BE DESTROYED by James Allen Hall
“Cats must go to good home. Or will be destroyed,” read the ad my father placed in the Pennysaver. Our phone number followed.
“I want to know,” the fifteenth woman that morning said between bursting sobs, “how you’re going to kill those poor little animals!”
“They’re going right into the wood chipper,” I retorted, tired of fielding phone calls incited by my father’s ad.
But his words worked. That day, my father said goodbye to a third of the 130 cats who had been living inside our home. “Just let me be alone,” he said to me at the end of it. Closing the door, refusing to come out even to eat.
* * *
Enter our kitchen, and you’d see a ring of cats watching from above, perched and shedding sphinxes hunkered together in the hollowed-out caves where the soft lighting had been. The sentinel cats had pushed aside the frosted plastic shades and made themselves at home up there. Furry Rapunzels in their self-exile, they let down hair and shat on the counters, on the stove, on top of the refrigerator and microwave. Turn on a stovetop burner and you would be greeted by the smell of singed cat hair. Or worse.
Some of them had free range. Others were caged in big coops made out of PVC pipe and chicken wire and carpet. Two cats per cage, two cages made a top and bottom bunk. Of course they were let out, for feeding time or when the cages were cleaned, which happened at least once every two days, depending on which of my two brothers was on cleanup duty that week. One of the rooms in the house was emptied of its professional office furniture (a sprawling desk with a maze of cherrywood cabinets, a computer and attached printer, all the business files from CJ’s Courier Service, Inc., the radio equipment, the five-line telephones: all evacuated to make room). It was the cat room: a carpet of newspapers cleared three times a day and re-laid, and edged around the room were the cat-boxes, like one continuous gray-pebble baseboard.
By the end, when my father placed the newspaper ad, the cages also lined our back screened-in porch, out by the kidney-shaped pool whose motor choked on kitty litter. By the end, there were 131 of them, some of them rescues, others born in – there is no other way to say it – captivity.
By the end, I mean of my parents’ marriage.
* * *
My parents met in a factory that fashioned sonobuoys, military devices used to detect submarine radar signals.
My mother approached my father: You look familiar, from high school?
My father had finished high school 911 miles away.
For their first date, my father flew her to that sleepy town in Florida. That first night, he drove her to Daytona Beach, where he wooed her at a club at the water’s edge, swaying to music that spilled out on the deck, where they took breaks from dancing to lean out over the ocean. It must have seemed to her that it could always be this romantic – hot jazz rippling over the endless silky Atlantic.
At the end of the trip, after he’d introduced her to his parents, my father’s mother said, “I guess you want that ring you gave to that other girl now?”
My father proposed at the plant. I think of them there: my father in slacks, my mother draped in painting clothes, a breathing mask over her mouth. I want to go back now. I want to keep my mother’s mouth obscured, obstructed, I want to stop him from bending to his knee, I want to protect him from her yes.
* * *
CJ’s Courier Service was my parents’ brainchild; they started it with the sole purpose of giving my older brother something to do after he graduated high school. It was named after him because he was supposed to run it, after it took off. The first client was my uncle Terry’s toxicology lab in Hialeah. CJ was the first driver, and my parents ran the business out of our five-bedroom ranch-style house in Weston, Florida, a modestly affluent section in the westernmost part of what was then unincorporated Fort Lauderdale. We lived on Westwood Lane, on a cul-de-sac where, our realtor informed us, Anthony Quinn had owned the large house three doors down. The front yard was home to rock gardens, a high boasting palm tree, bushes of Mexican heathers under the windows, and in the back was a baby banana tree. Maybe because of the proximity to the pool and its chlorine, maybe because our dog Rocky marked it constantly with his piss, maybe because of bad dumb luck, who knows, but the tree never bore any fruit. It never thrived, it just refused to die.
Within two years, we had acquired major accounts, employees answering phones and processing payroll, and a cadre of drivers who used their own cars to make deliveries for customers such as Owens & Minor, drivers we equipped with long-range radios, drivers zipping through the streets of Miami-Dade and Broward County all day, every day of the year. Even Christmas. Someone always answered the phone in the middle of the night at our house. At our house, the ringer was never off. For someone, there was never a full night’s rest, there was never peace.
My parents built a life around emergency rooms and patients bleeding on a table and babies born to crack mothers who needed their first shits tested immediately so doctors would know how to treat these tiniest of addicts. My parents built a life around the word stat. Around speed and need. They built the kind of life that cannot last. That kind of life must be destroyed.
* * *
Sometimes I wished we could train the cats to answer the phones, dispatch calls, answer customer complaints, complete billing requests, follow up on unpaid invoices, reboot the servers. At least clean the desks, shred the mountains of old delivery sheets, pay the drivers.
Vacuum the fucking floors.
* * *
“Your mother started seeing a man in Daytona Beach, when she was cleaning condos out there. He was a doctor, I found his card in her purse. You were three. That was the first time.” My father doesn’t say what he was doing rifling through my mother’s purse, and I don’t ask. I am twenty-four years old; he is a fifty-four-year-old man who is trying to stop his shattered-windshield life from breaking beyond repair. We are in my bedroom, talking. My mother is thinking about leaving him again, and that has made me my father’s 2 a.m. confidante.
There were more, he says. Passionate men, pockets full of money and promises. More moonlight on the ocean. When those broke, my father swept in from stage left, the Consoler, the Absolver, eager to take her back.
When I was twelve, a police officer started coming to the house to collect her at night. I don’t remember him except as a large shape filling the front door’s open gap, right hip with its holstered gun, left hip against the jamb as he waited for her to emerge, my cinnamon-scented mother, criminal in her red silk blouse. The trail of her nearly crackled as she left through the front door.
One night my father says he went looking for them. He tucked into his slacks my mother’s gun. He was on foot, approaching the squad car parked in the empty church parking lot. The car shook on its shocks, the windows fogged over. My father tells me he drew the weapon, clicked the safety off.
I’m telling you this so you know: My father had a choice. And he always chose my mother.
* * *
We delivered anything. Once, a client’s dog when he was called suddenly out of town and needed the drooling, benevolent St. Bernard taken to his father’s in South Miami. Once, a very expensive cellular telephone to a man named Martin P. Straight. Once, a big, R2-D2 shaped container filled with dry ice and stem cells (when opened, the fog drifted over the top of it, like a witch’s cauldron) which would then be reinfused into a cancer patient’s body. Once, a dildo. Actually, twice, accompanied with women’s underwear and high-heel shoes. Once, a voice on the other end of the phone telling me to turn around, the blood wasn’t needed, the patient had died on the table. Once upon a time, hurry. We were saviors.
* * *
The cats lived on two acres of open field behind a six-office strip mall at the end of Broward Boulevard in Sunrise. On the south side, it was bordered by a canal that ran parallel to State Road 84, the feeder for Interstate 595. To the west, a trailer park. On the north, a church which owned the field but had neither cleared nor developed it yet. The cats came most likely from the trailer parkers, who abandoned their animals to the field whenever they moved, or whenever a hurricane threatened. Which meant every summer, since this was Fort Lauderdale at the beginning of global warming.
CJ’s Courier Service took up a cavernous three-room office in the strip mall, which also housed a 7–11, a Domino’s Pizza, a Chinese takeout joint, and a space rented to a Korean religious group that held services very late at night. The cats begged for scraps outside the front door of Domino’s, and at the back door of the Chinese delivery, scarfing up the fried rice and dried-out pepperoni slices no one ordered. They flooded the dumpsters looking for food and shelter. And despite getting used to years of human neglect, they let us approach, they lowered their heads, they deigned to be touched gently.
* * *
The most omnipresent of the cats was Boots, cursed with a constant running nose and a need of attention; he was the kid on the playground who was constantly wiping his grinning snotface, eager to be anyone’s friend. When I remember him now, pacing hungrily from Domino’s to Chinese to the 7–11, his running nose investigating the edibility of all discarded trash, wandering too close to the road, not paying attention, too close to his own desires to realize he could be killed, I understand. Poor, sweet Boots, who was not promised a next meal or a bath, who once nosed a Snickers wrapper so hard that it was glued with his snot to his fur. I understand how hard it was to ignore the desire to save him – him and his purring, pathetic, mangy ilk.
* * *
The steamrollers came on a Monday morning. Mist still hung above the field. I was alone in the office, and when I opened the back door to see what the commotion was, there they were in the back field, like tractors but with glinting rollers that flattened the field’s scrub brush. My mother was there within fifteen minutes. Without her face on, waving at the rollers to stop, blocking them with her thin body, arguing with the men who got down off their deathtraps, her speech so fiery I could see speckles of spit flying out. She was joined by Sue, the cat lady who had begun to feed the cats originally, the woman who kept them from going hungry. But they couldn’t stop every bulldozer. The most my mother and Sue could do was dig into the big mounds of dirt that had filled with mewling. The most they could save was thirty cats from being buried alive.
* * *
The first day, they were on the 5:00 and 11:00 news. Close-up of the cutest and youngest ones, an armful of them wriggling and mewling. Then flashed our phone number, and well-meaning citizens came to adopt cats that were not anyone’s vision of cuddly – cats that were, in fact, in need of medical attention and, in Boots’ case, nasal surgery. Imagine the soccer mom coming to adopt a kitten for her second-grade daughter and meeting instead a hissing, near-feral feline, and you’ll begin to understand the difficulty of Foster Cat Project 2000.
The trouble was she couldn’t love what she didn’t want to hold.
And before we knew it, they multiplied.
* * *
Boots, Feets, Mouth, Legs.
Brute, Mama Bear.
Little Miss Gray Kitty and Big Mister Gray Kitty. Orange Guy. Tri Guy.
Names like bus drivers’ names. Gus. Tommy. Harry. Sebastian. Sylvester Jr.
Label-names. Meanness. Grandma. Rainbow.
Diamond, who died as a kitten. My brother Dustin buried him in the backyard before my mother could wake to find him gone.
The last one to live with us: Strawberry, nee Strawbaby, named for her reddish fur, though my mother called her Straw. “As in, The Last,” she said.
The last known dead: Socks, a gray scruffy cat who in his old age would make this screeching battle cry to say, “Carry me to a cat box now, if you know what’s good for you,” but who could not always wait.
Buddy and Midnight. When Midnight fell sick, and wouldn’t move off his little piece of carpet, we were sure he was going to die. Buddy wouldn’t leave Midnight’s side. Buddy nosed his bowl over by his friend’s barely-breathing side. He lay by Midnight’s side, two cats against the world. Midnight recovered. Love can do that to an animal.
There were one hundred and thirty-one, and they all had names, my father memorized each one. They were all little allegories: lost innocents, last chances, neglected signs. They lived with us and we fed them, and we became the crazy cat house, served with legal papers filed by the homeowner’s association, all those notices that went ignored.
They multiplied, and my mother became a kind of feline night-nurse, first delivering litters of kittens, then seeing to the runts, caring for the sick, the ones that would not take their mother’s milk. My mother would hold these kittens in her arms and feed them from a bottle. She learned to first drape them in a towel, folded and tucked carefully at the neck, so that they would not scratch and bite her. She sang to them. She named them.
It is a law of human nature: anything you name, you own. The converse is also true: what you name owns you back. This is how it is to be loved by someone. Also, to be destroyed.
* * *
The cat love seemed like an infection in my family. First, it was CJ who seemed to love them, helping Sue the Cat Lady feed them at night. Though perhaps that was a different kind of animal desire that propelled him to altruism: Sue was pretty, with long blonde hair down to her narrow waist, and bright blue eyes that seemed, but weren’t in fact, cross-eyed. She was quick to tell CJ that her husband was a cop, and that he wouldn’t allow her any more animals in their nearby trailer: she already had two cats, a dog, and a pot-bellied pig.
I started calling CJ “Dances With Cats,” much to my mother’s amusement. And then it was she who befriended Sue. Then it was two blonde ladies out at sunset, laying down plastic plates of cat food, talking through the feeding hour, friends united in saving their little corner of the world.
And then, somehow, it was my father, maybe around the sixty-cat mark, around the time that the collection of cats became unmanageable for everyone else. My father, saying, “If you can get rid of them then what kind of person are you? They’re innocent in all of this.” And, “I’m not asking you to help me, I can take care of them all by myself.” Knowing he couldn’t possibly work two jobs and wash thirty cat boxes every day. Knowing full well. But blind to it, like a man in love, like a man in love who needed something to save and protect, something that would need him just as blindly back.
* * *
First, my father was fired from the toxicology lab where he worked. By his brother.
Then CJ’s Courier Service lost our largest three clients, and laid off its drivers, and struggled to make the bills.
The collectors began circling like vultures, calling at all hours of the business day, asking for my parents, who we were told never to say were home. Once, when the Bank of America called asking for Marsha Hall, my mother said into the phone, “I’m not in right now.”
The collector left a message.
* * *
I wake up my older brother at 4:00 in the afternoon on a Thursday. He mans the night shift at CJ’s Courier Service, and it starts a little earlier on Thursdays because Dustin and I co-direct a gay and lesbian youth group that meets those nights. I have been away in Vermont for 10 days prior, and he is pissed at me for going “on vacation.” The “vacation” was the last of the 5 trips required to complete my low-residency master of fine arts degree in poetry at Bennington College in southwestern Vermont; each of those 10 days was filled with lectures and readings, workshops and seminars. I would call it invigorating, draining, but not a vacation.
He refuses to wake up. Tells me, “I don’t care if you miss your fucking gay group.” I am pulling off the blankets, tugging away even his pillows from his waterbed. The cat that stays in his room hides in his closet. One of the pillows lands in her rarely-changed litterbox. CJ stands up and draws back a clenched fist. I put my arms up, Evander Holyfield-style, protecting my face. My ears begin to ring. I push into him, knocking him back into the bed. I pick up his box fan and throw it at his body, which is already rising from the bed. Another round of fists on me. My mother throws open the door to his room, sees my older brother whaling on me, and throws herself at him, knocking him back down to the bed. That’s when I pick up the cat box and I throw its muddy contents on my shirtless brother, splashing him all over his chest with cat shit. And then I run to my room, and move my desk in front of the door.
We are the stress cracks of this situation. I am trying to become a poet. CJ was trying to sleep. Neither of us chose this life.
Two months later, it becomes a joke CJ tells people. “Yeah, Jamie said he’d never touch a cat box. But I damn sure made him change that one!”
* * *
“You guys have to cool it,” my father tells my brothers and me. “You can’t bother your mother with any of this,” he says, holding two of us by our shoulders, circling us up. “She can’t handle it, you guys.” The law now: don’t knock on her door, don’t let her answer the phone, even if you’re in the bathroom. Protect her at all costs.
What she couldn’t handle: not just the petty fights, moving out of the strip-mall office in the middle of the night, leaving no forwarding address, becoming defendants in a lawsuit for breach of contract, unable to afford the back rent.
She couldn’t handle laying off all the drivers – Amy and Richard and their sixty-year-old mother; Earl with his gnarly tattoos and his gay-biker-bar stories; eighty-year-old Abe who brought us a bag of bagels once a month. . . . The drivers who were like family, who kept calling, wanting to know when they could expect to be paid. The only difference between our former employees and our present collectors was the pleading tone.
My mother stayed locked behind her door, parked at our only remaining computer all day, logged into Yahoo chatrooms that centered on, at first, psychic readers and, later, on swinging singles.
“Leave her alone,” he said, squeezing my shoulder tight. It was the way my father tried to save my mother, and it was the way he lost her.
* * *
One night, at the dinner table, my mother and I sat across from each other, spinning spaghetti around silent forks. We were the only people home, everyone else still out delivering. She wore her blue silk bathrobe, her hair unwashed, uncombed. She looked like a woman who had fought too long.
It was the hour in South Florida where everything went red, the palm trees, the mock-adobe houses, the sprinklers coming on, their shots of stuttering water, the cars coughing on the congested highways, everything bathed in a surrendering sun.
She thanked me for dinner, then asked how things were going. “Fine,” I said, crisply. Meaning traitor.
“Good,” she said, meaning please let there be some part of you who still loves his mother. Behind us 131 cats were waiting for my father to come home and feed them. I could hear them breathing.
* * *
In those days, my mother was always on the phone with another man, my father was locked out of the bedroom. He slept in my room, in a chair with his feet up on my bed, dismissing me when I insisted he lie down next to me. “It’s just for a few hours, James.” I found him, mornings, in the rooms of that house, laying on the area rugs, his body unblanketed, his shirt rolled up underneath his head. More than once, he risked the stench of the living room, where the cats lived. There he’d be, among them, on the leather couch, sleeping sitting up, a pile of cats in his lap and on either side of him, asleep too.
* * *
The day she left, I woke early and dressed quickly in the dark. I wanted to be gone. I wrote a note and slipped it into one of her boxes, then drove to a friend’s house nearby.
My father drove her to the man’s hotel; my mother drove the man’s car back to our house. My father loaded her boxes into his car with my brothers’ help.
At the last minute, she took a cat with her too, the gray one with the white paws named Socks, who was born a hermaphrodite, who had been unable to choose between two things.
* * *
When my mother left, my father moved back into his room. He began not sleeping in his own bed then.
Then he was the man on the furtive telephone with her, trying to displace the other man.
One late night, as he was talking to my mother in the bedroom, a policeman came to arrest my father. He’d delivered a mobile phone downtown and parked illegally, blocking a hydrant. A judge had signed the warrant, the cop showed it to me when I answered the door. “Larry Hall,” he said gruffly, his voice official and trying not to choke on the animal smell. He shifted weight back and forth between his legs, pulling down at his vest as he waited. He was a young guy, the uniform still looked like a costume on him.
I convinced him to let my father put on a shirt, I convinced him not to use the handcuffs. I saw my father duck into the squad car, and I cursed him. He’d borrowed money from my grandmother to buy twenty-six dozen roses – one dozen for each year of their marriage – and sent them to my mother. Instead of paying off that goddamn parking ticket.
* * *
The business sold. But sold for payments in installments, and then the people mismanaged it, and CJ’s Courier Service went to the crematorium.
My father stayed home with the cats, changing cat boxes during the day, worrying over bills at night. He begged more money from my grandmother, then went to fitful sleep in his marriage bed. He said he had more sleep that one night in jail, though he emerged looking haggard when my brothers bailed him out.
Still my mother would not return to a house she said she lived in like a jail.
So he wrote an ad and put it in the Pennysaver.
* * *
The note I left in one of my mother’s boxes – the pots and pans – read, “I’ve been watching you leave for months. I just couldn’t watch anymore.”
* * *
About a third of the cats were adopted by people who answered our ad.
Another third of the cats my father deposited at my grandmother’s house. She owned an acre of land out in rural Homestead, where she lived in a house on a dirt road. She sometimes called with updates about the cats, and after those talks, my father would cry.
The last third my father took back to the field at the end of Broward Boulevard. That empty field which had been plowed and leveled, flattened, had actually never been built upon, never developed, never not an empty field where abandoned cats went to find shelter.
It is hard to picture my father, loading up the cats he loved – the ones with their claws still, the ones he said still possessed what he called “a fighting chance.” But it is harder for me to picture him unloading them into the world, and leaving them there to fend for themselves.
It is harder to picture because my father was so good at loving things.
He never learned how to stop doing it intensely, believing it saved her, believing if he loved something hard enough, it wouldn’t fail him again.
James Allen Hall’s essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, CutBank, Redivider, and the anthology Who’s Yer Daddy: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).