lunchtime musings

Over kufte kebabs at lunch today, Victor accused me of not thinking clearly about where my life's going. I'm not one to have witty comebacks ready at a moment's notice, those tend to be available only long after the fact, or when I'm writing on unrelated topics. So I didn't have a snappy reply. Instead I took a moment to reflect on recent events and then changed the subject.

Victor may be right. I used to be a pretty level-headed guy. I was never so studious as Victor, I never hit the books like he did and still does, but I also never wandered around drunk all the time like Buckyman Jim tends to do. Much like X-rays, Bucky's great to be around in small quantities but with extended exposure he tends to cause brain failure in lab rats. The past exploits of Buckyman Jim serve as a good foil to illustrate my own steadfastness.

But that was all years ago. Buckyman Jim moved away to work on Wall Street and Victor... well, Victor's still Victor. Back when the three of us would cruise around town, blasting Metallica from Bucky's grandma's ' 87 Cadillac deVille, Victor would pretty much disown the two of us as soon as we stopped at the T&F. They'd always sell us beer at the T&F, even though I, in my braces and long hair looked all of 15 years old, which I wasn't, and Bucky could pass for maybe 14, which he wasn't, and Victor... well, Victor still looks like he's about 17 years old. None of us looked even remotely like 21, but that never stopped the clerks at the T&F. So we'd pick up a sixer of Miller or maybe a couple bottles of Colt and head on down to the overpass on Colson and 48th. We'd cruise by first to make sure there weren't any bums or crackheads or anything, then park a couple blocks away. We'd found from experience that if we parked too close to the overpass the cops would notice the car and come hassle us.

Once we got under the overpass, Bucky and I would lay into the beers, but Victor never drank. Victor didn't start drinking before he turned 28. He'd always just say we were morons for getting drunk, and that he didn't want to act like an idiot so he wasn't going to drink. That was always fine with Buckyman Jim and me, more beer for us. So Victor would sit there and do double duty looking out for cops, bums, and crackheads with one eye and staring us down disapprovingly with the other. Buckyman Jim was the talker. He'd talk and talk and talk and he had to be making most of that shit up. Victor kept on his mask of disinterest but Bucky and I both knew he listened to every word. Our favorite story (well, officially "my" favorite story, but as I said, Victor was listening too, and it was obvious he liked the story too) was the one about how Bucky found a dead cat in his backyard. Well, not so much "a dead cat" as "two dead cat halves." It looked like it had been torn apart by a dog or a coyote or something. Probably not a coyote in the middle of the city, but how a dog got over Bucky's 6 foot fence, twice (once to get in, once to get out), to tear a cat in half and then leave it un-et, nobody will ever know. Anyway, Buckyman Jim claims he came home from school and found the halves in his backyard when he went out to check on his sun tea. Buckyman was always brewing sun tea. He'd set it out in the morning before going to school, pick it up after school and put it in the fridge, and then it'd be "ready" the next day. It was horrible stuff. Nobody would drink it but Buckyman, not even his parents.

So he was out fetching his jar of hot tea when he saw something furry and red. He went over to investigate and found, much to his simultaneous horror and delight, half of a cat. The posterior half. Two legs and a tail but not a lot else. He looked around and spotted, at the other end of the yard, another furry, reddish blob. He bounded over to investigate and found, to little surprise, another half-cat, this time, a head and two legs. Both pieces, he'd tell us, were surprisingly clean. Sure, there were guts and chunks and miscellaneous red stuff coming out where the cat had been torn apart, but it wasn't splattered all over the yard or even all over the cat-halves.

What does one do with a pair of cat-halves? Well, if one is to believe Buckyman Jim's story, if one is Buckyman Jim, one looks around the yard for a couple of sturdy sticks, and, having located those, goes into the house for some paper towels. According to the story, Bucky used one stick to carefully but none-too-thoroughly re-attach the cat halves, used the paper towels to clean up the minimal mess that remained to give away the fact that the cat was not, in fact, well, and used the remainder of the sticks to prop the cat up into a somewhat lifelike pose of repose.

That taken care of, Buckyman took his tea and spent papertowels inside to refrigerate the one and dispose of the others. When his sister and her friend arrived home from basketball practice, he asked them, with, no doubt, quite the poker face whether they'd seen the cat that had been hanging around in the backyard all day.

Buckyman Jim's little sister had always wanted a pet cat.

So the two girls bounded outside to find the wayward feline, and Buckyman Jim grinningly took up an observation position to enjoy the ensuing scene of what he always described as "delirious, screaming, chickens-with-no-heads running-about behavior" and "the funniest fucking thing i've ever fucking seen." No doubt it was quite the laugh riot. For Buckyman Jim, that is.

Victor and I always doubted the veracity of this tale. Well, not always. Always up until the day we found, under our very own drinking bridge on Colson and 48th, a pair of dog-torn cat-halves. Three jaws dropped that day, as a trio of beer laden misfits sauntered up from 46th to enjoy a pair of 40s and found their recreation interrupted by the happy presence of dismemberly death. "Holy shit!" said someone, probably. The particular details of the conversation escape me, but I do remember the important part: my plan. There weren't any sticks under the bridge, but there was plenty of rebar of varying lengths. Much like the cat that Buckyman Jim supposedly had reassembled in his backyard, this cat was relatively unsullied by gore. It could be done.

There was a playground two blocks further down Colson. It was 2:30pm on a Sunday. In those days, of course, parents let their kids go unattended to playgrounds. There wouldn't be any adults to get in the way of our gruesome prank.

I let it be known that we should reassemble the cat and transport it, in the grocery bag we had used to transport the forties, to the playground to be discovered and hopefully petted by some unwitting comic genius. Victor put on a show of being far above such shennanigans, but Buckyman Jim suffered no such pretensions. After some argument, we agreed to abandon the 40s to make room in the bag for our reassembled but not-ready-for-prime-time deceased feline. We drained the forties, there under the bridge, and dedicated the puddles to our "homies". The bottles we tossed, as always, from underneath the overpass up toward the unseen oncoming traffic. Who knows if we ever hit anything. The lack of angry motorists looking for culprits (us) suggests that we never did.

Our taxidermy and concealment finished, the three of us departed toward the playground. Victor let us know how stupid our idea was and that it wasn't funny at all, merely childish and disgusting. He was only coming along in case the police showed up, he claimed, because that's when the real funny stuff would go down. Buckyman Jim and I nodded at each other and rolled our eyes.

We arrived at the playground (which isn't there anymore, having been paved over as a parking lot a couple years after this very incident) and found the scene much to our liking: six or eight young girls, no boys (who'd just spoil the whole thing by finding our Frankenstein's monster just as awesome as we found it). They were occupied on one of those spinning disc things with the handlebars. You know, sit/stand on it and someone starts it whirling, then jumps on. I don't know what they call the thing. Anyways, the girls were all paying attention to that and not to us. We elected Victor to deploy the cat ("Why do I have to do it?" "Because, it's two against one. That's how democracy works.") and as Bucky and I took cover behind a bush, Victor crept toward the park's bench with his cat-in-a-bag. Once he got to the bench, according to my plan, he'd delicately dump the cat out of the bag (ha!) onto the bench, which faced toward the playground, and stealthily retreat to our position behind the bush, to witness with Buckyman Jim and me the unfolding of our masterpiece.

Just as Victor came within striking distance of the bench, I was beset by a soul-shaking sense of just how wrong this thing was that we were doing. I mean, it was one thing for Buckyman Jim to tell us (dubiously) how he played a prank on his deserving little sister, but it's kind of a different story to inflict a dead cat upon unsuspecting, underaged, and possibly undeserving random girls on a playgound. Pranks were pranks, and this one had seemed like a damned good one in the planning phases, but now, looking at the innocent little faces of the happy girl-strangers, I was having second thoughts. Thoughts of Hellfire and brimstone, thoughts of my angry, disappointed mother, and thoughts of traumatized innocent little girls growing up to be hookers or crack ho's or something. Also, I had noticed a police car approaching.

So, these moral considerations in mind, I picked up a pebble and beaned Victor in the head. He turned angrily and I motioned for him to abort the prank. He gave me the finger. I suppose that after all the pressure we'd had to exert to get him to take this mission, he wasn't planning to give up easily. But as he was turning back around to resume his approach (and, coincidentally, no doubt, as his field of vision shifted to include the approaching patrol vehicle) he had a sudden change of heart. Victor grabbed up his cat-monster-bundle and duck-walked back to our hiding spot.

"What the fuck?" he asked.

"Dude," I said, "we can't do this to these little girls. We don't even know them!"

"So what?" asked Bucky, "That's what makes it so fucking funny, man!"

"Dude!" I said, "these girls are way too young. They'll be scarred for life! Also, didn't you see the --"

At that moment it became painfully clear that the police car was indeed approaching our position, and, rather than be found out by the cops hiding behind a bush spying on a half dozen underage girls, we beat it on back to the Caddy.

I guess maybe Victor was right. It's that sort of clear moral vision that's really been lacking in my life of late.