The Beale Inside Me

Who can really say how it all begins. There's a lack of money, to be sure, but also a lack of overall warewithal. Back turned to family, friends, neighbors, you seek out the company of cats and racoons. You can't afford to have the trash hauled away, but a 28-room mansion affords plenty of space to simply fill up a closet, then a hallway, then parlor, dining room, and finally the bedrooms, one by one. Because you don't leave the house the only way you feel time's passage is in your joints and in the way one litter of kittens leads inevitably to another. Eventually you become an American Miss Havisham. You are a Beale of Grey Gardens.

Every town has its own notorious recluse, its own crazy cat ladies. Few of them become the subjects of Maysles documentaries, Broadway musicals, HBO docudramas. Few of them become cult heroines, but then few of them are the aunt and cousin of Jackie O. Staunch personalities aside, Big and Little Edie occupy a permanent space in my psyche not because of the weird circumstances in which they came to live but because of the ever-hidden reasons why. How does a debutante become a crazy cat lady? How does wealth become squalor?

All they wanted to do was sing and dance. In an upper-class culture that remained essentially Victorian well into the 20th century, in which women were to marry, raise proper children, marry off those children in turn, in which women were definitively not to be heard, all they wanted was a voice. They wanted to perform, to take the male gaze that would enshrine them in domesticity and instead profit from it, flaunt it, overspill its boundaries. Today we would find nothing transgressive about this, but in their day this was transgressive enough for husband and father, sons and brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins all to abandon them. They were poor because their rich family outcast them.

Who wouldn't in turn reject the world that first rejected you? That they ultimately had only each other was no doubt both a curse and a saving grace, a curse because with one another to rely upon there was no reason to leave the house, and a saving grace because neither was alone. It didn't have to be that way. Big Edie's husband abandoned the family because she refused to behave the way he expected her to behave, and Little Edie didn't marry after her debut because she didn't want to, because she wanted a different sort of life. They provided may things for one another, without a doubt, but what each provided the other was primarily an audience. Each allowed the other to perform, to enact, to transgress.

They are pre-feminist heroines who suffered the fate of their ilk. Fifty or 100 years earlier they would have been thrown into an asylum as hysterics; Big Edie's ownership of Grey Gardens instead provided asylum of a different sort. They fascinate me because they could have been me, were I born in a different time and of a different class. Instead, I've been free to transcribe my own life, free not to marry, free to live performatively through the written word in a way they were never free. Because I live in a culture where a woman is free to be an artist, I'm richer than they ever could have been.

Our Special Day

My cat Russell's death left me fairly bereft, but three months later I was ready to look for another cat. I was living in the East Village at the time, and NYC's animal control shelter up in Harlem felt like too depressing an option. Vet offices pretty universally had cats for adoption, though; plenty of crappy pet owners were too lazy to take their animals to Harlem to abandon them and instead left them on the vets' doorsteps overnight.

Russell had been a light orange and white longhair, and I knew I needed to get a cat who physically differed so he could have his own identity. I knew I wanted a male. I spent several weeks looking, but no cat seemed just right. Then a friend called. Her vet had an abandoned cat he was trying to place. She had met the cat, and thought he was incredibly sweet and that I might like him. So I went over to Brooklyn, walked down to the basement of the vet office where they kept boarders, the assistant opened the door to a cage that contained a big, black guy, and the cat meowed and lept onto my lap and began purring. "I'll take him," I said.

When he got to my apartment, Rufus lept out of the carrier, took a look at his bowls and litter box, and then immediately settled around my neck, purring. He knew he'd arrived home. That was nine years ago today, December 9, 1999. Since then he's moved with me twice, always arriving at his new space to leap out of the carrier, sit on me, and purr. He's a good guy. He pretty much loves everyone. In the picture above he's trying to get onto Jason's lap. Jason is my sister's husband; the photo is from several years ago, from the first time Jason came to visit with my sister. In other words, Jason was at that point a stranger to Rufus, but that didn't stop him from wanting to sit on his lap, purring.

I don't know when Rufus was born. The vet thought he was around a year old when I adopted him, but the only paper he came with was the copy of the NY Times at the bottom of the cardboard box in which he was abandoned. So we celebrate our anniversary every year in lieu of his birthday. I get him whitefish salad. He gives me some purrs, then has diarrhea. Gross, I know, but it's a tradition.

So, happy anniversary, Boo-Boo (yes, I have pet names for my pets, and yes, I know how queer that is)!

Why I Don't Have Children

When I was 15 I went on a diet. I think I'd lost something like 20 pounds before my mother noticed. She didn't notice that I was thinner; she noticed that I was eating more fruit and that she therefore had to buy more fruit. This has become a story I've told over and over again about how self-centered my mother was.

About a month ago I noticed that my cat was looking a little thin. He's also been acting crazy for food, begging around his bowl all day, bolting the food once I give it to him. I just figured he was getting thin because he's getting older, and frankly he's always been a pig and crazed for food. I took him to the vet the other day for his annual exam and found that he'd lost three pounds in the past year. It doesn't sound like much, but he only weighed 14.5 pounds to begin with.

Naturally the vet was alarmed. Any changes in his stool? No. Increased vomiting? No. Any change in diet or amount I feed him? No. A couple hundred dollars of tests ensued. Everything came back completely normal - blood sugar, liver, kidney, pancreatic function, thyroid, all normal. As far as she could tell, there is no medical problem.

I must be inadvertently starving my cat. I'm going to feed him more for a month and take him in and see if he's gained weight. If he gains some weight, the diagnosis will be human-induced starvation. Who starves their own cat and doesn't notice? I may have to switch vets due to embarrassment.

So, the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree. I've learned not only that my cat needs more food, but also that I ultimately am my mother's daughter.

Crazy Cat People

During my senior year in college I lived across the street from a small faculty apartment duplex. One of those apartments was occupied by a Spanish professor who was in Spain, on sabbatical, that year. My room was in an old inn and so was large, with two closets, a private bathroom, and a private parking lot. I was in heaven. About a month into the fall semester I began to be awakened regularly to the sounds of cats fighting and mating. I don't mean a cat or two, I mean lots of cats, going at it all night. It took about a week, but I figured out the problem: the Spanish professor had left her bathroom window open, filled her bathtub with cat food, and left her place in the care of a campus-full of feral cats.

I had moved across the street from a crazy cat lady.

Crazy cat ladies appear to be a staple of every community. Crazy cat men must exist somewhere out there, but I've never seen or heard of one. The hoarding of cats appears to be an activity that skews female, as does the hoarding of animals in general. From what I can tell the affliction begins with the feeding of feral cats, progresses to a plethora of cats in the house, and goes on from there. Cats are but a gateway drug; the hoarding of cats often leads to the hoarding of dogs as well, and on from there to farm animals.

Someone I knew back in high school has become a crazy cat lady. She discovered a stray cat in her suburban back yard and began feeding it. Of course, in short order her yard was filled every night with around 30 cats, looking for food. She thought it was cute. Her neighbors disagreed. She finally trapped and released all the cats, but remains the neighborhood pariah.

The first municipal election that I followed, back in 1995, culminated in the Board of Health's condemnation of the Democratic mayoral candidate's house. The house was filled with over 50 cats, cat food, cat urine, cat feces. Yes, she lost the election, although I thought she should have embraced her weirdness and campaigned on the "Crazy Cat Lady for Mayor" platform. You never know, it might have helped.

I take my dog to run in a park every day, but for several months this spring I was unable to use the one park where he can run leash-free because a crazy cat couple had decided to leave bedding and food for a feral cat. Naturally that cat soon turned into several cats, which led to the appearance of more food and bedding. The end result wasn't just going to be an entire feral colony, but was also the fact that my dog wouldn't run but would instead eat the cat food, search for cat feces, and roll around in the cat bedding. Park officials threw away the cat stuff three times before the crazy cat couple finally gave up.

In short, crazy cat people are everywhere. It could be that it's something that lies dormant in each of us, waiting to be released. Plenty of us do hoard, if not cats then books, papers, figurines, photographs, whatever it is we stock away and call a "collection." What made me think of all this, on a fine spring day? I went through my basement yesterday looking for my pruning shears, and realized that I have boxes down there that I haven't opened in years. I don't even know what's in them, I'm just saving them. So, if you see me buying an inordinate amount of cat food, please slap me. Thank you.