L.A. Weekly, June 7, 2002
THERE ARE THREE CATS LIVING HERE NOW; THERE HAVE BEEN AS
many as four, but never less than two since the afternoon, so long ago and
so just like yesterday, we came home to find the front porch carpeted in
little black kittens. They had been born under the
building to a stray a neighbor had
half-adopted, and had finally grown big enough and brave enough to make
their way into the courtyard, which is where I first saw them. I stood
there like Richard Dreyfuss at the end of Close Encounters,
surrounded by curious friendly aliens and unspeakably
happy.
Also they were
cute.
Nevertheless, an ad was placed.
(It was a big litter.) Some were found homes, but a couple of them we had
come to believe we especially understood, and possibly were understood by.
It was as plain as the milk in your bowl that only our particular,
inimitable love would do, and so on the very brink of giving them away --
presumptive new family standing by, interested, willing, undoubtedly
confused, having traveled miles probably, but clearly untrustworthy -- we
backpedaled: Oh that kitty no you don't want that kitty that's not a
very friendly kitty at all well thank you for coming isn't it warm today
have you tried the pound?
I HAVE BEEN WRITING THIS WITH A CAT ON MY
LAP.
And I am eating dry cereal out of
the box. And I am barefoot. And need to shave. Just to give you the
complete picture.)
I have been called a
cat person -- not in the Val Lewton horror-movie sense of the term,
at least I thought not, but in the sense of someone who is . . . not a dog
person. (Though like a cat -- like a dog, for that matter -- I am barefoot
and, albeit temporarily, whiskered. And eating bits of dry food without a
utensil.) I am not a cat person -- just as I am not not a dog
person -- but rather a person who happens to live with cats. I could
happen to live with dogs, but I don't happen
to.
In my own, no doubt universally
representative experience, it is people who consider themselves dog people
who are the more likely to subscribe to this Manichaean concept, and it is
with a trace of pity not untainted with contempt that they look upon the
cat people, as if we personally lack the rough-and-ready spirit of their
chosen totem. Everyone knows that dogs are the Boy Scouts of animaldom:
loyal, steadfast, true, brave, reverent (not so sure about thrifty --
though there is that whole bone-burying thing); they fetch your slippers
and guard your gate. Dog people will tell you that dogs are smarter than
cats, by some obscure yardstick of animal equivalence, but I have known a
lot of 4.0 students in my life and brains aren't everything.
Notwithstanding having been the subject of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical,
cats consistently get the short end of the pop-cultural stick, which for
that matter might include being the subject of an Andrew Lloyd
Webber musical. As opposed to the dog's slobbery chumminess, they are seen
as aloof, preening, distressingly independent yet in the thrall of basest
instinct: I must eat the Tweety Bird, I must eat the Tweety Bird.
They would not pull you out of a burning building. They would not run six
miles to try to make you understand that Timmy is in trouble. On the one
hand: Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Old Yeller. On the other: Garfield, Toonces and
that puppet on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. (Meow meow meow
meow, Mr. Rogers, meow meow meow meow.) Dog soldier but
cat burglar. Thus is stacked the deck. But a cat will not chase you
down the street barking insanely, or rip your throat out, except possibly
by accident, if you're holding one when a car backfires, say, or someone
coughs.
I LOVE MY CATS, BUT I WON'T PRETEND THEY AREN'T a little
irritating from time to time to time to time, full of complaint, careless
of my stuff, leavers of all manner of unwanted gift. They are inscrutable
little things -- though no more so than dogs and pigs and chickens and all
the other not-human animals, whose Weltanschauung is as remote from our
understanding, as permanently hypothetical, as the world of the dinosaurs
or the end of the universe.
Before I
ever knew a cat by name, we had a dog, an unkempt poodle my father brought
home in his hat as a wee puppy before I was even a wee puppy myself; she
lasted a good long time, though I don't remember her as well as I feel I
should. There was also (briefly) a goldfish I won at an elementary school
carnival in a game of skill, which is to say I won it by accident. I don't
remember having wanted a goldfish before then, or indeed the stewardship
of any other living thing. (I certainly didn't take care of the dog, and I
could have taken better care of that goldfish.) Then someone gave my
sister a kitten, which once given could hardly be given away, and there
were other cats after that. So I guess we were dog people and then we were
cat people (and we were raccoon people for a short time, too, but the
truth is we were never really raccoon
people).
As an adult I never looked to
own an animal (a human conceit, in any case); possibly it had something to
do with still-lingering goldfish-death trauma. I did once imagine I might
have a dog, much in the same way I once thought I might grow up to be a
famous architect (known for his secret passages) and marry Yvonne Craig
and/or Elizabeth Montgomery and get around town with a jet pack -- as part
of my eventual bitchen lifestyle. But I never could get that lifestyle
stuff together. My neighborhood is full of lifestyle people and their
lifestyle dogs, dogs on parade -- you are what you walk. They know
what they're about, these people, or at least what they want to be about,
or want to be seen to be about. My life is perhaps not so doggedly
intentional. All our cats have been strays; they came, they saw, they
stayed. You can go out and choose your breed or you can welcome what
scratches at the door, what jumps in through the window. I didn't grow up
to be an architect or marry a TV star or pilot a jet pack. I grew up to
scribble words and marry Sarah and drive a 17-year-old Volkswagen. And to
have cats -- stray cats, street cats. By and large (it's too bad about the
jet pack), it's fallen out better than I could have devised.
Illustration by Hadley Hooper