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October 27, 2005
I Have Always Relied On The Kindness Of Junkies
At three in the morning, not quite tired enough to pass out, but ready to get under the covers with a laptop or book, I went outside to call the cat back in. All I have to do to get the cat to come in is make that pst-pst-pst-pst sound and maybe call her name. She always comes running. The only time she did not come running turned out to be due to her being stuck in a shed. She mewed and I rescued her.
So last night, at 3:15, when she still had not returned, I knew something was wrong. I went outside and called some more. I checked the shed, but though faint mewing could be heard in the yard, it was not coming from the shed. I heard some rustling near the fence and called to where the noise was coming from.
"Mew. Mew. Meeeew," went the cat, who was on the other side of the fence.
"Oh, Gerty," I said, and poked my fingers through the chain-link to pet her sad, sniffling muzzle. I have never known the cat to go over there before. I suspect she managed to crawl under the fance, probably in hot pursuit of a rat, and then was unable to crawl back.
Knowing where she was and knowing I could not get her back through my yard, I went outside and over to the neighbor's locked driveway-front-yard-spacey. I crouched and called. Ten feet away, a drug deal was happening. No matter. Pst-pst-pst-pst. Come here, Cat.
She responded to my voice but was too spooked to cross the open space she'd have to traverse to get to me. For, I don't know, half an hour, I ran back and forth from my yard to the sidewalk trying to coax her home. When I called from my yard, she'd immedeately press against the fence, mewing with desperation to get through to me, but as soon as I came around to call her from the front, she'd become tentative and crouch behind the wheel of a car, blinking sadly at me but too scared to move.
I must have looked just the depth of patheticness-- a messy, unscrubbed girl, crouched on all fours in the street, calling to her lost cat. The drug dealer asked me for a cigarette with a look of protective concern on his face. "Lost your cat?" he said. I told him I could hear her, but I couldn't get her to come back. I didn't have a cigarette on me, so I told him to wait and I'd run in and get one.
"You're really looking for that cat," he said, as I held out the pack to him.
"Yes, I am," I said. "And if you could do me a favor--"
"Yuh," he said. He might have been almost laughing.
"--when you pull out," I said, nodding towards the tricked out pimpmobile he'd been leaning against, getting things out of, putting things in, "please just double-check that my cat isn't under your car."
He laughed a little. "Sure thing," he said. I saw that as he teetered off, doing the wobbly-legged pacing he'd been doing all night, he kept stopping and angling his head. He was checking under the bodies of all the parked cars. I know the cat wasn't under any of them, but I didn't tell him to stop. I didn't want to seem ungrateful.
I went back in to my yard to talk to and calm the cat. I came back out. An acrid-smelling junkie who'd been periodically coming over to talk to the dealer was now crouched down, calling "here kitty kitty kitty, here kitty. tnuck-tnuck-tnuck. here kitty," and rubbing his blackened fingers together as though suggesting to the cat that between his fingers he held something of interest. He seemed so genuinely concerned. "She's spooked," I said to the junkie, consolingly; he seemed to be taking the cat's indifference to heart.
The homeless man who sleeps on the stoop of the corner building had, by now, grumbled awake and come and tottered over to join the search party. I handed out cigarettes like a matron of the community handing out hot coacoa and doughnuts to a search party looking for a lost boy scout. At five in the morning, the junkie, the hobo and I crawled around on all fours calling to the now petrified cat while the drug dealer slowly paced the street, checking under cars.
The thing is, the cat, before the search party had gotten going, had come pretty close to the fence, and I knew that all the commotion was scaring her and that if everyone would just get quiet and go away, she'd probably back home in five minutes. But I was so moved and touched and grateful for their neighborly concern that I couldn't tell them that. Besides, it wasn't like these were neighbors from the building next door who I could thank and tell to go home to bed while I handled it. What else were they going to do? Where else were they going to go? I didn't want to be rude. The junkie, who I sometimes see panhandling on 16th street, was now extending charity to me. How could I turn that down?
By six, the search party, weary was breaking up and staggering off. The drug dealer was the first to leave, peeling out in the pimpmobile after checking underneath it first. Then the homeless man, then the junkie.
"When they" the junkie said, meaning the people in the house next door, "come out, you can get in."
I nodded.
"You'll get your cat, " he said saddly, and staggered off.
Ten minutes later, the street was empty. Apart from the lowing of the garbage trucks that had begun their morning creep down the avenues,it was quiet. I sat down and called to the cat with my eyes closed. She bulleted out from the neighbor's yard and through the front gate that leads to my own, as I expected she would, once the neighbors' well-meaning commotion had quieted down.
Posted by hissycat at October 27, 2005 07:57 PM
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Comments
Respect yourself, or no one else will respect you... Ebotte
Posted by: Ebotte at November 22, 2006 02:00 AM
Good clothes open all doors... Roman
Posted by: Roman at November 24, 2006 02:57 PM
Good clothes open all doors... Roman
Posted by: Roman at November 24, 2006 02:58 PM