Cosmo Kramer Giddy-ups for Last Time

(Here is another installment from my series TV Character Obituaries.)

NEW YORK, NY — Cosmo Kramer died on Tuesday when he fell off a New York City police horse and onto the multi-pierced face of a man doing sit-ups in Central Park. The punk rocker with the six-pack abs, in an effort to out-self-mutilate all the other pierced denizens of New York, had decided a week ago to have six knitting needles installed in his brow, cheeks and chin. His mother had told him he could poke someone’s eye out with “those Zulu-warrior spears jutting out of your once handsome face,” little knowing that her son’s countenance would serve as a veritable bed of nails, not unlike the one that impaled one of John Wayne’s soldiers in The Green Berets.

Cosmo Kramer was a noted New York City “character,” a man of crazy, impractical schemes and zany behavior. This helps explain why various onlookers mistook Kramer’s twitching upon the facial bed of nails as typical manic Kramer theatrics. Two men laughed out loud and joked about that “crazy motherfucker, Kramer. Check ‘im out!”

Meanwhile, the guy trapped underneath the spastic Kramer, the one the Indians call Bayonet Face, or BF for short, was trying to convey to the gathering crowd that he was smothering to death, a difficult feat in that he was smothering to death. What saved BF in the end was the end of Kramer, as indicated by his body going still, an occurrence so rare in Cosmo’s life that the two laughing men finally sprang to action and turned Kramer on his back. This allowed BF to raise his head and, with it, the knitting needles, as if he were a suspected Satanist gasping for air after having had his head dunked in a trowel of water by the Witch Hunters of Salem.

One of the men shook Kramer, saying, “C’mon, bitch, twitch!”

But alas, Kramer would twitch no more.

Then the crowd stepped back to make room for a little person that a window cleaner from Queens referred to as a “midget or something,” who had been running his stubby legs off trying to catch up with Kramer. This was Mickey Abbot, an old acting friend of the dead man. The two of them used to impersonate illnesses for student doctors until Kramer, to demonstrate the symptoms of gonorrhea, pulled down his pants and pissed an actual razor blade. The result was that he lost a permanent gig and could not cross his legs for two months. Now Mickey stood over Kramer and began kicking him in the ribs.

“Get up you big galoot!”

Mickey afterward told the long, bizarre tale of how Kramer had ended up on a police horse and thence onto an array of decorative knitting needles. Nine years ago, Kramer was sentenced to prison along with three of his acquaintances, Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza and Elaine Benes, in the wake of a sensational trial that featured Teri Hatcher sleeping with Johnny Cochran disguised as Jackie Chiles, after the black lawyer had said of his penis, “It’s real and it’s spectacular.”

The three men of the group did their time in the same prison.  George ended up joining the Aryan Nation for protection by passing himself off as an architect named Art Vandelay. The skin-heads had no use for construction designs but they were in the market for someone to make order of their cells, to hang pictures and fluff pillows. In exchange, George had to get a giant tattoo of a swastika on his back. He was already bald, so the skin-head part was not much of a personal transition.

Jerry was not allowed to enlist in the Aryan Nation, as he was a comedian, though his Jewishness may have also have been a factor. Therefore he joined the notorious Hebrew gang, Sharon Nation. They controlled the library and personal accounting contracts.

Kramer, it turned out, already had a gang, and in fact was its leader.  Jerry and George had been kept in the dark for over a decade as to how Kramer managed to not work a single day in his life and still afford a New York life style. He was the biggest cocaine dealer in the city – not so impractical after all — which explained as well his chronic twitching in that he often sampled the inventory.

It was drug money that had financed many of his zany side ventures that his front company Kramerica Industries wrote off as Research and Development. For instance, he imagined a pizzeria where customers make their own pizza, and also a storage balloon for oil, to say nothing of the little known scheme of a Morse Code device that converts into a waffle-maker.

When Jerry, in prison, learned that he used to live across the hall from a drug kingpin, he co-opted the legal branch of Sharon Nation to sue Kramer for, one, acting like he had never known the precise meaning of the U.S.  Tax Code, and, two, for having eaten all of Seinfeld’s food for years without ever having dropped even a dime into the empty pickle jar by the fridge – the one with the hand-written label that read: “Kramer’s Overdue Cash Donation.”

“And all that time,” fumed Seinfeld to his cellmate, Bernie Thugstein, “while I thought that goofy prick was broke, he was running a multi-million dollar coke operation. He had enough money to pay off the NYPD and to hire ex-CIA agents to assassinate his rivals, and yet the fucker would mooch food off me like a homeless person. What’s up with that?”

Kramer warned him that he should drop the lawsuit; that he, Kramer, was only a bit player in a much bigger network; and that he, Seinfeld, did not want to ruffle the feathers of the man on top.

The legal battle continued after the release from the slammer of the three men and Elaine Benes. The first thing Seinfeld did was to meet with Benes to tell funny stories about prison and to vent about Kramer. Elaine told Jerry to drop the lawsuit, and to not worry about the overdue food bill. She wrote Jerry a check on the spot.

“That should cover it, right Jer?”

Then it dawned on Seinfeld that Elaine was The Man.

“You?”

“That’s right, Jer. And don’t worry about Kramer ever raiding your fridge again. He’ll be taken care of.”

Mickey finished the tale: “Elaine knew that Kramer’s klutziness would serve as a perfect cover for murder. So she paid off the cops to arrest him and put him on a horse that had been injected with  meth, and yelled, “Giddy up!”

Mickey shook his head while looking down at the grave of his forever motionless friend.

“Elaine still has some scores to settle. If I was Mr. Peterman, I’d be careful on my next safari.”

(Check out my website: http://www.authorjamesfjohnson.com)

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