Before on NYPD Blue...sorry, the tape I got didn't catch it. I bet it was all about JB singing doo-wop like Dion, though.
Ricky wakes up and finds JB gone from his apartment. One less to cook for, Mary! But she's not glad for that, and feels compelled to point out that JB's a "dope fiend." Yes, and is the sky blue today, Mary? People can be rehabilitated, you know. That's what Ricky hopes, anyway. Ricky is all in a rush to get dressed and look for JB and says that, in lieu of nagging, Mary should just "leave a long note." That's pretty good. Mary gives him the bird, sandwiched between her first and ring fingers and says, "Here's your note, read between the lines." Wow, I'd dump her now, Ricky. That's really rude, and juvenile too. Or maybe you'd prefer to punch and run?
Woosh! Bloosh! Subway! Credits! Pounding drums! Following the credits, a Chinese dragon dance!
Some gritty shots of the street flash behind more titles, which tell me rapper Mos Def will be appearing! Cool! Then, in walks Michelle Beecham, a vintage clothing shop owner. The shop is called Synchronicity, down the West Village, and OF COURSE John knows it and shopped there for last year's Halloween costume. Boy, he should write a gritty gay guidebook to NYC. Anyway, Michelle thinks she's bought stolen property, some beautiful beaded empire-waist dresses. Baldwin and Greg come over and take her statement. Some gal brought the dresses in, Michelle offered her $600 (a bargain), that gal asked her boyfriend, and then took the cash. Then, it seems, some kind of magical stolen-vintage-clothing-alarm went off, and she thought the dresses were stolen. Michelle has had the dresses for three weeks agonizing about it. Greg and Baldwin offer to run an inquiry and say they'll be in touch. John says, "You may have brought so much happiness into someone's life!" Then to Di, "YOU, in a beaded empire waist dress? Oh yes." YOU, gay? Oh yes.
Sip starts grumbling to Di. Why does he always bend her ear? Location, I bet. Di, MOVE DESKS. Like a big, owly fishwife, he whispers to Di, "Did you know he brought that junkie home?" Di's like, do I care? Sip's like, "Well he did!" In walks Ricky, ears on fire. "Hi!" Sip ignores him and goes to his fish tank. Ricky says to Di, like she's the mediator, "What's his problem?" Sip grumbles, "Where were you, out getting a hotel permit?" Ricky gets feisty and says, "Do I need your seal of approval who I reach out to? Feed your fish!"
In walks Mos Def, playing a junkie pal of JB's, named Leslie. "What's going on. Morning, Bozo." Hee hee, Mos Def scored off Sip! Sip ignores Mos Def's comment and says to Ricky, "The hostel's back open." Ricky takes Mos Def back to the coffee area where he fuels up and remarks that JB might need an "intervention" of sorts. Ricky flips out and screams, "He ODed!" The camera waves down to show Mos Def creaming and sugaring his coffee, and saying that he doesn't know "if someone stepped up" to help JB. Ricky snorts, "Well, we know you sure didn't."
Ricky rushes out, saying he's "gotta go some place," and "lost time" to John. Mos Def saunters out with two doughnuts (mmm, doughnuts) in his hands. Sip cracks, "Got all the doughnuts you need?" Two may be enough...for NOW. Mos Def takes a meta moment and reminds us all how mean Sip can be by saying, "What you need to do is be more respectful when you're talking about possible death, is what you have to do." Sip waves his hands like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kirky comes up the steps with two little kids in tow, passing one off to a female detective so she can haul their mom up the steps too. She was arrested for shoplifting. Laughlin comes down the hall and starts yelling at the mom: "Did you leave your kids with that SOB?" And then to Kirky, "I'll give you the background." Kirky rolls her eyes and winces a bit at his ham-handedness.
In the pokey, Kirky asks, "What's going on in your head, taking your kids shoplifting?" Laughlin blusters, "It's the husband! Harvey. He's unemployed." He says it like it's a dread disease. The mom wants to go home, and Kirky's like, um, no? The mom starts to cry, saying, "Oh god, please don't bring him in! I don't want to be a bad person." Laughlin rushes out to bring in the husband and Kirky follows him, telling him not to go and rough up the husband. "What kind of night are you setting this woman up for?" Yeah, Kirky! It's PROTECT and serve!
Now we get a dialogue-less montage of Ricky exploring a yellow-taped crime scene of a charred, blackened store. He checks out a walled handed to him by a uniformed officer, then looks under a large yellow tarp. Then he leaves. The music is sad.
A weird lady, very reminiscent of Buggy Guy Gunther of the missing wife a few episodes ago, comes in and mumbles something to John about getting a call. Medavoy comes up behind her and yells, "How do you do!" The lady jumps a mile and trembles: "You left a message for me about recovering some stolen property?" Yeah, your dresses. She seems about as eager as a toll collector. Medavoy and Baldwin check her ID and stuff and she says she can come in when it's convenient for the other, dress-returning person. She doesn't even look at Baldwin, for pete's sake! It seems a little fishy and odd, but it's just a bunch of stupid DRESSES, for god's sake.
Laughlin hauls Harvey into the pokey. Kirky is waiting for him. "What'd she do now?" he asks. Stole stuff. Very melodramatically, he slams his hand down and says, "Ah! For god's sake!" Kirky says his kids are upstairs too. "I was just going to ask that!" he says. SURE you were. "They were with the klepto!" Laughlin seethes, "You hypocrite bastard. Were you looking for a job at the bottom of that rock and rye?" "Rock and rye"? What, was Harvey out drinking with Sip? What did they start with, Harvey Wallbangers? Kirky wants Harvey to agree to make an effort to keep his family together and to look for work. Harvey yells, "Was she complaining about that? Nobody likes being dragged down to a police station!" Laughlin yells back, "Nobody dragged you, asshole!" Kirky, struggling for control in the testes-charged atmosphere, says, "I take your point! In a gesture of good faith, I will drop the charges against your wife if you come in week and show evidence of employment or places you've applied." Kirky just wants him to try. Harvey leans over conspiratorially and tells her, "I'm not gonna air my dirty laundry about who's dipping their oar deeper in this relationship, but it's me." Wow, couldn't he have mixed something about carrying weight or rowing a hoe into that metaphor? Kirky says she appreciates that. Harvey looks confused and says, "It's nice to be appreciated once in e while...that is the girl I married." Kirky says she's glad. Harvey looks even more confused. Glad? Wuh? What'd I do?
Ricky shuffles in, limp and listless. He looks at Di. Di makes herself busy at her desk. Ricky drags himself upstairs. Sip starts to grumble and Di says, "Andy, STOP IT."
Ricky plops himself down by Mary's desk where she's out of uniform, busy shuffling papers, and breaks the news: "He's dead, JB. ODed. Someone burned him up." Mary shuffles her papers and says, "He chose what he wanted." Ricky looks away and says, "That wraps him up." Mary looks at Ricky's turned-away, wrinkly face and says, "You can't live other people's lives. It's just running away from your own life. We could be in each other's lives." Like dating each other? I though you were? Then Ricky says, and feel free to join in, "ANYWAYS." Then he leaves and Mary's head is reflected in the glass pane of her office. Be glad it's not her boob.
Beep, buzz, funky keyboards, station house. Ricky comes back down the stairs, looks at Di and looks away. Sip looks at Ricky and then looks away. Di doesn't look at Ricky. Ricky says, "He ODed, on B. In a hardware store. Then someone set the room on fire." Sip clears his throat and says sympathetically, "Arson should look at the building owner for setting the fire. They're gentrifying down there." Ricky gets all moist in the eye region and hurries into the coffee room. Sip starts muttering to Di, but she's following Ricky so only we hear, "Skel junkie has him dissolving in tears."
In the coffee room, Ricky is crying. Boo hoo, he loved JB! Or something. Di comes and says, "It's all right. " I hate when people say that when someone (or me) is crying. What's all right? If it's all right, why are there tears? Another thing I hate: "Shhh." Anyway, Ricky puts his head on Di's shoulder and blubbers, "He burned up! Just like my sisters." Di, confused, says, "They're alive?!" Ricky cries some more and says, "That's right. I don't know how to live!" Would you like that on your tombstone, you neurotic sweetie? Di makes a joke about having a manual at home. Ricky laughs and says, "I got your hair full of snot." Di says the only thing you can say in response to that, other than "eww." "That's nice!" Ricky says he was just kidding about the snot. "I was just saying what I was afraid of." Would that be getting snot in Di's hair, or not knowing how to live? He puts his head back on Di's shoulder. Di does not move away.
Medavoy carries in an armful of clear garment boxes. Michelle, Baldwin and the weird lady are following. They all go into the pokey to make the exchange of the beaded dresses. The weird lady presses herself up against the wire in the pokey, unable even to look at anything. She makes out a check for $1500 and says to Michelle, "I know you could have sold them for a lot more." Everyone is staring at the lady, pressed up against the pokey, as the says the dresses were her mother's favorites. "She had a cerebral incident, or accident. I think they mean incident. It was two weeks ago." Michelle says, "I'm sorry your mom died." Baldwin and Greg look shame-faced. I don't know why, but they do. It's awkward for them, I guess.
Sip starts his now-classic muttering to Di: "Lousy break. He confided to me a dream he had in which his sisters burned up." Di joins in, saying, "He said JB had burned up almost like it had happened to his sisters!" Sip asks where Ricky is now. Washing up, says Di. Just as I cross my fingers for another Ally McBeal moment between Ricky and Sip in the bathroom, Ricky appears. Sip says, "No one wants to give you a hard time." SURE you don't. Then Sip tells Ricky to take off and use some lost time. Not that he's "Dag Hammerschold" or anything. Oh my god, HE WAS PRESIDENT OF THE UN WHEN I WAS A KID! SIP, JOIN THIS DECADE! Ricky says he's going to "get a load on," and you know Sip is thrilled to hear that. "That's facing up to it." Ricky yells, "You ever see me inside a saloon?" I'm trying to remember...maybe that was a cowboy fantasy sequence in Silver Spoons. It's so easy to get these shows mixed up. Sip yells something about Ricky's getting help from booze and those "stupid paper clips...you're gonna lose all your normal friends!" Ricky says....everybody now: "ANYWAYS!"
Kirky comes into the coffee room, where Di is parked on the windowsill having coffee. I guess this is a break time, even though they chat very seriously about work. Kirky was just following the shoplifter around, apparently she is very bad at shoplifting. Plus her irresponsible husband really "pushes Laughlin's buttons. He comes in like Captain Crusader." Wow, is that a real superhero? Di dishes on Ricky: He's really upset about JB: "He seems so lost. He was crying, and says he didn't know how to live." Ooh, is that how you like 'em, Di? Lost and weepy? Oh my god, have we forgotten about Bobby for RICKY? I take back everything I said about wanting to see them together, okay? I'm SORRY.
A quiet piano plays and we get a dialogue-less montage with the bad-shoplifter-lady picking up her kids from child services, and Kirky putting one of the kids in the arms of the husband.
Kirky walks into Laughlin's office She says "hey"; he says, "how's it going." Then she's like, what up with your husband-bashing? He says, "You kiss up to him, treat him like he's got an ounce of responsibility." Kirky says she's worried about the kids. "If we improve the odds, they've got a fight." Laughlin blusters, "You think my concerns aren't as legitimate as yours? I am a veteran of that home life. Don't delegitimize my concerns." Kirky goes to leave and says she hopes they can help this family.
Michelle the shop-owner is giving a description of the beaded-dress thief to Medavoy. And if she ever comes in there with beaded dresses again, just push this secret buzzer and Baldwin will fly in there and bust her in the bazoo. Just kidding. Medavoy says that is must be "disappointing" for her that the rightful-dress owner wasn't more "enthusiastic." No, it's not that: "People in the secondhand biz get pretty good at figuring out people's lives. I was thinking of the mother on her death bed." If she had only acted sooner the mom could have been reunited with her long-lost dresses! Because moms love beaded dresses even more than gay guys do! Boo hoo, it's so sad!
Another montage, this time with Laughlin ambushing the husband outside a bodega and smashing his brown-bagged bottle. Then, to make this scene totally useless, Laughlin tosses some money at the husband's feet. That makes about as much sense as spitting in the wind.
Ricky's in the bar. He orders a Bud. Ah, Bud. King of beers. Heineken! Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon! Sorry, thought I was in Blue Velvet. Laughlin strolls in just as Ricky orders a Jack back on his second beer. They ask each other how it's going. Laughlin says, "Amazing, if you don't mind a world full of assholes." I feel that way sometimes. Ricky gets his Irish up real quick and asks if he and Laughlin are "going to have to throw down." Rumble! Or maybe they could just mambo, like in those fucking Gap ads. Laughlin says "present company excluded" and Ricky simmers down, now. So anyway, Laughlin starts yammering about Mary, and how he had a thing for her, and he hope it's not an issue for Ricky, and Ricky gets snappish again and says something about Laughlin "pissing in [his] ear," and Laughlin gets up but Ricky waves him back: "C'mere. We lose our senses of humor, where are we?" Laughlin agrees, "We're dead." They resume boozing. Laughlin treads on dangerous ground AGAIN, saying, "You know that Kirkendall? Nice rack?" Ricky says, "BE NICE," and Laughlin describes the case she's on. Ricky asks "what the alternative" would be to Kirky's methods of kindness and consideration. Laughlin says without irony or humor, "Give him a beating! I took care of business. I waited for him outside of this liquor store where I know he hangs out and broke his bottle. I humiliated him. He's gonna know I'm on his shoulder. I didn't take this job to let people like that slide." Ricky points out the obvious: "You think that's gonna be comfortable for him, with you on his shoulder like that?" Kirky comes into the bar and says, "She's dead." Laughlin says, "Oh god...he did it?" Duh! It's called cause and effect, look into it. Kirky says, "After you did what you did at the liquor store, he fractured her skull. Now she's dead, he's going to jail, and those kids are going into the system. Nice work, Laughlin." Laughlin resorts to brutality, the only thing he knows, and says, "You're lucky you're not a man." Kirky shoots back, "No, YOU'RE lucky you're not a man, because I'd like to beat your balls off." WOOOOH! "You had problems in your family growing up? Get over it!" Laughlin gets off his stool and says, "The hell with you!" Ricky comes between them as Kirky says, "I know who I am! I'm standing right here in front of you!" Laughlin leaves. Ricky asks if Kirky's all right. She's fine; is Ricky all right? Yeah. She leaves and Ricky continues boozing.
The quiet night music starts and we land at Di's door. Bling-blong! Di answers and Ricky' standing there, drunk. He's three sheets to the wind, drunk as a sailor, blasted, wasted, blotto, stinko, sauced, liquored up, soused, a bit tipsy, schnokered, you know. His eyesockets have X's in them. I'd think of more but I haven't been drinking enough. He goes, "So. This is wrong, this is wrong, this is inappropriate, I shouldn't be here." Di, not blind, says, "You seem to be drunk." Good one! Do you want the donkey or the turtle wax? Ricky says, "Oh, I'm drunk," and DI INVITES HIM IN. Stupid stupid stupid.
Ricky says, "You know what kind of drunk I am?" Angry? Belligerent? Sad? Happy? No. He twirls his finger around and says dizzy. Di invites him to sit on the couch. What, no offer of a bucket? Ricky keeps one foot on the floor, you know, to keep the spins away. Di's eyes work again and she says, "You are a sorry picture." Ricky says, "Di, got that manual?" She says she doesn't know what he's talking about and has to get some sleep. Ricky gets mopey and says he'll take his shoes and socks off when he's sure he won't barf. Oh, boo hoo. Then Di remembers: "The how-to-live manual." Ricky says, "Yeah, don't rush, I won't read it tonight anyway." Di is charmed, somehow, and tilts her head at him as she makes her way to her room to go back to sleep. This is charming? Oh, Di....