The Spoiled Cat

A spoiled cat lived in an apartment in downtown Seattle. The woman who owned this cat fed it salmon everyday and let it lick the extra egg yolk off her plate from breakfast.

The cat slept on the woman’s bed. It was a king-sized bed with a white down comforter. From the cat’s resting place it could see the Seattle Public Library out the window. It was like a holy shrine to books. A glass mushroom cloud lit all night.

In the day, the cat would sit on the windowsill and watch the sea gulls or the men in ties working at desks in the high rise a block over. When the window was open, the cat could smell the Puget Sound.

One day, the woman pulled out her sewing kit. A spool of thread tumbled to the ground and rolled in a furious little circle. The cat pounced on it and before the woman could stop it ate the thread right off the spool.

The cat wanted more. It cried and cried until the woman gave it another.

The cat stopped eating its salmon for dinner and breakfast. It would not lick the breakfast plates. The only thing it would eat was thread. Thread every day, twice a day, in any color you can imagine. The woman would not refuse the cat anything, and she had soon fed it all the thread in her sewing kit.

Days later, when the woman was in class, the cat jumped down from the windowsill and started rubbing itself on the corners in the apartment. It rubbed against the wicker chair where the woman did her reading. A piece of fur from the cat’s right haunch caught on the wicker. It proved to be an exceptionally long piece. As the cat moved the fur lengthened from a centimeter to an inch to a foot to a trail from the bedroom to the kitchen.

When the woman returned the cat was gone. And she found her apartment strung with tabby-colored thread.

At Happy Hour

Jessica, Jessica Allen (new to me, Jess’s friend from church), and I sat drinking $3 margaritas at a bar by the Sound—by a marina, a forest of white masts. There were rows of white hulls, more like fleets of bobbing seagulls than anything else. Expensive seagulls. I ate a bucket of apetizer shrimp and Jess and Jessica both had nachos.

Church. Jesus and church. Every other group discussion I have these days is about those two. Pastor Ellen is trying to take alcohol out of the downtown Seattle Presbyterian community. No more ladies’ club nights or happy hours before Bible study. Ellen is from Texas.

And you know, I can see it. The reason brought to session: some people are alcoholics, and the church should be a safe place to socialize. Social events shouldn’t make this THING harder than it already is.

But there’s this other thing too—a goal of purity, discipline, starvation to perfection. Order. Control, at least of yourself, and, in Ellen’s case, those whom you can influence.

Jessica told me that her cigarette-smoking ponytailed Italian (as in from Italy) fling alerted her to the primary definition of the word decadence: rot.

Decadence, decadence. What is it? Only a clear movement toward death or, preferably, non-humanity.

And Jesus turned whole jugs of water into wine when the partiers were already drunk. And we wine drinkers love him for it. First miracle! Bring out beer and cosmopolitans at night and Bloody Maries with our eggs for breakfast. Mimosas come a little later and keep coming while we tan our thighs and lower backs out in the sunshine. We lay on the ground.

The cryptic Jesus. Nomadic. Who, in my mind, has a gift for skipping stones. Gonna love you all seven days a week and not be cute about it. His blood is wine, for Christ’s sake... over the limit, under arrest.

... or preferably, non-humanity. As Fausto II and III [...] became more inanimate they moved closer to the time when like any dead leaf or fragment of metal they’d be finally subject to the laws of physics.

When Jesus arose from the dead did he have any blood left? Or between the Supper and the flogging was it dispersed in a flood of drunkenness? That culture conservatives would like to keep out of church events.

Jesus on Sundays—when the girls wear soft skirts and sandals that wrap around their ankles. Jesus in the desert not eating. Starved to perfection. Thin ankles.

I left our table two margaritas in and followed a maze of white corridors to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror over the automatic soap dispenser. I had a red glow in my face. A short woman with dark hair looked at me too.

“You are beautiful,” she said. “If my son weren’t so far away, I’d have him meet you.”

And All the time pretending it was a great struggle between the laws of man and the laws of God.


Italics: from V. by Thomas Pynchon