The Comedy is Finished

fact of the matter is, Koo is getting damn hungry.

There’s a lot of food in his room, bread and cereal and milk and even what smells like bargain basement Scotch, but Koo won’t touch any of it. It’s the booze that makes him nervous about the rest. Why give him so much, and why throw in whiskey? Maybe it’s drugged, huh? They’ve left him alone a couple hours, so maybe they’re just waiting for the drug to take effect. Koo doesn’t know how or if he can help himself out of this jam, but one thing is sure: if he’s doped up, he can’t take advantage of any break that might come along.

As for his cell, his cage, his prison, Koo looks around and says out loud, “I been in worse places, and paid forty bucks a night.” It has become his habit in recent years to talk to himself, but only in the form of one-liners, asides, comments on the action of his life. This remark is unfortunate, though, because it leads his thoughts directly to the next question, which is: how much will this room cost? All or most of his assets? His life?

“Then there’s the view,” Koo says, hurriedly. “It overlooks the garden. Completely. And the weather’s been so wet recently.” Turning, pacing the small room, making fretful hand gestures, he says, “I wish I had a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. I’d use it to point at things.”

Koo used to smoke. For nearly thirty years, one of his trademarks was the cigarette between the first two fingers of his left hand, used in casual gestures, mostly with gag lines where something was being dismissed. “I told him, Sergeant, I don’t want to be in the Army at all.” A silhouette drawing used in the logo of his weekly television show back in the fifties showed his profile and his waving left hand with the cigarette and a curl of smoke coming up around his face. But seven years ago his doctor told him to stop, giving him a lot of medical reasons that Koo refused to hear, and Koo stopped. Like that. He’s never been willing to think about death, about his own mortality or any of the grimmer steps along the path, the aches and pains, the accidents and illnesses and gradual wasting away that must come to every human being in time. He doesn’t want to think about all that shit, and he won’t think about all that shit, and there’s nothing more to be said about it. He’s got enough money to hire good doctors, so he hires good doctors, and he does what they tell him to do, and if they insist on telling him why he just nods and grins and doesn’t listen.

There’s no way out of this room. The door is securely locked, and it opens outward so there’s no way to get at the hinges. Shortly after he was left alone in here Koo did some poking at the fabric covering the wall, working low on the corner nearest the door, and behind the cloth he found Sheetrock and behind that concrete block. “No way am I gonna dig through concrete block,” he told himself, and searched no further.

The next question was the window. After the bitch with the scars vacated the pool, Koo spent a while studying that window, considering the possibility of maybe throwing a chair through it or something. Water would rush through the opening, but long before the room filled up the pool would have emptied below the window level. It would be like a James Bond flick; heave the chair, brace himself against the side wall until the water level in room and pool equalized, then swim to freedom!

Yeah; carrying an American flag and shooting Roman candles out his ass. “When I was twenty I couldn’t pull a stunt like that.” Also even when he was twenty the noise and racket involved in wrecking a swimming pool would attract a certain amount of attention. Also also, this window happens to be two thicknesses of very heavy-grade plate glass, and if he did throw a chair at it probably the chair would bounce off and crack open the Koo Davis skull. “I got trouble enough,” Koo reluctantly decided, and since then he’s had no further thought of escape. He’s stuck here with these meatheads until they decide to do something else.

Scrabble click. Koo looks over at the door, where the sound came from, the sound of a key in the lock, and he can’t help a little thrill of fear, that buzzing adrenalin surge like when you’ve just had a near miss on the freeway. “Company,” Koo says. “And me not dressed.”

The door opens and two of them come in. One is the sarcastic-looking fellow who was in here the last time, and the other is the sullen-faced bearded character who showed him the gun at the studio. The bitch with the scars isn’t along, for which Koo is grateful, but on the other hand neither is the worried-looking guy who apologized for Koo’s nosebleed. Koo misses that one, he was the only touch of common humanity in the whole mob. And speaking of mobs, just how many of these people are there?

The two young men come in, closing the door behind themselves. The bearded one puts a small cassette tape recorder on the nearest table, then stands silently with his back against the door and his arms folded over his chest, like a harem guard in a comedy, while the sarcastic-looking fellow says, “How you doing, Koo?”

“I got nothing to say, warden,” Koo snarls. “To you or the D.A.”

“That’s good,” the fellow says, then looks in mild surprise at the plastic container with the whiskey in it. “Not drinking? Wait a minute—not eating either?”

“I’m on a diet.”

The fellow frowns at Koo, apparently not understanding, then suddenly laughs and says, “You think we’re trying to poison you? Or drugs maybe, is that it?”

Koo doesn’t have a comic answer, and there’s no point giving a straight answer, so he just stands there.

The fellow shakes his head, amused but impatient. “What’s the percentage, Koo? We’ve already got you.” Then he goes to the counter beside the bar, lines up three plastic glasses, and pours a finger of whiskey in each. “Choose,” he says.

“I won’t drink it.”

“Just pick one, Koo.”

“How come you call me by my first name? You’re no traffic cop.”

“I’m sorry, Koo,” the fellow says, with his most sarcastic smile. “I’m just trying for a more relaxed atmosphere, that’s all. For instance, you can call me Peter, and this is Mark. Now we’re all friends, am I right?” He gestures at the three glasses. “So decide. Which one?”

“My mother says I can’t play with you guys anymore. I got to go home now.”

The bearded one—Mark—says, “Pick a glass.” There’s nothing comic in his manner at all. In fact, there’s the implication in his voice that if Koo doesn’t pick a glass, this guy is going to start using his fists again.

Shrugging, Koo says, “Okay. I say the pea is under the one on the left.”

“Fine,” says the sarcastic-looking fellow: Peter. He picks up the other two glasses and hands one to Mark. “Happy days,” he says, toasting Koo, and then they both drink the whiskey. “Not bad,” the leader says, and extends the third glass toward Koo, saying, “Sure you won’t join us?”

Oh, the hell with it. “I’ll hate myself in the morning,” Koo says, taking the glass, and he sips a little. It tastes nothing at all like Jack Daniel’s, Koo’s favorite whiskey, but it does spread an immediate warm alcohol glow through his body.

Peter has now taken some folded sheets of typewriter paper from his jacket pocket. “You’re going to make a recording for us now, Koo,” he says.

Koo had guessed that from the cassette recorder. He gives Peter what’s supposed to be a defiant look. “I am?”

Peter glances over his shoulder at the tough guy, Mark, then grins again at Koo. “Yes, you are,” he says. Holding out the sheets of paper toward Koo, he says, “You may want to look it over first. You’ll begin with some personal remarks of your own, some statement to convince your family and your close friends that it’s really you, and then you’ll follow up by reading this. Exactly as written, Koo.”

Koo takes the papers. There are three sheets, messily typewritten, with many pen and pencil alterations in various handwritings. It isn’t easy to read, but very soon the thrust of the message makes itself clear, and Koo looks up at these bastards and says, “You’re out of your fucking minds.”

“That’s okay, Koo,” Peter says, unruffled. “You don’t have to agree with it, you just read it. Like it was a movie script.”

“They’ll say no,” Koo tells him. “And then what happens?”

“Tough for you,” says Mark.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Oh, don’t be pessimistic,” Peter says. “You’re an important man, Koo, you’ve got a lot of important friends. I think they’ll come through for you, pal, I really do. That’s why I picked you.”

“They won’t do it,” Koo says.