“Hear! Hear!” I slurred. “Pretentious phonies. What do they know about tragedy—should be covering cargo arrivals.” To properly emphasize the point, I decided to pitch forward on my face and deliver the rest directly to the asphalt. Rising like a tagged pug, I soon found myself teetering before a large building which Butterfat took to be the offices of the Bulletin. Cocking his pitching arm and doing a windmill windup with the brick, he made ready to smash the window.

  “Wait,” I gurgled, pivoting his delivery leeward. “That’s not the newspaper. The sign says Philadelphia Art Museum.” There was by then a clanging report as the errant brick smashed with major league velocity into a bronze statue that graced the museum’s green lawn, severing the masterpiece’s nose like a no-frills rhinoplasty.

  “Hey,” I bellowed, surveying the damage. “Look what you did to Sylvester Stallone.”

  The muscular monument, a generous gift from the great actor commemorating his Rocky movies in the town, now stood bereft of its majestic proboscis.

  “What?” Butterfat said, rubbing his rotator cuff, which had made a funny ratcheting noise when he threw. “Izzat Benjamin Franklin? Where’s his bifocals?”

  “Lookit this,” I gushed, retrieving the facial feature from the ground. “You busted off Rocky’s hooter.” Butterfat blinked in befuddlement and, rubbing his pitching arm, wobbled off into the night muttering something about needing two Advil. By now my heart was beating rapidly as I picked up the iconic artifact. What made me do it I’ll never know, although the alcohol level in my blood competed favorably with the plasma and platelets. Looking right and left to make sure I was fink free, I pocketed the detached bugle and bolted like an infidel in possession of an idol’s eye. I suppose my plan was to get my car and somehow negotiate the Turnpike back to Manhattan. There I’d fence the treasure at Sotheby’s, putting it up for auction and fetching seven figures in a bidding war between demented film crazies. I recalled locating my Honda, piling in with a mere forty-minute struggle, turning on the engine and hitting the gas, causing the car to execute a series of gymnastic flourishes that ended with a reverse half gainer and left the vehicle upside down, its wheels spinning. I dimly recall a rather heated exchange between myself and two uniformed denizens of the policeman’s ball that climaxed with the bouncing of a night stick off my IQ.

  At the station house I emptied my pockets for the desk sergeant, submerging him in lint, old keys, Tic Tacs, and several yellowing photos of Lili St. Cyr, but he homed directly in on the weighty bronze beak, now exhibit A. “Oh, that,” I said, emulating a piccolo as I babbled feverishly. “That’s just a nose I carry for good luck. It’s an old Etruscan custom.” Aiming for grace under pressure, I tossed off a casual laugh that came out like the sound a cat makes when you run it through a paper shredder. By now, the two lawmen, frustrated by my cool reserve, had started to alternate playing bad cop–bad cop. I held firm till I heard the word “waterboarding,” when my resolve faltered and, with a bleat, I began to scream hysterically at the prospect of suffocating. More profound than St. Augustine’s and a lot more incriminating, my confession to merchandise Sly’s schnozz came tumbling out amidst a profusion of large pendant-shaped tears.

  Fortunately, in Philadelphia capital punishment does not extend to illegal possession of a nose, but as far as the cost involved repairing a defaced public work, let’s just say I’m still paying through my own nasal membranes.

  Tails of Manhattan

  TWO WEEKS AGO, Abe Moscowitz dropped dead of a heart attack and was reincarnated as a lobster. Trapped off the coast of Maine, he was shipped to Manhattan and dumped into a tank at a posh Upper East Side seafood restaurant. In the tank there were several other lobsters, one of whom recognized him. “Abe, is that you?” the creature asked, his antennae perking up.

  “Who’s that? Who’s talking to me?” Moscowitz said, still dazed by the mystical slam-bang postmortem that had transmogrified him into a crustacean.

  “It’s me, Moe Silverman,” the other lobster said.

  “OMG!” Moscowitz piped, recognizing the voice of an old gin-rummy colleague. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re reborn,” Moe explained. “As a couple of two-pounders.”

  “Lobsters? This is how I wind up after leading a just life? In a tank on Third Avenue?”

  “The Lord works in strange ways,” Moe Silverman explained. “Take Phil Pinchuck. The man keeled over with an aneurysm, he’s now a hamster. All day, running at the stupid wheel. For years he was a Yale professor. My point is he’s gotten to like the wheel. He pedals and pedals, running nowhere, but he smiles.”

  Moscowitz did not like his new condition at all. Why should a decent citizen like himself, a dentist, a mensch who deserved to relive life as a soaring eagle or ensconced in the lap of some sexy socialite getting his fur stroked, come back ignominiously as an entrée on a menu? It was his cruel fate to be delicious, to turn up as Today’s Special, along with a baked potato and dessert. This led to a discussion by the two lobsters of the mysteries of existence, of religion, and how capricious the universe was, when someone like Sol Drazin, a schlemiel they knew from the catering business, came back after a fatal stroke as a stud horse impregnating cute little thoroughbred fillies for high fees. Feeling sorry for himself and angry, Moscowitz swam about, unable to buy into Silverman’s Buddha-like resignation over the prospect of being served thermidor.

  At that moment, who walks into the restaurant and sits down at a nearby table but Bernie Madoff. If Moscowitz had been bitter and agitated before, now he gasped as his tail started churning the water like an Evinrude.

  “I don’t believe this,” he said, pressing his little black peepers to the glass walls. “That goniff who should be doing time, chopping rocks, making license plates, somehow slipped out of his apartment confinement and he’s treating himself to a shore dinner.”

  “Clock the ice on his immortal beloved,” Moe observed, scanning Mrs. M.’s rings and bracelets.

  Moscowitz fought back his acid reflux, a condition that had followed him from his former life. “He’s the reason I’m here,” he said, riled to a fever pitch.

  “Tell me about it,” Moe Silverman said. “I played golf with the man in Florida, which incidentally he’ll move the ball with his foot if you’re not watching.”

  “Each month I got a statement from him,” Moscowitz ranted. “I knew such numbers looked too good to be kosher, and when I joked to him how it sounded like a Ponzi scheme he choked on his kugel. I had to do the Heimlich maneuver. Finally, after all that high living, it comes out he was a fraud and my net worth was bupkes. P.S., I had a myocardial infarction that registered at the oceanography lab in Tokyo.”

  “With me he played it coy,” Silverman said, instinctively frisking his carapace for a Xanax. “He told me at first he had no room for another investor. The more he put me off, the more I wanted in. I had him to dinner, and because he liked Rosalee’s blintzes he promised me the next opening would be mine. The day I found out he could handle my account I was so thrilled I cut my wife’s head out of our wedding photo and put his in. When I learned I was broke, I committed suicide by jumping off the roof of our golf club in Palm Beach. I had to wait half an hour to jump, I was twelfth in line.”

  At this moment, the captain escorted Madoff to the lobster tank, where the unctuous sharpie analyzed the assorted saltwater candidates for potential succulence and pointed to Moscowitz and Silverman. An obliging smile played on the captain’s face as he summoned a waiter to extract the pair from the tank.

  “This is the last straw!” Moscowitz cried, bracing himself for the consummate outrage. “To swindle me out of my life’s savings and then to nosh me in butter sauce! What kind of universe is this?”

  Moscowitz and Silverman, their ire reaching cosmic dimensions, rocked the tank to and fro until it toppled off its table, smashing its glass walls and flooding the hexagonal-tile floor. Heads turned as the alarmed captain looked on in stunned disbelief. Bent on vengeance, the two lobsters scuttled swiftly after Madoff. They reached his table in an instant, and Silverman went for his ankle. Moscowitz, summoning the strength of a madman, leaped from the floor and with one giant pincer took firm hold of Madoff’s nose. Screaming with pain, the gray-haired con artist hopped from the chair as Silverman strangled his instep with both claws. Patrons could not believe their eyes as they recognized Madoff, and began to cheer the lobsters.

  “This is for the widows and charities!” yelled Moscowitz. “Thanks to you, Hatikvah Hospital is now a skating rink!”

  Madoff, unable to free himself from the two Atlantic denizens, bolted from the restaurant and fled yelping into traffic. When Moscowitz tightened his viselike grip on his septum and Silverman tore through his shoe, they persuaded the oily scammer to plead guilty and apologize for his monumental hustle.

  By the end of the day, Madoff was in Lenox Hill Hospital, awash in welts and abrasions. The two renegade main courses, their rage slaked, had just enough strength left to flop away into the cold, deep waters of Sheepshead Bay, where, if I’m not mistaken, Moscowitz lives to this day with Yetta Belkin, whom he recognized from shopping at Fairway. In life she had always resembled a flounder, and after her fatal plane crash she came back as one.

  Wake Me When It’s Over

  SLUICING MY WAY through Midtown traffic of an icy dusk, I managed by extraordinarily good fortune to pass a pile of discarded newspapers just as a gust of wind swooped them airborne and scrambled them in every direction, with an old New York Times page blasting smack across my windshield. Ordinarily, the sudden inability to see who I was running over while careening down Broadway would have triggered a banshee’s hysteria, but the printed matter totally obscuring my vision was so engrossing, I became oblivious to the honking motorists and wailing pedestrians diving toward self-preservation. The riveting text was in fact an ad for a product called My Pillow Premium and was the inspiring tale of a man who spent eight years researching pillows in order to develop the world’s most comfortable one. Warning that anything less than a Van Winkle snooze could lead to a bevy of the thousand natural shocks including colds, flu, diabetes, heart disease, and mental degradation, the ad hinted darkly at a nefarious scheme of planned obsolescence. Apparently, the invention of My Pillow Premium has discovered most pillows are actually designed to break down, causing the unsuspecting to wake up in the morning with a sore arm, a painful neck, and an imaginatively lurid threat new to me, numb fingers. The guaranteed miracle item here for sale is touted as not less than life-changing, and the ad closes with a modest quote from the product’s progenitor: “I truly believe My Pillow Premium is the best pillow in the world, and if everyone had one, they would get better sleep and the world would be a better place.”

  Cut to the Explorers Club in London. Rich, dark wood paneling lines a commodious room with a roaring fireplace, conversation areas, and comfortable Chesterfield sofas and chairs. Maps and photos of far-off lands excite the walls and further accent an atmosphere where men sit around in assorted groups drinking and sharing tales of this or that python or volcano. In one corner, over brandy, are Sir Stafford Ramsbottom, that old Oxford curmudgeon Basil Metabolism, and the legendary Chinese globe-trotter, Keye Lime Pie. They exchange anecdotes of derring-do adventure from the Arctic Circle to the land of the tsetse fly. Presently, they are joined by Nigel Whitebait, a handsome, tanned explorer whom they have not seen in months. Whitebait is a man who has been everywhere and seen everything. He is one of the few men at the club who witnessed a human sacrifice and would have found it barbaric if the victim had not been an insurance salesman. Daring from youth, Whitebait at twenty-one had fallen from a climb to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and had been totally reconstructed bone by bone by the Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur department. Legend had it, at thirty he was captured and nearly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea and only managed to escape by leaping off the table when they were garnishing him with parsley. At fifty, Whitebait lived amongst pygmies for two years, managing to sell them three hundred pairs of elevator shoes.

  “We gave you up for dead when we heard your ship went down in the China Sea,” Ramsbottom said.

  “A bloody typhoon,” Whitebait replied, “and me surrounded by sharks. Fortunately, they were card sharks and I refused to play.”

  “But where have you been these last months, old boy?” queried Metabolism. “We missed you at Binky Welkin’s funeral. Poor Binky—body crated home from the Amazon, head shrunken to three inches, lips sewn together. Apart from that, he was the old Binky.”

  “Where I’ve been is a corker of a tale,” Whitebait said, “And if you’ll permit me to throw back my Courvoisier, I’ll lapse into it with characteristic brio.” His audience of three settled back and turned off their hearing aids in anticipation of the narrative.

  It began on a flight to Chicago. There was myself, Fielding Wingfoot, and that irrepressible Irish soldier of fortune, Heinous O’Rourke. We were en route to a theme bar mitzvah based on the old Hollywood movie The Snake Pit, when our navigation system went on the fritz and we found ourselves over Outer Mongolia. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the pilot had lost his horizon line and was flying upside down, which made it doubly hard for the stewardess to serve lunch. Soon after, the fuel ran out and we started to plunge, crashing into the side of a mountain. The plane exploded, splitting apart and bursting into flames. I had been reading at the time and lost my place.

  Well, lads, here we were, marooned in the Himalayas with no provisions save for my last remaining Tic Tac, which we divided three ways. Experienced explorers all, we set out navigating by the stars but mistook Canis Major, the Dog Star, for Jupiter, which meant at the rate we were traveling we’d reach London in six trillion light years. Short of food, by the second week we had gotten used to dining exclusively on snow. O’Rourke, who fancied himself somewhat of a gourmet, handled the dinners. We usually had a snow appetizer, a snow main course, two snow vegetables, and a choice of several snow desserts. Wingfoot, who had become delirious with hunger, suggested if O’Rourke’s meals weren’t more filling, we should consider eating O’Rourke. And then, we saw it, an opening in the pass of the mountains revealing a hidden city. A gleaming city nestled among the rocks of the Himalayas with a kind of oriental-style architecture, gold streets with temples and fountains. Like Vegas. Exhausted and starving, we approached the city with trepidation, praying the restaurants would not require a necktie. To our delight, the population welcomed us. They led us to a great hall and fed us with succulent meats, fruits, and an ambrosia-like wine. As we feasted on ice cream and chocolate, we couldn’t help noticing all the citizens were robust, youthful, and attractive. The men were like Olympic athletes, and I was quite surprised to learn the ravishing blonde popping grapes into my mouth who looked to be no more than twenty-one or -two was ninety-six. When I asked her where she had her face work done, she giggled and looked away. Finally, we were led into the chamber of the High Priest, who bid us welcome. We bid him good tidings. He bid us sit down. We bid him speak. Soon there was a bidding war, and somehow, we outbid him and wound up with a walnut armoire, which we got at a steal.

  “Where are we? Who are you?” I asked the tribal elder.

  “We are a special people,” he explained. “We are a peaceful people, gifted in the arts and sports. We have remarkable longevity. Ours is a world with no strife or wars. Not a single person here is on Prozac.”

  “What’s the scam?” I asked. “Is it the yogurt? The pure mountain air?”

  “If you good pilgrims will gather ’round and allow me to speak, I’ll lay the entire dreidel on you,” he said, holding up a pillow. “Every inhabitant of our land sleeps on one of these. It’s called a My Pillow Premium. Our forefathers designed it scientifically eons ago, taking into account the rotation of the earth on its axis plus the time it takes a midget to get up on a barstool. If you’re one of those people who lies on your arm when you’re sleeping, with the ingeniously configured stuffing of the feathers, which consist of fifty percent from wild ducks and fifty percent from wooden decoys, your fingers are guaranteed not to get numb.” I clutched the voluptuous artifact in my hands, and it was like caressing my wife’s bosom or, better yet, her friend’s.

  “But people have been doing fine sleeping on standard headrests,” Wingfoot said.

  “Have they?” asked the High Priest, oozing contumely. I thought about my parents and how my father slept on foam rubber pillows and used to wake up with numb ears. Try as he did, he could not wiggle them, and it cost him his job. And how else to explain Ramsbottom’s heart attacks? It was only recently he discovered how high in cholesterol his regular pillow was. The Holy Priest explained My Pillow Premium was fat free and also had added calcium.

  “Dig what I’m telling you boys,” he said. “The world would be a better place if everyone zonked out on this cozy little cushion.”

  That night the hoary elder took me aside and entrusted me with a special mission.