Wild Things

My cat can't get the outside out of his system. The first time we saw him, five weeks old and Oreo-hued, we were told he'd spent his first weeks in the wild. He was obviously good at it since he survived long enough to be found by a police officer. She wanted to keep him but her other cat would have none of it, so she brought him to the animal shelter. This was eight years ago. Coerced into life as a house cat, Cupcake (they also told us he was a female, but the name stuck) is always trying to connive his way out. Lately, he's figured out how to paw at the screen door in the dining room until it snaps open and he can make his getaway.

The dramatic tension arises from the fact that I'm petrified to let him out of my sight. I adore this creature, his soft, black and white fur, the way he head-butts me for attention before collapsing next to me for a good long petting session. A couple of years ago, when I was still drinking, he disappeared. I almost had a breakdown. I downed a bottle of wine and collapsed in a friend's arms, a blubbering mess. Three days later Cupcake showed up at the back door, asking to come in. I said to him, "I know you can't get the wildness out of you so I forgive you."

Almost every day I let him out once or twice under strict supervision. He yells at me and loiters by the door until I acquiesce. He loves to hang out in Dave's garden, chewing on the sunflowers and rolling in the dirt until the white part of his coat turns dingy, but his favorite hideaway is the dark, cool space beneath the front porch. This morning I let him out the back, and after sitting on top of the compost for a while, he made a dash for the front yard. I gave chase but he shimmied under the porch. I got down on my stomach like a worm and peered through the lattice, trying to spot him. There he was, hunched in a far dark corner, pretending to be a bear. The day is warm and sun-dappled, so I decided to wait him out. I took my glass of soda and sat under one of the towering maples that stand sentry in the front yard. 

If it were windy, I wouldn't have dared: These old trees are fragile and prone to losing limbs. Last July, a week before my accident, a massive branch fell to the ground, right where I'm sitting, taking a chunk out of the round boxwood. It weighed almost 100 pounds. That was a year ago. Then, as now, the yellow day-lilies were in bloom, and the purple hydrangea was following suit. The tall scapes of the hostas were festooned with new lavender blossoms. Two of the old, leggy rhododendrons had not yet rediscovered the joys of blossoming, but this afternoon a few white flowers, tinged with pink, bowed from the highest branches. It's gratifying to see a long-neglected garden come back to life, giving me hope that the soul can do the same.

I understand how freedom is catnip, intoxicating, almost irresistible. That same yen is what drove me, in the spring of 1983, to finally cut Stuart loose for the final time. He did not go willingly and tried to woo me back with poems and long, woeful looks. But I had to reassert my independence. He stood between me and the life I thought I wanted, where I answered to no one except my instructors I wanted to hard to please, poets like Louise Gluck, who had arrived as a guest instructor with a head full of neuroses and a purse full of pills.

After breaking up with Stuart, I got a new roommate. I spotted a flyer for free kittens in the communal shower and soon brought home a six-week-old orange tabby. My new friend Margot suggested I name him Cibo. Margot was a freshman. We met in the Backlot, where the MFA students spent most of their time looking for poems in the bottom of empty beer pitchers. Margot was large in both size and spirit, brilliant and bawdy and creatively gifted. She wore a leopard beret atop her naturally blonde bob. She lived in a turn-of-the-century bungalow in Long Beach with her younger sister, her father, a firefighter, and her mother, a creative writing teacher. 

Margot spent many an hour at the trailer. We smoked joints and talked literature and sang along to the Violent Femmes. "Why can't I get just one fuck?!" we'd yell at the top of our lungs. Margot made me laugh, made me feel like I was capable of making friends on my own. I needed this affirmation at a time when I was beginning to chart my own course, apart from the cool embrace of the Darma Bums. I did not know that Margot was tormented by eating disorders and depression, or that she envied my boho- feminist MFA lifestyle, just as she probably didn't know how much I envied her easy genius. I was quite awestruck when, not long after we met, Margot won Seventeen magazine's prestigious fiction contest. She could speak a smattering of several languages, including Italian, which is how she knew the Italian word for "food." (A word to the wise: Do not name your cat Cibo if coyotes stalk the hills. Nothing good can come of it.) 

The trailer was as homey as I could make it. Mom had given me some plants, which I placed on a sunny shelf under the front window. The jade plants in particular attracted an endless thread-line of ants, but I got used to them. Everyone in Irvine Meadows West had ants; that's why you stored your food in hanging baskets. By the trailer's front door was a small sliding window created, I guess, so you could pass drinks or food to the outside without opening the door. I liked to leave the window open for ventilation. One day I came home and found three cats eating my kitten's food. I didn't mind sharing, and pretty soon the entire feline population of Irvine Meadows West--those that hadn't yet become coyote food--was crashing at my place. If I forgot to leave the window open they'd throw themselves against the door to get my attention. At any given time, there or four cats would be crashed in the main living area on the striped velvet love seat I'd bought to replace the homely green vinyl bench. Stuart's cat Freud was among them, and it must have annoyed Stuart no end that his cat was welcome, but he wasn't.

The cats had their human counterparts in the characters and eccentrics who'd drop by unannounced at all hours of the day or night. I fancied my trailer the low-rent version of a Paris salon where bohemians and free-thinkers of all stripes were welcome, particularly if they came packing illegal substances--which is how I came to smoke opium and heroin and freebase cocaine for the first time. My schedule left plenty of time to party. The Juggler, who had a serious girlfriend by now, often stopped by, and brought with him a new member of his troupe, a medical supplies salesman and part time street performer. I'd often watch them practice in the grassy infield. I slept with The Salesman, thus driving a stake through the heart of Stuart's hopes for reconciliation--a bad move, even by my standards, as the Salesman turned out to be an utter cad. As a result of my treachery, the Darma Bums ostracized me once again, and this time, it was permanent. 

There was more bad news. Toward the end of the term, my mentor, Charles Wright, announced he was leaving UC Irvine for the University of Virginia, where he'd been offered a prestigious chairmanship. He'd long felt like an exile from his beloved South anyway. After 17 years in the hinterlands of Southern California, he was going home. Since studying with him was such a draw, several poets opted not to return for the second year, though I was not one of them. 

I opted to leave town for the summer. Given the state of affairs in May, it seemed like the logical thing to do. Sara was going to tour Europe with a youth orchestra, Mom in tow. Since we hadn't returned since leaving in 1966, I decided to fly over on my own, do the Eurail Pass thing for a few weeks, and meet up with them in Paris. Two months of solo vagabonding around Europe struck me as the ultimate expression of my new independence. Maybe, I thought, I'll find some poems along the way. Sal Paradise eagerly agreed to sublet the trailer for a month. The night before I left, Jules, Clare's ukelele-playing ex-boyfriend (she'd since moved on to an artist named Keith), took me out for margaritas in Newport Beach, and I was still drunk when I collapsed into my economy-class seat bound for New York City and then Heathrow.

So many mistakes, so long ago, and I didn't learn from any of them. 

A rustling broke my reverie, and I spotted Cupcake slinking through the foliage. Good, I don't have all day to watch a cat. I got up and walked over to him. As usual, he growled at me because he didn't want to come in. I bent one of the hosta scapes down to his face and tickled his nose. Still holding my glass of soda in my right hand, I bent to scoop him up with my left hand. He growled and hissed. I walked to the porch, Cupcake under my arm like a baguette. But as I climbed the steps toward the front door he began to kick me with his hind legs, which are not declawed, and I squeezed him to my side with my elbow. He began to slip out. My right hand was occupied with the glass, so I tried put him down on a rocking chair, keeping him pinned with my left hand. I managed to put my glass down but when I went to pick him up he sank his fangs into the base of my thumb. This was unprecedented. I howled in pain but didn't release because I knew he'd run back under the porch. By now he was thrashing violently, clawing my arms and biting my hands and hissing like the demon zombie cat in Pet Sematery. The kids heard my howls and came to my rescue; Ethan grabbed Cupcake and Dave led me to the kitchen to wash my wounds.

Cupcake's ferocity left me in a state of shock. "I can't believe he attacked me!" I cried. "What's wrong with him?" I had a deep scratch near the bottom of my pinky scar and my left thumb was sprained from the battle; an hour later it was swollen and sore, incapacitating my left hand even further. Blood still oozed from the puncture wounds. Walking down the hall, I saw the cat standing at the front door. He turned and looked at me and meowed pitifully as if our cat fight had never happened. Yes, I will forgive him yet again, though this time, it will take longer.