“Stanch your adrenaline,” the immortal beloved parried, pushing my brakes to the floor, “I scored a pair of skate wings at Scales and Entrails downtown. I thought I’d puree them for dinner along with fresh capers, and we can open that bottle of Eskimo wine we got on eBay.” Having settled the issue by ukase, she set about confabulating a feast based on an old family recipe that includes a sauce that could easily pass for mucilage.

  “Don’t stand around agape,” the lady of the house barked, addressing me like I was a rookie on Parris Island. “You unwrap the catch of the day, and I’ll start removing the flavor.” As the realization that a thick sirloin and its supporting cast would have to be sublimated into a haiku of unendurable poignancy, I began to unpack the bat-like main course my wife had purchased, which lay enshrouded in sheets of the Daily News. It was on those very pages that a story caught my eyes, now weeping like Niobe, with more than routine interest.

  It seemed like Mike Tyson’s estate was being sold, and the champ’s fiefdom was nothing short of Xanadu. It boasted eighteen guest bedrooms for those occasions, I suppose, when two baseball teams drop over unexpectedly. It had thirty-eight bathrooms, as Tyson apparently does not like to pound on the door screaming, “Are you ever coming out?” There were seven kitchens, a waterfall, a boathouse, a disco, a huge gym, and a large theater. The original asking price was twenty-one million federal diplomas, and either the buyer was an accomplished hypnotist or the premises lacked some essential ingredient like a missile silo, because the principal was somehow sweet-talked down from twenty-one million to a more demure four.

  The tale madeleined me back a couple of years to a little real estate affreuse of my own where the handling did not scale such empyrean heights, although there was a point when my blood pressure rose enough to set off the sprinkler system.

  The screed centered around our co-op, which my wife decided we must put on the market because she had found a townhouse, the recent renovating of which perfectly expressed her taste for Spanish Inquisition. If we dumped our Park Avenue classic six, with some juggling we could make the switch a near even trade-off, reasoned my little éclair, using a mathematical computation that included Planck’s constant.

  “Miss Mako and Mrs. Greatwhite, the real estate agents, say our place could tap a load,” the spouse trilled. “The house is asking eight million. If we give up meals, terminate our health insurance, and cash in the children’s college tuition funds, we could probably swing the down payment.” My fingers tightened around the fire poker as my mate’s eyes burned in their sockets like the Mahdi’s. She clearly was determined to move, and as Hitler undoubtedly appeared as he stood rubbing his hands over maps of Poland, she badgered and cajoled until I consented to offer our capacious aerie to anyone with a spare ten million clams.

  “Remember,” I cautioned the two real estate harpies, “I cannot even think of buying the new place till the old one is sold.”

  “Sure, Ignatz,” the broker with the larger dorsal fin said, filing her third row of teeth with a Stanley rasp.

  “My name’s not Ignatz,” I snapped back, bridling at her cozy familiarity.

  “Sorry,” she apologized, “you look like an Ignatz to me.” She winked with a grin at her cohort and added, “We’ll list the place for four million. We can always come down.”

  “Four million?” I squealed. “It’s worth eight if it’s worth a penny.” Mako appraised me with the wily acumen of a forensic pathologist.

  “Leave this little pigeon drop to us,” she said. “You just keep working on that Rubik’s cube, and ere long you’ll glom sufficient cabbage to segue into your new digs and still have a few shekels left over to install running water.”

  I had not calculated any improvements when I formulated a budget, but it became clear the ball and chain was set on a measure of tweaking which everyone felt could be covered down the line by the merchandising of my kidneys on the black market. Mrs. Barracudnick, the realtor for the brownstone, explained to my wife that since there were several other parties champing to snatch up the vintage townhouse at any moment, it might be prudent to make a preemptive bid and suggested a number that would be walking-around money to any Saudi prince. I chose to play hardball, but when weeks went by and no prospective buyers came to see our place, my wife began upping her Xanax.

  “We’d better drop the asking price,” she said. “Miss Mako says we’d have a much better chance of moving the apartment if it wasn’t lumbered with a hallucinatory price tag.”

  “I’d hardly call four million hallucinatory. We paid two ten years ago,” I explained.

  “Two mill for Toad Hall?” Mrs. Greatwhite said, polishing off the last of my Jim Beam. “You must’ve been puffing hemp.” Finally understanding, after many years, what motivated Jack the Ripper, I dropped the asking price to three million and was buoyed by the fact I did receive a few inquiries; one from a Russian couple who thought the price was three hundred dollars and one from a gentleman who worked for the Ringling Brothers as a circus geek, whom I was told emphatically would never pass the board. Meanwhile, Mrs. Barracudnick said there was a sudden rush of interest in the brownstone and a celebrity was about to make an offer.

  “There’s just been a bid on the house you want. Josh Airhead, the actor, wants it. Quidnuncs bruit, he’s marinating the concept of middle-aisleing Jennifer Moped. If you’re really serious about the place,” Barracudnick giggled sadistically, “I’d top his offer.”

  “But we haven’t unloaded our apartment yet,” I squealed like Madame Butterfly.

  “Get a bridge loan,” the real estate broker said with a smile Faust would have recognized. “I have connections at a loan company. Just enough to tide you over till you eighty-six your white elephant.”

  “White elephant? Bridge loan? If we could just get two and a half for it,” I groveled.

  “Or even what we paid,” the better half said, stopping just short of suggesting we donate the place to the city as a birthing home and take a tax deduction. With missionary sacrifice, Mr. Vigorish of the Smash and Grab Loan Company withdrew the syringe from my arm and rubbed the artery with an alcohol swab.

  “Press on it,” he said. “So you don’t get a hematoma. I didn’t take more than a few pints—on account.”

  “Isn’t nineteen percent a little rambunctious?” I mumbled, “particularly with this economy?”

  “Hey, the shylocks in Jersey take twenty-five, and they kneecap you if you’re tardy with the mazuma. We just spoon up our collateral.” Content I had driven a hard bargain and proud of my adamant refusal to put up either child to secure the cash, I signed the agreement as Vigorish stared lupinely at what undoubtedly appeared to his eyes as an order of lambchops in Ralph Lauren tweeds.

  “We now have two homes,” I bleated to my wife, fishing out the cyanide capsule my accountant had given me in the event things had taken precisely this turn.

  “I’m sure we can get rid of this firetrap,” Miss Mako comforted me. “It may take one more price reduction, and maybe you’ll have to throw in the furniture.” With visions of bankruptcy, our golden years lived out in cartons, I lowered the number further and further. Meanwhile, carping whiners paraded through our home, appraising each floorboard and molding before vanishing forever into various versions of the naked city’s eight million stories. Then one day, as I was inquiring at a pawnshop how much I could raise on my pacemaker, our two real estate carnivores marched in a dapper-looking specimen of about fifty. Nestor Fastbuck had the entrepreneurial energy of a Mike Todd and the continental good looks of Cesar Romero. His interest in our apartment seemed genuine, as he returned several times with his architects and a decorator. I could hear them caucusing as they plotted the removal of walls, the installation of bathrooms, an exercise room, a wine cave. Now and then they would glance over at me, and once I heard Fastbuck whisper, “Amazing how some people live. What subjects for a study by Margaret Mead. Naturally, before I ask the crew to touch anything, I’ll pay for a full fumigation.” Solvency being the better part of valor, I let it slide rather than nuke the trio with one lick of my vermilion tongue. Fastbuck after all was rich, a banker with impeccable credentials and distinguished. In short, an ideal tenant. Our co-op board, which usually winnowed hopefuls with the compassion of Dr. Mengele, could not possibly find fault with this man, and I even imagined he might be a fellow member of Skull and Bones as our new board president, Mr. L. L. Beanbag, was. The other members of the board, normally stern Jacobites, would surely dissolve under Fastbuck’s easy charm. Mrs. Westnile of 10A, Atilla Weinerib who had the penthouse, Sam Stalking Horse, our resident Native American—all would welcome a neighbor like Fastbuck, whose financial package was chockablock with blue chip holdings and whose written endorsements included notes from Bill Gates and Kofi Annan. I suppose more discerning types than Mako and Greatwhite would have twigged on a reference that read, “Nestor Fastbuck is an alright Joe who don’t drink, shoot craps, or nail loose broads. Signed, Reinhold Niebuhr.” But alas, dreams of a high commission eroded their perspicuity. The account of the interview in Harvey Nectar’s apartment, as it was explained to me, though probably exaggerated, was unique. It seems to have begun well. Fastbuck understood there were no pets allowed and vowed he threw no loud parties, preferring to live monastically, employing one cleaning woman, Edema. Herman Borealis of 5D joshed Fastbuck with mock severity about Yale as Borealis was a Harvard man, and it turned out, fortuitously, they both wore Zimmerli underwear. Matters were about to conclude on a high note when there came a loud noise from the hallway.

  “Open up, it’s the FBI!” a voice boomed as a battering ram knocked the door from its hinges. Fastbuck froze as a phalanx of federal agents burst in. “There he is! Get him!” screamed an agent in a flak jacket. “And be careful, he’s wanted for armed robbery.” Fastbuck leaped over the piano, crashing into Sam Stalking Horse and dislodging the Arapaho’s hairpiece. Apocryphal or not, it is told that, during the capture, gunfire erupted, and a few stray slugs whistled into Harvey Nectar’s portrait of his wife, Bea, as Hera. It wasn’t until six months later that I sold my co-op to a family of Quakers for a figure which just about covers the juice on my bridge loan, a bridge I have many times thought about jumping off.

  Buffalo Wings, Woncha Come Out Tonight

  FEW PEOPLE TWIG at the name Ernest Harmon Hix, but in the 1920s his weekly feature in the old Tribune rivaled the great Robert Ripley in garnering and illustrating a smorgasbord of life’s quiddities. Strange as it seems, Hix’s daily presentation would regale the reader with such indispensable curios as “Louis the Fourteenth never took a bath till he was seventy,” while Ripley’s Believe It or Not might enrich our appreciation of the cosmos with such gems as “A hailstone fell in Texas with a carp inside it.” The two men went at each other, mining the bizarre for many greenbacks and great popularity, and if alive today might only be challenged by the delectable outré morsels that show up occasionally in the Huffington Post. One such oddment I came across on my iPhone while waiting for the chef of a Broadway restaurant to remove all traces of flavor from my meat loaf before serving it began with this headline: “The All Chicken Band Is Cluckin’ Awesome.” It then went on to describe a musical group consisting of chickens called the Flockstars, who pecked out tunes on a keyboard. The owner of the coop where these feathered hipsters jammed told the reporter he wanted to come up with some distraction for his brood. “People who keep chickens, especially in the winter,” he explained, “are looking for boredom busters to keep them entertained.” The thought of a barnyard full of feathered creatures milling about fighting vainly the old ennui touched me no end, at which point I recalled Harvey Grossweiner, who has a tale which I will now step aside and let him spiel in his own ipsissima verba.

  Got a call today from my agent Toby Munt of Associated Parasites, who tried to soften the blow with paeans to my genius that I’d lost the lead opposite Cate Blanchett in the Charnel House of Parma. “And it had nothing to do with your bilateral lisp,” Munt assured me, “although as your rep I took umbrage over the Sylvester Pussycat comparison. The good news is the British director Royal Wattles likes the cut of your jib, and if he ever purloins the wherewithal to do that remake of The Beast with Five Fingers, he’s expressed genuine interest in your thumb. Anyhow boychik, gotta run. Due at Davey Geffens’s. He’s redoing his closet and wants to know if I could use some El Grecos, otherwise he’s gonna throw them out. Ciao.” And with that he hung up, leaving me to calculate exactly how many days it takes a human of my height and weight consuming only Cheez Doodles and tap water to fade from the planet.

  Capricious is the life of the dedicated mummer, and while my portrayal of Waffles last month in Uncle Vanya got a nice mention in Aficionado, the cigar magazine, no one’s breaking my door down. Of course, I realized decades ago when I chose the muses over a cushy sinecure aboard my father’s roach extermination truck that a life dependent on auditions might very well include malnutrition. That’s why when the phone rang weeks later and I heard the usually despairing voice of agent Munt fluting with optimism, my heart shifted into third.

  “Finally, good news,” he chirped into the horn.

  “Don’t tell me the Spielberg thing came through?” I guessed, fingers crossed.

  “No, Steven’s still taking that year off abroad to advise the Knesset,” he said.

  “Then what? Did Dermot Crutchley’s musical about smegma get greenlit?”

  “No, no, it’s none of the above. It’s basically some huckster called in search of a multi-talented individual for a particular project. He wanted someone like Hugh Jackman, only better looking and with more charm.”

  “What kind of project is it?” I asked. “A film? A stage play? I’d hate to get tied down too long in a TV series. Still, if it’s that HBO miniseries about Einstein’s year with the Basie band.

  “I’m not sure exactly what the premise is,” Munt said. “Actually, I didn’t have time to query him vis-à-vis the particulars. I recall he mentioned something about chickens.”

  “Chickens?” I fifed back.

  “I can’t talk now. I’m late for a lunch with Meryl. She’s intrigued by an offer to play Arafat. Anyhow, take a meeting, boychik, and you’ll glean the ingredients apace.”

  Despite a slight stiffening of my left scapula that in the past has signaled the onset of a nervous breakdown, the following morning I found myself motoring out to a poultry farm a good three hours from Rodeo Drive. The owner, Al Capon, a small-time egg baron whose fortunes rose and fell with every new study on cholesterol, offered his pudgy hand and blew a gust of smoke my way from a panatela.

  “So you’re Grossweiner,” he said, giving me the up and down.

  “When I last looked,” I shpritzed back good-naturedly in an effort to melt some of the frost on his pickle puss, but apparently my aperçu rocketed over his head like a Scud missile.

  “Didn’t I see you on TV selling carrot shredders?” he queried, proceeding to interview me in a manner not unlike the interrogation of the Decembrists by the Czar’s police.

  “My life has been all sock and buskin,” I rhapsodized, sensing he was playing cat-and-mouse and feigning ignorance about my credits to put him in a stronger negotiating position. “A consummate actor, I’ve done Shakespeare and the Greeks, Pinter of course. But my background’s also hambone. It’s rumored I carry a tune, and while I’m no Astaire, I do manage a lively buck and wing. Studied at the Actors Studio. And I’ve MC’d my share of bar mitzvahs when the rent was due. Plus, I can perform a one-man evening of Noel Coward.”

  “These are chickens,” he said. “You get along with chickens?”

  “Chickens—yes, well, my agent Toby Munt mentioned something about chickens. He wasn’t quite sure of the context.”

  “I need someone to entertain the chickens,” Capon said.

  “Uh-huh,” I nodded. “And by entertain them, you mean—”

  “See, the average civilian don’t grasp that chickens get bored easily. ’Specially in the winter months.”

  “I—I hadn’t realized that fact myself,” I stammered.

  “Chickens need distraction else they don’t lay eggs, and eggs is how I come to drive a Lamborghini. The point is I need someone to keep them interested so those cackleberries continue minting the precious ovoids. The gig’s good for five hundred clams a week. In or out, blockhead?”

  In the film noir classic Nightmare Alley, Stanton Carlisle finally sinks so low he becomes a circus geek whose specialty is eating a live chicken. I’m not saying my sell-out was quite that bloodcurdling, but the following day, after convincing myself it wasn’t as cringeworthy as my first job as an offstage voice in the puppet version of Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil, I gathered several props and drove to a certain barnyard. There I was confronted by a chaotic audience of jaded roosters and hens presumably seeking diversion. Wyandottes, Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, and Jersey Giants strutted aimlessly, trying to cope with the tedium vitae. Doffing a skimmer, I opened with “Put On a Happy Face” from Bye Bye Birdie and segued into a sprightly cakewalk to the tune of “At Georgia Camp Meeting.” When the medley failed to rouse the fowl, I switched emotional moods to “Sonny Boy,” the surefire Jolson tearjerker, fondling a small rooster on my lap to represent the adored child. Unfortunately, the bird proved high-strung and, flapping and squawking uncooperatively, managed to vitiate all pathos. Sensing a sluggish house, I broke out a few clever card tricks and then did a levitation Howard Thurston made famous at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore. Still, neither seemed to ignite the apathetic avian jury. When I failed to get a rise from my impression of Peter Lorre doing Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” I became frustrated and found myself throwing in some hostile rotissomat lines. Clever back-and-forth banter with my Yiddish-speaking ventriloquist dummy, Yitzhork, got nothing, and I actually think that when the dummy’s head revolved completely around, it scared some of the younger pullets. By now, flop sweat was beading up on my brow as I sued for approval from some Plymouth Rocks one final time with a rendition of “Cherokee” on the theremin, but it proved equally futile. And then, as all seemed black and hopeless, I recalled an item about a visionary who motivated chickens by teaching them to play music, and I wondered if there was a similar idea that could turn the trick for me. Perhaps theory and harmony were beyond my tutorial skills, but the art of drama was well within my wheelhouse. If the fowl could be taught melodies on the keyboard, surely they could be taught to peck on a Smith-Corona. The next day I brought my portable typewriter in and, by placing a grain of corn on the home keys, soon had the engaged fowl frantically filling up sheets of Corrasable Bond with the intensity of reporters banging out deadlines. At first it was all gibberish, of course, but as a few days passed and they got the hang of it, I noticed greater attention to plot and character, and that’s exactly how Broadway Hen House was born. You know the rest of the story; the deal with Warner’s, the four Golden Globes, and an Oscar-winning part for me as Jasper Weems, the rebel who gives up brain surgery to become an egg candler. I now hear these same feathered auteurs are working on a sequel, a musical in collaboration with some denizens of another coop who, word has it, have turned in a great score on the keyboard. If only Ripley or Hix were alive to see them all pecking away.