
awkwardly to hawk Aqua Velva; a color spread suggesting women would prefer

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Chesterfields to a diamond bracelet as an Xmas gift; two men discussing Sawyer’s home
movie projectors, boring except the man holding the remote was, inexplicably, a Sikh, with
full beard and turban; Sony recording equipment, which got me to thinking.
“Hey Bugs, can you remember stuff when you hear it?”
“Like doity jokes?”
“Like your lines.” I pointed at the ad. “This here says you can record it, and then it’ll
play back to you as many times as you want.”
“Oh, yeah, dat would be easier,” he said, excitement burbling up through the sludge of
his morphine. “Didn’t Zykov say that Shakespeare wuddn’t meant be read, it was meant to
be seen?” He pointed at his eye, revelation dawning over his furry face: “I don’t need to
read.”
“Keep practicing, Bugs,” I said. “It’ll come in handy when Governor Nixon wants you
to give a speech.” I turned the edge of the page to the next set of sidebars. There was only
one, and it was less an advertisement than a sort of open letter, all text but for an
accompanying image at the top, a pair of silhouettes pressed lip to lip, one human, one cat.

Ladies,

Have you ever found yourself cuddling with your pooch or tabby and
thought to yourself: He’s so soft, so pretty, I wonder what it
would be like to …

That’s not an uncommon wish. If you would like to experiment, the
Connoisseur would like to help. He might even give you a small stipend

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for your trouble. All private, all confidential.

Send queries along with photos of yourself to: PO Box 105474,
Hawthorne, CA, 90250.

The Connoisseur looks forward to hearing from you.

I was about to ask Bugs if he’d ever heard of this racket, but when I turned to look, he was
passed out, head flopped back, mouth-breathing at the ceiling.
“You two are so adorable,” said Janey, padding in on the balls of her bare feet. She sat on
the leather arm of my chair, her thigh a few inches from my face, the lingering chlorine
pricking my nose.
“Are you reading Playboy? I thought you were practicing your lines.” Before I could
stammer out an embarrassed response, she glanced over my shoulder and pulled her thumb
and forefinger up the triangle of my ear, coming together at the tip. “So, you gonna send
pictures of yourself to the Connoisseur?”
If I’d been able to blush, I would have. “I don’t think I’m the target audience.”
“I know a couple girls who sent photos in.”
“What happened?” I asked, looking up at her. Droplets of water were falling from the
tips of her hair, skidding down her back, disappearing into the strap of her bikini, the
marshmallowy white of the leather sofa.
She shrugged. “He sent letters back to the pretty ones, or the ones who sent topless
photos, with checks for ten dollars and an address where he said he wanted to meet them.”
“Underpasses, alleyways?” I had a vision of the man in Lady Dear’s death film, the

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kingpin with the long beard and the aviator glasses. The Connoisseur.
“No, silly,” she said. “It was like the lobby of the Howard Johnson, or an In-N-Out in
El Segundo.”
“Did he say anything else in the letters?”
“I never read ‘em,” she said, the white teeth in her red mouth smacking her pink gum,
“but the girls said he asked them to think about what they’d like to do with talking animals
and be ready to talk about it. None of ‘em ever did it.”
“Why did your friends reply to the ad at all?”
Smiling, she stood up to face me. I let my eyes take the elevator from her wine-bottle
waist all the way up to her heart-shaped shades. “Are you asking if they were all pining for
their puppies?” she whispered. “Touching themselves and fantasizing about Goofy?”
“You could do better than Goofy,” I said, easing up, my eye level just above her cleavage.
From behind I heard a thump. “Damn,” said Bugs, who’d fallen across my side of the chair
and hit his head on the arm. “Why dja stand up? … Oh, hel-lo,” he added, smiling.
“What’s this?” she asked, tapping a ragged fingernail against the vial on the coffee table.
“My medicine,” I asked.
“It’s morphine,” said Bugs, rubbing his eyes. “It makes you forget all the bad things.”
“Oh, can I have some?” she asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Please.”
“Go long, kid,” said Bugs, snatching the vial and cocking it behind his ear, jogging in his
Speedo behind the sofa in a naked bootleg.
“Bugs,” I said, finding my arms above my head, playing linebacker with no one to cover
the pin-up split end squealing behind me: “Here, here, toss it over his head!”

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“Bugs, that shit is strong,” I said. “ A couple drops of that and you can’t feel a thing.”
“Ohhhh,” said Janey from behind me, “that’s what I want.”
Shaking his skinny hips, he feinted tossing the vial, enjoying the marionette effect of my
arms jerking around to try to intercept possible passes.
“You’re just being stingy, Thomas,” he said. “Didn’t your mom teach you to share?”
“I didn’t have a mom, Bugs,” getting winded from the helter-skelter jumping jacks I was
doing to keep the morphine out of that girl’s hands, calisthenics my younger self could’ve
done till dusk. I needed to break the gridlock. “Bugs, Babs just took off her top!”
“What? Where?” said Bugs, turning to the left, staring out at the pool, giving me a
second to hook around the coffee table, but Bugs looked back just as I was diving to tackle
him, then he sidled left and tossed that tiny brown missile through the air. As it rose then
fell on a wobbly arc, my loyalties shifted: if Janey didn’t catch it, the vial would shatter on the
white tile, leaving me without my near-daily solace.
She caught it with a whoop, just as I landed blind, all my weight channeled onto my bad
paw, which buckled with a zap of pain. Janey raced up the spiral staircase, Bugs’s nose
practically in her ass. At the top of the landing, he turned and gazed down at me. “Thomas,
don’t you know everything’s so much easier if you just don’t think about it?” Facedown on
the tile, blood filling my paw like water into a balloon, I had to admit he seemed right.
Above me I heard hoots and giggles, the definitive clap of a heavy door shutting, the click of
a deadbolt.
I rolled onto my side and let Malibu’s saline floral air settle into my lungs and calm my
seasick stomach. I could see my wrist swelling to fill the cuff of my jacket, and all at once I
was burning up. Why was I always wearing suits? It was a Tuesday, in the summer, in
Malibu, and my host was wearing a Johnny Weissmuller special. Was I ashamed of my fur?

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I didn’t know. I rolled back over and pushed myself up in a sort of one-handed squat thrust,
seeing not only stars, but ampersands, exclamation points, hash tags and percentages, a
whole vulgar neon vernacular of pain. Past the swarm of lights was Babs, standing in the
doorway, framed by glass against the backdrop of the blue water.
“Are you okay?” she said, rushing over so fast I could see the water droplets fly.
I was wobbling on an unseen axis, a planet rotating dangerously, revolving around
nothing. “My hand,” I said, rolling back my cuff to show off my wrist, which had grown as
big as a heart and was throbbing just as hard.
“Oh, you need to lay down,” she said. “Is there a bedroom close?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, jerking my thumb over my shoulder at the door of the guest bedroom,
where once I’d slept off many a corn beer.
“Go get comfortable,” she said, “I’ll get you water and a couple of aspirin.”
A minute later, I was curled on the white comforter of the guest bedroom’s queen, my
shoes and jacket tossed in the corner. Babs came in with a glass of water and a pair of
aspirin, the bottle of gin under her arm and a towel wrapped around her head, tugging up the
corners of her eyes, making her look vaguely Oriental. With her toe she closed the door
behind her, then knelt by my side of the bed and handed them to me after I sat up.
“Thanks,” I said, tossing the pills to the back of my throat, taking a long gulp. “I heard
yelling,” she said, coming around the foot of the bed and settling in next to me on her side,
her soft jaw cupped in her hand. “What happened?” But before I could answer, she said,
“Janey is too presumptuous.”
“And Bugs is too old to care.”
“That’s a dangerous combination,” she said. A shallow arroyo ran from along her
breastbone all the way to her navel. Did girls used to be so skinny? I couldn’t remember.

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“I won’t ask if you remember my name,” she said.
“Babs,” I said. She smiled, sat up, and filled the water glass with gin. She took a drink,
then handed it to me, and went back and forth and back and forth until only an inch
remained at the bottom. “Did you know the animal actors who died?” she finally asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “they were –”
“I loved Lady and the Tramp,” she said, then bit her lip and added, “when I was a kid …
That part when they’re eating at the Italian restaurant and they start slurping the same piece
of spaghetti …” She puckered her lips, then sucked on an imaginary strand of pasta, her lips
moving closer and closer to my face, until she gave me a brief peck on the lips, then
withdrew her blushing face. It was the type of kiss a niece would give her uncle, not the sort
I assumed was happening upstairs in the master bedroom. I wondered if not undressing her
was any less virtuous because I was motivated less by any sense of fidelity or purity or self-
control than the desire to be less of a dirty old man than Bugs.
“Mr. Grimalkin, is it true that they filmed Lady Dear dying? That they …” She blushed a
deeper red. “That they … violated her?”
“What?” I sat up, too fast. “Who told you that?”
“Well, I overheard my dad on the phone, last week. He works for Disney. Mr. Disney
thinks that the murders are a plot against the company.”
“What?”
“All of them have been Disney actors,” she said. “Lady, Mr. Toad –”
“His name was Igby.”
“Okay,” sitting up and raising palm by way of apology. “I didn’t know. Igby, and Beaks.”
“But Screwy was MGM, and Tweety works for Warner.”
She shrugged. Her shoulders weren’t much wider than her head. “All I know is what I

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heard my dad saying on that phone, that someone had filmed her murder. From what I
gather, Mr. Disney wants to assign bodyguards to all the animals who work for him.”
“Did your dad mention any leads?”
She stared at me. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been in contact with the LAPD. I’m practically a deputy officer
now.”
“I’ll tell you if you kiss me,” she said, “if you kiss me for real.” The angel on my shoulder
was giving me the thumbs-up, and the devil was rolling his eyes that I wasn’t already balling
her. I’d never been unfaithful to Gracie – I’d slapped an ass once or twice, looked down a
few dresses from third-story balconies, but never any breaches of contract. I had no idea if
Gracie had been true to me. But I told myself I was doing it for Lady Dear, Igby, Tweet,
Beaks, Screwy, then grabbed her by the back of the neck with my tingly paw and knifed my
tongue into her mouth. Not wanting to settle for calling her bluff, I raised, reaching my
good paw behind her back and unfastening her bikini top. She was the moaning the way
girls moan who’ve only ever seen it done in the movies, but just because she was aping Liz
Taylor didn’t mean it wasn’t turning me on, and I was tossing the bikini away when to my
surprise she pulled back and said, “Do you like them?” The breasts were small, buoyant,
white as paper, and I was about to tell her I approved when she added, “No boy’s ever seen
them before.” I sighed and closed my eyes. Even the devil on my shoulder winced at that.
“The boys at my school are stupid.”
“Most boys are,” I replied. We were now facing each other, Indian-style, her brown
knees almost touching mine.
“They chase after Janey,” she said. “It’s a wonder she doesn’t have the clap.”
“Look, Babs,” I said, reaching past her breast to set my good paw on her fragile shoulder.

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“Janey’s peaking too early.” I meant it. “She’ll be washed out and bloated with two kids
before she’s twenty-two.”
“Really?” she said.
“Really,” I said. I sighed. “Now put your top back on.”
“Okay.” As she did, I asked her what else she’d heard from her father’s conversation.
“Mr. Disney apparently wants to increase the amount they give animals who are on
retainer.”
“Wait, why is – oh,” I said, realizing Disney was afraid the actors he’d tossed aside were
seeking unsavory avenues to supplement their income, thereby tarnishing the brand. “Did
he say who was making the movies?”
“Someone they call Mr. Pain, pain like getting burned with an iron while they gang rape
you.”
As if on cue, a garbled yell trailed its way from above, just before a door banged shut and
large feet machine-gunned down stairs. “Thommmmmmmaaaaaassss,” called a turgid voice,
and then, almost before I could hop out of bed, Bugs had thrown the door open, eyes
lidless, ears as rigid as the TV antenna named after them. “She – the girl – I don’t know …”
I flew up the corkscrew of stairs, terrified the sex had gotten rough and she’d started
bleeding, or that he’d suffocated her, or that she’d jumped out the window. I stood for a
moment at the door, where Janey was unconscious on the bed, a shiner under each eye.
“That wasn’t meeeee,” Bugs said from behind as I knelt on the bed at Janey’s side,
listening for the heartbeat that was there, and the breath that wasn’t. “She said she’d taken a
tumble down her front steps yesterday.”
I was about to tell him to go to hell when Babs from behind him said that’s what Janey
had said to her.

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“I sweaaaaarrrrr, Thomas,” said Bugs, as I started chest compressions, “all we did was
cuddle. She had a lil’, thennnn I’d a lil’, then she had a lil’ more. We were cuddling, and
then sh’us went slack, no breathing.”
“Oh my god,” said Babs, covering her mouth at the bedside as I tilted Janey’s head back,
pressed our lips together, and gently blew. “Did she overdose?”
As I started the next set of chest compressions, I kept my eyes on Janey’s tongue, which
was the same color as her bubblegum lips. Bubblegum. I gasped, rolled her onto her side
and scooped my finger into her mouth, and when I felt something soft and sticky, I slowly
petted it out, swiping it from the back of her tongue just as Janey gasped, coughed, spit up a
bit of gin and gazed up at me as though I’d ridden into the bedroom on a white horse. All
of us in the bedroom seemed to be breathing in the same hyperventilating rhythm. When
Janey seemed to understand where she was, she snatched her heart-shaped glasses from the
nightstand and slid them back on. She tried on a smile and through a thick tongue forced
out the words: “Please don’t tell my mom.”

6.

Back in ’46, motivated by some combination of patriotism and guilt over not having
served, I hosted my first annual Memorial Day party, which began with a certain solemnity, a
dozen of us sitting around my deck, remembering: Spike, who never forgot a name or a face,
listed off all his tank brigade’s casualties in North Africa; Hank Fonda brought his kids,
dandling little Pete on his knee as he recounted his destroyer’s bombardment of the
fortifications at Omaha Beach, all while nine-year-old Jane blew bubbles at Mickey Mouse,

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who scowled and waved them away; Porky told a story about a little Sicilian girl giving him
daisies when he and the Seventh liberated Palermo; Don Rickles started out seriously
enough, but soon the USS Cyrene was docking in Manila, and most of the rest of the story
was spent in a bordello, a tale so funny and so foul that after the punch line it took Hank
Fonda ten seconds to catch his breath, while Jane asked, “Daddy, can I have a strap-on?”
After that, there was no going back: Daff was pissing on a pile of dead German soldiers
on the steps of Rouen Cathedral, Elmer was ransacking a Tyrolean chateau for heirloom
jewels, and as I went to the icebox to mix martinis, I heard through the open window tales
of frottage, desecration, sodomy, underwater blow-jobs, arson, pharmacological experiments
gone awry, the smell of napalm on skin, the relative breast size of French women, Greek
women, Egyptian women, Tahitian women, a story about giving bayonets to the liberated
Jews at Dachau and letting them have their way with the SS guards. I remember wondering
as I measured the vermouth in an El Cortez shot glass what I would’ve done if I’d been at
Okinawa, with the mean end of my rifle pointed some slant-eyes with arms raised overhead
– would I have pulled the trigger like everybody else?
Then I brought the martinis out, Errol Flynn showed up with two Chinese girls who
didn’t speak English and a macaque who did, and all thoughts of the war were put aside. By
the end of the night, Don Rickles was piloting a stolen gondola from the canals to the sea, a
dart was sticking out of Errol Flynn’s neck, and I came back to my bedroom to find little
Jane Fonda passed out. I slept on the floor.
Gracie, my summer girl, my favorite patriot, loved the idea of a Memorial Day party, and
as with most of the rest of my life, I’d handed her the keys to the bash once the Unitarian
badger pronounced us man and wife. She’d sanded out the party’s rough edges, invited
women, hired kitchen help for the night, and generally decorated the hell out of the place,

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enough bunting to make you feel like you were at a Republican convention.
I felt different at this year’s party for two reasons: first, three days beforehand I’d made
out with a topless teenager; and second, Gracie had decided to shift the decorative focus to
our recently departed friends. I’d been wandering around for seventy-two hours with a low-
grade fever of guilt, strong enough to keep it on my mind, not so strong I felt compelled to
tell Gracie. When I’d come back from Bugs’s, she asked if I’d taught him any words. I said:
Concubine, and she laughed. She’d been too busy prepping for the party to demand sex,
which was a relief – while I still felt an occasional stab deep within the gnarled passages of
my manhood, my deeper fear was that I couldn’t because I didn’t want to. It was baffling,
terrifying: I knew in my mind Gracie was the prettiest cat I’d ever seen, and she was great in
the sack, with a little bit of whimpering quivery-lipped schoolgirl folded into fuck-me-I’m-a-
whore impishness, but now the devils I didn’t know seemed so much more alluring than the
devil I did. Over the past three nights I’d had sex dreams about Babs, Janey, Lady Dear, a
nasty one that involved Deirdre and a lot of rope. Now an hour and half before the start
time, I was in the living room, taping yet another photo of Lady Dear above the mantle, this
one after the premier of Lady and the Tramp, LD in a gown holding a flute of champagne,
Kirk Douglas kissing her on the cheek. Gracie had dimmed the lights, and the house was full
of lit candles, photo collages, armfuls of carnations. It felt like a wake. In the photo, LD
was beaming. She was never again as happy as she had been that night. Some people were
probably never in their lives that happy. Maybe that spike of pure bliss is a blessing. Maybe
it’s a curse.
In the kitchen, Gracie was juicing limes and directing the Mexican cook in making
guacamole, and when I clicked in on my wingtips with the 2” lifts, Gracie turned, wearing
the apron I’d given her a year before, your basic white number – but still not as white as

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Gracie – on which I’d painted KEEP YOUR PAWS OFF ME, but instead of PAWS, Spike,
Jerry and I had dipped our own in paint and pressed them into the fabric.
“Tommy!” she called, although I’d only left the kitchen five minutes before for my next
assignment. I kissed her, and without signal from me, my whiskers twisted about hers as
though making twine.
On the moon-blue countertop, the cutting board was full of bay scallops as big as my
fists. The day before, she told me she wanted lobster tails, and when I told her we couldn’t
afford a hundred two-pound tails, she looked at me like I was a truant officer and she was a
tardy kid.
“You going to dice these up with some mayo and paprika?” I said, backing up to make
way for Consuela as she barreled toward the fridge.
“That’s so Baltimore,” she said. “This is going to be Mediterranean. Just lemon juice and
olive oil and salt.”
Because the rest of the house smelled like a boutonnière, the kitchen aromas were
welcome. “Gracie, what’s say we open a couple windows, maybe turn the lights up? It looks
like a haunted house in there.”
“Tommy,” she said, taking my hand, “we’re in mourning. It’s good to remember friends
who’ve passed.”
“Friends? I haven’t seen Screwy since the Rose Bowl. And Lady Dear? She’s not a
friend.”
With her other paw, she slapped me on the cheek, not hard, but hard enough to hurt,
hard enough the Mexican lady turned, her chevron eyebrows raised. “I’m sorry,” Gracie
mumbled.
“It’s okay,” I said, startled. “I didn’t know she mattered that much to you.”

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“We saw each other, sometimes.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry I slapped you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m sure I deserved it.”
The doorbell rang. “Consuela? Por favor?” said Gracie. Consuela trundled her bulk out
and into the living room.
“Please don’t be a guest,” I prayed to the ceiling. We’d only finished half the decorating,
and I was far too sober to handle a conversation with Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald.
“Let it be panhandlers. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
The unseen front door opened, blowing a flowery breeze into the kitchen. “Meez Gree-
malkeen … cochino?
“Hell,” I said. I knew what that one meant.
“S-s-s-s-s-s-señorita.”
And there was Porky Pig, hours early, wearing a three-piece royal blue suit, a carnation
boutonnière of his own, and a smile like an overeager child’s at a casting call. I wanted to
dropkick him down to the Boulevard, but Gracie threw her arms up like she was signaling a
touchdown, then hugged that pink porcine dirigible.
“Porky,” I said, reluctantly extending my hand.
“Sorry I’m so early, Tom,” he said, shaking. “I was anticipating more t-t-t-t-t-t-traffic.”
“Pork, don’t you live in Los Feliz?”
“Yes sir,” he said, pulling from behind his back what appeared to be a rhubarb pie.
Gracie took it with a touched smile.
“J-j-j-j-j-j-just like you always make me,” he smiled. The latticework looked less like a
grid than pick-up-sticks.

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“Los Feliz, not some two miles from here. For a party that starts at six.”
“Six? I thought that Gracie had said five at rehearsal.”
I licked my thumb and wiped the face of my watch. “Tells me it’s four twenty two.”
“I always liked to help with the p-p-p-p-p-preparations.”
It was so much harder to be a jerk to a sweet-faced pig with a stutter. I sighed and
brushed back my whiskers and said, “Pork, let’s you make the first round of martinis.”
“Aye aye, captain,” he said, saluting then rushing to the moon-blue fridge that matched
the counter, the linoleum, the kitchenette chairs and table, the Kit-Cat Klock I hated,
matched the cabinets and the dishes within them, the Kitchen Aid Gracie was trying to
convince Consuela to use to make the guacamole smoother. Standing in my kitchen was like
standing at the bottom of a dry pool.
Back in the living room, I decided I was through with all decorating, so I flopped down
onto one of Gracie’s spaceman chairs. I couldn’t see Pork, but I heard the wintry gasp of
the icebox, the tinkling of ice on cut glass, the rattle of the stirrer inside the shaker. Curved
like a tilde on the chair, I had an up-close view of my crotch, swaddled tight in my old suit. I
lifted my chin to Lady Dear, smiling down on me from above the mantle. Gracie once told
me Lady Dear was the only woman she’d ever met who needed sex more than she did.
Sometimes I wondered if the spayed and neutered weren’t happier, wandering the park fat
and happy and free from desire like furry little Buddhas.
“Hey T-t-t-t-t-t …” I could hear him sigh from the kitchen. “Hey, boss, how you think
rehearsal is going?”
“Well, Wile hasn’t eaten Yogi,” I called back. “And Mick …” At this, I heard a pit-oo-ey.
“Porky!”
“Sorry, Gracie.”

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“No Consuela, it’s all right, I’ll wipe it up.”
“Do you know how many lines you have?” I called.
“No idea.”
“Fourteen-hundred and thirty-eight,” he said. “I counted. I don’t know if I’ve ever even
written that many words.”
“Is Zykov still hiring hobos to jump out at you on the street?” Zykov had appointed
himself a sort of Wizard of Oz for all of us, diagnosing Pork as a Cowardly Lion in serious
need of courage, Bugs as the brainless Straw Man. For our director, Wile was the Tin Man,
sans heart, news to no one; for my favorite coyote, Zykov prescribed a trip to a petting zoo
with a child. Wile had taken Yosemite Sam, who was at least child-sized, but I doubt what
Zykov had in mind was the pint-sized cowboy holding the staff of the Burbank Children’s
Zoo at bay with his six-shooters while Wile devoured a lamb in front of a dozen tykes. The
legal aftermath was all over Variety. Apparently the Zoo was now adding what they’d
named, after its chief patron, the Noggles Schmear Hog House.
Courage, brains, heart. Pork, Bugs, Wile. Check, check, check.
I didn’t know what I didn’t have.
Untying the apron behind her back, Gracie came through the doorway and winked at me,
heading to the bedroom. On her heels was Pork, who handed me my martini and planted
himself on the edge of the sofa with his. After toasting Bill Shakespeare, we clinked glasses
and drank, and it was already down the hatch before the taste could register, which spared
me having to spit it in Pork’s face.
“Leggghhhhk,” he said, tearing up.
“Dear God, Pork, what did you put into this?” I didn’t see how any combination of
alcohols could taste so bad.

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“I d-d-d-d-d-d-d-don’t know,” he said, scraping off his tongue with a coaster. “I just used
what I s-s-s-s-s-saw. I’ve never made a m-m-m-m-m-martini before.”
“Porky,” I said, sitting up. “There are five things every man must know how to do:
change a tire, win a knife fight, mix a martini, and catch a fly ball.”
“That’s only f-f-f-f-f-f-four.”
“The fifth isn’t repeatable in polite company,” I said, leading him to the kitchen.
“Galliano?” I asked, holding up the yellow glass rocket. I couldn’t believe he could be in a
posse with boozehounds like Daff and Bugs and not know how to make a martini.
“Peppermint extract? And did you drain all the juice from that jar of olives?”
He threw up his fat, white-gloved hands.
I showed him how. With three ingredients, it didn’t take long. I shook the shaker and
poured it out clear as angel tears into a pair of fresh glasses, then led him back to the living
room. Pork raised his glass to the photo of Lady Dear I’d just tacked up. “I would’ve been
p-p-p-p-p-p-p-pretty thrilled to make her a martini. Never had the c-c-c-c-c-courage to ask
her out.”
“I thought you only went in for the swine.”
He shrugged. “Dogs are prettier.” I couldn’t argue with that.
“Why do they d-d-d-d-d-d-do it, Tom?”
I had no idea why anyone would kill Lady Dear or the others. “I wish I knew.”
“Why do b-b-b-b-b-beautiful women always make such bad d-d-d-d-d …” He exhaled.
“Such bad choices?”
I turned to him, the paunchy profile of forty inches of stuttering bacon. “I don’t know,
Pork, but if you find the answer to that one, you’ll have Hollywood figured out.”
“I’ve heard the k-k-k-killers record the murders. I’ve heard they violated Lady Dear.”

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“Where did you hear that?”
He shrugged. “What are you g-g-g-g-g-going to do about it, Tom?”
“About Lady Dear?”
“Ab-b-b-bout all of them.”
To give myself a chance to consider it, I took a slow sip. “Why me?”
He turned finally from the photo of Lady Dear. “Who else?” he said. “There’s a reason
they picked you to be Hamlet.”
“Are you scared?”
To my surprise, he chuckled. “Look at me,” he said. “I’m the last animal anyone would
want to k-k-k-k-k-k-kidnap for some sex slave p-p-p-p-p-p-porno.”
I took another sip. “You’d call it a porno? I think it’s snuff.”
“For the people who watch that sort of thing, there’s no d-d-d-d-difference between sex
and power.”
Involuntarily, I leaned my head back like a farsighted person trying to read the paper
better. “Porky Pig, armchair philosopher,” I said.
He sighed. “I spend a lot of time alone. G-g-g-gives you a chance to think … Anyway,
who’s coming tonight?”
“Everyone,” I said, smiling. “Everyone.”
It was true:
Eddie Fisher, drunk and happy, with Liz Taylor on his arm, also drunk, but less happy.
Noggles Schmear, without cast, and, thankfully, without bacon suit, but escorted by a trove
of red-haired beauty queens: it had been said that since the war he’d almost single-handedly
drained the Irish Catholic beauty from Chicago, South Boston and Queens, siphoning it via
free one-way American Airlines tickets and the promise to be in a movie with Alan Ladd.

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A very sunburned Steve Allen.
That freak Ronald McDonald with his dingbat feet and womanish hips.
John Special Smelter in a mourning suit and black rose boutonnière. “Thomas,” said the
bloodhound in his Knoxville drawl, shaking my hand with both paws as though expressing
condolences, “it is a privilege and a pleasure to be here.”
Minnie, perkier than I’d seen her in years, with her date, a silver fox who was, in fact, a
silver fox.
At half past six, a slow knock took me to the door, which after sidling through the crowd
I opened only to find Ron and Nancy Reagan towering above me, nose to nose. I stared up
at the beautiful couple as though I were at the drive-in. I hoped Gracie and I would still
rubberneck each other like that when we’d been married that long. After shaking Ron’s
hand, I lifted myself onto my toes to kiss Nancy on the cheek. She smelled like tuberose.
But from behind I heard heels then whiffed Gracie, a broiling bed of want. Her paw slid up
along the inside of my suit sleeve, her finger pressing into the vein on the underside of my
wrist, as though checking my pulse, as though trying to make me pass out. “Gracie,” said
Nancy, “thank you so much, dear, for that canapé recipe. Tuna! I never would have
thought.”
“Albacore,” Grace murmured, entranced. “Fresh.”
In a voice like a warm shower on a winter morning, Ron was asking me if I’d read The
Conscience of a Conservative.
Later, Rick Nelson strolled down from his parents’ incognito, wearing a homburg and
enormous sunglasses, shaking my hand, handing a bottle of bubbly to Gracie. “Prosecco,”
he said so softly I hardly heard him. “Tom said you like champagne.” He took off hat and
sunglasses. His face was as tan as buckskin. Gracie swooned against me. I was glad to host

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any guest whose fan club had more chapters than Mickey’s.
Not a minute later, Goofy stepped through the doorway, but not before sticking his long
face through, waggling his head about to check for booby traps. The stars must’ve told him
it would be a dangerous night for Leos.
Jorge and Esteban – the Cubans flamingos, the typecast duo of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern – knocked with their beaks, and as soon as I opened up, they cawed, “Soupy,
Soupy?” “Shrimpy, Shrimpy?” “Drinky? Drinky?” “Lady? Lady?” They were learning their
lines phonetically. It was some small comfort I would be able to order their deaths.
Mickey didn’t knock, letting himself in, squinting at the partygoers in his ancient black
tux, his Barrymore collar, the long tails hiding his own, the white silken tie and Mickey
Mouse tie pin. In one hand he held a top hat, in the other his death’s head cane. “Quite the
shabby lot, aren’t they?” he said, turning his nose at the other guests.
“We didn’t say it was white-tie,” I said.
“I always assume everything is white-tie,” he said.
“Mick, you’ve been coming to this party for ten years.”
He craned his creaky neck and squinted at Rick Nelson’s feet. “Is that child wearing
moccasins?” He swung his head back to me, his unshining cast-iron eyes burning into my
suit, which was navy, and my tie, which was green. He paused a moment. “What is the
rabbit wearing?”
At each descriptor – pink trousers, boating shoes, a spread-collar shirt the color of
limeade – Mickey winced, as though suffering a bout of angina. “Dear God,” he finally said.
“I consider it a victory that he’s wearing clothes at all,” I said.
Shaking his head, Mick almost smiled, then tottered past, smacking me in the leg with his
cane.

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Joe Vogel didn’t knock either, and when I rushed over, he didn’t greet me so much as
assess me. Of course, that was how he looked at everyone who worked for the Lion.
“That’s an excellent suit, Mr. Grimalkin,” he said. “I must be paying you too much.” He
smiled. I had no idea if he was joking.
Wile, eyes bloodshot, reeking of old gore and the animal stink of mindless rage, came
with signboards, but when he flipped the first over, WHERE IS THE BIRD?, the words
were claw-written in blood – from the ammoniac smell, my guess was chicken. I told him
last I heard Roadrunner was in Reno. It was sometimes disturbing to consider that one of
my steadier friends was essentially half Dracula, half Captain Ahab.
Zykov arrived with his hand on Volton’s shoulder as though it were an overhead bar on a
subway car. My director handed me a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams and told his
companion to point him in the direction of Elizabeth Taylor.
After the parade of troubled associates, famous semi-strangers and lukewarm old friends,
it did my heart good to see a brown blur pinwheel through the open bay window – once
Jerry had told me he felt bigger when he was moving fast. A furry cyclone, he spun through
the air over the heads of Sal Mineo and a pair of Schmear’s redheads bunched together on
Gracie’s loveseat, landing in a feet-first slide directed at Mickey Mouse, flying into the old
man’s ankles like he was stealing home. Mick toppled like a felled fir as Jerry flew under him
unscathed and caught Mickey’s champagne flute mid-drop, spilling nary a bubble. Even
Vogel smiled, glad to kick Walt Disney’s ass vicariously. From the floor, Mick was blindly
kicking at Jerry with his spats, as ineffectual as a turtle on its back. Goof pulled his cranky
Quixote up and dusted him off as I retrieved the Mouse’s cane, trying to make an adult
impression for Ron and Nancy.
Despite his humiliation, Mick had enough self-possession to turn to Jerry, point the head

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of his cane at my partner, and say, “May your descendents spend their lives running through
mazes chasing cheese.”
Jerry smiled. “I’m drinking your champagne,” he said, downing the bubbly and exiting for
the kitchen, where I heard Consuela call, “Meester Mouse!” I could almost see her picking
him up like a tot, feeding him lox on a cracker.
After an hour as the one-man welcome committee, my mouth hurt from smiling, and I
realized I was sober, which after dusk was a crime against gentility.
My triple rye was almost lipside when Leo Shampoo wandered out from behind Steve
Allen, covering his mouth with his tiny ravioli hand. “Your water’s rusty. You need to have
your pipes checked.”
“No kidding,” I said, taking a sip despite his girlish squeal. “Where did you come from?”
“Well, we are all made of stars,” he said, shrugging. “But more recently, single-celled
organisms.” He sighed as though buckling under cross-examination. “Okay, okay. Akron.
That’s my final answer.” He spotted a blown-glass bowl of Jordan almonds. “Ooh, space
beans,” he said, picking it up.
Footsore, I moved a platter of crab bake bites from the island to the counter and hopped
up, my wingtips clipping happily against each other above the floor. With all the bedside
manner of an executioner, he said, “So, I’ve been thinking about your penis.”
“Doc,” I hissed. Consuela was still in earshot, and I suspected she understood more
English than she let on.
“The answer is hallucinogenic drugs. Specifically, LSD. Loads and loads of LSD.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I said, stirring my finger through his Jordan almonds.
“It’s like watching a movie and being in a movie. At the same time.”
“Doc, I wish I was in movies less, not more.”

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“The only more effective treatment for no-boner-itis requires dragon teeth and a
meteorite. But the procedure is very painful. And it requires a shaman.”
My disbelief was distracted by a sudden smell – Consuela was opening the open door,
hefting out a tray of bacon-wrapped calamari. Hunger was tapping its Morse across my
stomach. “But it works?” I said, turning my nose back to the blunt, large-pored face of Leo
Shampoo. “And it’s legal?”
“Everything’s legal the first time you try it.” Out from the inner pocket of his tasseled
velvet jacket, he drew a folded piece of paper the size of a baseball card. I was expecting
unmarked white lozenges, but instead I saw what I thought at first were Mickey Mouse
stamps, except Mickey’s grinning face was as rich a purple as the Penguin’s spats.
“What the hell are those?”
“Blotter papers. You put one on the back of your tongue and wait for the Great Spirit to
visit you.”
Maybe this was what I needed, but Mick’s mug was a bad omen.
I stared at the grid of Mickey Mouse faces, a tiny purple Warhol. I wanted to think
Gracie loved me for more than easy money and good sex, but the black sprites who
whispered in my ears at night told me otherwise. The stamp was halfway to my mouth when
Gracie came pattering in, eyes on the Kit-Cat Klock.
“Tommy, where is he?” she asked, as I slipped the stamp into the inside pocket of my
suit.
“Uh, who?”
“Percy. It’s nine o’clock. He sent such a beautiful RSVP note. Such nice cursive.”
“He’s a busy man,” I said. Percy Bornholm did nothing. Percy Bornholm did
everything.

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“Is he a warlock?” asked Leo Shampoo.
“He’s the most impressive physical specimen I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“Thanks, Gracie.”
“Is he single?” Gracie asked me.
“I am,” said Leo Shampoo, setting down his bowl of Jordan almonds and smoothing out
the sides of his pageboy haircut. “Who is it? Katharine Hepburn?”
“Kate Hepburn is old enough to be your mother,” I said, grimly picturing coitus between
the grizzled starlet and the mini-troll.
“Joan is single,” said Gracie, ignoring us, “and I’ve been telling her all about him. Plus
she’s English!”
“El-lo, g’vnah!” said Leo.
“Joan?”
Gracie sighed, rolled her eyes, her tail rising behind her cocktail dress. “Collins.”
“Percy’s line of work is dangerous, and he’s never in one place for long.”
“That’s perfect for Joan. She can’t be tied to just one man.” I choked mid-sip.
“Anyway,” she said, tail relaxing, realizing what she’d said, “can’t you find him?”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, honestly. But I was saved by a gunshot. The
party mewling evaporated as Gracie and Leo and I double-timed it into the living room.
“Tarnation, Elizabeth, who is this greenhorn?”
It was a sign I was becoming overly domesticated that I worried more about what
Yosemite Sam’s spurs were doing to my sofa than I was about the Colts he was pointing
across the living room at a reed of a man in a black suit, stuck between Betty Boop and a
smoking hole in the white brick of the hearth. Like old balloons, man and beast were
floating toward the walls. “I love you, Elizabeth,” said Sam, wiping with the back of his

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hand at the yellow snot sluicing from his red nose onto his orange moustache.
“Somebody get me a gin,” said Betty. She looked tired, her face cracked by worry lines
that no rouge could powder over.
But I’d known her back when, the teenage trollop, with a waist no bigger than the fat end
of a bat and eyes that said they didn’t know much but would like you to teach them how.
She was fourteen when she landed in Hollywood, a refugee from the chilly East Coast
childhoods none of us liked to talk about, so she lied about her age – not hard to do when
you’re built like a figure-eight – and found work waiting tables and Musso and Frank, a story
still gossiped about five years later when I started there. She was Lizzy Bubchek then, the
flouncy flapper who’d sit on your lap for a smile, kiss you for a wink, call you Daddy and let
you do things to her no daddy should do for a sip of champagne and an Oyster Rockefeller.
Ignoring the truth, the poobahs swerved around her age like you would a panhandler, but if
justice – that weary hag – had had her say, a quarter of the actors and half the studio execs in
Hollywood would’ve been jailed for statutory rape. The one who became her permanent
daddy was Adolph Zukor, who along with his New York Strip and green beans asked one
night in 1930 for a double helping of Lizzy Bubchek, which she might have given him for
free, but – being smitten, or stupid, or brilliant – he paid for with five thousand dollars and
the promise that within a month, she’d be giving every teenage boy in the country wet
dreams. I’ve been told she spent the better half of that advance on a pony, a thousand
gallon jars of maraschino cherries, and an acre of red taffeta.
I met her six years and, as she confided to me once, three abortions later: to help cover
rent, Bugs and I used to busk on Santa Monica Boulevard, any degrading bullshit that might
get a nickel tossed into Bugs’s battered straw boater: acrobatics, cut-rate palmistry, knock-
knock jokes, knife-throwing, Al Jolson duets, and one early a.m., an impossibly small girl in

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black pin back curls stumbled past while Bugs and I were duking it out, tussling in a fight
that was either burlesque or real, I don’t remember which. She stopped and covered her
mouth and pointed, hiccupping, her shoulder blades hugging a lamppost. We stopped
rolling, picked the gravel out of our hands, and told her we were pleased to meet her, at
which she giggled, and said that cross her heart she never ate rabbit, or cat. She smelled like
she’d just taken a bath of gin and gardenias, and for all I knew, she had. I asked where she
lived, but she couldn’t remember her address, and when I asked what her name was, she said
Lizzy, what she went by as a diddled wastrel in Scranton or Yonkers or Dover or whatever
other hellhole she’d fled. Bugs later claimed he knew her real identity from the first, but
really, we ushered her back to our Venice bungalow because she was one of those rare
creatures – like Gracie – whose mere presence rang the bell of paternal worry your heart.
She was the saddest pretty thing I’d ever seen, and the prettiest sad thing. That night Bugs
passed out thirty seconds after I unlocked the triple bolts, but curiosity and my ulcer kept me
up until dawn with Betty, that odd drunk for whom spirits were an upper. At two hundred
words a minute, she was opining about pearls and shrimp cocktail, tax rates and which
producers knew what a tongue was for. We didn’t sleep together, that night or any after, but
that wasn’t the last dawn Betty Boop fell asleep weeping in my arms. I wasn’t actually in
love with her, and it seemed like no one was, although every hack with a cock and a SAG
card told her so. By the time the war came, she was penciled in for two flicks a week, I was
churning out patriotic T&J episodes, and we only saw each other at bars in the company of
richer, more famous people we didn’t like. We always pecked cheeks and promised to get
dinner sometime soon, then never did.
Six weeks after V-E day I stumbled into the backroom of Little Tony’s for my weekly
poker game with the Looney Tunes crew, where to my surprise there was a new player, a

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cowpoke no taller than a fifth-grader, all shoulders and moustache and ten-gallon hat. Even
before we were introduced, I thought to myself: That man belongs in a cartoon. Hopping up
from the table, he shook my hand with such aggressive goodwill he might have fractured a
metacarpal, telling me his name was Sam, and that he’d killed more Nat-zees than the entire
British Expeditionary Force put together. Later inquiries confirmed this was more or less
true. Over the course of dozens of poorly played hands, he explained that he’d grown up in
West Texas on a bleak homestead two hundred miles from the nearest movie house, and as
such, the first film he’d ever seen was on base in Ipswich in ’41, where they’d projected Betty
Boop onto concrete slab walls. Her cartooned image rang his heart up for a bill he’d never
be able to pay, and while he parachuted into the Lowlands to assassinate whole SS leadership
trees, he would dream of what he’d say to her when they met. He could’ve taken the hero
tour for the year after the war, then settled into a cushy job as a lieutenant colonel in an
office where everyone salutes you and the secretaries bring you coffee and sandwiches
whenever you ask for them, but instead, he left the service to work for WB as Bugs’s bandito
nemesis.
I was there at John Wayne’s Independence Day party when Sam finally met Betty B, and
he came prepared, presenting her with what he claimed was Joseph Goebbels’s gold tooth,
promising that without her, he wouldn’t have had the gumption to keep pressing into France
for almost 100 unsleeping hours after landing at Normandy, carrying on his person nothing
but amphetamines, sour mash, and a thousand rounds for his Colts. When she asked him if
French girls kissed as hot and hard as American girls, he tipped back his ten-gallon and said
he’d have to check and see.
For years, they outran the wind together, a combined nine feet nine inches of riotous,
boozy glory. Sam’s adoration buoyed Betty, and she kept him from shooting to death

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innumerable bellboys, busboys, waiters, cabbies, bartenders, studio secretaries, and most
importantly, Bugs Bunny, who as Sam saw it was a poser and a moron. Which, of course,
Bugs was. But Betty’s reign had ended even before Sam had cold-cocked his first Nazi. No
woman wanted to be a flapper in the Dust Bowl, and no man wanted one either. A hungrier
nation demanded a more substantial woman, the fleshy, cheery, unironic pinup. I knew and
loved Mary Pickford, but only the blind would choose her over Rita Hayworth. Betty could
only see this cultural development as a personal rejection, Betty who might as well have
worn a sign around her neck that read Please love me. But Sam was still moon-eyed over her,
and desperate love can sustain a relationship for a long time. And for a long time, it did.
Goofy and I had a dollar bet on which would come first: the Reds bombing us, or Betty and
Sam splitting. Goof took destruction, I picked heartbreak. I was right. But it took close to
a decade of his red rage, her black moods and blackouts, before they rode off into different
sunsets. Their public fights made the worst row Gracie and I’d ever had look like a chess
match: she’d shriek that she hated him and he’d roar that he loved her, then he’d break the
elbow of whatever valet was unlucky enough to have pulled up with their Packard. What we
all knew but were afraid to tell them was probably put best by Goof: Two Sagittariuses together
are a funhouse in the bedroom, and a madhouse everywhere else. It was Betty burning their house
down that probably spelled their final doom, but even then, Sam would only agree to a
separation, not a divorce, and they were still legally married in my living room, the living
room where death’s stooge saltpeter had told the gentler scents of my party to scram.
“Who’s that, that, that crowbait colt?” Sam asked his wife. Everyone was watching,
wanting him to pull the trigger, not wanting him to pull the trigger.
“His name is Brent. He’s an accountant,” said Betty. He wasn’t handsome, but he was
tall, with a whiz kid’s face – pasty, shaped like a slice of pie, no chin and all brain. His hair

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and suit were the color of ink on a profitable company’s balance sheet. He would have
looked no different in black and white. But he was young, which conformed to my theory
about Betty Boop: fleeing death at an increasingly slower pace, she took shelter in the arms
of increasingly younger lovers. This one had been playing T-ball when Sam parachuted over
Omaha beach.
“Put the guns down, Sam,” I said, unable to believe Grace – squeezing my paw, cheek
pressed into my shoulder – had invited both of them.
Ignoring me, he said, “I know you gamme the mitten a long time ago, Betty, but –” he
sniffed – “but for him?” He stepped off the sofa, the mean ends of his Colts still trained at
his wife and her friend.
Just like epileptics can smell a fit coming, I’d always had a nose that could sniff action
before it arrives, and as my whiskers started twitching, Jerry rolled out from under the coffee
table and leapt into the air in front of Sam, stuffing a Jordan almond so deep into the barrel
of each Colt the guns looked like snakes trying to swallow moles. Sam stared down my
partner as a few people twittered, but the air was still as tense as a flexed bicep on Muscle
Beach. In the corner, the gramophone was playing “Travelin’ Man,” but not five feet away,
Rick Nelson wasn’t going anywhere.
“Ya’d understand this, mouse,” Sam said, “if ya’d ever been in love.”
They faced off, two homunculi capable of feats no larger man would dare, men whose
veins pumped with rage boiled down to a tincture inky as oil. I thought they would tear each
other apart on my carpet, or at the very least that Jerry would sneer at his sentimentality. But
instead, my partner shrugged under his seersucker jacket and mumbled, “Probably right.”
His gaze floated upward, a round kite of regret, until he spotted me. “Hey Hoss, how’s
about some Scotch. The good stuff.”

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“Sure, Walls,” I said.
Sam wiped a tear from his eye, shaking his head at Betty, at the blanched accountant now
standing behind her. “When did the world get so pale?” he said, spinning on a boot heel and
tromping toward the door, dropping his guns behind himself. I felt Gracie’s tail curl around
mine as she let out a long breath, while Betty stormed off to the kitchen, her accountant
half-crumpled onto the mantle, clutching his patent leather hair. Steve Allen wiped his own
sunburned brow with a cocktail napkin, Daff waved his Marlboro at Sam, who was clomping
out into the night, Robert Fuller told Eddie Fisher he was never worried, and Rick Nelson
asked if anyone had reefer.
I could feel Gracie’s paddleball heart as she said, “I thought we were going to die,
Tommy … so if you’re going to the stash, get champagne.”
“We’re out?”
“No, I want the Bollinger magnum. Just for us,” she said. “I thought I might lose you.”
After a quick kiss – when was the last time my tongue had touched hers? – I skeedaddled
into the living room, almost colliding with my michelin boss.
“Tom!” shouted Schmear, decibels louder than “Travelin’ Man.” “Exactly the man I
wanted to see.”
“Glad to hear it, Mr. Schmear.”
“Quite the shindig!” He waggling his link-on-patty hands toward his gingers. “I told
Maura and Bridget and Colleen and Molly that someone might get shot at tonight.” He
whispered behind the back of his hand. “They find violence quite titillating.”
“Glad the redheads are having a good time.”
“Redhead’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “Deirdre coming tonight?”
“She and Headley are vacationing.”

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“Too bad. You know her well?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell him I was sometimes struck with a psychological
heartburn, picturing a skinny girl on all fours with whiskers on her face and melons in her
bra, waiting for me. “Well enough to know you’ve been sending her X-rated telegrams.”
He tossed this away with his fat fingers. “She’s interested in show business, and I …
showed her around, helped her make contacts. The telegrams let her know I’m interested in
continuing to pursue a relationship.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Pleasure is my business,” he said, with a wink, then bellowed: “Entertaining the children
of the world! So,” he added, “what do you think about a nice little dinner, just the five of
us? You don’t have to tell her I’m coming.”
“I’ll talk with Gracie. I’m sure we can arrange something.”
“Excellent!” he yelled, clapping me on the shoulder and shoving me out of his path to the
kitchen. “I smell cookies!”
In the hall a craps game had popped up, the usual dice crew of Yogi, Goof, Burgess
Meredith, and Stan Donen sprawled around stacks of coins. From a deep crouch, Burgess
backhanded the red dice low against the wallpaper, a dizzying Creamsicle pattern of what to
my old eyes looked like sunbursts, dirigibles, dredels, umbrellas.
“Seven? Again?” shouted Goof, his ears guttering as Yogi swiped the stacks, tossing them
clinking into a burlap sack that read JELLYSTONE. I’d known Goofy for twenty years, but
I still couldn’t dovetail the two most basic facts about his personality: he was a gambling
addict who believed that his entire life was pre-ordained by the motion of celestial objects.
Stan gave his shoulder a commiserating squeeze as Yogi sipped at his whiskey-and-water.
“Somebody shoot off a Roman candle out there?” asked Burgess.

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“Uh – yeah,” I said. “Bugs, he, uh, stuffed a firecracker down Porky’s pants.”
Burgess laughed at the thought. “Life imitating art,” smiled Stan. Everybody liked to
imagine Porky in pain.
“Great party, Tom,” said Yogi, lifting his porkpie off his head then setting it back down
again. I hadn’t know him as long – The Last Wild Bear in Jersey had only come west five or
six years before, but he’d never been wild, growing up hustling around Atlantic City, a
Ducktown cardshark with an ace up every sleeve and a Benzedrine-laced sugar cube for
every pony. I had it from his own mouth that he’d never tossed a pair of dice he hadn’t
shaved, weighted, heated, drilled, or otherwise dickered with, and even though his he was
making fifteen large a week from the Yogi Bear Show, here he was in my hallway cheating his
friends for pocket change. They’d restacked their nickels and dimes, Burgess rolled another
seven, Yogi shrugged and tossed the coins into his bag. Smarter than the average bear.
“What can I say, boys?” he said. “Lady Luck is smiling on da house tonight.” I shook my
head, and as I turned down the side hall, he chuckled and tossed me a quarter. You can take
the boy out of Jersey …
At the end of the side hall, the door to the bedroom was ajar, and I was about to push it
open when I heard a woman whinny, “Ronnie …”
Piqued, I peeked in to see Ron and Nancy tangled on top of my bed, her eyes closed as
he nuzzled around her cleavage. His coat was off, her skirt was hiked up, and the smell of
tuberoses was overwhelming. Ron looked even taller lying down, and his plate-sized hand
was coasting up the outside of her slim thigh, above the stocking to the garter. He’d started
dating her while we were working at SAG together, and he’d suggested to me more than
once that they burned up the sheets together. They’d been married ten years, with a couple
tykes at home, and they were clawing at each other like kids in a loft after a dance.

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Before I could turn back to the hall, Nancy’s eyes opened and her vaguely Oriental face
turned toward me, sharpened by angry and embarrassment. I’m sorry, I mouthed.
“Ronnie,” she hissed, grabbing his shoulder, “Ronnie, it’s Tom.”
His face emerged from the silken folds of her blouse, brief lipstick contrails war-painting
his tan cheeks. “Tom,” he called, beaming, no hint of shame in his bonhomie. It was about
to get very uncomfortable, and as I opened the door, I had no idea what to say, but then
from the closet – the sanctuary of my best whiskey and the mini-fridge that held Gracie’s
pinkest champagne – came a weeping and gnashing of teeth. Grateful for any distraction
from Nancy Reagan’s cleavage, I opened the Venetian door to John Special Smelter snuffling
into the ragged pads of his paws, crouched under Gracie’s skirts. Beside him was a half-
empty fifth of the thirty-year-old Lowland Scotch that Jerry had sent me for. From behind I
felt more than heard Nancy’s castigations bouncing off the rubber of Ron’s good cheer.
I was hoping to chat up Special Smelter, giving R&N a chance to button and zip and
reconvene among guests who’d never be the wiser, but John’s face as it unstuck itself from
his hands – beatific, entranced – made me realize something was either very right or terribly
wrong, something that involved Ronald Reagan.
“I was afeared,” said John Special Smelter. The breath that poured from his mouth
through the perfumed silk of Gracie’s clothes was abstract expressionism in two tones:
cheap fish and expensive hooch.
“Join the club,” I said, bending with a creak to swipe the fifth of Scotch.
“I knew that this very night I would meet a harbinger of great change. The Lord has
been directing me to the Apocalypse of John,” he said, grabbing onto a pair Gracie’s skirts
and pulling himself up. He petted the bottle of scotch. “Take it, and eat it up; and it shall
make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.” His wrinkly paw reached

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for some distant star. “I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the
sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads
the name of blasphemy,” he said, his graying paw turning toward my bed. “And the beast
which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as
the mouth of a lion.”
He sighted the Reagans down a long finger then said, “Here, thought I, was the beast,
here Jezebel, the false prophetess, in congress with him …”
Ron was having a hard time finding his shoes, while Nancy was standing, wincing, her
fingers pecking at her shirt’s buttons.
“Just like honeymooners, sometimes,” Nancy murmured, her face even in the low light
the same color as the lipstick still smudging Ron’s face.
“And I heard the Good Book say: “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she
made all the nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.”
“Really, we were just kissing,” said Nancy, sighing as she realized her all her buttons were
one hole off.
Smelter pounded his knuckles against his chest and said, “And then I smote my breast
and thought to myself: Los Angeles, Los Angeles, all the nations have drunk the wine of thy
corruption.” I was about to tell him that the only drunkenness he needed to worry about was
his own, when he brightened and stepped out of the closet, lifting his paws toward the
ceiling. “But then as I heard her whispering the name of our God, I knew the man was no
beast, the distaff no harlot, but true Baptists both –”
“Actually, we’re not Baptists,” said Ron, popping up from the other side of the bed,
wingtips in hand. “But I’ve always admired them. Patriotic. Hardworking. A very fine
group of people.”

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“I opened my eyes and through the blinds the man I saw was none other than George
Gipp.”
With that, all the apocalyptic pieces rearranged themselves in the shape of a football.
Despite clear internicene differences – which was to say, Special Smelter thought the Pope
drank the blood of underage virgins – he loved the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame even more
than Yogi loved his Mets, more than Bugs loved himself, and perhaps even more than
Minnie still loved Mickey. Understanding, Ron veered into fan-mollification mode,
dropping his wingtips on the bed and striding over barefoot with an avuncular smile, but
John Special Smelter was not done yet: “I saw the great bear fall from the sky, sweeping with
it eleven stars. I saw the dragon leashed and hissing. I saw rockets and tanks, offenses
without running backs and a great wall crumbling.”
“No running backs?” said Ron, crouching beside me to meet John Special Smelter in the
eye. “Gipp would be out of a job.”
“Ron,” said Nancy, eying the doorway. “So sorry, Tom, so, very, very sorry.”
Special Smelter scrambled atop Gracie’s vanity, then dropping his paws in a helmet atop
Ron’s head. “America,” Smelter murmured. “Liberty.” I was near enough to feel the crackle
and hiccup of John’s blessing burn into Ron’s thick skull. If Ronnie Reagan didn’t amount
to something more than host General Electric Theater, I would be mightily disappointed. The
blessing of John Special Smelter had resurrected the career of Frank Sinatra. At the very
least, it should’ve been able to make Reagan mayor.
Ron’s own oversized paws were raised above his head, gripping the bony, black-sleeved
arms of John Special Smelter as the hound intoned “Victory, victory, victory.” Their eyes were
closed, and for a moment Nancy and I shared a look of awe and solicitude as she re-
buttoned her blouse. I poured a finger of Scotch into an empty water glass on Gracie’s

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messy nightstand and offered it to her. She declined. In the neutral tone of a journalist, a
tone that floated above adulation, pity, or scorn, Nancy whispered, “Ron believes in all the
forms of goodness and power.” Then she grabbed the glass and shot the whisky down.
Box-stepping around Ron as Special Smelter finished his prayer, I retrieved from our secret
fridge a Jeroboam of Gracie’s champagne, as tall as a bowling pin and twice as fat.
“A-men,” said Ron. “A-men, a-men, a-men.”
“Just close the door after you’re done,” I said, sliding from the dark of my bedroom back
toward the craps game, where Goofy was clutching his head, my second most fatalistic
friend sensing his own secular apocalypse in the dice that kept coming up seven. I smiled as
I thought of Special Smelter, his hands oily with Ron’s macassar, glowing with the heat of his
prayer. Not only does God play dice with the universe, but the dice are loaded.
I started to turn toward the living room, but Burgess Meredith started doing an
impression of Ike at a press conference forgetting what he was about to say. I hoped the
next Republican in the White House would be smarter.
After slaloming through the hundred building buzzes of my guests, I found my wife
outside, trying to coax Mickey back in. She’d always had a soft spot for grotesque creatures.
He was perched on the end of the diving board and Grace was at the water’s edge. They
were turned away from me as I slipped from one side of the sliding door to the other, still
lugging my mace of champagne.
“C’mon, Mickey, everyone wants to see you,” said Gracie.
“No one wants to see me,” he droned in his awful fake Transatlantic accent. Mickey
Mouse was born in Grand Rapids. “I’m a loathsome toad.”
“You’re definitely not more than half loathsome,” she said.
“The only one who loves me is Walt.”

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“Walt does love you,” she said, vaulting fluidly onto the board despite her cocktail dress.
“Everything else just thinks I’m rich and cruel.”
“Well, they do think you’re rich.” Gracie was not without her faults, but she almost
never lied.
“They think I abandoned Minerva.”
“You did abandon Minnie.” Minnie had been a sort of fairy godmother for my wife in
the years before she was my wife, and there was no woman to whom Grace was more loyal.
“I needed distance.” Backlit from the houselights, Mick’s whiskers were trembling. It
would’ve been easier to hate him if he’d left her for the needle or a cocker spaniel with a
name like Crystal, but when in the winter of 1949 he disappeared for six weeks to a cabin in
Santa Clarita, it was probably distance that he needed. He and Walt had received a Special
Oscar in 1932, when Mickey was twenty-three and the size of the Mickey Mouse fan club
was larger than the population of Los Angeles. The Beverly Hills post office had to hire
four employees only to sort and deliver Mickey Mouse’s mail, and Mick – or so I was told –
tried his to respond at length to every scrap. It would have be a fulltime job by itself, but
Walt Disney, who was Henry Ford with a camera and a moustache, had Bugs shooting thirty
hours a week and doing publicity another fifty. Mick slept in a couch in his office, lived off
coffee, blintzes, cheese Danish and very good Gouda. He was, after all, a mouse. He’d
married Minnie the year before the war, but she told me long after that she was lucky to
spend two nights a week with him. Much later Mick told me that if not for his six weeks
solitary vacation – during which he slept fifteen hours a day and spent the rest of his time
sketching Douglas Firs – he would’ve driven his Pierce-Arrow off a cliff. Well-rested and
pounds lighter, with a desire as pure as a pilot light to make things right with Minnie, he
returned from Santa Clarita to an empty home. It was only two years later that Minnie even

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agreed to speak with him on the phone.
“You’re a terrible person,” Gracie said to him, “but so am I. So is everybody.”
The night was clear, and the line of the Santa Monicas above us was the violet-pine
cardiogram of a dying man.
“Tom isn’t a terrible person.”
“No,” she said. “Tom isn’t. He’s good. Once in a while he’s very good.” That second
statement was a thin pin slowly deflating the first. I wanted to be very good all the time.
“Porky is good,” said Mickey. “Supporting his parents, the ancient swine. If my parents
were alive, I wouldn’t do more than send them a fruit basket every Christmas.”
“Jerry is probably a quarter good.”
“He’s a Sambo,” said Mickey. “A Sambo with a mean streak.”
“A Sambo who doesn’t burn his fan mail,” I said, shouldering the bubbly over to them.
Gracie sprang from the board and landed on four paws, but Mickey didn’t turn. “Hello,
Tom,” he said, “quite the house you have here. So far from the ocean, I’m sure it was a
steal.”
“Mmm, the big Bollinger,” said Gracie, placing one size-four stiletto in front of the other,
stalking me on a tightrope. I’d plucked a pair of flutes from the kitchen, and I set them onto
the concrete, along with the Jeroboam, so cold my paw was almost numb.
“Is Minerva still in there with that pelt in the five-button suit?” asked Mickey, swinging
his feet around over the water, over-rotating so much he almost fell in. He grunted and
rocked himself to his feet, pressing a white-gloved hand into the knotty nest of his lumbago.
“Last I saw she was trying to extricate herself from a conversation with Ronald,” I said,
peeling the foil off the bottle.
“Reagan?” he asked, debating how best to get off the board, which stood twenty-four

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inches above the deck. I didn’t offer him my hand, so Gracie did, and he chuffed and
winced stepping down onto the cement.
“No,” I said, smiling. “McDonald. He was talking about his ulcer, showing them his
bunions.”
He raised a finger. “I never liked that hayseed Sam before, but I admired his derring-do
tonight.” Mick raised his tiny black fists to the stars. “Seize destiny by the horns and claim
what rightfully belongs to you.”
I wondered if I would still pine for Gracie years later if she left me. Probably not. She
picked up the flutes and handed one to Mickey, leaving me with the bottle.
“To fate!” said Mickey, raising the empty flute as I tore off the foil wrap.
“To love,” said Gracie.
“To making it out alive,” I said, raising the Jeroboam. I wanted to ask him if Disney
really thought the murders were a plot against his company, but I didn’t want to disturb
Gracie, who’d started twirling around to the Shirelles bouncing through the open window.
“Mama said they’ll be days like this,” she whispered.
Beyond the fence beyond the pool grew a beasty growl that was either a puma or a
Vincent motorbike.
Grace scampered toward the gate, Mick and I trailing behind, and after she unlatched, it
swung in to reveal Percy Bornholm and his date pommelling their legs over a Black
Lightning, striding toward us, Percy in a tuxedo the same shade as the sky, his date in a
cocktail dress that shimmered green like a lizard in the sun. Hail Britannia indeed.
War hero, Olympian, blueblood, Oxbridge polymath, Percy Bornholm was further proof
God loaded the genetic dice. He was a baronet with a ravenous intellectual curiosity equaled
only by his ravenous sexual appetite. I’d first laid eye on him in a bar in Seoul while on a

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USO tour, Percy raking back his white-blonde hair as he emerged from the restroom three
steps ahead of an attaché adjusting her skirt dreamily and murmuring in what I found out
later was Afrikaans. In the seventeen minutes between that encounter and his leading my
USO co-headliner Jayne Mansfield to his hotel room, Percy and I chatted about Truman,
aliens, Brahms, Da Vinci’s helicopter sketches, and most of all, movies. He’d watched more
flicks than anyone I’d ever met, remembered every scene, every shot, every snatch of the
score. I introduced him to the people I knew in Hollywood, and once in a long while, he
would drop into LA and we would chat about the newest Shostakovich, the latest Hitchcock,
but mostly I heard from him via mail, the letters postmarked from Algiers, Berlin, Santiago,
and, most recently, Saigon, likely ground zero for his relationship with the wide-mouthed
paisley-eyed kid on his arm, whose penny-colored skin was perfect but for a scar that began
just below her jaw, snaked toward her cleavage, dove behind an enormous emerald pendant,
tunneled beneath her snug dress and reemerged mid-thigh, trailing down a shapely calf and
petering out above the ankle. She looked like someone’d tried to gut her.
Staring down toward me, Percy said, “May I introduce Agamdeep …” But she was
ignoring me, staring over my shoulder. “Meekey Mouse?” she asked. She paced past me in
spike heels, extracting from her clutch a folded sheet, then opening it to full size. In an
accent that linked South Asia to South America with a cumin-y burr, she said: “Fan club
member August twenty-two nineteen five zero.” Disney’s thick, over-looped signature, a
photo of Agamdeep in a shawl dress before her body became a Brancusi, the pentagonal
face of the cartoon Mick stamped on a gilt circle: I’d seen people waving their fan club
certificates at him since 1937. Jerry and I had a fan club, too, and at last count it had 22
members, plus the president, a 48-year-old spinster from Topeka. Her name was Enid. She
called at least once a week.

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Sauntering over, Mick was doing his best Sinatra (even though he hated Sinatra and the
rest of what he called the Hollywood Nouveau), snapping his fingers, clicking the heels of
his lifts hard against the cement. Percy was staring at Agamdeep as though she’d started
doing the limbo.
“Yes, my dear,” said Mick, pulling a platinum pen from the inner pocket of his ancient
tux and licking the tip, “I am Mickey Mouse. M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E,” he half sung in
sotto voce. Gracie stifled a giggle, squeezing my hand.
Stirring so much plumminess into his voice I doubted it would dissolve, Mick said, “I
have heard report that the ranks of the MMFC are swelling in … Tokyo?”
“Vietnam,” said Percy, coming up from behind. That was what unaffected plumminess
sounded like. “But her father is Guatemalan.”
Mick scowled up at Percy. “Yes, I’ve been told they erected shrines to me in French
Indo-China.” Grace squeezed my hand again, whispering in my ear, “He’s such an ass.”
Percy stared down baffled at the little man with his Chaplin cane, his graying muzzle and
all-black eyes. As a Brahmin, Percy’d never understood celebrity, despite his love for the
movies; the only power he understood had heft and edges – torpedoes, stacks of pounds
sterling – so he did what the rich always do when they encounter what they don’t
understand: he ignored it.
“Tom,” he said, squaring himself toward me, neither squatting nor bending as the more
condescending humans did, “do you happen to have any of that marvelous unpasteurized
Orange County cream on hand?” Ironically for someone whose grandfather orchestrated
the Opium Wars for his own profit, Percy didn’t smoke, drink, or snort. He was, however, a
connoisseur of cream.
“We do,” I said.

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Less handsome than captivating, Percy had white-blond hair he wore like the navy pilot
he was, a sharkfin nose, and eyes that seemed to change color every time I saw him: pond
scum, grape soda, Hershey’s kiss. Tonight they were speckled yellow-brown like Indian
corn. But as for the rest of him, he was a Greek god, taller than Jimmy Stewart, with a
butterflier’s back that cobra’d even under his tux jacket. Apparently while he was at
Cambridge, ladies would drive to his swim meets from London just to see him without his
shirt on.
From behind I heard a clean explosion, and I spun, scared. But Percy continued inside:
he could tell the difference between a grenade’s detonation and Mickey Mouse opening a
bottle of champagne.
Inside, Leo Shampoo was getting a crick in his neck trying to explain the evolutionary
basis for pain to Ronald Reagan, and I directed Percy around them to them to the icebox.
“So,” I said, burbling into his tumbler three fingers of cream, “I’ve been hearing rumors
of Percy Borhnolm sightings in our fair city.”
“I’m retiring,” he said.
In my own tumbler, I mixed equal parts cream, brandy and that morning’s French roast
in a gerry-rigged Brandy Alexander. I stirred it with my finger, clinked glasses with my
favorite Brit, and took a sip. “I didn’t realize you had a job,” I smirked.
He roared, slapping the side of fridge, sending Lady Dear’s obit fluttering down from a
Road Runner magnet. “That’s why I like you,” he said. “No one in England would have the
rocks to say that to a nobleman.”
I patted myself for a lighter to no avail, so I shrugged and ignited one of the stovetop’s
burners, set the end to crackling and took a long drag. “But seriously,” I said, “what
occupation are you no longer going to be occupying?”

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He smiled. “Your drink is named after my uncle.”
“Your uncle is named Brandy?”
“They created the drink in honor of his nuptials.”
“So if an occupation is what you spend the most time doing and thinking about, does
that mean you’re giving up sex?” Through the sliding glass door Agamdeep was on one
knee, chattering at Mickey, a dark black blotch on her inner thigh.
“I have many interests, Tom.”
“Is she packing heat?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve decided to stop selling heat to various world powers in order to … pursue
your other interests.”
“The cinema.”
“You want to be in movies?” I stared into the living room, at the preening drunken fools
who shared my career.
He shook his head. I want to make movies.”
“Great. You’ve come to the right party. So … how’d you and the uh …”
“Agamdeep.”
“Agamdeep meet.” I wanted to have exactly nothing in common with Leo Shampoo, but
both our conversation partners were making our necks hurt, so I relocated onto the moon-
blue kitchen table.
“How is not my favorite interrogative. In fact, there’s only one I dislike more.”
“Why?”
Who and what and when and where are so elegantly simple.” His eyes were perusing Ronnie.
“Tell me,” said Percy, “is that Ronald Reagan?”

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“The Gipper himself.”
“What a suntan.”
“He enjoys his pool.”
Staring out toward my pool, he said, “I should probably make sure Agamdeep hasn’t run
off with Mickey Mouse.” Exiting, he chuckled to himself: “You think you know the woman
you love …”
I hopped off the table, slurped an oyster, and wandered into the living room, where I
hoped that human and animal alike would’ve been reduced to beasts by Demon Liquor, that
Dan Duryea and Bullwinkle would be arm-wrestling, that Daffy and Milt would be starting a
conga line with one of Schmear’s gingers, but instead of democratizing my guest list, the
booze had split it: the humans were sloshing gin, cackling, squeezing any ass within grabbing
distance, but the furry and feathered had drifted towards the candles and photos we’d tacked
up, the miniature shrines of the no-longer-famous, the very dead:
His voice deepened half an octave, his stutter submerging into a five-martini slur, Porky
was telling Jorge and Esteban about the time he and Igby had flown kites in Santa Monica.
Near of a photo of Screwy pounding his own head with a mallet, Bugs was weeping into
his Tequila Sunrise – he only drank drinks that were orange or clear – telling Bullwinkle that
he only hoped that Screwy’s life of self-inflicted pain had made his death more bearable.
And everywhere under the stills of Lady Dear, some actor was paused, the fur of his
scruff pushed upward by coat and starched shirt, drifting in memory while studying the
spaniel – the date gone wrong, the date gone right, the awkward jerky sex, the milkshake-
smooth stroke-and-moan. What did it matter now?
At three in the morning, no one had left except Spike, who I hadn’t seen arrive. Grace
told me he’d brought a bowl of chicken salad, waved to everyone, nearly broken Betty

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Boop’s back with a hug, and left twenty minutes later, needing to get up for seven a.m. mass
at St. Vibiana’s. I’d nested in one of Gracie’s egg-shaped spaceman chairs, and across from
me on the orange plaid sofa perforated by Sam’s spurs were Percy and Milt, who kept
squeezing his fists as though trying to milk the air for money. Milt’s suit was also orange
plaid, and against Gracie’s sofa, he was just a face, an ugly, motor-mouthed Cheshire cat
sputtering to Percy about my ambitions. Once a few months before after a lunch that
concluded with two too many martinis, I’d started gushing about the Virginia Woolf book
Headley had given me, and Milt scribbled it all down, nodding like a bobblehead while I told
him how I’d blubbered about The Waves, sunk with the certainty that I would never create
something so beautiful.
“He’s an artist, this one, my Tom, my boyo here, not just one of those furry basketballs
they got bouncing around over at Disney, got ideas” – he said, tapping his temple – “got
heart” – squeezing his man-breast through his suit.
“I’m not an artist,” I said. Ralph Vaughn Williams was an artist, Paul Klee was an artist,
Tennessee Williams was an artist. I was a cat who wanted to make movies that didn’t
involve objects being dropped on me by a rodent whose mental state had been documented
in Abnormal Psych textbooks. Cartoons were Bo Jangles work. I was a person, and I had
ideas. Some of them I thought might be interesting.
“Tom has ideas,” beamed Milt. “Some of them might be interesting.”
“False,” I said. My tongue felt cottony in my mouth.
“Pitch ‘im, pitch ‘im,” squeaked Milt in his Poughkeepsie squeal, still strangling the teats
of some poor unseen Holstein. “Fast ball, down the gullet!”
Percy’s eyes were now black, and the aperture of the pupils seemed to be widening,
blanketing not only iris, but encroaching into sclera, a la Mickey Mouse. Truth be told, I

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didn’t have a pitch, so much as a feeling, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. “There’s uh,
there’s a cat, and uh, there’s a mouse, and –”
“Owner goes missing,” said Milt, “left on a trip, didn’t come back, boom, gone, now they
have to go find ‘em – got my ear to the ground, I hear Disney’s making one like that called
The Incredible Journey – we could beat ‘em to the punch,” he concluded, left-hooking the air.
“Disney’s making a live action?” I said.
“What I hear.”
I tried to turn around to see the rest of the room, but that turned out to be impossible in
Gracie’s spaceman chair. “Who’re they using? Mickey? Donald? It’ll be a disaster. Good
luck, Walt.”
“No, not talking, guess they’re using normal animals.”
“Hey,” I said, winging a balled napkin at him, “who’s not normal?”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, his fingers squirming, his cheap rings glinting under Gracie’s floor
lamp, which was shaped like a giant version of the crooks playhouse managers once used to
drag Milt offstage. “I mean no offense to your fine race.”
“I’m not a race,” I said. “I’m a person who happens also to be an animal.”
His hands spread out an invisible marquee: “Tom and Jerry: The Impossible Voyage. We’ll
make millions. So, your owner disappears –”
“I don’t have an owner.”
“Do in the show.”
“Owner’s never there.”
“What about Mammy?”
“Mammy doesn’t count,” I said.
“We open to your owner leaving the house,” said Milt, sweeping his hand across the

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room.
“No owners,” I said. “No chases, no sprinting in mid-air before I fall, no more stepping
on the blade of a hoe and kertwanging my own face with the handle, no running through
walls, no Rube Goldbergs that end up with me in the hospital.” I raised a single finger.
“Nothing heavier than a kiss dropped on my head.”
Milt turned his weak chin toward Mr. Schmear, sitting on the other side of the room with
a redhead on each knee. “Metro’ll never go for that.”
“Then tell Metro I’m no longer their employee,” I said.
“Tom,” he said, his puddly eyes pinballing. “Let’s not get hasty.”
But I was a Hindenberg, puffed on gin. “I’ve won eight Oscars. Melt them into a block
and drop them on Joe Vogel’s head.”
“It’s a tough time, Tom. You know that. The studios need a sure thing. A talking
animal wandering around a movie without a plot –”
“What if you didn’t need the studio?” said Percy, the blackness of his eyes beginning to
tint green. “Completely private financing,” he added, staring across the coffee table at me.
“I’m listening,” I said.
On Percy’s plate was a crab salad sandwich he hadn’t touched in half an hour, whole but
for a small nibble, and after glancing up at Percy, Milt took the napkin I’d thrown at him,
unballed it, set the sandwich inside, wrapped it, and hid it in his jacket pocket, all before
Percy had uttered his first sentence: “Imagine Truffaut, Renoir, Godard: imagine something
real.” His voice was north country magic, the King’s English as Hamlet himself might have
uttered it, an alchemy of cold water and fresh wind and ancient treasure, a voice that
sketched a mural of luxury – the yachts of Copenhagen harbor, a whiff of Savile gabardine,
postprandial cognac and Cohibas in an Upper West Side parlor, the Oxford lawns at dusk.

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If any voice could summon existence from nothingness, it was his.
“You and Jerry could be factory workers, struggling to make a living.”
“Topical,” said Milt, his misshapen head bobbing along in the wake of Percy’s lilt.
“Shut up, Milt,” I said.
Percy’s monologue continued, telling me we would take New Wave and noir and
Neorealism and blend them all into one grand American art. Milt was so captivated he
stopped breathing and was starting to turn purple when Percy concluded: “And recently I
have purchased a property in Venice that would make the perfect set. Tom, you could act
and direct, and I would produce.”
“Yes,” Milt gasped, as though he’d just gotten off. Percy took a sip of his cream, leaving a
milk moustache only slighter paler than his skin.
“So when do we begin shooting?” I said.
“Come by the property sometime,” said Percy. “We’ll imagine scenes.”
“Oh my God, this is so amazing,” Milt wheezed. “Tom will work for free,” he said,
turning to Percy. “All he asks for is a three-point share of the profits.”
“Like hell I will,” I smiled. I was a paycheck man, a paycheck man who’d be Hamlet, a
paycheck man who’d star in a real live feature. Now at last my tombstone could honestly
read: ACTOR.
With trembling hand, Milt lifted his Star Tours coffee mug to toast, but oversized soles
were slapping toward us on the hardwood and Ronald McDonald was at my side, pouting,
hands on hips as wide as Mammy’s. “Who do I have to fuck around here to get a cigarette?”
he said. I pointed at Milt, Milt pointed at Percy, and Percy pointed at me.

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7.

“Can I get y’all anything? Apple juice? Sun lotion? Benzedrine?” drawled the black-
haired Texan who reminded me of a young Ava. She was nude but for a yellow bikini
wedged up between her thighs, and I had to force my head up from her brick-brown breasts
to her peepers, the same shade as the pool that sat between the white-washed mansion and
the guest house that was as big as my actual house. In the late morning sun, everything
glittered like newly minted coins.
“Benzedrine,” I said.
“You have beautiful collar bones,” said Willie.
“Oh, thank you,” she said.
“Like a dinosaur’s,” continued Willie. “One of those small, fast ones.”
“O-kay.”
“Miss, do you happen to have any eggs here?” asked Cuffy, shielding his eyes from the
sun.
She bit her lower lip. “Oh, I don’t know if Mr. Belladonna keeps any –”
“Salmon? Walnuts? Pork chops? Wellington?”
“I don’t really know. I can check the fridge.”
“No, don’t bother. I know my way around,” said Cuffy, hulking off toward the big
house.
“What about a cigarette?” asked Willie, pulling a ripped, coffee-browned pack of
cigarettes from his pocket, shaking it upside-down to prove its emptiness.
“Oh yessir,” she drawled. Her teeth were small and white and looked like they’d break if
they bit into anything harder than soup. “We have lots of those.”

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She scampered away into a collage of young beautiful humans pitter-pattering across the
hot cement, from shade to towel to pool. Taken together, they weren’t wearing enough
clothing to cover a pothole: the life Cuffy had left behind when he quit the bottle.
The house, guest house, and pool belonged to Hector Belladonna, who as a young
cameraman quit Hollywood when Frank Capra told him he had no eye Belladonna might
not have had an eye, but he had an idea.
The stag films we’d all grown up with and conveniently forgot to mention at confession
seemed almost genteel now: a fully clothed woman would fan herself and sigh, pantomiming
swelter, then take her time unbuttoning her blouse, letting down her hair, unzipping her
skirt, all the way down to her severe brassiere and parachute-sized panties. Then she’d
swoon onto a bed, and if you were lucky, perhaps rub at her stomach a little. The war
changed all that. Once you’ve seen a pair of farm girls eat each other out in a goat pen
outside Palermo, once you’ve had a Hong Kong whore shove a string of glass beads up your
ass, you can never go back. Linda May smiling in a bikini on the surf wasn’t going to cut it
anymore. GI Joe didn’t crawl up Iwo so he could come back home to the missionary
position, and having the missus spread her legs and take it was about as exciting as swabbing
the deck. That’s where Belladonna came in. Girls with perfect teeth and loose morals had
been flouncing out to Hollywood for years, and Belladonna realized that the most desperate
and naïve would star in any movie, no matter what kind, and on the other side of the screen
were a million horny vets. It was simple supply and demand. Trust me: when half the kids
in what they were calling the baby boom were conceived, their papas were remembering a
poolside scene of a girl screaming while getting fucked from behind, a scene directed by
Hector Belladonna and shot at the pool where I was currently dipping my toes, as Willie in
one grand maestro’s swoop was doffing his trilby, skimming it into the pool, and clapping it

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to his head with a quart of water that gushed over his face and shoulders.
“Salt water,” he said, smacking his wet lips. “Wasn’t expecting that.”
Nearby, a girl paddling her calves in the water started giggling, her breasts shaking with
each titter as sensitively as wind chimes. “You’re funny.” The word Johnnie had been
tattooed shakily on her shoulder. I’d never seen a girl with a tattoo before. “Why doncha
just take off your suit ‘n’ hop in?” I thought of Janey: D-student diction, slutty languor, and
gravity-resistant breasts were all you needed for free one-way ticket to a porn set in Van
Nuys, where you could laze all day under the California sun like jaguars at the zoo, and all
you had to do was fake enjoyment at the regular ravishings by the likes of the muscle jockey
squatting atop a towel nearby, crouched as thought ready to pounce.
Wiggling a pinkie in his ear, Willie smirked and said, “Well, compared with that fine
specimen there, I’d feel a little … unmanly.”
“Van’s the name,” the young man said, giving a thumbs-up and squinting as he lifted his
face toward us. It wasn’t exactly sure what his thumbs-up was approving.
“Delay,” said Willie, “and my associate, Thomas Grimalkin, Esquire.”
“You get hot with all that fur?” asked the girl.
“You seem to want to see us naked,” I said.
“I want to see everybody naked,” she said.
“I like your jacket,” Van said, pointing a manicured finger at me. I wasn’t sure if he was
joking; one of the many unintended consequences of marriage is that you wake up one day
with a wardrobe transplant, of which my red tartan blazer was among the least egregious
examples.
“Thanks,” I said.
“So you’re with The Tongue?” said the girl.

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“Pardon?” I said.
“Mr. Clean,” she said, a red fingernail filliping at the house where Cuffy’d gone in search
of protein.
Willie tramped past her to Van, dusted off the cement with his wet hat, and sat down
with a cough. “What kinda fitness regimen you ascribe to, fella? Dumbells? Pulleys?”
“They call him The Tongue?” I said, dropping Indian-style next to her, my back to the
pool.
“He’s a legend,” she said.
“I know The Nose, too,” I said, scanning the palm shade for Pin.
She cocked her head to the side you do when you see a whimpering puppy. “Mr. Pinny is
such a sweet old man.” Pin was thirty-seven.
Up close, her blonde beehive looked lacquered, which I supposed it was. I tapped the
top. “Can you feel that?”
“Nope,” she said. Distracted by her prize-winning chest, I hadn’t noticed her eyes until
then; they were large and bloodshot, the pupils dilated, just a green belt around a black hole.
“Eric Fleming once said to me, ‘The bigger the hair, the closer to God.’”
“You believe in God?” she asked.
“Uh, I don’t know. I suppose. It’d be nice to think that somebody has a plan for this
crazy world.”
“I used to go to church,” she said. “Church of Christ. But I didn’t feel anything.”
“Do you feel something now?”
She nodded. “Needed. I feel needed.”
I understood that. “So what’s your name?” I asked.
“Tiara. Picked it out myself.”

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“It’s a nice name.”
“So, why are ya here?” she asked. “The Tongue get nostalgic or something?”
We were there because Joe from Hawthorne had disappeared, and with him any direct
link to the Lady Dear 16mm, a film that featured live sex as well as live death, and the only
two people I knew who’d been filmed having sex were Cuffy and Pin, Belladonna boys both.
All I’d told Cuffy was that Willie had traced a lead back to the porn business, and I
wondered if he could get us on set.
“I’ve done a little acting,” I told Tiara. “I’m interested in expanding my … venues.”
“Oh,” Tiara said, her mouth contracting to a tiny zero. “Isn’t that illegal?”
“I thought you wanted to see everyone naked,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, running the red bullet of her fingernail down my throat.
“What is it like?” I said, actually curious. “Is it real, you know, when you … or is it
fake?”
“What’s the difference?” she asked.
Before I could reply, Willie was pushing himself to his feet, telling me, “Mr. Cat, Van
here can hold a hundred pound dumbbell in each hand and do twenty squats. In the sand.
Can you believe that?”
“All he ever talks about,” Tiara whispered. “Reps ‘n’ sets ‘n’ situps ‘n’ curls. Doesn’t
even notice when I take off my clothes anymore.”
“Just takes practice,” said Van, hopping to his feet and giving the thumbs-up. If he ever
quit the movie business, he’d have a bright career in infomercials. “Three days of exercise a
week, ten glasses of water a day, eight hours of sleep a night.”
“So, uh, what’s the – ahem – thrust of the story today?” Willie chuffed in his meat grinder
of a voice.

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“A love triangle,” said Tiara.
Van pointed at Tiara with one hand and mimed a workmanlike handjob with the other.
“Shut up, Vanny. “It’s a very beautiful story. And a very sad story. Mr. Pinny plays an
aging bachelor …”
But then I spotted the aging bachelor himself, standing in the doorway of the back house,
black hair fanned out crazily, his face the color of snot, looking like the last man in the world
waking up to the blackened wreckage of civilization, trying to remember if he was the one
who’d pushed the red button. Over-stretched skin hung in ripples and folds about his nose,
and there was a twitchy hollowness about his lower face that said either cocaine or recent
tooth extraction.
“Dear God, is that …” said Willie, blocking the sun with his trilby the better to see.
“Pinocchio,” I nodded. “I suppose I’d change my name too if I was born Zigfried Butz.”
“All he ever wanted was to become a real boy.”
Pin lit a cigarette and winced against the beauty of the day, as captivating as he had been
as a twelve-year-old playing a puppet, yearning reduced by the heat of disappointment down
to bleak paste.
“Mr. Pinny,” Tiara sighed, her hand cupping around her breast as though testing out a
ball at the bowling alley. “Mr. Pinny. Lie.” Down in the shallow end, pretty heads were
rolling back on skinny necks, and on a hammock slung between two palms, a good-time girl
was burrowing her fingers under the waistband of her bikini, red polka dots on white, like
Minnie’s dresses. Pin was weeping, his face unmoved.
“What in the name Ebenezer …” said Willie, removing his coat as Tiara motioned Van
over.
“It’s L.A.,” I said, shrugging. “Everything is an aphrodisiac.”

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From behind I heard a bedspring of a voice say, “Allegro! Allegro!”
I turned to see a man limping toward us in a sleek black suit, hands raised above cufflinks
in an act of benediction. Van’s tight trunks were tightening further under Tiara’s kneading
hand, but he managed to wheeze, “Mr. Belladonna’s Italian. He’s asking us to speed along
our arousal.” Belladonna was Flatbush all the way around, as Italian as matzo. He sounded
like Bugs doing a Mussolini impression.
“He wants us wet now,” huffed Tiara, Willie nodded his topiary of hair away from the
pool, but unsticking my eyes from Tiara was like picking gum of the sidewalk. Even as I
clipped over to him, I felt the thinnest film of my eyes stuck to her body.
“So, Mr. Cat, do you think these could be the same people who killed Ms. Dear?”
“They were all animals,” I said. “Except the one with the dark glasses and the beard.
And he didn’t look like type who’d hang out around a pool in the valley. Besides,” I added,
staring across the pool at Pin, who was having a coughing fit in the shadow of the
backhouse, “Pin’s sad, but he’s not evil. He always sends a Christmas card.”
When Belladonna started waving his hands like a poor man’s Leonard Bernstein, a gaggle
of men swarmed out from nowhere with Super-8s stuck to their faces, circling each sexual
crèche, here pattering near for a close-up of a bronzy breast, there lifting a camera over the
shoulder of a stud getting a blow job. It wasn’t until you watched it that you realized what a
messy, uncomfortable business sex was. And yet, still: my heart rate was in the triple digits,
my Johnson and Johnson was rubbing its grizzled face agains the back of my fly, and I could
feel every vein and artery in my neck pumping with the hydraulic pressure of lust.
“Mr. Belladonna admires,” Van gasped, “the realistic style of Antonioni and Truffaut.”
Percy loved Antonioni – he’d be a sucker for going handheld for our movie.
“How you doing there, champ?” smiled Willie. Under Tiara’s expert hand, Van’s trunks

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looked like a balloon about to pop. With eyes closed, Tiara kept mouthing: Lie lie lie lie lie.
“Slow down, Tiara,” he whined. “I’m almost …” He pushed her hand away, yanking her
away from whatever crimson fantasia she’d been picturing behind her metallic green eyelids.
She squinted under the high sun and sighed.
I’d never seen so many people so turned on before, and my sixth sense was awash in
anchovy and stewed fig, the warm salty surf of Cozumel.
To our left Belladonna began narrating through a megaphone. “Tiara is sleeping in the
sun when pool boy Vincenzo spots her.” She sashayed to the longue, Van tottering behind
like a stack of dice.
“A question, Mr. Cat,” said Willie.
“Shoot,” I said, as Pin disrobed to a pair of baggy BVDs by the bathhouse.
Willie rolled his trousers to the knee and sat down poolside, letting his calves sink into
the water, his eyes bouncing to each gymnastic coupling as if playing Whac-A-Mole. “Even
though these hominids lack fur, tails, whiskers, you still find them alluring?”
“A pet schnauzer will hump the bedpost while his owners fuck.”
All the Super-8s were directed at Tiara, prone on a deck chair, feigning sleep like an
amateur, with exaggerated inhalations and feet as rigid as a hard-on.
“Is it hormonal?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I said, easing onto the towel Tiara had left behind, which
still bore the double parentheses of her ass imprint.
“So if you were blindfolded, it would still turn you on?”
I closed my eyes and sniffed, letting my whiskers waggle like anemone in the heat. To my
cat sense, sex was like meat, over-salted and rare, but the smells of coconut oil and apples
ripening further up the Valley were almost as strong.

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“Sex is sex is sex,” I said.
“Do people have their own smells? Their own hormone smells?”
“Gracie is a piña colada in a coconut shell, light on the pineapple, heavy on the rum.
Spike … bricks and bacon. Old Man White is iodine, honing rod.”
Makeup girls had cornered Pin and looked as though they were preparing him for
mummification.
“What about Mr. Mouse?”
I had gotten so used to Jerry, I didn’t even know. I wasn’t sure his smell was any
different from mine, and I didn’t know what mine was. I shut my eyes and remembered the
audition where we met, a back lot soundstage a week after the invasion of Poland. I’d never
seen a creature with such control over his body; it seemed like he could do anything short of
push-ups on his whiskers. He could pirouette on point, run seven steps up a wall, catch
houseflies in mid-flight, balance on a rolling bowling ball without falling, spit a mouthful of
pins at a corkboard so accurately the casting director couldn’t miss the writing on the wall:
MGM SUCKS MONKEY BALLS. I had a fever of 103 at my own audition, and after
huffing through backflips, doinking Scott Joplin on an old standup, and lurching like a
zombie after Jerry, Mr. Schmear asked if there was anything else I wanted to show them. I
was sure I’d blown it, and since my talent hadn’t been enough, I pushed all my chips onto
Daring, turned on all the burners in the stove they’d set up in the mock kitchen, picked up a
broom, hopped onto the range, and began fox-trotting the bristly in a cross pattern. The
heat was licking up my paws like I sometime licked my own when no one was looking, and I
was about to hop down to prevent catching fire when Jerry leapt up toward me, so dropped
the broom, caught him and kept dancing. “I like you,” he whispered. “You’re crazy. So am
I. I’ll probably kill you, but it won’t be boring.” At that moment, I whiffed at his childlike

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face.
“The ocean,” I told Willie.
“Hey. Cat, hobo,” said Belladonna, apparently noticing us for the first time. “Exeunt.”
Willie doffed his hat in apology, I flipped him off, and we retreated to the shade of a
nearby lemon tree.
“He called you a hobo,” I said.
Willie nodded, looked at his leaking shoes and mustard-stained trousers, stroked his
cactusy stubble, licked his palm and smelled it. He shrugged. “Accurate.”
Van had approached Tiara’s deck chair, gripping the skimmer. From my distance, the
Johnnie tattoo was just a blue-green blotch on her shoulder. I wondered where he was, and
what he thought of all this.
“Do non-talking animals understand what you are?” Willie asked, picking a lemon,
zesting the rind with a Swiss Army knife.
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“I was a biology major at UCLA.”
“I don’t know if I understand what I am.” My eyes drifted left, to Pin. The makeup
people were wiping his tears, laying foundation into his cheeks, arranging his eyebrows,
attacking his hair with combs and Brilliantine. At a further remove, a handful of girls stared
at him, pleasuring themselves, using him as kindling for their fantasies.
“What is it with them?” asked Willie.
“There are plenty of guys out there with Louisville Slugger dicks. There’s only person I
know whose nose grows eighteen inches when he lies.”
“Wait,” said Willie, pushing his trilby to the back of his head, “That’s real?”
“Best party trick I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Once after a good bout of fibs, Tweety landed

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on his nose and did a little soft shoe up and down the thing.”
“Another biology question.”
“I’m going to start charging you a nickel per.”
“Were you born bipedal?”
“Sort of. It’s like learning to walk on stilts. It takes practice for it to become natural.
Sometimes I just want to scamper on all fours.”
In general, I hated giving interviews. It was all What’s Jerry like off-camera? To which I
wanted to say, Have you ever heard of the Rape of Nanking? But instead told them he was a barrel
of fun, made up stories of an all-mouse bowling league in Downey – beer served in shot
glasses, an extensive selection of cheeses, balls the size of grapefruit. Sometimes they asked
how I faked pain so well, and I shrugged it off, since I couldn’t tell them the truth: The pain
was never fake.
But Willie was different. He wasn’t about to blab to ten thousand tweedy housewives.
He was also unaware of the convention that you don’t inquire of a talking animal what it’s
like to be a talking animal: in the same way you didn’t ask Sidney Poitier if dark skin was an
asset when playing hide-and-go-seek or if steel wool hair was sometimes scratchy, you
weren’t supposed to ask Thomas Grimalkin what it was like to have claws (useful), whether
cream was his favorite drink (close second to rye), whether he had nine lives (he wishes), if
he really was curious (terminally). But while I doubted Mr. Poitier wanted someone from
Women’s Day asking whether black skin was hotter in the sun than white skin, I wanted them
to ask me how it felt to have fur and wear clothing, so that I could tell them it was
sweltering. The Venn diagram for Mr. Poitier – who was a gentleman and also one of the
most beautiful people I’d ever seen – was a small “black person” circle inside the larger
“person” circle. The Venn diagram for me was a cat eye intersection of “person” and

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“animal.” I didn’t know if that made me a sliver or an infinity.
“Madame, can I get you anything?” This from Van, dropping his voice an octave. His
back was shaped like a funnel.
“Have you ever had sex with a human?” asked Willie. In the eyes of the federal
government, I was a person, a full citizen, a taxable voter. In the eyes of the California
Decency Commission and California Penal Code Statute 286.6, I was an animal, subject to
up to ten years in prison for any “lewd act with a human, including but not limited to
intercourse.”
“No.”
Tiara yawned, smiled at Van, clicked a cherry fingernail against a bottle of coconut oil.
“Rub me down.” He started rubbing what seemed like quarts of oil into Tiara’s chest.
“God, she has a magnificent chest,” Willie said. “And that stud is such a clod.”
“Maybe that’s the point of porn,” I said. “Not only are you turned on, but the man is
such a dunce you think he doesn’t deserve her.”
“But you do,” Willie said, and when I nodded, Willie asked, “Do you think Van is
pretending?”
“Some stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Actors are morons.”
“Present company excepted.”
I shrugged. “I don’t claim to be smart. Just hardworking.”
Tiara was moaning, peeling off her bikini. I couldn’t tell if she was faking it. “Down
here,” she kept saying, “down here, down here.” She was rubbing at her lower stomach.
Nervously, Van poured so much oil on her that it wouldn’t have surprised me if in nine
months, Tiara gave birth to a sweet little baby coconut.
“Our noseman is making a move,” Willie grinned. Pin had traded his BVDs for a

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Speedo, and he was waltzing alone under the sun, made even more ridiculous by Chubby
Checker boinging in suddenly from the main house as Cuffy opened the side door, biting
into a turkey leg. He made for our shade, eying with detachment the three-ring porno circus.
“You and Mr. Puppet work together?” Willie asked him.
Cuffy nodded. “Depends on what you mean by ‘together.’”
Belladonna was still perched atop the diving board like a horny chickadee, silently waving
the cameramen closer to the action, including a close-up of Van peeling off his trunks.
Eye candy was writhing everywhere, but all eyes were on the prematurely aging bachelor,
the Victorian tragedian. I suppose that’s what could’ve made him a great actor. He’d always
worn his heart on his sleeve, which meant anybody who wanted could make him bleed to
death. Like Marilyn, his mind was built of glass, but hers was stained all the colors of a
priest’s vestments on Holy Days, too beautiful to break; Pin’s was soot-rouged and opaque, a
window begging for a brick.
Van was straddling Tiara, angling his penis down toward her mouth as if he was
interviewing her.
“Mr. Moustache, is it fair to say that the hunk isn’t quite so … cucumbery as you might
think?” I didn’t have the greatest distance vision, but it did seem more like a cornichon than
a gourd.
Cuff finished chewing a mouthful of turkey and wiped delicately at his lips. “Kid’s a
lavender. Hector doesn’t pick ‘em because they’re big – he picks ‘em because they’ll suck his
cock.”
Curious, I ratcheted my head back the better to see Cuffy’s face.
“No,” he said, in response to the question I didn’t ask. His expression was professorial,
evaluating Tiara as she started slurping Van, her back sailor-striped from the deck chair’s

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bands. Gracie always told me she loved going down on me, but she certainly wasn’t as
enthusiastic as Tiara. I hoped she wasn’t lying.
Pin picked a bottle of sherry and a pair of snifters from a table, pretending he didn’t
notice that fifty feet away Tiara was swanning her upper body over Van’s crotch, trying to
hook her mouth over the end of his upward-pointing hard-on, which kept popping out.
“Amateurs,” said Cuffy, tossing the turkey bone over his shoulder.
Still waltzing, Pin called, “Mary, Mary my dear, would you care for some oloroso?”
Finally allowing himself to see her, his whimsical trance shattered like the flutes he dropped
to the pool deck. Combs of tears began washing down his face, trickling off the folds of his
nose skin.
Looking relieved more than guilty, Tiara extricated herself from Van’s cock and peeked
around his hip. “Oh, Mr. Kenilworth, Mr. Kenilworth, the pool boy, he – he forced himself
on me!”
“No, um, no,” said Van, almost tripping as he stepped over the chaise and her naked
body in a wide Sumo turn, “that’s not right. She wanted it.”
“You are my fountain of youth, my dulcet sweet,” Pin moaned, approaching with hands
clasped. “How could you have let this gigolo …”
“I was waiting for you, Mr. Kenilworth. He was just warming me up,” she concluded,
pushing Van out of the way.
Cuffy pointed at Pin. “You do not want to miss this.”
“The capital of France is Hoboken,” Pin was telling the clouds that weren’t there. “Bing
Crosby was the first President of the United States.” He was working his upper lip into his
nose, as though imitating a bunny.
“Do you think it hurts?” asked Willie, feeling at his own finchy beak.

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“Every physiologist from here to London was always banging on his door,” I said. “Pin
always declined.”
“My net worth is increasing,” shouted the little wrinkle-nosed man.
“Used to be the slightest error would make it spring out,” said Cuffy. “Calling a red rose
pink.”
“I am tall! I am strong!” Pin was declaiming. Everyone was still watching him, but none
of them were touching themselves.
“Couragio,” shouted Belladonna. “You are a stallion. A nose stallion. Rub it into her.
That will help.”
“My best days are ahead!” said Pin as Tiara rolled back onto the deck chair, spreading her
legs.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “with me.” He bent over her, the flaps of his proboscis waggling
over her oily hairless groin.
He emerged from between her legs, his now-shiny nose still the size of a grape. “I am
loved,” he shouted. “People love me.” Something in his middle face seemed to grow.
I squinted. “Did that work?”
As though in answer, Belladonna roared, hurling the megaphone into the pool. He
peered around at his glum studs sprawled deflated in the yard. Impotence was contagious.
“I can still do it, maestro,” said Pin, raising his hands up at Belladonna.
“Not today, Pokey. We need someone now.” He pointed across the pool at us.
“Is that The Tongue?” said Belladonna hobbling off the board. “The Tongue, is that
you?”
“Looks like they’re calling you back up to the bigs,” said Willie.
“Thought porn was sort of the problem, way back for you,” I said.

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“Just don’t let me near any needles later,” he said, pulling his wife-beater over his head.
His pecs were as big and square as pastry boxes.
“You’re The Tongue?” said Tiara. “I’ve always dreamed of working with you.”
“The prodigolo has returned,” said Belladonna. The cameramen scanned their Super-8s
toward Cuffy striding toward the damsel in distress.
I was expecting Cuffy to kneel at the end Tiara’s chaise, but without a word he scooped
her off the chair with one arm and swung her up so her legs were wishboned around his
neck. Then his tongue emerged from his mouth, the size of a spade, and snaked inside her.
Willie’s eyes bugged, Tiara made the sort of noise I didn’t think it was possible to fake, Van
squatted awed in the shade, and at his side Pin cried into his hands, his humiliation far too
real.

“I didn’t think animals could feel pain,” said Pin, sniffing, backhanding at a fly on a velvet
chair in Belladonna’s library.
After introductions, Belladonna had dropped us off in the study to oversee a pillow-fight
scene in one of the mansion’s many living rooms. Most of the library’s two-story
bookshelves were occupied by urns and statues of naked women, Greeky and dirty.
Somehow, a statue of a woman fingering herself was more arresting than a live woman
fingering herself. Willie was examining a pornographic Byzatine mosaic, Cuffy was still
smiling from his pinch-hitting, lazing on a chaise leafing through somebody named Nin, and
I was trying to explain to Pin why he should care about the recent slayings. “You’re an
animal,” I told him.
“Am not. I’m a boy. A real boy. Man. Real man.”
“Mr. Goatman is getting the job done,” said Willie, staring at the shiny tiles. Satyrs had it

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easy – any fool could tell their animal part from their human part.
“You’re different. I’m different,” I said to Pin. “You got a nose that can grow, I got
fur.”
“You’re a cat. There isn’t a name for me.”
“Quite the lies you were telling out there, Mr. Puppet,” said Willie, turning from the porn
to rifle the cabinets under the bookcases.
“I’m a real boy!”
“And you don’t send a boy to do a man’s job,” said Willie, smiling at Cuffy.
It had been a tutorial. Cuffy’s tongue had worked into Tiara until the muscles of her
lower stomach started to spasm. Her thighs on his shoulder had turned to aspic, she started
blabbering nonsense and then came with the sort of wail I associated with professional
mourners, at which Cuffy spun her down to the deck chair, unbuttoned his Levi’s, pulled
himself out, and rammed into her from behind while whispering God only knew what into
her ear, his blonde handlebar stroking her cheeks as his hands stroked her inner thighs. She
hadn’t come all the way down from the first one when the second one started, Cuffy coaxing
her with his words and hands while fucking her as violently as any lion you’d see on safari.
When they were both done, Cuffy wrapped her in a beach blanket and reclined the chair all
the way. When everyone else had scampered inside for the pillow fight, she was still huddled
there, shaking in the heat.
“You stoled it from me, out there,” said Pin, pommel-horsing on the arm of the velvet
chair, waving Cuffy away. “I was almost there. I could tell.”
“How long’s it been since you could get it up?”
“I can get it up,” he said, turning from Cuffy to me. “It just don’t work all the time. Gets
tingly, but nothing happens.” He took whatever Willie was pouring.

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The double doors swung open, and Belladonna limped in – childhood polio, I guessed –
against a backdrop of twenty girls in brightly colored underwear pluffing each other with
pillows and cackling. Cuffy’d explained that in addition to the hardcore shows, Belladonna
was developing a line of cuddlier sex films for those whose consciences didn’t allow them to
watch the real mattress mambo. “The prodigolo has returned,” he said.
“Hi maestro,” said Pin, standing with a shit-eating grin and offering his tumbler up.
“Grappa, maestro?”
Belladonna pushed his hand away. “Don’t talk to me.”
Grimacing through bad teeth, Pinocchio mumbled something about a lingering cold as
Belladonna took Cuff’s melon of a head in his hands and kissed him on each cheek. Up
close, Belladonna smelled of ether, and his Dino tan was marred with a recessed Braille of
acne scars. “How’s about this guy?” he said, his Flatbush bleeding through Rome. “You see
how Tiara arrived? You see that arrival? Two arrivals.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Smut Man, but in my limited experience with stag films, the … arrival of
the woman doesn’t really seem to be priority numero uno.”
“What’s the largest untapped market for adult film?” Belladonna replied.
“Catholics,” said Willie, pouring himself another grappa. “The maritally satisfied. The
happy.”
“Who is this guy?” said Belladonna, shaking his head.
“Talking animals,” I volunteered as an answer.
“Hmmm, that’s interesting. But wrong. The correct answer: ladies. They want more
than just jackhammering.”
“Chicks like a good story,” said Willie.
“Ladies like seeing other ladies arrive.”

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The double doors reopened, and Van came padding in, smudges of lipstick in two shades
on his flat golden belly. “Hi Mr. Belladonna!” I wondered what Van considered a drought.
Four days? Five days? It was hard not to hate beautiful people who got paid to have sex.
“Vincenzo!”
“Mr. Belladonna,” I said, “what about people who like to see furry people arrive, then die.
We have reason to believe the killers are making snuff, and considering your … line of work,
we were wondering if you knew anyone who made pictures that included humans and
talking animals.”
“That’s illegal. And so is snuff.”
Willie lit a cigarette – the girl from Texas had finally delivered them after the scene was
over, although she’d forgotten my Benzedrine. “Put it out,” said Belladonna from the desk.
Willie lit another and started smoking both at the same time. “All of us down at the
station would really appreciate any cooperation you could give.”
“Mr. Belladonna, he said ‘station,’” Van stage-whispered. “He’s a detective.”
“That is possible,” said Belladonna, finishing his grappa and directing Van to the bottle.
“I’m friends with many detectives, many of their bosses. Now put out those cigarettes.”
I felt my claws emerge involuntarily from my paws, a darker sort of erection. Belladonna
wouldn’t care if they murdered every talking animal in the city.
“Hey, kid, how do you like it?” I said. Belladonna handed his tumbler to Van, who filled
it with a smile. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pin shuffling backward out of the room,
snot leaking from his Shar Pei nose.
“Oh, grappa’s tasty. I like all the Italian drinks.”
“No, no,” I said quietly, picturing Lady Dear. “When your boss fucks you in the ass, you
do like those long slow strokes?” I asked, undulating my hips against an ottoman. “Or do

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you prefer the quick hard ones. Maybe a reach-around …”
I heard a thump and a plish, then looked over to see Belladonna’s tumbler rolling around
a wet patch of Persian.
“What!” shrieked the little man. He looked at me for the first time since entering the
room. From the desk, I picked up a framed photo of Van and Belladonna in Speedos, Van’s
arm over the pornographer’s shoulder, Belladonna’s wrinkled hand on the young man’s
brick-hard stomach.
Smiling, I turned the photo at him so that the glass caught the light. “My wife, it really
depends on her mood. Sometimes she just wants to cuddle, and sometimes, at the end of
the night, the sheets are in tatters,” I said, Frisbee-ing the photo across the room to Willie
then flexing my claws at Belladonna as though showing off rings. “I try to be a
conscientious lover.” Without looking away from the brown pebbles of Belladonna’s eyes, I
pointed over his shoulder at the petrified man-boy. “I’m sure you are too, when you’re
cock-deep in his shithole.”
Belladonna took a swing, but he must not have understood that my usual sparring
partners were a super heavyweight bulldog and a mouse who could fly: I ducked, and it
would’ve been easy enough to use his momentum to grab his arm, pull it behind his back,
and make him listen, but I wanted him to feel me, so instead in a motion that was half come-
hither gesture and half uppercut, I slashed his neck from skinny knot to chin. Across the
room, Willie was smiling out smoke.
As Belladonna yowled, grabbing at his bleeding neck, I continued: “Sir, we would be so
very much obliged if you’d tell us what you know about human-animal pornography.
Eternally grateful.”
Van shook a finger at me as Belladonna cursed, stumbling back into his velvet chair,

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sounding as though he were trying to cough up a furball.
“You’d better get, get out, mister.”
“Or what?” I said. “You’ll fight me? I’ll turn your face to hash. You’ll call the cops?” I
pointed at Willie, who raised his chin at the kid and grabbed his crotch.
“Fuck you,” Belladonna wheezed, doubled over in his chair. “I’m in deep there.”
Willie rolled out his lower lip and held up the framed photo so we could all see it. “Deep
like you’re deep in this kid?”
“This is a flesh wound,” Belladonna said, holding a wad of tissues against his neck,
leaning against his desk to keep the weight off his bum leg. “You can’t really hurt me.”
“We’ll blow the photo up and put it on every billboard from Burbank to Orange
County,” I said. “With your names on it. Every Susie and Bill will ask their moms” – I
made my voice squeaky-high and sing-songy: “‘Why is that ugly old man putting his hand so
close to that boy’s privates?’”
“I’m not ugly,” he said, blood starting to trickle down his wrists, staining his white
French cuffs an unbleachable vermilion.
“I work for Noggles Schmear. Metro executives are very concerned about the deaths of
their employees.” The first half of that was true.
“There’s a huge slush fund,” Willie said. “Mr. Cat here has control of the funds.” None
of that was true. He lifted the photo high. “Picture this high above Sunset Boulevard,
twenty feet by forty.”
I shrugged, trying not to smile.
“Tom,” said Cuffy, his blue eyes hovering in the deep pockets of his skull, “it won’t do
any good.”
“It ain’t here,” wheezed Belladonna. “The animal stuff, they don’t do it here. I’ve heard

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about a ranch up in the mountains, Chinamen in South Beach –”
A revolver crack broke through the white noise of titters and pillow pluffs from the rest
of the house. Still holding the photo, Willie sprinted out, reaching into his coat for his gun.
I jogged behind, through the bronzed hive of shrieking girls, through air that smelled like oil
and burned skin and looked like the inside of a snow globe. Willie raced down hallways with
sconces and gilded wallpaper, stopping in front of a small shut door. I caught up just as he
opened it. It was a fancy bathroom, and Pin was sprawled against the claw-foot tub. The
part of his face where his nose had been was a red hole flecked with bone. The gun was
smoking on the mint-green tile of the floor, and gray-pink brain was sliding down the mint-
green tile of the wall. On the mirror, in lipstick, with the second word underlined, were
written I AM A REAL.

At Walt Disney’s insistence, Zykov cancelled Hamlet rehearsals for the rest of the week so
everyone could attend Pinocchio’s wake and funeral, which was a relief, since I was half an
act behind in memorization, and the afternoon of the wake, I was trying to remember how
exactly man was supposedly like a god as I shined my cap-toes, as Gracie tried to find an
appropriately conservative dress in her closet. When the phone rang on Gracie’s lingerie
chest, her tail pointed at me then jerked toward the phone.
“I got polish all over these gloves,” I said, holding up my paws in their rubber gloves, the
black-on-yellow like poor burned Tweet, only now ten weeks after the Oscars finally out of
the hospital.
She huffed. “Fine,” she said, tramping over in her filmy underthings and, voice
transformed into perky perfect housewife, said, “Hello, Grimalkin residence. Grace
speaking … yes, he is home … no, he doesn’t golf … yes, it is an awfully nice day for it …

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may I ask who’s calling …” Her quizzical face expanded into shock. “Oh, of course, of
course, Mr. Disney.” I pulled off one glove inside out, careful not to stain the fur of my
forearm as Gracie mouthed The Big D.
“Hello, Mr. Disney?”
“Hello, Mr. Grimalkin. I assume you’ve heard of Pinocchio’s … death?”
“Uh, yes, yes sir,” I said. I hadn’t told anybody I was fifty feet away when he pulled the
trigger.
“Well, I’m the executor of his will.” I heard a little sniffling on the other end.
“Oh, I see. Of course. Were you … close?”
At that, Walt Disney broke down. “Not as close as we should have been,” he finally
squeaked out, and I heard a bit of onscreen Mickey in his voice – I suppose after spending
enough time together, two voices start resonating on the same frequency. “I was not as
good a mentor as I should have been to that young fella.”
Since he didn’t know I’d been at the scene – unless Willie had blabbed – I had no idea
what he wanted to talk about. “Well, he did make you the executor of his will.”
“Yes, he would come over every Thanksgiving for dinner. Lilly stuffs a fine turkey.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “That’s nice of you.” Gracie stared at me. I shrugged a who-the-hell-
knows shrug.
“You were a friend of his, of …” After some sniffling “Pinocchio?”
The last I remembered seeing him before the trip to the porn set was an Inauguration
Party Shirley MacLaine threw for Kennedy. He was drunk and tired and looked like hell, so
I’d just assumed he was a Nixon man. I felt bad, so I went over and told him a joke that
began A moose, a monk, and a Jew walk into a bar. He’d laughed at the punchline.
“I suppose I was,” I said. Gracie held up a dress for my approval. It was plaid in sky-

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and-bubblegum. I shook my head.
“Pinocchio’s will requests that you be one of the pall-bearers.”
“Oh,” I said. “Of course. It’s – it’s an honor.”
“Thank you,” he said. “If you could arrive at First Presbyterian half an hour early
tomorrow …”
“Of course,” I said.
As I hung up the phone, I said, “I’m carrying the casket.”
“Won’t you be too short?”
I rolled my eyes, but she turned out to be right: the next morning, I was standing in a
little huddle in the back of First Presbyterian of Hollywood with Mr. Disney, Mickey, Walter
Mathau, Spike, and a smiley bald Filipino named August. Walter Mathau was much taller
than I expected.
“Yes,” said Disney, clasping and unclasping his hands as though making hamburger
patties. “Height differences.” His eyes were red, his wrinkles deep. “Hm.”
Only August – 5’2 tops – found it funny. “Ha!” he said, pointing down at Mickey then
up at Disney. “You shorter than you.”
I could smell a racist comment coming from Mickey, so I asked August how he knew
Pinocchio. “Choir,” he said. “Bible study. I am baritone, Mr. Pinny was tenor. Very high.”
“Wait,” I said. “Pin was in a bible study?”
“What is a bible study?” asked Mick, who was standing next to his higher power, Disney,
who was shaking his head, excusing himself to find the funeral director, and, if possible, a
bier-on-wheels.
“Bible study is read verses, talk about Jesus,” he said.
Mick looked legitimately confused. “What is there to talk about?”

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“Bible can be … confusing. We talk about what Jesus say, what Paul say, make sense in
our head of it all,” he said, tapping his dome, the color of a Nilla Wafer. He put his hand
over his lapel. “Already it make sense in heart.”
“That is such a good way to put it,” said Spike.
“And Pin went to this, this bible study, every week?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Much belief,” he said, and then, for the first time since I’d met him, I could no
longer see his teeth. “And also much sadness.”
Pin must’ve been quite the Presbyterian: over the course of the next half hour, the pews
sardined with hundreds of people who looked like they’d never set foot on a movie set,
followed by dozens of animals in black, including Grace, having hitched a ride with Minnie
after I’d convinced her a lavender dress would not be appropriate. Even Minnie seemed to
be wearing black, although closer inspection revealed charcoal polka dots against a field of
bloody thunder.
“Hi Minnie,” I said, striding toward them down the side aisle.
“Hello, Tom,” she said, making a sandwich of my hands with hers. “I didn’t know you
were so close to Pinocchio.”
“Neither did I,” I said.
“It’s so grand,” said Gracie, head turning under her pillbox hat. “Unitarian churches
aren’t like this.” The church was grand, built from blocks of stone too heavy even for Spike
to lift, with a vaulted organ big enough to raise the dead.
Gracie took a deep breath. “It smells like ten thousand carnations. I think Pin would’ve
liked that. Ohhhh …” she sighed, taking my hand. “Do you think we should’ve invited him
to the Memorial Day party?”
“I don’t think the answer for Pin was another place to drink too much.”

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Minnie shook her head. “I can’t believe he was involved in …” she glanced around at
the filling pews. “Pornography,” she whispered.
“What?” asked Gracie.
“He shot himself in a porn set in Van Nuys,” I said.
“Oh,” Gracie said, covering her mouth with both paws. “That’s terrible.”
“I didn’t know he shot himself,” said Minnie. “Mr. Disney said the police report hadn’t
been released.”
“I just assumed …” I said.
“So tawdry,” said Minnie.
“Once you’re a star, it’s hard to give it up,” said Gracie. “Everybody needs to be
needed.”
Just then, the needy filed in – Van and Belladonna, followed by a dozen women wearing
what could only be called obscene funeralwear. Tiara, the Texan girl, all of them were there,
clicking in on stilettos, realizing collectively that they’d made a serious sartorial error:
necklines that revealed enough skin to eat dinner on, hemlines so high I didn’t know how
they’d be able to sit without breaking some indecency ordinance. By the law of the transitive
property, everyone was soon staring at them, conversations deflating to near-silence. More
than a few people covered their mouths. One woman actually whispered, “Oh my God.”
Goofy appeared to be checking his horoscope to see if Capricorns were supposed to meet
their one well-endowed true that day. Stricken, clutching her clutch with both hands, Tiara
scanned the room for a friendly face, and when she saw mine, she smiled then bit her lip
then gave a little finger-wave from the hip. It was hard to know how to greet someone not a
week earlier I’d seen come so hard it looked like she was having a seizure. Lifting my chin at
her, I gave my practiced red carpet smile.

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“Do you know her?” asked Gracie.
“Course not,” I said. “She’s probably just a fan. Looks young enough she probably grew
up watching all of us.”
“Where’s Jiminy Cricket when you need him?” Minnie asked. Jiminy had passed on a
number of years before at forty-five, which I was told is a ripe old age for a cricket.
“I always thought my life would’ve turned out so much different if I’d had a Jiminy
Cricket.”
My eyes returned to my wife, adjusting her pillbox. “What do you mean?”
“It’s just so much easier to do the right thing when you’ve got someone standing there
telling you to do the right thing.”
I was still puzzling that over when the cantor approached the lectern. A minute later, the
minister, a beagle, was striding down the aisle toward the altar, and a few minutes after that,
he began preaching on Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities,” he declared from the pulpit. “All is
vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” He recited
more verses, about how generations come and go and are forgotten.
“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth
sorrow.” What a downer. I glanced at Gracie, frowning next to me, who didn’t know how
Lady Dear had died, didn’t know I’d fooled around with a teenaged human not three weeks
before, didn’t know I had actually gotten hard since the Parmesan wedge incident, just not
with her – and I wondered if she wasn’t happier that way.
After concluding the recitation, the beagle said that Pinocchio was a weary soul, like the
Preacher of Ecclesiastes, and I thought of Hamlet sitting alone in his draughty castle, all of
his smiles false, his bread turning to sand in his mouth. The only people in the play who
were happy were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and perhaps the happiest people I knew

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were Jorge and Esteban, their thoughts never occupied with anything more complicated than
shellfish. Sometimes I wondered if it would be easier to be a regular old cat, curled up in a
windowsill on a June afternoon, a bowl of cream warming in the kitchen, an old maid always
waiting to stroke me under the chin.
“It’s easy to be weary in Hollywood,” the beagle went on, “It is a town, a business, that
grinds you down, where those in power treat you as things, not people, where you are
abandoned when you are no longer profitable.” My eyebrows felt like they were rising off
my head, floating up to the flying buttresses, and without moving my face, I tried to gauge
the reactions. The place was silent, and what I would’ve given to slip inside Walt Disney’s
mind at that moment.
“Pinocchio was not the only actor to die recently. Four animals actors have been
murdered in the past six months, brutally murdered. I’ve known some of them, and they
started dying long before the rope or the knife or the flame got to them.”
I whispered in Gracie’s ear. “Wasn’t the preacher –”
“He was in Lady and the Tramp,” she whispered back. Quite the career change.
The beagle minister shifted gears and started talking about Pin, the beautiful tenor voice
he lent to the choir, the taffies he kept in his pocket for the children of the congregation,
his faithful attendance at Bible study, where he asked probing questions about God and
grace and forgiveness.
“That’s beautiful,” murmured Spike, sitting to my right, and rather daintily for a 200 lbs
bulldog, he daubed at his eyes with his Knights of Columbus handkerchief.
I was hoping the beagle would end on that cheery note of remembrance, but instead, he
concluded by saying, “Pinocchio didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered. We’re all
culpable. Whether through our action or omission, we didn’t love him enough.” Minnie was

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now crying openly, and she wasn’t alone: little gulps and sniffles and moans were bouncing
off the stone walls of the church like Lotto balls, and it was a relief that the beagle
relinquished the stage to the choir and organ, which kindly blew our brains out with its
volume and power – “A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing” and “Deep in the Shadows of the
Past” and, although it wasn’t the right season, “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” It was
strange singing a Christmas carol in late June, hard to elbow out of my mind the thought of
Pin wandering his apartment alone, humming along to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the
phonograph player, stringing popcorn around a tiny Christmas tree, the star crowning it
forever askew.
I checked the program – Disney was to give the eulogy, and when he strode up the aisle
after the last hymn, my guts clenched up, fearing he would pick a fight with the minister
who’d accused him of murderer. I tugged anxiously at my whiskers, wishing I had my
catnip, or better yet, my morphine. When Disney produced folded sheets of paper from the
inside of his jacket, I sighed in relief: Walt Disney didn’t go offscript. But being Walt
Disney, his true subject was only ever himself and what he’d created – Disneyland was
nothing more than the imagination of Disney erected to scale in the real world – and as
such, the eulogy was not for Pinocchio, but for Pinocchio. I decided to time him:
Total time spent discussing the mechanical difficulties of building an animatronic whale,
floating the whale in San Pedro Bay, and having it “swallow” Pinocchio: 2 minutes, 43
seconds.
Total time spent discussing the casting of little Ziegfried Butz as Pinocchio: 22 seconds.
Total time spent discussing the casting of the Blue Fairy (who was hotter than a shrieking
kettle): 1 minute, 19 seconds.
Total time spent discussing the manufacture of Jiminy Cricket’s spool-sized top hat: 34

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seconds
Total time spent discussing the effect of Pinocchio on the fortunes of the Walt Disney Co.:
1 minute, 38 seconds.
Total time spent saying Disneyisms like: “Laughter is America’s most important export”
and “We’re all children at heart” and “Everybody worries too much” and “A dream is a wish
your heart makes” and, of course, considering the man-boy he was eulogizing, “Always let
you conscience be your guide”: 3 minutes, 53 seconds.
Total time spent discussing Pinocchio’s life after Pinocchio: 0 seconds.
Fortunately, Disney did find a wheeled bier, and at the end of the service, we guided it
down the aisle to the roar of the organ’s blistering minor key toccata, walking in pairs
according to our height: Disney and Walter Mathau, Spike and August, me and Mickey
Mouse. If Disney died before Mickey, I wondered if the mouse would toss himself on the
pyre.
The luncheon was at the church hall next door, the same food as every funeral luncheon:
tuna salad on croissants, fruit cocktail, green beans almondine. I sat with Spike and August
and Gracie and Minnie. Spike had two plates. Minnie was only eating green beans. In the
corner of the room, Mick sat alone, plateless, smoking.
Our table was silent but for the clack of silver on china, the quiet tsks of animals who’ve
mastered genteel mastication, and I was trying to think of something to jumpstart the
conversation, when, in the way that you can spot beautiful women in scant clothing even
from great distances, even out from the corneriest part of your eye, I detected that someone
with more chest than taste was approaching. I looked up to Tiara tiptoeing over, clutching a
plate heaped with fruit cocktail, a pair of green beans crossed atop: a vegetarian coat of arms.
Smiling her brightest failed beauty queen smile, she asked of the chair across from me, “Is

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anyone sitting here?”
“No,” I said, as my heart rate doubled. “Please.”
She ate the green beans first. “Mom always said to start with the vegetables.”
“Mother always told me to take a drink of water after every bite,” said Minnie, “so that I
would feel fuller faster.”
Making a face, Tiara swallowed her green beans, hard enough to make her chest bob.
“Super idea. You’re real thin.”
“Thank you,” said Minnie.
“So,” said Gracie, after taking a drink of water, “did you work with Pinocchio?”
Tiara nodded. Next to me, Spike was wringing his snowball paws, and when Tiara said,
“Mr. Pinny was fantastic, very talented, very capable,” he coughed and stood up to excuse
himself. “Little John Fitzgerald has the flu. I’m going to call Mary Martha and check in.”
“So,” said Gracie, “what is it like?” Under the table, my hand found her knee and
squeezed hard enough to make juice, but Gracie charged ahead: “Do you enjoy it?”
The shame was evaporating from Tiara’s face – she was sensing a kindred spirit. “What’s
not to like?” she said. “I love sex, and I love movies. It’s the best of both worlds.”
“Who’s Johnnie?” I asked, trying to change the subject, raising a forkful of green beans
toward her shoulder and its scribble of a tattoo.
“Johnnie’s dead,” she said, not looking up from her mountain of fruit cocktail.
Not being a well-endowed woman in a low-cut dress, Walt Disney I didn’t notice until he
was almost over my shoulder. “Excuse me, Mr. Grimalkin,” he said. “May I have a word
with you?”
He strode so fast toward the exit I would’ve had to jog to keep up, but I wasn’t going to
look the fool, so he gained quite the lead as he made his way down the long hallway,

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eventually ducking into a room that I entered ten seconds later, the fluorescents flickering to
life above my head. The cinderblock walls were covered with construction paper prophets,
sheep built from cotton balls and paper plates, a poster of a large boat jam-packed with pairs
of animals. Walt Disney was studying it all, baffled, confronted with a visual language he
could not comprehend.
“It’s a Sunday school room,” I said. “They send the kiddies down here to make a papier-
mache Jesus while the preacher next door tells their parents not to cheat on their taxes or
covet their neighbors’ wives.” He nodded, studying what appeared to be a periodic table of
the books of the Bible, then wheeled to scan the room, dumbstruck that none of his
creations graced the desks or whitewashed walls.
“So,” I said, “I like tuna salad. Anything in particular you’re pulling me away from it for?”
“Of course, Mr. Grimalkin,” he said, settling into the chair behind the teacher’s table and
gesturing at one of the tiny student desks.
“I’ll stand,” I said.
“As you wish.” He folded his hands on the table and continued: “Mr. Grimalkin, I’m a
straight talker, and I’ve heard you are as well.” I shrugged. “I’m concerned, Mr. Grimalkin.
I have reason to believe that my company is under attack.”
“It’s more than just your underlings who are getting snuffed.”
He stared me down with a dogcatcher’s snarl. “It’s more than just the murders, if you
must know.” The monologue that followed seemed prepared, and the gist was that an
increasing portion of Minnie’s fan mail had grown menacing – asking if Minnie ever had
rape fantasies, including what looked like undoctored photos of humans and animals having
sex. All the mail was winnowed by the studio, so Minnie had no idea, but two weeks prior,
after a filming of The Mickey Mouse Club, a pair of men accosted the actress who played

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Minnie in the parking lot. (Minnie retired when Mickey left her, only occasionally making
appearances at galas and ribbon cuttings. Unbeknownst to the overalls-and-backpack set,
there’d been three Minnie dopplegangers who’d replaced her over the past twenty years.)
They’d pulled up in a truck and told her they were going to take her to a dark place and
make a woman out of her. When the one in the passenger seat exposed himself, she
screamed for security and the truck screeched away. The actress had told Disney, and he’d
bought her a 24-hour security detail, then sworn her to secrecy.
After finishing, Disney paused, brushing croissant crumbs from his grizzled parenthesis
of a moustache; while he didn’t let any of the employees at Disneyland wear facial hair, he’d
made his fortune on the backs of the furry. All of these ideas seemed to sleep soundly side
by side in the great clean white dormitory of Walt Disney’s mind.
“I’m sorry about all,” I said, “but I don’t see where I come in.”
He rubbed the papery gray skin of his face. “I’ve been told that you know something
about Lady Dear’s death.” Met with my silence, he went on: “I have heard rumors that her
death …” he sighed. “Was filmed.”
“What does it matter? One way or the other, she died a horrible violent –”
His fist fell like a gavel against the table, so hard a Jesus Loves You pencil case fell off the
edge. “Because we protect our property!” he bellowed, standing. He sighed, teary-eyed. “Even
after they’ve passed away, it’s our responsibility to protect their image. You might know
this, but we recently purchased from Mr. Belladonna the Master Copies and duplicates of
every … film of his that featured Pinocchio.” Two grown men arguing over Pinocchio’s fate:
which was Gepetto, and which was Stromboli?
“Awfully generous of you, thinking so much about Pinocchio, now that he’s dead.”
This time, he didn’t take the bait. “I need to know if you saw Lady Dear’s death being

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filmed. If you have, there’s a different film – a duplicate, unfortunately – that was mailed to
me recently, and I would appreciate if you came to the studio to watch it and to see if it was
potentially made by the same person or persons.”
“Are they trying to blackmail you?”
“There was no note. Would it work for you to come to the studios Monday?” He pulled
out his billfold. “Of course, I would reimburse you for your time. Would five thousand be
sufficient?” I didn’t know if it was more disturbing that he was trying to buy me off to do
the right thing, or that he carried $5000 in cash. I made $5000 a month – a good month.
“No, no money,” I said. “And not Monday. We have rehearsal. What about Tuesday?”
For the first time all day, he smiled. “Ah yes, Hamlet. Very fine. I’ve heard it’s a very
good play. Lily and I are so much looking forward to seeing it. And Mickey is the king …”
He closed his eyes, imagining I supposed Mickey on a throne, wearing a golden crown.
When he opened them, they were as lidless and wild as a conjuror’s. “I love Mickey Mouse
more than any woman I’ve ever known.”

8.

The alarm clock jackhammered in my ear and I pounded it blindly with my fist until it
stopped.
“Mmmmmnnnnnnnnnggnnnn.” Grace rolled toward me, smelling like sleep. The
reassuring heft of blankets was pinning me to the mattress, warming me, but my nose was
freezing. Mornings were cold in the hills, even in summer, but on principle I didn’t turn on
the radiator after May 1.

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“Let me skip first period, papa,” she mumbled. “I know my geometries.”
With a grunt I rolled up my eyelids to a bedroom that was a haze of black velvet. Her
ears were twitching, half a dozen sleep-colics warping the fur of her face, no worse than my
own, I was sure. I couldn’t sleep on my back what with the tail, which meant my waking
face every morn was paisley’d with whorls. I stared up into the mirror above our bed and
thought to myself: Christ, I look like Yosemite Sam’s beard.
Resisting the urge to lick her fur into order, I dampened my thumb instead and rubbed it
against a particularly egregious patch.
“Hey,” she said, opening her eyes, as blue as the veins of that cheese she liked so much.
With those eyes and that snowy coat, it was easy to see why at the start of her career she’d
been billed as the China Kitten. “Lick your own face.”
“Your face looks like my tongue feels.”
“That’s what happens when you eat a tin of anchovies before bed.” She sucked in her
cheeks and made fishy lips at me, blinking slowly. Gracie was good at faces.
“Do you have your lines ready for today?” I asked. Under the blankets, her tail started
playing This Little Piggy with the toes of my bare back foot.
“‘Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?’”
It was like Bill Shakespeare was pouring fourteen hundred and thirty-eight dollar bills out
the seventh story window and I had to catch each one. I squinted and tsked. The gray blobs
of the room were solidifying into gray rectangles.
“Ay, truly; for the power of beauty … something something something … I did love you
once.”
I thought she’d chide me for not doing my homework, but instead she whimpered. “I
don’t like you saying you don’t love me, even if we’re pretending to be other people. I’m not

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crazy, am I?”
Memories rolled in double-time Technicolor: Gracie serving me a dinner of the holey
leather loafers I wouldn’t give away, boiled and garnished with sauerkraut; Gracie returning
from the stables with her crop and asking if I wanted to be the jockey or the stallion, which
left me unable to sit down for the better part of a week; Gracie showing me her childhood
bedroom in the Central Valley, the quarters her father had given her childhood self when she
shot a rat or recited a Tennyson poem, which was crazy enough by itself, but crazier still was
that she’d stacked and glued the quarters into spindly columns on which she displayed her
tiny ballerina figurines, quarters enough that in the 40s, she could’ve bought a second pony
with them.
“Everyone I know is crazy.”
“Spike isn’t crazy,” she said.
“Spike thinks his guardian angel helps him find parking spots.”
She chuckled, then stopped. “Am I too much?”
“I’ve never had enough. I don’t know what too much is.”
The silent This Little Piggy ended with her tail lassoed around my little toe, yanking like she
wanted to extract it.
“Yow!”
“You’re supposed to say I’m perfect, that you love me more than anything, that you
never want me to change or go away.”
“Love, love is strange,” I sang, staring at the drawn Venetians, glowing with the new sun.
“Don’t be cute. I spent a long time looking for my soul mate. When I was in school I
had every rich boy with whiskers and tail from Merced to Bakersfield chasing after me.”
“Okies whose idea of sculpture is a spittoon.” I imagined the alternative life she was

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imagining, sitting high on the veranda, cracking almonds in the heat, field hands pruning the
plum trees below, mustangs skittering in the distance.
“Go to hell,” she said, “I’m a yokelly Okie, too.”
Sensing a grand mal pout, I changed the subject. “Hey, on Memorial Day, Schmear
asked if we could set up a little dinner with him and Headley and Headley’s girl.”
“As the fifth wheel?”
“I think his plan is to knock Headley off the axel and become the fourth wheel.”
“So you’re going to pimp out this girl and toss Headley under the bus?”
“Hey,” I said, bopping her on the shoulder with one of the herd of throw pillows that
slept with us. “Schmear didn’t say why he wanted to. Maybe he’d like to learn the British
perspective on Castro’s Cuba.”
“She is sexy,” Grace said. “I would sleep with her.”
“Do tell.”
She closed her peepers and sniffed. “You know how can just smell on some people …”
Her eyes opened, slivers of Arctic ice. “That they like it dirty.”
I nodded. “Like a little bit of shit smeared on the underside of a rose.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Just like that. And she’s beautiful, like one of those women in – oh,
who’s that painter guy, Tomsy?”
“Rubens.”
“Rubens, bingo,” she said, tugging the sheet up over her shoulder and tapping me on the
nose with the tip of her finger. Sometimes I wished I was married to someone who knew
the names of the Dutch Masters, whose familiarity with Beethoven extended beyond “Roll
Over.”
“Her skin must bruise at the slightest touch,” I said, as Grace stroked my cheek.

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“Imagine if you slapped her ass.” I did. Grace continued: “It would be like a purple
pawprint. Like a brand. Give Headley a call.”
“Roger, roger.”
Half an hour later, we were easing down Hollywood Boulevard with the top down,
Gracie reading me cue lines with a hot mouthful of pork in every voice she could think of:
Cary Grant, Lamont Cranston, Lauren Bacall, Desi Arnaz, but laughing so hard she could
barely get it out, spitting bits of mashed corn into the wind. I had no idea what she was
saying.
The sun was dangling like a grapefruit at the end of the Boulevard, soaking warmth into
the fur of my face, and I reached over Gracie’s lap to fish my Wayfarers out from the glove
compartment. Behind the lenses, everything bronzed to the burnt orange of barrel tile roofs:
the moppy palm trees, the stucco storefronts and the bars over their windows, the ham-
colored tourists staring up at everything, the odd cypress slowly being strangled by the
growing concrete, the billboard of a man spanking a woman spread over his lap with the
headline, If your husband ever finds out you’re not store-testing for fresher coffee, another billboard of
Ron Reagan smiling at me on the other side of Highland, with the words Van Heusen shirts
won’t wrinkle …ever! perched on his shoulder like a parrot.
As I turned the El Dorado left onto Highland, Gracie yawned at the slumbering El
Capitan and asked if I would premier my movie there.
“I don’t know. Yeah. It would be great.”
“What’s the title?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m bad with titles.”
She plucked her lips in thought. “Will there be romance?”
“I don’t know yet.”

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“Will there be a part for a mischievous femme fatale, with a penchant for gin and the
rumba and brooding distant men?” She squeezed my knee – dot dot dot dot dash. “A
femme fatale who turns out to have a heart of gold at the end? Or maybe who’s really in
cahoots with the baddies the whole time?”
“Who’s distant? Who’s brooding?”
She took another bite of tamale, then swallowed. “Most girls don’t have to guess if their
husbands still want them.”
I lit a Lucky and drained as much as I could. To my left I heard a woman twang, “Da-rul,
it’s Joan Fontaine’s star!”
Staring straight ahead, I felt Gracie’s cold eyes on my cheek, slurping the vim right out of
me. “Couple months ago, on set, the day after the grand piano, Jerry hit me in the crotch
with a wedge of Parmesan. Think it might’ve cut some cord down there or something.”
I turned to see her wince, as though disappointed that was the best I could come up with.
“I’ll only ask you once,” she said, so softly I could barely hear over the wind, the Star Tours
PA, the barnyard oooohs of the tourists. “Do you have a mistress?”
“No,” I said.
Worry dissolved like Alka Seltzer over her face, leaving her bubbly with relief, forgetting
everything we’d just said. “So if there’s no romance, what are you and Spike and Jerry going
to do for an hour and a half?”
“Secret formulas, long-lost tribes. Long empty hallways. The desert. Warsaw Pact
intrigue. Apparitions. The Pope telephones frantically. A funnel spout in the North
Atlantic. Lights flashing over Time Square. Two stuntmen in a stuck elevator talk in code.
All the animals at the LA Zoo escape. Slime oozes from the Hills.”
“None of that makes sense.”

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“I’m not sure I want it to.”
Two minutes later, I was pulling my Caddy among its brother beasts in the Hollywood
Bowl parking lot – some human had once told me talking animals compensated for being
little by driving cars as big as gunboats: in the lot slumbered Mick’s ’36 black Pierce-Arrow
limo, which looked like sort of car Death would ride to his own funeral; Special Smelter’s
hillbilly jalopy, rusted as the Titanic and as big as the fuselage of a P-51; Yogi’s Mercedes
gull-wing, gorgeous enough to be worth the ribbing we gave him about the Luftwaffe; the
woodie Spike used to chauffer his numerous ravenous sons to football practice.
“Why’s Spike here?” asked Gracie.
We found out moments later from the bulldog himself, doing high-knees in an old
infantryman helmet by the entrance fountain.
“Lord Hamlet,” he said, raising a massive paw into the air, high-kneeing over to us, “Illo,
ho, ho, my lord.”
I smiled – no one made me smile more often than that 200 lbs lump of muscle, gnarled
teeth, and furry wrinkles.
“Gracie,” he yelled. He bounded over, picked her up off the ground, and swung her
above his head.
“Oh, Spike,” she chirped.
“The Marcellus they’d casted broke his paw surfing in Malibu,” he said, easing Gracie to
the ground and punching me in the shoulder so hard I had to step back to avoid falling over.
“I turned it down the first time, because I didn’t want to miss any of the pups’ Pop Warner,
but when they called back, Mary Martha told me it was a sign.”
From behind came that squeaky altar boy alto, “And the chameleon they got to play
Ozzie fell asleep by somebody’s pool after a premier and got double pneumonia.” Ten feet

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above us, Jerry was on-pointe atop the head of the Muse of Music, forever playing the harp
for herself. He pirouetted, leapt off, slid down the stone bow of her instrument, and
bounced off her knee into my arms. His eyes were bloodshot, his whiskers trembled.
“Cold-bloods are such pussies. Anyway, they said they needed a smart-ass to play Ozzie,
somebody to make fun of you. Zykov called Mr. Schmear, who called me. I was planning
to spend the summer playing roulette at the Flamingo, but –” he sighed – “duty calls.”
“It’s Osric, Jerry,” said Spike.
“Mick’s down there creeping on Minnie,” said Jerry. “I had to get some air. And nobody
told me the director’s fucking blind.”
Onstage, it turned out Mick was creeping on Minnie, wearing his stupid cape and making
Snidely Whiplash eyes while she tried to remember her lines. From the nosebleeds, Gracie,
Jerry, Spike and I surveyed the scene, hearing everything. I didn’t know the first thing about
theater, but if the success of a show depended on the skill, focus, and hard work of its
actors, we were doomed.
“God, what a Mongolian clusterfuck,” said Jerry.
“Enlighten me, Walls,” I said, “on the difference between a Mongolian clusterfuck and a
regular ol’ clusterfuck.”
“Regular clusterfuck stays still. Mongolian clusterfuck is on horseback, galloping around,
with the high possibility of death and dismemberment.”
“Huh,” said Spike, nodding. “You learn something new every day.”
Wile was whipping prop spears at Jorge and Esteban, who were circling overhead and
squawking obscenities in Cuban. Bugs was pushing a script in Yogi’s face and yelling at him
to read his lines to him. Guess the recording machine hadn’t worked out. A few paces
away, Zykov was asking Porky what sort of man he thought Polonius was.

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“I suppose a man like my own f-f-f-father,” smiled Pork, squeezing his white-gloved
hands together.
“Fascinating,” Zykov told the air over Pork’s left shoulder. “Your father also sent spies
to follow you at university?”
Pork’s face was darkening from eraser to fire hydrant. “No, he g-g-g-g-g-gave me g-g-g-
g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g … he gave me smart advice. The early hog gets the t-t-t-t-teat.”
Not far overhead, Jorge and Esteban hung a louie, then swung behind us, so close the
force of their wings ruffled the fur at the back of my neck.
“Tomas! Tomas!”
I turned, crouching backward to avoid a collision.
“Dingo es loco!”
“Eh, eh, killee!” said the other one.
“Actually, he’s a coyote,” said Spike, pointing a finger down at Wil, who was clutching a
sharpened broomstick, licking a finger and raising it to the breeze. “Canis Latrans, not Canis
Lupus Dingo.” Gracie, Jerry, and I whipped our heads to Spike, whose formal education
ended somewhere between picture books and long division. It seemed to surprise the
flamingos, too, and they stared down at Spike – catastrophically, as it turned out, crashing
into each other in mid-air and falling in a pink knot twenty feet to the concrete steps behind
us. With no possibility of a clean shot, Wil sighed, shook his head, and tossed his javelin
clattering to floor.
“You see,” Spike continued, “I’m Canis Lupus Familiaris, which means ‘Friendly Dog
Wolf’ in Latin. I’ve read the literature.”
Gracie chimed in: “I read in McCall’s that they’re thinking about adding ‘sapiens’ to the
end of the talking animal sciencey names, to distinguish all of us.”

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“Wise cat,” I said. “I like that.”
“Smarter than the average bear,” Jerry smiled, glancing stage left, where Bugs was
snatching the script from Yogi.
“Doe,” Bugs yelled, flicking a finger against the page. “It’s right there. “D-O. Doe, a
deer, a female deer.”
“It’s do,” Yogi yelled back, “like you gotsta pay up ya union dues.”
From his satchel, Wile pulled out a marker and tablet. TETE-A-TETE. NOW.
“Hey!” said Bugs, intercepting the message. “Where’s da tits at?”
Ninety seconds later, I was backstage with the Canis Latrans. “I have heard tell of your,
shall we say, escapades, in the Valley.”
“Cuff knows a porn guy. Belladonna. We were looking for connections.”
“I had not been informed you and Mr. Cuffy were associates.” His crossed arms were at
my eye level.
“Jesus, Wile,” I sighed, kicking the bowl of an enormous stage light. “Associates? Cuff
and I are pals. He gives me free beer sometimes and doesn’t blab when Jerry says drunk shit
about the efficiency of the gulag.”
I could feel my retinas straining in the pockety darkness. Around his pupils, Wil’s eyes
were a sunny yellow that would’ve been pretty on anything but eyes.
“Mr. Cuffy operated a bear-baiting ring for a number of years, I have been told.”
I jerked my thumb at the rear curtain behind us. “You just tried to spear Jorge and
Esteban. With a spear.”
He growled, perhaps at me, perhaps at himself, perhaps at the injustice of a civilization
that seemed sometimes to demand consistency. He picked a piece of meat from betwixt two
bullet-sized fangs – a hunk large enough to feed a family of squirrels – examined it, then

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tossed it down his gullet.
“The likelihood was next to nothing. That fat Staten Island bear was offering twelve to
one that I would hit one of them. There were no takers.”
“After all, you’ve still never caught Roadrunner.”
His mouth opened like a freight elevator onto a set of stained teeth. No sunlight graced
the backstage, and you couldn’t hear a thing on the other side of the lasagna sheet curtains.
Once out in the desert near Fontana, I’d seen Wile joust a Hell’s Angel; the biker was riding
his Hawg, armed with a machinist’s wrench; Wile was sprinting, armed with his arm, which
he used to stop the bike cold and launch the biker backward into a briary ditch. Wile could
break me with one hand.
But this time, his double fence of teeth was a smile of chagrin. “Galahad had his cup,
yours truly has a giant bird with an mongoloid IQ.”
“You’d say that about any bird.”
“That is a goddamn lie.” He jammed bony forefinger of his claw between my eyes, so
close I saw it in double vision. “Tweety is a scholar and a gentlebird. That creature is a
saint.” I had heard that sometimes after a long night of executing California Condors up in
the mountains, Wile would stagger downhill, drunk on blood, let himself into Sly and
Tweety’s place, and collapse on the floor next to Tweet’s tiny bed.
“The flamingos are talking animals. You’re trying to kill people.”
He snorted, coughed, spat to the ground a glob of mixed carcass and mucus. “Enough
armchair philosophy. “The Valley is the wrong place to be looking for suspects. Not north,
my friend, but south.”
“I’m listening.”
“Some Chinamen. In Long Beach. Communists who need to make cash for the cause.

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So, for a song, they buy the old Balboa Studios, begin showing stag movies.” Although no
one could hear us, his voice faded to a whisper. “I’ve been told a pony was featured
prominently. Possibly an Irish wolfhound.”
“Been told? Possibly?” I should’ve taken my morphine that morning. Stupid unspoken
oaths to that mute lion at the zoo. I sighed. “Okay, Wile, where are they?”
“So we’re going to go down to Long Beach, knock on the door of Balboa Studios, then
ask them if they’re Commies breaking bestiality laws? And when they shake their heads
because they don’t speak English, we draw a horse screwing a slant-eyed stick figure and
smile real big?”
“No,” he said, pulling something from the back pocket of his dungarees.
It was a photo, dark but clear. Medium shot, the edges crowded with enshadowed boxes
in what might have been a warehouse. What was certain was the subject. Pot-bellied Igby,
tied to a chair and dressed in the kind of old-timey clothes he’d worn for that Mr. Toad flick.
His face, shaped like a pair of puckered lips, was blotched and bruised a color I imagined
purple green. His jaw drooped loose, and a hatchet and handsaw lay crossed near his feet.
“Bastards,” I said. Even when he was down and out, too poor to splurge on presents,
Igby always sent me a birthday card every year, crowding all the available space with a
message of friendship and gratitude, penned in his bitty cursive. Wile nodded and flipped
the photo over. On the back was written February 12, 1961, “Frog Legs” and below that, what
looked like a drawing of pick-up sticks, and below that what looked like snakes and ladders.
“Chinese,” said Wile, “and Cambodian. A magnifying glass informed me that newspaper
down there in the corner is the Long Beach Independent-Press-Telegram.”
We kicked our way through the prop-scattered dimness towards the stage, staggering
into, around, and through velvet curtains that smelled like a dowager’s parlor, following

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cracks of light until we stumbled out into the full sun risen finally over the mountains and
bleaching the concrete of the Bowl to a whitewall white. The sun and dust set Wile to
sneezing, nasal combustions that sounded like war. I heard everywhere the butchering of
Elizabethan English, but with my eyes drawn to slits, I saw only a cross-section: droopy
twitchy rabbit ears, a porkpie hat, the profile of a human face smaller than Volton’s, younger
than Zykov’s, and far more handsome than either: pouty lips trembling, a jaw to sharpen a
knife on, a nose from a statue, hair an ermine would’ve envied. Monty Clift: once beautiful,
always drunk. He spun toward me like a top about to fall, rubbed his chapped hands
together with a chuckle, and stared at me, his head yawing forward and back to make the
many Toms he was undoubtedly seeing all shrink down to one. Before Gracie I’d had my
own share of mornings where gin would massage hangovers back into a buzz, but I
remembered those fogs as almost happy, chuckling at the memory of stuffing Peter
Lawford’s cigarette holder with cumin while he was in the men’s, watching him spend the
next half hour hacking up air that smelled like Mexico. The fun of the night before
mellowed the morning’s headache and poisoned blood. Monty Clift never looked like he
had fun the night before.
“Hey Tom,” he said, “and, and is it … Will? Willy Coyote?”
Wile pulled a signboard from nowhere, then wrote: WIL. RHYMES WITH BILE.
“Ah, my apologies.”
HAVE YOU SEEN A BEEPING BIRD RECENTLY? USELESS WINGS,
GENERAL REEK OF IDIOCY? It took Wile a minute to write this, so while he did,
Monty explained Zykov had asked him to speak to us a little about acting, working with a
script, entering into your character, and when Wile was done writing he flipped through the
cards for Monty.

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“No, sorry,” he said. Wile seemed ready to pen a follow-up when from far above us and
to our right came the catcall: “A-lo, doe-gy, doe-gy. A-lo, leetle poopy poopy.” Jorge and
Esteban had lighted upon the crown of one of the nearby trees, bobbing on the bone-thin
branches in the warm wind.
“Shit,” I muttered as Wile burst away on all fours with the force that seemed impossible
in a cartoon, and in real life was plain scary. I heard his dungarees ripping at the knees as he
plowed over poor Porky, who was telling no one in particular to their own self be t-t-t-t-true,
slid between Mickey and Minnie, elbowing Mick in the neck as he did, and leapt off the stage
toward the Cuban birds. They weren’t my concern. I looked up to Monty. “That’s great,” I
said, gesturing at the stage, which looked more like a dysfunctional farm than a set. “Actual
acting isn’t really, you know, what we do. We could use all the pointers we can get.”
“Thanks,” he said, wincing as though he didn’t know what actual acting was either.
“I mean it,” I said. And I did.
I was the sharp-clawed punk at St. Francis, the any-dare-drinker, window-leaper, a
shredder of multiplication tables. I used a rosary as a lasso, snuck in swear words when we
conjugated Latin verbs as a class, peed on statues of saints, and before I caught on to the
difference between talking and mute animals, I tried to convince the stallions employed by
the Baltimore PD to buck their riders into the Patapsco. But looking back, all that puckish
chaos was just a papier-mâché moon I’d wadded together to eclipse the far bigger, brighter
sun of the love I felt for so many things. I wept when I read “O Captain, My Captain,” sang
hymns in every choir I could find, was the assistant organist at the Basilica, read over the
course of four years the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (in half hour
chunks in a storage closet before school so nobody could see me), everything but V-Wi,
which the school had lost, and ever since I’d regretted my lack of knowledge about

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Woodrow Wilson, who’d been President when I was born. One morning I hazarded to ask
wizened bouncy Sister Constance how the universe was created, what it was like at the very
beginning, the moment when all of everything started, she set down her chalk and explained
to us about a new theory a Belgian Jesuit had presented called the Big Bang. Chuckles at
that from the other boys – the mutts, tabbies, wharf rats and odd squirrel who slumped in
old desks – but not from me. My pencil raced across my greasy notebook paper to capture
her words, the way she described the universe as being like a person, starting from a speck of
itself in miniature, containing everything already, just tiny and jammed together, then
growing to its full mature size. I’d asked her if the universe would die someday like people
die, and she’d said that people don’t die, not really. At lunch the boys all crusted me for
trying to sound educated, so I set fire to some juniper bushes outside the art annex.
I wouldn’t have been the first orphan to go to City College then transfer to Hopkins, but
my grades were shit and I didn’t want to be poor for another four years. Since I could sing
and dance and play piano, the mid-Atlantic vaudeville circuit would’ve been an easy enough
jump, but then my senior year at St. Francis, I saw The Band Concert, a short cartoon starring a
small black mouse named Mickey – a disastrous outdoor band performance of The William
Tell Overture. The mouse was the bitchy frazzled conductor, while easily distracted animals
played the other instruments and a white duck in a sailor’s cap hawked ice cream cones
nearby. When the duck notices the band, he parks his cart, pulls a flute from his sleeve, and
begins playing “Turkey in the Straw,” which the band falls into as well, sending the mouse
into a rage, leaping off the little stage and breaking the duck’s flute over his knee. But then
the duck produces another, which Mick also breaks, and then a third, having what seems like
an endless supply tucked away in his midshipman’s jacket. Later the duck whips an ice
cream cone that hits the back of the neck of the mouse, who wriggles from the cold as the

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pink ice cream slides down his spine, shimmying his shoulders and shaking his round bum, a
sort of belly dance that leads the band to riff for a moment on an Arabian tune. It was
brilliant – unpredictable, balletic, hysterical, musically deft – and not one human appeared in
the entire nine minutes. Vaudeville might’ve been easy, but that was the problem – it was
easy. And I didn’t know if I wanted to make eight dollars a day for the rest of my life
tickling the ivories for some slick-haired straight man. So I moved west, and even if Mickey
Mouse was a snake and a worm, if not for him I probably would’ve been spending that
afternoon playing boogie-woogie for tips at a longshoreman’s bar on the Chesapeake.
The trouble was, I still had never really learned how to act. I was a cat Marcel Marceau
who’d spent time in every ER room in Los Angeles. With the exception of the occasional
Tin Pan Alley rag, the sounds I made onscreen were unfaked yowls. Secretly, I’d always
envied the Looney Tunes crew who got to yak it up onscreen. The Tom of the show didn’t
have a personality – he was a curmudgeonly id who wanted food, sleep, and for Jerry to die.
It was easy to slip into that Tom’s skin, to make mean faces and furrow my eyebrows, but
that didn’t require thinking, or feeling. It was shitty prep for playing literature’s most famous
character, besides maybe Huck Finn. Huck would’ve been easier to play, and more fun. But
I was too old for that, and too fatalistic. Hamlet was a drag, but he made a hell of a lot of
sense to me.
Grace pattered over, smiling at Monty, who leaned down so that she could air-kiss him on
each of his bloated cheeks. Before Monty’s accident, Bob Hope had once joked to me that
Monty made every other man look like Jimmy Durante. Nothing’s sadder than when gods
become men. As a kid, I’d always thought Advent was sad, and every December I hoped
against hope that Jesus would decide to stay in the clouds, not make himself meat and
skydive down into the mess we’d made.

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“How’s Liz?” Gracie asked.
“Oh, Bessie Mae, she’s on top of the world,” he said through a twitchy mouth. “It’s
lonely at the top. So,” he said, head wobbling down at me, the leading man – the leading
cat?” My heart twanged a little at his deference.
“Either’s fine,” I said.
Zykov began clapping to get the cast’s attention. “Animals,” he said, turning his face
from one side of the stage to the other and striding forward. “We have a guest, an honored
guest, a great ac-tor.” He began listing Monty’s various awards and achievements.
Bullwinkle had been enduring a conversation with Eeyore, so he trotted over quickly, as did
Minnie, trying to escape her ex-husband, and Bugs, trying to escape his illiteracy. Mr.
Rodrigo roused himself from a catnap, Yogi and Goof grudgingly ended their game of
Indian Poker, and Spike already had a notebook and pencil out. Only Special Smelter was
unmoved, collapsed on the middle of the stage, his sniffling honker stuck in his ancient King
James. Flat on its back, the Bible was lopsided toward the back end: my guess was the
hound was poring over finger-stained, already-memorized passages in the Book of
Revelation, and while our attention was on Monty, his was on the holy-rolling hound.
Pointing at Special Smelter, he interrupted Zykov’s recitation of his bio:
“Pain,” he murmured. “Pain is where we begin. To act is to take all of the hurting of
another creature and swallow it whole, to digest it with the acids of your envy and desire,
until it hits your stomach and gets mashed with all of the pain already there. You don’t just
imagine what the poor fellow you’re playing was going through, you eat it till it sweats out
your pores.” We were all as still as a wax museum. Special Smelter glanced up from the
Bible. He wasn’t used to anyone noticing his misery.
I could’ve been an anthropologist of alcoholism, and my ledger read: 30% become saps,

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30% become fools, and 30% become devils. It was a rare creature that liquor made a bard. I hadn’t
realized Monty was one of those.
“What’s the one thing we all have in common? We all hurt. I hurt because I drove into a
telephone pole and broke my face. I would have choked to death on my own teeth if Liz
Taylor hadn’t pulled them from the back of my throat. Now it hurts to smile. It hurts to
chew. My insides are a mess and everything but apples gives me heartburn. I wince
whenever I look in the mirror. His eyes carouseled around the horseshoe of hushed animals.
“I want the crowd to feel that. So. Moose man,” he added, pointing at Bullwinkle, “what’s
your pain?”
“Back in Minnesota they would stand me in the corner and use me for a coat rack,”
Bullwinkle said in his mopey mumble, scratching at his antlers.
“What about you?” Monty said, pointing at Mickey. I was expecting palaver about how
he didn’t feel pain, but instead he looked at Minnie, at Gracie, then at me.
“I know I’ll die alone.” Minnie turned away.
“What about you?” he asked Porky, who’d already started sniffling.
“That Mom and P-p-p-p-p-p-pop’ll die and I won’t have anyone to eat Christmas dinner
with.”
“You,” Monty said, pointing at Special Smelter, and instead of mentioning beasts and
dragons and horns and trumpets, the hound said, “Nobody remembered my birthday this
year.”
“You’ll get used to it,” said Eeyore.
Monty pointed at Bugs, whose ears drooped. “I know everybody tawks about me behind
my back, and what dey have to say ain’t very nice.”
“Grandfather lion?”

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“I know I will never return to the savannah,” said Mr. Rodrigo.
“Spike?”
Spike’s plough of a lower jaw churned the air for an answer, his lower canines sticking
up like tiki torches. “I think my wound,” he finally said, “is that I have no wound.”
“What about you, Miss Grace?”
She glanced at me, then bashfully swung her eyes low. “The boys don’t look at me the
way they used to.”
“What about you?” he whispered down at Jerry, who was standing on the arm of
Claudius’s throne.
“None of my vices make me as happy as they used to.”
“And what about you, Hamlet?”
I wanted to make a joke, but somehow I couldn’t: you couldn’t lie to Monty Clift’s altar
boy eyes. “My pop never had a chance to see me make anything of myself, and sometimes I
wonder if I have made anything of myself.”
He scanned the furry crowd. “Think of that thing whenever you’re onstage. He smiled
at me and Gracie holding hands. “Shall we try?”
“Which part?” I asked.
“Act Three, Scene one.”
“Sure,” I said, relieved he wasn’t asking for Acts IV or V, which were spotty at best.
“Yes sir,” said Gracie, her tail stroking my flank.
“You’ve just given your ‘To be or not to be’ speech.”
“Yap,” I said. “It’s a doozy.”
Shooing everyone else toward the wings, Monty asked me, “So how do you think
Hamlet’s feeling?”

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“He starts pulling on a thread, and by Act Three, he realizes he’s unraveling his own shirt.
And what do you do when there’s nothing protecting you from the cold cruel world?”
Monty nodded, losing himself for a moment, his gaze floating up up up past the
nosebleeds to the alders and ash and cottonwoods behind. Recalling himself, he squatted
low, until his curaçao eyes were level with ours. “You decide to keep pulling, and then your
girl comes in.”
I remembered Olivier’s Hamlet, languid, mournful, each word like a drop of perfume.
“When I watched Larry Olivier –”
“Forget Olivier,” he whispered. “The magic doesn’t come from here,” he said, tapping a
finger against the thick slack skin of his temple, and I thought the hand would move from
head to heart, but instead it dropped lower, to his stomach. “Comes from the guts …” His
hand dropped further still, to the whisker-like double flare of wrinkles at his crotch. “Comes
from here.” His head swung to Gracie. “You’re horny. You’re scared.”
“I am horny,” she whispered. “I am scared.”
“And you know more than you’d like to admit,” Monty said to me. “You think
everyone’s out to get you.”
“Everyone is out to get me.”
“Let’s go,” he said, rising to full height and retreating. Gracie gave me an encouraging
smile. Pacing away, I took a deep breath of summery air and tried to imagine what it would
be like to tell Gracie we were done, the shame and the sorrow and the relief. Scorching into
the back of my shirt were the eyes of the all the people I loved and hated most in the world.
“The fair Ophelia,” I said, wheeling in my wingtips. “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my
sins remembered.”
“Good my lord, how does your honor for this many a day?”

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“I humbly thank you,” I said, “well … well … well.”
She approached on a glissade like the dancer she was. “My lord, I have remembrances of
yours that I have longed long to redeliver.” She pulled a red silk handkerchief from the bust
of her dress. Her preparedness was touching. “I pray you now receive them,” she
continued, extending the handkerchief to me.
“Heartbreak!” Monty screamed from behind us, the words as startling to Gracie as a slap.
She sniffed. “I pray you now receive them,” she whimpered.
“No, not I. I never gave you aught.”
“He’s lying!” yelled Monty.
“My honor’d lord, you know right well you did, and with them words of so sweet breath
compos’d as made these things more rich.” She pulled the red silk back, pressing it into her
muzzle with both hands, and inhaled. “Their perfume lost, take these again, for to the noble
mind rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. There, my lord.” She dangled it out in
front of me, and in one motion, I snatched it up and tossed it over my shoulder. I could
hear Porky moan, “Oh no.”
Hamlet and I laughed. “Are you honest?”
“My lord?” Gracie said, eyes still on the discarded silk.
“He’s asking you if you ever fucked anyone else,” said Monty, and Gracie’s wet eyes went
wide.
She gulped down whatever shock or guilt was rising from her own gut. “My lord?”
“Are you fair?”
“What means your lordship?”
“That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.”
“Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?” She was beautiful.

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She might have been honest. I was neither.
“Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a
bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into its likeness. This was sometime a
paradox, but now the time gives it proof.” On her toes, she padded closer, still teary. “I did
love you once,” I concluded.
She set her paw on my shoulder. “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.”
“You should not have believed me –”
“You’re turning your back on the only woman you’ve ever loved!” Monty shouted.
“You should not have believed me,” I sneered, shoving her paw away, “for virtue cannot
so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I lov’d you not.”
“I was the more deceiv’d,” Gracie murmured, kneeling to pick the silk off the stage.
“He’s never going to make love to you again,” said Monty, with all the certainty of an
Old Testament prophet. “Remember the last time, the first time, and all the times in
between. Never, never, never again.”
The first time. Sometime between the very late p.m. and the very early a.m., August 11-
12, 1957. Date number three. Number one was Musso and Frank (good), number two was
the L.A. Phil (Stravinsky: very good), number three was a costume party at Donald’s place in
Pasadena. We hadn’t yet fooled around, and I hadn’t tried to: I thought a twenty-two-year-
old heiress wouldn’t be receptive to a thirty-seven year-old tomcat copping a feel. Besides,
in the back of every Catholic boy’s mind is the lingering suspicion that marriages will
crumble if the deal is done before you say “I do.” Still, the desire I felt was exquisite, a clear
and gem-like flame that only burned a brighter red when she trotted out from her apartment
to my car in a ballerina costume. I was a hobo, and the baggy ripped slacks and oversized
jacket conveniently disguised my four-hour intermittent erection.

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At the party, Donald was an admiral, Mickey was Jesus, Porky was a strongman, and Jerry
was Mickey, in character, complete with funeral coat, death’s-head cane, and dour attitude.
What humans were there were either pirates or in blackface. Every creature with a cock was
hitting on Gracie, and I got drunk too fast. Sylvester was telling her knock-knock jokes, she
was laughing, and I found myself arguing about Suez with Lee Cobb. I went to irrigate my
empty tumbler, but when I came back she was gone, so I combed the shadowy rooms of
Donald’s Victorian, then the manicured acre of his backyard. From behind a massive oak I
heard whimpering and found Gracie sitting against the back of the tree, arms lassoing her
knees, crying, and when I asked her what the matter was, she asked me why I was ignoring
her. I shrugged, balked, then finally told her I didn’t want to be possessive.
“I want to be possessed,” she whispered up to me, then unzipped my fly. I dropped my
gin, tried to breathe slowly, watching the craggy disapproving faces in the oak bark. Cutting
through the warmth of her mouth was the chilly beam of one idea: This is not how it’s supposed
to begin.
Onstage, under a sun that made her fur gleam like Christmas snow, Gracie winked at me.
She must’ve been remembering something else. Or maybe not.
Filled with a rage whose source I couldn’t name and a sadness whose source I could, I
shoved her back and spat, “Get thee to a nunnery.” She fell, startled, tripping over her own
feet. As I stormed toward the orchestra pit, I saw the rest of them from the corner of my
eye: Bullwinkle was blubbering and Monty was nodding gravely and Zykov was smiling as
though my acid tone was a symphony. Unseen behind my feet Gracie was sniffling,
hiccupping.
As I shouted my lines to the Bowl, imagined all of Tinseltown, all of America, all of the
world: “I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have

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thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What
should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are errant knaves,
believe none of us.” I clomped back toward her, a white lump on the ground, her face
shattered like dishes hurled in a fight. “Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father?”
She swallowed. “At home, my lord.”
I imagined Old Man White riding around the fields on horseback, shouting at the grape
pickers, his seersucker suit still somehow unmarred by dust or thorn. “Let the doors be shut
upon him, that he may play the fool no where but in his own house. Farewell.”
“O, help him, you sweet …” but she choked on “heavens.” My own heart was beating
too fast, and my head was weightless in the heat. My Gracie, my sweet Gracie.
“If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as
pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.” None of us would. “Get thee to a nunnery,
farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what
monsters you make of them.”
I paused, not wanting to sting her with any more old words. I bent low and was about to
whisper her name when her eyelids rolled back and she grinned. “What’s the matter,
Tommy? Cat got your tongue?”

Limos weren’t unusual in my neighborhood, but a white Bentley at 10 a.m. on a Monday
was occasion enough for Harriet Nelson to leave her watering can and mosey down the
crackless sidewalk as the driver parked the Bentley and button-hooked around the prow-like
hood to open the back door.
“Hello, Mrs. Nelson,” I said, unlatching the gate of our white picket fence.
“Rick said he had such fun at your Memorial Day get-together,” she said, her hands

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clasped together at her waist. She was the sort of woman who wore pearls when watering
her rose bushes. “Ozzie and I so wish we could have been there.”
“Of course,” I said, when I heard from inside the limo the swish of silk on leather and
Percy reared out in a dove-gray mourning suit.
“Oh my,” said Harriet, moving close enough I could read the time on her gold watch. I
felt underdressed, as I always did around Percy, even though I’d polished my two-tone bucks
and pressed my khakis.
I made introductions.
“A pleasure,” she said.
“Charmed.” She didn’t offer her hand, and he didn’t extend his. Percy didn’t own a
television, and Mrs. Nelson probably didn’t know there was a bustling international traffic in
arms. In their non-overlapping spheres, each had no idea who the other was, no idea the
other was at the zenith of their own world.
“You have lovely rose bushes,” Percy said, sweeping his hand at them as though making
a speech. “I noticed them as we passed by.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Where are you all going on this fine morning?”
“Venice,” Percy said.
“Ah. Say hello to the ocean for me,” she said. “I don’t see it much anymore.”
“We will,” I said, then followed Percy into the limo.
Before I could ask about Venice, he asked, “What do you think Mrs. Nelson thinks of the
Domino Theory?” Across the limo, he sat large and grave as the Lincoln Memorial.
“Do you really not know who she is?”
He shook his head. In the crepuscular shadows of the limo, his eyes were the color of
dried heather. “Do you think she knows that a third of the world is in flames?”

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“I think every morning, she wakes up and kisses her husband on the cheek and puts on
her makeup and goes downstairs to the icebox and gets herself a peach. A perfect peach.
And she eats it.”
Despite its length, the Bentley was gliding through traffic like a fish, and its engine
sounded like the sated purr of some cruel beast. I stretched my legs, lit a Lucky, and asked if
he’d seen the trailer for The Longest Day.
He shook his head. “I haven’t been to the cinema in months. Although …” Memory
tugged the corners of his mouth back toward his ears. “I had no idea Agamdeep was a
member of the Mickey Mouse Club.”
“So you’re telling me you’ve only left the bed for whisky and rubbers?”
The aperture of his smile widened from smirk to cocksman grin. “Not even whisky,” he
said. “Agamdeep does not tipple either.”
“Yellow fever?”
“Monogamy.”
“No,” I said, eyebrows floating above my head.
“When next you see her, you might observe the fourth finger of her left hand.”
I choked on smoke, coughed like I was losing the war to TB. I shook my head. “I would
imagine I would be able to observe it from quite some distance. Diamond?”
“Emerald. Asscher cut. Quite tasteful.”
“Does it exert its own gravitational force on nearby objects?”
He wove his fingers into a series of X’s. “‘Tasteful’ does not mean small. Grace’s
engagement ring would not be described as petite.”
After a few years, I’d ceased to notice Gracie’s ring, whose heart-shaped sapphire was
bigger than an M&M. Smiling at Percy, I raised my cigarette in a nicotine toast. “Here’s to

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marrying late. Twenty years ago she would’ve been lucky to get a cigar band.”
I paused to watch crumble one of the foundational assumptions of my reality – Percy
Bornholm’s perennial bachelorhood. What would be next? Mickey volunteering at a soup
kitchen?
“Here’s to love,” he said, lifting a tumbler of milk.
“That’s the best explanation you’ve got?” The sex life I imagined for them was swirling
before my eyes, and I wanted to pluck a morsel from the air and chomp down. Was she
double-jointed? Born without a gag reflex? Tight as a socket wrench? Or was she simply
the first woman Percy’d ever met whose capacity for fucking matched his own?
His smile desiccated to a thin line. “Women who’ve suffered torture have a different
perspective on sex.”
I nodded, then rolled down the window and let my paw kite. Even in the headwind it
was hot. A week till Independence Day. Eventually, I turned my head from the sleepy
stucco storefronts of West Hollywood. “Maybe Agamdeep understands why somebody
would want to rope a talking dog to a table and fuck her while somebody else burns her with
a flat iron.”
His irises seemed to have darkened to squid ink. “There is no understanding. People do
evil things because people are evil.”
I had no response to that, so instead I said, “You wake one day and think to yourself: I’ve
never done anything great. Then you start thinking that every time you wake up. That day for
me was a long time ago.” I felt heat behind my eyes – I’d never said that to anyone, not
even Gracie. I didn’t say anything to Gracie anymore. “You wouldn’t understand that.
You’re a war hero.”
“On the contrary.”

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When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “I want to make a movie that shows people what it’s like
to be me, animal me.”
“What is it like to be you?”
“Everything is too big, and I compensate for being small by wearing dressy clothes, but
they just make me hot and itchy, and being hot and itchy in grown-up clothes makes you
seem that much more like a kid. The best you can hope for is that people think you’re cute,
The best you can hope for is that people think you’re sort of a person.”
“Enough of a person not to eat.”
I chuckled. “Exactly. And I was so close. We were so close. Nineteen fifty-two. The
Searchers. I was going to be a cowboy.” I sighed, staring out at the delis and hamburger
stands of Fairfax Avenue.
“The only moment we have is this one.” To my cattish sense, his pheromones were a
leitmotif: D-E-A-G-C# … and whither next I didn’t know: the resolution of a high D
perhaps, but just as easily the uneasy F#, the major third, or the F natural, mournful and no
less precarious.
I turned again to the window. Our itinerary was an arm, the mountainous shoulder of
Hollywood trailing down the elbow of Fairfax and Venice Boulevard, where we turned,
cruising along the forearm of Los Angeles, which ended with its fingers dangling in the
ocean.
I’d been a seacat all my days until Gracie moved us to the canyon, and Venice was still
home, every storefront and intersection a memory. Centinela, Colonial, Wasatch, Boise,
Frances, Stewart. Venice High, where Bugs and I were for one beautiful disastrous season
assistant coaches on the girls’ track team. The PCH, which was neither pacific nor coastal
nor a highway, crammed with tank-sized convertibles a mile from the water. I rolled down

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my window and let all of it into my lungs, the smell of dead fish brining on the shore, of
motor oil and hot dogs and tar. I squinted to see if the woman idling in the pink El Camino
on the PCH was in fact Dolores del Rio. It was not. I waved anyway.
We slid past bodegas and by-the-hour motels. Men in sombreros selling mangos on
sticks. Boys in swim trucks cracking their beach towels in the air like Lash LaRue. A busker
pointing his trombone toward the sun. Three negro bodybuilders lumbering back from the
pits, passing back and forth a carton of milk. I saluted them as we passed, and they returned
the favor. Then the limo turned onto a side street, suddenly and unexpectedly into the shade
of a factory, where a dozen laborers were hauling its former contents to a flatbed truck. We
parked half a block away, the driver let us out, and Percy led me to the giant brick cube. My
heart rate rose as I read the darker silhouette against the sun-bleached brick: JONES
ADHESIVES.
“Formerly a glue factory,” Percy said.
“Hm.”
“You should be pleased,” he said. “They no longer make glue from horses. It’s all
synthetic now. Progress.”
“Great,” I said as he ushered me into the cavern that still smelled like scared old nags.
“Imagine it. You and Jerry on the line. A film of the everyman. Black-and-white, like
Godard.” The inside of the factory already felt like being in a black-and-white movie.
Everything inside was wolf, slate, nisser, dun, charcoal and pewter and stormcloud. The belts
were still there, along with the catwalks, but everything else was being gutted in double-time.
“So what’s the drama?” I asked, as my eyes drifted from the corrugated steel rafters down
to a card table wedged near a boiler, where a pair of mods in Moe haircuts were puzzling
over paperwork and circuitry. Workers buzzed around them, but the two young men looked

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like they’d never picked up anything heavier than an LP. Santa’s elves did not wear shoes so
pointy, nor did Grace own trousers so tight.
“Kippy, Marlowe!” Percy called. “The man of the hour has arrived.” They stood. One
was tall and wore Gandhi glasses, the other was short and did not. Both sported turtlenecks
despite the heat.
“Ungle,” said the short one.
“Cap’n,” said the other.
“Dis stuff’s croizy.” Bewildered, they handed us what looked like metallic punch cards,
yellowing papers covered in schematics and math equations, stamps with tiny geometric
designs that turned out to be copper.
“Dis was gleu factory?”
“I doan Adam an Ave it.”
I looked to Percy for translation, but he was examining everything with a collector’s eye.
“Do you know what they’re for?”
“Fline saucers?” the tall one said, pointing to a detailed drawing of a donut-shaped forms
hovering in mid-air.
The short one piffed out air through girlish lips. “De mafs oin novvin I ever see.”
The paper was full of x’s and y’s, arrows and parentheses, tick marks and Greek letters.
“Look,” the tall one said, “Das lambda calc an das Oinstoin, but dis –” he said, stabbing a
stem-like finger into the middle of a page filled with stacked sets of equations bookended by
huge brackets, with marginalia that looked like doodles of creaseless impossible origami. He
stared at Percy, then down at me. “Dis is Magic Merlin.”
“Where did you find it?” asked Percy.
“Up the apples ‘n’ pears,” said the short one, waving up at the small office where ten

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years earlier I’d passed out and woke up with my career in tatters. Since Percy knew
everything, I wondered if he knew that too.
“Looksee this,” said the tall one, pulling out a small radio, smiling. “Bo-lles ‘n’ stoppas.”
He pulled the antenna tall and tuned it until the white noise clarified to an understandable
American voice, with only the tinkle of electric surf in the background: “Yeah, uh … we
knocked the door of one-nine-one-one Curson with the warrant and the uh … lady of the
house came out without any uh … trouble …”
“What?” I said. I felt my ears prick, natural antennae. 1911 Curson was our address.
The voice on the other end said, “Did she discuss the incident?”
“Uh … no,” said the other voice. “She uh … well, she’s pretty broken up. We’ll see
what she says downtown … But man,” he continued, his voice relaxing from awkwardness
to sleazy awe, “she looks just like the cartoon. Sexiest cat I ever saw.”
I tipped my chin up toward Percy, whose eyes were the color of bullets. “Keep up the
good work, boys,” he said to his brainy Cockney nephews. “Tom,” he said, with the grim
confidence of a man who’d extricated guiltier people from stickier situations, “what’s say we
head downtown and rescue the damsel in distress?”
We hoofed it back to the limo, the modern steed, bearing us east.
Traffic on the 10 was more stop than go, and Percy was asking me if I had a lawyer.
“No.”
“I’ll find one. Has Gracie to your knowledge committed a crime?”
“No.” I knew that at worst Gracie would be in some holding tank, but still, I pictured
her naked in a cage hung from the ceiling of the central offices, for all the officers to jeer and
ogle and spit upon. I set my jaw and felt hot liquid pooling at the corners of my eyes. The
limo stopped again and I smashed my fist against the door’s inlaid birch.

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“We’ll be laughing about it over Sauternes tonight,” said Percy, patting my leg.
I rolled down my window to a fog of exhaust and cigarette smoke and the curses of
drivers made late by whatever apocalypse was disrupting us up ahead. It was L.A. reduced
to its component emotional parts: boredom and peevishness. But over the honks and
blasphemies I heard a great mechanical purr building from behind the limo, louder and
louder, as drivers craned to see. “What the hell is that?”
“A helicopter,” Percy said, without looking. “An Alouette II if I had to make a guess.”
Seconds later, flying as low as a crop duster, it whipped overhead, so near I could see the
pilot hadn’t shaved that morning, so near I could the only passenger, an enormous white cat
in a white suit, a white Stetson tucked low over his brow, a cigar between his red lips, leaning
out the open door and staring east toward the sons of bitches who’d tossed his daughter in
the clinker. For one moment, the pissed-off drivers ceased their bitching, their honking,
their snarling, staring up at the feline who’d outsmarted them all. And then, he was gone,
leaving me behind, earthbound and stuck.
“I can’t believe he’s going to beat me there,” I sighed. I wondered if she would have
called him first even if she’d known where I was.
Odin White did beat us to the station, but not by much: within a few minutes the cops
managed to haul the overturned plum truck to the shoulder, and with an almost sexual
release we glided past the sweet-smelling wreckage and into the clear, at which Percy gave
the driver permission to push the Bentley’s ten cylinders to the edge. We made it from
Culver City to LAPD headquarters in seven minutes. I sprinted up the steps with Percy
close behind, and I was not ten feet inside the swinging double doors when I heard the red-
clay-and-bourbon baritone of Old Man White, bellowing hard enough to make the particle
board ceiling shimmy: “What in the hell do you mean, manslaughter?” I found him in the

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central office, spitting consonants at ham-faced sergeant. “This is specious speciesism,” he
growled, his s’s striking the officer like asps.
“Major White,” I called. 1
st
Infantry. WWI. Black Lions. When he ran out of
ammunition, he crossed the Meuse with a pick ax to clear the Jerries on the other side.
“Thomas, is this how they do things in the South?” he asked. More than once he’d told
me nothing good could come from anything south of Santa Barbara. “Presumption of guilt?
Suspension of habeas corpus?” Officers with stars on their lapels began circling for damage
control, including Chief Donovan himself, and although he was seventy-five years old, Old
Man White started turning quick little circles, shifting weight from foot to foot as lightly as a
Golden Glove flyweight, scanning the humans, his gnarled fists raised, his tail whipping the
air as if for flies. At my side, Percy looked impressed; as a connoisseur of power, he
appreciated the masterful application of force.
Chief Donovan strode through the other officers and stared Old Man White down a nose
broken and never set properly. “Who the hell –”
“You ever want to each a peach again?” said Old Man White, setting himself to face the
man square. “You ever want to eat a strawberry? How about a walnut? I can personally
guarantee you that you won’t eat another one all year if you don’t release my daughter
immediately.”
“Major White, if you would like to see you daughter, you may,” came a voice from
behind. It was Commander Speck, forever weary, forever one step behind the villains.
Chief Donovan turned his razor-burnt face from Old Man White to me and back to Old
Man White. “You attached to Grace White?”
“Grace White Grimalkin,” I corrected.
“Goddamit,” said Odin. “Somebody tell me what happened.”

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“On the night of May 17, a Mr. Horace Foster was shot through the chest outside of his
home in Griffith Park. He was killed instantly, and an autopsy revealed that the cartridge
was a .50-110 Winchester.” He paused for effect, and although the technicalities were lost
on me, Old Man White nodded warily. “It’s a old buffalo hunter bullet, and Winchester
hasn’t manufactured them, or the guns, for thirty years. There are only eleven registered in
Los Angeles. One of them was registered to Mrs. Grace White Grimalkin.” I bit my lip,
remembering our gin-soaked night near the Observatory.
“What about the other ten?” said Old Man White.
“The ballistics report suggested the gunfire came from further up in the park. The other
ten owners had alibis, and moreover, six of the guns were rusted beyond use.”
“There are plenty of unregistered guns out there,” murmured Old Man White, his eyes
the hot blue of a pilot light. “Not just those ten, not just the one I gave her.”
“We’ve been searching Griffith Park, and yesterday near the site predicted by the
ballistics report a detective discovered what appears to be a conquistador helmet.” I had to
cover my mouth to keep from swearing. Speck rolodexed through a pocket notebook.
“The inscription reads: To Tomsy, from your favorite good-time girl Gracie. There was rifle residue
in the nearby creosote.”
“I want to talk to my wife,” I said as Chief Donovan retreated again to his office,
cracking his knuckles one at a time.
Commander Speck nodded and led me out toward the elevators. “Only visitor at a time,”
said ham-faced officer as Old Man White followed behind me.
“Go fuck yourself,” my father-in-law and I said at exactly the same time.
She wasn’t in a cage, or the drunk tank. Instead, she sitting on a folding chair in the
corner of the switchboard room, staring into a cup of coffee, a female officer by her side. In

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a building full of men, they put her where they put all the women.
“Papa!” she yelled, standing so fast she splashed coffee on the linoleum. “Tommy.”
Old Man White wrapped his much smaller daughter in a hug that resembled a wrestling
move. I imagined a pair of sweaty men grappling in unitards, then collapsing into each
other, embracing, murmuring apologies, fears, long-forgotten slights, then weeping, weeping,
weeping for joy.
“They were so rough, Papa,” she said, tilting her head to the side so that I could see her
face, the scared-excited expression of a girl about to be spanked by her friend’s father.
“When I went to the door, I was only wearing a negligee,” she whispered, so yieldingly the
words disappeared over my shoulder, lost amid the chatter of the switchboard operators.
“They licked their lips. They patted me down for weapons, both of them. One after the
other.” These comments were for me. “They slid their hands under my negligee, up my
inner thighs. All the way up. They handcuffed me, forced my hands behind my back,” she
breathed. “And they were so much bigger.” She licked her lower lip. “They wanted so badly
to have their way with me.” If the female officer heard any of this, she pretended not to,
examining her nails with the heed of a jeweler.
Gracie released herself from her father’s arms and turned her face from mine to his,
letting her lower lip pout. Her voice condensed from steam to water as she said to Old Man
White, “And they wouldn’t even let me put my makeup on before taking me down here.”
He shook his head with the grim satisfaction of a prophet whose worst predictions come
true. “I never should have let you leave the San Joaquin.”
“So, Grace,” I said hoarsely, my throat parched with lust. “What did you tell the good
police officers?” I whisked the female officer away.
“Nothing, Tommy, I didn’t tell them nothing,” she said, taking a seat.

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“Anything,” said her father.
“Anything,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Percy said he knows a good lawyer,” I said.
“We’ll get Clarence Darrow!” shouted Old Man White, raising a white finger to the
ceiling.
“Sir, I’m pretty sure Lawyer Darrow has gone to the great courtroom in the sky.”
“Hmmmph,” he grunted. “I didn’t read that in the papers.”
“I think it was a while ago.” Since the rights of talking animals were dependent on the
hypothesis that creatures with bestial ancestors could be sentient, Clarence Darrow had been
a champion of ours ever since defending Scopes in the Monkey Trial. Above the TV in
Spike’s living room were framed photos of three men: John F. Kennedy, Fulton Sheen, and
Clarence Darrow. Oh, what knots Spike’s Catholic mind must tie itself in.
“The cops told you what happened?”
The coquettishness vanished into a migrained face as she pounded the side of her fist
against the soft depression of her temple. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know bullets
could go that far.”
“Wait,” said Old Man White, taking the seat the female cop had vacated. “Tell me what
happened.”
So we did, sparing no detail except the sequence of tackling, impotence, thorn bush. At
the end of it, the fight seemed drained out of him. “You shot elephant cartridges downhill?
Into a neighborhood?”
“I didn’t know they were elephant cartridges,” Gracie moaned. “I didn’t know how close
the houses were. I didn’t know they could go that far.”
I set my paw on her head, the fur hot from some combination of fear and frustration.

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“I’ll take the fall,” I said. The words felt like razor blades in my mouth. “It has your prints,
but I was wearing my driving gloves. Could have been me.”
“Oh, Tommy,” she said, leaning into me. “I’ve made such a mess of things.”
“We’ll get out of this,” I said, trying to spin out plausibilities in my mind. I took a Lucky
from a pack in my pocket, dropped it, picked it up, dropped it again, picked it up again.
“They got Lana Turner’s kid off even though she stabbed Johnny Stompanato a dozen times
in the chest. We could say the gun went off by itself.”
She sniffed. “The cops said they found six other Winchester bullets in his yard and
around the neighborhood.”
“Shit,” I muttered as behind me a dozen women chirped and rearranged wires in an ever-
changing cat’s cradle. I tried putting on my best face. “Worst case scenario, involuntary
manslaughter is what – a year, two? I bet we could get it knocked down to probation or
something.”
“What if the family sues?” Gracie said. “Wrongful death.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Old Man White, massaging her shoulder. From the
chair, he lifted his nineteenth-century face to mine. “You’re taking responsibility like a man,
Thomas. Looking out for your family. I admire that.”
“Thanks, Major White,” I said.
“Call me Odin.” He’d never said that to me before.
“So what’s next?” I asked Gracie.
“There’s an arraignment hearing tomorrow morning.”
“They’ll probably release you on your own recognizance,” said Old Man White, “but if
there’s bail, I’ll pay it.”
“I don’t want to spend the night here, Tommy,” she said.

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I sighed. “I know, Gracie.” I had to force myself to hold her gaze. “Just think, though,
you always wanted to be in one of those film noirs, and now when you audition for one,
you’ll be able to say you have experience behind bars.”
She tried to smile at my hamstrung joke. “I don’t think it’s worth it, Tommy.”

“Where do you keep your whiskey, Thomas?” Old Man White asked later that afternoon,
not thirty seconds inside my front door, opening my cupboard doors and slamming them
shut when he didn’t find what he wanted. Thirty-feet behind, bellboying his steamer trunk, I
was already regretting my offer to have him stay with us.
“One above the fridge,” I said, staring through the arch that separated the living room
from the kitchen. He was tall enough he didn’t need a stepstool to reach the cupboards.
Since I did need the stepstool, why did I keep it up there? Now it was too late to move them
– if I did, he’d make some oblique comment about how I always needed a boost.
“I’m assuming you take yours neat,” he said.
“Uh, yeah, Major White – Odin. Yeah, Odin, neat.” I dropped the steamer, which hit
the hardwood with a cartoon slap. He strode out, carrying two tumblers, each four fingers
deep with the Dirty Bird.
“I have better whiskey than Wild Turkey,” I said.
“No, you don’t.” He handed mine to me and lifted his. “To John Muir, Clarence
Darrow, and Dwight David Eisenhower.”
I sipped mine, he drained his, his Adam’s apple pulsing behind the elk bone slide of his
black bolo tie. It was going to be a long night.
He refilled, then stood, casting his eyes to the walls in an attempt to decipher the visual
code of his daughter’s adult mind. He’d never been to the house, and probably hadn’t been

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south of Fresno since Prohibition. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the unframed canvas
hanging above the piano, a cartoony still life of a steak, raw and ungarnished.
“Uh, porterhouse, I think.”
“No. What I mean to say is: is it an advertisement?”
“I don’t think so. It’s art, I guess. At least that’s what she tells me.” What I wasn’t going
to tell him was that we’d spent $1500 on it, that I’d instigated the purchase as much as
Gracie.
“Does she like meat? I didn’t think she liked meat.”
I eased into one of Gracie’s spaceman chairs. “You know, Major White –”
“Odin.”
“Odin, the encyclopedia of what Gracie likes is almost as long as long as the encyclopedia
of what she hates. And she adds new entries every day.”
He nodded, lowering himself onto the sofa. “That’s very poetic. Are you a poet?”
On the lips of any other man, that would’ve been an insult, but the mind of Odin White
admitted no irony.
“Uh, no. But I read it now and again.”
“Frost. I admire Frost.”
“Frost is –”
“I wrote poetry as a young man. All young men should write poetry, as all young men
should box. Do you box?”
“Never learned the specifics, but half my job is boxing.”
“Would you like me to recite a poem for you?” Before I could respond in the
affirmative, he barreled into “The Road Less Travelled.” At the end, I wasn’t sure if I was
supposed to clap, or nod, or congratulate his oratorical powers, so instead I lifted my

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tumbler, and said, “To Robert Frost.”
“Robert Frost,” Old Man White said, raising his. After a pause, he pointed at me like a
feline Uncle Sam and said, “You’ve taken the road less travelled.”
Relatively sure this was a compliment, I said, “Thank you.”
“I’ve seen your films,” he said, “at least a few. There’s a film house in Stockton.”
“Oh. Good.”
“I don’t like films. Too simplistic. Insufficiently nuanced. No insight into the human
condition. I go to see yours, then I leave before the feature. I like yours.”
“Thanks. We –”
“The chase represents the great truth of life distilled: we all want something we don’t
have.”
“Wow.” I decided to risk a joke. “Very philosophical. Are you a philosopher?”
He laughed in the way his namesake would have: an oceanic bellow that could crack
pines and turn rocks to rubble. He gave me the Uncle Sam again. “You’re Hamlet.”
I nodded, brought my whiskey to my lips, realized what I really wanted was morphine, or
catnip, or sex – sex most of all – and set the tumbler back down on Gracie’s table.
“I read the classics,” he said. Age descended more gracefully on animals whose fur was
already white. Gracie said he did a hundred pushups every morning before his breakfast of
sardine omelet and swam in Bear Creek every afternoon before dinner. “I’ve read Hamlet
eight times.”
“Seven more times than I have.”
“Why do you think he waits to kill Claudius?”
I scratched under my chin. I wasn’t sure if it was a trick question. “Well, I suppose he
doesn’t want to believe that everybody is in cahoots against him. It’d be bleak if all the

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conspiracies turned out to be true.”
“I think he was a coward.”

I woke early for the arraignment, but Old Man White was already up and dressed. His
bolo tie appeared to be a mouse skull. “To the wars!” he shouted when he saw me.
“Right,” I said.
Percy met us on the courthouse steps, his eyes the color of grass after a rain shower, his
suit like something from a magazine, and at his side was a man who looked like something
from a true crime comic book, loaves of flesh straining against the buttons of his chalk-
stripe double-breasted suit, enough thick rings on his fat fingers to double as brass knuckles,
voluptuous lips that seemed on the verge of smirking, mischievous grey eyes with reservoirs
of menace behind. He was shorter than Old Man White, and as big around as an oil drum.
“Thomas, Mr. White, may I introduce Mr. Dominic D’Abruzzo, esquire.”
His palm was steak-thick and very soft. “Lady Justice has been shanghaied here,” he said
in a quiet Jersey rasp. “We plan to return her to port.” I nodded, and he continued. “The
witnesses: none. The evidence: circumstantial. The ballistics report: grossly overstated.”
His cloud-colored eyes pinned me: “Your wife, she’s a fighter.” I was relieved he didn’t say
anything about me taking the fall, and I was ashamed at my relief.
D’Abruzzo ushered us up the steps and inside. I wondered if he’d ever killed anyone.
Before I could absorb my surroundings – checkerboard tile, copper crown moulding,
general musk of despondency – I heard a voice call my name and saw Gracie racing toward
me, the woman cop from the day before clipping behind. “Tommy,” she said. I thought
she was making a break for it, and a half-second’s calculus told me that if it came to it, I
would aid and abet, that we would somehow escape the courthouse and its dozens of cops,

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race Percy’s limo to Old Man White’s chopper parked in Burbank, fly south fast, live out the
rest of our days in a Ensenada beach house, eating fresh swordfish and drinking Mai-Tais. It
wouldn’t be so bad.
But Gracie slowed, nearing us, and she was beaming, as was the police officer behind.
“They’re releasing me, Tommy!” she said, crashing into my chest.
“Yeah, Gracie, I know,” I said, cradling her. “We’ll put up the bail.”
“No, no, they’re dropping the charges. They found the person who really did it.” As the
female officer nodded, Gracie explained that they’d found a drifter’s campsite up in the hills
of Griffith Park, along with a Winchester ’86 and cases of elephant cartridges. The drifter
was dead. Alcohol poisoning. The police had confirmed with locals that he liked to roam
the neighborhood talking to himself about Jesus.
At the conclusion of her story, Percy threw his long arms in the air and yelled “Huzzah!”
Old Man White embraced her and said, “I knew you never could have done anything
wrong.”
“Easiest case I ever had,” grinned D’Abruzzo.
I sighed, deciding that I was happy. We owed someone something for this, and I didn’t
want to know what that something was.

9.

Gliding my Caddy into one of the few open spots in the lot – chalkboard black and big
enough to land a Cessna – I felt like Jonathan Harker outside Vlad’s castle, like a Crusader
knocking on the gate of Saladin, like John Wayne clomping unarmed toward a Comanche

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village. I squinted at the complex of buildings, wondering if the morning sun behind them
was playing tricks with my eyes. Nope. The water tower had Mickey Mouse ears.
Welcome to Disney Studios.
The façade of the central building was held up by enormous stone versions of the Seven
Dwarves, while flapping in the nearer distance was a banner stamped with Pluto’s slobbery
face, and from some unseen speakers, Satan’s children’s choir was droning “It’s a Small
World.”
I stepped out into the heat of June, dropped morphine into my flask, took a swig, lit a
Lucky, shotgunned it, lit another, stuffed it into the corner of my mouth, took another swig,
rubbed my neck with catnip, took a few calming breaths, and marched into the mouse’s den.
After striding under Dopey, Grumpy and the gang (all of whom were actually quite
gentlemanly, except for Sneezy, who like Chuck Berry was currently in the pen for
transporting a fourteen-year-old across state lines – white slavers, beware: the Mann Act will
getcha), I opened the door and wandered to the welcome desk, which in Disney’s trademark
cursive was helpfully labeled ALWAYS LET YOUR CONSCIENCE BE YOUR GUIDE.
The woman behind it was wearing Mickey Mouse ears atop a brutal blonde bob.
“May I help you?”
With the Disney pantheon staring down at me in glossy statue form, I dropped my voice
and tried to think how Philip Marlowe would say it. “Thomas Grimalkin. Here to see
Disney. Walt Disney. He’s expecting me.”
“Of course,” she said, smiling at me with teeth so perfect they looked hand-carved. She
pulled a pair of Mickey Mouse ears from under the desk. “Would you like to be an honorary
Mouseketeer for the day?”
I stared at her, wondering if she was joking, and when it became clear from her rigor

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mortis face that she was not, I pointed at my own ears. “Already got some.”
“Of course. Would you like a button?” she asked, pulling a Minnie button from a
drawer. “Or perhaps a sash?” she added, retrieving from another drawer a sort Girl Scout-y
cummerbund festooned with everyone from Mickey down to Clarabell.
I exhaled and she made a face at my smoke. Philip Marlowe never had to put up with
this shit. “Could you direct me to Mr. Disney?”
“Right this way,” she said.
She led me through an empty soundstage as big as a hangar, peppering me with Disney
trivia the whole time, as though she was paid for each fact recited to an uninterested guest.
“Do you know that Mickey Mouse’s ears are set one hundred and five degrees apart, the
same angle as the hydrogen atoms in a water molecule?”
“You don’t say.”
“Do you know that the sorcerer in Fantasia is named Yen Sid, which is “Disney” spelled
backward?”
“You don’t say.”
“Do you know that Disneyland’s Matterhorn is the tallest structure in Anaheim?”
“You don’t say.”
I heard the Mickey Mouse Club before I saw it, sniffling in sing-song the sort of jingle
you’d hear on the radio for an ad hawking detergent. Of course, that wasn’t so surprising –
The Mickey Mouse Club was an hour-long commercial for itself that every weeknight tykes
forced their parents to delay dinner for. If that wasn’t sorcery, I didn’t know what was.
The secretary opened a door, and there they were, a dozen kids in mouse ears aping
childhood as imagined by Walt Disney: faggy uniforms, synchronized motions, wooden sets
painted popsicle colors. The little jingle finished and somebody yelled “Cut!” At once, the

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smiles sagged, shoulders drooped, MM ears removed to scratch itchy scalps. One girl no
more than ten started rubbing the hinges of her jaw – sore from grinning, I assumed.
“Aren’t they just adorable?” asked my guide.
Unsure if it was a rhetorical question, I declined to answer.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” she said, pointing at an empty canvas director’s seat. “Mr.
Disney will be in shortly.” Before departing, she left pair of Mickey Mouse ears behind my
chair, just in case.
In the middle of it was the adult ringleader Jimmie Dodd, the simplifying conscience of a
misremembered adolescence, as perky between takes as he was when the eye of the camera
was on his Howdy Doody face – jogging in place, cracking his knuckles, singing scales. He
must’ve been fifty, but he was still handsome in a creepy bachelor uncle sort of way.
Disney’s hand was everywhere, Disney himself was nowhere; I couldn’t believe I was
going to have to sit through The Mickey Mouse Club. I wondered if Disney had done it on
purpose. I focused on my breathing – in for a four-count, out for eight, like Bugs and I had
taught the sprinters on the girls’ track team at Venice High. Most of what I remember from
those practices was Bugs staring at the girls’ heaving chests as they breathed, telling them
they were doing just fine.
It was too early to be drunk, and yet. I was clutching the chair’s arm to keep from
reaching for my flask. I thought of the lion at the zoo who exhorted me to give up my
dissolution. That had been a nice idea. I pulled out my flask and took a quick nip, but a boy
with a messy blonde ducktail spotted me and speed-walked over. “Hey,” he said, his big
teeth elbowing each other for space in his little mouth, “this is an alcohol-free set.”
“They had to tell you that? What are you, ten?” His white turtleneck was stitched in red
with his name: Davey.

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“Eleven. Mr. Disney sent Mary Jane home my first year because she was drinking
schnapps in the girl’s room.”
“It’s a prescription,” I said, which was partially true.
“Likely story. If you gimme some, I won’t tattle.”
I pictured Janey, only a few years old than this boy, choking and passed out on Bugs’s
bed. “Sure,” I said, pulling the flask from the inside pocket and handing it over. “Knock
yourself out.”
He stuffed it under his white turtleneck, stole behind a fake tree, put it to his lips, tipped
the bottom so high his Mickey Mouse ears fell off, and glugged. He returned to me a few
seconds later looking like he’d seen God.
“Wow,” he said, passing it back to me. “Is this what it feels like to be a grown-up? I
want to be a grown-up right now.”
“You’re welcome, Caliban,” I said, returning it to my jacket.
He tottered back toward the set, much happier than his exhausted compatriots.
The nondescript director was calling everyone back to one wing of the set, which had
been converted into a facsimile schoolroom.
“Okay, Mouseketeers,” said Jimmie Dodd, standing at the front of the class as the kids
slid into the steel-and-wood desk. “Who can tell me what a Communist is?”
Tiny hands flew skyward.
“A bad person.”
“An enemy of America.”
“A Russian.”
“A Chink.”
“The devil!” screamed Davey, whose neck was having a hard time steadying his melon of

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a head.
A few kids turned around to gawk, and Jimmie Dodd’s ginger eyebrows rose,
accordioning the wrinkles of his forehead.
“And what do the Russians have that’s so dangerous?” Jimmie asked.
“The bomb.”
“The H-bomb.”
“Nukes.”
“Oh, God, we’re all going to die,” moaned Davey, flattening his face against his desk.
Jimmie Dodd glanced at the director twenty feet away, who mouthed We’re rolling.
“The Russians are ruthless,” Jimmie said, as the kliegs overhead dimmed on the
schoolroom and brightened on the opposite wing of the sound stage, where, to my surprise,
Cuffy stood pointing a crop at a world map, wearing the world’s largest Soviet marshal’s
uniform, its double-breasted olive jacket covered with so many medals it looked armored.
On the map, southern California was marked with a red X, which he tapped the tip of his
crop. “Zees eez vare zee bums veal drop.”
Davey was whimpering. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew they were going to come for me.”
“Hollyvood,” Cuffy continued, stroking his blonde handlebar evilly. “Zee center of
freedom and fun in Amer-ee-ka.”
“But don’t worry,” said Jimmie, as the lights rose on the schoolroom. “With our
advanced American radar detection systems, we’ll be able to know about a missile at least
thirty seconds before it hits. Which gives us time to do what, kids?”
“Get under our desks!”
“American desks!”
“We’ll be safe under there.”

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“That’s right,” said Jimmie as the kids scuttled like rats under a log pile. “As soon as we
hear the siren, we should –”
“Are you people insane?” said Davey, struggling to his feet. “It’s a nuclear weapon. Do you
think the Jap kids in Hiroshima would’ve been safe if only they’d crawled under their desks?”
Jimmie swallowed as the director shook his head at him, rolling his pointer fingers over each
other. I wonder if any of the Mousketeers had ever gone off the res on-camera before.
Davey squatted next to the adjacent desk and a tiny girl huddled beneath. “Darlene,” he
said, “imagine a flaming house falling down on us.” He rapped on the wood of her desk.
“Do you think this is going to protect you?” She started bawling. He stood, steadying
himself on Darlene’s desk, and stared right into the camera. “Children of America,” he said.
“Run away. Flee to the hills.” A few of the younger Mousketeers began weeping. “The
Russians hate you,” said Davey, “and they’re gonna blow your town to smithereens.” With
that, he collapsed to the floor, his Mickey Mouse ears landing upside-down at his feet. The
other Mouseketeers gasped and circled up around him. I stood up to get a better look.
“Think he’s dead?” asked an older boy.
“Cut!” said the director, storming over to Jimmie. “What the hell – ”
“Heck,” hissed Jimmie.
“What the heck’s the matter with him?”
“Probably just overheated,” said Jimmie, although the sound stage was cool as a cellar.
“I told you the air raid sketch was too much for them,” said the director.
“Mr. Disney said that it’s an important lesson for the children to learn,” said Jimmie,
stepping through the children and sliding his hand behind Davey’s head. “Davey? Davey?
Are you okay?”
The boy coughed and sat up, mournfully scanning the flimsy wood of the set, the heavy

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arms of the rafters high overhead. “We’ve gotta kill the Ruskies before they kill us.”
Trying to smile, Jimmie stood, told the kids to return to their seats, then pointed at the
director, who shrugged and started rolling.
Jimmie’s canned mini-homilies they called Doddisms: “Be nice,” he told the camera,
panning around behind the school desks. “So many of the world’s problems would be
solved if we were just more pleasant to others.” I swung my head to the other wing of the
soundstage, where Cuffy in the semi-darkness was clutching a toy rocket, flying it over his
desk, shushing the air, a pot of water coming to boil. “Smile at the mailman,” Jimmie Dodd
continued. Davey was running his fingers through his ducktail, a snapshot of adolescent
anguish, but the rest of the Mouseketeers were nodding along. Clearly they already smiled at
the mailman. “Do your chores without grumbling. Thank your teachers at the end of the
class period.”
At that, Davey cried, “We’re talking about the end of the world. How’s dusting the
lampshades going to keep the Russians from killing us?” Darlene blew her nose in a sheet of
notebook paper.
“Cut!” yelled the director. “Dammit, Davey.” A few of the wee distaffs covered their
lips with both hands, as though the curses might sneak inside them through their mouths.
“Kid’s got a point,” I said.
“Who the hell are you?” the director asked. His moustache was bristling like an angry
porcupine.
“The guy who’s won more Oscars than Mickey Mouse,” I said, launching a boozy
amoeba of spit toward the man’s wingtip. I gave the kids Tom’s trademark scrunch-faced
sourpuss scowl, at which the Mouseketeers oh’d and ee’d, leaving their desks and tramping
over. Deciding the scene was over, Cuffy clomped toward me too, his jackboots going tsk-

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tsk on the poured concrete floor.
“Versatile,” I told him, ignoring the kids as well the director who was still accosting me.
“Playing Nazis and Commies.”
“The accent’s not so different,” he said, shrugging. A couple of the little girls winced as
he approached. “Mr. Disney and asked me about the part at Pin’s luncheon. Definitely pays
better than porn,” he said, glancing at the kids. “And a much lower chance of getting the
clap.”
“Are you going to murder us?” one especially pint-sized girl asked Cuffy, at which he
squatted low then prestidigitated a half-dollar from behind her ear. She gasped, he handed it
to her and started pulling hard-boiled eggs from his mouth, which he gifted to the children
in turn. He made one of his medals disappear then reappear pinned on one of the turtleneck
of the Mouseketeers. I had no idea he knew sleight-of-hand. The kids were clapping, and
even Jimmie Dodd nosed over to see.
“Focus!” shouted Davey, banging on his desk. “Parlor tricks aren’t going to save us from
the Commies!”
“You’re right, Davey,” came an avuncular voice from behind us, and I turned in my seat
to see Walt Disney striding toward us, his face the same bleached gray as his suit. “Fear is
necessary. Fear is good.”

Disney had arranged for a private screening in one of the complex’s many theaters, but
he didn’t let the projectionist roll until Cuffy and I each signed so many legal documents –
non-disclosures, mostly – we could’ve papered a wall with them.
“Popcorn?” asked the secretary with the blonde bob, carrying three buckets of the stuff
as we finally settled into our seats. I loved popcorn when I was a kid, but of course never

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had the money for it, so I’d always scrounge under the seats for the shoe-pancaked tidbits;
now whenever Gracie and I went to the movies we got the biggest bucket the theater sold,
so tall in my lap I could barely see over it.
But not this time. “This isn’t the sort of movie goes well with food,” I said.
“Corn’s the surest way to a diseased duodenum,” said Cuffy, shaking his head as the
lights dimmed.
“We’re fine, Milly,” said Mr. Disney. “Thank you.”
He raised a finger above his head, cuing the projectionist.
The telltale sound of a deck being shuffled, a bit of screen crackle, and the opening
credits:

“Mouse Sex Ears”
A cop production

“I haven’t seen it myself,” Disney whispered. “But I’ve been told it’s quite obscene.”
The first shot was a spoof of the signet that began each episode of The Mickey Mouse Club:
a cartoon face inside a circle, a rodent rattier than the cartooned Mickey – sharper nose and
ears, a general suggestion of the wharf – winking at the camera, tongue waggling. The
caption read: The Dickey Douse Rub.
“Blatant copyright infringement,” hissed Disney.
A second later we got to see Dickey Douse in the fur, on a simple stage in front of the
velvet curtain, wearing cut-off shorts, a smarmy smile, and not much else. He was huge, his
torso shaped like a cyclone, muscles delineated even under a pelt of coffee-colored fur.
“Boys and goils, have we gawd show f’you,” he said in the way he must’ve learned from

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whatever Staten Island pizzeria owner took him in as an abandoned whelp. “Widout furder
ado, da Douseketeers.”
Like a carnie impresario, he turned his white-gloved palms toward the parting curtain and
back-pedaled offstage. As an unseen brass ensemble wheezed an old big band tune, a line of
topless chorus girls twirled and kicked and flounced their arms in time, and atop their heads
were tiny caps, pointier cousins of Mickey Mouse ears. The Rockettes they were not. None
of their motions quite synced, and instead of the Radio City troupe’s wide-eyed dental-ad
smiles, these girls – women, more accurately – wore hardbitten expressions of grim carnality.
On my left, the steam funneling out from Disney’s ears was the by-product of the
combustion of whole libraries of intellectual copyright law. Cuffy, on the other hand,
seemed to be enjoying the show.
At the end, Dickey Douse came in from the wings clapping slowly. “G’job goils,” he
said. “Now: Roll Call.”
“What?” Disney huffed. “I came up with that idea.”
Dickey strolled among them while they stood at attention, and he when slapped an ass,
cradled a less than buoyant breast, or, in one case, slid a crooked finger beneath a bikini
band, the woman would drolly deliver her name. Lots of flowers, jewels, months.
In mid-grope, the film cut amateurishly to a shot of a kitchen where a nubile young thing
was washing dishes at the sink, with her back to the camera, wearing only an apron and a
pair of Dickey Douse ears. A collection of sonnets could’ve been dedicated to a less worthy
object than her ass, a magical hybrid of peach and beachball that floated beneath her isthmus
of a waist, a rear end brindled with the tan line of the Coppertone girl, halfway to grown up.
I’d never thought twice about it, but the ad was more than a little creepy – a dog stripping
the bikini off an already topless toddler. How many steps from there to Dickey Douse?

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Not many, apparently. A door slammed, and Dickey marched in, wearing a workman’s
shirt, dungarees, and a toolbelt. “Dinnie, I’m ’ome!” he yelled, although she wasn’t ten feet
away.
The girl who turned on the dirty pads of her feet and placed a sudsy fingertip to her
lower lip wore ounces more makeup than the surf princess in heart-shaped glasses I’d picked
up in Malibu, but it was Janey, no doubt. My own heart dropped even as the base of my
cock tingled. At least her black eyes had healed.
“I been a bad girl, Dickie,” she said. “I went’n bought a scarf without askin’.” She
pointed to a filmy emerald thing hanging on the coat rack.
“How much it costed?” he said, crossing thick arms over a thicker chest, Kramden on
steroids.
“Not so much,” she said, not meeting his beady gaze.
“I ask you one mo’ time – how much it costed?” As loathsome as the ratty muscle jockey
was, Gracie and I’d had that conversation ten, twenty, fifty times – just like every other
couple, I supposed. I doubted the creators of Dickie Douse were trying to hold a mirror to
matrimony, but there it was.
“Four-fifty,” she whispered, staring at the linoleum.
“Fo-fitty?!?!?” Four-fifty was a steal – last time Gracie’d gone shopping and returned with
us with only four-fifty poorer I couldn’t remember.
“I’ll make it up to you,” she said.
“You got four-fifty?” he said.
“I got this,” she said, untying the apron strings and pulling the neck-strap over her head,
knocking off her Dickey Douse ears. Cuffy whistled. Even Disney ceased his litigious rant
for a moment. Like some European sports car, she curved sleekly and without interruption

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from collarbone to sapling waist to a coppery muff that made me sigh – Daphne and
Deirdre and Janey: the red hair tugged at some deep part of me – a coppery muff as
diaphanous as the silk scarf that had gotten her into all this trouble in the first place, so fine
it looked like you could lick it right off. I doubted Vickie would be so generous.
He wasn’t. In their bedroom, she unbuttoned his shirt with little admiring purrs, knelt at
his feet and unlaced his boots, unbuckled his belt and slid the snug dungarees down to reveal
a monstrous member, kinked and violet-black, as big as her forearm. As it grew, so did her
eyes. She tried taking what of it she could in her mouth, but he pushed her face away.
“Ain’t y’mout I want. On the bed.” She obliged, easing herself onto the low brass bed,
waiting for him as he stood above her yanking his own hardness as if it were a pump-action
shotgun.
“Turn over,” he said. She did.
What followed was consensual, rough but not cruel, and featured no household
implements twisted to dark purpose. During the sex, Janey sounded exactly as I thought she
would: bitchy, masochistic, everything growled deep from the back of her throat: “Drill me,
Daddy. Make it hurt.” From her winces and occasional cries of pain, it did.
“She’s not faking it,” Cuffy whispered.
At the end, Dickey was as good as his name, pulling out and dousing her as his eyes rolled
back and his whiskers twitched. Without bothering to wipe her off, he stood up and told
her he was going to go out for a beer with the boys. “Come back soon,” she said, then
paused for a moment, trying to remember her line. “Once a day ain’t never enough.”
The scene cut to her pretending to sleep in bed, freshly showered and made up. There
was a knock on the door, and I assumed it would be Round Two with Dickey, but instead it
was a girl with a dark Brillo pad of hair roofing a face less pretty than perky. The girl’s

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primary asset was a bust prodigious beneath a white turtleneck that read Annette.
“Annette!” called Janey from the bed. “Annette Poonicello.” I had to cover my mouth
to keep my chuckle inside.
“Oh, come on,” said Disney. “Not Annette. Sweet little Annette.” I wondered if he
realized his little innocent was currently shooting a film in which she spent most of her time
in a bikini.
“Spitting image,” said Cuffy.
“Oh,” said Annette, covering her eyes when she saw Jane. “I’m sorry Dinnie, I didn’t
know you were dishabille.”
“’S’all right,” said Janey, patting the edge of the bed. “I’m not ashamed a my body.”
“Of course not,” said Annette. “You shouldn’t be. No woman should be.” At that,
Disney and Cuffy and I all shared a glance. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d never
had that thought before. “Where’s Dickey?” asked Annette, setting herself on the edge.
“Out with the boys,” said Janey.
“He’s so big,” said Annette, hugging herself.
Janey nodded. “More ways than one. Before he went out to the bar, he was … with me.”
Little Annette covered her mouth at the revelation. “But sometimes, I don’t feel like we
really have a connection. Sometimes, a woman wants something, something softer, something
sweeter, an emotional link to the person she’s with.” She was tiptoeing her fingers up
Annette’s arm. “She wants to be treated like a queen, not a harem girl. Sometimes you want
a steak,” she said, walking her fingers toward Annette’s breast, and sometimes you wanted a
soufflé.” Whatever washed-up poet wrote those lines did not have the literal-minded
American moviegoer in mind. Was I a steak or a soufflé? I didn’t know what the hell that
even meant. Whatever it was, I was looking forward to whatever was going to happen next

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more as a how-to than as porn, but I never got to see what truly pleases the fairer sex: just as
Janey was tugging the turtleneck over the shocked Annette’s bust, Disney stood up and
yelled “Cut,” stopping the film at the white undercarriage of Annette’s bra, just as a voice
from above us bellowed, “Minerva is not a lesbian!”
Mickey stood just below the projectionist’s booth, shaking his death’s-head cane at the
screen. Ten seats down was little Davey, who made a face and said, “Phoooey, I wanted to
see her knockers. I bet they’re gravy. I was so bummed when Annette left the show. She
was so stacked.”
“It’s not the real Annette,” Disney told the boy. “Some two-bit tramp faker.”
“And the real Minerva was never unfaithful,” Mickey bellowed. “Never, son, never.”
“Okay,” said Davey.
“Kid, if you do decide to go into porn,” said Cuffy, pointing a thick finger up at the boy,
“always wear a rubber.”
Their concern was touching. “Davey, why are you here?” I said.
“I figure if we’re all gonna get blown up by the Ruskies any minute, I’d rather go
watching a movie than rehearsing some do-goody episode, so I followed you.” He grinned.
“Boy, if that is the last movie I ever see, it was a dandy. Who’s that girl? Was that Mary
Jane? Maybe my mom could get her for a babysitter.”
“So,” said Disney, looking down at me and pointing at the screen.
“So …” I said.
“Did it seem like the same as the one you saw, with LD,” he hissed in sotto voce.
“Wait, there are more?” said Davey, eight rows above us. “Awesome.”
“This one is higher budget, and it’s funny –”
“No, it’s not,” Disney and Mickey said at the same time. Mickey appeared to need his

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cane as he descended the steps.
“The point is, the movie I saw was snuff,” I said. “This is just straight-up porn. It’s only
illegal because of the beeeeee … because of the whole animal-human thing.”
“And because of copyright infringement,” said Disney.
“Are any of the … performers the same?” asked Disney.
“No,” I said. “There were some jacked carnivores in the LD one, but not Dickey Douse.
Him I’d recognize.”
“Max Syzygy said there were a half dozen stag houses showing this film,” said Mickey,
hobbling into our row.
“Who?” I said, feeling my heart ballooning at the last name.
“Max Syzygy,” said Disney. “Vice President for cartoons.”
“So he’s seen it?” No way he wouldn’t have recognized one of his daughters friends.
“No. He didn’t want to. He’s devout.”
Davey poked his head around Cuffy. “Do women always cry when they’re making
babies?” We four overcooked old men turned to face him.
“Such things are best done in silence,” said Disney.
“Only when you’re doing it right,” said Cuffy.
“When she tells you to turn out the lights, don’t do it,” said Mickey.
I wished I’d had something better to tell him.
Finally Disney wheeled back to me and said, “Have you heard of Cop Productions?
Some sort of ex-policemen, I wager. Maybe they used their connections in the department
for cover.” C-O-P. Could be an abbreviation, could be an acronym. “We told the stag
theaters we would sue, and they pulled it, but I doubt this is the last we’ve heard from Cop
Productions.”

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“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Don’t you have connections in the police department?”
“I thought they were in cahoots.”
“I trust your judgment.”
“I would be happy to enquire. And if Mr. Syzygy wants to call, you have my number.”
“Thank you for your time,” he said. “Oh, I forgot,” he added. “As I was going through
Pinocchio’s effects, I found this. It was addressed to you.” He pulled a fat envelope from
his jacket pocket. To Thomas Grimalkin, it read. I’m Sorry.

10.

On the morning of Independence Day, I woke with the sun and knelt at Gracie’s side of
the bed. I knew her coat was the color of Christmas morning, but in the low light, it was the
yellowy gray of everything else in the room. As her eyes flickering under their lids, she
whimpered, flexed a paw, sighed. She once told me all her dreams were sex dreams. I
believed her.
In the living room, I retrieved the King James from the bookshelf: since Gracie would
never read the Bible, it was the safest place to keep papers I didn’t want to her see. I opened
it to the place I’d blindly slid Pin’s letter a few days before, which turned out to be the book
of Isaiah, connected in my mind to Christmas by some vaporous thread, lions and lambs
slumbering together, with a little child leading them.
This wasn’t that.
I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it

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stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his
feet, and with twain he did fly.
And I thought: aliens.
And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of
his glory. Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the
midst of a people of unclean lips.
That was true. My lips had besmirched a teenaged kid, slavered over the sexed-up
suffering of another human being, uttered all manner of calumny and cant. My months-long
low-grade fever of lust was spiking, desire droning constantly in the back of my mind like an
unsquashable mosquito.
Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the
tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine
iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and
who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to be sent. Maybe I already had been.
And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive
not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their
eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.
That was not the mission I was expecting. I didn’t think anyone in LA needed help
shutting their eyes to reality.
Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly
desolate.
Now I understood just why Special Smelter was so mopey.
I could almost see the verses bleeding their foreboding into Pin’s letter, darkening a faint

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apology for not keeping in touch into some grave confession of a crime I didn’t want to
imagine. I stuffed it into my pocket and reached for the King James, gripping only the white
space at the bottom corner, as though the words would infect me. But before I could return
it to the shelf, a few yellowed sheets of paper fell from the pages, and I unfolded them with
chagrin in my grin: the pen-and-ink drawing of a balloon-headed alien, the UFO schematic, a
circuit diagram like the world’s most hellish rat maze, relics from the place that had ended
my live-action career and now just might restart it. I refolded them and submerged them in
my other pocket.
I carried them with me later that morning as I cruised out to Venice, jerking the wheel
every time I heard the flare-and-pop of Roman candles, telling myself they weren’t bullets or
ICBMs. I hadn’t been back to the glue factory since Percy had first shown me around, and
over the silhouette of JONES ADHESIVES he’d erected new signage in white cursive:
Magritte Studios. The jailhouse fencing and concertina wire were still standing, but the collage
of scrub grass and gravel had been cleared and replaced with cobblestone paths snaking
around high hedges trimmed square as a stick of gum. Wandering in, I gawked at topiary so
precise they looked die-cut: poodles, a pod of dolphins, a peacock whose fan of leafy
feathers was big enough to eclipse a garage door.
The heavy steel handle of the heavy steel door was thrumming, but as I discovered when
I opened it, not from the purring of the dynamo or the conveyor belts’ cantering. From
speakers I couldn’t see, Shostakovich’s Third String Quartet was storming, a weepy sort of
rage I could understand. In order to placate Stalin, the near-sighted genius had given each of
the movements a jingoistic name. This first was: Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm. It was as
loud as rock ‘n’ roll, so loud it felt like the cellist was bowing on the lining of my stomach. I
hated rock ‘n’ roll.

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Fountains of bleach must’ve been sprayed on every surface of the factory’s interior: not
only had the ordure of horse mutilation been eradicated, but every girder and shaft and
screw gleamed like a UFO, and every bit of concrete was as unstained as a First Communion
dress. My eyes teared in the chemical haze.
Jerry was absent, as were Percy and his skiffly nephews, but I heard people chatting in
American on the other side of a steel brace. I swung round until I could see them: a man
and a woman hip-to-hip on a bench, with skin as clean as anything else in the place – maybe
the writers Percy had told me he’d hire to help me with the script?
“It is not a South Asian problem, Harriet,” said the man.
“It is a South Asian problem, Ozzie. Ho is a slant-eyed George Washington.”
Cute. I’d have to tell the Nelsons.
“The Monroe Doctrine has been extended to the world, and the world should be
grateful, Harriet,” said the man. They seemed not to have heard my footfall because of the
surging second movement: Rumblings of unrest and anticipation.
“The Monroe Doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine extends only to the Western Hemisphere,
Ozzie, and it is good, because it is not in our strategic interest nor economic interest to
extend our influence further. That sort of extension would over-extend our resources.”
I hoped Percy wasn’t paying them by the hour – they could debate Vietnam on their own
time. I’d never written anything longer than an Oscar acceptance speech, and if we were
going to start shooting, I needed these wordsmiths to double-down.
“The resources of the Monroe Doctrine are extensive, and not exclusive, Harriet.
Extending the Monroe Doctrine, the doctrine of Monroe, would only extend our power.”
“The power we extend we could extend at home, to those who are being excluded, to
those being excluded by our exclusivity, Ozzie.” Like her husband, this Harriet was blunt-

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featured, but also, it was impossible not to notice, possessed an enormous rack.
“The extension of exclusivity is the extension of power, and power is a good thing. And
Diem is a fine and Christian man, Harriet.” The man had started patting the woman’s knee
rhythmically, in a bloodless attempt at affection. I’d say their disagreement over the Vietnam
problem was the least of their marital worries. Gracie and I never talked politics.
Ignoring his hand, the woman began twisting her strand of pearls around her finger.
“The Christian men of the age are extending their tanks and doctrines over the backs of
the overextended excluded poor.” The only thing being overextended was my headache,
less from the blasting Russian strings and more the dizzying conversation, which was like
watching a pair of dogs chase their tails for too long.
“The power of the poor is the danger of the hemispheres, the Christian men of exclusion
and extradition and examination and extermination …” he kept rattling off ex words but my
attention snapped when his wife’s increasingly taut strand did, the pearly shrapnel flying
everywhere. The husband didn’t seem to notice that, nor the hisses and coughs exploding
from his wife’s mouth. I thought I might have to perform the Heimlich when I heard an
eely voice from the upstairs office cube shout, “Damn, damn, damn, damn,” and down the
stairs raced Marlowe, twisting the knobs on what looked like a cigarette case. As soon as he
did, the couple collapsed. Damn foreigners and their hypnotic drug cults. All I could hope
was that Percy wasn’t involved in their hoodoo.
I strode over to intercept the gangly Brit. “Back off, Winston,” I said, “and give me the
antidote.”
He sighed, grinned. “Oi’m fraid the only annidote’s beta testing and a s’perior cooling
system for the muvver-lovin circuits.” I scanned the couple, dead still, their hair –
suspiciously thick for white humans – smoking pungently.

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“You’re killing them,” I shouted, grabbing at the knobbed box, just as the third
movement began: Forces of war unleashed.
He was quite tall, and to keep me from it, he simply, infuriatingly, held the box above his
head. “They can’t be killed,” he said. “They weren’t never aloive.”
“Of course they are,” I said, squeezing the crumpled woman’s wrist, only to drop it and
hop back at the undead chill of her skin. “She’s, she’s gone into shock.”
“Examine the facts,” he said. He flipped the woman onto her back, her back rigid, lips
twitching. With long fingers, Marlowe began to unbutton her blouse.
“You shouldn’t,” I mumbled half-heartedly.
“I’m not going to rape her.” Just above the cup of her bra was a tattoo no bigger than a
caterpillar.
“You’re a white slaver! You’ve tattooed her with your symbol!” I concluded, raising a
finger to the rafters like Perry Mason.
He rolled his eyes. “It’s a model number. She’s a robot.”
I stared at her breast and its blue-black ink, so close my whiskers frisked over her hot,
clayey skin. MSP 7.
For the first time, I took a real look up at him. Compared to the human men who
crowded my days – the hunks and surfers and hollow-cheeked sensitives, the kingly cowboy
extras and pompadour’d greasers, Apollos all with weapon-grade jaws and impossible teeth –
he was ugly. His lumpy face looked like God had started making it, then was called away on
more urgent business and never returned, and his hair was already receding under the bangs
of his shag, pulling the rug out from under him.
“Kippy,” I said.
“Mar-lowe!” he yelled. “Kippy’s out for burri-tos,” he said.

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“My apologies,” I said. “Marlowe, what’s going on?”
What followed was full of digressions and technical language I didn’t understand, and
compounding my confusion was his Cockney accent and rhymes, but as best as I could tell,
this was the gist: Kippy and Marlowe, after being expelled from Cambridge a few years
before, became technical-mechanical consultants on their uncle’s various projects, and he’d
hired them on for the film.
“So, what are you making them for?” I said, tapping the shoulder of the man robot, fetal
on the concrete in his cardigan.
“‘Wot’? Wot are we makinnk them for? Every der’ee job nobody wants. Janitor, coal
mine, sewage maintenance, ‘ouse cleaning. Fink about it: someday, everybody got one a
these, nobody ever asta work again.”
“It’s impossible,” I said. “Them. No way.”
“Some payple say talkin’ an’mals is impossible.”
“I’m not man-made.”
“You must learn to trust technology,” he said. “Elsewise you won’t get ‘long very well in
the twentieth century.” From the inner pocket of his velvet jacket he retrieved a small
horseshoe magnet, which he dropped over the man’s face. I flinched as the curve boinked
off his forehead, flipped in mid-air and shot back downward faster than gravity would, its
poles locking like leeches onto the man’s forehead.
Leeches. I was starting to feel like one of those dumb saps on that Twilight show Gracie
liked who are too dumb to see the warning signs and end up getting their brains eaten out by
two-headed space worms. My saner part told me to retreat, but my damn feline curiosity
prodded me ahead to the aha. My mind felt like a puzzle cut by a crazy puzzle-maker, where
all the pieces lined up perfectly to create a picture that didn’t make any sense, where in order

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to make it make sense you had to jam everything together, grinding the wonky edges into
each other.
“Before, when they were talking, they didn’t pay any attention when I came in.”
“They don’t recognoize you as human.”
“I’m not human.”
“Cut ‘em a break on the foine philosophical distinctions. Th’only three weeks old. I’m
just pleased they seem to understand the Domino Theory.”
“They do whatever you tell them?”
“If c’rrectly programmed.”
“They don’t get tired? They don’t feel pain?” I said as the fourth movement began with
its mournful cello, the violins attenuated, strings plucked: In memory of the dead.
“Define ‘feel.’”
“I don’t think it’s just housewives and mining companies who’re going to want these.” I
imagined Belladonna with a harem of robot bombshells who never got tired and never said
no, an army of bomb-throwing robot thugs who never got tired and never said no.
“Marlowe,” called a voice behind us. “Oh ’ell, did Ozzie and ’arriet fag out again?” It
was Kippy, carrying a huge brown bag in each hand. Olé-ing away the sunned penny smells
of the robots were the fatty savor of shredded meat, the sting of lime, the slutty musk of
cumin.
Dropping the bags on the floor with a wrinkle of his honker, Kippy pulled a gizmo from
his pocket, pressed a button, and the Shostakovich stopped. “None a this old stuff,” he said,
apparently not realizing Dmitri was still alive. “I want James Brown.”
Too bad. I’d miss the fifth movement, my favorite: The eternal question: Why? And for
what?

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The knock rang low on the steel door, too low for anyone except toddlers and talking
rodents. I jogged over as with a belly full of burrito. Jerry hated it when he couldn’t open a
door. I opened it to a yellowy wedge of sunlight and my partner in tiny aviators and kids’
Levi’s cuffed deep at the ankle.
“Top of the morning to you, Walls.” The shoulder of his polo shirt was speckled red.
“Like Alice in Wonderland back there, Hoss,” he said, jerking his thumb back at the topiary.
“And who the hell is Magritte? I was circling the neighborhood ten minutes in that taxi.
Thought it was Jones something.”
“Is that blood?” I asked, pointing at his shoulder as he trotted in.
Wiping a thumb over his downy muzzle, he winked. “Cut myself shaving.”
At the card table, Marlowe and Kippy were doodling circuitry diagrams, mumbling to
each other. “El-lo,” said Kippy.
“Where’s Percy?” Jerry asked.
“Some ‘mergency came up,” said Kippy.
“You Magritte?”
Kippy shook his head.
“Do you actually understand what they’re saying?” Jerry asked me in a stage whisper.
Marlowe rubbed away the circuit diagram from a nearby blackboard and began drawing
zigzags up and to right. He tapped Morse on the board. “Dis represents plot, up t’da
cloimax.”
In a comedy, he explained, the protagonist was better off at the end of the narrative than
at the beginning, whereas in a tragedy, he was worse off, and – quite possibly – dead.
“Dead is definitely worse off than alive,” Jerry said.

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“So wot koina film iz is gonna be?” asked Kippy.
“Well,” said Jerry, swinging his head in panorama, “Hoss and I work on the line in this,
making, uh, strap-on boobies.” Nodding excitedly, he gestured at his chest. “You know, it’s
that thing where guys want to, when they’re …”
Inasmuch as horror and bemusement can reside in the same expression, they dovetailed
in mine. Kippy and Marlowe mostly looked horrified. “Never mind,” Jerry mumbled,
waving the idea away. “Prudes.” He pointed at the lightning bolt plot diagram on the
blackboard. “The first zig is that I’m sleeping with your wife. The second zig is that I’m
stealing money from the company. The third zig is that I’m also an anarchist. He wheeled
to me. “The climax is you find out all three things at the same time, but it’s too late. The
building is wired, and explodes with you inside it. I escape on a motorbike with your wife
and a bag of money. The last line is her saying that I’m much better in the sack than you
ever were … Why are you all looking at me like that?”
“We were thinking something more … realistic.”
“Realistic? What’s not realistic about that?” he asked.
“Strap-on boobies?” I said as the Brits giggled.
“Fuck you,” he said, “when you’re with a dame, the strap-on boobies help with that thing
where you know what they’re feeling.”
“Empathy?” I offered.
“Bingo. Strap-on boobies have empathy all over ‘em.” The ball turrets of his enormous
bloodshot eyes swiveled over the factory’s tanks, crankshafts, chutes, its sprockets and
chains, the cat’s cradle of girders, the sparse forest of I-beams. He nodded in approval; the
scene mirrored his mind, a Rube Goldberg of pain waiting to be triggered. “Okay,” he
finally said, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his paws. “We need to practice our leaps

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and tumbles.” His eyes flicked open. “You, fat boy,” he said, pointing at Kippy. “Does
that conveyor belt work?”
“Oi can check,” he said, trotting away.
“Do it. Tree,” he said, nodding his chin up at Marlowe. “Get writing. I want three
scenes pronto. Light on the dialogue, heavy on the death.”
Marlowe nodded and retrieved a pencil from behind his ear.
I cracked my neck, loosened my tie, started skipping in place. “We could use that strut
like a balance beam,” I said, staring upward. “Vault onto it from that catwalk there.”
“Sure, Hoss, but first I need to pick up a pack. If I’d known Percy was going to be MIA,
I could’ve had the cab stop.”
“Got some ‘ere,” said Marlowe, reaching into his tight jacket. “Marlboros. Luff
American cigarettes. Happy Independence Day. Sorry me ancestors put up awl at fuss.”
Jerry winced. “Uh, I don’t, uh, I don’t smoke it straight. Got to be mixed.”
“Ohhhhhhhh,” said Marlowe, “wink wink nudge nudge. I gotcha. Spliff.” He reached
into his alligator skin wallet for cash. “Could y’buy anuffer fer a cannabis bruffer?”
“Reefer’s for fags,” said Jerry. “I smoke my tobacco mixed with fruit. It’s natural, like
what the Indians smoked.” His favorite flavor was grape soda. “Hoss,” he said, “want to
take a stroll with me?”
“After you, good sir,” I said, and we left the disappointed limey behind.
The daylight was bright as the flame of a firecracker. I hadn’t realized how clean the
factory smelled until I took a breath of the Venice stink – piss evaporating in potholes,
children left too long in the sun.
“So we’re getting paid for this, right?” Jerry asked, setting onto his tiny nose his aviators,
the lenses no larger than guitar picks. “It’s not like that pro bono Hamlet bullshit, is it?”

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“Yeah, definitely not,” I said, although Percy and I had yet to talk numbers.
“What, like five grand?”
“Something like that. Plus maybe half a percent on the back end.”
He toed some gravel further down the brand-new sidewalk, sending it tumbling under a
topiary tortoise. “Think he’d give me another five grand instead of the half percent?”
“You got some money worries?”
He shrugged. “Haven’t shot an episode since March. And the Metro retainer ain’t
much.”
“I could spot you until then,” I said, retrieving my billfold. “What do you need, two
hundred? Three hundred?”
“Keep your money,” he said. “I’m not starving.” Jerry once told me he’d never had sex
with the same dame twice. Not the cheapest lifestyle.
“You keeping an ear to the ground about the murders?” I said, ambling slow enough
Jerry didn’t have to hustle.
“I should be asking you. You learn anything from that kid cop?”
I didn’t know anyone I could tell everything: if I told Gracie everything I knew, she’d tell
everyone she knew; if I told Bugs, he’d lock himself in his mansion and never come out;
Spike was such an innocent telling him would’ve been like detailing the Holocaust to a
toddler. Jerry was the natural ear, and he didn’t blab. But of all the minds I knew that would
savor watching live carnage, it was Jericho Mouse. Besides, the shoulder of his white golf
shirt was speckled with what looked a lot like blood. And I knew from blood.
So I shared only my trip to Disney and the porno Mouseketeer spoof I saw. Jerry roared
at the entire story, from giving Davey a peck of my morphine whiskey to his weepy
apocalyptic rants. At “Annette Poonicello,” he lost it completely, doubled over in laughter,

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pounding the sidewalk with his tiny fist, finally wheezing so as to catch his breath.
“Oh my god,” he coughed, taking off his aviators and wiping away tears. “God I want to
see that movie.”
“Too late. Disney made the stag houses pull it.”
“Stick in the mud,” said Jerry, recovering. “Schmear would’ve loved that shit.”
“You’ll get no disagreement from me on that front, Walls. Dickie Douse. Schmear
would’ve been slapping both knees at the same time.
“Dickie Douse,” mused Jerry. “Guy was a big rat, black?”
“Huge. Like Spike if Spike didn’t eat so many cupcakes.”
“Staten Island?”
“Guy talks like a calzone looks.”
“I know a Dickie Di Martino, from the beach. Guy can bench four-fifty.”
I nodded. “That’s good, right?”
He stopped in his Chuck Taylors, each the shape and size of a piece of toast, and turned
to me with a sad shake of his head. “Yeah. Four-fifty is good. You couldn’t bench the bar.”
“So you think he’s the type?” I asked.
“The type?” asked Jerry, apparently befuddled at my denseness. “The type who’d like to
get paid to bang a slutty teenager? That’s not a type. That’s a man.”
His Chuck Taylors and my oxblood wingtips had delivered us to an open doorway and a
wooden Indian. “Pack of peach,” he said, wandering ahead to an alleyway, unzipping his fly.
“I’m going to find some roses to water.”
Two peach cigarettes’ worth of nicotine buoyed Jerry’s mood enough that I was able to
convince him to follow the limoncello sun toward Muscle Beach.
The place was a glorified prison yard, a sunken concrete pen gridded with benches and

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squat racks. On the sand beyond were the bars and rings where the acrobats and gymnasts
trained. Everything was a little rusty, and even a hundred feet away, the ocean wind painted
us in the smell of coconut oil.
“Smell like home, Walls?” I asked.
“Smells like the clap,” he said.
Indeed, the boys and girls were playing quite nicely, all of them so muscular they looked
inflated. As we neared, I spotted a woman in a cutoff Army sweatshirt bench-pressing
dumbbells taller than Jerry, a shirtless cut of beef spotting her on each arm. “Disgusting,”
Jerry said. “Women bodybuilders.”
Adjacent to the bathrooms in the far corner of the Pen was a small herd of furry
weightlifters: a chipmunk doing push-ups with a plate on his back, a lynx deadlifting a bar so
loaded it bent like a pole-vault, a orangutan doing pull-ups with a hip kick that shot him
above the bar so high he could clap before re-grabbing the bar. Between them and the
humans was a moat of empty benches and squat racks: living high up in Hollywood, it was
easy to forget how segregated the rest of the world was.
The humans smiled as we ambled through, recognizing the grizzled gray cat and the
adorable brown mouse. “Congrats on the Oscar!” yelled a woman with biceps bigger than
my thighs. But the furry muscle-jockeys were enthused for a different reason.
“Jericho Mouse,” said the lynx, jogging over, his X-shaped body making me feel even
further removed from our sabertoothed ancestors. “It’s a honor,” he said, extending his
hand. The rest of them were equally awed. A beagle asked for Jerry’s autograph.
“What’s all this?” asked Jerry, pointing through the crowd toward a banner on the side of
the bathroom that advertised an Independence Day exhibition.
“Strongman, bikini show, acrobatics,” said the lynx.

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“Know if Dickie D is going to be there?”
“I think so,” said the orangutan. “But you can ask him yourself,” he added, pointing
black-nailed finger behind us. Sneering through the human section were Dickie and a posse
of beasts: a Rott-Doberman mix; a creature I’d never seen but I guessed was a wolverine;
and an oily hyena with a tiny gold hoop through the tip of his ear, a hyena who might’ve
borne a passing resemblance the oily hyena in the Lady Dear movie, but I didn’t like looking
at hyenas longer than I had to, so I couldn’t be sure.
They didn’t stop sneering as they neared, fangs the color of old piano keys. I wished
Spike had been there.
“Dickie,” said Jerry.
“Jerry,” said Dickie.
“May I introduce my partner, Tom Grimalkin.”
“May I introduce Rex,” he said, jerking one thumb at the Rott-Doberman, “Jacko,”
jerking the other at the wolverine, who was squeezing a stress ball with an intensity that
suggested he had some serious stress to relieve, “and Chuckles,” pointing his sharp chin at
the hyena, who on closer inspection had blood trickling down his snout. That could mean
two things, and neither was good.
My sixth sense was crackling with bad news. Jerry had not let on that he and Dickie were
not on the best of terms, nor that he palled around with a crew that made Wile E. Coyote
seem both weak and sane. I should’ve known from experience that when Jerry didn’t tell me
he was on good terms with someone, I should assume he was not. Visions of a sanguine,
revelatory chat were evaporating like Jerry’s piss in the alleyway behind the tobacconist’s.
“I hear you’ve made a foray in acting,” Jerry said to him.
He shrugged. “Heard you made a foray into AA.”

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I had not heard that. I glanced down at Jerry, who said, “That’s a goddamn lie. I went to
one meeting then left when somebody explained you had to give up all your drinking.”
“Jer-ry,” smiled Dickie. “Boozin just makes y’ may-yad.” He tapped the valley between
his pecs. “Been sober since Joo-ly nineteen fifty-nine.”
“Congratulations,” said Jerry. “Would you like a medal?”
“Whadda they call that drinka yours? ‘Pussy juice’?”
“Cunt blood,” Jerry said. “Ask your mother about it.”
I was expecting him to swing, but apparently Dickie’d had internalized many of the 12
steps. “Wha’can I do ya for?” he said.
“Your movie.”
“Let’s tawk about it in my aw-fice,” Dickie said, gesturing toward the men’s room door.
“Fine by me,” said Jerry.
“Walls, you want me to come?” I said.
“I got it, Hoss,” Jerry said, following the much larger, much rattier rodent into the
concrete-block bathroom, leaving me alone with the other three goons, wide-eyed and wired
on God knew what.
“So,” I said, glancing at the Rott, whose chest wouldn’t fit inside a Hula Hoop, “what can
you bench?”
“Your car,” he said, as the hyena’s black spade of a tongue began investigating the blood
on his upper lip.
A minute later, Dickie returned beaming, clamping his claw-like hands together, and
behind him Jerry was holding a small card, worn by finger and thumb to a gloss. “Let it be
knowned dat Richard Aloysius DiMartino and Jericho Mouse have come to an agreement.”
Light from the high sun caught Jerry’s card, stamped with a mouse skull and under it a pair

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of crossed dumbbells. I knew without him having to tell me: in exchange for what Dickie
knew, Jerry would lay on the line his title as World’s Strongest Rodent.
“You didn’t have to do that, Walls,” I said as Jerry shuffled over. “You didn’t have to
risk it for me.” He’d been carrying that card in his wallet for seventeen years.
His grim expression quickened into wry cockiness. “It’s not just for you. It’s for Beaks.
And Screwy. I loved that fuck-up. And for Igby, even though he was a priss. And for Lady
Dear.”
“That’s noble of you, Walls.”
“She gave great head,” Jerry said wistfully. “Besides,” he added, winking, “it’s not a risk
if you can’t lose.”
The challenge, Dickie explained to the growing crowd of the furry and furless, would be
three-fold: Strength, Acrobatic, and Freestyle.
“So who’s going to judge the Freestyle?” I asked.
“Apparently they’re electing a new governor. He was coming by anyway for the
Exhibition, and D said he’d be happy to judge.”
“Wait – who?”
Jerry squinted through the fencing, scrambled up the nearest squat rack, and pointed.
“Him,” he said.
Turning off Pacific Avenue was a minor motorcade, and in the backseat of one of the
ragtops stood a man in a dark suit, a toothy smile encroaching up his duck bill nose, arms
stuck straight out like a funambulist’s, each terminating in a V-for-Victory sign.
“Nixon? Nixon is going to be the judge?”
“It’s a hometown crowd for DiMartino,” said Jerry. “I wanted an outsider. Dickie said
he used to be Vice President. Figure he’s as trustworthy as anybody.”

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The crowd split, half of them trotting out to see Nixon, the rest staying to watch the
competitors warm up. As Jerry and I tossed a medicine ball back and forth, he explained the
Strength portion would be the one-armed barbell snatch.
“You can one-arm snatch more than him?” I said, glancing over Jerry’s shoulder to
Dickie, who was flexing for his female admirers. “His shoulders are bigger than your head.”
“Proportionate to our weight,” said Jerry, catching the medicine ball and setting it down.
“There’s a scale in the bathroom. He weighs a buck twenty, and I’m a shade over forty.”
“Didn’t you used to weigh like thirty-four?”
He shrugged. “Gouda.”
“I see.”
“So, if I can one-arm snatch more than a third of what he can, I win that one.”
“What about acrobatics?”
He smiled. “Iron Cross.”
“What are you going to do for the freestyle?”
“Ever see the time Houdini made it across Niagara Falls on a burning tightrope while he
was straitjacketed inside a two-ton safe?”
“Uh, Walls, that’s impossible.”
“Not more impossible than what I’m going to do.”
Within a few minutes, the crowd outside the fence was three deep, while inside, the Pen
was swelling with bodybuilders, plus a handful of bikini models clicking around in stilettos,
air-kissing everybody. I lost count of the number people who’d asked Jerry for his John
Hancock, and for the first time in recent memory, his happiness seemed unsullied by gripe
or suspicion.
Dickie had trotted out to the motorcade and now returned with Nixon, the only other

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person in sight besides me wearing a jacket and tie. His natural expression seemed to be the
hound-dog dole of Special Smelter, and his brows – two dark caterpillars forever on a
collision course – made him look like he was reprimanding you, even when he was shaking
your paw and saying, “Mr. Grimalkin, such a pleasure to meet you. My girls are such fans of
your show. Tremendous work, really.”
“Yeah,” droned Dickie, demoted suddenly from ringmaster to third wheel. “I’ll, uh, leave
you two. Gonna go woik up a lil’ sweat.
“Physical culture,” said Nixon, nodding at the scene like a museumgoer at a particularly
arcane exhibit. “Strength, health, vigor.” He squeezed his pale hands to fists then lifted
them into the air. “A Californian trait. If we could bottle this and sell it to the rest of the
country, we would make so much money we could lower our state income taxes to zero.”
“Huh,” I said. “Never thought about it that way.”
The hot white sunlight bouncing off the hot white concrete was broiling the poor
candidate, who removed his handkerchief to wipe ounces of sweat from his brow. “So,” he
whispered, “this is some kind of feat of strength that I’m judging? I’m not exactly familiar
with …”
“Uh, I don’t know,” I said. “Didn’t Dickie explain it?”
“Richard? That black rodent? To be honest, I had a hard time understanding him.
Ethnic accent, you know.”
“I think it’s only the last part you have to judge.” He nodded. “I voted for you, by the
way.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Grimalkin.”
“We all appreciate that you kept Checkers.”
“Thank you,” he said. His was not the most sensitive irony-dar. “I’m proud to say I

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carried the animal vote.”
“If only all Americans were furry …”
“Oh, not just the mammals. Apparently I’m quite popular among reptiles as well.”
Stifling a smile, I turned my attention to the center of the Pen, to Dickie, surrounded by
his feral gang, and Jerry, who was alone. Jerry did not take kindly to coaching. Jerry’s
barbell was empty, and on each end of Dickie’s was a plate bigger than an LP.
Straddling his bar, Dickie cupped a hand around his ear, and the crowd roared. As he
chalked his hands, one of the bikini models shouted, “You’re gorgeous, Dickie!” I wonder if
he did have the clap. I wonder if he’d given it to Janey. Not being the same species, I
wondered if he could. He squatted behind the bar, gripping it with one hand, back concave,
chin pointed out to the horizon line, and threw it overhead with the ease of a dancer tossing
a streamer. The crowd was already hooting as he dropped it clattering to the rubber mat, but
Jerry snatched his empty bar above his head before Dickie’s plates had finished rattling.
“Nice job, Walls,” I called.
“That’s your partner?” asked Nixon.
“Yessir.”
“Cute as a button.”
Dickie and Jerry chatted for a moment, then began adding dessert plate-sized plates to
their bars, one for each side on Jerry’s, three for each Dickie’s. An aide brought a lemonade
over for Nixon, and one for me too. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you, Mr. Grimalkin,” he
said after taking a long straw-suck of lemonade.
“Oh?”
“When I’m elected governor, I’d like to start a state board for animal affairs, a liaison or
ombudsman to communicate the concerns of animals directly to Sacramento.”

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With noticeably more effort, Dickie ripped the bar off the ground, exploding upward
with his massive legs as though trying to leap into the air. His paw clung to it as it quivered
overhead, and when it hit the ground, it sounded like a car wreck.
“My goodness,” said Nixon.
With eyes closed and whiskers a-tingle, Jerry flipped his 65 lbs up above his head, silently
and very fast. With a hiss, Nixon drained the last of his lemonade.
“Board of animal affairs? You asked Bugs, right?” I said as they put another two plates
on Jerry’s bar, another six on Dickie’s.
“Oh, well, hmm, well, yes. Yes, initially I did, although I did ask Mr. Bunny to keep it in
confidence –”
“Ha!” I shouted involuntarily, loud enough that a number of spectators swung their
heads around. “Sorry,” I said, “it’s just, just that asking Bugs to keep a secret is like asking
Errol Flynn not to proposition a cigarette girl.”
Hunched as low over the bar as a nose tackle, Dickie blasted off the ground like the
rocket that would someday destroy Los Angeles, a wave of force that flew from buttocks up
through lower back, and ended at his shoulders. The crowd sounded like a hurricane. I
didn’t see how you could do that without getting whiplash.
“Yes,” Nixon replied as the crowd noise settled to a simmer, “we, uh, we understand that
now. Mr. Bunny has been … vetted, including a thorough psychological examination –”
“Oh my God,” I said. For the first time, Nixon had my complete attention. “What did
you find in there?”
“There?”
“His mind.” Because cats have a greater field of vision than humans, I was able to look
directly up at him while still keeping an eye on Jerry, who was massaging his right shoulder,

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the one he’d used for the first two lifts. Don’t do it Jerry, I thought. Don’t switch. Jerry’s left
arm was strong, but not as strong as his right. After ten lifts, it might’ve been advisable to
switch, but not after two. When he gripped the bar with his left hand, I knew he wouldn’t
get it. He didn’t. He pulled it to his chin but couldn’t quite get under it, dropping it with a
flak of cursing that made more than a few spectators cover their mouths.
“You’ll get him for this one, Walls,” I shouted, then turned back to Nixon.
When I moved out to Hollywood, the nuns at St. Francis gave me two gifts: gold
cufflinks cast in the shape of the Franciscan coat of arms: crossed arms with the stigmata,
and a cross rising from it, cufflinks I’d worn on my wedding day; and an abnormal psych
text book. They told me it would come in handy in California. It had.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Megalomania, paranoid personality disorder, candaulism.”
“How do you even know what that is?” He glanced down, appalled, as I stared up his
lima bean nostrils.
“Bugs likes to dangle in front of you the things he has and you don’t.”
“We realized Mr. Bunny would not be a trustworthy member of the team.”
“I think that’s a sound decision,” I said as Jerry and Dickie padded through a friendly
gauntlet of fans out to the sand.
“Mr. Grimalkin, I believe in progress. I know that pretty boy in the Oval Office thinks
he believes in progress, but he hasn’t done a damn thing for Negroes, or for animals.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
The aide brought him another lemonade and a fresh hankie. “I don’t know,” Nixon said
when the aide returned to passing out pins. “That’s why I need someone – you – to tell me
what the animal community needs.” I remembered someone telling me once that Nixon,
while he was courting Pat, would drive her to dates – with other boys. I sensed the same

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neediness, both clueless and calculating.
“What would it entail?”
“Bimonthly meetings in Sacramento – I could fly you up – task forces, a small budget for
programs, whatever needs you saw.”
“The need I see right now is that my … colleagues are getting killed,” I said, leading him
out onto the sand. I wondered if he knew the day he became Vice President turned out to
be the worst day of my adult life.
“I know,” said Nixon, his jowls waggling with consternation. “Once I’m in office –”
“Once you’re in office I might be dead,” I said, sinking two inches with each step. For
conditioning, Jerry sprinted in the sand at Muscle Beach. Or at least he used to.
“What can I do?”
“Write an op-ed for the L.A. Times. Make it a campaign issue. Pat Brown hasn’t
mentioned the murders once. You write an op-ed denouncing the LAPD and the general
treatment of talking animals as second-class citizens.” I could hear the abacus clicking in his
greedy brain. “How many people live in California?” I asked.
“Sixteen million,” he said.
“Two hundred thousand of them are talking animals,” I said, even though I had no idea
what the actual number was. “You write that op-ed, every one of those votes is yours.”
“I will.”
I was standing with Richard Nixon among the brief early-afternoon shadows, a black
pick-up-sticks on the washed-out khaki of Venice Beach, while men and women who
smelled like macaroons flexed and stretched and exchanged numbers – sets, reps, poundage
– like baseball cards. The paler, doughier civilians lingered at a safe distance, snapping
Kodachrome and noshing French fries. No one ventured over to ask Nixon for an

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autograph.
“What, uh, event is next?”
“Acrobatics.”
The rings dangling from long chains must have been six feet off the ground, but Jerry
declined the lynx’s offer of a boost, and with a stopwatch-carrying tabby at the ready, my
partner vaulted upward, snatched the rings, and pulled himself upward in one elegant
motion. Like a garage door rising, his locked arms shifted from vertical to horizontal until
he was a furry capital-T. After ten seconds, he yawned as though bored, spotted me and
Nixon, and said, “Hiya, Mr. Nixon. Venice Beach welcomes you. Where’s Checkers?”
Everyone chuckled at that, even Dickie, even Nixon.
In total, Jerry held the Iron Cross long enough to tell a dirty knock-knock joke to one of
the bikini models, sing the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and recite the opening
of the Declaration of Independence, all the way to “let Facts be submitted to a candid
world.” If only it were that easy. Jerry remained motionless aloft so long that after a few
successive waves of cheering, some of the crowd began to scatter. “Hey!” Jerry yelled at
them. “I’m not entertaining enough for you? You think this is easy? Just wait till Staten
Island tries.” With that, he flipped himself 180 degrees into a St. Peter cross, then let his feet
drop, used the momentum to flip backwards, and stuck a landing in the sand.
“Three minutes and fifty-four seconds!” shouted the tabby as he shook his head at his
stopwatch.
Clapping and whoops somersaulted across the sand, scaring a nearby roost of petrels up
into the breeze. “Your move, guido,” Jerry said, passing Dickie as he approached the rings.
Standing under them, the jacked rat said, “I’d like to tank all youse for comin’ out today, and
specially taank my spawnsa Joe,” he said, pointing toward an aged tough whose skin looked

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like jerky. By way of acknowledgement, Joe nodded, then spat chaw into a paper cup.
As the crowd hushed, the rat pulled himself in a rocking muscle-up until his elbows were
locked at his side. He extended his arms until they were parallel to the sound, the hinges of
his jaw balling with clenched muscle and his pecs shaking like burgers in an earthquake.
When gravity won a few seconds later, Dickie’s nasal bleat sounded like nothing so much as
his climax in the XXX Mouseketeers spoof. When he fell and covered his face, I wondered
if he’d done the same after he was done with Janey – porn always cut away before the end,
and all creatures are sad after sex.
“That must be harder than it looks,” said Nixon as Dickie stood up, a tear sliding down
his turnip of a schnoz.
“Most things are,” I said, wondering where Janey was at that moment. Had classes
started at USC yet? Maybe that was all she needed: a roommate she could trade makeup
secrets with; a boyfriend named Paul or Bill or Steve who wore cardigans and would open
doors for her; a wizened old professor to inspire in her a love of botany, or the Dutch
Masters, or Freud. Wait: not Freud.
“So,” said Nixon, “it’s this next segment I’ll be judging? Freestyle?” When I nodded, he
pulled out from his jacket a pen and a leather notepad embossed with the Presidential Seal.
“What are the criteria?”
I had no idea, but I wanted Jerry to win. “Artistry, power, balance, agility, speed.”
The fact that Jerry was tête-à-tête-ing with Dickie instead of chatting up bathing beauties
left no question about the importance of that little card in his wallet, and when he was done
with Dickie, he hustled over to me, waved away my congratulations, and asked me to help
him set up. “Dickie’s going first this time. I want to know what I need to beat.” He
glanced up at Nixon. “Artistry. Tom mentioned artistry, right? That one’s important.”

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Nixon nodded, flipping his notebook open to show him the word “artistry,” hard-penned
and slightly off-kilter.
“Dickie wouldn’t know artistry if it bit him in the ass,” Jerry muttered. “Here, Walls,” he
added, heading back to the Pen, “Help me move some weight.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Nixon,” I said. “Duty calls.”
Back in the Pen, Jerry fake-smiled at the fans congratulating him and directed me to grab
one of the 45 lbs plates.
“Out to the rings?”
He shook his head. “The playground on the other side of the bathrooms,” he said,
picking up a medicine ball and leading me out through the throng.
“So, what did you do last time for the freestyle portion?” I grunted, sinking to mid-calf
with each sandy step toward the swing set.
“There wasn’t a last time,” he said. “I always won the first two.” Peeved, he shook his
head. “Can’t believe I couldn’t snatch eighty-five.”
“Any of your family here?”
He shook his head. “They always go to Tahoe for the Fourth.”
“Oh,” I said, “why aren’t you –”
“Because you told me we had fucking rehearsal.”
“Ah, right. Where do you want the plate?” I said, stepping onto the concrete foundation
of the playground. After trudging through the sand, it felt like flying.
“By the teeter-totter,” he said as he looped around the slides and swings and towers,
studying the setup like a general his battlefield.
A minute later, crowd-noise summoned us back to the Pen, where Dickie was beginning
his routine. It started with him gripping the end of a weight bench, then kicking upwards till

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he was upside-down. After opening his body to vertical, he began doing handstand pushups,
enough that I eventually lost count, and when he popped up dizzily, the Pen was loud with
adulation, whoops and key-rattling and the piffle of sticks run over fencing. After a bout of
bad ballet that gave him a chance to catch his breath, Dickie eventually said, “Aeeyan for my
finale …” and strode down the central thoroughfare of the Pen to the far fence. In the
middle of the aisle, he’d set a barbell with a 45 lbs plate on each end, and after a few deep
breaths, he began sprinting toward it.
I couldn’t have guessed what he would do because I didn’t know anyone could do it: just
before reaching the barbell, he started torquing off a stride as though about to hand-plant
and flip over the heavy weight. But instead, he gripped the bar as his body swung over it, his
feet planting just beyond like the fulcrum of a catapult, with his body as lever and the 135 lbs
of iron the payload. With ballistic force, his abs flexed and the muscles of his upper body
turned potential into kinetic energy, flinging the barbell high and far down the thoroughfare,
so close to the far fence the bystanders on the other side squawked and turned tail. It
crashed ten feet short with a mighty clatter, springing off the rubber and crashing into the
fence. Like a rodent King Kong Dickie banged his fists against his chest before his mangy
posse tackled him in celebration. After extricating himself from the scrum, he found Jerry
and stormed over.
“Your turn, squeaky.”
From the corner of the Pen, Nixon raised a piece of notebook paper that read 8.47.
Jerry nodded and wordlessly marched out, down the boardwalk, past the bathrooms, and
onto the playground, where the crowd reformed into a ragged horseshoe. Jerry said to me,
“Just before I hit the seat of the teeter-totter, toss the plate onto the other seat.”
After the last of the stragglers arrived, Jerry sprinted toward one of the steel legs bracing

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the swing set, set at an angle far steeper than 45 degrees, and began racing up it, hands-free,
and with such speed that when he reached the top, fifteen feet above the ground, he was
able to spring into a flip-twist that landed him on his tiny Chuck Taylor’s atop the central
bar. The crowd gasped, and he began a series of back handsprings that bore him in quick
epicycles down the steel crosspiece. When he landed the last, he turned the balance beam
into a pommel horse, balancing his weight on his tiny hands and swinging his joined legs
over the bar so that to the clouds above he would have appeared to be a clock’s rogue
second hand. His legs scissored back and forth over the bar, then rocked up into a
pawstand and began turning, an upside-down pirouette. Awed whistles bulleted through the
roar of the crowd as he flipped back onto his feet, rising on pointe in his sneakers and
pirouetting for real, arms making an ogive above his head. Backlit by the sun, his proud
expression was salted with rage. Fred Astaire once told me he danced out of anger, and it
struck me now that Jerry did too: anger at a world that made him small, anger that it valued
size over grace, anger that he, the most physically talented creature I’d ever seen, was too
small to drive. Everyone who pays for sex does it to feel more like a man, but never was
that more literally true than with Jerry.
A flock of ospreys were spiraling nearer, and when Jerry spotted them at the end of his
pirouette, he grinned and flipped off the bar. On the swing beneath he’d set the medicine
ball, and a mid-air flight alteration landed him on top of it, then he began running, and in
what at first seemed to be an optical illusion, the ball began spinning in place like a model
globe. He saw me gawking by the teeter-totter and winked: he once told me that being a
cartoon was nothing but disbelieving the laws of friction, gravity and causality. It was true,
at least for him. After gaining enough speed, he began leaning back then forward then back
then forward, which started the swing to swinging. Quickly the arc of the pendulum grew

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longer, and finally, as the swing-chains swept him up nearly horizontal, he leapt off the
ancient pumpkin of a ball, straight toward one of the ospreys hovering on an updraft, and
uselessly I tried from thirty feet below to shoo the bird away so that he wouldn’t spoil Jerry’s
landing, before realizing the osprey was an involuntary part of the act. A raptor, the bird had
only ever chased, never the reverse, but the tables had turned, and the bird went cheeter-cheeter-
cheeter, trying to extricate himself from the flight path, but Jerry was too fast, grabbing it
around its shoulders, and after one barrel-roll that I thought would bring them both down,
the bird righted itself, protesting with many cheeters, but Jerry was quickly breaking him with
tugs of his feathers and heel-jabs into the bird’s ribs. I remembered the only time I’d ever
ridden a bird, and wondered what ever happened to Clanks. I hoped he hadn’t been
poached. I hoped Wile hadn’t gotten him.
The crowd was silent the same way the crowd had been silent in the theater at the end of
Citizen Kane, not from disinterest, but from awe. For a few moments, the only sounds were
the soft surf, the bewildered flock of ospreys, and the click-clack of Kodaks. The osprey
wanted to fly seaward, but Jerry prodded him inland, over the towers, behind the bathrooms,
and finally back, cruising toward the teeter-totter. All at once I felt nervous: it had been the
sort of performance troubadours wrote ballads about in the Middle Ages, but for the finale,
he would need me to time my toss perfectly. I reached to pick the plate up, then jerked my
hand away, as though it was a stovetop burner: the sun above and concrete below had baked
the plate to a smolder, and in an instant my mind pinballed down various decision-trees:
press my sole onto the seat as Jerry landed (not enough weight – Jerry would crash and I
might break my leg); squat above the seat and drop when Jerry neared (maybe too much
weight, plus the fear I’d drop too late and my seat would fly up and smack me in the crotch,
like God’s great kick to the balls). No, Jerry wanted 45 lbs of counter-weight in the form of

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a falling plate, and just as I realized I could take off my jacket, pick it up, and spare myself
the burn, Jerry leapt off the osprey. Gritting my teeth, I toed the plate up against the center
of the teeter-totter and hoisted it to my waist. Angry heat shot down my hands as Jerry
pinwheeled and twisted like a high-diver, but even though my peripheral vision was
vanishing from the pain, I couldn’t drop the plate until I could see the bloodshot cracks in
his eyes. I could feel the first degree burn slipping into second, and for a moment,
everything went black.
I opened my eyes to the sun, sweet breezes cooling my hands, and heard the plate rolling
behind me on the concrete, but I couldn’t see Jerry for a moment, until I spotted a furry
moon that eclipsed the sun, still rising as I licked my scorched paws. It wasn’t until Jerry
reached his apogee that I understood I’d passed out onto the seat at exactly the right
moment. Luck always trumps skill.
A man could’ve made slow, considerate love to his wife in the time Jerry was airborne,
and when he landed, he kicked up a minor sandstorm into Richard Nixon’s many-pleated
pants. The crowd’s joy was like V-J day all over again. Even Dickie was clapping
enthusiastically. I wanted badly to sprint down to the beach and plunge my hands into the
chilly Pacific, but I tamed that urge and joined the crowd thronging around the Strongest
Rodent in the World. Outside the circle of congratulation, Nixon had to cough and ahem
for us to notice the number he held above his head: 8.12.
“What?!?” I shouted. Like a river suddenly reversing course, the masses quieted to
silence, then began booing.
Nixon shook his head soberly as I stormed over to him, Jerry stunned behind me. “I had
to take a full point off for your assistance,” he said.
“What?” I said. “That’s not part of the rules.”

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Anxious sweat was running in streams down the worry-wrinkles of his forehead,
channeled down between his brows until it flew off his ski-jump of a nose. “When you don’t
have rules, you make them up.”
“Listen to the crowd,” I said, lifting my reddened palms at him.
“I never listen to the crowd,” he said.
Dickie slunk over, uneasy under his new crown. Jerry handed him the card.
“Congratulations,” he said, not looking the rat in the eye.
“Jerry, it’s bullshit,” I said.
“I couldn’t seem like I was playing favorites,” Nixon said. His hankie was already
dripping, so he wiped his forehead with the makeshift scorecard, blearing his face an inky
blue. Someone tossed half a hot dog bun that hit Nixon in the ear, and with that, the Secret
Service swooped in from nowhere, whisking him away from the hoi polloi, who were
powerless, but right.
Someone yelled “Pat Brown for Governor” and the crowd picked up the chant: “Pat Brown!
Pat Brown! Pat Brown!”
“I’ll write that op-ed today!” Nixon shouted over his shoulder as the Secret Service rushed
him through the Pen to the motorcarde beyond.
To get my attention, Jerry tugged at my jacket. “Walls, uh, give my apologies to Percy that
I’m not going to be able to make it to rehearsal later. I’m a little tired.”
The zip of Roman candles fired at Nixon’s retreating limo caught my attention, and when
I looked back down, Jerry was gone.
The only people congratulating Dickie had eaten carrion that morning, and he broke free
from them and kicked through the sand toward me. “Hey, I doan tink it was right ya
podnah got peen-alized. Was a good show, y’know.

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“Thanks.”
“Look,” he said, “no hard feelings, awright? Ya didn’t hear it from me,” he added in a
whisper. “But I he-uh dere’s some action at de old Balboa Studios.”
“What about Lady Dear?” I said.
“Doan know nuffin, swear to Gad,” he said, raising his paw. “Awful shame ‘bout her.”
“What about your friends? The hyena, the wolverine.”
He shrugged. “I ain’t my brother’s keeper, but I heard tell ‘bout a sex ranch up in da
mountains. Some serious shit.”
“Where in the mountains?”
“Dat I doan know.”
“What about Janey?”
A salacious simper slivered into his face. “You mean that sweet piece of –”
My fist didn’t let him finish his sentence. He spun and fell and I walked away wincing,
massaging my paw. Ten minutes before my hands had been as strong as Sonny Liston’s, and
now both were burned and one might’ve been broken. Where was Leo Shampoo when you
needed him?

My one corn beer at Cuffy’s sired three more, which I drank with the pleasure-free
vacuuming of a workman cleaning an oil spill, and since it was a holiday and anyone not
chronically alone would be with loved ones, the place was empty but for me, Cuff, and a
loose confederation of professional drinkers. With the Dodgers off that day, I distracted
myself by squinting at the dusty bottles on Cuffy’s top shelf while slurping beer four to suds.
His clientele wasn’t the sort that drank for taste, and as such, the single malts and aged
tequilas sat neglected as spinsters. I read the labels as best I could in the dim light: Balblair,

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Islay, Bowmore, Speyside, Talisker, Skye. I had visions of brave rams throned atop crags
and skrilling out over the ocean, men hurtling rocks, redhaired women wearing kilts with
nothing underneath.
“Hey Cuff, I use the phone?”
He pulled it out from under the bar and set it behind my beer. “It’s private,” I said.
“What about the one in back?”
“Private? Nothing these boys ain’t heard before.”
“Do me the favor,” I said. “I’ll buy a double a one those,” I said, pointing high. “That
one from Skye. Sounds nice.”
In the back room, I riffled through the phonebook till I found the Cs. There were only
two Clunys, and she sure as hell wasn’t Mortimer. After two rings, the answer was:
“Yeeaaaasss?”
“Hi, Deirdre? It’s Tom, Tom Grimalkin?”
“Tooooom, hullo. So nice t’hair from you.”
“Yes, nice to, uh, hear from, uh, you too. Gracie and I were thinking recently, well, that,
we’d never, uh, had you and Headley over for dinner, and we were wondering if the two of
you were free sometime for dinner.”
After a pause, she said, “Headley an oi are no longer togither.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I lied.
“Duss the invitation still stand fer a lonely gurl floying solo? Would you mind terribly a
trio, me and you and yer luffly gorrrrgeous wife?” she whispered. Her purred r’s were
prickling the hairs on the back of my neck, sliding all the way down to the tip of my tail.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Let me find a time that works for Gracie and we’ll get back to
you.”

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“Plaze do. Oi’m so curious to see … everything.”
As I lurched back to the bar, lust was playing Whac-A-Mole with my heart inside my
ribcage. My double was poured when I returned. “Sixty cents,” said Cuffy.
I didn’t even blink at the cost, handing him twin nickels and quarters, and thanking him
for the favor. I closed my eyes and sipped the amber liquid, a Scotch as smooth as skin.
Then Goof had to storm in, flipping up the dark lenses on his pilot’s goggles to tell us that
Thumper McWhistle was missing and Algeria was in flames. I’d had enough bad news for
one day. Saluting Goofy, I mentioned a date with Gracie that we didn’t have, and drove the
Bel Air back up the canyon, premature fireworks flowering in flame overhead. Pulling into
the driveway, I was less drunk than sad, but Gracie, curled in one of the spaceman chairs
with the dimmer low, seemed both drunk and sad. On the coffee table, one bottle of
champagne was empty, another dewy and mostly empty, and on her lap were obits and her
copy of Hamlet.
“It doesn’t end well, does it, Tommy?” she asked, not looking up.
I didn’t know if she meant Hamlet or the murders. It didn’t matter.
“No,” I said.
She blew me a kiss and asked me to pass the champagne. I took a swig and handed it
down to her. “How was rehearsal?”
“Percy didn’t show,” I said, retreating to my new liquor cabinet, a pantry I’d annexed
from the spices Gracie didn’t use. For her, the only seasoning any dish needed was Tabasco,
lemon juice, and salt. Lots of salt.
“Where were you all this time?”
“Jerry and I went down to Muscle Beach.”
“It’s so dirty down there.”

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“Well,” I said, returning with my triple, “you should be happy we live all the way up here
in the clouds.”
“I am happy we live up here. It’s safe up here. Isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I said, sinking into the low sofa. “Safer than Algeria.”
She tried to smile. “They had it on the five o’clock news. It was awful. The buildings
were smoking. Little children were bleeding. I didn’t even know there was a war there. I
hate war,” she concluded, clutching a pillow to her chest.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m too old for them to draft me if Jack Kennedy decides to
invade Cuba again.”
“It’s not the Algerians or Cubans I’m really worried about.”
“Baby, there’s nothing we can do about the Russians.”
She stared across the table at me in the semi-darkness, her eyes glowing like ghosts. “I’m
worried that someone is going to kidnap me, rip my arms off, and burn me alive.”
“Gracie, they’re all …” I tried to find a word both kind and accurate. “Washed up,” I
concluded, imagining Igby playing checkers against himself in the back house in Little
Armenia he rented by the week.
“I’m washed up, Tommy,” she wailed.
“Not true.”
“I thought I was going to be the animal Doris Day.”
“You’re still young,” I said. “Besides, you’ve got Ophelia – you’re starring at the
Hollywood Bowl.”
“I haven’t been in an episode in four years.”
“You want to be in another episode? I can talk to –”
“I want to be in your movie!”

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“Oh.”
“What? Did Percy already cast someone else?”
“No.”
She scowled and swallowed. “Do you have someone else in mind? Another cat, a
younger cat, some bimbo who’ll blow you on a conveyor belt?”
“Gracie, no. There’s nobody else.”
“I miss it, Tommy. If I’d wanted to sit around all day and drink, I could’ve stayed up
north, with servants and stables and all that.”
“I’ll talk to Percy.”
She drained the rest of the champagne. “I just can’t get my head around it,” she said.
“What?”
“Why would anyone do it? Kill all us poor animals?”
“When you think a rocket could kill you any minute, it’s nice having some sense of
power.”
She was gazing out the window at the harmless rockets bursting in the distant hills, every
minute or two momentarily tinting her white fur cotton-candy shades. She hadn’t heard me.
“Why would they kill Lady Dear?”
I took a long drink of rye. One more and I might be ready to tell the truth. Before I
could, the pyrotechnic palms beyond our real palm trees caught my eye, burning for one
brilliant moment gold and vermillion, Granny Smith and Easter lily, then dying out forever.
The phone rang. I set my drink down and placed my fist over my open palm, as did
Gracie. “Rock, paper, scissors,” we said together as the phone rang again.
My paw was still balled. Hers was open. “Silly Tomsy,” she smiled. “Brute force never
wins.”

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I trotted into the kitchen and answered after the fourth ring: “Yallo.”
“Hello, may I please speak with Mr. Grimalkin?” The voice was a young woman’s, the
tone wired.
“Speaking.”
“Mr. Grimalkin, it’s Babs, Babs Syzygy.”
“Hello, yes,” I said, fear slicing through the foam of my buzz.
“Mr. Grimalkin, Janey is missing. Nobody’s seen her in a week and a half, not me, not
her mom, not Peggy.
“Oh, I’m … sorry to hear that.”
“Mr. Grimalkin, is someone there with you?
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“What have you done so far?” I asked, walking the phone toward the far corner of the
kitchen, until the coil was taut as a clothesline.
“We filed a missing persons report, and I thought she might just have bopped down to
San Diego or something – she can be spacey, sometimes, but then … did you hear about
Thumper?”
“Yes. Do you know the details?”
“They haven’t found him yet, but my dad said Mr. Disney is beside himself. Apparently
he was crying in his office this afternoon. And, Mr. Grimalkin?”
“Yes?”
“Well, I didn’t think about it before, but Janey was a Mouseketeer once.”
I coughed, feeling whiskey fumes rise up my throat. “What?!?” I said. My eyelids sank
and I tried to breathe. “What?”

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“Yeah, that’s how we met. We hit it off, but then she got kicked off for drinking
between takes. It was three or four years ago, but still, she has a Disney connection.”
“Is Mary Jane her Christian name?” I whispered, picturing drunk little ducktail Davey.
“Yes. How did you know?
“What can I do?”
“Could we meet to talk about it? I could come to your house?”
“No,” I said. “Is your number in the book?”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Yeah. Maxwell Syzygy. There can’t be more than one.”
“I’ll give you a call back.”
“Okay,” she said. “Bye.”
I hung up and brought the bottle of rye back to the table.
“Who was that?” asked Gracie.
“Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“They call you on the phone now?”
I settled into my old indentation on the cushion and noticed she had the open Bible on
her lap.
“Were you reading it?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I read it, sometimes. For inspiration. Comfort. Something.”
She squinted down at the tiny text and read: “Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and
the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate. Some comfort. I prefer The Lord is my
helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?” That was her mother’s epitaph.
When Gracie was two, her mom had been hit by a drunk driver riding back from the hills. I
always thought it was a strange tombstone inscription for someone whose life was ended by
one of those mere mortals. “I will not be afraid,” Gracie murmured.

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11.

Just as pets and masters change to look alike, time and hard usage had made Willie and
his DeSoto sound the same: the gravelly voicebox of the engine, the stentorious hacks, the
belches resulting from air and liquid mixed improperly, and throug it all a general,
impossible-to-pinpoint wheeze. The DeSoto gasped at the inclines and tight turns of Boyle
Heights, and only ceased its kvetching when Willie parked it in front of a ramshackle
bungalow. Asleep in the yard was Leo Shampoo, contorted into a rubber-boned pretzel, and
all that stood between his soft body and the sun were a Speedo and a rat’s next of exercise
bands tangled around his torso.
“You sure we want to take him?” asked Willie, hopping over the driver’s side door, which
he’d informed me no longer opened.
I ambled past a withering azalea bush and squatted next to Leo, curled fetally on his side,
his dainty foot tucked behind his neck. “Well,” I said, “he’s the only person I know who
speaks Chinese.”
“How could anybody possibly fall asleep in that position?”
When Willie grabbed his shoulder to rouse him, Leo Shampoo yelped into consciousness.
“Ohhhh fudge-racket,” he moaned, trying to extricate himself from his own tortured pose.
With creaks and cracks, his leg was returned to its natural position, but when he tried to
stand, he fell into a patch of dirt. “Ouchy, ouchy, leg fell asleep,” he said, trying to knead
feeling back into his thigh. “Tingly, tingly.” Tacked to the front door was a sign that read
Beware of Ferret.
“Dr. Conditioner,” asked Willie. “What did you do to yourself?”
“Yoga,” he groaned. “I was preparing for our mission. Centers the mind,” he added,

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tapping a white dot into his burned temple. When he extricated himself from the bands he
looked like the strawberry milk cow.
“Long Beach,” he said, “I’m ready.” He began inching back toward the house, every step
a sting. “Just let me go get some aloe.”
When the good doctor emerged from his house ten minutes later, he looked like the
Creature from the Black Lagoon on vacation: green with aloe, his slimy body was covered
only in cut-off Levi’s, an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, and shoes that he told us were called
huaraches. He carried a dreamcatcher, a bag of Starlight mints, and a copy of that morning’s
L.A. Times. He looked quite pleased with himself.
“Next stop: justice,” he said, settling into the back seat. “Oooooh, hot leather, hot
leather, ooh, okay.”
As Willie guided his ornery beast toward the 5, Shampoo asked, “So, Tom, how’s the –”
“Fine,” I replied. “Just fine.”
The knob had fallen off the radio tuner, which made finding the Dodger game quite a
quest: pinching the tiny rod and turning my fingers swept us from Hank Williams to “Moon
River,” passing over Dodger Stadium but never landing inside. But the signal for KLAC was
clear and strong, so finally I gave up. Giving up meant the Beach Boys.
“So, Dr. Conditioner, anything happening out in the world?” asked Willie, his voice like a
lawnmower that wouldn’t start.
“Your voice disturbs me,” said Leo, retrieving a mint from his bag and passing it upward.
“And candy is the best medicine.” As Willie popped it in, Shampoo added, “It generates
saliva. Really, the throat is just like a vagina. Proper lubrication is important.”
After a long silence filled only with the white noise of the headwind, Willie said, “I’ll
pretend I didn’t hear that, Dr. Conditioner.”

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“So, doc,” I said. “How’s about the news?”
I heard the riffling of newsprint in the ragtop breeze, and Leo Shampoo said, “Rocket
ships and Russians in space … and – oh fiddle sticks – the satellite they were sending to the
Venus veered off course. Now we’ll never know what women think.”
“Oh shit,” said Willie, “there’s the 710.” The southbound exit was 200 yards ahead and
five lanes to the right, and Willie veered blindly, almost side-swiping a truck full of cherries,
almost rear-ending a Volkswagen bus as we swerved onto the offramp. I shut my eyes.
“… Some Negroes were jailed in Georgia …”
I opened my eyes to an off-ramp guardrail, and beyond it a bleached sky and a ringside
view of the barrio. Newer highway systems built their exits into lucky four-leaf clovers.
Ours, being older, was a simpler and more apt shape: a cross.
“… And they still haven’t found Thumper Mawhistle’s body yet. He’s presumed dead.”
“Were you acquainted with the unfortunate lagomorph?” asked Leo Shampoo.
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. “Any good op-eds?” I asked.
“Red Menace … garbage collection … space race … Hey, Dick Nixon.”
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
“A society ought to be judged by the way in which it treats its weakest members,” Shampoo read.
“and many of our weakest fellow citizens are in the midst of a persecution. I speak, of course, of the recent
spate of murders targeting our furry and feathered fellow citizens.” My heart rate, already high, spiked
again.
“Weakest?” I said.
“I am asking my friend Mayor Yorty to assemble a task force of the finest LAPD officers to find the
person or persons responsible, and to bring them to justice. Moreover, I pledge that if elected governor of this
great state of California, I plan on my first day in office to create a Board of Animal Affairs to act as liaison

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between the governor’s office and the talking animal community. My friend, the actor Thomas Grimalkin,
has agreed to serve as President of the Board, and John Wayne as Vice President. To quote Mr.
Grimalkin’s fine Oscar acceptance speech, ‘None of us are safe until all of us are safe.’”
“President,” said Willie, reaching across the stick to punch my knee.
“John Wayne,” I said.
“Do you think they’ll give you your own letterhead?” asked Leo.
“This calls for tequila,” said Willie, head diving beneath the steering column like a
spooked ostrich.
I grabbed the wheel as Leo requested the worm. He was almost giddy as Willie
eventually resurfaced with a fat-bellied bottle full of a murky liquid, like a chemistry
experiment gone to seed. “Last time I had tequila was in Rosarito,” Leo Shampoo informed
us. “I blacked out and woke up in what I thought was a closet until I saw the kneeler. It
turned out to be a confessional in Our Lady of the Rosary. On the other side was a wild
boar. I made a confession anyway.”
At our heels as we clipped southward was the L.A. River, a trickle by any other name, a
sludgy belt of water too meager to wash a car, a concrete-bedded disaster as navigable as a
parking lot puddle: always evaporating, never quite evaporated.
These were place I’d only ever seen on maps: Bell, Downey, Compton. It was all scrubby
yards fenced in heavy iron, teetering phone lines, thirsty acacia trees, thick black women
moving slow in the growing heat. After we crossed the 405, the Negro blight shifted to
shiny, anonymous industrial.
“Northrop,” said Leo, pointing at one of the passing buildings, as big and glittery white
as God’s coffin. “That’s where they keep the downed alien spaceships.” His s’s were
softening into shushes. I hope the Chinamen could still understand him.

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Mile after mile, one corrugated steel building followed another, and I wondered what the
engineers and executives inside would do if they knew that a pair of limey skiffle-heads were
constructing robots that made Elektro look as crude as a bobblehead. If people would pay
to watch a talking animal have sex with a person, to watch a talking animal die, would they
pay to watch a robot have sex with a person? Was that legal? Would they pay to watch a
robot die? Could robots die? Robotophilia, robotophobia. Zoophilia, zoophobia.
Fasincation birthed twins: love and hate. Maybe they were Siamese twins. Maybe the
Connoisseur of Pain was Siamese. Maybe I would find out that day.
Above us terns danced in a drunken scavenge, flapping through winds bleary with diesel
fume and ammonia and brine, circling toward a green sign that told us the next exit was the
Vincent Thomas Bridge. We tooled up the onramp, jacked up like the lift hill of a roller
coaster. To our right were the great green hills of Palos Verdes, sticking out into the Pacific
like a beautiful elbow, and atop one of those hills was Mickey’s mansion. Below and to our
left us was the port, a Gomorrah of tankers and cranes, importing junk, exporting death.
“God, it’s gorgeous,” said Willie as he scanned the gray grid, his voice softening to the
purr of rice pouring from a bag. As a cargo plane descended above us, he shifted from third
to second, his martini olive eyes following it down. “That is more beautiful than any bird,”
he said.
“No,” said Leo Shampoo. “Haven’t you ever seen a bald eagle?”
“Only on the back of a biker’s jacket. But look at that,” he continued, his eyes wandering
from the road yet again. When it dropped below the height of the bridge, I caught my
breath. I’d never been above a flying plane. This was how God saw things. “Your bald
eagle’s born flying,” Willie said. “We made that just to give the finger to gravity.”
“I’d say we made it to fly spare parts overnight from the factory in El Paso,” I said as it

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swooped down onto the runway as smoothly as an ice skater, its flaps flipping up to brake.
“Bald eagles can have a wingspan of eight feet,” Shampoo protested. Immediately Willie
spread his arms, one arm outside, one arm pushing back my chest, and no arms on the
wheel, which I grabbed to keep us from trying our own experiment in air travel. From the
backseat the sunburned doctor said, “Everyone was born to fly.”

“So,” I said to Willie, eying the passersby from our table at a sidewalk café, “We’re
looking for a Chinaman.” You couldn’t see the pavement for all the Chinamen. They were
everywhere: bald Chinese cops, fat Chinese delivery boys, Chinese matrons carrying fruit
that looked like it was imported from another planet, Chinese bathing beauties in yellow
swimsuits with lacquered black beehives atop their heads, Chinese toddlers eating donuts
and laughing, Chinese businessmen in shiny tight jackets with no lapels, Chinese grandmas
who looked hollowed out from the inside, Chinese teenagers in short pants with razor-
straight leg hair. They were all talking at once, like a symphony of pinball machines.
“Long Beach is a hub for Southern California’s Asian communities,” smiled Leo.
“A fact you might’ve mentioned before we left LA.”
The waitress had delivered opaque coffee in small cups, steaming hard even in the
midsummer heat.
“They call it espresshho,” murmured Leo.
“It’s bile,” Willie said. He upended the bowl offering tea packets and dumped his coffee
inside, along with half the saucer of cream and long stream of sugar, then stirred the khaki
mixture with his finger and took a long slurp. “Ah, more like it.”
The neighborhood smelled like old fish, sweet dough, vinegar, gasoline. Lazy seagulls
were coasting in long commas above us, but I didn’t see a talking animal anywhere, and the

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looks I was getting split the difference between amused and hungry.
Willie leaned back in his rattan chair, closing his eyes to pick at the remaining flecks of
meat in his carcass of a case. “What are we going to ask?”
“Maybe they’ve heard suspicious noises coming from the Studios. Maybe the owners are
regulars at the café here.”
His eyes snapped open. “Even if we could get a warrant, which we can’t, what are we
looking for? A bloodstain on the floor that looks suspiciously like a frog silhouette?”
Our teenaged waitress bounced over, a tight little nip with a Jackie Kennedy bob the
color of fresh pavement and teeth that had been massaged to perfection by an orthodontist.
“Hiiii,” she said, taking each of us in turn: the hatchet-faced hobo detective, the talking cat,
the tipsy man in the open shirt with granny glasses and slimed skin the color of sockeye.
“Do you watch cartoons?” I asked.
She nodded. “For sure.”
“Why do you like them?”
Her head bobbed from side to side. “They funny,” she finally said. “They go splat – bang
– boom – yeeeoooowwwww,” she said, smacking her hands together. “They hurt, but then …”
She tossed her hands to the cloudless sky. “They okay.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, “something like that.”
Shampoo crooked his pointer at her, then when she bent over, he whinged something in
Chinese that after a few seconds made her blush, then cover her mouth, then pop up
frowning. She spat something back in Chinese, then she followed it up with an angry “You
go now. You go now,” she repeated, louder, pointing across the street then catching the
attention of the other waitresses and patrons with a long string of clanging syllables. A few
of the less ancient stood up, their chair legs scraping against the concrete of the sidewalk.

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Leo was shaking his head. “No,” he said, “That’s not … ” But I was crooking him
offstage, Willie was tossing down a five-spot and retrieving his hat, telling every to have a
very, very nice day, we were fording 3
rd
Street toward the DeSoto, dodging sedans and
delivery trucks, pushed across by a barrage of shaken fists and angry declamations that
sounded like bullets ricocheting through a gong factory.
As we screeched away, I sighed and let my head loll onto the headrest. “Jesus, Mary, and
Joseph,” I sighed. “What did you say?”
“I’m not an expert in Mandarin,” he said.
“She was about to cry,” said Willie, accelerating through a stop sign.
“I took a correspondence course,” Leo whispered.
“What!?!?!” I roared. “The whole reason you’re here –”
“They sent tapes,” he said. “I listened. Anyhoo, what I thought I told her was that we
were investigating a crime, that there was a video that showed bestiality and rape and
murder, and I told her we would pay her if she would give us any information about it. But
I think the tequila might have mixed up a couple of the verbs in my mouth.”
“Do tell,” I said.
“I think I accidentally asked her if she wanted to commit a crime with us, to commit
bestiality and rape and murder, and then –”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“And then that we would pay her for it,” Shampoo concluded.
“Well,” Willie said, tossing his hat onto the dash and rubbing his pelt of hair, “I guess
Christmas came early for her this year.”
I glanced in the rearview, grateful at the absence of a mob wielding samurai swords.
When Leo offered us mints, we declined.

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“Well,” I finally said, “Balboa?”
“You really think they converted the whole studio? You really think there’s that much of
a market for watching animals get tortured to death?”
“I think you underestimate the creepiness of the American imagination,” said Leo from
the backseat.
“We can bring in Dickie DiMartino for questioning,” said Willie, “and the girl.”
“Yeah.” Except Janey was missing. I needed to talk to Babs.
“We could put the squeeze on them,” Willie said, “Bestiality is still a crime on the books,
even if nobody enforces it.”
“Miscegenation is still a crime is sixteen states,” said Shampoo. “But an unjust law is no
law at all. You should be able to love whoever you want.”
“I agree, Dr. Conditioner, but whites and blacks are still the same species. They can
make cute little brown babies together. If Mr. Cat has sleeps with a woman, I don’t know,
they could make a …”
I glanced over at him, an eyebrow raised above my Wayfarers. “What – a manticore?”
He shrugged. “So thought the ancients.” As usual with Willie, I couldn’t quite gauge his
level of irony. “Look,” I said, “if Porky Pig had sex with a girl monkey, God forbid, they
wouldn’t make a hairy little porker with opposable thumbs.”
We edged up to a red light, and kitty corner across the intersection were the words
BALBOA FILMS, the red letters taller than I was, planted atop the crossbar of what looked
like the world’s largest soccer goal. The buildings beyond slumped under the weight of
neglect, but there were a few cars in the gravel lot, and Willie slalomed the DeSoto in to join
them. I was reaching for the door handle, ready to storm the place, when Willie set his hand
on my knee.

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“What’s the matter? It’s all coming together.”
“No warrant,” said Willie. “An LAPD badge isn’t a key to the city.
“I’m making a movie,” I offered. “I could say, honestly, that I’m in the market for some
film equipment.”
“And if they say no?” asked Willie.
But I didn’t have the chance to respond: striding across the gravel from one of the back
lots was an Asian tough in a trench coat, looking eager to introduce us to the business end of
his fist.
“Shit,” I said.
“Why is he wearing a Macintosh?” asked Leo, staring up at the sun dangling in front of us
like a golden Christmas ball. “Doesn’t look like rain.”
“He’s got a machine gun under there,” said Willie, sliding his hand around his ribs and
pretending to scratch a sudden itch. I could see his knuckles rapping against the handle of
the gun housed in a shoulder holster there. “Don’t look at me,” he said through clenched
teeth, eyes still on the man, now not twenty feet away. I turned my eyes to the dashboard
just as Leo Shampoo clanged out some correspondence course Chinese from the backseat.
“Oh no,” I whispered, feeling my eyes close and my body slump forward. Have you
murdered any animals recently? We would like to pay you to sodomize a monkey.
I opened my peepers to see the man chuckling by the driver’s side door, rattling off some
Chinese back at Leo.
“What’s did you say?” I hissed into the back of my fist.
“I told him we were friendly, and that we liked animals, and people, and especially
Chinese people. I think.”
The man was still talking. “What’s he saying?” I asked.

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“Uh, well, some numbers, and some animals. Kinds of animals.”
“Are they running a butcher shop in there?” asked Willie.
“I don’t know the word for ‘butcher.’” The man’s smile was almost obsequious. “He’s
saying they’re very good, they’re all very good, but especially the one they have today.”
“But what is it?” I asked.
“Oh,” said Leo. “Oh … it’s a movie.”
“Movie,” the man said, grinning. He pointed at me. “You like.”
“Sure,” said Willie. “Why else would we be here but for the Sunday afternoon matinee?”
We crunched behind the man across the gravel and into a suite of rooms whose walls
were a Hall of Fame of skewed Silent Age film posters: Buster Keaton, The Lure of Ambition,
Fatty Arbuckle, When a Woman Sins. Crates stacked on the sides of the room funneled us
toward a booth and accompanying blackboard, whose of list of titles in English and two
languages not constituted from the Latin alphabet explained the smell of popcorn, but not of
hot pennies. Willie was whistling “Swanee River,” apparently no longer concerned about
whatever ordnance lurked under our barker’s trench.
“Hi,” I told the man at the booth – the ticket taker, I presumed.
“Hay-lo,” he said. My watch said three o’clock, and the closest time was a 2:50 showing
of The Love That Dar Not Speek It’s Name.
“Uh, three for the love one,” I said, nodding at the board, opening my wallet, pulling out
a buck. Our buddy in the trench nodded along happily as the ticket-taker said, “Very good.
Ten dollar.”
“Uh, what?” said Willie.
“Do you mean ten cents?” I asked.
“Ha,” said our friend. “Dollars.”

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The ticket taker nodded. “Not see anywhere else.”
“Simple supply and demand,” said Leo Shampoo.
“Thanks, Adam Smith,” said Willie, shelling out one of his Hamiltons.
“Ten dollars each,” smiled the ticket-taker.
Willie coughed the last hunk of credulity out of his lungs. “Excuse me? I don’t care if
it’s lost footage of the birth of Christ and the fall of Rome, it’s not worth ten dollars each.”
Trench coat and ticket-taker volleyed in Chinese, at the end of which the ticket-taker said,
“Nine dollars,” while feeling under his chair. I began crouching, sure it was a revolver he
was reaching for, but it turned out to be three grease spot-stained lunch bags. “And
popcorn, free.”
“Well, the popcorn seals the deal for me,” said Willie, trading $27 for the three bags.
The theater the ticket-taker directed us toward was tiny, ten seats by ten, and populated
by a male Braille of shame, desire, and not less than two pairs of Mickey Mouse ears, a self-
selecting audience about as small as I would’ve expected considering the ten dollar ticket
price. But as the three of us settled into the back row, the finer points of microeconomics
were evaporated by what I saw onscreen. In a posh living room, a Tupperware party was
concluding, its furry beskirted guests laboring toward the door under stacks of pastel bowls,
where they air-kissed Lady Dear, who was vamping it fake lashes and a Betty Boop dress,
perfectly capturing the mock-sadness of a hostess when her guests leave. The only other
actress I recognized was Melissa May Hopechest, who was occasionally paid to spurn Daffy
onscreen.
The notable lack of gore on the upholstery – plus the fact that all of the women were
still clothed – suggested we were still in what Zykov would’ve called the rising action, but as
Lady Dear refluffed pillows and consolidated the remaining Jordan almonds into a single

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bowl, I wondered if there would be any ravishings or bloodletting. Perhaps the viewers had a
milquetoastier motivation, merely wanting to observe the furry variety of the fairer sex in
their natural environs. Maybe Lady Dear would wash the china, sweep and vacuum, tally her
checks and bills while humming along to the Dean Martin on the record player.
A knock interrupted her while she was putting the few remaining slices of cherry pie a la
whipped cream back into the fridge. I was braced for carnage, before realizing she couldn’t
die twice.
While the camera swung round to Lady Dear’s point-of-view as she opened the door,
what I was not braced for was my wife.
Grace was waiting on the porch with a gift bag, wearing a minidress I’d never seen and an
expression I had, a slatternly smirk that said it had done everything and still wanted more.
“Hey,” Leo whispered, “isn’t that your –”
“Shut the hell up,” I said.
“You’re late,” Lady Dear pouted.
“No I’m not,” said Gracie, the words slipping past lips as red as a Valentine.
“We had so much fun,” said Lady Dear, sweeping her paw at the party’s flotsam and
jetsam.
Grace seized Lady Dear by the scruff, and as the dog whimpered, Gracie pressed her
muzzle to the spaniel’s. The kiss was long and fierce, and I felt my tongue kneading my hard
palate as Lady Dear finally pulled away. “No,” she huffed, “I can’t. That one time was just a
fluke.”
Even as I felt a tug and swell in my pants, a hydra-headed shame was breathing in my
face: other men were seeing my wife grope someone who wasn’t me, were seeing my wife
grope a woman, were seeing my wife grope a woman voluntarily, were seeing my wife grope

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a woman voluntarily and – because we didn’t need the money – for no other reason than
that she liked it.
“Bitch,” said Gracie, shoving her hard enough she stumbled backward and fell to the
Persian. “You know you wanted it.”
Lady Dear’s response was sniffling with downcast eyes. “It’s wrong,” she implored,
finally looking up.
“That’s why you like it.”
“Go, please,” Lady Dear said. “If you touch me again, I won’t be able to control myself.”
“Don’t you want to open your present?” Gracie asked, dangling the gift bag in front of
her face. After a moment, Lady Dear nodded, taking it and removing what at first I thought
was half a baguette.
“Holy Moses,” said Willie, recognizing the Bakelite dong for what it was a second before
I did. Plastics. Damn plastics.
Lady seemed equally startled. “Ohhhh,” she said, making an OK sign around the base
and pulling upward.
“That’s not all,” said Gracie, fists on her hips, legs spread, towering in spike heels above
the poor dog.
“Christ,” I sighed, loud enough to make one of the Mickey Mouse ear-wearing pervs in
the next row to turn around with a curdled face, but when he started shushing me, I
snatched his hand with my paw, twisted it backward against itself, and pressed my claw-like
fingernail into his palm. “Unless you want the stigmata, my friend, I recommend minding
your own business. Do we understand each other?”
He nodded and swung back to the screen to see Lady Dear removing a contraption of
leather loops and steel hoops from the bag.

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“Have you been a bad dog, Lady?” my wife whispered.
Lady Dear nodded. If you’ve ever owned a darling puppy and come home to find your
favorite sofa chewed to fluff and thread, you know what her expression was. I rubbed at my
old face, needing something, anything – a mouth on my cock, a needle in my arm, a liverful
of whiskey. I hadn’t touched my morphine in almost a week, but I flexed my good bad paw
and with the other squirted that bitter sweet poppy juice into the back of my throat, chasing
it with a liberal basting of catnip about the jaw and throat.
Never meeting Gracie’s gaze, Lady Dear handed over the dildo, unzipped her dress,
shimmied free of it, unhooked her bra, pulled her panties down between her thighs, and
stepped out. If Gracie had asked, I would’ve been very happy to provide my own cock in
place of the ersatz number. Lady Dear slipped the black noose overhead, bandoliered her
downy golden bust, belted it thrice around her sapling waist, and finally looked at Gracie for
approval.
“The leash,” my wife said, lifting an open palm toward Lady Dear like a Civics teacher
confiscating a snuck snack.
With what was either fear or a very good impression of fear, Lady Dear gave her the leash
and got down on all fours atop the Persian, and as she did, the film shifted to Gracie’s point
of view, sweeping from the trembling spaniel up to focus on the opposite wall, bare but for a
Norman Rockwell print, the famous one of the boy in the doctor’s office glancing at his
physician’s diploma while unbuckling his pants. At my side, Leo Shampoo was nodding,
whispering, “It’s so important to check the references.”
The camera dropped down to Lady Dear as the morphine hit, jittering the action and
brightening everything to oversaturation. To combat the growing dizziness, I closed my
eyes, but opened them a few seconds later when I heard yowling: Gracie was crouching

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behind Lady Dear, snarling curses and insults like some tight-lipped SS interrogator as she
yanked on the leash with one paw and with the other churned the dildo inside the bucking
lap dog. I wondered how much of it was real, and what that even meant anymore. I
wondered if I would feel better or worse if it was Gracie naked on all fours in a harness
getting fucked from behind by Lady Dear. The hormonal fabric of the small theater was
swelling with lust, a sort of sexual meiosis of mood, and the desire in my own mind was
flaming even as the morphine in my blood was dousing it: maybe my problem wasn’t a
lingering wound from the mean end of a Parmesan wedge, and maybe it wasn’t the seven-
year itch. Maybe it was that until recently, I’d been draining a vial of morphine a week
Willie was taking notes, Leo was musing under his breath about the delicate relationship
between physician and patient, and I was remembering an afternoon I’d come home to find
Gracie in the back in a bikini, pounding to oblivion an anthill with a ball peen hammer.
With clenched jaw, I imagined Bugs, Wile, Sylvester watching this, but as I did, I realized
that they would buy me beer if they discovered my wife was a crazed deviant. Hearing I’d
been appointed President of Nixon’s Board of Animal Affairs would make their eyes wander
to the nearest screen or bottle of hooch, but if they saw this movie, they’d be biting their
knuckles and telling me I was one lucky son of a bitch.
I hadn’t realized my eyes were closed until I opened them to see Grace and LD snuggling
in bed, the sheet and duvet pulled to their waists. Or, more accurately, Lady Dear was
snuggling, petting my wife’s neck, her huge brown eyes soft as undercooked eggs, while
Gracie was scanning the room for the next diversion. That was a situation I knew well. At
least I was pleased to learn that my wife’s breasts were bigger that the spaniel’s.
“What did you serve the ladies?” asked Gracie.
“Cherry pie with whipped cream. Two of them asked for the recipe.”

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“Whipped cream.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Any left?”
“Yes ma’am,” said the dead woman, hopping up. “One piece or two?”
“Just the whipped cream,” smiled Gracie, almost sadly.
Lady Dear returned with the bowl, and not being the brightest bulb of the litter, only
understood its purpose when Grace threw off the sheet and duvet, spreading her legs until
she looked like a feline T-bar. I was not about to let the jackoffs in Mickey Mouse ears hear
my wife come, and I was about to get up, find the projectionist, and explain to him that his
options were 1) pain and 2) stopping the reel – when I heard a click in my ear and felt
something round and hard pressed to my temple. Being a cat, I could see out of both
corners of my eye simultaneously, and I saw other hands pressing other gun barrels into my
associates’ skulls. I stared at my wife, odalisqued as Lady Dear lathered her pussy in
whipped cream, and something wet and astringent billowed over my mouth. I saw Lady
Dear slurping between my wife’s legs, and heard sounds Gracie had made so many times
before, so long ago.

When I woke up, my arms were behind my back, a staticky tingle running from my
shoulders to my fingertips, and when I tried to bring them around to my sides, I felt a twin
bite in my wrists and heard chain link click against itself. So much for getting ethered and
then dropped off on some remote beach. When I hazarded to unshutter my eyes, I saw only
the velveteen darkness of a cloudy midnight. “Hey,” I whispered, “Willie? Leo?”
“Welcome back to consciousness, Mr. Cat,” sawed a voice from behind me and to my
left.

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I sighed. The tumbrel was more bearable when you weren’t the only passenger. But it
was still a tumbrel: “Glad the LAPD taught you to sniff out dangerous situations and avoid
them.”
“Didn’t think they’d try to lure us in.” With a bit of brightness poking through the resin
of his voice, he added “But that flick was worth nine bucks if any movie ever –”
“Shut the hell up,” I said. “That was my wife.”
“Oh. My apologies, Mr. Cat. But, well … nevermind.”
“Is Leo here?”
“If he is, I haven’t heard a peep from him. Maybe they fed him to the sharks.”
The space was coming together like a photo developing in a chemical bath: it was
cavernous, industrial, filled mostly with crates stacked in columns that rose toward the
girdered ceiling far above, crates stamped with the slashes and dashes of the Chinamen’s
violent language.
My inspection was interrupted by something behind me and to my right rattling and
snorting, then yelping: “Jesus jam on a biscuit!”
“Welcome back, Dr. Conditioner,” Willie said.
“My sunburn!” moaned Leo. “Where are we? Oh, my arms …”
At this, someone I couldn’t see shambled over. “Quality means doing it right when no
one is looking,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Do you have any aloe?” said Leo.
“Don’t find a fault, find a remedy,” our guard told Leo. “Anybody can complain.”
“So, mister, is there any particular reason you decided to interrupt our movie-watching?”
I asked.

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This one was directed towards me: “When everything seems to be going against you,
remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”
The man didn’t sound Chinese, and I wondered if he was a white Buddhist monk, left
here by the pornographers to instill some Eastern wisdom in us.
“You know, mister,” I said, “if you unlock these handcuffs, I’ve got some money hidden
on my person. What would it take? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred?”
“If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security
that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.”
“He’s looking at me funny,” said Leo Shampoo.
“What does he look like?” I whispered. “Does he have a beard? A cane?”
“What are you going to do with us?” Leo asked, fidgeting in his chair.
“Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice,” said the guard.
From Leo’s direction, I heard creaking, tinkling, grunting.
“Leo, what does he look like?” I asked.
Instead of a response, I heard a click, a sigh, a creak, a whoosh, a clang. The man garbled
out, “Those who walk with God always reach their destination,” as small shoes shiffled my
way.
I felt my cuffs click open as Leo hustled away. I stood up, woozy from the morphine
and ether, to see Willie unmanacled and Leo rubbing his wrists.
“You were carrying lock-picks?” I asked, noticing the brief metal sticks peeking out from
his pocket like dental equipment.
“Easier to hide than a shoulder holster,” he said, pointing at Willie, whose gun was gone.
A chittering from behind brought our attention to the guard, crumpled on the cement
like a cripple, bland and beardless, staring at us less in anger than confusion. The crickety

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clicking did not appear to be coming from his mouth, which was opening to say, “Failure is
only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.” He collapsed, head hitting the floor
with an unhealthy clank.
“Nice job, Leo,” I said.
“Thanks.”
Just as we turned out attention to the surrounding labyrinth of crates, one of the possible
escape routes was filled with footfalls and peeved Oriental yelling. We three double-timed it
in the opposite direction, Willie’s hat flying off his hair and almost hitting me in the face,
Leo huffing a few feet behind. Propelled ahead by what sounded like a clowder of angry
housecats, we zigzagged between crates until the path forked. I followed Willie left, but I
heard Leo roll right – the better choice, it turned out when our path narrowed down to
nothing, two converging walls of crates shoved together so tight you couldn’t stick a Gideon
Bible between the stacks.
“What does Samson do when the bad guys are chasing him?” asked Willie as a flashlight
beam swung near. “He brings the walls of the place down on top of them.”
“Wait, they weren’t chasing Samson, and he was inside the building when he –”
But already Willie was pulling at a crate, straining to pull it out. “Hold on,” I said,
weighing suicide and execution, then sighing and clawing my way up a shorter stack. Once
atop it, I started heaving against the adjacent column of rough wood, and the force of the
crates on the other side pushed back against me. Whatever was inside them was a hell of a
lot heavier than fortune cookies.
“Keep it up,” whispered Willie, and with a few more shoves, the column of crates began
to rock drunkenly back and forth.
“Hey you cat!” I heard someone yell. I peeked around the stack to see the man in the

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trench coat – who did indeed have a machine gun – running at the head of a posse of armed
Chinamen.
“Willie, duck,” I said, with one last heave, enough to start a minor domino of splintery
wood. Twenty, thirty, forty crates leaned and teetered and toppled and fell crashing, some
splitting open to reveal Colts and M1s, uzis, claymores and grenade launchers, magazines
enough to fuel quite some war.
“Mr. Cat,” said Willie, crouching behind the barricade of busted crates and serious
ordnance, “I think we now know why our Oriental friends ethered us.”
“So, what now?” I said, grabbing a magazine and trying without luck to fit it into a
revolver.
“Now no more breaky-breaky,” shrieked a voice on the other side of the hill of weaponry
and broken wood. “Boom-boom, stupid!”
“The chink doth protest too much,” I said. Willie grinned, yanking a submachine gun
from the pile.
From the other side, the clink of metal on metal and the groan of cheap overstressed
wood suggested one of them was attempting the climb. “Good luck, Tenzing!” I shouted.
We had yet to match gun to cartridge at the bottom of our canyon of crates, and when
one of the goons scrabbled up the summit, the best we could do was fastball revolvers up at
him. I missed him twice, but Willie winged him in the shoulder, which only made him
madder. He started shooting indiscriminately down at us when from far above another
voice screamed in Chinese. For a moment, we all looked far above to see Dr. Leo Shampoo
standing atop a nearby stack – shirtless, pudgy, sunburned … and toting a Tommy gun. He
shot a stream upward, which ricocheted off the girders and rafters like raging bees, then he
barked some command down at them.

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“Dr. Conditioner,” said Willie. “A man of many surprises.”
While his attention was directed down at us, an unseen voice from yet further up – cold
and Asian and female – said, “Please drop weapon.”
Leo looked up, chagrined, and set the gun at his feet.
“C’mon, Leo, why didn’t you shoot her?” I asked.
“Because. I would shoot him first,” said the voice from above, coming closer until a face
materialized behind the voice. It was Percy’s girlfriend, a pistol held in each hand. Even
foreshortened and thirty feet above, she looked as shocked as I felt.
Five minutes later, we were sitting in a sort of AA circle in what likely had once been
Balboa’s film archive, a squat musty room with no natural light and the dirty sock smell of
haggard nitrate film – me, Willie, Leo, Agamdeep, Trenchcoat, and five other Chinamen I
was informed were actually Vietnamese. The exchange of glances was a raucous game of
pinball with ten balls, but no one had said anything yet. Willie’s heavy jaw kept trying to
form words, only for them to crumble in his throat.
Just to process the fact that my wife had turned out to be a nastier version of Bettie Page
would’ve taken weeks, gallons of whisky, and enough Chopin to make my fingers bleed. But
at least that I understood. This was a code without a key. One thing was for sure: I was
less glad to be alive than I would’ve thought.
It was the conversational equivalent of mutually assured destruction, and we might have
sat there in that crypt of cinema till the end of the world, but for Dr. Leo Shampoo, finally
looking up from his seat, tiny palms extended, like someone trying to disentangle a fistfight.
“Okay, there’s an elephant in the room … and it won’t go away until somebody just says it.
So I’m going to say it. We all watch porn, and we all like it, and that’s okay.”
I bit my lip, but on the other side of the circle, Agamdeep closed her paisley eyes, covered

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her mouth, and began tittering, a giggle that grew until her body was convulsing, until tears
were sliding past her brief nose, and then I let myself laugh too, as did Willie, as did
Trenchcoat, as did the Vietnamese men in their coveralls, although I wasn’t sure they got the
joke.
“So,” said Leo, emboldened, with a cocktail party insouciance, “how did you get into
international small arms trafficking?”
The Asian mouths snapped closed, and Willie grimaced like the question had Charlie-
horsed him, but Agamdeep only raised her narrow shoulders. The rabbinic shrug must’ve
been something she picked up from Percy. The only adornment for her lovely neck was that
long tapeworm of knife-scar that began at the hinge of her jaw and burrowed southward.
I opened my mental dossier of Percy: glue factories and abandoned film studios, robots
and miniguns and porn. Had he been making animal films for years – was I just the next
step up the ladder of fame? And just what kind of movie did he want to make with me
anyway? If he thought Jerry and I would agree to …
But before I could articulate any of this, a clank rang through the metal door.
“Enter,” said Agamdeep, but instead of Percy, instead of a man in a long beard and
aviators, it was the guard Leo had KO’d with the folding chair. He appeared to have a
concussion, reeling in on arthritic knees, his expression disoriented. “Hello, Hank,” she said,
as though he were a child who’d disturbed her at her work.
“Thinking is the hardest work there is,” he said, “which is probably the reason why so
few engage in it.”
“So true,” said Leo, shaking his head, “so true.”
“Just what kind of operation are you running here?” asked Willie.
“Not my operation,” she said, pointing at the Chinamen. “Their operation. They call. I

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come.”
“Sorry about your face,” Leo said to Hank. “I doesn’t look too bruised.”
Agamdeep was rubbing her temples as he pivoted his head toward Leo. “If there is any
one secret to success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see
things from that angle as well as your own.” Leo was nodding at this peacenik blather, but
my eyes were on Hank, whose ears seemed to be smoking. I rubbed my eyes, but still: gray
funnels steaming from his ears, suggesting his brain was on fire. He gurgled as if choking
and Agamdeep, sighing, had to lift a hand to halt Willie, who was standing, ready to perform
the Heimlich maneuver.
Some alarm buried in Hank’s chest started zapping the air with concern.
“Hank is prototype,” said Agamdeep as Hank crumpled to the ground, wheezing.
“What?” asked Willie.
“He’s a robot,” I said, tapping his butt with my shoe. It was as hard as a bowling ball.
Agamdeep nodded. “He moves better than earlier ones.” She looked down at him.
“Boys think it would be ha-ha funny for him only to speak Henry Ford quotes.” After a few
moments, his interior alarm ceased.
Now there was a robot in the room. We settled back into our seats, Agamdeep’s
expression suggesting this was not the best day of her life.
“That was quite the movie they were showing in there,” Willie said. “And it’s convenient
you got all these soundstages. Vertical monopoly: control the production, distribution,
theaters. That’s a nice racket.”
She waved her willowy arms at the men, the room, the whole porn-for-cash-for-guns
syndicate. “Not my racket.”
“Still one thing I don’t understand,” I said, ninety percent sure no one was going to shoot

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me, “There a reason why Snow White –” I pointed at Trenchcoat – “and the other
princesses decided to knock us out while we were watching that movie, a film we paid them
to see? Just thought it would be a barrel of monkeys to mickey three moviegoers? One
thing’s for sure: this place will not be getting a Five Diamond rating from Stag Theater Review.
I don’t know if people in Saigon or wherever the fuck you’re from go to the talkies hoping
that somebody’ll wash their face with a rag soaked in knockout gas, but that’s not how we do
it here, son.”
Trenchcoat had been straining to catch the words as they daggered out of my mouth, and
each stab pissed him off just a little more. “Shut up you cat!” he screamed as I finished,
hand flying into his coat and reemerging with a pistol, but even before he could level it at
me, Leo, in the chair adjacent, swung his arm like a mallet, the side of his fist walloping
trenchcoat in the family jewels. The pistol fell as he did, keening what sounded like a
geisha’s plaintive song.
“Thanks, Leo,” I said.
“Not a problem,” he said, giving me a one-finger salute.
Now we had two people collapsed in the middle of the circle. This was a fun game.
“They had heard of snooping around by talking cat and skinny, ugly policeman.”
“Hey!” said Willie, flexing his biceps. “I’ve started a new muscle-building regimen.”
“So,” I said, staring at the five Vietnamese. “They thought it would be prudent to kidnap
a cop and a famous actor … on the suspicion that they might be snooping around?”
Trenchcoat was still whimpering, but the others seemed to understand enough of this to
hang their heads.
“We don’t always choose our … associates,” said Agamdeep.
“Ain’t that the fucking truth,” I said.

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“So why shouldn’t I just arrest all of them?” said Willie.
Another shrug. “Because they know me, and I know Percy, and Percy … knows
everyone.”
I thought of Gracie and that poor dentist in Griffith Park, now mouldering six feet under
with a hole in his chest as big as a coaster. “Willie,” I said. “these boys didn’t mean any
harm by it. Did you, boys?” The Viet Five shook their heads. “They come from a violent
place. Still, you know, learning the way we do things over here. Rule of law and all that.” I
stood up. “What’s say we call this whole thing a wash. Tell Percy I’m looking forward to
seeing him next rehearsal.”
Willie squatted by Trenchcoat, retrieving his pistol and pulling off the man’s watch for
good measure. He stood, dangling the watch over the man’s face. “Now it’s a wash.”
“We’ll see ourselves out,” I said, following behind Willie and Leo, who took one last look
over his shoulder at the poor robot, condemned forever to a spoken life of Henry Ford
quotes.
“What a piece of work is man,” Leo murmured.

When Willie dropped me off at home after a silent, congested ride north, we waved and
tried to smile and told each other we’d be in touch. All of my rage toward Grace had
drained away like whey through cheesecloth. As his DeSoto shivered away, I stood for a
moment in my front yard, watching the ruddy mountains backlit like an aging starlet by the
fading sun. There is nothing sadder than a late Sunday afternoon.
I opened the door, relieved to find the house empty. I turned on the news and curled up
on the sofa. Onscreen, Marines were jogging through an obstacle course down at Camp
Pendleton, happily crawling through mud while drill sergeants yelled at them. Apparently

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they were shipping out to Indochina tomorrow. They all said they were real excited to
combat the Red Menace. During a commercial for soap, I saw atop the Bible a note Grace
had left me in her tightly coiled cursive:

The Babs girl called again. Said it was urgent. From the fan club?
I’ll be out late tonight. Don’t wait up for me.

I love you darling. I always will.

GG

I woke up on the sofa with a jaw sore from tense dreams and a hard-on trying to punch
its way out of my trousers. The residue left from my dreamlife was like modern art – no
people or objects, nothing identifiable as real, only feeling: gooey gobs of fear, stabs of rage,
hazy bands of boredom, sweeps of lust made by overfull brushes, dribbling little tears down
the canvas, black on red on black, an impasto of power and release and pain.
Through the Venetians, the sun had made sailor stripes of light and shadow on the coffee
table, which because of the mountains only happened after lunch. I’d slept for eighteen
hours, which explained my sandpapery throat, empty stomach and full bladder. I shuffled
into the bathroom, where I slurped water from my cupped paws, trying to avoid the face in
the mirror while suffering through the ignominy of my subsiding boner before I could finally
pee.
Although it turned my fur to iron filings, I took a shower, feeling I owed it to someone –

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perhaps the lion at the zoo, perhaps my father, who’d only ever cleaned himself with his
own tongue. If I was going to confront my wife. I would need to be clean, alert. I
shampooed the acreage of my fur, rinsed, toweled myself semi-dry, trimmed my nails,
flossed and brushed and gargled Listerine for good measure, and when I strode into my
bedroom, I had the full force of rectitude and hygiene behind me. But our bed was empty,
and it had been made, which was unusual – the comforter tucked between mattress and box
spring, the sheet folded over it, the pillows fluffed.
Grace did sometimes stay out late, but I couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t come
home. So, while I was waiting for my toast to brown, I called Minnie.
“Hello, Minnie speaking.”
“Hey Minnie, it’s me, Tom.”
“Hello, Tom, so nice to hear from you. How is our Gracie this morning?”
“Well, uh, that’s what I’m calling about. She didn’t come home last night, and I was
going to ask if she’d spent the night at your place …” For an instant, I had a vision of
Minnie in a leather bodysuit caning my wife, but I shook it out of my head. “But I guess
not.”
“No,” said Minnie. “She’s not here. I haven’t seen her since rehearsal last week.”
“Any idea where she might’ve gone?” I said. “She call you up, invite you out
somewhere?”
“No,” said Minnie. “I’ve been holed up for a while memorizing my lines. I just don’t
have a head for it, Tom.”
“I understand. I can’t believe it’s going to be here in, what, ten weeks, twelve weeks.”
“Oh, Tom, I saw that piece in the newspaper, the one Nixon wrote. I thought it was just
wonderful. I never imagined he cared a lick about animals. I might vote for him this time.

373

Is he trustworthy, Tom? Do you think he’d be good for California?”
“I don’t know if I can speak for California,” I said, aware that I had zero knowledge of
Nixon’s platform, not wanting to bluff to the sweetest woman I knew. “But I think he does
actually care about animals. Checkers, you know.”
She chuckled as my two slices of toast sprung up. “Yes, that has to count for something.
And I think you’re just the person to lead the Board of Animal Affairs. It’s been a good
summer for you, Tom. I’m so proud of you.”
I found myself tearing up, and I swallowed twice to keep my voice from cracking.
“Thanks Minnie,” I said. “That means a lot. You’ve been so good to Grace and me.”
“You deserve each other,” she said. I could hear her smile through the wires.
“All right,” I said. “I’m going to call Kim and Janet and the other girls and see if they
have any idea.”
“Sure, Tom. I know she’ll turn up soon.”
I hung up and tried Kim Novak, Nina Foch, Janet Leigh, Penelope Quince et al. – the
whole Rolodex of Ladies’ Night – but none of them knew where she might be. I was on the
fulcrum of a teeter-totter balancing annoyance and panic, weighing my wife’s unreliability
against the barbarity of the world, when my eyes drifted back to the Bible, my private file
cabinet. I fished Pin’s letter out from Leviticus, noticing that the seal bonding the top fold
to the side flap had been dickered with: a stab from a letter opener, steak knife, or perhaps a
red fingernail. Grinding my teeth, I ran my own finger under the rest of the seal and opened
the letter, typed and signed.

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Dear Tom,

If you’re reading this, it means the demons have finally gotten to me. I’m a coward and a failure, a heel and
a pervert, and I’ve never deserved even the small kindnesses you’ve showed me over the years.

The journey of my life has not gone according to plan, and one detour so often leads to another. When you’re
remarkable for only one reason, it’s easy for powerful people to take advantage of you. I’ve spent the better
part of the past ten years with my nose in places I wish it had never been, and I’ve put things in my nose I
wish to God I’d never tried.

A year ago, I was approached by an acquaintance who made me an offer to star in a film, a film that would
star me, and a few talking animals. A very generous offer. I accepted, and one film led to another. I wish
I’d never done it – bestiality is a sin against God and nature, even if the carnal act is consensual, which it
was. It’s an abomination, an insult to the animalness of animals and the humanness of humans.

This is very hard for me to say, Tom, but a few months ago, I saw your wife, on the set. It’s the first time I
saw her, and she told me it was the first time she’d ever done it. We were going to have a scene together, but
we both told the director we were uncomfortable with that. Nothing happened, but Grace made me swear
never to tell you, and I did. But death releases you from those vows, I think. I’m sorry, Tom. I’m so sorry.
Grace isn’t a bad woman, and she does love you. Don’t let this ruin your marriage.

Pin

PS Please pray for my soul. And ask Spike to say a novena for me.

375

My first reaction after slapping myself was to scramble around the living room for the
nearest matches: the words on the paper would seep over the neighborhood, the city, the
state, the world, a sulfurous stink permanently wafting from my home. I found one of the
matchbooks with Bugs’s face on the front, and on the back, along his number and address,
the caption Ladies Only. There was one match left, and I struck it alight and held it under the
corner. With the speed of a breath, a line of flame slid up the page, leaving char behind, but
as it began consuming the postscript, some unseen hand lifted the cuckold cone hat off my
ears and dropped down the gumshoe’s fedora.
“Shit,” I hissed, setting the page down on the King James and then pounding the fire out
just before it consumed the signature. “Shit, sorry God,” I said, glancing up to the exposed
beams of the ceiling. I brushed the ash off the Bible. “I’ll say some prayers for Pin.”
The coffee table was a missing square puzzle of documents: Gracie’s note, Pin’s letter,
the jaundiced schematics I’d taken from Jones Adhesives, the Good Book, next to which I’d
set Bugs’s proposition to the ladies of Los Angeles. I could almost hear his Flatbush drone
reading the subscript: For a good jackrabbit time, call me, or just drop in.
I felt my lips purse and slid the matchbook atop Pin’s letter. For a decade Bugs had left
the matchbooks at select bars in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Santa Monica, until
too many matronly badgers and bulldogs started climbing the gate around his house in
Malibu.
Now someone else wasn’t the only one offering the young women of Southern California
a furry good time. I knew how to find him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to anymore.

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12.

July faded, day by day: the Mariner I veered off course and plummeted into the Atlantic,
mushroom clouds were billowing everywhere over the desert, I memorized my lines, and
Gracie didn’t come back. I told those who asked that a dear spinster aunt who’d helped
raise her had died up, and that she’d flown up for the funeral and stayed to help Old Man
White adjust. No. Grace was gone. My wife had left me, and every morning I woke up a
smidge more comfortable with that fact. I pictured her at some Sapphic ranch out past San
Bernadino – breaking horses, breaking women, waking up every afternoon at two with a
champagne hangover and a tongue between her legs. I told myself that I didn’t want to be
with someone who didn’t want to be with me.
I skipped rehearsal, didn’t return Percy’s calls, played Ravel for an hour without my paw
aching, went to every game of a Dodger sweep of the Giants by myself. I took the last
game, an 11-1 blowout, as an auspicious omen, and put in a call to the Syzygy house, only to
be informed by the missus that Babs was at summer camp, but was looking forward to
interviewing me for her Daughters of the American Revolution scholarship application. “As
am I,” I told Mrs. Syzygy.
The next morning, while glancing at the day’s matinees, I noshed a breakfast jerry-rigged
from what little was left in the pantry and icebox: potato chips crumbled over canned tuna,
garnished with pickled jalapeño rounds and chocolate sprinkles. While showering for the
first time in a week, I debated That Touch of Mink at 1:15 and the 1:50 of What Ever Happened
to Baby Jane?, and I padded into the living room, nude and dripping, to find Jerry smoking on
my sofa, tiny shoes dangling, reading all of my secrets on the coffee table. He was the only
other person besides me and Gracie who had a key.

377

“Jesus, Walls,” I said, dropping the towel I’d been drying my head with to figleaf my
nether regions.
“Shoulda told me, Hoss,” he said, more hurt than peeved. “This is serious shit.”
“Pardon me for not broadcasting that my wife left me after cheating with Lady Dear on
screen.”
“Pin letter doesn’t say anything about Lady Dear,” he said as I submerged into one of the
egg chairs.
I tapped my chest. “I saw that.”
“Didn’t know you patronized stag theaters.”
“I was … on a mission,” I said. “With Willie, Detective Delay, from the LAPD.”
“What did you say to Gracie?”
“I didn’t,” I said, lighting a Lucky of my own. “Came back from South Bay to find her
note.”
He scowled in confusion. “Couldn’t have been a surprise,” he said, tapping Pin’s letter.
“He’s been dead a month.”
I filliped the plastic rim of the chair, and said, “Didn’t open it till this week.”
He stared at me, slowly letting his eyelids fall, shook his head as though trying to rid
himself of a brain-freeze, sighed, winced, massaged his eyes, and, finally whipped the Bible at
me.
“Hey,” I said, batting it away as another piece of paper slid from its pages and fluttered
folded to the coffee table.
“Nice going, Sherlock,” Jerry said. “Sitting on your best damn clue for a month. What,
did you think it was going to hatch?”
“I’ve had a lot of bad news recently. I didn’t think I could take another hit.”

378

“How’s that working out for you?”
“Walls, you seem to be missing forest for tree here. Gracie is a lesbian psycho. A lesbian
psycho who gets paid to have sex on camera.”
“What do you mean ‘psycho’?”
After draining my Lucky and lighting another, I gave a précis of the movie, at least the
part I saw. “Sweet Jesus,” he coughed as I finished.
“I know,” I said. “I never thought it would be Gracie cheating on me.”
“It’s not cheating if it’s with a woman,” he said “It’s the prelude to a three-way.” His
eyes twinkled with cunning. “Come up with a list of other dames you want to sleep with,
have Gracie invite her over for an evening of Bordeaux and buggery. Or something like
that.”
“Classy.”