Whose radiance, whose presence, ever gleaming,

My rolled-up passion beseeches to unfurl

And through my eager veins is ever streaming.

She walks in grace and sprightliness beteeming

But meets not once the envoys of my eyes,

And though she knows full well of my esteeming,

Silences not my effervescing cries

And never tries.  A note of hers denies

My righteousness of dignity and blame:

“I love you,” writes her gentle hand.  But sighs

Return.  The reader she means has not my name.

I let her letter flutter to the floor,

Deciding now to think of her no more.

I should probably explain my skepticism about these so-called “cats.” Believe me when I say it has many causes. First among them: cats are nimble. Cats are very nimble. Cats are too nimble. If you’ve ever held one (and I assume most people have), you probably remember the way the cat’s body draped across your arm like a curtain. As far as I’m concerned, the only living creature that has any business draping itself across anything is the jellyfish — and that’s only because jellyfish don’t have bones. But cats do. And even though the typical cat won’t sting you until you have to pee on yourself to make the burning go away, the amount of milk it drinks from day to day should, in theory, make its bones as un-Gumby-like as possible. Or maybe it has lots of cartilage. Either way, yuck.

As if their ability to imitate Auntie’s moth-eaten drapery weren’t enough, I should also point out that cats are always landing on their paws. It’s rather uncanny: You could knock one off a table, shoo one off your bed, throw one out of a moving car, whatever you (I) want, and the wily thing would still land on all fours, most likely with a “gravity? What gravity?” kind of attitude. Now, I’m not sure why, but something about a cat’s ability to make the best of any situation at the expense of one of the fundamental laws of Newtonian physics; something about that scares the crap out of me. It’s awfully satanic.

I’d feel more comfortable with the entire species if I could just see one cat—just one—not make that perfect landing. Just once. That’s all I ask. One cat, one mistake. I’d give all the catnip in the world to witness this. Heck, I’d even reward the cat (probably injured) with more Fancy Feast or Tweetie Birds or whatever the hell it eats, than it could ever consume in its nine lifetimes. “Here, cat,” I’d say, “here’s for your trouble. Now stop looking at me. I can’t tell what you’re thinking.”

As to the subject of cats looking at me, I should probably say something about their eyes. How should I put this? Ah, yes: Cats shouldn’t be allowed to have them. If having eyes is a right, cats abuse that right — the yellow-eyed ones, in particular. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I do remember a yellow-eyed cat making an awful first impression when I was a kid. I was having a play date with one of my partners-in-crime when a piece from the game we were playing (which, ironically enough, might have been Mousetrap) inexplicably ended up under his bed.

I was closer.

Lifting up the bedspread and peeking under the mattress, I squealed in shock when I saw two beady, yellow, slit-pupiled eyes glaring at me from out of the otherwise perfect darkness. How dare you? they seemed to say. Get out! As if that message weren’t clear enough already, the fucking cat swiped at me with its claws. They were sharp. Here’s a metaphor, just in case the experience of two creepy eyes peering out of the darkness isn’t vivid enough already: Have you ever seen the cover of The Great Gatsby? Pretty freaky, right? Now, imagine if The Great Gatsby had a claw and used it to swipe at your face. That’s what this experience was like.

Another metaphor: the Dark Lord’s tower in The Lord of the Rings movies. You know, the one with the big, fiery eyeball on top, which he uses to observe his conquest of Middle Earth and search for his lost ring. “That doesn’t look like an eye,” my girlfriend remarked once a couple of years ago while we were watching The Two Towers in my basement. “It looks like a vagina. A big, fiery vagina.”

True, I suppose. But one could also argue that the Dark Lord’s eye looks very much like a cat’s eye. Feel free to agree with my girlfriend on this one. My mind wouldn’t necessarily have gone in that direction previously, although it does now. But she’s absolutely right: Yellow cat’s eyes and big, fiery vaginas are similar in that they’re both heinously colored and have vertical-slit pupils. They’re both unpleasant to look at. Now, imagine that instead of having only one of these, The Lord of the Rings had two. After all, wouldn’t it make sense for both of the “two towers” to look alike? If the two were standing side by side, wouldn’t they look like the cover of Gatsby? By extension, wouldn’t they look like a pair of cat eyes?

Those of you who are mathematically inclined should be thinking of a little something called the “transitive property” by now. This smart-allecky law stipulates that if A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C. If you apply this logic to the discussion above, you’ll probably realize that cats don’t really have eyes at all — they have two fiery vaginas.

But I digress. There’s a lot more I could say about cats, although I doubt any of it would matter in light of what I just said. I’m sure plenty of writers have argued that cats are unfriendly and less fun to play with than dogs. As far as I’m concerned, these things are pretty obvious. This begs the question, then, of why I dislike cats as much as I do. Are they actually as evil as I’d like them to be? Or am I predisposed to revile them?

Evil, yes. Predisposed, well, yes. I must come clean. Something tells me I wouldn’t be so negative when it comes to cats if it weren’t for my allergy. Simply put, cats make me sneeze. They make my eyes red, my sinuses inflamed, and my mood cranky. And it’s absolutely impossible for me to count the number of pajama parties I missed out on because Grandma had one.

- - - - -

I think I’ll crawl back under the bed now, and wait for someone to lose a board-game piece. Be forewarned: My eyes are brown. You won’t be able to see them in the darkness.

Photo provided by author.

Every now and then, a time comes that forces a young man in love to switch off his mind before it blows a fuse or six. You can always tell when moments like these arrive because suddenly, for no apparent reason, Life starts using you as target practice—and I don’t mean “of the Robin Hood variety.” After all, arrows are pretty easy to dodge, especially when they come at you one at a time, and especially if you’re on your toes. A young man—who uses Reason to discipline himself—can do this. But once the “girl you’ve been dating” becomes the “love of your life,” Robin-Hood-with-bow turns into Tony-Soprano-with-pistol—faster than you can say “hullo,” I might add. In other words, you’re up Shit Creek without a paddle. You’re fucked. Not just literally.

I should clarify. Girlfriends aren’t supposed to be hindrances. Mine was a blessing, a constant reminder of just how lucky I was, especially since it was she, and not I, who initiated our getting together. She helped me deflect any hardship that came at me, and I did the same for her. This is what relationships are for, after all. But she reached the “love” phase a lot faster than I did (I am, after all, male); by the time I arrived there myself…let’s just say I was having trouble sorting myself out and keeping her happy at the same time. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have had much of a problem. And neither would you.

About a year ago, the number of difficulties I was facing increased beyond my control. My carefully constructed college experience was being destroyed: Boston University was hardly my first choice, but it was either that or the University of Illinois. Between a fun city on the East Coast and a cornfield somewhere downstate, which would you choose? Yeah, that’s what I thought. As it turned out, Boston was actually a pretty good situation. I was reading the Great Books, my dorm (the Community Service House) had fifteen people in it (most of them female), the Hillel was fantastic, I had a few friends and family members at other nearby universities (Boston has many), and, best of all, I didn’t even have to take math. High school was finally over.

My first three semesters of college were a charm. Never before had I kicked so much academic ass in so short a span. Imagine my surprise when everything went to shit in semester number four: an emotional whirlwind set in and, as the Scorpions would say, I was getting rocked. Like a hurricane. Moving on.

The Boston winter was gracious enough to melt away, and by mid-April, the spring weather seemed almost apologetic for what I’d been enduring since late October; but on this particular Friday night, the refreshingly warm breeze wasn’t much of a consolation.

I usually made it to Hillel around 6:20 PM, always wearing my best suit out of respect for the Sabbath-Eve services (I’m not even religious), an event I always looked forward to and which I still look forward to. What can I say? I’m a man who enjoys his Fridays. This week, my girlfriend’s roommate was out of town, and I don’t think I need to elaborate on what we had planned for the evening. Let’s just say I packed a hanging bag, showered and dressed in her room (which, conveniently, was right across from Hillel), and was approximately fifteen minutes late for the 6:30 service.

I’ll say it again. I’m not religious. However, I do look forward to Friday night services, if not for the religiosity than for the community and the melodies we usually sing over the course of the services. I am, however, particularly musical, thanks to about eleven years of clarinet playing, most of which I did in various concert bands and symphony orchestras, including the ones at BU. Being exposed to organized music for such an extended period of time usually comes with a number of benefits.

Typically, when a person spends enough time attuning himself to musical subtlety, he (by which I mean “I”) will start interpreting the world as one big musical composition: the wind speaks through a percussionist’s wind chimes, inclement weather finds perfect expression in the later movements of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, a car horn is really just a pair of notes whose frequencies are slightly out of sync. That’s why car horns are so effective. They’re atonal. Their noise grates against a person’s physical (and emotional) eardrums. Nothing says “pay attention!” like jarring noise, and nothing evokes a stronger emotional response than jarring situations. Everyone knows that good things “sound” nice, but musicians are the only ones who could explain that “niceness” results when chords progress with pleasant predictability from the “perfect fourth” to the “perfect fifth” to the “minor seventh,” reaching their expected cadence point on the “tonic,” with all chords having been in root position¹.

Services at Hillel usually “sounded” nice. Then suddenly, without rhyme or reason, I found myself experiencing the most atonal, dissonant, car horn-like Sabbath-Eve of my life. And therein lies the problem. The burden of musical training is that the mind associates harmonic dissonance with social discord. Expecting my weeklong turmoil to culminate in something more peaceful, or pastoral, I found myself growing anxious when I realized that I was one of only a few people actually trying to engage in the ritual. Most people were whispering, a wasted effort if everyone in the room is doing it, as well. A few weren’t even trying to be discreet. Occasionally, a whoosh of air and a slam would punch through all the ambient noise as the door opened, shut, and admitted yet another tardy student who didn’t care enough about divine worship to merit being on time. The dissonant chords created by their voices clashed unpleasantly with the ritual’s consonant chords. They were talking, I was praying. They were religious, I was not. Try listening to Mozart and Metallica at the same time and you might get a sense of what I’m talking about. Metaphorically speaking, they were the Mozart-experts. I was not.

If you think my logic is flawed, you’re absolutely right. Services were never quite the experience of communal rapture that I would’ve liked. They weren’t at BU; they aren’t anywhere. I’ve always been too much the idealist. People talked all the time, week after week. The anxiety I felt was really just an outward expression of my inward frustrations—most of which disappeared when I did. Moving on.

The next thing I remember is running out of Hillel and back to my girlfriend’s room. Her woman’s instincts must have alerted her that something was wrong, because she was right behind me the whole time, scrambling to keep up as I flew down eight flights of stairs and across Bay State Road.

I don’t remember what was said back in her room. It was probably important at the time, but it hasn’t been important in the long run. I’ll never know one way or the other.

But I do remember storming out the back door and saying something like, “I just need to go for a walk. No, you can’t come with me. No!” I do remember the tremors in her voice and the fear in her greenish-blue eyes as she tried—but failed—to hold onto my arm.

The next thing I remember is walking, or rather stumbling, completely sober, down Bay State, a pretty street lined with trees and former brownstone apartment buildings that BU had bought and converted into student housing. I stumbled across the Storrow Drive footbridge and found myself on the esplanade that runs along the shore of the Charles River. I stumbled across the bridge at Beacon Street, leaving Boston and entering Cambridge, and was soon on the MIT campus. It was dark out, and the city’s lights, including the light from the obnoxiously large Citgo sign, reflected off the surface of the river and refracted through my teardrops.

I know, I know. Why all the fuss? Why don’t you grow a pair? Were you really that bothered by the unpleasant services? Were you really having girlfriend issues?

No, I wasn’t that bothered by the services, and no, I wasn’t really having girlfriend issues. It was everything else. The steady and carefully constructed table of my college experience was losing its legs one by one, collapsing unpleasantly into a pile of wood scraps. Circling the Charles, soothingly alone, I breathed again, and slowed my heartbeat down again, and let my frustrations play out in my mind, one by one, which is how I prefer to deal with anything.

You don’t need to know what those frustrations were. Sorry. I’m moving on…

An hour or two later, I was back at her door. While before my mind was way over-stimulated, now it was completely numb. My brain simply couldn’t feel. Apparently, neither could my hands, because I almost didn’t realize that my dress shoes were each dangling from one of my index fingers. I had removed them somewhere between the pyramid-shaped Hyatt Regency and the BU Bridge. I’d even rolled up my pant legs. My socks were nowhere to be found. I still don’t remember where I lost them.

Only the Lord remembers what mental anguish I’d put my girlfriend through in my absence. Bless her. She opened the door and caught me as I tripped over the threshold. She took my shoes in one hand, me in the other, and led me into the bathroom, where she sat me down on the edge of the bathtub and started washing my feet. Seriously. In a very “frankincense and myrrh” kind of way.

Then she spread a blanket across her bedroom floor and guided me down onto it with a firm and steady hand. I complied. I didn’t have a choice. She then proceeded to feed me. What was it? Pasta (Angel Hair, appropriately). She cooked the pasta with water boiled in the microwave and the French press that was usually just for her morning espresso.

I don’t remember the taste very well, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that that poor girl—whose intentions were only ever good; who would soon suffer the pain of abandonment when her boyfriend transferred elsewhere; whose soft and sensitive nature had won him over like sunlight melting an ice cube; who deserved much better—that girl showed me the meaning of kindness.

There is a moral here, and it’s not that I think with my stomach.

Photo by the author.

I wish I wasn’t sitting here,
a lonely marble bust.
In life I traveled far and near,
in death I gather dust.

You see my face is much the same,
my visage always grim.
Because I wrote of France aflame,
her outlook awfully dim.

Because her peasants cried, “Revolt!”
and slew their haughty king,
Whose blood became their wine of “Cult
of Pungent Rioting.”

My sculptor knew I sang the stench
of Enlightenment gone wrong,
And so my face he made entrench
that gruesome, vagrant song.

He never knew that I could love
some humor in my life:
I grinned as jolly tumbrels drove
while urged with drum and fife.

In women, too, I claimed the luck
that others often chase—
Beneath their skirts I’d often duck
and press their heartbeats’ rising pace.

All this was kept from dusty pages,
lost when I was still alive,
And now my bust deceives the ages.
Like this I do survive.

He stole my sentiments that day,
he took my human race—
I rue the day he carved away
the laughter from my face.

The crawl space under the kitchen was a better adventure: no ghoul, plenty of junk to look at. Perfect. We’d lived in this house for almost seven years but I hardly ever came down here. I figured it was time.

It was pretty funny to recreate the move-in mentality. We’ll just put the extra cans of paint in here, in case we ever need them later. Oh, and the extra linoleum tiles for the basement floor, too. Meanwhile, three years had gone by before my mother had gotten sick of the beige paint and the brown tile and poof! they turned pomegranate red and forest green, respectively. I sat in the crawlspace looking at the cans filled to the brim with useless beige, Benjamin Moore, lead-free (sheesh!) paint. I looked at them and chuckled. I could hear the tat-a-tat of my mother’s feet padding around the kitchen floor, the underside of which was less than a foot above my head. If you concentrate, sometimes you can figure out what she’s listening to.

There was plenty more in here. For example, my five-year-old self would’ve wanted to build a fort out of all the boxes. They were strewn here, there, and everywhere across the dusty concrete floor. Apparently the movers hadn’t even bothered crawling in with the boxes. They must’ve just hoisted them to the door and slid them in one by one as far as friction would allow. Fragile, the wrinkled cardboard said. Handle with care. Or not at all. That’s probably how all my Little League trophies got busted. Nice going, fellas.

I looked around at the walls and saw (with a certain satisfaction, I might add) that there was at least one part of the house that did have some insulation. Stay out of my room during the winter. You’d be better off down here. Trust me.

My great-grandmother’s disassembled bed frame sprawled in the farthest corner like a pile of woodchips. I remembered when it was assembled and in use back in the day. There was a carved, wooden pineapple at the top of each corner. When I was a little kid, one of my uncles had told me they were real; a few years later I’d finally learned that pineapples didn’t actually taste like the hospice nurse’s latex gloves. Now the luau had been over for almost fifteen years. I looked at the bed frame fondly. There was another box sitting next to it that I could only assume contained my great-grandmother. I wouldn’t open that if I were you.

All these treasures were visible by the yellow light of the single bulb, which was screwed audaciously and without a fixture into one of the rafters directly overhead. I wouldn’t say it was good reading light, per se, but I would say that it made my girlfriend’s cleavage even more appealing than usual, as if that were even possible.

Everything’s louder at 3:48 a.m. The mini-fridge that doubles as your nightstand is definitely working harder than usual to keep that half-eaten brick of extra-sharp cheddar from going bad. A chorus of creaky protest greets your ears as your bare feet pass over the warping floorboards. Having to pee at ass o’clock in the morning is, after all, more criminal than the sweaty lumberjack whose beflannelled hackery made them that way in the first place. Somewhere outside, the rush of a car streaking past your window suggests you’re not the only one having a late night. The bass is cranked so loud on its stereo you can feel it pulsating through the street pavement and up the crumbling bricks of your ancient apartment building. It’s not exactly the kind of music you’d expect to find on the soundtrack of some shitty Victorian romance movie. But it works well with the thump! thump! of your ceiling: Somebody upstairs is getting lucky tonight. Somebody other than you.