9

Her name was Hidey. Hidey cause she hides. She lived to be 21, in human years. And before she became a tiny 2lb toxoplasma vector she was a Maine coon. She was a full blooded nutcase, one of those one-person one-cat kind of cats that lived like a roommate, only as a roommate that lives in your room on your bed. She spent the later part of her life living on my neighbors roof. They never minded her, she was a phenomenal mouser, and in the years that she spent with us no house in any proximity ever had vermin. She outlived or outlasted about a dozen other cats, some of which were mauled by dogs, some were devoured by coyotes, others suffered intestinal failure, or simply vanished to never return. She just spent so much of her time on my neighbors roof yowling at me every time I walked out to my car or had any business in the front yard, and it was a long unnerving yowl, she didn’t meow; she roared at you in a snide way.

Hidey was my first cat. There exist several photos of me as a sleeping child with a pair of luminescent glowing over my shoulder. In all those photos right next to my sleeping face this dirty-looking furball staring directly into the camera, it’s wide-eyed stare illuminated on the low-resolution image forever by the flash of some two-dollar wind-up camera. Always in exactly the same place she slept fort the first 12 years of my life.

She is and remains one of the most relevant memories of my childhood. I know this because I remember her as a child when I lived in Chino. I remember her as a kitten, hiding everywhere. She would just come out of the woodwork. Like an alien horror film, first a tail here, a foot there and then she was upon you, rubbing her tiny face against yours and butting her head repeatedly; as if her tiny brain were repeatedly trying to climb into your own, but too much flesh and fur kept it from happening. I remember this even as my memories of Chino seem to evaporate in a constant cloud of construction dust. It was this cow-town with a prison. Now it’s a suburban town with a prison. I often wonder if it will just become an entirely suburban town and if they will just give the prisoners a housing tract with higher walls. As my childhood slips into perpetual memory I wonder what happened to all the cows that were there. I wonder if my grandma’s ranch carries the feelings of adventure that it did for me so many years ago. I wonder if the three families that now live there after they divided her property and knocked out the stables know what it is to ride a horse. But I already know the answer to those ideas, and these are the same people that buy dogs, or adopt cats from their local animal shelter. They don’t find them living in medical warehouses.

We got her from a guy named Ray. Ray was my mother’s best friend for many years. He owns this medical supply company that manufactures catheters. They met in high school, they went to prom together. Ray found three cats that day, and named them all. There was Little-ray, after himself. There was Little-mark, after his partner Mark. And there was Johnny-rotten, who wouldn’t come out of the garage. And no doubt my mother, in her infinitely poor parenting felt that Jonhnny-rotten was a perfect pet for a 3 year old. Which in hindsight, it probably was. The truth is when we got her home, she would not come out from under my bed for weeks. Where she continued to remain as this scared angry little kitten that turned into a ball of claws and teeth at the drop of a hat. To this day I still have lasting scars from lacerations that cat left me. But I think at that age knowing there was a tiny little monster under my bed had a strangely comforting quality. Some people say cats are evil. I am not one to contest this, but rather suffice to say in the world that we live in; it takes one to know one.

It was years later before I accepted the feline form as my banner. I can’t say why because I simply don’t know. But the cat and what it takes to be a cat live deeply in the recesses of my mind in a way that I struggle to explain, but I’ll say it like this;

During my interrogation, the police kept throwing out this word over and over again, wondering why some vandal would deface public property with cats, what was their message? What could I possibly be getting at? And as they said it over and over I began to lick my lips at the thought of the word they were using. They kept saying “mayhem.” Mayhem. Mayhem, the deliberate debilitation of a person or system.

Once Hidey brought home a locust. She found it in a small patch of soybeans that an elderly Chinese couple tended. She brought it home alive and played with it like a child’s toy until she eventually dismembered it piece by piece. The locust probably didn’t view the struggle for its life as a game or that the gradual dismemberment of its body as anything less than severe. But Hidey, made it seem almost comical as if it were a flying spring that needed to be gnawed on each time it was pinned down and when her little macabre game was over, that is to say, when the spring had no more bounce left in it, she devoured as a child eating a half-melted candy bar.

The only other animal that I know of to torment its kill are orcas. I’ve never seen them in the wild outside of documentaries but the scenario is the same. Regardless of what one believes ‘Kosher’ to be, a kill is a kill. Miyamoto Musashi knew this, Hidey knew this, and from a very young age I have known this. I wonder often if the design of a higher predator is fundamentally linked to their experimentation with their prey. I wonder the implications that this has for mankind. In all of its glorious self-proclaimed organization we are and remain the only animal to torture. We don’t even eat our torture victims, which I think is the truly heinous crime. In a weird way it lacks wherewithal as if those proponents of this most obscure activity deliberately start something they have no intention of finishing. And say what you will, Hidey fucking devoured that locust.

I think what makes Hidey last in my mind is not that she was a survivor, but the way in which she survived. Eating bugs. Living on my neighbor’s roof. Yowling at anything that gave her a cross look. I remember her eyes, most of all. They were yellow like a career crack-fiend, riddled with this color that would imply jaundice with striped features in the sclera, these two owl-eyes sat on her face with a cutting stare that could peel the paint off a wall. They sat on her face in a way that appeared as if the daintiest cosmetologist had spent hours applying eyeliner to her. The black circles of her face could have been airbrushed they were so immaculate, which gave such a strange contrast as if every day eye shadow and eyeliner had been applied to accentuate her glowing eyes. As if a homeless person had found a crate of MAC makeup and wore it everyday.

In my world, cats are like homeless people. Or at least that what I told the police. We adopt them like orphans, we take them in like a guy that has a bad run, or a divorced woman that’s down on her luck. They’re dejected intelligent mammals which lack the ability to communicate effectively in a human world, where they can’t reach the button on a crosswalk. As a child I used to foster litters of kittens. Whole clowders of stray kittens have come and gone, they get adopted out to go live out their lives in who-knows-where. I owned other cats, show cats, sissy cats that never leave the windowsill. So I imagine when they were eaten by a coyote their life up until that moment was quite comfortable. I imagine Hidey saw the whole parade several times. Each time that same little squint through her mascara’d eyes, as if to say, “Saw the whole thing. It was gory. How are you, dear?”

I would go out and pick up the parts of a bengal, ragdoll, domestic shorthair, whatever to her observant unjudgmental watch. I often wonder if I’ve lost so many cats that I’ve become desensitized to their lives. I like to think that I just understand them in their own terms. A cat is an ephemeral being, some live long and spoiled lives at the hands of overweight middle-aged women. Some are discovered as kittens in the back of a Japanese restaurant to go home to large Mexican families who smother them with affection for years. Some live rich lives from the entrance to a drain at the edge of town. No matter what they come into our lives for one reason or another and vanish to leave only memories. It’s part of who they are and it is important to respect that.

Hidey died last winter. She was 21. She probably weighed 2lbs as I lowered her into the ground in my garden. My garden is a cat-themed garden. I bought two exotic lilies in her memory. There is a ceramic cat statue to mark her spot, though I move it a lot so that only I know where she really is. I don’t know why I do this. Ultimately I hope to be buried in that same garden, virgin so that I may return to the earth without incident. As we all ponder our entrances and exits nothing lasts but time, I am honored to have spent my time with such a graceful spirit and beckon that the kodama look after her, from the far side of the river. As if that means anything at all.