JOHN MCCAIN (PART 2)

It's Memorial Day weekend and I'm alone. No plans. But I can sense that delicious weekend opener to Summer. 42nd Street is packed with patriotic revelers on their family ways to the "Intrepid" and it's adjunct attractions: spy planes, helicopters, a submarine, outside beer joints, bicycle rentals.

The Friday morning before Memorial Day, I text Jackie (my 72 year old neighbor) and ask her to look under the bed at Aroo.

"He hasn't left his little nest all week."

"He's not coming out? Usually he comes out when he hears my voice."

"Well, pull him out Jackie. Drag him out ! I want to see what he looks like."

Jackie gets down on hands and knees with vigor and strength. I  marvel at her sprightliness.

She pulls him out by the nape of his neck, "the way the mother cat does it" she explains.

Aroo emerges blinking and inert.

He looks out of it.

Jackie brushes him with his favored pink brush and I standby with his cat-dancer.

I bob it in front of him, flaccidly. It entices one or two looks but nothing like his usual obsession.
Aroo looks baffled and wasted, like he's coming off a long, jagged binge.

Jackie and I deflate.

"This cat!" Jackie proclaims, "This cat has been tortured and cornered with strangers shoving things down his mouth. This cat has been forced into a cage and dragged to strange and cold places. The examining room at that vet in Chelsea is in a basement! A basement! No windows and no telling what other caged dying animals were down there." 

Jackie is really getting on her high horse and when she does there is nothing to do but let her go and look down with shame.

"But Jackie-"

"No Charlie, He's had enough! No mo-ah treatments! No MO-AH! He wants to be left alone. He's tired of being tortured. YES! TORTURED! Charlie don't let them torture Aroo anymore. He's had enough. He's been through the worst kind of tortures. He and John McCain. Both of them caged and tortured. It's terrible. Really terrible. John McCain and Aroo."

This is too much for me. Jackie (once again) shatters my solemn groove.

"Did you just group Aroo with John McCain?"

"Yes I did! You're laughing Charlie. But think about it, it's true. It is!"

I'm covering my mouth from laughing too hard.

"Well, at least I made you laugh. But Charlie, I'm telling you, no mo-ah treatments for that cat. He's done. 

DONE!!!"

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 1)

My sister says,

 "when a cat purrs, it's not only an expression of contentment, but a method for self-healing".

Aroo, the cat (plucked from the streets of New York), 

Aroo, my charge (the only pet I've had as an adult), 

Aroo, my roommate (the darling of all who enter apartment 916), lies beneath my bed, dying.

Sometimes he purrs, a few times he moans, 

(moans I've never heard him make before, moans apparently reserved for just these final moments) 

but mostly Aroo is stoic, silent. 

I sit on my scooter, stuck at the entrance to my bedroom, helpless and cutoff from the cat. I can't get down to him and he won't come up for me. 

"Aroo" I call emphatically

. "A- ROO!"

But he won't be lured. It's like he's in heat and doesn't want to be bothered.

"Cats die not unlike the way they give birth, it's private and exclusive...  dictated by a mysterious calling privy only to them" my sister (also) later tells me.

And so I stare at the black under the bed, trying to comprehend my cat giving birth to his death.
The cat, seemingly preprogrammed for his death, is simply following preset orders, orders that don't include me. Stuck on my scooter, lonely and abandoned, I'm a little mad. 

blocked

blocked
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

Tragedy

Tragedy
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts