walnut, CA and ben the cat…

ben the cat

ben was a neighbor cat who was neglected and ignored, so lauren took him in. he was amazingly affectionate, slept on  a shaded corrugated metal roof next to the horse stalls in the backyard of lauren’s 1-room apartment when it wasn’t too cold outside, and would have come with us to colorado if he hadn’t been taken by a coyote or great horned owl.

another hot day in walnut

walnut was a great little community. everyone had horses there. there was a park with a corral, and a trail that wound through the small suburb for the residents to ride around. I remember a huge hill as well abutting the neighborhood completely covered in mustard plants. the only downside was how hot it would get during the summer. weeks on end of 100+ days. not good for laurens who don’t sweat, which is why she looks so miserable in the above photo.

lauren and ben, walnut, CA

lauren took to feeding him and caring for him, and he took to lauren, sleeping in the apartment and hanging out all day long, so we asked the neighbor who he technically belonged to if he (the neighbor) wouldn’t mind if we adopted him (the cat), and he said ‘fine I don’t care’ which made us very happy indeed. I think it was just a few days later he disappeared. we walked all over walnut for three days following the trail and through the mustard plants looking for any sign of him, but of course we never found anything.

panting cats freak me out

here’s ben panting and taking a break from play in the shade. anyway, losing him hurt like hell, but somehow losing him to a predator like an owl or coyote made it different, slightly easier to take somehow. this is hard to describe. some weird humanistic impulse to use nature, what jack london (a titanic asshole, btw) called ‘red in tooth and claw’ and the barbaric cruelty of how there has to be a predator-prey relationship at all, as an escape, a defense mechanism of sorts. but it’s definitely fucked up, IMO. I mean, why do we have to eat? if we didn’t have to eat, we wouldn’t have to war over resources. actually that’s stupid, we’d still find other shit to war over probably. but getting to a point where one realizes one take up space in this world is not an easy thing to swallow, so to speak. and some people, once they hit that wall, aren’t able to climb over it and justify their own existence. it’s why we went vegetarian for almost 8 years. (though we continued to eat eggs and fish. thank you scott pilgrim for that brilliant scene with the ‘vegan police’.)

out of focus ben

anyway, ben was wonderful and sweet and we wish he could’ve come with us to colorado. he would’ve loved the long walks we took around the gravel pit with blue, misha, sophie and beau-beau.

you’re not allowed cats in university housing…

there's figaro on the left, requiring Lauren's protection

and so we skip several years ahead to our first cat, figaro, a male tuxedo stray mutt. these are the only photographs we have of him. (we had some others but they’re lost; a shame, too, really; they were of him cradled in Lauren’s arms after he’d had a bath – really cute.) there’s Lauren trying to keep the neighbor cat from picking on him again. these photos were taken outside my summer campus housing at USC, cardinal gardens, between my sophomore and junior years.

Lauren trying to keep him in the apartment

that means Lauren’s either 20 or 21 here. holy shit…

my brother found figaro hiding underneath a parked car at his school parking lot one day, separated from his mother and meowing like a motherfucker. (if you object to profanity at all, holy shit is this the wrong blog for you.) at the time he was so small he could fit in the palm of your hand laying flat. he couldn’t have been more than two or three weeks old. I happened to be visiting when my brother’d rescued him, to do laundry probably, and seeing as it was pretty clear he didn’t really want to keep him, I brought him back to my apartment.

I was about to make a discovery about raising cats, it turned out, at the grocery store. a clerk I talked to about kitten food recommended KMR, a synthetic kitten nursing formula you can buy in a tin, with just a dusting of wet food occasionally to get him weened. rather than bottle feed him (that skill I didn’t develop ’til way later) we just let him lap the KMR up off a dish. I don’t know if it was the age at which I entered his life or if the KMR had something to do with it, but he imprinted onto me. he followed me around everywhere. he slept with me, slashed my hands and wrists so bad during playtime as to leave scarring that worried classmates and strangers, let me hold him interminably, and even tried to follow me to class a few times.

he was content being indoors when he was younger, but the older he got the more pissed off he became about being kept inside. he was supposed to be an indoor cat, because you’re not supposed to have cats in university housing and it was rumored the school policed up any cats found on campus housing property and took them to the pound, but he constantly escaped whenever the door was opened. eventually we managed to find an uncomfortable equilibrium where he was either indoors most of the time when I was in class or outside with me when I wasn’t. but he hated the supervision, and my roommates didn’t catch him up every time when I wasn’t around.

by my junior year, he was around 8 months old and living with me and three other guys in another apartment still in the cardinal gardens complex. he still managed to escape now and then, and when we wouldn’t let him out he would claw at the door and complain incessantly, causing one of us to break down and take pity and let him out again. I think this was a mistake. one thing I would’ve done differently is I would’ve had the presence of mind to get him neutered, but back then I didn’t know shit-all about anything animal-related. my only experience had been with sasha and shiela years before, and there it was mostly, as painful as it is for me to admit, out-of-sight-out-of-mind mixed in with moments of cowering and crying as the old man plied his cruelty. Lauren always lets me off the hook, saying I didn’t know better and that I wasn’t the person I became or wanted to be, that living in tyranny held no power to either protect them or not behave in a manner that, as countless psychological studies talk about, was typical of abused children. I’m less so inclined, but whatever. Skipping…

I honestly don’t know how else I would’ve done things differently. certainly the neutering would have calmed him down some, I should think. I know he would’ve kept on complaining, but had I, we, been more disciplined about keeping him inside, we might’ve been able to keep him with us longer. at least long enough for us to have gotten out of campus housing and moved to a proper apartment in the boonies, like the place we eventually found in walnut, CA.

at some point figaro either got in a fight with an infected cat or, as the veterinarian tried to tell me, I think, to help ease some of my pain, he was born with leukemia, contracted from his mother (it occurs to me I’ve never asked Lauren if this is even possible and she’s never volunteered). so in the end figaro was with us just past 1 year, right around the time I was moving out of cardinal gardens.

again, as with sasha and shiela but for different reasons, I wasn’t ready. not in where I lived, what I did for a living, what I knew about caring for animals, who I was. the one place I was ready, it turned out, was in here (pointing to chest). I didn’t go out and adopt figaro. I just didn’t turn away from a situation. I like to think that most people likewise don’t turn away, but in a city like los angeles I think most people can’t help but feel like they’ve got too much on their plates already. I still regret the way it turned out, but I don’t regret not turning away.