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dangerpest will have a field day with this one
Sep. 12th, 2002 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wickedfleaIf I started watching Amelie, would I get over the subtitles in a couple of minutes and settle into the movie? I have it rented from Netflix and have kept it for over a month because I just can't get into the mood to watch a subtitled movie. I feel like such a dumbass.
I was waiting at the bus stop and took out my legal pad to start jotting a few thoughts down. When the guy sitting next to me saw the pad he immediately asked me: "Hey, you sellin' stuff? Hey sir, are you sellin' stuff?"
"Um . . . no . . ."
"Oh. Pffft."
And he stalked across the street to the bar. What did he think I might be selling? Knockoff cologne? Falafel? Crystal meth? No, I guess that's more of a west-coast drug. Anyway, maybe I should start carrying stuff that I can sell. "Well, I got this Damn Yankees CD that BMG sent to me by mistake in 1992. It's never been played. How 'bout a buck-fifty? Great, let me get out my legal pad."
I think I'm going to get a cat this weekend. I'm talking to someone at work who does a lot of work with the Greater New Haven Cat Project. If she says that she can get me a good one, I'm gonna go ahead and do it. I don't want one of those defective cats.
I'll have to think of a good name, though. Most of the pets I've known have had stellar names.
When I was a kid, I used to stay with my Grandmother and mentally retarded aunt a lot. We had a big Morris-lookin' orange-and-white cat. We didn't know how old he was, so my aunt named him Zero. Incredibly cool name.
My Uncle Jerry and Aunt Pearl from Houston always had a gang of cats. Jerry's were the best. One of the cats that he fed and let hang around outside was named Y.C., for Yard Cat. His two best cats were Buster and Herman, a couple of trickster brothers who would skid across the hardwood floors as they chased each other and generally raised cain. Jerry always acted like they exasperated him, but he really got a huge kick out of them. Pearl's cats were always jet-black assholes who would hide behind the record cabinet when kids came around. There's just no two ways about it: any cat named Satin Doll Heller is an ASSHOLE. That cat lived to be about thirty. My aunt always signed that stupid cat's name to my birthday cards, and every year I would think, "Christ, is that beast still around?" She was about half bald when she finally knocked off, I think.
I came up with the two best names that I've ever heard for pets. When my mom and John (before he was my stepdad) had their antique shop in the old Smokehouse restaurant, Fool, Grimmett, and I would always spend a lot of time out there, climbing up on the roof to smoke cigarettes and shoot bottle rockets. There was a business across the highway called Rice Equipment. I never did figure out what kind of equipment they made or sold or whatever they did over there. Anyway, they had this big sort of hound-looking dog who would always come over and hang out with us. (I'm totally ignorant of dog breeds. He was tall and had floppy ears and some strange, hairy mole-like things on his face.) The name we gave the old boy was Lester DaMollesta. The funniest thing about the name was that we didn't pronounce DaMollesta to rhyme with Lester like you'd think (like duh muh-LES-tuh); we said it duh MOLL-es-tuh. It sounds a whole lot more better that way. Lester DaMollesta would follow us all around the smokehouse except when we went up on the roof. He just never managed to negotiate the ladder successfully. One day when we were about to come down, Grimmett dropped a big rock off the roof and it crashed on the concrete right in front of Lester DaMollesta's face. We never saw that dog again. We yelled out his name for days, but he never showed back up. I never have truly forgiven Grimmett for scaring off Lester DaMollesta.
The other fantastic name that I came up with was for a cat who used to hang out around my dad's house. Beauregard T. Swank wasn't really Dad's cat, but he came around all the time to score something to eat. I suspect that he was getting fed at a lot of houses; this was one big cat. No one could refuse him, though, because he was just such a cool motherfucker. He was the only cat I ever knew who could really do the Bill the Cat "ACK!" noise. All the poseur cats tried to do it back in the 80s, but Beauregard T. Swank was the real deal. He too just sort of disappeared one day. Come to think of it, a lot of neighborhood cats disappeared around that time. I still suspect those maniac Shappley brothers from down the street.
The dachshund that I had when I was growing up was named Schroeder. Schroeder was another total badass. When he was a couple of years old he got in a fight with a big dog from across the street. He had scars where the hair never grew back on his face and back, but he held his own. Another time we came home on New Year's Eve to find him in shock; we suspected that someone had shot fireworks into the yard. We took him to the vet, who didn't know if he would make it through the night, but Schroeder ended up living to a ripe old age -- probably 16 or so. The gray hair on his face made him a little funny-looking, but he was still a total badass who was known to kill snakes that were foolish enough to venture into our back yard.
Schroeder was one of my two favorite pets. Well, he was really one of the only two pets that were ever really mine -- that lived at my house. After my parents' divorce Schroeder lived with Dad, which always bummed me out because I only got to see him every other weekend -- but it was good because he was at Dad's house, where he always seemed happiest. After my brother died in 1977 (when my parents were still married), we soon bought a new house on Lampkin Rd. and kept the old one on Maple to rent out. I remember one day when we had just moved, Schroeder ran off and we couldn't find him. I was six or seven, and I just freaked. I was practically hysterical -- which was weird, because Schroeder had gotten out of the back yard many times and it had never really concerned me because he always came back. He did eventually show back up, of course. Within another year or so, my parents separated and divorced, which sucked at the time (though I've come to realize that I'd have been even more warped if they'd stayed together), but at least it meant that Schroeder got to go home.
The other pet that was really mine was my cat Abigail. OK, so it ain't Lester DaMollesta, but it's not a bad name. At least it's not Snowball or goddamn Satin Doll or something. Abi was totally, totally cool. She was a beautiful, all-white cat, and could be very affectionate, even with strangers, but she was by no means a kiss-ass. She would slap the fuck out of you quick as look at you, often for no discernable reason. She could be pissed off about my having given her salmon Fancy Feast for the third day in a row, and she'd fume for hours, not saying anything -- and then John would come over and she'd sink her teeth into his calf.
Abi stayed with me through several moves over the years. We got her in about 1978; she stayed with Mom and me when we sold the Lampkin house and moved into the little house on Central. Years later, she stayed with me when Mom moved to Virginia and left me to live in the house and go to State. Then, in 1994, she moved with me to Virginia after I'd crapped out of school for about the fourth time. During her time on Central, she ruled the neighborhood until the very end, when she was pretty damn old. We would hear horrible wails coming from cats outside, and soon afterward Abi would march into the house with a smirk on her face. The only time I knew about her being defeated was not long before we moved to Virginia. I came out of the house one day to find white hair literally all over the front yard. I walked around to the side of the house and found Abi curled up next to the wall. I brought her inside, where she lay on the couch motionless for a couple of days. Finally she did come around and start acting normal. I guess she got a hurting laid on her ass for the first time and had to take a couple of days to get over it. When Abi and I moved into Mom's place in Va., we didn't have a yard or anything, so Abi became a full-time house cat for the first time in her life. About a year later, we moved into a house, but I decided not to let her come out of retirement; she was really old by then.
I lived in the basement of the new house, while Mom and Abi stayed upstairs. In the spring of 1996, my incredible drinking habit and my hatred of my incredibly shitty job as a Burger King shift manager caught up with one another. One morning I woke up to the sound of the phone ringing, looked over at the clock, saw that I had overslept AGAIN, said "FUCK IT" out loud, unplugged the phone, went back to sleep, and never went back to work, even to turn in my keys. Over the next several months I did very little besides drink about a case of Natural Light a day (couldn't afford a 12-pack of Coors Light and several shots of Wild Turkey anymore), eat a little peanut butter and crackers every couple of days, watch the Orioles on TV, and stagger to the bathroom to vomit blood every once in a while. Not long after I'd been in that state for a while, Abi started getting in really bad health. Her hair was matted, her teeth were making her breath smell terrible, and eventually she started losing control of her bladder. We covered the couch in plastic bags and towels, but it was obvious that that wouldn't work for long. So I brought her down into the basement with me. I took her to the vet, who said that there wasn't much she could do for Abi, but she gave me some antibiotics to give her. Somehow she rallied, and though she no longer had much energy at all, she was able to start using the litterbox again. I kept her in the basement with me, though; it was nice to have some companionship. During those months she stuck to me like glue, sleeping at my feet every night. Meanwhile, I was in the blackest depression of my life. The only time I would leave the house was to make the trip to that nasty-ass grocery store in downtown Pulaski for my case of Natural Light. I used to wonder who was going to die first -- me or Abi. I was really hoping it wouldn't be her, because my nerves and spirits were in such a state that I didn't think I'd be able to handle it if she went first. We were a sad case as she creaked over to the litterbox and I (suffering from gout in both feet) crawled across the basement floor to get another beer out of the mini-fridge.
Somehow, after at least six months of fucking around with my mom's head -- I think my abilty to do so for so long was evidence of some heavy-duty codependency -- we managed to get me into a four-day detox in Roanoke and eventually rehab -- in Mississippi of all places. (Strangely enough, their facilities seemed a lot more promising than Virginia's.) In November of 1996 I took a 21-hour bus trip from Pulaski, Va., to Columbus, MS, and checked into treatment. After about six weeks in primary treatment, I transferred into "three-quarterway" and got out on a weekend pass just after New Year's. Mom was in Starkville for the holidays, so she came and got me so that I could have a late Christmas with the family -- Abi included. That crazy cat was still alive, bad breath and all.
After I got out of secondary treatment about three months later, I stayed in Starkville and started making plans to go back to school. Not long after I'd been out of rehab, Mom called and said that she'd finally had to put Abi to sleep. And I was sad to hear it, but it didn't crush me like I'd been afraid it would. I couldn't help thinking -- and I know this sounds like some old bullshit out of Women's Day or Chicken Soup for the Total Sap Soul -- that Abi stuck it out long enough to see that I was going to be OK. And as crazy as it sounds, just the thought of me crawling around that stinking basement and worrying about how I was going to handle it when that old cat died has been enough so far to get me past the times when I get a little thirsty.
And that, my friends, brings an end to Wicked Flea's crazy-pet-names and true-confessions LiveJournal post.
I was waiting at the bus stop and took out my legal pad to start jotting a few thoughts down. When the guy sitting next to me saw the pad he immediately asked me: "Hey, you sellin' stuff? Hey sir, are you sellin' stuff?"
"Um . . . no . . ."
"Oh. Pffft."
And he stalked across the street to the bar. What did he think I might be selling? Knockoff cologne? Falafel? Crystal meth? No, I guess that's more of a west-coast drug. Anyway, maybe I should start carrying stuff that I can sell. "Well, I got this Damn Yankees CD that BMG sent to me by mistake in 1992. It's never been played. How 'bout a buck-fifty? Great, let me get out my legal pad."
I think I'm going to get a cat this weekend. I'm talking to someone at work who does a lot of work with the Greater New Haven Cat Project. If she says that she can get me a good one, I'm gonna go ahead and do it. I don't want one of those defective cats.
I'll have to think of a good name, though. Most of the pets I've known have had stellar names.
When I was a kid, I used to stay with my Grandmother and mentally retarded aunt a lot. We had a big Morris-lookin' orange-and-white cat. We didn't know how old he was, so my aunt named him Zero. Incredibly cool name.
My Uncle Jerry and Aunt Pearl from Houston always had a gang of cats. Jerry's were the best. One of the cats that he fed and let hang around outside was named Y.C., for Yard Cat. His two best cats were Buster and Herman, a couple of trickster brothers who would skid across the hardwood floors as they chased each other and generally raised cain. Jerry always acted like they exasperated him, but he really got a huge kick out of them. Pearl's cats were always jet-black assholes who would hide behind the record cabinet when kids came around. There's just no two ways about it: any cat named Satin Doll Heller is an ASSHOLE. That cat lived to be about thirty. My aunt always signed that stupid cat's name to my birthday cards, and every year I would think, "Christ, is that beast still around?" She was about half bald when she finally knocked off, I think.
I came up with the two best names that I've ever heard for pets. When my mom and John (before he was my stepdad) had their antique shop in the old Smokehouse restaurant, Fool, Grimmett, and I would always spend a lot of time out there, climbing up on the roof to smoke cigarettes and shoot bottle rockets. There was a business across the highway called Rice Equipment. I never did figure out what kind of equipment they made or sold or whatever they did over there. Anyway, they had this big sort of hound-looking dog who would always come over and hang out with us. (I'm totally ignorant of dog breeds. He was tall and had floppy ears and some strange, hairy mole-like things on his face.) The name we gave the old boy was Lester DaMollesta. The funniest thing about the name was that we didn't pronounce DaMollesta to rhyme with Lester like you'd think (like duh muh-LES-tuh); we said it duh MOLL-es-tuh. It sounds a whole lot more better that way. Lester DaMollesta would follow us all around the smokehouse except when we went up on the roof. He just never managed to negotiate the ladder successfully. One day when we were about to come down, Grimmett dropped a big rock off the roof and it crashed on the concrete right in front of Lester DaMollesta's face. We never saw that dog again. We yelled out his name for days, but he never showed back up. I never have truly forgiven Grimmett for scaring off Lester DaMollesta.
The other fantastic name that I came up with was for a cat who used to hang out around my dad's house. Beauregard T. Swank wasn't really Dad's cat, but he came around all the time to score something to eat. I suspect that he was getting fed at a lot of houses; this was one big cat. No one could refuse him, though, because he was just such a cool motherfucker. He was the only cat I ever knew who could really do the Bill the Cat "ACK!" noise. All the poseur cats tried to do it back in the 80s, but Beauregard T. Swank was the real deal. He too just sort of disappeared one day. Come to think of it, a lot of neighborhood cats disappeared around that time. I still suspect those maniac Shappley brothers from down the street.
The dachshund that I had when I was growing up was named Schroeder. Schroeder was another total badass. When he was a couple of years old he got in a fight with a big dog from across the street. He had scars where the hair never grew back on his face and back, but he held his own. Another time we came home on New Year's Eve to find him in shock; we suspected that someone had shot fireworks into the yard. We took him to the vet, who didn't know if he would make it through the night, but Schroeder ended up living to a ripe old age -- probably 16 or so. The gray hair on his face made him a little funny-looking, but he was still a total badass who was known to kill snakes that were foolish enough to venture into our back yard.
Schroeder was one of my two favorite pets. Well, he was really one of the only two pets that were ever really mine -- that lived at my house. After my parents' divorce Schroeder lived with Dad, which always bummed me out because I only got to see him every other weekend -- but it was good because he was at Dad's house, where he always seemed happiest. After my brother died in 1977 (when my parents were still married), we soon bought a new house on Lampkin Rd. and kept the old one on Maple to rent out. I remember one day when we had just moved, Schroeder ran off and we couldn't find him. I was six or seven, and I just freaked. I was practically hysterical -- which was weird, because Schroeder had gotten out of the back yard many times and it had never really concerned me because he always came back. He did eventually show back up, of course. Within another year or so, my parents separated and divorced, which sucked at the time (though I've come to realize that I'd have been even more warped if they'd stayed together), but at least it meant that Schroeder got to go home.
The other pet that was really mine was my cat Abigail. OK, so it ain't Lester DaMollesta, but it's not a bad name. At least it's not Snowball or goddamn Satin Doll or something. Abi was totally, totally cool. She was a beautiful, all-white cat, and could be very affectionate, even with strangers, but she was by no means a kiss-ass. She would slap the fuck out of you quick as look at you, often for no discernable reason. She could be pissed off about my having given her salmon Fancy Feast for the third day in a row, and she'd fume for hours, not saying anything -- and then John would come over and she'd sink her teeth into his calf.
Abi stayed with me through several moves over the years. We got her in about 1978; she stayed with Mom and me when we sold the Lampkin house and moved into the little house on Central. Years later, she stayed with me when Mom moved to Virginia and left me to live in the house and go to State. Then, in 1994, she moved with me to Virginia after I'd crapped out of school for about the fourth time. During her time on Central, she ruled the neighborhood until the very end, when she was pretty damn old. We would hear horrible wails coming from cats outside, and soon afterward Abi would march into the house with a smirk on her face. The only time I knew about her being defeated was not long before we moved to Virginia. I came out of the house one day to find white hair literally all over the front yard. I walked around to the side of the house and found Abi curled up next to the wall. I brought her inside, where she lay on the couch motionless for a couple of days. Finally she did come around and start acting normal. I guess she got a hurting laid on her ass for the first time and had to take a couple of days to get over it. When Abi and I moved into Mom's place in Va., we didn't have a yard or anything, so Abi became a full-time house cat for the first time in her life. About a year later, we moved into a house, but I decided not to let her come out of retirement; she was really old by then.
I lived in the basement of the new house, while Mom and Abi stayed upstairs. In the spring of 1996, my incredible drinking habit and my hatred of my incredibly shitty job as a Burger King shift manager caught up with one another. One morning I woke up to the sound of the phone ringing, looked over at the clock, saw that I had overslept AGAIN, said "FUCK IT" out loud, unplugged the phone, went back to sleep, and never went back to work, even to turn in my keys. Over the next several months I did very little besides drink about a case of Natural Light a day (couldn't afford a 12-pack of Coors Light and several shots of Wild Turkey anymore), eat a little peanut butter and crackers every couple of days, watch the Orioles on TV, and stagger to the bathroom to vomit blood every once in a while. Not long after I'd been in that state for a while, Abi started getting in really bad health. Her hair was matted, her teeth were making her breath smell terrible, and eventually she started losing control of her bladder. We covered the couch in plastic bags and towels, but it was obvious that that wouldn't work for long. So I brought her down into the basement with me. I took her to the vet, who said that there wasn't much she could do for Abi, but she gave me some antibiotics to give her. Somehow she rallied, and though she no longer had much energy at all, she was able to start using the litterbox again. I kept her in the basement with me, though; it was nice to have some companionship. During those months she stuck to me like glue, sleeping at my feet every night. Meanwhile, I was in the blackest depression of my life. The only time I would leave the house was to make the trip to that nasty-ass grocery store in downtown Pulaski for my case of Natural Light. I used to wonder who was going to die first -- me or Abi. I was really hoping it wouldn't be her, because my nerves and spirits were in such a state that I didn't think I'd be able to handle it if she went first. We were a sad case as she creaked over to the litterbox and I (suffering from gout in both feet) crawled across the basement floor to get another beer out of the mini-fridge.
Somehow, after at least six months of fucking around with my mom's head -- I think my abilty to do so for so long was evidence of some heavy-duty codependency -- we managed to get me into a four-day detox in Roanoke and eventually rehab -- in Mississippi of all places. (Strangely enough, their facilities seemed a lot more promising than Virginia's.) In November of 1996 I took a 21-hour bus trip from Pulaski, Va., to Columbus, MS, and checked into treatment. After about six weeks in primary treatment, I transferred into "three-quarterway" and got out on a weekend pass just after New Year's. Mom was in Starkville for the holidays, so she came and got me so that I could have a late Christmas with the family -- Abi included. That crazy cat was still alive, bad breath and all.
After I got out of secondary treatment about three months later, I stayed in Starkville and started making plans to go back to school. Not long after I'd been out of rehab, Mom called and said that she'd finally had to put Abi to sleep. And I was sad to hear it, but it didn't crush me like I'd been afraid it would. I couldn't help thinking -- and I know this sounds like some old bullshit out of Women's Day or Chicken Soup for the Total Sap Soul -- that Abi stuck it out long enough to see that I was going to be OK. And as crazy as it sounds, just the thought of me crawling around that stinking basement and worrying about how I was going to handle it when that old cat died has been enough so far to get me past the times when I get a little thirsty.
And that, my friends, brings an end to Wicked Flea's crazy-pet-names and true-confessions LiveJournal post.
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no subject
Date: 2002-09-13 06:18 am (UTC)This was a great story. I'm so excited whenever I hear about someone getting a new kitty! (I volunteer at a cat shelter and would have a house full of cats if I could, but my Calpurnia wouldn't have that.)
no subject
Date: 2002-09-13 09:28 am (UTC)I haven't seen Crouching Tiger yet either. Another one for my Netflix queue!
no subject
Date: 2002-09-13 09:40 am (UTC)