Holden Caulfield at Middle Age

If you really want to hear about it, it started ... Christ, when does anything start? No doubt it goes back to birth trauma or some shitty earlier incarnation or one of those. Or maybe that big weekend when I was 16, when I gave Phoebe that red hunting cap and sat watching her on the carrousel in the winter rain. The good old days. And, amazing but true, about 30 years ago now. Time sure does fly when you're having fun. Also when you're not. I remember I bought the hat to cheer myself up after I lost all the goddamned fencing foils on the subway. I can still see them in a pile in an empty car, rattling along toward Queens.

Anyway, my life of crime. It began one dark night in Beverly Hills, almost two days ago. I know it's a little low to blame your children for things, but the truth is that Cassie did trigger it, Cassie and her greasy friend Spike. But that comes a little later.

I was staying at D.B.'s mansion up in one of those fancy canyons inhabited exclusively by Hollywood hot-shits and moguls and faces you see up on billboards. These days, D.B. is a bona fide mogul. He's produced about 10,000 movies and is close personal friends with everyone you've ever heard of. Don't get me wrong. D.B.'s great. At the moment, he's down in Yucatán on location in the jungle, shooting the film version of that big Broadway musical Cortes Calling!!

You wouldn't believe D.B.'s house. It looks like it belongs in a Thomas Hardy novel or something, this classic Tudor country manor, slate roof and all, grafted onto the subtropical hills. It could be merrie olde England, except for the Forties lipstick splashes of bougainvillaea and the ripe avocados falling on your head, and the trees bordering the street that look like towering mutant pineapples ready to attack. The place has a pedigree a mile long. Clara Bow lived there before or after or with Will Rogers, and W. C. Fields once threw up into the pool, and a young Woody Allen once broke a racket over Errol Flynn on the tennis court for making anti-Semitic remarks about his backhand--you know, like that. D.B.'s nuts about it. He just bought it last year with his points from Star Wars, after literally years of driving by and drooling on the leather in his Jaguar over it.

Which is partly what I was doing there. He's so crazy about the house, he didn't want to leave it alone while he was in Mexico--somebody might break in and steal one of the legends or something. Also, we were doing that brotherly dance that happens sometimes when I sort of lose it. The first time was after my big weekend when I was 16. I spent a month with him after Dr. Blundvogel and his associates determined I was again fit to walk the streets. That was the first time D.B. tried to convert me, to convince me I should strive to grow up to be a screenwriter, like he was then. He always said, "You can be Rich and Famous." Like the words were capitalized or something. He still uses the same old line on me. Rich and Famous. Like it could actually happen magically here in the late rounds, with Howard Cosell calling the play-by-play. Like it might even mean something if it happened. Right after I got back from Korea and couldn't find anything else I could do, I finally took old D.B. up on his offer and tried writing a few scripts. I even bought a cashmere V-neck sweater with suede sleeve patches and grew a sad little mustache. But my scripts were the worst. I always ended up liking all the characters and not letting anything shitty happen to any of them--which makes for a nice benign universe but really awful drama. Luckily for all of us, they never got made. Oh, D.B. did borrow a few chariot scenes I'd done and put them in Visigoth Glory, a minor Victor Mature vehicle that turns up on television sometimes on Saturday mornings. But that was it. I had absolutely no talent for screenwriting, or for being Rich and Famous.

Oh, I guess I was almost rich for the last few years Patty and I were married. I mean, we had a duplex on Fifth near the children's zoo, and we went to London or Paris--at Patty's insistence--once or twice a year, and we drank Perrier-Jouët in the flowered bottles when we felt like it. I put together a pretty decent collection of big-band 78s and Patty had the first Cuisinart in our building. This largess came to us courtesy of Vern, my Industrial Giant father-in-law. The moment Patty and I got back from our so-called honeymoon in Curaçao--which has to be the worst excuse for an island in the Caribbean, cactus everywhere instead of palm trees, unrelenting gale-force trade winds that smell like bus fumes, about four feet of natural beach and a sun that fries you like bacon before you know it. The first thing you see getting off the plane, there in tropical paradise, is an oil refinery, belching away. Terrific place. Anyway, the moment we got back, sunburn peeling, Vern had put me right into a decent suit behind a travertine desk, and began patiently grooming me, the son he never had, to take over the (continued on page 294)Holden Caulfield(continued from page 235) reins there at International Tile & Siding. At the end, after all those years of patient glooming, Vern was very disappointed to learn that his daughter and I hated each other, and that I was going off to Vermont to start a summer camp, instead of taking up the old reins there at I.T. & S. when the time came and all.

My mother, who passed on suddenly about the same time Patty and I were going through the terminal stages of Modern Life, had left me an old abandoned summer camp in southern Vermont. She'd just inherited it a few years earlier from a favorite old uncle or something Dickensian like that. She'd gone there as a girl and took me there one day when I was a kid and I went nuts over it or something. I remember the baseball diamond had gone over to weeds, but you could still see just a trace of where the base paths had been. It was eerie. I liked it a lot. So, as moms will, Mom remembered and passed it on to me.

That's where D.B. found me two weeks ago, in fact. The camp idea never really took, shall we say. Especially the third and final year when my highly recommended head counselor, an ex-Air Force captain, turned out to be a little too fond of the Junior Bluebirds and went from tucking them in at night to taking showers with six or seven at once before I caught him and had the sicko bastard put away. Messing with kids is just about the worst thing you can do, because they don't know anything yet--everything's still weird to them, so sometimes they can't tell the difference between weird and normal. Sometimes I wish I'd taken his head off with that shovel instead of calling the sheriff. That was also the year Rosemary the cook kept losing her glass eye in the vat of hot breakfast oatmeal, because at that hour she was generally still hung over, and not quite as fastidious as she was later in the clay. By midseason, we had more staff members than campers. You don't want to hear about it.

But I sort of just stayed on. I guess mainly because I couldn't think of a good reason to be anywhere else. In the winter, I lived in one of the cabins I insulated and put a wood-burning potbellied stove in. I read a lot and worked on my Thoreau routine. In the summer, I moved into the barn like old mess hall, built of virgin pine years before what my father always referred to as the Great War. It's a single high vaulted room with open beams and slanting golden cathedral light twice a day.

I was sitting at one of the old picnic tables consulting with a woodchuck when D.B. showed up to rescue me. The wood-chuck was checking me out on hind legs from a table on the far side of the room. I was deep into a quart of Chivas--if you're going to starve, go in style, I always say--and was asking the woodchuck about my school bus. Whether, in his opinion, they'd taken away my school bus out of hate or malice. It had to be one or the other. All last spring, I didn't even take a salary, for Chrissakes, and was paying for the goddamn gas myself. This was after the North Somerset Village Council had voted to stick it to the Arabs and OPEC by doing away with my route through the lower hollow. Not enough kids to justify the cost. It just happened that that hollow was where all the poor white trash lived, with their dead old Frigidaires and gutted Chevy pickups belly up in front of their trailers, and their bony inbred mongrels running around all over the place. Where better to begin cost-cutting? So I volunteered to keep driving for free and to pay for the gas myself. But after a while, that was apparently too strange for the village, something a goddamn Commie or something would do. And so last month they came out and took away my school bus.

I'm really avoiding telling about this like a bastard, aren't If I'm really sorry. Anyway, D.B. somehow got wind that I was sort of losing it again--probably from Phoebe, who is not to be trusted, in spite of all her Hippocratic oaths and credos--and came to lure me out to California, where I could be Rich and Famous, instead of sliding steadily downhill, as D.B. so kindly put it, like I'd been doing in the four or so years I'd been away from Patty and Cassie--and Potatoes, if the old furball hadn't used up all nine lives yet. I had to agree with D.B. that my track record out on my own did leave something to be desired. And the woodchuck was out of good answers regarding hate or malice. So I let myself be persuaded by D.B. to leave my glittering record as Director of Camp Child Abuse and Freelance Commie School-Bus Driver behind me, to go west, unemployed middle-aged man, and begin life anew as an Official House Sitter. D.B. gave me all the same old cheery bullshit and then reminded me of something I hadn't forgotten--namely, that Cassie was out there in junior college now, and that she sometimes dropped in unexpectedly on Uncle D.B.

•

The truth is, and conniving old D.B. knew it, of course, it was the chance of seeing her that made up my mind for me. For reasons I'm not very proud of, Cassie and I have hardly seen each other or exchanged postcards since I moved out. I know it's my fault. I mean, I'm the one who's supposed to be the adult, right? But I can't seem to cut through that cool mask she always wears around me, so I usually end up screaming at her or crying or fleeing in search of nine martinis or something else a normal parent really wouldn't do.

So two nights ago, I was house-sitting in D.B.'s sunken living room, with a fireplace you could roast an entire cow in, doing what I usually do when I'm bored and lonely and depressed--watching television, listening to a call-in talk show on the radio and reading, with a bottle of Scotch close at hand. Nothing unusual going on here, officer. Just keeping my options open.

On television, I was well into the annual Jerry Lewis telethon. By three a.m. or so, he was getting positively threatening. He improvised some ditty that went in part, "You're aggravating a tired guy!" You know, help these poor twisted kids or I'll guilt you to death. Then some creature wearing glasses on a real wax nose, who looked incredibly earnest if not dead, started ranting about a special task force that, when set loose, would cause a dramatic speed-up in pledges. Like he was Feldherr of the SS branch of this charity or something. Lewis, meanwhile, was marching around with a lollipop in his mouth, short of breath, sweating, fuzzy around the eyes, moving right up on no control. I think it's nice of him to stage an annual public nervous breakdown for all of us, and I visually watch as much as I can take. Every year I hope that this time I'll get to see it live on television when he finally turns into a lizard once and for all.

The radio was even better. The talk-show guy was putting down kids who were repeat callers. He called this "the tyranny of the finger' and said it ought to be stopped. Then came a public-service ad that went, "When we lose a forest, we lose a lot more than meets the eye. And I ought a know. I'm Ray Charles."

Really. You can't make that kind of stuff up.

I was reading an organic-chemistry textbook Cassie had evidently left behind on her last visit. At least I hoped it was her last visit. She'd inscribed her name in the front, in that large, certain but somehow delicate script she has, and had meticulously underlined all the significant data in the first nine pages of the introduction before the burning flame of her curiosity was required elsewhere, never to return. I didn't blame her a bit. Chemistry used to bore me blind. I don't think I passed one chem course in any of those nine dozen schools I bounced through before my father finally gave up on me. But the other night, I was fascinated. It turns out chemistry's funny, for one thing, although they do their best to cover it up. They throw around all this solemn theoretical bullshit about empty yearning valence rings and dancing electrons tiptoeing through them and all--for which there is no observable proof, as far as I can see. They don't really know why any of this stuff happens, when you really get down to it. They just know that it does. Which is pretty funny, when you think about it.

So I was reading Cassie's book. I'd just gotten into the chapter on covalent bonds when I suddenly found myself crying. I'm always doing stupid shit like that. I was looking at this diagram of covalent oxygens and carbons, and reading about how this double bond is one of the strongest there is, and suddenly there were these little wet wrinkled circles all over the page. I couldn't help it. Something just hit me. I didn't really take the crying part very seriously, since it's been happening a lot lately. But it did make me think. Covalent bonds. Who ever had one?

I tried to drift off to sleep in the chair. Then I was in that weird twilight zone that isn't waking or dreaming, and I was seeing these ghostly diagrams of covalent bonds floating in front of me. In them, I was carbon to the oxygen of Patty and Cassie and Potatoes. I hate things like that. And then Potatoes was sitting on my old desk, and Patty and I were into the final strangle holds of Modern Life.

Sometimes late at night, when I was feeling rotten and alone and totally betrayed by life, which was most nights then, Potatoes would jump up on my desk at the crucial metaphysical moment and give me a blam! to the forehead with his own, and then immediately start purring for all he was worth. It translated roughly as Hey, shithead, remember me? Quit feeling so sorry for yourself and give me a few right behind the ears. You want love and understanding? Blam! Blam! And he'd butt me in the forehead again, like a billy goat or something, and purr louder. You'd love Potatoes. "Also known as the Bear, he's the best damn cat that ever breathed air!" Muhammad Ali said that about him once. No, I'm just kidding.

But Potatoes is pretty terrific. He was originally half of the kitten team of Meat and Potatoes--but then Meat died and ruined the joke. The year we had the summer house near Woodstock--the final doomed compromise, as it proved, for Patty and me--Potatoes, after spending his entire young life inside a duplex overlooking the park, turned into this great fat black-and-white hunter. For me, I finally figured out. The first few times, I smacked him, lecturing on the merits of pacifism while beating him up. But he did it until I learned. This was in his blood. He was bringing me this parade of half-grown rabbits, squirrels, moles, songbirds, field mice--out of love. He was a cat. and that was the way he did things. Whether I liked it or not. One day, I was sitting on the porch and Potatoes appeared out of the tree line, wearing this huge dark handle-bar mustache that's wriggling all over the place. It was a black snake a yard long. Potatoes was serenely bringing it on home to me. Love and death.

I think I fell asleep dreaming about covalent bonds.

I awoke to ... well, to be perfectly truthful, the first thing I thought was that it was an air raid and the dirty Krauts were bombing the shit out of New York with V-2 rockets, just as I had imagined every night when I was 11 or 12.

I lurched out of the chair before I was quite awake. I think I was sort of swatting at stray marauding Nazis, like a zombie or something, when I finally realized where I was. The air raid was D.B.'s state-of-the-art sound system, turned up to state-of-the-art. It sounded like the World Trade Center falling over, accompanied by drums and buzz saws. Dancing to this, jumping up and down to it, anyway, were Cassie and what looked like the Creature from the Blackboard Jungle.

Cassie must have thought at first I was The Slasher come to get her at last, because she breathed in to scream. Then, when she saw it was me, she breathed out a little and began beaming instead, running toward me with open arms. She was wearing satin running shorts and a T-shirt, and I couldn't help noticing her bouncing new breasts for a moment longer than was right. They always surprised me. I was always astonished how she had grown up to be one of those sleek WASPy knockouts who wouldn't touch me with a stick when I was her age. Talk about breeding monsters. She isn't really like that, but Cassie looks like all those beautiful boarding school bitches who had eyes exclusively for handsome athletic jerk-oils like Stradlater, and not string beans like me with pimples on the ends of our noses and nothing clever to say in the clinch.

"Holden! Daddy! What the luck are you doing here?"

"Cassie, you know I don't like you to--"

"Don't start right in, Ok?"

"But words like that--"

"Are words. Please? Lighten up for once? Come and meet Spike."

After all my hearts-and-flowers fantasies about how this would be a reconciliation fit for heroic oil paintings, the last thing I wanted to do was fight with her. So I let her sort of drag me over toward him. While all this was happening, the sound system was still blaring. We all shouted over it at one another like old people going deaf who won't admit it.

"Spike, this is my father!"

Spike was fairly novel-looking. His head was shaved into what used to be called an Iroquois or a tomahawk, and the narrow remaining strip of hair was dyed bright green. He was wearing a cruddy biker's jacket and trousers that really looked like they were tailored Jonathan Winters trash bags.

Spike smiled, revealing several teeth, and extended a seriously greasy hand to me, which I accepted and shook without hesitation, just to show what a good guy I was and all.

"Charmed, man," Spike said as we shook. "You got any blow?"

Cassie jumped in, waving a hand in the direction of the speakers.

"Isn't this hot It's Spike's latest, Basement Love! He's the lead singer for Bloody Holly. They were on the cover of Trouser Press a few months ago."

"Yeah," Spike grunted contentedly. "Wanna see it?" He started rooting around in various pockets without waiting for an answer, volunteering, "We used to be Dick Disgusting and the Forks. But that got a little corny, you know? Here you go. Maybe you got some grass, then?"

Spike handed me a piece of paper that had been folded and unfolded so many times it looked like the Treasure of the Sierra Madre map. It was a magazine cover, or had been, featuring Spike and three other endocrine disasters. The cover line shouted: "Bloody Holly--Neonihilist New Wave Sensation!"

"We're gonna take a swim," Cassie shouted over what sounded like pygmy war chants coming from the sound system. "See you tomorrow!"

"But Cassie, don't you want to--"

"Holden, please. Tomorrow, Ok?"

"I had this dream--"

"You and Martin Luther King. Tomorrow, all right? You can't just come bopping into my life, telling me your dreams, and expect me to drop everything and listen. I'm not the little girl you walked away from so you could go live in the fucking woods. I grew up without your help, in case you hadn't noticed."

She turned abruptly and dragged Spike off toward the pool. He gave me a friendly little wave goodbye. I stood there while the band played on.

The next part is a little confused. I must have sat back down in the same chair. Then Spike's record was finally over and I could hear splashing and laughter outside. And then I couldn't hear anything. And then I could hear Cassie, breathing more and more heavily and beginning to moan in what was definitely not pain. I didn't know what to do. My little cookie out there with that slug? What was I, the responsible modern parent, supposed to do about that? Ignore it? Kill him?

I don't remember all of what happened. One second I was still sitting in the chair, and the next I was lurking in the shadows on the pool deck, holding one of those swimming-pool leaf scoopers--one of those long aluminumpole things with a big sieve like eye at one end. Apparently, I'd ripped the screening out. I don't remember any of that. But I do remember slipping the scooper eye over Spike's head, which he had obligingly just raised to commence a sort of braying. I hooked it under his chin and yanked him from the soft lock of Cassie's legs. Then I dragged him a few feet by the neck until he plopped headlong into the pool.

It was very satisfying. At least until Cassie began shrieking and Spike started to show the first signs of drowning.

In two quick steps, Cassie was diving naked into the pool after Spike, who actually looked fairly peaceful hovering there a foot or so underwater in the deep end, an emerald plume spreading near his head in the beam of the underwater spotlight. Cassie had passed junior lifesaving the second she was old enough, so she had Spike in a fireman's carry in nothing flat and towed him unresisting to the side.

"Holden, you asshole! You complete asshole! Help me!"

This really wasn't going the way I had hoped it might.

"Grab his shoulders--pull him out! Hurry!"

Cassie shoved Spike an inch or so out of the water on sheer will power or something, and I reached under his shoulders and practically threw my back out tugging him up onto the deck, with Cassie pushing from below. Then she was kneeling over him, first putting her mouth on his and breathing into him, and then pounding on his chest. She kept doing this until one punch produced a little spurt of water out of Spike's mouth, like he was a fountain starting up, followed by all kinds of horrible coughing and gasping and other signs of life.

Cassie kept kneeling over him while he lay there recovering. She was shivering and her hair clung to her neck in a cold wet tangle. She was staring at the concrete between us and sort of woodenly repeating, "You asshole, you asshole, you asshole," over and over again. Every few seconds, another tear would fall unheeded to her thighs, which were covered with goose bumps.

I felt rotten. She looked so pathetic, and she was so right. I've never taken the gloomy Homeric associations of her name very seriously, but she was being true to her namesake, who used to come up with all those lousy forecasts no one wanted to hear but that happened to be true. I was a world-class asshole. Am. By default and years passed, what Cassie did was none of my business. Or even if it was still some of my business, I didn't exactly have the right to go around drowning her boyfriends. But that was me the asshole, too. I don't think I had any intention of actually hurting Spike or anything. What had just happened was supposed to be, I don't know, some weird kind of Freudian joke or something. A comic engraving: Pop Enraged. Not attempted murder. Really.

Finally, she looked up at me through sad eyes and said in that same numb, quiet voice, "Will you just go away? Go love someone else. Pick on Mom or Potatoes or some total stranger. But leave me alone for a while, Ok?"

•

In retrospect, I guess it was adding insult to injury to steal Spike's motorcycle. But I had to get to the airport right away. And he was snoozing in my daughter's arms, so at the time it seemed like a fair trade. I also borrowed a couple of credit cards from a bunch D.B. had left behind, the better not to be robbed and murdered for them by some crazed peasant in Yucatan.

By the time I figured out how to start Spike's Harley, it was dawn. I hadn't been on a motorcycle for about a hundred years, and never on a hog like Spike's, which was decked out with everything but a Strato-Freeze air conditioner. But I got it going and almost killed myself only six or seven times before I got the hang of it again.

The next thing I knew, I was stuck in traffic on the way into L.A.X. The goddamn sun was barely up, and all five lanes were jammed. Where were all these people going? Puerto Vallarta?

One thing I find very depressing is people who have to wear appliances. I wear bifocals cleverly disguised as aviator glasses, and that's bad enough. But right next to me in this boat of a Cadillac was this bald old Dr. Sivana coot with Coke-bottle bottoms over his eyes and a big glob of hearing aid above his ear, stuck there like a live escargot that just crawled out of his brain or something. And in the lane on the other side of me was this plain dental-assistant type in a plain little Japanese gas saver that looked like a killer bee, and she's got these wires coming out of her mouth and hooking around her neck, getting in some valuable extra time on her prize-winning smile-to-be by wearing her retainer in traffic.

I guess it also wasn't exactly thoughtful of me to leave Spike's bike in the tow-away zone in front of American Airlines. But I've always been sort of ... impulsive. And I wanted to get to New York as last as I could.

At the airline counter, I spent about a week in line behind this ratty little guy trying to hide his rattiness by wearing this extremely busy suit that looked like the Battle of the Polyester Plaids. It made him look even rattier, and you could tell he knew it by the way he kept scratching the back of his head in these nervous little flurries. I really can't stand it when you get stuck in line behind a ratty guy who can't help it.

You don't want to hear about the flight. I sat next to a reborn dog groomer who explained at length how her newfound Christian faith applied to her work. The movie was, as they announced it, "a comedy classic"--Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, which featured all sorts of hilarious plane crashes.

I had the cab driver let me out at Phoebe's brownstone on East 74th. I didn't remember until about the 20th time I rang that she was in Europe for a month. D.B. had told me. She was traveling and attending some big convention in Vienna, where all these psychiatrists were getting together to chitchat about mental illness and real estate and make religious pilgrimages to Freud's couch or something. Except for Phoebe, I really don't like psychiatrists. They're a measure of how lonely we all are. We mostly pay them .$100 an hour to be our friends, for Chrissakes, to care about our problems and give useful advice, just like good friends do free if you have any.

It was probably better old Phoebe wasn't home. She would have found out what I was up to and tried to talk me out of it and all. The truth was, I didn't know exactly what I was up to. And it was tins gorgeous September Monday in New York. So I decided to take a walk to figure it out.

I headed downtown along the East River. On Sutton Place, there was this classy silver-haired butler in a black uniform, holding a leash that was attached to a yappy little Lhasa Apso that was throwing a pedigreed temper tantrum. It had its stubborn little legs dug into the sidewalk and it was not moving. First the butler glanced down at the dog, and then, fixing his eyes on the horizon, gave the leash an abrupt discreet jerk that crossed the dog's eyes and sent it flying a couple of feet. The butler's lips curled in satisfaction.

I walked almost to the Bowery without having any bright ideas. But I was near my old neighborhood from my beatnik days and decided to see if my old bar might still be there on Bleecker.

I didn't have any trouble finding it.

I shaded my eyes and pushed my nose against the window, squinting to see inside. Like I was trying to see if maybe the past might still be there, magically intact, or something dumb like that. Amazingly, some of it was. The wonderful old bar and back bar, rich mahogany carved in nouveau curves like smoke rising, they're still there. But the rest of it's been turned into one of those singles fern bars, all natural wood and hanging plants, the kind that have been spreading unchecked from Sausalito since 1970 or so.

These days it's called Fingers.

When I worked there, it was The Bleecker Street Tavern. And it was. Bleaker, I mean. The tourists mostly had the good sense to stay away. It was a quiet joint where assorted artsy locals and vaguely literary types hung out. You know, the bartender was finishing his 23rd unpublished novel, the day dishwasher was the top-seeded poet at the Café Bizarre, the jukebox was all Miles and Bird and Coltrane. Cool, you dig, man? Like, fried shoes!

A tough old momma named Mama ran the place, and I waited tables or bus-boyed, depending on her mood. It drove my parents right up the wall. There I was, their son, pushing 30, waiting tables and walking around looking like May-nard G. Krebs. I still didn't have all my weight back from my winter vacation at the Reservoir back in scenic Korea. With my beard and that patch of gray hair I've had forever, I looked like a tall used Q-Tip. My parents had even liked it better when I first got into Zen and went around for a year meditating all over the place.

How could I possibly pass up a memorial drink at Fingers? The actual historic spot where I first saw Patty, crying her eyes out at a table tucked away behind a pillar. If I hadn't bought her that beer, and made the mistake of asking her what was wrong, I wouldn't be launching a new career as ... what? A catnapper, maybe? Or, more accurately, a cat burglar?

I went in, ducking under a dangling thicket of asparagus fern suspended by macraméed twine, and sat at the end of the bar. The place really sent me time-tripping about Patty. Christ, I even remembered what she was wearing that night. Regulation Bonwit's college casuals for then: a short-sleeved madras blouse that looked like patchwork autumn leaves, khaki Bermuda shorts, blue tennis shoes--yachting shoes, actually. Two hundred percent preppie.

At closing time, she was still sitting there, watching the same beer go Hal. I persuaded her to have breakfast with me at the Night Owl.

"What's wrong?" I kept asking. But blank, like she didn't hear me. I kept on asking.

"Nothing," she said finally, and sighed in this sad resigned way that sounded somewhere beyond angst, ennui, Welt-schmerz and the complete works of Sartre. "No shit. I just had the wrong recipe." She laughed, the way she sighed before. "The reds and yellows turned brown!" This time she laughed, like it was the funniest thing since Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock. "Brown!" Then she started crying again.

You don't want to hear about it. No Camille or Anna Karenina, perfectly modern Patty had simply taken the wrong combination of uppers and downers. I found out pretty quickly that Patty was fairly finely tuned. If you didn't watch out, she was in the shop a lot. There was a party over at some loft on St. Mark's Place. I didn't really feel like going, but I wanted an excuse to hang around with her awhile longer. Don't ask me why. I guess the truth is I've always been a sucker for difficult girls. Or at least was then.

There must have been 100 people there, and all of them were alert. Somebody had a bunch of this latest wrinkle in speed and was passing it around. It came in little glass vials, like stereo-speaker fuses filled with liquid. Patty recognized it right away as Desoxyn, the pride of Abbott Labs. In spite of Patty's encouragement, I didn't try any. Even then my favorite drugs were Scotch and soda. And cigarettes. I'm very boring where drugs are concerned. Patty, on the other hand, was a regular Christopher Columbus and Madame Curie rolled into one. She regarded it as her personal duty to try anything new that came along. You should have seen her a few years later, during the electrical-banana period, smoking Pall Malls through hollowed-out bell peppers and looking around to see if God had shown up yet. So, naturally, Patty had to try some of the Desoxyn.

For the next couple of hours, she got going on her complete autobiography, meals included. Everybody around us was talking a mile a minute, solving deep universal questions all over the place. An incredible din of insight and wisdom. What Patty was telling me was fascinating and all, but finally I had to go to the john. Which took a while, since there was only one john, with no light in it.

When I got back, Patty was sitting on the Hoor with a few other people, listening to this skinny kid perched on an apple crate. He was singing and playing an acoustic guitar, and had a wire contraption around his neck that held a harmonica in front of his mouth, so he could dive at it like a seal whenever he felt the need. He was wearing a black-corduroy railroad cap, a washed-out work shirt, cheap lumpy jeans, scruffy desert boots. His face at rest fell naturally into a slight smirk.

He was going on about trying to get his baby to follow him down somewhere. I thought he was awful, but Patty was loving it. When he finished, she started clapping like mad and rushed up to him.

"That was a gas! Who are you?"

"Wild Bill Cody and Pecos Pete." He grinned.

"Cool," cooed Patty, eyes aglow, bestowing her highest compliment. "Do you know Dink's Blues?"

He sang a phrase or two.

"'If I had wings, like Noah's dove, I'd fly away, to the one I love--'"

Then he broke off and said to Patty, "Lemme play you somethin' new I'm workin' on. It's a little dif-furnt."

He planged his guitar a couple of times to get rolling.

"'Landlords and discords, sad Madonnas of the parking lots....'"

Do I need to tell you who Patty went home with? Goddamn musicians. I didn't see Patty for a month, except for once on Macdougal. They were walking down the middle of the street together and Patty was clinging like blissful ivy to his arm. Then, finally, she wandered into The Bleecker messed up again, after he dumped her. The star-crossed beginning of Patty and me.

•

"Sir, can I get you anything?"

I don't know how long I'd been sitting there when this cute young barmaid seemed to materialize in front of me behind the bar. Freckles everywhere, huge luminous Bambi eyes, a shining fuzzy halo of copper curls. She was wearing one of those gauzy peasant blouses made of feed sacks from India. She looked barely old enough to be serving drinks. More like Little Orphan Annie.

"Can I get you anything?"

"Chivas and soda, please."

"Coming up."

When she came back with the drink, she put it in front of me, saying, "You're a little old for this kinda place, aren'tcha?"

"I probably always was," I said. "What kind of place?"

"Oh, you know. Whatcher sign? Alfalfa sprouts. Disco roller skates. Like that. The mustaches change, but the conversation stays the same. It's boring. And I know boring, I grew up in Cleveland. Cleveland Heights, actually." She batted her Bambi eyelashes a couple of times and, when I didn't say anything, went right on. "It's kind a sad, really. You know that group Paul McCartney was in before Wings? The Beatles? They had that song that went, 'All the lonely people, where do they all come from?' I don't know where they come from, but most of them end up here. Can I get you another one?"

•

It must have been--what?--around four in the morning when I got out of the cab at the corner of the park near the Plaza. For a second there, I almost went in to take a look at the carrousel for good luck. But then I remembered the real one burned down, got struck by lightning or something, a couple of years after my big weekend when I was 16. The one there now is a phony.

So I headed up Fifth along the park side.

Have you seen the park lately? It looks like shit. They dredged the south pond to clean out the mugging victims and baby carriages, but still it looks filthy. Under the streetlights, the shining muck looks like the La Brea tar pits. I used to worry about where the poor lousy ducks went in the winter. These days you have to worry about how they're making it through the summer.

I was getting close to our old apartment. It's near 64th on Fifth, close to the children's zoo. There was no way of telling what I was getting into. Our apartment-gone-condo is in one of those fancy old stone high-rises with electronic security up the ass, guarded by a wedge-shaped night doorman with steel muscles and a black belt in every single one of the martial arts and crafts. The kids in the building used to call him Conan.

He had specific orders to never let me set foot inside the building. Patty was no dummy. She had it written into the goddamn divorce agreement that Potatoes was legally 100 percent hers, due to my uncertain character. She even had her dapper racquetball-champion divorce lawyer inform me that the concept of visitation rights doesn't apply to lower species. Lower, my ass. But it meant I had to get past Conan somehow. If I could do that, I still had my old keys. I told Patty I symbolically tossed them into the East River during a fit of depression the day I moved out. I think she believed me and, anyway, knowing her, it was unlikely that she'd do anything as dull as having the locks changed. By four A.M., she'd either be up there asleep with her latest admirer or spending the night elsewhere with him--probably a musician, since among the women, it seems to run in the family. Either way, I figured I could quietly sneak into the apartment, burgle Potatoes and be gone, slick as The Shadow himself.

But, like life usually is, it wasn't remotely what I expected.

I decided to case the joint first. I hunched my shoulders and skulked inconspicuously past the canopied entrance to the building, darting a furtive detective glance inside as I passed.

And there was no Conan in sight. It was his night off, or he'd quit to single-handedly reinvade Manchuria or something. The replacement was this Central Casting fat old doorman, with a great inner-tube gut beneath a Radio City usher's uniform. He was sort of dozing over a newspaper. Suddenly, this looked like a pushover.

Which it was and it wasn't. Technically speaking, I guess I committed another felony, which by my count would be three in the past 24 hours. This one was breaking and entering, or forced trespass, or one of those other sexual terms we use for property violated. Or are they property terms we've appropriated for sex? I never can remember. If only we still had old H. L. Mencken around to straighten these things out for us. These days, we have to settle for Steve Allen and Tony Randall.

I cooked up this fancy story for the fat doorman. How I was Patty's psychiatrist and all. and how when I'd seen her this afternoon she'd seemed depressed, and how I now suspected she intended to commit suicide tonight, and how some time ago she'd left me keys in case this happened again and all this other crap. I walked into the lobby as urgently as I could manage. But before I could say anything, the doorman said, eyes glued to his National Star, "Party's in fourteen C. I never seen the like. Saran Wrap dresses. Elevator's self-serve. Over there." He pointed the way without taking his eyes off a picture of Jackie Onassis with her skirt blown up to her neck by the wind.

Guess the number of our old apartment. That's right, 14-C. Apparently, I was on my way to rob a party.

Inside the elevator, I punched the 14 button.

This ought to be fairly interesting, I was thinking on the way up. If I were smart, I'd bag it for the night, give up. The second Patty saw me walk into her party, she'd have every cop in five boroughs crawling down my throat. She's a real heavyweight in the grudge-carrying division. Don't get me wrong, I really love Patty. God knows, she's never boring. And she'll probably be beautiful until she falls over during shipboard shuffleboard when she's 95. It's just that I had my own bad weather to deal with, and I couldn't always be navigating through her howling typhoons and tidal waves and French jazz trumpeters named Jacques, even though wonderful pot-of-gold rainbows often followed. To save myself, I needed a more temperate climate. I always was more boring than Patty. I don't think she really cared when I left, we were that far gone, but it was this great kick in the teeth theoretically, you know? Even if you forgot about all the money, she still couldn't believe anyone would ever want to leave her. Especially me. Nobody in his right mind, etc. She was probably right, but I had to leave anyway.

The elevator doors opened on a party going full blast and spilling out into the hallway. Loud throbbing music was coming from inside. Hot, hot, hot stu-uff, hot, hot, hot, hot.... Apparently, my ex-wife had entered a new period: Disco Patty. The people in the hallway were mostly thin, fashionable young men of various genders. Several were passing around a little open brown bottle marked Locker Room, and then throwing their heads back ecstatically, while they turned beet red and gasped for air. It looked like a lot of fun.

No one paid any attention to me as I walked in.

Luckily, Patty was nowhere in sight. And there was a crowd to hide in. All I had to figure out was where Potatoes might also be hiding during all of this.

The fat doorman was right. There was a woman wearing a clear-plastic evening dress with nothing underneath but her. One dark beautiful girl had unburdened herself of everything but black-silk stockings topped by flowery garters and a lacy low-cut bra. She was dancing with some sleek Riviera gigolo type, and as they whirled together, he was suavely sucking on her armpit, which she seemed to be enjoying thoroughly. Buckets of Dora Pérignon Brut were placed strategically about. Dry smears of brie and caviar crumbs scattered like bird shot on ravaged silver trays.

The old idea in a brand-new package. She'd even redecorated. Everything was white, what they're calling High Tech. For my money, it's your favorite factory brought into your home and whitewashed. Industrial-strength molded-plastic chairs and couches and stray cubes, all white, with white-on-white paintings on the white walls. It looked like the moon base in 2001.

I picked up a glass of champagne and started to mingle, very carefully. But apparently Patty's new incarnation brought with it a whole new crowd. Not only didn't I see her, there wasn't a familiar face anywhere. I pretended to casually circulate through the party, toward my old study. Potatoes used to like to sleep on my desk at night, curled around the base of my lamp in the warm circle of light. He wouldn't be out here anywhere. Potatoes always liked a good party, but he also hated assholes other than yours truly. On my way, my wrist was grabbed by this cadaverous socialite. She had about $1,000,000 worth of diamonds hanging from this skinny wrinkled neck like a Galapagos tortoise's. Her dry, withered lips were painted socko red in an exaggerated kiss-me-quick Cupid's bow.

"Help us with an argument, young man. Gore here says that Western civilization has always been boring, and Truman maintains that it hasn't. What do you say?"

I said the first thing that came into my head.

"Well, there's no business like show business!"

And then I walked off, smiling pleasantly. Finally, I got to the study. But no Potatoes. No desk or lamp or chair, either, for that matter. The room was bare to the floor. Since he was nowhere to be found on the first floor, I climbed the stairs. The door to the master bedroom was closed and apparently locked. Some woman was standing there, banging on it and shouting, "I want my coat! I've got to go home!"

What she didn't know but I did was that there was a connecting bathroom between the master bedroom and a smaller bedroom next to it. And the door to that one was open. I sort of casually drifted inside.

I could already hear them before I opened the bathroom door. The lights were out in the John, so I slipped inside and stood there until my eyes got used to the dark. The only light was a thin vertical slice where the door to the master bedroom was just barely ajar. In there, all the lights appeared to be on. And among the various slurpings and giggling and heavy breathings and rhythmic paradisiacal moans humidifying the air, there was one I recognized too well.

I had found Patty.

And knowing Potatoes' sense of irony, I'd probably found him as well.

By slow millimeters, I opened the door just enough so I could see what was going on. It turned out I didn't really need to bother. Everyone was much too busy to notice me. It was really quite something. I'd never actually seen eight or ten bodies writhing in a naked pile on a king-sized bed covered with coats and mink stoles before.

And flopped on a dresser observing it all with great disdain was Potatoes, fat and sassy as ever. He was watching the performance on the bed like it was just more proof that people were a lot farther down the evolutionary ladder than cats, down around alligators and lichens and liverworts.

I walked straight into the room tall and proud. Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck. Without hurrying, I walked around the bed toward the dresser Potatoes was on. A couple of the people on the bed noticed me but didn't seem to care one way or another, and one graceful girl's arm beckoned me in, like it was a swimming pool or something.

I was so cool, I even stopped a couple of feet away from Potatoes to do our old trick and start things right. When he's in the mood, when I pound on my chest like I'm having a coughing fit, he'll jump at me from wherever he is and just know that I'll always catch him and start petting him. Which I always do.

So I stood there next to the Sexual Freedom League rally and smacked my chest with the flat of my hand.

Potatoes looked up and sort of did a double take. I swear. It was like, Well it's about time, shit head! And then he stood up and stretched a little and made a lithe bound for me. He was purring like crazy by the time I caught him.

I think I started crying again about then, or at least tears came rolling out of my eyes. Potatoes licked a couple off my cheek and purred louder. Really. It was a real Shirley Temple reunion.

I turned with Potatoes in my arms and looked over the pile. For some reason, I suddenly wanted to be sure Patty saw me before I made my exit. She was pretty busy at the moment and had her eyes closed to concentrate better.

But when she opened them, there I was.

She couldn't really scream, because her mouth was full, but her eyes bulged while she tried--a new wrinkle her friend no doubt appreciated. And she couldn't get up to chase me or call the cops or anything, because she was, well, really busy. Houdini couldn't have gotten her out of there.

I blew her a kiss and headed for the door and unlocked it. When I opened it, the woman who'd been outside banging on it came exploding in as I went out.

I couldn't tell if her shriek was joy or horror.

"My highly recommended head counselor turned out to be a little too fond of the Junior Bluebirds."