bartender slams the bottle down. He reaches under the bar and presses a button. The music stops. Every head in the bar turns toward him, toward the two of us. He waits for a hush to come over the meager crowd before pointing at the door and shouting, “Get out now!”
I pretend not to have heard him. I become totally still. I say nothing. I just sit in my stool and stare blankly at the bottles in front of me. They are assembled in tiers, a Roman senate of psychoactive beverages. The bartender picks up the vodka bottle. He walks out from behind the bar. He unscrews the cap. He takes a swig: he spits it at me. It soaks my right shoulder and stings my neck. I don’t move. He takes another swig and spits it at my face. I close my eyes. He circles me clockwise, continuing to fire eighty-proof loogies from every direction. Some people are watching but no one reacts.
Leaving the bar is not an option I consider. But how can I extract myself? I can’t allow this bartender to assault me with whatever items he has on hand. Is there someone I can appeal to here? As another jet of burning liquid grazes my left thigh, I instinctively slide my hand into my pocket in order to protect my cell phone. Suddenly it occurs to me—I could transport myself out of the bar without leaving. I pull out the phone and dial.
“It’s Joseph. I am at the XYZ Bar.”
“Oh yeah, Joe?” replies my boss, with a rasp. “You figure out how to get this memorial going? Tell ’em this guy just dropped dead.”
“The bartender is spitting liquor on me,” I state.
“Oh yeah? Spittin’ on you? Well, Joe, those motherfuckers over there are crazy. That’s all right. We don’t have to do it over there. We can do it over at, uh, Saint Mark’s.”
Now that this pronouncement has been made, I no longer have business here. I return the phone to my pocket, turn, and walk with matter-of-factness out the room, down the stairs, and out the door onto East Fourth Street.
I wander around the East Village, which is quietly bustling, alive with crepuscular chatter. I stop intermittently to sit on the stoops of strangers. I cook up plans. Revenge plans. Maybe I could return to the bar with a Super Soaker squirt gun, I think. ‘That’d learn ‘im. And with which liquid might I fill it?
As the night air dries the liquor and saliva from my skin and clothes, my rage wanes. Eventually I resolve simply never to darken the door of the XYZ again.
The next morning I wake up. I reach over and pull the check my boss gave me out of my jeans. The numbers he wrote were already jagged and wild and now they’re blurred from vodka. But they’re still legible. I walk over to the bank. I deposit that check. It bounces.
CAT LADY
“I am not a cat lady,” my mother declares, a bag of Whiskas under her arm and a Maine Coon at her feet. She marches through the laundry room to answer the lament of a portly calico who is kept locked in the pantry. “No, you stay out here, Don Diego,” she cautions the Maine Coon. “Mrs. Gummidge has yet to reconcile herself to other cats. Thus she remains in self-imposed exile here in the pantry.” My mother manages to slip into Gummidge’s chamber without Don Diego. “Well, Gummidge. You didn’t finish your white albacore. Why didn’t Gummidge finish her white albacore, pray tell?” She directs the question to the calico, while referring to her in the third person—the way, in Batman, that Alfred speaks to Bruce Wayne. Master Wayne wishes not to entertain any guests this evening? “Gummidge desires that I take this tiresome tuna away, and present her, in its stead, with some fresh Whiskas—or perhaps some Science Diet? Yes, Gummidge need a new snack.” She moves from butler talk to baby talk. “Gummidge finished with dat tunie. She done.”
My mother emerges from the pantry, the china plate of abandoned albacore in one hand, the now slightly lighter package of Whiskas in the other. She is wearing a calf-length pink cotton skirt and a discarded t-shirt of my brother’s that bears, down the front, the word “paranoia” six times. Her hair hangs down to the middle of her back. Though it is gradually becoming more and more white, for years it was a deep copper, with just two silver streaks that framed her face. The streaks had been a lineament of her icon in my childhood; several of my classmates had believed her to be a witch, citing the strange strands of silver, symbols of age that stood in contrast to her still-youthful face. My mother has some wrinkles now, but her lips remain overly full, defiantly young. Only months ago, a Walmart one-hour-photo clerk mistook her for my wife. She is an age chameleon.
“Sit down, Carol,” she says to my aunt, the sister of my father, who waits for her in the kitchen. “I’m just going to run upstairs and quickly change.”
“Take your time,” Carol calls.
My mother is usually an obsessive hostess, assaulting guests with hot chocolate and pillows, items of sustenance and comfort. But Carol comes over almost every day now. She is slender, with recently bleached blonde hair, and red lipstick. She had once embarked on a Broadway career, but aborted it, opting to marry and raise a family. Still, she is revered by community theatergoers throughout the greater Kalamazoo area. Her husband, Terry, recently had an affair with a local country western singer named Debbie. He is now divorcing Carol. She has taken to self-medication, sometimes preparing cocktails of vodka and various anti-anxiety pills.
My mother returns in a purple skirt with intricate black designs, a luminous gold short-sleeved shirt, and alligator boots. “Want to visit Gummidge?” she asks.
“Oh, not right now, Kit,” Carol replies. “In a bit, though. I’ll see plenty of her.”
Carol has agreed to help my mother take Mrs. Gummidge to the vet’s this afternoon.
“She’s awfully forlorn, you know,” my mother says.
A one-time filmmaker, poet, mixed-media artist, and high school English teacher, my mother has not created work since our house burned down in the eighties, destroying her reels, assemblages, and manuscripts. Since that time, she has, however, devoted herself to the 24-hour-a-day interactive performance/installation of caring for, dominating, and dramatizing the lives of cats. While critics, historians, neighbors, and the mailman all classify this piece as quintessential Theater of the Cat Lady, my mother often entitles it I Am Not a Cat Lady. This could be understood as a surrealist strategy, akin to that which Magritte employed in his painting of a pipe with a caption that reads, “This is not a pipe.” My mother, the Cat Lady Who Is Not, wishes to keep her relationship to the cats unexplained.
My mother summons the void in her baby talk to cats. A militant grammarian, she is prone to suddenly deny her understanding of subject/object and past/present, affect a speech impediment, and recite Elmer Fuddian incantations. For example, I remember once doing my middle school algebra assignment at the kitchen table, in the company of my mother and our cat, Cubby, a former stray with one ear who bore a remarkable resemblance to a baby bear and taught himself to sit up and beg and wave for treats, play fetch, and other circus bear tricks. As Cubby blankly watched my pencil in the erratic movement of equation solving, my mother announced, in baby talk, “Cubs don’t do ‘rithmatic! No. Him don’t do no ’rithmatic.”
