cheek

Stability Before Departure

One of the last things Chester vomited on was my precious copy of Alan Dugan's Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry. During those last weeks, I was tolerant of his vomitorium habits, and in this case I did my best to clean the book off -- though now its cover is curled into a cylinder. But -- today I took it down off its high shelf, flipped through it: one poem stuck to me, and possibly even explains his last moments.

Here's how it went: on Friday (10/9) -- after several days of nibbling at food then stumbling away -- Chet devoured his last meal (raw chicken livers) and never ate again. On Sunday he stopped drinking, and thereafter he became progressively paralyzed -- first his back legs, then his front. He was silent and stoic all the while, even giving me his "smiling eyes" and an occasional wink as I carried him around for a "window tour" or carefully placed him in his litterbox for a piss. He liked it when I was his slave, but he still didn't want me all up in his grill during hospice time. I kept putting out food and water, of course. He ignored the food, but would crane toward the water and try to rest his head over the bowl -- I ended up putting water in a saucer so he could do this more easily without drowning himself.

On Wednesday, I came home from work to find he'd pissed himself and tried to crawl away from his puddle. I cleaned him off with a warm facecloth, and put him in his litterbox again. I heard him pee as his head sorta slumped on its corner -- I ducked my own head to his level and said, "That's the stuff, eh Chet?" and he winked. Then I took him out, put my throbbing head in my hands, picked up the phone, cleared my throat fourteen times, and scheduled a euthanasia for the next day, at 3:20pm. Alice suggested I tell Chet about it, so that's what I did next, weeping like a chump all the while.

A few hours later, he started calling out to me. The first time he did it, I freaked: a full-throated meow coming from the paralytic in my bedroom. I turned him over and hung out with him, asking him what's up. He gave me this odd, intelligent gaze -- none of this blank-delirium stuff you hear about as cats slip into darkness. I could tell he didn't really want me crowding his space though -- he was never much of a cuddly lap cat -- but I kept myself nearby, and every now and then he would yell. Sometimes it would be two or three gaspy attempted meows followed by the real thing -- this became a reedier, more incompetent sound as the night went on. Like a poorly tuned kazoo. Eventually he would just turn his head toward me and open his mouth.

I tried putting water or tuna juice in his mouth with a dropper, but this fluid just ran over his cheeks. Several hours of this, interrupted by his occasional passing out -- and remember I'd already scheduled his euthanasia for 3:20pm -- I could feel grim death creeping into every crevice of our apartment, and I became nauseous & maybe a little delirious myself. Around 4am I was climbing the walls -- should I just call a cab and get him an emergency euthanasia? Is he in pain? What's he trying to tell me?

I tried to convince myself he was yelling the feline version of "God damn everyone in the whole fucking world and everyone in it but you, Carlotta." but I still had no idea: after years of being able to read his every vocal nuance, I couldn't do it now. At 11:20am, blank and dizzy myself, I had to use the bathroom, so I put my hands and head on him & said "alright Chet I'll be right back" -- he turned his head and opened his mouth again. When I came back to him, with the toilet still flushing, he was dead -- tongue out, rictus grimace, no breath, no heartbeat. All I heard was the saddest music in the world: my toilet's cistern refilling.

So anyway today, ten days later, I stumbled over that Alan Dugan book -- that last (literal) target for his bile before his decline, and found this poem, which maybe Chet selected for me before the end ha ha ha:

I have begun my freedom and it hurts.
Time opens out, so I can see its end
as the black rock of Mecca up ahead.
I have cut loose from my bases of support
and my beasts and burdens are ready, but
I pace back and forth across my right
of way, shouting, "Take off! Move out
in force!", but nothing moves. I wait
for a following storm to blast me out of here
because to go there freely is suicide!
Let the wind bear my responsibility.

Last words for Chester

Hey Chet, Alice tells me I should let you know what’s going to happen to you before I bring you out the house. So here goes nothin’: you’re in a very bad way, and you ain’t gonna get better, so I’m taking you to be euthanized. That means you’ll have a needle in your leg, then you’ll die, except you won’t know it.

I have no idea what happens after you die, and neither of us is the type to comfort ourselves with paradise dreams, or a mirrorhouse of lives replicating into eternity. In all likelihood, you’ll just stop existing. But you’ll be preserved in my brain, plus the minds of many awesome folks who knew you through the years. Few of them will forget your cynical stare, your lust for nutritional yeast, your heroic slaying of bats, your galloping & chattering after laser-pointers, your hilarious fascination with the Beast With Two Backs, your dense luxuriation as deep fingers remade your lower butt. Chet, you’re like W.C. Fields crossed with Lawrence Tierney: – no curling into laps and purring for you! And only the best-quality folks loved you.

If you’re frightened about the end, well... so am I. Take comfort in the fact that I’m gonna die someday too, and I’ll be even more spooked when that time comes. I might be pouring piss out my boots, tell you what, and if there is that mirrorhouse I trust you’ll get reincarnated solely to laugh your ass off at my boot-piss. Today though, I’m carrying you down Lyndale in a box, and returning without you. Strange and sad, but despite all the grim indignities this week brought us, I’ll be celebrating your life in style. Dancing with tears in my eyes.

For cats like you, life is sunbeams, swagger, hunting, and voyeurism. Then... well this.

It's kinda like she's Joan Bennett in Suspiria!

The town that made Margaret Thatcher.

Strange, though, that the policies she pursued, consciously or not, destroyed nearly everything her father held dear: the established order, stability, community. Can you see evidence of that destructive energy from the corner of North Parade? The longer you stand there the more you can convince yourself that you can. There was once a pub over the road and a Catholic church. The pub has gone now (though there is another, desperate-looking one a few yards along - the Nobody Inn). The view now takes in a vast Asda and a Lidl. There is not a family-owned shop in sight. In the absence of society, things can fall apart. Along the high street from the Methodist chapel in Grantham, every shop window these days carries a police notice: "Warning, handbag thieves operate in this area."

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all.

:: Archibald MacLeish

Obviously it is the beginning of National Poetry Month. Should be pretty obvious why I started off with this one...

In the street

Helen Levitt is dead at 95. Such a long, strange and secretive life, and her greatest work still yanks our heads around six decades later. As many of you know, I'm pretty cynical about photography as an "art". Levitt's one of the handful I've encountered who knew how to do it right -- simultaneously capturing and composing the sublime as it chalked the sidewalk or dandled menacingly off the porch. Her only peers as shutter geniuses are (were) Berenice Abbott and Diane Arbus, which suggests that women always have the jump on men in this medium.