Aachoo Voo, Private Eye
Episode 13
Halloween in New York City
I was trying on my costume for the Halloween party I was attending later at Lance's place. I knew there'd probably be lots of gorgeous dames there and hopefully some gorgeous guys and I wanted to look my most fetching. (Fetching? Who came up with that expression?) "Here, boy! Atta boy! Fetch this! Good boy!" Holy mackerel! Words fascinated me. Slang changed every few years. New words were made up out of old words. I loved New Yorkers with their colorful vocabularies but no one could touch Cajuns for weird and creative expressions. I once knew a guy named Eugene who was Cajun, lived in New York, and was tongue-tied. Try that on for size! It was hilarious!
I was going as a black cat. I liked black cats. They made perfect spies, the way they could disappear in the dark when they closed their eyes. Of course Weiner and most other cats mistakenly thought they disappeared when they closed their eyes but found to their dismay that they did not. I loved it when Weiner pulled that trick on me after getting into mischief only to open his eyes later and find me staring nose to nose right up in his little orange face. He always seemed shocked to realize I could still see him. He also attempted to hide behind table legs, mops and other thin objects. Once he hid behind the outstretched wings of the parrot in the corner of the kitchen until I had given up looking for him. "You just wait, you bad kitty!" I'd said, exasperated. "You are in so much trouble when I find you!" And as I turned to go, the parrot dropped his gray wings, exposed his trusting friend, snickered and walked out of the room. Weiner never trusted the bird again and I didn't blame him. Nobody trusted that bird, especially me.
I hadn't seen Lance in a month of Sundays and I wanted to hear what fantastic tales he had to tell, only half of which I would ever believe. He was such a dreamboat that nobody really cared what he said, only that he was looking at you when he said it. He was a gas and I was a goof but we made sweet music together sometimes even though it was usually off key. After watching him walk down the hallway one day as she arrived at my apartment, MiMi Voo fanned herself and said "Hot diggity dog! Coo -Wee, he pretty!" "MiMi!" I exclaimed, thinking the very same thing. "I'm gonna tell Poppi!" "Don't you go telling your Paw-Paw now, babiller! I'm old, cher, but I ain't dead,! Coo-Wee!" And we fanned ourselves together and laughed. MiMi always made being bad feel good. Like my mother always made being good feel boring. Between the two of them, I had grown up being too good to be bad and too bad to really be good. A walking contradiction, you might say. A devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. And the two of them fighting like cats and dogs. But the boys liked me.
At least until the "Aachoo Curse" showed up in it's usual way. I was the original "bombshell" before Hollywood got hold of the word. And I wasn't even a blonde. Just a walking A-bomb that left people, places and things in ruins. A result, I believe, of a curse put on me by one of MiMi's bayou neighbors who practiced voodoo or hoodoo or some kind of doo, carried around gris-gris and Rougarou dolls and was said to be "coullion." (Crazy, cuckoo, 'teched in the noggin') The woman was wicked to the core, had dispatched eight husbands to parts unknown and had set her cap for Poppi Voo before my grandparents had gotten engaged. He was something different, not Cajun, very sophisticated and educated and she found him fascinating. He ignored her, of course, having eyes only for MiMi upon his arrival from "over the pond." 'Opposites attract' as the saying goes but that was one for the history books! MiMi knew she had found her one true love the first time she saw him drinking tea and holding up that little pinky finger and swatting mosquitoes with his debonair hat at the same time. She had seen a film once at the moving pictures show of a man drinking tea like that and she just started hankering for one of her own. I don't know what Poppi had been hankering for but he was completely smitten and bitten by the love bug and all without use of a potion or Juju of any kind.
He studied MiMi like an unknown specimen and Cajun culture as one would study life on alien planets. He fell in love with both much to his parents' dismay and settled in, got married and changed the name of the ramshackle farm that MiMi would soon inherit from her folks to Voo Estates and the bayou to Voo Bayou. Harlotta did not take the rejection lightly and stood outside during the wedding march and did incantations against MiMi and Poppi, all their grandchildren and the weather for the following week. Evidently she forgot to curse any future progeny that they might produce themselves so my father got off lucky where curses were concerned even though MiMi often shook her head at my mother and rolled her eyes and moaned "You are the result of a curse!" Which drove her insane. Poppi had long ago ceased to try to dissuade her of that notion. It was useless. He actually liked my mother. But he liked everybody. Except Harlotta.
Poor Poppi never learned to farm. MiMi's cousins did most of that for them. Poppi just studied and investigated and wrote papers and books on subjects of interest. He did, however, actually grow a carrot one year and was proudly taking MiMi to see the puny thing when a rabbit hopped up, grabbed up the carrot and devoured it right before their eyes in a kind of a dare. Poppi was devastated but MiMi devised a plan to make him feel better and within three days a whole row of carrots were standing orange and proud in the garden, courtesy of the fruit and vegetable stand on the edge of the parish. If Poppi ever got wise to the scheme, he never let on. He took photographs of the carrots, framed them and even had some published in Farm Life magazine. MiMi bought him a blue ribbon to display on the mantel with the photographs and proudly showed them off to visitors. Behind his back, the people of the parish called him "Carrot Boy" and had themselves a good chuckle or two. Eventually, they took a liking to him, accepted him, and shortened the nickname to "Carro."
I stood at my living room window and watched the Halloween parade of ghouls and goblins march up and down the streets of my New York City neighborhood. Toulouse and Weiner stood on stools and perused the creatures they didn't recognize and the parrot critiqued every costume from his perch in the kitchen. "Will you look at that?" I heard him mutter several times and laugh that crazy laugh and go through his litany of other laughs he had learned. He mimicked my mother's perfectly. He called her "Lady Paramore Voo". He never could quite get MiMi's laugh down pat because let's face it, it was otherworldly but he always let out a big Coo-Wee when she walked in the door. She loved it. She tried to teach him some Cajun but it was difficult for a New Yorker like him. I sometimes eavesdropped on some very interesting conversations between the two of them, most of which involved horrible but admittedly humorous conspiracies to torment Lady Paramore Voo in some new manner. I called them birds of a feather. It was sweet though to hear him say "Grand Mere, come here!" Or "I love you, MiMi!" "What about me?" I asked him one day and he just gave me a long stare and shrugged his bird shoulders and said, "Aaa!" Or something like that.
Lance made a beeline for me as I entered the open door to his apartment. The big blonde who hated me was hanging onto his coat tails with a mighty grip and he was forced to drag her with him as he threw his arms around me in my kitty attire. "I've missed you, Aachoo!" he exclaimed huskily and we both halfway stopped and listened for the parrot to say "Bless you!" but of course I hadn't brought him. He was at home in his cage sulking. He had gotten all dressed up and everything but I refused to put up with his nonsense tonight. Lance was looking good in a toga with a gold wreath on his head, gold sandals and white knee socks. He tried vainly to shake the blonde off but she just glared at me and held on. She had attempted to come as an Esther Williams bathing beauty but she looked more like a B-movie Mae West in a suit three sizes too small. She also wore a mermaid tale skirt that she kept tripping over.
I knew she hated cats. I put my fake cat claws up in her face and hissed. A slow ballad started playing on the phonograph and Lance pulled me over in a corner and we started doing a cheek to cheek. It would have been a sweet and romantic moment for us except for the blonde. She just wouldn't take a hint. I danced with his front and she danced with his back. Someone told me later that he had a huge grin on his face the whole time we were dancing. I guess it made his night. It just made me sick.
Not knowing how to shake her, Lance started mixing her drinks that had more alcoholic oomph to them and thirty minutes later she was passed out cold on a pile of coats in his bedroom. He put a finger to his lips and closed the door behind him and I fleetingly wondered how many times that scenario had played out. "Let's show 'em how it's done, Miss Kitty!" he winked at me and we tore up the dance floor. No, literally. I shredded his Persian carpet. But we had fun. As the night wore on, the place got packed with party goers and Lance and I sneaked out of his wildly decorated apartment and hit other parties going on in the building and across the street in yet other buildings. He had grabbed a couple of coats out of the hall closet and we snuggled against one another in the October cold, tipsy and giggling and wondered if the blonde had woke up yet. I almost wanted to be there when she did. Especially when Lance told me that he'd wrapped a fisherman's net around her that he had picked up in Greece. That was going to be one angry mermaid!
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