Black Cat, White Man

I'm tired, almost too tired to write. I'm still wearing the jacket I wore when I went out to pick up the thai food I had for dinner, the one I didn't take off when I got home because my living room doesn't ever quite want to heat up, the one I eventually wound up napping in on the couch I got for free from a client. The nap was a few minutes of blissful obliviousness. The jacket is blue and slightly clean. Why don’t we wash coats and jackets as often as we wash shirts and pants?

The couch is a green monstrosity that is too small in which to totally lose myself. In a perfect world I’d have a couch that swallows me whole. It would envelop me so completely that not a single Earthly distraction could possibly distress me. Like some sort of mysterious jungle creature that sits idly among the vines and ferns and appears to be a place for weary adventurers to lay down but is actually a monster that devours its victim by wrapping him in soft pillows and conforming cushions. Its cry the sound of a Sunday afternoon baseball game on television. It digests him the way a cloud swallows a flock of balloons and every once-in-awhile it belches out a small pile of broken pretzels and quarters.

Speaking of not fitting into things, I’m reminded of the day I was home on a visit from college and decided to take a bath. Nothing extraordinary about our bathroom at the time, aside from the various objects inside the medicine cabinet, that favorite place of guest-snoopers and curiosity devils. Although all medicine cabinets are home to numerous stories there weren’t any bestsellers on the shelves of ours. It was a middle class bathroom in a middle class neighborhood in a middle class town. A sink, a shitter, a tub, and the occasional bacterial infection.

The tub was only notable because it was a favorite hangout for our diseased cat, Angus. You’d charge into the bathroom in the process of unzipping and unsheathing, thoughts a thousand miles distant and suddenly you’d be jolted by a small black cat sitting in the middle of the tub. That was Angus, small and sleek, as serene as a pharaoh and immobile as a statue of one. Just sitting, doing nothing but blinking in the slow carefree way only cats are able. If your mind was sufficiently distant it would scare the shit out of you, that freaky little animal lolling away the afternoon in the tub. It would shock you, because of the starkness of his black feline form there in the whiteness of the tub and surrounding tiles. He’d turn his head at you in slight irritation at the interruption and you’d stare at him for a few moments, penis in hand, cat in the tub, and then you’d both move on.

Angus died of cat AIDS after too many late night fights. (Either that or he was sharing needles. Seriously, click here: http://www.vet.cornell.edu/fhc/brochures/fiv.html) After he was diagnosed the vet told us to keep him inside but we were too lazy to bother much about that.

I don’t know what compelled me to take a bath but that’s what I did. The entire act was an exercise in both determination and grade-school physics. I don’t think I was motivated by a desire to get clean, as any sensible person my size would use the shower for such a practical purpose. I’m tall. I have long legs. I could sit in the bath but my knees were out of the water. I could wash my ass and ankles just fine, but to get my knees wet I had to straighten my legs, awkwardly pushing up my back. This part wasn’t so bad. But then, to get my shoulders and head wet I had to slide down on my back and put my legs up against the wall. Only after I was straddling the faucet like a teenage girl would my back and shoulders and head be wet. I was a loaf of bread in the sink; I didn’t belong there. But somehow I managed to sufficiently wash myself, coloring the water an unpleasant dirty, soapy gray. The color of bath water. And I had to wonder who the hell takes baths? Small women, kids and midgets, that’s who. And babies, but unlike bread, they actually DO belong in kitchen sinks.

I should probably take off this coat before it gets too dirty.