Lunatics (3 page)

CHAPTER 4

Jeffrey

It was totally self-defense.

I know how it might look in hindsight. But as the saying goes, hindsight is in the eye of the beholder. And at that moment, what I was beholding was an asshole—a
large
asshole—holding a broken pole from a birdcage stand, which can be a lethal weapon, in a threatening manner.

I had no way of knowing what this asshole was going to do. But I had reason to believe that he was mentally unstable, because, Exhibit A, he calls his store “The Wine Shop” and he's selling fucking parakeets in there, him and his little Jap sidekick, calling me a racist because I can't off the top of my head name seventeen famous blind white people. And for the record, how famous is a
cross-country skier
? Even if he is famous, which I doubt, I bet he has people skiing behind him yelling “Turn left! Turn right!” or else he's going to ski into a fucking tree. So while I admire his determination, no way is he in the same blindness league as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, who never had anybody standing behind them at the keyboard shouting, “Move your right hand to the left a little! Make an F-sharp!” Or whatever.

But my point is, this fucking unstable lunatic is coming at me in a threatening manner with a Louisville Slugger, and in that situation, legally—and bear in mind that I have spent many hours in a court of law—you have the right to defend yourself by whatever means necessary. So I grabbed the first thing I saw, which it turned out was a cage. My plan was to hold it between me and the lunatic while I backed out the door.

You should have seen his face when I picked up the cage. Jesus. His face turned the color of Hawaiian Punch, and his eyeballs got the size of fried eggs, and he's waving his broken pole from a birdcage stand and yelling “PUT DOWN THAT LEMUR!!”

I'll be honest: At the time I didn't know what a lemur was. Later I found out from Wikipedia that they were the little furry animals with the big eyes in
Madagascar
, which I have on DVD, but at the time all I knew was, I was not going to put down the cage and have nothing between me and the lunatic with the broken pole from a birdcage stand. So I backed up, got the door open, and took off running.

Fortunately I parked close by, and I was in the car and got the doors locked before the lunatic reached me. He was waving the broken pole from a birdcage stand and screaming, and all I wanted to do was get out of there, so I started the car, threw it into gear and stomped on the gas. Maybe I brushed him a little going past, but as I said earlier, this was clearly a self-defense situation.

Looking back, maybe I should have dropped the cage before I got into the car. But everything was happening so fast, plus if I dropped the cage it might have injured the lemur, which I later found out was endangered. So the argument could be made from an ecology standpoint that I actually
rescued
this valuable animal, which the unstable lunatic had placed in a potentially hazardous situation vis-à-vis he was swinging a broken pole from a birdcage stand in its vicinity. I'm not saying that is my main legal position. My main legal position is that I was totally within my rights to defend myself.

As you can imagine, by this point I was pretty upset, so I drove straight home. I have to say, as a person who just almost got his skull crushed, I was disappointed in Donna's reaction.

“A
lemur
?” she said. “I ask you to bring home wine and you BRING HOME A LEMUR?”

“It was self-defense,” I said.

“Can we keep it?” said Taylor.

“NO WE CANNOT KEEP IT!” said Donna, who gets excited (she is Italian). “I have SEVENTEEN WOMEN coming here in a half hour to discuss
Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen, and they will be expecting to drink WINE, so your father is going to TAKE THE LEMUR BACK TO WHEREVER HE GOT IT FROM and BRING HOME SOME WINE LIKE I ASKED HIM TO or he is going to spend the REST OF HIS LIFE SLEEPING IN THE GARAGE.”

“Mom, you're scaring the lemur,” said Taylor.

“I can't take it back,” I said.

“Yay!” said Taylor.

“Why not?” said Donna.

“Because the guy it belongs to tried to kill me,” I said.

“And why would he do that?” said Donna.

“Well, partly because I took his lemur.”

Donna rubbed her face with her hands, starting high and then pulling down, so her mouth got all stretched out. It's not an attractive look for her, but I have learned over the years not to point this out.

“All right,” she said. “Taylor, you will put the lemur in the basement . . .”

“Yay!” said Taylor.

“. . . for
now
. Tomorrow your father will get rid of the lemur.”

“But
Mom . .
 
.”

“Your father will GET RID OF THE LEMUR, and I do not care how he does it. But right now he will GO GET SOME WINE. He will get a LOT of wine.”

Which is what I did. There is no point arguing with Donna when she is being that Italian. I thought about mentioning to her that the lemur owner was the same asshole who called the offside, but I decided it was probably better if she didn't know that. I figured she was never going to find out, because I had no intention of ever coming into contact with that lunatic again.

CHAPTER 5

Philip

I loved that lemur
more than I loved my father-in-law.

I try my best not to get emotionally involved with the animals in my pet shop. Through the years, I've learned that it will only lead to heartbreak due to the inevitability that sooner or later they will leave the store—either by way of a sale or (as in the case of that sickly Spanish Timbrado that I accidentally dropped and crushed with my heel when I grabbed the broken pole from a birdcage stand and took off after that racist maniac) feet first.

So try as I may to maintain a purely professional relationship with all that crawl, hop, fly, lope, slither, or swim and regard them as mere inventory, there was something about that lemur that made me break my own rule. Why? Because it was endangered? Well, yes and no. Of course my heart goes out to any species that borders on extinction. I feel that way about polar bears, giant pandas, sunset frogs, Bengal tigers, Hawaiian monk seals, Egyptian vultures, Serpent Island centipedes, and Malagasy Giant Jumping Rats. But since I've never forged a personal relationship with any of them, I regret their impending demise but lose little or no sleep over it.

With that baby lemur, however, from the moment it came into The Wine Shop, I felt an immediate connection. Perhaps it was his size (just 2.1 oz.) or the fact that its thumbs were only pseudo-opposable, which made its hands less than perfect at grasping objects, that I felt the desire to care for it. Feed it. Nurse it. It was delivered about an hour before closing on a Saturday evening and, because of its special needs, I was reluctant to leave it unattended until the store reopened Monday morning. So I took it home, brought it downstairs to our finished basement, put it in a corner next to a heat lamp and hand-fed it dry leaves, which I left in a bowl next to the cage for his next feeding.

Daisy's folks were in town and I found her note saying that she, her mom, and the kids had gone to a movie. And that my father-in-law, who'd opted not to join them, was napping in the downstairs spare bedroom in the finished basement—about fifteen feet away from the lemur. Wanting to take full advantage of the quiet, I went upstairs to the family room to watch a game I'd TiVoed (
Wheel of Fortune
) when, not ten minutes later, the smell of something burning was followed by the sound of our smoke detector, which was followed by the sound of my father-in-law's incessant pounding of his fists on the door to the downstairs bedroom that he'd accidentally locked himself in. Apparently, I'd put the heat lamp too close to the dry leaves, so when I got down to the basement, I grabbed the cage and brought the frightened lemur up to the safety of our kitchen and cuddled it before grabbing the small fire extinguisher we kept inside the pantry, went back downstairs to the now smoke-filled basement, put the fire out, heard the sounds of my father-in-law's somewhat softer pounding on the spare bedroom door, went back upstairs, grabbed the spare key we kept inside a kitchen drawer, went back downstairs, opened the door to the spare bedroom, and carried my unconscious father-in-law up the stairs and outside for fresh air, where he was revived by oxygen-toting firemen who'd pulled up just as I was laying him down on our front lawn.

And now this very same lemur had been stolen. Kidnapped. Endangered in the hands of someone oblivious to or, even worse, uncaring about its delicacy. So I told the policeman that I knew who the perpetrator was and that I wanted him arrested and punished to the fullest extent of a law. I said “a” law and not “the” law because I really didn't care which law it was, just as long as its punishment was cruel and unusual. I told him this in the emergency room at Children's Hospital—where Hyo had driven me after that lunatic's car knocked me down and ran over my ankle as he sped away.

“What's his name?” asked the humorless policeman whose nameplate identified him as Officer H. Pepper from the local Fort Lee precinct.

“I have no idea,” I answered.

“But you just told me that you know who this guy is.”

“I do. But I don't know his name. All I can tell you is that he's number fourteen's father.”

“Excuse me?” asked Officer Pepper, who was now looking at me with the same expression traditionally seen on the faces of people who are talking to idiots. “What could that possibly mean?”

“His daughter plays in the AYSO league that I'm a referee in. So all you have to do is get your hands on the roster for the Princess Daffodils in the ten-and-under division, see which player is number fourteen, then arrest her father and prosecute the bastard to the fullest extent of a law. Any law.”

“No,” said Officer Pepper, who was now looking at me with the same expression traditionally seen on the faces of people who want to beat the daylights out of another person. “How it works is
you
get a hold of the roster, see who number fourteen is, then call me with the information and then I'll go deal with her father, okay?” before handing me his card, which I quickly glanced at to see and happened to notice his rank.

“You're a sergeant?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You're Sgt. Pepper?”

“Don't start, okay?”

“You must get a lot of teasing.”

“I said don't start, okay?”

“Fine.”

So while the good folks at Children's Hospital taped my chest in deference to two cracked ribs and fitted my left ankle with a soft walking cast, Hyo went online and found the Princess Daffodils roster on the AYSO website. The player who wore number 14 was Taylor Peckerman. Her parents were Donna and Jeffrey Peckerman, and because the listed address was only about a half mile away from ours, I felt compelled to drive past their house on my way home.

CHAPTER 6

Jeffrey

There is an old legal principle,
which I forget the technical Latin name of, but it comes from English common law, and the gist of it is: If you go to a man's home, he can, legally, kill you.

And when we say a man's home, we can legally interpret that to include the man's property, meaning his yard, his sidewalk, and—you will see later why this is important—his swale. A man's swale is his castle, especially if he mows it
and
fertilizes it, which I do. My swale would not be out of place at Augusta National.

So here is what happened:

I was upstairs, lying on my bed watching
SportsCenter
. (This is off topic, but: Has there been an NBA highlight in the past seventeen years where a player scored a basket and he
didn't
travel? I mean, since these are professional basketball players getting paid millions of dollars, shouldn't they have to
dribble the fucking basketball
once in a while? Whereas in your modern NBA, a guy can be nowhere near the basket, he's basically still in the locker room, and suddenly he runs to the basket carrying the ball like it's a ham sandwich, and after three hundred steps he dunks it, and instead of getting whistled for traveling, he gets on
SportsCenter
. And before you think what I think you're going to think, I'm saying they
all
do this, including the white guys.)

Suddenly I heard this shout from Taylor's room: “Buddy! No!!”

Taylor named the lemur Buddy. She thinks it's a male, even though there's no way to tell by looking at it. I did not give her permission to keep Buddy because Donna would kill us both (I mean me and Buddy). But I did say Taylor could have Buddy in her room until the next day, when I would figure out how to get rid of him. Donna, after Category 5 whining from Taylor, had agreed that okay, Buddy could stay one night in Taylor's room, but Taylor was to keep him up there and not let him get anywhere near the Oprah book-and-wine group.

So I jumped off the bed and hustled down to Taylor's room, where she was freaking out in the direction of her canopy. Back when Taylor was in her princess phase, what she really really wanted, more than anything in the whole wide world, was for her bed to have a canopy. It cost $450, and ten minutes after we got it, Taylor was done with the princess phase and on to the next phase, which I think was Hannah Montana. But she still has the canopy, and Buddy had climbed up on it for the purpose of taking a dump. It turns out that lemurs, in their native environment, are tree dwellers; they like to have some altitude when they relieve themselves. So Buddy was perched up there, dropping long, droopy squirts of lemur shit onto Taylor's bedspread, which is currently a Justin Bieber model.

“Why did you let it out of the cage?” I asked Taylor.

“Because he wanted out!” she said.

“He wanted out so he could go to the bathroom!”

“Well,
I
didn't know that!” She said this with that voice that women develop at a very early age, the one where whatever happens—the cable goes out, they have a headache, a lemur is shitting on the bed—it's your fault.

I went to grab Buddy, but here's the thing: A lemur is basically a monkey. It has, like, ten million years of experience with not being captured. So I'm lunging around Taylor's room, trying to grab this thing, but it's skittering around like a big hairy mosquito, up on the light fixture, down on the floor, up on the bureau, back up on the canopy, and every time I go to grab it, it's gone.

One mistake I made, and this is something you should bear in mind if you ever find yourself in this situation: You should close the door. I realized this when Buddy skittered into the hall and headed for the stairs. I was right behind him, but I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're Randy Moss. (Or some equally fast white guy.) You're not going to catch a fucking lemur.

Here was the situation downstairs, as it was later explained to me by Donna after she had calmed down a little and stopped talking about removing my balls with a corkscrew:

The women were no longer discussing
Freedom
, by Jonathan Franzen. It turned out that, of the seventeen of them, exactly one, Jeanette Keebler, actually read the entire book, and she wasn't sure what it was about. So after several minutes, the ladies had dropped literature and switched over to the topic of breast enhancement. At some point, this became a general discussion of the human body, and at some further point diabetes came up, and Denise Rodecker, who had had several, maybe four, glasses of wine, decided she would show everybody her insulin pump. This is a little gadget that looks kind of like a beeper, which pumps insulin into a person, in this case Denise Rodecker. She unhooked it from herself and, as it happened, was showing it to the
Freedom
discussion group at the exact moment when Buddy skittered down the stairs.

Here's another fact about lemurs: They are very curious. When they see something interesting, they want to check it out. Don't ask me why, but of all the things in the living room at that particular moment, including a wide range of hors d'oeuvres, the thing that was most interesting to Buddy was Denise's insulin pump. It was like a magic trick: Denise is holding her pump up in front of everybody, and there's this blur, and, bam, Denise is holding nothing, and there's Buddy up on the window fixture with the pump in those little hands he has, studying it like it's a Crown Jewel.

At that point, a lot of things were happening at once. Denise was screaming, and some of the other women were screaming, and Taylor was crying, and Donna was yelling at me to—easy for her to say—get the insulin pump back from Buddy. I knew I couldn't catch him bare-handed, so I was looking for something to trap him with, and I grabbed the first thing I saw, which was this carved wood mask Donna got when our cruise ship stopped in Jamaica that depicts the face of an African-American male with the words “YA MON” on his forehead. So I'm holding this mask, moving toward Buddy on the window fixture, and I would have had him except that at that exact moment, Jeanette Keebler, who has never been a rocket scientist, decides to escape, and opens the front door.

Buddy sees the opening and leaps off the window like a little furry batman, still holding the pump, and skitters out the door. Denise is now screaming so loud, my teeth ache. I'm after Buddy, holding the mask, pushing through the women. By the time I get outside, Buddy is standing in the middle of the lawn, looking at me. He still has the pump. I slow down and start creeping forward, saying “Good boy, Buddy, good boy, there's a good boy,” in a calm tone. He's watching me getting closer, not moving, like he's sincerely considering what I am saying, and I'm thinking another two steps I will have the little shitter.

Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I see this Prius come gliding up the street. I take another step forward, and I'm slowly raising the YA MON mask into attack position, when suddenly this Prius swerves up onto my swale, and the window goes down, and this voice, which I immediately recognize, yells, “GET AWAY FROM THAT LEMUR!”

An asshole like that, you
know
he drives a Prius.

“GET THE
FUCK
OFF MY SWALE!” I yelled.

“THAT LEMUR IS MY PROPERTY AND YOU STOLE IT,” he yelled.

I was going to point out that it was self-defense, but suddenly Buddy took off running toward the Prius, still holding Denise's insulin pump. I took off after him, but before I got there, he jumped through the window into the car. The asshole threw the Prius into gear, and I was yelling at him to stop, but he stomped on the accelerator. The car swerved sideways, and I felt this pain in my hip, and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back with dirt landing on me as this lunatic Prius asshole wrecked my swale peeling out of there. I rolled over and got up on my knees, and I have to say in all modesty that for a guy who had just been legally assaulted by a vehicle and was not in a proper throwing stance, I got a
lot
of mustard onto the YA MON mask. It went through the window clean, and I know I heard a yelp.

By now the Prius was back on the street, tires squealing. Donna and Taylor were out of the house now, running toward me. I was still on my knees, watching the Prius. Just as it turned the corner, under the streetlight, a shape jumped out the driver's-side window.

“Buddy!” yelled Taylor.

The little shitter ran straight to her.

He wasn't holding the pump.