Moving more smoothly than I’d thought a lobster could, my chitinous captor hauled me to the lighted doorway and stopped there. “Ckckckckck,” he said, or words to that effect.
Laszlo’s eyes bulged. His friend’s eyestalks fully extended themselves and examined me from wildly unlikely combinations of angles. My captor continued to rattle like a baritone snare drum. I continued to kick, my heels hitting my captor’s cephalothorax with a dull booming sound, until he grabbed my ankles with two lesser pincers and held me motionless.
My hands remained free, however. I raised the wrist radio to my mouth, turned the volume up to full, and yelled, “I’m caught! I’ve been captured! Send help!” I intended to say much more, but a prehensile segmented feeler curled down from behind me, removed the radio, and crushed it like a grape before my eyes. Okay, I’m easily convinced. I went limp and waited to see what would happen.
Both lobsters were rat-a-tatting on at a great rate now, and Laszlo’s expression was slowly changing to something I knew in advance I wasn’t going to like. I was right.
“Well, if it ain’t Mister Wiseass Anderson hisself,” Laszlo drooled. “Fawncy meeting you here.” Then he laughed, an uninspiring sound.
“Aha, youthful Laszlo,” said the first lobster, while the second continued to clatter. “This person is known to you?”
“Dig it,” Laszlo admitted. “This here’s ol’ Wiseass Anderson.”
“Oh. What is it, this wiseass?”
“He’s jus’ another MacDougal Street bum, man. That’s all he is.”
“Indeed. And did you bring him here, Laszlo Scott?”
“Me? Hell no. He brung hisself, man. Like, he’s jus’ tryin’ to Spy on me, that’s all. He’s always, you know, tryin’ to Spy on me an’ like that.”
“A spy?”
“Dig it.”
“Indeed.” The lobster advanced toward me menacingly, its huge blue claws snapping fiercely bare inches from my face. “Well now, we know exactly what to do with spies. Indeed we do. Exactly. Oh my, yes.”
I missed Michael very much. Indeed I did. Oh my, yes.
11
AND WHERE was Michael all this time?
As soon as I was safely on my way to Laszlo’s, Mike went back to bed, of course. After all, he explained, it was only eighty-thirty, and he was still tired from last night’s adventures with the pill, and he knew Laszlo wasn’t likely to be up and moving much before noon, and he knew I’d want him to be at his best — alert and well-rested — in case following Laszlo led to complications. Right?
“It wasn’t as if I were deserting you or anything, Chester. Really, I don’t see how you can discuss it in those terms, not even in jest. Look, I even had the radio on the nightstand by my bed, turned up to full volume, to make sure I’d wake up if you called. Christ, Anderson, when you get into these unreasonable moods…”
But sleep is Michael’s finest art. I’ve seen him sleep through a fire in the same room (complete with firemen et cetera, some of whom thought he was dead until I pulled his thumb out of his mouth and they heard him groan), the big Los Angeles quake of ’69 (or was it ’70?), countless deadlines, appointments without number, three exceptionally loud recording sessions, one very raucous birthday party (his) — in short, through just about everything that might wake up any normal person. If Mike ever gets famous enough to rate a biography, I mean to write it myself and call it The Magnificent Sleeper, or maybe The Man Who Slept Through Everything.
Anyhow, Mike had no trouble sleeping through my early-morning efforts to call him. No, what finally woke him — at half-past one, when I’d already shadowed Laszlo back and forth across Tompkins Square three times — was the vidiphone, to which he is psychically attuned.
The call was from a chick named Yvonne on whom Mike’d once had improper but futile designs, whom he hadn’t seen in eighteen months. She was just in from some far place and was entertaining improper designs on Michael for a change. Would he care to have lunch with her?
This call took an hour — Mike’s phone calls often do — during which several lesser calls of mine went quite unheard. Meanwhile Sativa got up and, with much banging about of pots and pans, made Mike a second breakfast. Furthermore, Sean came home from the doctor’s with an awkwardly placed dressing, a large jar of ointment, and a shamefaced expression.
Mike arranged a luncheon date with Yvonne for three o’clock at her hotel room and hung up. Sean immediately turned on my harpsichord and set out loudly to discover how it worked. Mike showered. Sativa, who grooves behind parties and/or noise, confusing the two, dialed a fairly loud detergent drama on our seldom used 3V.
The dentist who occupied the floor below my place tried to complain about the noise by banging on his ceiling with a broom handle, something he’d never done before in all the three years Mike and I had lived there. No one heard him, nor did anyone hear my sporadic attempts to communicate with Michael.
By somewhat more coincidence than I’m used to, Mike never happened to be in his bedroom when I called. He dressed, as is his wont, in motion and everywhere, ducking into his own room only to pick up garments to be put on elsewhere, wherever in the house the action was.
Mike, dreamy-eyed, horny, and glittering, left for his date with Yvonne at two-thirty. Sean and Sativa left with him, bound on little missions of their own. At last the place was quiet, and my voice could doubtless be heard in every room, coming at full tinny volume from the wrist radio Mike’d left, forgotten, on the nightstand by his bed. I haven’t asked, but I hope Yvonne was worth it.
At just past five, when Laszlo’d led me to lobster headquarters on Canal Street, Michael was still engaged in an air-conditioned hotel room with Yvonne, possibly discussing politics. (He was very anti-Kennedy that year, for reasons unknown to me.) Ten minutes later, when I was discovering that Laszlo’s Reality Pill connection was a deep blue shellfish, Michael and Yvonne were just leaving her room en route to The Garden of Eden.
“You see, she was very eager to meet you, Chester. I mean, she’d heard so much about you and all, the usual thing. But I knew you wouldn’t want her at the pad — she being just a little bit stupid, among other things — so I took her to The Garden. Where else?”
And at something like six o’clock, when I was in the claws of one lobster and being threatened by the other whilst Laszlo gloated moistly, Mike and Yvonne were well established at The Garden, talking with Andrew Blake and Karen about me — or so Mike claims.
“The thing about Chester,” Andy’s supposed to have said, “is that his genius works in so many different directions at once.”
“Right,” from Mike, theoretically. “Music, poetry, novels — the only things he can’t do well are things he hasn’t tried yet.”
And so improbably on and on, Mike still insists, for several hours in a choral recitation of my varied virtues that, if I could only believe it really happened, might almost have made my captivity worthwhile.
And if I work hard enough, I may believe it yet.
12
ANYHOW, THERE I was, tied hand and foot to a pillar in the middle of the loft, being surveyed with varying kinds and degrees of avid interest by two blue lobsters and Laszlo Scott.
One of the lobsters — they all looked alike to me — said something that sounded like popcorn popping, and the other lobster went away. I could hear him, out in the hall, pushing heavy packing cases around like so much air. I worried.
“Yes indeed,” the remaining lobster said. “We know how to deal with spies. Oh my, yes.”
“Kill the wiseass mother,” Laszlo hinted. “C’mon, Chief, tear ’im up. Yeah, man, yeah! Kill the bastard.”