(THEME. GK SINGS)
SS: A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but high above the busy streets, on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building, one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions --- Guy Noir, Private Eye --- (PIANO)
GK: It was one of those days in early spring when you wake up and you look out at the black ice and the snow melting and the trash underneath, and you roll over and you ask yourself, "Why did I have that third beef burrito last night?"
And then you go down to the office and you look through old People magazines for a couple hours, and you wait for your phone to ring.
(KNOCK ON DOOR)
GK: Yeah, come on in, the door's unlocked. (DOOR OPEN, CLOSE.)
TR: You Guy Noir?
GK: Yeah? What if I am?
TR: Registered letter here from the Loomis Collection Agency.
GK: Yeah?
TR: It's about the money you owe to Pepe's Cantina. Three giant burritos, an enchilada, and two Tijuana Fireballs. If you don't pay up right away, they're going to come up here and tell you what the ingredients were.
GK: Yeah, yeah, just throw it in the pile there with the other bills. (DOOR OPEN, SLAM)
GK: It was a gray day. I thought, "Maybe it's my eyesight. Maybe I just needed contact lenses. Maybe a pair of those colored contact lenses. Then again, would people trust a detective with pale violet eyes? Hard to say.
My caseload was down to two: a woman who had hired me to locate a couple she saw on the street who she thought she used to know but she forgot their names, and a guy who lost his car keys.
(PHONE RINGS)
GK: Guy Noir here.
TK (OTHER END): How you comin' on my car keys?
GK: I'm workin on it, okay?
TK (OTHER END): I'm sittin here, I gotta get to work.
GK: You ever hear of public transportation?
TK (OTHER END): How can you be workin' on finding my car keys if you're sittin there answering the phone, huh?
GK: Listen. Did you look in your coat pockets?
TK (OTHER END): No. Just a minute. I'll look. (PAUSE) Nope, they're not there.
GK: Okay. How about your other pants pockets? You check those?
TK (OTHER END): No. Why?
GK: Go look in the pockets of the pants you wore yesterday and call me back. Okay. (HANG UP) Scheeze, I gotta get out of here. Get some fresh air. Clear my head. (MUSIC BRIDGE, FOOTSTEPS, TRAFFIC) Some days, I think I should've gonna into another racket. Municipal bonds. Or liposuction. I was developing one of those dark moods that can be relieved only by the presence of a beautiful woman. That, or a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. I walked around town looking for a place to sit down and have pie and coffee, but they're all gone, those places. They're only in Edward Hopper paintings. I'd walk in a restaurant (DOOR OPEN, JINGLE. CAFE AMBIENCE) and there was this woman with a menu four feet long.
SS: Hello, my name is Sue Beth, and I'll show you to your table.
GK: I'm just here for a piece of pie and coffee, okay?
SS: Oh, we don't have pie. Sorry.
GK: You don't have pie! Isn't this America?
SS: We don't have pie. We have a white chocolate macadamia nut tart and a dark chocolate flourless torte; we have caramel corn rice cakes and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and blueberry muffins the size of a baby's head and we have fourteen kinds of scones and twenty-one kinds of biscotti. No pie.
GK: No pie.
SS: No.
GK: Why?
SS: Because all those flavors that people used to get in pie --- chocolate, pecan, raspberry, butterscotch --- now we put those flavors in coffee. We inject the essence of pie into the coffee, and that way, we still get the taste, and we also get to have extremely tight butts and very hard stomachs, like mine. Hit me. Go ahead.
GK: I don't care to.
SS: Go ahead. Hit me. Right in the stomach.
GK: No thanks. Another time. (DOOR CLOSE. TRAFFIC. MUSIC BRIDGE) Then it hit me. If you want pie, go to Joe's. (FOOTSTEPS.) I headed for Joe's, which is down in the wholesale fur district, and I couldn't help but notice that a lot of the old fur warehouses had been turned into performing arts spaces and architects' offices and------ (MUFFLED RING) suddenly I felt a tingling in my pocket. (MUFFLED RING) What in the world is this doing here? (CLICK) Yeah?
TK (ON PHONE): It's me again. I looked in my pants pockets and the keys weren't there.
GK: What are you calling me for? I don't even have a cellular phone.
TK (ON PHONE): Oh no? What's that you're holding in your hand? A banana?
GK: I have no idea where this phone came from.
TK (ON PHONE): Anyway, I'm thinking maybe my wife took the car keys with her to work, and I can't call her cause she teaches at a junior high school --- you mind going and asking her?
GK: I wouldn't set foot in a junior high school if you paid me.
TK (ON PHONE): I am paying you!
GK: Not enough. Listen. Go look on your bureau dresser, okay?
TK (ON PHONE): The bureau dresser?
GK: Yeah. Do you have a little china dish or something on your dresser where you put stuff you take out of your pants pockets?
TK (ON PHONE): Yeah?
GK: Look there.
TK (ON PHONE): Okay. (HANG UP. FOOTSTEPS CONTINUE. MUSIC BRIDGE)
GK: I came around the corner, and there in front of Joe's, was a big crowd of people looking in the front window. (BABBLE OF VOICES) I'd never seen a crowd around Joe's before.
(BABBLE OF VOICES GETS LOUDER)
TR: ...I don't think I'd say abstract so much as I'd say expressionist.
SS: Well, I meant abstract in the primitivist sense.
TR: I don't see that.
SS: Well, maybe it's more Dadaist than primitive.
TR: I saw Dada at MOMA.
SS: They had Dada at MOMA?
TR: I went with Mama, she was on her way to Sedona.
SS: Look, he's cutting the cheese now. And putting it on the Spam.
TR: That is so beautiful. I think he's the only food artist in the world who could do that.
SS: Spam is so incredibly sensuous.
TR: That oval shape.
SS: Right out of the can.
TR: The way it glistens. It has that luminescence.
SS: Luminescence. That's exactly right.
TR: The reflectiveness of Spam is incredible.
SS: It's incredible.
TR: I don't think any other artist gets at the essence of canned pork shoulder the way Joe does.
SS: The man is a genius, he is a Picasso of pork. He brings out that whole sense of industrial food, that sense of total homogeneity and total process --- I mean, that's what Spam is, it's process --- and he works with that, and works through it, and that's why it just seems to pulsate with energy, doesn't it.
GK: Excuse me, you're not talkin about Joe, are you?
SS: Yes, of course. ----Say, didn't I see you at the opening of the headless Barbie doll show last week?
GK: No.
SS: At that gallery next to the Tasmanian restaurant, upstairs from the performance space where they do the show with the toilet tissue?
GK: Lady, I'm not in the arts, I'm a private eye. A tracer of lost car keys. ----(MUSIC) I looked through the window, and there was Joe, behind the counter, making his usual stuff. But he was dressed in black pants and a black turtleneck and a beret. And the stuff wasn't on plates, he was putting it in frames, and people were walking around looking at it, and I saw the price under one. It was a grilled cheese on rye, and it was selling for $1200.
(KNOCKS ON WINDOW) Hey, Joe.
He looked up and shrugged and went back to the Spam he was workin on.
SS: He is like, absolutely the Matisse of grease.
TR: The Van Gogh of dough. The Donatello of Jell-O. (MUSIC)
GK: I headed back to the Acme Building.(DOOR SLAMS; FOOTSTEPS) I headed straight for the file cabinet, to see if there were any corn chips left in there, and --- (PHONE RINGS. PICK UP) Yeah. Guy Noir here.
TK (ON PHONE): I looked on the bureau dresser.
GK: Not there, huh?
TK (ON PHONE): Nope.
GK: Okay, listen. Let me tell you what happened here. You came home last night and left your car keys lying on the kitchen table and your wife picked them up and she put them in a logical place. Okay? You follow me?
TK (PHONE): Yeah, but where?
GK: She put them in a place where keys belong. So all you got to do is put yourself inside the mind of your wife and think, 'Where do keys go?'
TK (PHONE): Like, maybe on the key rack?
GK: You got a key rack?
TK (PHONE): Yeah.
GK: Maybe that'd be a place to check.
TK (PHONE): Okay. Just a minute. (PAUSE) Yup. Right there. How much do I owe you?
GK: Does your wife bake pie, by any chance?
TK (PHONE): Made a lemon meringue yesterday.
GK: You got a piece left?
TK (PHONE): Yeah?
GK: Lemme give you the address....(MUSIC BRIDGE) So I settled back to wait for my lemon meringue pie, and to finish my solitaire game, when (KNOCKS ON DOOR) ---- yeah, come in, the door's open. (DOOR OPEN, CLOSE. FOOTSTEPS)
GK: Hey, Joe, good to see you. How's it going?
TR: Hi Guy. Not so great. Kinda tough being an artist.
GK: Yeah? Well, it looked like you were doing pretty good. People looking at your work and everything.
TR: Yeah, you got a lot of admirers, but then you've got these critics. A guy wrote a review of my Spam show the other day, he called it "derivative". Derivative. Where'd he come up with that?
GK: Well, maybe Spam contains derivatives.
TR: I couldn't believe he would say that. "Derivative". It depressed the heck out of me. It was my first bad review. He said that my chopped liver sandwich was a "pastiche" ---- a pastiche! And now it won't sell. My chopped liver. Won't sell.
GK: How much you want for it?
TR: Thirteen hundred.
GK: Thirteen hundred? for chopped liver?
TR: Last fall I sold one for eighteen hundred.
GK: Yeah, but it's only chopped liver.
TR: It's art.
GK: Yeah, but it's chopped liver.
TR: I feel like I'm in a complete artistic tailspin. Eighteen hundred in the fall and now I can't even get thirteen hundred. Derivative. Where'd he come up with that? Pastiche!
GK: Joe, you've got to ignore these critics. Don't pay any attention.
TR: Maybe he's right. Maybe my chopped liver has become shallow. Maybe I need to recharge my batteries.
GK: It's March. We all do. We're all running on vapors, Joe.
(PHONE RING) Excuse me. (PICK UP) Yeah, Noir here.
TK (ON PHONE): Sorry to bother you, but I can't find a pie tin to put this lemon meringue pie on, so as soon as I find that, I'll be right over.
GK: Check the cupboard, okay?
TK (ON PHONE): Oh. Okay. ---Which cupboard?
GK: A lower cupboard. Where the baking things are.
TK (ON PHONE): Oh. Sure. Okay, thanks. I will. (PAUSE) Hey. Where'd I put my car keys? They were right here. GK: Where'd you set them down? TK (ON PHONE): Right here on the counter. GK: Then they must be there. TK (ON PHONE): I don't see them. GK: Maybe they fell on the floor. TK (ON PHONE): Nope. GK: How about in the cupboard? Down where the pie tins are? TK (ON PHONE): Oh yeah. There it is. I must've just set it down. Thanks. (HANG UP) (THEME) SS: A dark night in a city that keeps its secrets, and there on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building is a guy still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions. Guy Noir. Private Eye. (MUSIC OUT).
(c) 1997 by Garrison Keillor and Laurel Wroten