Catsby: A Novel

Chapter 8

Around nine in the evening, I threw a tuxedo jacket on over a dress shirt and jeans and snuck through the hedge. The party at Catsby's was already well underway. Not only had the dubstep been pounding since three in the afternoon, but the line of cars dropping pretty young things off at the front door was now backed up traffic a half-mile, all the way past Bruce Springsteen's place.

Judi Dench was in the carrier on my back porch, where I hoped she'd sleep the night away. There wasn't much to set ablaze on my porch, except for the giant pile of firewood and the hundreds of stacked copies of old newspapers.

Oh, and I still hadn't found my missing kidney.

"Excuse me, waiter," I said, approaching an older man in a white suit. "Do you know where I might be able to find the lord of the manor?"

The waiter scowled at me. "I'm not a waiter—I'm the writer Tom Wolfe."

I apologized and moved through the crowd toward the house. The name was vaguely familiar, but all of the old white male writers sort of blended together for me. Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood.

There was a tap on my shoulder. I swung around and found myself face-to-face with Cordon Bleu. "Having fun yet, stranger?" she asked.

"Nice to see you," I said. "Still training for your big competition next week?"

"Like you wouldn't believe. I'm taking the night off from wieners. Just champagne for me tonight." She sipped from the flute in her hand.

I could feel the stitches acting up again. "Do they have anything harder?"

She shrugged. "Harder than champagne? You want to kill your liver?"

"Is the liver anywhere near the kidneys?"

"How should I know, Dick? I'm a competitive hot-dog eater, not a doctor." She shook her head. "You feeling okay?"

"Long story. I'm not staying long. I just got this invitation from Mr. Catsby—"

"An invitation! No one gets an invitation to a Catsby party."

"I did."

"How odd," she said, leading me inside the mansion. "I believe you, but it's very strange."

"Have you met him?"

"Who? Catsby?" She laughed. "Don't be absurd. No one's met him. He's like bigfoot."

"So he's really hairy and walks funny."

She shook her head. "I meant he's mysterious and he craps in the woods."

I glanced around at the assembled throng of guests, chatting and drinking and dancing in three-dimensional splendor. A Kanye West track was thumping so hard that my teeth were shaking in their sockets. It had been a while since I'd had a dental checkup, maybe that was something I needed to get checked.

We found the kegs, and a waiter handed me a Solo cup and a Sharpie.

"Let me guess, you're not a waiter—you're some fashionable writer," I said, taking note of the gentleman's thick-rimmed glasses and bookish demeanor.

"I'm a novelist. The name's Jonathan Safran Foer," he said. "But I'm also a waiter."

"Oh," I said, avoiding his plaintive, sadding gaze.

I scribbled a crude penis on my cup. Cordon scrunched her face up in mock offense.

"Dick," I explained. "It's my name, and this is how I sign things. With a little drawing of a—"

"—dick," she said, and we both laughed. God, I loved this woman.

I pumped my cup full of Miller Lite and took a swig. The beer was cool and refreshing, and the same golden color going down that it would be coming out. If my remaining kidney did its job.

"I've been drinking for the past week," Cordon said. "How about we find someplace quiet to sit down for a bit?"

"Like a library?" I teased.

"I think that's on the third floor," she deadpanned.

We wandered through the vast interior of the mansion—through the living room, through the dining room, through the bowling alley.

"So who is this Jay Z. Catsby?" I asked Cordon as we passed through a long, cavernous hallway lined with old black and white photos. Upon closer inspection, they appeared to be recent Instagrams, printed out and framed.

"Who is Catsby?" Cordon asked. "I heard he killed a man. I heard he's a member of the Illuminati. I heard he's Hugh Jackman's butt double."

"Why don't we just find him and ask? He's got to be here somewhere."

Cordon peeked into a room and waved me through. We'd found the library. So she hadn't been kidding. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of printed books in the room, all organized on shelves according to the Dewey Decimal system. This was a proper library, right down to the row of computers in the middle of the room, where old men clicked on pornographic websites, pants unzipped.

"Who cares who he is?" Cordon said. "He throws large parties...and I like large parties."

"You like large things?" I asked suggestively.

Cordon slapped me on the arm. "You're so dirty, Dick."

A woman our age with her hair in a bun put a finger to her lips and shushed us, pointing at a sign. "Welcome to the Catsby branch of the Jersey Shore Public Library," it read. "Quiet, please."

Cordon lowered her voice. "It's so rare that a woman runs across a man who can say filthy things and not sound infantile."

I farted, and we both doubled over in laughter.

Unfortunately, I laughed so hard that my stitches tore asunder, sending me to the ground in a screaming fit of pain. This no doubt threw the librarian into further paroxysms, but what else could I do? I was bleeding to death on the floor of Catsby's library amidst a pool of light beer. A good death, but a death nonetheless.