GuidedRoman circii tours—those on wheels—of Greenwich Village and the Bowery, invariably include visits to (or passing notice of) such taverns as The White Horse, McSorley’s, Julius’s, Leo’s, The Jumble Shop. But only Red Fred’s Village Voyages takes out-of-towners and uptowners to Aunt Annie’s Ale House. Which is, perhaps, the reason so few out-of-towners and uptowners are found weighted down with old typewriters in the East River. The Ale House’s clientele is—in the parlance of the fuzz—unsavory. A mugging-cum-swimfest w/typewriter was, therefore, not uncommon at Aunt Annie’s. (Times, of course, change, and He Who Would Stay Abreast must change with them: In the good bad old days a man who had been weighted down with an Oliver the size of a small threshing machine stayed weighted. Try that with an Olivetti or a Hermes thin as a wafer, and the victim-elect is not only likely to decline the nomination but to emerge, damp and annoyed, and start grinding an ice-pick point—or other uncivil, though not altogether unexpected, behavior.)
No matter what they may mutter at Charles Street Station House, it was accident, nothing but accident, which brought Red Fred and a bumper crop of sweating hayseeds (Royal Arch Masons from Chitling Switch, Nebraska: retired elocution teachers from East Weewaw, Wis., wearied with the season’s labors, shuddering at the very sight of prunes, prisms, and cheese: and other specimens habitans of The Great American Heartland) on the scene at the exact moment, Greenwich Village Meridian Time, when Angie the Rat, a prominent Six-for-Fiver—having compounded his interest once too often to expect further indulgence of Big Patsy the horse-player—was unceremoniously, but none the less effectively, sent where the bad loansharks go. One bullet in the left larynx, one bullet in the right larynx, and one bullet in the precise center of the umbilical quadrant. The reubens, male and female, scattering with shrieks and squeals, the assailants leisurely made their escape in an oyster-grey Edsel (which proved, of course, to be stolen).
Such amenities, confirming what had heretofore been mere wicked suspicions, instantly brought the yokels back for more. More, MORE; and, for the moment, left the competition nowhere. Fred might even have dispensed with the jumbo beret, the black tinted-lens horn rims, and the chestnut-colored beaver, which served him in lieu of neon signs and barkers; only he was stubborn.
And to be brutally honest (dealing as we are with clinical detail), Fred had to wear the beret, shades and foliage. He was not called Red Fred for naught. His name still appeared with inglorious regularity on subversive lists circulated by private, alphabetized agencies; and he thought it best to await the Revolution incognito.
It was, perhaps, because the assassins had hyped up his almost moribund business that Red Fred thought with mild kindnesses (when he thought of them at all) of Big Patsy and his two side-boys, whose names at this stage of narration are unnecessary. One can well imagine Red Fred’s dismay, then, at the appearance, the following Tuesday, of Gook, the blind beggar (whose bobby was serving alternate Thursday nights as a Civil Defense sky watcher), who informed him that Big Patsy was indeed anxious to see the tour guide posthaste. This, to make clear Red Fred’s attitude was (in the fullest Hitchcockian sense of the cliché), for the birds.
Gook made it abundantly evident, however, that if Red Fred did not bust his tuchus getting down to the empty loft building, on the corner of Bleecker and Bank streets, it might well fall on him the next time he went by. And that Big Patsy would be most reluctantly compelled to come and get him.
There was even some mention of sulphuric acid.
Red Fred, as a consequence, put on a clean shirt (for had not Big Patsy once remarked in Aunt Annie’s that if there was one thing he could not abide, it was a slob?) and made haste to keep his appointment.
The loft building in point was a massive; brooding structure more reminiscent of a tyrannosaurus coprolite than a hideout for wayward horse-players. Big, black, brooding, it hovered over the corners of Bleecker and Bank as though it was hungry. Red Fred had the distinct impression it was hungry for him.
Red Fred’s height was five feet six inches, and his hair was not only thinning in front but—as though anxious to do its part all down the line—was also departing steadily from the rear. The shades he wore were corrective lenses ground along the thickness lines of a cathode ray tube. He was, in short, short and balding and near-sighted.
He was also a coward, a thief, and scared out of his gourd.
The loading dock door of the old loft building stood ominously ajar, as though someone had been standing behind it, waiting for Red Fred to come in sight through a crack in the splintering jamb. Red Fred whistled a tremulous note or two from “The Peat Bog Soldiers” and opened the door, stepping through quickly.
When the length of rubber hose connected with his skull, it was arithmetically-placed at that soft juncture of temple and ear known to exponents of the sage art of karate as peachy-keen for sending an opponent to the land of turquoise torpors.
Red Fred gracefully settled across the polished shoes of Big Patsy’s chief arm-man, Wallace “Gefilte” Fish. The name now becomes of importance. Carry on.
It is not to be thought that Wallace was fond of gefilte fish; in point of fact, he detested it, but, just as a man with two left feet may admire the ability to dance, so did Wallace admire intelligence, a quality in which he was, lamentably, deficient. His knowledge of science could have been covered by a 1¼ grain kiddy aspirin tablet, and belonged—if it belonged anywhere—to the era of high-buttoned shoes and one-piece underwear: Wallace was convinced that sea-food was good for building up the brain.
Unfortunately, any item of this nature which derived from salt water caused Wallace to break out into something which resembled an illustration from a dermatology textbook. Enter (as Shakespeare might have said) gefilte fish—an item of nourriture composed of carp, white-fish, and pike: every one of them strictly a fresh-water creature.
Keep this in mind.
When Fred returned to full cognizance of his surroundings, he saw what he by now was fully convinced was a dreadful sight, viz.: (reading from right to left) Wallace, Big Patsy, and the latter’s second assistant, a cat-like creature with ginger-colored hair, skin, and eyes, known far and wide simply as The Kerry Pig.
All three were dressed as if ready to attend an undertaker’s psalm-sing, and the expressions on their respective faces were approximately somber.
“This,” said Big Patsy, “is a mere sample. Free. If you like it, we can supply the full treatment.”
“At,” offered The Kerry Pig, “no extra cost.” The sound which Wallace uttered may perhaps not be precisely transliterable as “Duh”; but that is close enough for anyone not a registered phonologist. It was intended to indicate affirmation.
“Gentlemen,” said Fred, thinking it wise to remain flat on his back, but all set to roll like a hoop-snake at the first sign of a kick-twitchy foot; “Gentlemen, I bear you no malice for this monstrous incivility, realizing as I do that you are victims of The System.” Here he paused to turn aside his head to spit. “And hence no better than pawns, as it were, of the War-mongers and their other ilk in the high councils of Monopoly Capitalism: but wherein have I offended thee, pray tell?”
Big Patsy sneered. The Kerry Pig snorted. Wallace uttered The Sound. “That is rich,” said Big Patsy, sneering. “That is very rich, indeed. You,” he said, pointing a long, thick, impeccably manicured finger, “are a bird. I will tell you wherein you have offended us. As of two o’clock yesterday afternoon every gendarme and shamus in New York City it is looking for us with photographs pasted as it were on the undersides of their caps (if uniformed). They have this idea, which it’s a lie, a slander, and a base canard, that it was we whom give Angie the Rat them lead Miltowns to swallow.”
Fred received this intelligence with some surprise, it being well-known, from Canal to Fourteenth, that Big Patsy y Cia, avoided photography with a zeal which would have done honor to an Old Rite Amishman.
“The reason the constables they have this absurd notion,” continued Big P., “is that one of them Hoosiers who you were esquiring around The Village at the moment of The Rat’s demise, had nothing better to do with his time but get out his old Brownie and snap the three of us at the moment of our departure, which it was purely coincidental, I need hardly add.”
“Instead of getting down on his knees and yelling an Act of Contrition in the poor man’s ear,” said The Kerry Pig.
“As a result of which,” Big Patsy continued, “every pothead, hippie, hipster and lady of the evening is now free to walk the city streets unmolested, whilst the entire might of the law is coincided on hunting we three down as if we were wild beasts of the field or suchlike: which it’s All Your Fault.” And he gazed at Red Fred with no small measure of discontent.
“And in conclusion,” Wallace Fish began, concluding with alarming rapidity as Big Patsy deftly inserted his elbow between the aforementioned’s fifth and sixth ribs.
“In conclusion,” Big Patsy took up the standard for his stricken comrade, “since the source of our discomfort stems at least indirectly from your direction, I and the boys has held solemn conclave together and have, like, decided that the source of our deliverance will emanate from the selfsame source, to wit—you.”
“I don’t understand,” said Red Fred.
“I do not stutter,” Big Patsy informed him:
“Do I understand you want me to get you out of here? Is that what I am to understand?”
Big Patsy beamed benevolently. He tugged at the dimpled front of his Countess Mara tie and allowed a fatherly twinkle to infest his right eye. “As they said in them halcyon days of the Red and Blue Network, you have answered the $64 question. Or we could introduce your person to an entirely new and novel version of The Watusi.”
“Mashed potatoes!” added Wallace Fish.
Red Fred suddenly felt harassed. The Worker’s Handbook had some pretty stiff things to say about allowing the pawns of the Capitalist/Fascist Demagogues to knuckle you under. “I’ll do no such thing.”
Fourteen seconds, six feet and one hundred and twenty-nine bruises later, Red Fred, rationalizing wildly on The Worker’s Handbook interpretation, acquiesced in cavalier style: “I’ll do that very thing.”
It should be pointed out at this juncture that Red Fred’s Village Voyages were not conducted on a renovated bus; they were not conducted on foot; they were not in fact conducted by plane, train, chariot, felucca or yak-cart. They were conducted on a series of small open-sided wagons, hitched together and pulled by a tiny steam engine built to look like a tandem pair of pink gastropods. A fringed awning surmounted this perambulating snailery; a charming caboose played denouement with the legend RED FRED’S VILLAGE VOYAGES affixed thereon; and several ladies and gentlemen of the species homo hippicus were employed to station themselves at irregular intervals around the cars. See authentic bohemian Greenwich Village. Cha-cha-cha!
On the second Wednesday in August following Angie the Rat’s handsome funeral (13 heart-broken mourners 13), Red Fred’s Village Voyages putted lackadaisically past the heat-prostrated eyeballs of one hundred and sixteen of New York’s Finest, beating its way uptown toward the East Side Airlines Terminal. Aboard were only Red Fred and three authentic, bohemian (what they used to call) beatniks.
The shades were by Ray-Ban, the slacks of Italian silk, the berets and bop-kick goatees courtesy of a four-year-old photo of Dizzy Gillespie in Down Beat and the open-toed thong sandals from Allan Bloch. They looked flea-ridden, esoteric and intense. One of them slept. One of them scratched. One of them sweated.
The “boys” were leaving the scene.
To split: to, like, make it. If you got eyes.
And other ethnic phrases of a similar nature.
The police re-marked the caravan sleepily. The intelligence that Fred had, on more than one occasion, denounced them as cossacks, kulaks, and cosmopolite hirelings of the infamous Joint Distribution Committee, had not yet reached them. True, from time to time, more as a conditioned reflex than anything else, they served him with a warrant for violating City Statute 1324 (entitled: An Ordinance Against Running Stagecoaches On Streets Not Illuminated With Gaslamps); and at Yuletide they put the arm on him for “charitable” contributions odd and sundry. But aside from that, he was seldom bothered by them.
As the snail undulated its way along MacDougal Street there came into sight at a point just abaft The Kettle of Fish a tall, gaunt, gold-encrusted police officer with a face like a horse who has not only just read Baudelaire for the first time but has scribbled How True! in the margin.
This was Captain Cozenage, whose record while in charge of the Homicide Squad was without parallel in the annals of crime: as a result of which he had been, in rapid succession, switched to the Loft Robberies, Pigeon Drop, Unlicensed Phrenologists, and Mopery Squads: and was now entrusted with a letter-of-marque to suppress steamboat gamblers on the East River. (“Only stay the Hell out of Headquarters!” begged the Commissioner.) His staff consisted, in its entirety, of Patrolman Ottolenghi, a hot lay-preacher for the Exmouth Brethren, an obscure and dehydrated evangelical sect believed at City Hall—quite erroneously—to exert an enormous influence in the boondocks of Staten Island. When Cozenage struck out, windmills for miles around quivered; for this reason—and because of fear being the ingrained better part of Red Fred’s valor—the snailery bolted to a halt beside Manhattan’s own Javert.
“Good morning, Captain,” Red Fred greeted him, rather nervously. With Cozenage you never knew what was coming next; he had once read through one of Fred’s impassioned printed appeals to the Workers and Peasants of the Bronx and found nothing more to complain of than two dangling participles and an improper use of the ethical dative; and then proceeded to summons him for entering into the verbal indentureship of a minor without consent of a magistrate; a reference to Fred’s casual hiring of a high school boy to help pass out the pamphlets, which puzzled the bejeezus out of sixteen judges before being finally tossed out of court.
“You people from out of town?” Captain Cozenage now inquired gloomily of the caravan’s three passengers.
“Like the most, Pops,” Big Patsy answered, striving monstrously to counterfeit the personality he had assumed, but feeling, vaguely, that he was somehow not succeeding. With some earnest hope of mending matters, he added, “Just now on our way back to Muncie, Indiana, home of the largest mason-jar factory in the civilized world.”
The Captain nodded. “‘Native of Cyther’s cloudless clime,’” he intoned. “‘In silent suffering you paid the price/And expiated ancient cults of vice/With generations of forbidden crime.’”