Drinking With Cats
May 5, 2012 § 4 Comments
It’s difficult drinking with cats. They won’t do it willingly, no matter how you disguise it, unlike dogs, happy to guzzle beer till they pass out like the freshmen boys they so resemble. You cannot offer a cat a tuna martini. You have to inject the spirit directly into a vein (after having caught the ferocious feline and swaddled it in a towel), and then, if you’re not careful, it’s sober one minute, blotto the next.
I’ve discovered from patient experimentation the amount equivalent to a middle-aged female human’s first drink—a few drops, what you’d wipe off your mouth with a napkin—and to wait a civilized 45 minutes before doing it again. And they, in turn, have learned to stay on the bed with me, our version of the 70’s sunken conversation pit, and gaze at me enthralled as I repeat iconic stories from my youth. Stories that sound so paltry compared with a fatherless brown boy escaping Vietnam in ’75, a Croatian 17-year-old tricked into prostitution and held captive until the day she finds a cell phone and texts Nicolas Kristoff, a young American raised Mormon, now recovering in Las Vegas. But the cats are not aware of my inadequacies as an entertainer.
Drunken cats. They know better than to show it. They let their eyes close slowly in that dreamy way they’ve perfected; they don’t try to go anywhere; and if they must get up, and reveal some loss in coordination, anyone could blame it on my habit of strewing vacuum cleaner parts and piles of magazines I can’t figure out which credit card is automatically re-subscribing me to on the designated clear areas of the floor. They knock over my coffee and glasses and the lamp frequently, even when they’re not drunk, so it’s all just more of the same. Sometimes I make them listen to Linda Ronstadt.
Drinking with cats means the cats are even less present, leaving me no choice but to ruminate (in a winey way) on why I choose not to feel my feelings—that phrase that always reminds me of palpating the vaginal folds of an unwilling old lady. But why must I live a life where my feelings are often so unpleasant I have to lob them into the future, where they wait for me with 10 friends and a fuck-you attitude? I’d like to conduct a survey of chronic depressives asking this question. Why? What is the meaning, the reason? I think the answers would be illuminating, if not quite on the level of Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden.
Drinking with cats. You can only do it properly when they’re dead. You drain them of their blood (a steel table with a trench around the perimeter is good for this), and replace it with a dollop of scotch and a generous pour of a yeasty champagne. The scotch lends them a peaty warmth, the champagne the delirious fizz of animation. This lasts about an hour, but during that hour they sing, tell filthy jokes, and talk mysteriously of the sentient shadows on the other side—the color of velvet they always say, as if velvet has a color—then, alas, the party is over.
Yes, they speak. They sound like nails hammered into rain.
The rare cat will rise as a vampire after death, and be a priceless companion. She, too, can speak, although she won’t. She is immortal, and as such gives your own mortality another kick in the ass, making every day of your life seem like more of the same: never quick or clever enough, overtaken by the merciless future…but she is so beautiful! She walks like a queen, and her eyes…
The vampire cat feeds off small rodents, which she enthralls with her uncanny powers, ensuring the victims are too weak to totter more than the few steps from their holes to where she patiently waits, curled atop the slick pages of the newest Elle. Vampire cats never excrete, nor do they mew, meow or yowl; they look out north-facing windows with the serenity of a jade Buddha; and though they require a dark closet in the sunlit hours, if you get in there with them you can hold their chilly corpses in your lap and think about what it will be like when everyone you love is dead.
And if everyone you don’t love is not dead, the vampire cat will take care of it. They don’t care for human blood but they can open an artery, not to mention charm their way into any household and make all the residents think the cat belongs there. I’ve heard of cases where the master of the house lies dead—some intruder, some murderer—but the wife is most upset by the disappearance of this cat, whom she’d never laid eyes on before yesterday but with whom she feels already such kinship, such longing, a soul bond…
I learned most of this on the Internet, in a chat room behind a firewall behind an international auto-parts auction site. I’ve only met a vampire cat once, at a home I was taken to blindfold, after being driven in circles for a dizzying 30 minutes. The cat was smoke-silver, long-haired, with midnight eyes. She weighed 22 pounds. She stared at me, kneaded me with her great paws, claws pricking like somebody else’s conscience, and put dreams in my head.
They’re not easy dreams. The charming man I met last night was killed by barricudas in a flooded estuary in White Plains. My deceased mother-in-law was found wandering in a torn dressing gown through the corridors of an unsafe Oakland hotel. My best friend lost her five-year-old daughter to a self-mutilating disease.
It helps to drink. The cats watch me. I don’t drink too much, just enough to help me adjust.
To what, you say? To what to you adjust? Not having an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, curving to follow the natural line of the rock, and surrounded by exotic greenery? Not having a valet with white gloves who folds up like a collapsible tripod when not needed? Not having money grow under the bed, or appear in the clean laundry, or be diverted from others’ bank accounts in small, regular amounts? Not having love, a condition for which I am already too fragile.
.
Curse of the Cat Woman
It sometimes happens
that the woman you meet and fall in love with
is of that strange Transylvanian people
with an affinity for cats.
You take her to a restaurant, say, or a show,
on an ordinary date, being attracted
by the glitter in her slitty eyes and her catlike walk,
and afterward of course you take her in your arms,
and she turns into a black panther
and bites you to death.
Or perhaps you are saved in the nick of time,
and she is tormented by the knowledge of her tendency:
that she daren’t hug a man
unless she wants to risk clawing him up.
This puts you both in a difficult position,
panting lovers who are prevented from touching
not by bars but by circumstance:
you have terrible fights and say cruel things,
for having the hots does not give you a sweet temper.
One night you are walking down a dark street
and hear the padpad of a panther following you,
but when you turn around there are only shadows,
or perhaps one shadow too many
You approach, calling, “Who’s there?”
and it leaps on you.
Luckily you have brought along your sword,
and you stab it to death.
And before your eyes it turns into the woman you love,
her breast impaled on your sword,
her mouth dribbling blood saying she loved you
but couldn’t help her tendency.
So death released her from the curse at last,
and you knew from the angelic smile on her dead face
that in spite of a life the devil owned,
love had won, and heaven pardoned her.
Edward Field
It has been a disappointment that my cat Lola refuses to consume traditional alcoholic beverages. Most evenings I drink alone.
But recently I have adapted my grandmothers dandelion wine recipe to catnip, and Lola loves it. Brewing is simple, just substitute catnip leaves for the dandelion clippings. My brother grows catnip fresh at home, and this greatly increases the quality of the fermentation. It has a beautiful yellow-green tinge, like a Sauvignon Blanc or a Greek Assyrtiko.
Kitty and I are now sharing a drink and discussing the ramifications of Obama’s pronouncement on gay marriage. Lola is contemptuous of the whole subject. Marriage of any kind is totally abhorrent to her.
She may tell you she finds marriage abhorrent, but if you ask her I bet you’d hear a different story. Why do you think she chews her fur off and gets sloshed on catnip wine by 3 pm? You haven’t discarded your human wife and joined in her in truly daring matrimony, as your attentions to her would lead any female to expect.
I love Charles, he treats me wonderfully, but there is something lacking. As Big Mama Thornton put it: “… he thinks he’s high class, but that is just a lie. He ain’t never caught a rabbit…” He’s so slow he can’t catch a gecko, so cumbersome he can’t chase a squirrel up a tree. I could never marry a creature who lacks such basic skills. -Lola Kitty
There’s always something lacking in a man, Lola. I would suggest the same is true of a tomcat.