Chapter 4-1

       

SuperDuper 4

    I put in for a week of vacation and pledged to avoid the bars for the duration. I had barely seen my own apartment in the daylight and FraidyCat was getting very edgy spending all his days alone, sharing only a few early-morning hours a week with a hundred and forty-pound wheezing hang-over. 

    With a one-week vacation I would spend quality time with FraidyCat. I would visit the local markets and cook food at home. I’d lounge around the apartment, read a heap of books in the cozy shaded corner of the front room. There would be air - more air than possible - filling the apartment and it would be lightly laced with the aroma of green tea and honey. I made plans to buy a small, soft rug to place on the delicately polished oak floor. I’d sit on the rug and meditate. I’d speak gently to the pale green hanging fern that I would buy at the Korean market. It would be a happy fern. I would get to know the neighbors in my building, maybe the woman with the toes. We could bake a cake and share some joy. I had big easy plans for my week off.

 

    Saturday morning. 

    The cash machine in the bank’s atrium whizzed and spat, whizzed and spat. It was glorious. The crisp bills snapped out from the machine, perfectly aligned, perfectly stacked, on and on and on. “Zziiip-plat! Zziip-plat! Zziip-plat! Zzip-plat!” I got excited thinking that perhaps the machine had gone bananas.

    I smiled, finally expecting the machine to stop. I put a hand out to grab the dough, but the machine didn’t stop. I swallowed hard.

    My heart began to beat harder, first pounding in the chest and then spreading outward, upward, until it felt like I had a squirrel on each shoulder leaning in on my ears, whispering things to me between tiny squirrel-fisted furry-nailed jabs at my eardrums. 

    ‘What if it really happens?’ Whack! ‘If the machine is busted!’ Whack! Whack! ‘If it dumps its load right here?’ 

    I cringed. 

    Enjoying a momentary fantasy about a cash machine gone hog-wild and having a cash machine actually go hog-wild were two completely different things. One required absolutely no effort and exacted no consequences, and the other thing…

    “Zzip-plat! Zzip-plat!” Those bills shot out so fast and in such perfect alignment, they made a little movie! Jackson winked, pulled off his masks one at a time and there I saw the faces of my clients, associates, designers and architects. My boss was in there too. 

    The squirrels shouted, ‘Had to have the cash, huh? Now you have it! Look into the camera - don’t look surprised!’ Whack! ‘You don’t have to give it back! They’ll never know!’ Whack! Whack! Whack! 

It had to be eight-five degrees outside. I’d already been sweating and there was no way to avoid the camera. The damned thing would catch me. The money would dump. I’d take it and then get arrested six hours later.

    ‘Give yourself up!’ Whack! ‘Never! Take the money!’ Whack! ‘Leave it there! Sissy-Boy! Go to jail!’ Whack! ‘Weiner-head!’ 

    “Zzip-plat! Zzip-plat! Zzip-plat” It sped along with no sign of letting up.

    I hate making decisions. Snap decisions are the worst. That’s why I hate going to fast-food restaurants; if you don’t spit out your order in less than six seconds everyone looks at you like you have a belt of dynamite strapped to your waist. I freeze up. It never fails. That kind of pressure is crushing. I get confused, angry -what are my options? Anxiety. Pick a meal and be done with it! In four seconds I could ruin myself, end up twitching over the counter, blubbering, pulling out half a line from the regular menu, half from the meal menu. It comes out backwards and upside-down. “Four regular mediums, soda burger jumbo, fried-three with fries!” And it doesn’t end there. It never ends there.

    And so I found myself eyeing the bills as they rocketed endlessly out of the ATM thinking, this really can’t be happening!

    Then it was my feet. They were jigging around against the tiled floor, tapping out a strange and frantic S.O.S without my consent. I leaned over to get a better look. It was astonishing. 

    “Zzip-plat! Zzip-plat! I squeezed my head between my palms. It wouldn’t stop the squirrels.

‘Take it!’ Whack! ‘Wait and see!’ Whack! Whack! ‘Whiffer! Act natural! Keep’em guessing! Don’t blow it!’

    I didn’t want to blow it.

    Whistling a tune for the camera was useless, my mouth was dead dry. After two attempts my mind went blank. Clear white forever - I’d passed out on my feet - a mummy inside layers and layers of pure white gauze and winding sheets. There was no feeling in there but my mind was working. I was thinking. 

I was thinking that I wouldn’t feel guilty about stealing the bank’s money. It was quite a surprise. Taking money from a bank was not a crime in my book. I thought about Robinhood and then there he was, in there with me, in my mummy-state. He didn’t say anything but he looked good swinging back and forth from a long length of gauze. His green cape and green tights and funny green booties gave me a laugh. He whispered something in my ear and I don’t know what he said but it outweighed any righteous ambivalence I had about doing the right thing with the bank’s money.

    None of that mattered. What mattered was this: I didn’t want to be a chuckle-head, or soft to the world, and I certainly didn’t want to pass out in the bank. At what point did the rules about the direction my life become based on jaw-breaking snap decisions? How did this happen?

    I wanted to be like Robinhood. 

    The gauze and the winding sheets came away in one great pull: The atrium of the bank came back, the ATM machine was in front of me and my feet were still there dancing around – bip!-bitty-bip!-bitty-bip! – like crazy below the knees. 

    I hadn’t lost yet.

    ‘Do something! Whack! Say something! Whack! Whack! Throw’em off!’ 

    But without a plan I was an imbecile. Conspicuous. 

    I tried waggling my tongue into the security camera above the ATM.

    Then another thing began to happen: I heard a small voice saying, “oh dear…ohhh dear me…” It was so faint.

    “…Oh-lord,” it said, “Mercy and heaven…” It came without an ounce of strength, dishrag limp. It came from a very small, old woman standing in the adjacent ATM stall. She’d heard me screwing around, heard the squirrels. She might have been crying. The way she fingered her hair when our eyes met, that said something. She was clearly unhappy.

    I made like a miracle with my hands. “What?” I asked, “What?”

    But she ran out of the bank without another word or whimper, purse clutched to her chest. Once outside she turned to catch a look at me through the window. Her hair was the color of tinfoil. In the sunlight her whole head lit up like an alarm.

    I turned back to the machine. 

    A receipt chugged out from the top of the machine. It was over like that. I grabbed the green stack, slapped the sweat from my forehead, clawed the receipt, and bolted out the door.

    There’s a comfortably shaded courtyard park that spans the length of La’Guardia Place between Bleeker Street and West Third. The bank opens out onto this park and this was where I tore about, running in short, jagged, figure-eights like a trapped ant looking for a crack in the ground. The money and receipt were still clutched in my outstretched hand and more than a few people turned their heads to see what I was up to. A strolling couple with two innocent looking children eyed me while fingering cameras that hung from their neck-straps.

    “See the crazy man? See him? There are a lot of crazy people in New York City, aren’t there?” said Mom, in baby-talk, to her youngest. “Should we take a picture of the crazy man?”  

    I ran circles around the statue of Fiorello La’Guardia. The Old Patriarch, the mayor of mayors, larger than life, captured forever in a strangely exuberant, exultant gesture, filled with vigorous energy. I’d imagine him up there offering a terrific rallying cry to throngs of invisible citizens. A man of action! A man’s man! A man who drew up the plans for his own future, denying fate’s options! 

    I sank to my knees in front of the massive bronze. The receipt hung from my fist, crushed and soaked in sweat. I squinted down at the limp tab and focus on the small dripping numbers. It told me that there were five hundred dollars in my hand. The same amount I had asked for. The bills tallied correctly. Laughter slowly crawled up and over the wad of self-loathing lodged in my throat.

Pet Parade, Pet Paradise, Pete’s Pets, Pets’nVets, The Pampered Paw – all within four blocks of my home. 

    In the pet section of the phone book you will find: Pet Adoption, Pet Bereavement, Pet Boarding, Pet Cemeteries & Crematories, and on and on. There are over sixty listings under Pet Shops in the Manhattan phone book. There are a lot of well-tended little beasties crawling and swimming and flying around this town. Something irked me. I looked up the word Shelter. Not shelter as in pet shelter - that’s under Pets - Pet Adoption. I was looking for shelters as in Homeless Humans. There was one single listing for a shelter in New York City. Imagine that. I flashed from the Pet pages to the Shelter page and imagined what it would look like if the typesetters accidentally replaced the word pet with the word homeless. The listings would read: Homeless Adoption, Homeless Bereavement, Homeless boarding, and so on. 

    I looked at FraidyCat for a moment, picturing instead, Fraidy the Homeless man curled up on my livingroom floor next to the radiator. It would never work. There were problems with that. There were a million problems with that. The whole thing looked wrong. It had to be a mistake. I made a note to look into the homeless situation in Manhattan.