Rescue Operation, Step One: they stopped off at The Mess, roused my fellow Tripouts, explained the situation, and sent the group out scouring the Village for me in a random manner that would have worked, ordinarily.
Chaz demanded wergild for the scattering Tripouts, so Sean remained to play guest sets at The Mess, his Village and professional premiere. Mike returned to The Garden.
Step two: “Chester’s missing!” he announced.
“Define your terms,” said Andrew.
“Where?” asked Gary the Frog and Harriet.
“We’ve got to find him, don’t we?” Karen Greenbaum wondered.
“What,” it dawned on Andrew, “do you mean, missing?
Mike explained at length. Then Andy said, “In other words…” and counteracted Michael’s explanation. Gary the fatuous Frog asked foolish questions. Mike explained it all again, loudly with dramatic gestures.
“Oh,” said Andrew Blake. “We’ve got to find him, then. At once. He may be in some trouble.”
“That’s what I said,” said Mike. “Now look, I’ve got this all planned out. Everybody… Hey, wait! Come back!”
Too late. Everybody was dashing off to find me — Andrew Blake, Gary and Harriet, little Karen, even a few strangers (probably named David) swept up by the excitement — leaving Mike and his plan all alone in The Garden of Eden.
“And it was such a lovely plan,” he grieved much later. “It wouldn’t’ve worked, of course, but it was very pretty. Very professional, you might say.”
That was just past nine, and I’d been suffering roughly calibrated agonies for something like ninety minutes. As tortures go, these were very, let us call it, Subtle, and I wondered a lot about Ktch’s last victims.
To begin the program, I experienced a deep, perverted yearning to refrain from sexual intercourse with three of the most improbable creatures I’ve ever been forced to imagine. As a torment, this was fairly easy to take.
Then Ktch wandered in, read a few dials, said, “Tch tch,” quite convincingly, turned a knob or three and wandered out again, leaving me to suffer through act two in solitude.
Act two, which they must have picked up from Laszlo somehow, was an extraordinarily vivid hallucination of myself reciting my own poetry. I took note of a few stagecraft errors to be avoided next time I read, but was otherwise fairly unagonized. My admiration for the subtlety of these blue lobster deepened.
Then Ktch returned, Laszlo in tow and looking most uneasy, to check the readings again. It’s hard to tell with lobsters, but he seemed a bit surprised. One stalked eye examined the dials intently, the other, extended full length — four feet — examined me. Laszlo shuffled his feet and tried to be inconspicuous.
“Tch tch,” Ktch repeated. “Your fortitude is most impressive, Spy. Indeed, quite admirable. Not at all what I’d been led to expect.”
Laszlo cleared his throat and tried, without moving, to hide.
Ktch flipped a switch and the torture stopped right in the middle of one of my favorite poems.
“You must realize by now that we cannot be defeated,” he said. “There is no resistance you can offer, no strategy by which you may hope even to delay our victory. You, after-all — or rather, your people — will do our fighting for us, and you cannot think to defeat yourselves. We will merely restore order. You can’t fight that. In fact, there’s nothing to fight. Surely you understand this?”
I kept mum. Laszlo, for reasons of his own, looked enraged, embarrassed, and humiliated — an intriguing combination.
“You simply can’t win,” Ktch continued. “Why then, Spy, do you not cast your lot with us? Your people have a folk saying: ‘If you can’t run your tongue across them, merge with them.’ I ask you to give this quaint wisdom your serious consideration. If you join us…”
Oh, that’s what he wanted. I whistled him another chorus of “Love Sold in Doses.”
“Admirable,” he said, “and wholly unexpected. Such a waste.” He devoted himself for a few minutes to the torture devices — refining the settings, I supposed — while Laszlo stared at me with the most illegible expression I’ve ever seen.
“That should do it,” Ktch finally said. “Now I must leave you to our own devices for a few hours, while Laszlo Scott and I are fed and otherwise refreshed. But remember, surrender under torture is no disgrace. Farewell.”
He flipped a switch and floods of odd sensation burst upon me before I had a chance to mention that I was overdue for feeding myself. But I hadn’t been going to mention that anyway, I guess.
“Farewell, Mister Spy,” the lobster said, and he and Laszlo split, leaving me to act three of my torment: the complete adventures of Donald Duck, 3V, wide screen, with full sensory participation. Fine. I’ve always enjoyed the classics.
A tiny corner of my mind wondered what it was these lobsters imagined they were doing to me. Another corner wondered where Mike was. Donald Duck defied the universe.
There being nothing better he could do, Mike stayed in The Garden. “If you were going to show up at all, that’s where you’d go,” he explained later. He drank lots of coffee and worried a bit, mostly about what I was likely to say about all this.
Laszlo arrived at half-past ten with his last consignment of Reality Pills and, being Laszlo, made a warped beeline for Michael, sneering, “Hallo, Michael the Bare-assed Theodore. How’s about a little taste of ol’ Reality on Laszlo, huh, baby? Wanna get High?”
So Mike grabbed him by one padded shoulder, yelling, “What’ve you done to Chester!? C’mon, talk, you goddamn freak! Where is he!?” — sweet music for the Laszlo ears.
“Anderson?” a nasty purr. “How do I know where your buddy’s at, man? He’s your buddy, ain’t he? Hey, man, turn me loose!” It was his moment of glory, and I hope he made the most of it.
But Mike was too worried to be cool. He shook Laszlo briskly, ripping his jacket, and said, “I’m going to beat the living Shit out of you, man,” loudly enough to be clearly heard on the sidewalk outside.
“Lemme go!” screamed Laszlo, grinning. “Halp! Call the fuzz, somebody. Halp!” enjoying every second of it.
Nobody rallied to Laszlo’s defense, but Joe came over and said, “Take ’im outside, will ya, Mike? I don’ wan’ no trouble inna Club, y’unnerstan’?”
“Forget it.” Mike released the Bard. “It couldn’t possibly be worth it.”
Laszlo backed a prudent four feet off and extended an unkempt hand, saying, “No hard feelings, Mike, okay?” — a line he must’ve copped from The Hardy Boys a hundred years ago and never found a use for until then.
Mike winced nobly and turned away. “Oh, go paint yourself purple and moo,” he ordered. “Go away.”
Laszlo didn’t get it, but he went — with Michael hot and hidden on his trail. The game was afoot, or vice versa.
I, meanwhile, had troubles of my own. The Magnificent Duck had abandoned his biography to play endless Brahms sonatas on a do-it-yourself-kit homemade harpsichord, which came closer to what I’d call torture than I really liked and prompted intermittent second thoughts about what the lobsters could possibly do to me with all those alien gadgets of theirs. I like Brahms, you understand — but played by a paranoid duck?
Ktch himself remained offstage for a while yet, and Laszlo — had I but known — was already getting his arcane jollies on MacDougal Street.
I was hungry. Highly entertained, after a fashion, but mainly hungry. Hunger is a notorious drag.
And everybody else was having good times, too.
Acting on the principle that that’s where he usually went when he was lost, Andy took the E train to Forty-second Street and sought me out in every semidirty-book emporium between Forty-first and Forty-seventh Streets, where he was well-known and respected as the pseudonymous author of classics beyond counting. It hardly mattered that I wasn’t there.