Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [10]
I left the Kettle when they closed it, since there didn’t seem to be any alternative. By then I had drifted in and out of perhaps a half-dozen conversations and twice as many private reveries and was having a high old time, in all senses. And I had very nearly managed to drink myself sober all over again. To wit, my memory of some of those hours in the Kettle was sketchy, but when I walked out into the stale air of MacDougal Street I was in full possession of what faculties Providence gave me.
Not that I was sober. I could walk straight and talk straight and think straight—well, almost—but I was nevertheless looped.
If drinking always worked that way, I swear I’d do it every night. There’d be no earthly reason not to.
So I walked up MacDougal Street singing something. I think it was “Big Yellow Taxi,” the Joni Mitchell thing. There are some difficult notes in the chorus and I was missing some of them, and aware of it, but I still sounded pretty good to me. I crossed MacDougal at Third Street. I don’t recall having any special destination in mind. There was a station wagon waiting for the light to change. I crossed behind it (which I suppose constitutes jaywalking, which you can add to the list of my sins) and I paused at the end of a line of the song, suddenly unable to remember what came next, and through the open rear window of the station wagon two voices supplied the next line in unison. Two clear, fresh, youthful, soprano voices, and they got all the notes right.
I leaned an elbow on the back of the wagon and peered owlishly in at them. The car was full of girls. There was one in front driving and one sitting next to her, and there were two more in the back seat, and there were another two—the songbirds—sitting cross-legged in the luggage compartment. The ones that I could see were all very pretty. So, I learned later, were the others. A total of six pretty girls sitting two and two and two in a station wagon at the corner of MacDougal and West Third at something like three-thirty on a Saturday morning.
“Why, hello,” I said. “I certainly want to thank you for helping me out with the song.”
“It’s a beautiful song,” one of them said.
“It’s a beautiful evening,” I said.
“It was raining earlier.”
“Earlier it was the winter of my discontent. Now it’s made glorious summer.”
“And are we the sons of York?”
“I doubt it,” I said, squinting in at them. “You might be the daughters of Lancaster.”
“Burt Lancaster? Hey, is Burt Lancaster anybody’s father?”
“If we were wise children,” another one said, “I suppose we would know.”
“Are you a wise child?” another one asked me.
“No, I’m a mad drunken poet.”
“Oh, everybody’s a mad poet. Are you at least Welsh?”
“My mother came from Ireland,” I said. “ ’Did your mother come from Ireland?’ ” I sang.
The light had turned green in the course of all this, but the car stayed where it was. Now it turned red again.
“And where did your father come from, mad drunken poet?”
“How would I know? I’m an unwise child.”
“Have you a name, mad poet?”
“Mad with a U,” I said, “and poet with an E.”
“I think I missed that one,” somebody said.
“Laurence with a U,” I said, making another stab at it. “Clarke with an E.”
“Laurence Clarke?”
“Yes, Laurence Clarke the mad poet.”
“What do you do when you don’t write poems?”
“Everything,” I said. “I never write poems. I haven’t written a poem for a year and a half.”
“Then what do you do?”
I considered this. “I don’t edit Ronald Rabbit’s Magazine for Boys and Girls,” I said.
“Neither do I, mad poet.”
“Ah, but I did,” I said. “Or at least I was presumed to do so, but Ronald Rabbit’s doesn’t exist. I was stowing away on a corporation, and today they fired me.”
“Poor mad poet.”
The light had turned green again, and the car behind us was using his horn to bring this fact to our attention. “We can’t just stand here,” one of the girls said.
“We can’t drive away,” another one said. “We can’t leave Mad Poet here. How would we find him again?”
“You mean Laurence Clarke. You shouldn’t call him Mad Poet.”
“You can call me Mad Poet