Koo-Nar--A Personal Narrative
Larry: OK — when I first got out of the service . . .... I was poverty-stricken. I
went through my — my, what- do-you-call-it, separation money like flies on shit,
you know? Buying drinks for the whole crew. I’d go into bars and just say, “Give
everybody a drink,” and throw in a wad of money and go into the next bar and say,
“Buy a round for the house,” and lay it out. I was really cool!
Carol: You were so glad to be home—
Larry: No, I wanted to make friends—‘cause—I’d been out of circulation for so
long.
Well, anyway, to compensate for this [pause] obvious lack of thrift, I moved in a
guy’s—it was supposedly a garage, but it sorta leaned at a forty-five-degree angle
and had about an inch slits in the boards—between the sides. And I hung a
parachute up for a ceiling, you know, and I parked my MG under there. And I had
a bed—’three innersprings and three mattresses! And—and that’s all I had in there
for furniture—and then an ironing board, and then I had a vise on the ironing
board—and that was my kitchen.
Really, I lived in this shack, and I’d wake up with snow drifts on my bed.
Carol: Think how it toughened you, Larry! You’re a better person for it!
Larry: Did you ever take a bath in Lake Clare in February?! [High- pitched] Oh,
hoho—God! It makes my goodies blue just to think about it. Oh, Lord!
Larry: So anyhow, where in the hell was I anyhow—?
Carol: King of the rats!
Larry: OK, OK, Koo-Nar, king of the rats—. [Everyone: Right!]
Larry: OK, when I first moved in there I didn’t have money zero. And—and all I
had was three pieces of celery that a guy gave me from work.
Carol: Oh, you poor baby!
Larry: —So I made soup out of it in a tin can. [Laughter] I really and truly did,
honest to God, that’s all I had for all week. And as things got better I bought a loaf
of bread and—but listen, let me tell you, before I moved out of there I had money
stashed in nail cans, and...
Carol: You were a miser!
Larry: Yeah, you could say that! Really!
Larry: Anyway, this rat lived in there with me, you see? Not by invitation! And,
every night I’d hear him in the garbage bag, and I’d flash a light over there, and
he’d run like hell. And he was a big dude! Well, he got so when I’d flash the light
over there, he’d just go [puts thumbs in ears and wiggles fingers while making
noise and sticking out tongue], blll-bll-bl. [Laughter] I’m not kidding you, this was
a BIG RAT! — looked like a raccoon! [Laughter] And as long as I fed the dude
we were on peaceful terms.
Carol: One night you forgot—
Larry: One night I forgot to feed him, and I heard him under the bed.
You could hear him running around in the bed springs. Anyway Koo-Nar got in
bed. And I had this terrible nightmare, and I dreamed Koo-Nar was, was chewing
on my leg. And you know how you move in slow motion in your dreams? And I
dreamed I grabbed him and choked him and choked him, and the harder I choked
him the harder he’d bite, you know, and he wouldn’t let go. And finally—he just
succumbed—as rats do when one shuts off their air. And I dreamed I just threw
him [makes motion with arm] just as hard as I could, but it was all slow motion in
the dream. (Course, when you got seventeen blankets and a snow drift on top of
you, it slows you down, too.) But I never really woke up!
And I didn’t find out that dude was for real till spring!
I was gonna to move into Momsy’s, see? Mom all this time had just been having a
heart attack.
Carol: Poor Mom!
Larry: Yeah, poor Mom, one day she said, “Scheib, for God’s sake, you’ve
proved you can live through the winter and all that crap in a shack. Now come
home!” I says, “OK, just for laughs.”
So I’m packing up all my stuff out of the old shack, see? And I pull all my
blankets off the bed, which hadn’t been changed all winter [groans and laughter].
And when I got down to the bottom sheet—[lowers voice] there’s all this rat shit.
And I thought, “Oh, my God!”
Carol: Koo-Nar’d been living in your bed.
Larry: All that time I’d been wondering what happened to Koo-Nar.
Then I remembered that dream I had that night and I thought, “By God, I got
him!” And I saw in a flash: he shit his drawers when I choked him to death.
[Laughter]
And I got to looking around, and I pulled these mattresses. And between these
mattresses and the parachute—which served as a wall between my MG and my
bed—there lay KOO-NAR preserved by the cold!
Carol: Poor baby, with your throttle marks on his very throat.
Larry: Well, he was scrawny—and decimated—and he looked as though—he’d
dried there.
But there that son-of-a-bitch was. And I thought, you know, “One plus one equals
two.” And I looked down at my leg and there was a scar, a big hole. I’d never
bothered to look at my leg before. Guys don’t look at their legs, you know. But
that little son-of-a-bitch had gnawed me. And I got him, even in my sleep, which
proves what a great hunter I really am!
Carol: Right! However, it doesn’t prove where the name Koo-Nar came from.
Larry: OK, all the time I lived with Koo-Nar before [pause] his demise, for some
reason I just knew his name was Koo-Nar. Because he was the king of the rats, the
biggest of all, and it just seemed fitting that I name him Koo-Nar.