And what can our humans know of our work? They see us sleeping all day; they want us on their laps; they pamper and baby-talk us; they believe we enjoy all these unbelievably silly toys; they want us to mouse and stalk and pounce. They want purrs and meows.
If they knew what we do, surely their outsize brains would turn to mealymush. Surely many would never sleep easily again. If they really knew, they would be cutting us open by the dozens in their desire to possess, to acquire, the mechanics of our abilities.
So we play our roles with dignity and panache: We are their puss-puss pet, meow-meow-meeow. And they are just the schmuck with the opposable thumbs who can work the pop-top of cat food tins, and whom, for their oh-so-special talent, we allow to sleep on our beds with us.
Meow meow. We must keep up appearances.
This one today reeks of bad news and breakdowns. I don’t like this one in the living room, this Barrel-Chested Bulldagger who smells like deceit crawling over.
“Shoo,” the Barrel-Chested Bulldagger says to me. “Shoo,” waving her hands to ward me away. I look at her, ears back.
“Oh, leave Moshpit alone,” Ms. D says. I love the twinge of affection in her voice.
“I don’t want him to get fur all over my jacket,” the Barrel-Chested Bulldagger says, hanging her precious jacket on the wall hook. But it’s not the jacket that she’ll have to worry about.
I know Ms. D doesn’t mean to, but I’m constantly bewildered by how she allows such characters through the door to sully her home. A home, such a blessed place, that right now just feels like it’s being vandalized.
Every defiling, no matter how slight the tarnish may seem, contributes to the erosion. Every strike a home buttresses itself against does its damage. It would break my heart if Ms. D came home one day, or woke up one afternoon, and found the home around her worn down and rotting to heck so much that she could not live there anymore. Something in you never recovers every time you leave a home behind, and I want all the bits of my Ms. D.
We must be rid of this chaffing wickedness who’s in the next room. From the get-go, I’ve fluffed and danderized all I can, but damn if the Barrel-Chested Bulldagger is just not allergic.
Plan B: This new maneuver is something that I learned from my pal Lately. Lately’s human, J, was out of town, and J’s roommate/ boyfriend/whatnot was having all these blokes over. Lately is nothing but loyal. One night he’d had enough, and when the erring humans were deep into playing King of the Range, he sauntered over, all lovely fur and purrs. All feline grace and stealth, he sought out the intruding pair of shoes and positioned himself over them. Then, quickly and efficiently, he pooped a perfectly chastising nugget into the shoe. Oh, the hollering and hawing that ensued!
So I creep in. The Barrel-Chested Bulldagger’s boots are in plain view: open invitation. Cherry-red Doc Martens. New, too, from the looks of the soles. I quickly assume the position, straddling the one boot. I squeeze. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I concentrate, focus, and give it another go. It really is difficult trying to poop without the delicious squish of litter between my toes. One more time: Eyes on the prize! I tell myself as I steel my nerves. Rage poop!
Suddenly I hear a screech. The Barrel-Chested Bulldagger has spotted me crouching over her shiny cherry-red boot. I go balls to the wall and squeeze the payback out of me: It’s a touch squishy and smears vehemently across the boot leather. I leap up and dash out of the room while the Barrel-Chested Bulldagger is still in shock.
I can hear her screeching like a banshee. And I can hear Ms. D laughing, deep-belly, falling-over laughter. I sneak a peek: The Barrel-Chested Bulldagger is repeatedly bawling, “It’s not funny”; she’s grabbing handfuls of paper towels and wet-wipes and not doing a good cleaning, either. They will not start and there will be no end. And all I hear is Ms. D laughing and laughing, as if it is the greatest joke, the highest order of slapstick ever, and it is a lovely sound, that laugh.
Ms. D is asleep but I cannot peek into her dreams. Not tonight, not when she sleeps like this. Not soused in such vapors. Passing out is not sleep, and all the doorways are closed. I wonder what she’s dreaming. She whimpers slightly in a minor canine chord. Soon there will be drool, one tendril after another, pooling on the pillow; then there will be the snorting and snoring, and this will surely be followed by her symphony of flailing arms, swatting and clawing, swinging and punching, at whatever imaginary flying bugs are besetting her.
But there is not much I can do for her tonight. So I climb up beside her, put my paws on her belly, and start to knead, moshmoshmoshmoshmosh. She stills somewhat. So I climb on top of her, put my paws on her left boobie, moshmoshmoshmoshmosh. I knead and I knead, slow, rhythmic, and constant, moshmoshmoshmoshmosh. She half-swats at something, then sighs and stills. I keep kneading, now on the right boobie, moshmoshmoshmoshmosh, until I’m sure she’s still and will be for the night. Then I curl up on her chest, holding her in my purr.
Tomorrow is the night of the big caterwaul. We need this night as much as we need kibble, fresh flowing water, green grass, and catnip. The caterwaul is as essential to us as a scratching place, a string to pounce on, a ball to chase, or the occasional small reptile or mammal to torment.
To the uninitiated, it all just sounds like cats yowling in heat, or fighting for turf. Oh, if only they knew the complexities involved. If only they knew how much and how profoundly their futures are entangled with our beautiful racket.
In the caterwaul, we vocalize and we reenact all that we bear for our humans, our friends. We carry the burden of witness: their transgressions, recklessness, unforgivables, inexcusables, every ugly pore and vile gash. And still we are ever faithful, unwavering in our tender hooks. We see each one of them for who they can be, who they might be, who they should be. But still, we adore each of them for who they are.
And in our caterwaul, we purge what we see of them that no one else sees, not even God, who’s always truant, or too busy cooing over newborns in their bassinets, or tending to his legend.
We bear witness to each angle of indiscretion, every shade of shame, the spiraling despair and the leaping joys. We share the burden even when we don’t understand the spectrum of human shortcomings that come into play.
I can see the caterwaul coming already.
My aria is prepared and performed in fine form. At the coda, Lately joins me and we lie side to side, curl to curl, the bitter smoke and prickly haze of our exorcism replaced by the fragrant jasmine and night-blooming lilies of back gardens. Soon, all that will be left is the sniff of dander, the hum of the earth.
Lately and I remember differently this transgression we’re attempting to un-noose, and working together will give us the full picture, or at least some picture.
We are holding on to each other; no, we’re pushing away, not pushing away, trying to feel something outside our skin, to find the point of connection, the crickling synapses of all the nervy bits firing and misfiring, aligning and relapsing. We are simply trying to touch another without spreading our decay or contracting any of theirs. The act of leaving fingerprints. Seems idiot-easy, but how our humans fail. But what can we do?
For who are they but ours, so imperfect and damaged, so ripe with pride and decency, naive as lamb chops? And what more can we do but stubbornly protect them, and simply love them, in all their bullying fragility?
SHAKEN, STIRRED
Jamie Berger
TIME STARTS AGAIN HERE.
“Fucking Daphne.” I barely mumble it under my breath, then turn to serve someone at the other end of the bar. I can see from fifteen feet that she’s already a mess. Martini Monday’s been over for an hour and her friends are all gone, so that makes her my mess. I don’t know how she could’ve heard me, but when I turn back around to her at the bar, she’s taken off her coat and is sitting on her stool, giving me the stink-eye. “Look, Jamie, you don’t have to be thrilled to see me; just pour, baby.” Now I see the shiner, and that both her eyes are red and puf
fy from crying. She’s dressed in girl drag, a Daphne I’ve never seen: a tube top, a miniskirt, fuck-me pumps, pink frosted lips; Daphne as one of those cigarette-swilling heartbreakers who strides in and gets things going. She pulls a blond wig out of her coat pocket, makes a weak attempt to put it on, but then just tosses it on the bar. I reach for the Stoli. She tells me her story.
LET’S GO. WE’LL WRITE THE STORY.
Daphne turns into a tree in Greek mythology, but everybody knows that. Daphne shifts shapes, appeals to gods. Fucking Daphne can be a tricky proposition. Sometimes these stories were even true.
WANT A TASTE OF RELIGION?
There are a million versions of the joke: I like my women like I like my coffee—warm and rich. Well, most people don’t realize it, but they like their martinis like they would never like their sexual partners: ice-cold and a little weak (although lately, I get a lot of requests for dirty and salty as well).
The regulars christened it Martini Monday, a small off-night indulgence amid the decadence of the dot-com boom, and it became a tradition. The crowd was queer, mostly female, and loud. One was a lawyer, another a programmer; others edited tech magazines or wrote lesbian theory and porn, BDSM manifestos, and cyberpunk novels. They loved my martinis because they were easy to drink: cold and a little weak. They drank vodka, so I could throttle the shaker until tiny ice crystals snuck through the strainer into the chilled glasses. Vermouth was but an imagined voice. I’d swish it around in the glass, then shake it all out, then pour in the cold, clear, water-mellowed booze. My martinis tasted like martinis taste to William Powell in Thin Man movies, like the loveliest thing on earth, like a soothing mountain stream. They were martinis that made you feel as if you were an adult who’d learned to really love martinis. But what you were actually liking was the cold and the easy. Maybe that’s how I like my women: oxymoronic: cold, and easy. Daphne was neither cold nor easy, and who wants a hot and complicated martini?
ANJA, 2007
It started the way things start that aren’t supposed to happen. I’ve always been good. In the year we’ve been together, I’ve tried never to be jealous, and I never snoop. When I find his journal open on the couch, I close it; when he leaves his email open, I log out without a glance, disciplined and in love. The only way I can explain myself now is that I did what I’d always wanted to do—to sweat with unease, to guiltily and greedily imagine who and how and how good.
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK ANY OF THIS HAS TO DO WITH YOUR MOTHER?
Daphne was ruled out from the day I first served her in ’95. The reasons for that are vague, beyond her being with a woman and my being married. But I classified her as “friend” from day one. Mine was a classification system as unconscious as it was trained, a convolution of Mom’s feminism, and its rules were simple: One has sex with women for love, women one might partner with forever. Women not loved are not to be lusted after, or flirted with. They are to be thought of as no different from male friends, utterly platonic. If I someday found myself attracted to men, new rules would have tobe written.
SHE’S NOT MY TYPE.
Who was I that Monday night in 1998, three years after I first met her, when Daphne showed up trashed, beat-up, looking for trouble, for me? And who was Daphne? Time, of course, confuses shit all to hell.
I was someone who never learned how to have fun in bed. Daphne was someone who’d never learned how to have fun in a relationship. That’s one way to look at it. But then, who was I to talk? Sarah, my wife of eight years, had left me three months earlier. Daphne and I spent many a Monday like this, talking over the bar—her telling me the misery of her long-term relationship; I, half-there, racked with self-pity, mourning my lost love and a lifetime of wrong priorities, of always making earnest love to one potential life mate after another and never fucking. What a pair we were.
Daphne always told me how she and her girlfriend, Amy, fought, what they fought about. Not with fists—they beat each other up just fine with words—but that drama came in a distant second that night. The shiner was from a stranger on the street who mistook Daphne for a guy and fag-bashed her. When he realized she was a real-life girl, he told her he was so so sorry, I thought you were a guy, and took off in his car real fast.
As I digested this information, it occurred to me that I really was a bartender now—all atrocities were predictable and almost bland. All couples were miserable, and their miseries were generic. I made a note to myself to quit bartending before it was too late, if it wasn’t too late already.
ANJA, 2007
I found the ripped, yellowed corner of a decade-old Wired magazine cover on the kitchen floor, the words “Fucking Daphne” in his lefty scrawl.
Daphne? Fucking? Wired?
Nothing else. For some reason I imagined a phone number written on the back, but what sense would that make, unless “Fucking Daphne” were someone’s full name? “Hi, I’m Fucking Daphne.” Maybe a sex doll? I felt hot, flushed on the back of my neck, and my sides felt warm. Fucking Daphne who?
SOMETHING THAT STANDS FOR SOMETHING ELSE, A CODE LIKE AN “X” STANDING FOR HISTORY.
A Daphne walks into a bar. It’s not the Daphne you know, or the Daphne I know now or knew then, it’s some part of both and a lot of other Daphnes and not-Daphnes. A fucking Daphne walks into a fucking bar. Does she even have dreads back then, or all that ink? I don’t think so, but that’s the only way I know how to see her now, to see us then: It’s eight-thirty, it’s 1998, it’s San Francisco; the Martini Monday crowd has wobbled on home. There’s nothing going on tonight, just me and D holding court in some dark corner bar for our respective sadnesses, which, come to think of it, fill the place quite nicely. Daphne falls in love with me when she’s sad and drunk. I’m a bartender. And she’s a regular. And she’s nearly always sad. So Daphne loves me. Her eyes, red and swollen.
She tells me about the black eye, about how good a day she was having up until then, about sitting on the sidewalk afterward with a steak she’d just bought slapped on her eye, tells me, again, to “just pour, just keep pouring.” Take away all our fancy education, and we’re a regular Jim Thompson novel, a Bukowski poem. I give her medicine, listen, talk a little, give myself medicine—we get medicated. Here, I’m pharmacist, therapist, not customer or client, so I listen more than I talk. But eventually I talk, too. I get drunk and vulnerable, which makes D love me all the more, and I love her for that, for listening and loving, as much as I hate my wretchedness and hers.
After two martinis, we switch to Jäger shots with Stella chasers. This is before the frat boys completely took over Jäger, but still, it’s not our usual. This is a special occasion. And the Jäger does its speedy, crazy, almost hallucinogenic job. I start to sneak my usual peeks to where the ink meets the edge of her stretchy knit. I’ve always loved a tube top. The trashiness of it, the boobness of it. Daphne leans in just a little to give me a better view.
A couple comes in, sits at the end of the bar. Their body language is undoubtedly first date, maybe even one of those new Internet first dates from Salon.com; they’re too upscale for a Craigslist hookup. He has a beer, she a glass of merlot—it’s not starting off well. Watching them and interpreting their gestures lightens our load. They have a second round but don’t grow more at ease with the alcohol. In fact, they seem more tense, he gesturing more broadly, laughing too loudly, slipping into the hard-up hard sell, she sitting more and more upright. They’re done forever after round two. He pays, leaves me a buck, thinking, I’ve already wasted enough on this tight-ass bitch.
AFTER A FEW DRINKS, IT’S TIME TO SPEAK MOROSE CODE.
One o’clock in the morning. It’s just the two of us, the Marilyn wig, which, in our newfound wisdom, we’ve decided suits me quite well, and the juke. We’ve been feeding it all night. Al Green, the Cure, AC/DC, Foo Fighters; so long as it’s sappy or angry, it’s on our list. Then she finally says it.
“I don’t want you so bad, you know, Jamie. I don’t want you forever or anything. I don’t w
ant to be your fucking girlfriend. I just want to know that part of you, the part of you that gets naked and has sex and loses control. I want to know the fucking Jamie.”
I say nothing at first, pour us another drink, turn out the sign, lock the doors, and sit down on her side of the bar. I take my shot, chase it down, watch the room shiver.
I say, “I’d like that, too,” and I reach over and trace the patterns down her chest, reach under her top, cup a breast. We kiss and we kiss some more and then we look at each other and laugh. I glance over at the pool table, raise an eyebrow, and we laugh again. We’ve both seen it in movies, both the rape scene and the fantasy, the porn of sex on a pool table, the gangbang video of sex on a pool table, guy after guy taking his turn, the woman, the “slut,” voracious, unquenchable, soaked. How did they clean up that table? I find myself ruining porn with thoughts like this all the time. Do they just throw the table away after? You don’t make enough cash on a twenty-minute gangbang video to just trash a pool table, do you?
WHAT DID HE WANT?
Women I’m with ask me if I’ve ever slept with a prostitute. I usually lie and say no, not because of shame or because I want to make some kind of impression, but because I don’t remember the details. If I say yes, then they’ll ask me about it, and I don’t want to make stuff up and I don’t want to be abrupt and say, “I don’t want to talk about it.” But what I really don’t want to say is that I just don’t remember. I remember the circumstances, the anticipation, but not the incidents; the talking in the alley, but not the blow job; the seedy reception room, but not the sex. I can’t remember a lot about a lot of things, sex especially. It’s not just that it was with a prostitute and I block it out because I have shame, so forget that interpretation. It’s sex in general, and I don’t think I’m loaded with shame about sex in general, at least not anymore.
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