TUMBLING ACT

I spend the first part of the last Saturday in June in contained, drowsy, air conditioning.

Jackie comes over to do dishes, rhapsodizing about the movie actor and fifties heartthrob, Tab Hunter.  She has his autobiography from the New York Public Library in hand.

"Charlie! Look at these pictures! Such beautiful pictures! I've never seen such beautiful pictures."

She finds me in my bedroom, on my rolling office chair, doing... nothing.

Whenever Jackie comes over, I am pleasantly bowled over. Today, she's crazy about Tab Hunter - as moony as she was fifty years ago. And her passion is contagious. I can't help but get excited about Tab Hunter too.

She opens the cellophaned book to the middle section where there are many pages of  black and white Hollywood snapshots of Tab Hunter with various starlets.

"Find my glasses Jackie! I can't really see the pictures!"

"Your glasses, your glasses - are they in the bathroom? Are they in the kitchen?" She's urgent. This is important.

(This is why Jackie likes me- why others in the past have liked me. I'm often suggestible to other's hobbies, passions, fetishes. Unless I immediately shun their influence, I'm taken in. So today I spend an hour in bed, my legs in the air creating a 45 degree angle to the headboard, researching Tab Hunter, ogling shots of Tab and Natatlie, Tab and Anthony.

_____________

Earlier in the day, before breakfast, before coffee, (but after dreaming of being lost in a beach community hungover- I spent the entire dream trying to get home but I couldn't think because I was too hungover), after that - I fell off the toilet. Not completely off, but precarious enough to get my adrenaline going- enough to make me say to myself, to mouth the words silently, "stay calm,  just stay really calm".

__________________________

Later in the day,  I scootered to the 39th Street Flea Market. This has become a Saturday habit. I mostly peruse, but today I surprise myself and buy an "occasional table".  I know it's an occasional table because the table has a provenance.  Someone has written "occasional table, 1920s, Great Neck, NewYork, restored 1989, Glastonbury CT" in black ink on the underside. The occasional table is white wrought iron base with eight ceramic tiles on top. Some of the ceramic tiles have birds on them.

I had to have the table.   The table will reassure me that I am the kind of a person who would own a table like this.  When I get it home, I casually glance at the table, trying to imagine that I'd always owned the table. I picture people coming over and congratulating on my precious good taste. I picture them cursing themselves for not making it to the 39th Street flea market before I did.

_________________

I read David Foster Wallace's novel in the park outside my building. I feel I must, because Wallace is my exact age and David Eggers wrote that he thought it was one the best novels of the past fifty years.
But Wallace killed himself last year so I'm reluctant to read it - but I'm enjoying it - so I WILL continue to read it... and after reading for an hour, I come home and have a glass of wine.

I made dinner and as I make dinner I fall off the backless kitchen stool.

I lie on the floor and mouth the words, "just stay calm, just stay really really calm."

I call building security from a land line in the kitchen - I tug the phone to the floor - clatter.
Ten minutes later, two men in uniform quietly unlock my apartment door, find me on the kitchen floor and lift me up to standing.

One of the security men wears cologne.

I smile as they pick me up off the floor, like they're performing an amusing trick, like we're part of a tumbling act.

Thursday

Thursday
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 8)

I sit alone, unsure of what I am ordering, my face, an illustration of certitude and fear.

I listen to Susan and Mattie (in the next room) gently lift Aroo onto a pillowcase and lower him to the bottom of a topless cat carrying case.

I hear Aroo whimper.

"WAIT. What's happening? Stop!"

"No" Mattie says, "It's okay. We got him. He's okay."

Susan and Mattie bring Aroo to me like they're handing a newborn to its mother.

And when Aroo is my lap, it's just terrible. He can't lift his head. His eyes are open but register nothing.
This is not the cat I know. This is a prop, an approximation.  He looks half-dead.

"Well, he's gone" I say accusingly "I mean, he looks terrible!" - and I say this like Susan and Mattie are to blame.  (Have they been in complete denial under that bed?)

I massage Aroo under his furry chin. He's alive but clearly gone. I feel abandoned to my own health disaster.

"Aroo. Aroo!!"

The cat who lived purely for (affection and play) has been killed, by what exactly?
What is he fighting? (What am I fighting)?

Aroo is in my lap and Susan and Mattie flank me. I am the central figure in a medieval religious panel.

Aroo makes three or four little coughs. "He's still breathing" I say. But Susan adds, "I think this is it. I think he's going right now" and she says it with just a tinge of opportunity of how lucky we are that he's going NOW (and she's right).

"He's gone".

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 7) ON A DIME

We google "how do you tell your cat is dying"; reluctance to eat or drink, distracted/disoriented, cooling bodies, rapid and shallow breathing, weakening eyesight.

We can't decide (or rather I can't) if we should bring him to a hospital tonight, or wait until morning.

I can't see him. It's all guesswork. And he might improve. It's late. I'm emotional and wiped.
"Let's let him stay under the bed." (I can't cope).

...and the scene that will play out when he's carried out of the apartment in a basket, barely alive, forced to say my last goodbye - knowing I'm sending this (life loving) cat to his death? 

No. This is too much.

"Lets let it go until tomorrow."

"I can stay over tonight " Susan says. "You shouldn't be alone. If Aroo starts to cry, I'll be here to help."

But then Susan reveals she has to be in the Bronx at eight in the morning. She would need to be up at six to shower and dress before going to work.

"No. That's no good. That's way too early, you can't do that."
I live in a yolk of exhaustion and Susan's offer seems reckless, grueling.

Susan retreats to the bedroom while I clarify the options with Mattie.

"We bring him to the vet tonight (to have him put down) or wait and see how he is in the morning. That's it. Two choices."

But then Mattie reveals that the three or four doctors she spoke to today -all said to put the cat down, as soon as possible - it would be cruel not to.

And suddenly, at eleven-thirty at night,  it's plain to me that my vacillation, my wish-washy haze, is causing Aroo additional suffering.

I turn on the proverbial dime.

"OKAY. No. Let's do it tonight. We'll do it tonight. If Aroo is feeling bad tonight, he'll feel wretched tomorrow. Go get the cat."

key chain

key chain
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 6)

They arrive within the hour, Susan first and then Mattie. 

They scramble past me into the untidy bedroom, dropping bags and coats - like actors late for rehearsal.

They lay beneath the unmade bed (for hours) massaging, caressing, cajoling.

They are maternal and patient but I want it over. 

"I wish he'd die now" I say to calves and feet. I'm drained and nervous.

I feel powerless and male by the door, stuck on a scooter, the expectant father anxiously awaiting his cat's death, waiting for word from the cat midwives.

Maybe Mattie feels my exclusion. "Charlie, you wanna come in closer? We can all meditate together- we can pray to see what might be best for Aroo."

"No." I deflect.

" No, I'm going in the living-room."

And I put the scooter in reverse hitting a door jam. Forward again then reverse. Boom clunk, till I make it to the next room.

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 5) WITNESSING A TERRIBLE THING

I call my sister. My sister tells me to call Mattie. 

I call Mattie (but she doesn't pick up) so I call Susan and tell her to come over. 

"NOW."

"I was going to wait until Mattie gets there."

"No, come now, take a cab. NOW."

I call the animal hospital in Chelsea, but they're closing and tell me I'll have to wait and bring him in the morning.

"That's no good" I tell them, him, whoever.

They give me the name of a vet who makes home visits. I call and leave a message for her. 

(When I leave messages (now) I have to begin by apologizing for my speech, "you'll have to listen carefully," I say, "because I have some difficulty speaking.")

The travelling vet (later) leaves a message that she is traveling out of town. I will have to bring Aroo to a 24 hour hospital in midtown, the human equivalent of a cold, desperate, emergency room.

After making my calls, I wait on the scooter. 

I am  continually on the scooter like a little kid in love with his Big Wheel.

Jackie unpacks recently delivered organic groceries... and I begin to laugh.

"You're laughing Charlie, what's so funny?"

The soaring drama?

The unfolding disaster?

The complete lack of control?

I'm held in time.

Witnessing a terrible thing makes me feel giddy.

"I'm not sure, Jackie."

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 4)

Tuesday.

Jackie crawls under the bed and barks,

"That cat! Charlie, I'm telling you, it's no good! That cat is going. He's gone!"

Jackie's dramatic delivery is naked and realistic. She shakes her head. She won't look me in the eye. I tighten into a ball on my scooter.

"What should I do? Jackie? What should I do?"

She looks me, level and earthy,

"call someone, Charlie, YOU have to call someone. This is too much. Get that cat to a doctah. Now!"

As Jackie speaks we hear a bone-chilling moan from beneath the bed.  The pitch and styling of the  meow is unfamiliar to me, like there could be another animal under the bed with Aroo.

9th

HUDSON

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 3)

Sunday morning, I text Nat.

"Do you have five minutes?"

Nat takes an elevator down to my apartment (on the ninth floor) from his (on the eleventh).
He's in my apartment in two minutes.

(I've worked with Nat in summer stock (years ago): "Charlie's Aunt", "Little Shop", "The Matchmaker".
We became reunited when he married a mutual friend in my building. We now run into each other in the lobby, the elevator, the new little park outside the building. Our high-rise feels like, one long, vertical city block).

"Can you take a look at Aroo?"

"Sure I can." Nat whistles with two fingers "Aroo!" and drags the cat out from under the bed.

Aroo appears doped up and ever so annoyed.

"Hey there little fella, how you doin' there little fella?"

Nat's relationship to the cat is very male.  No "sweet baby" comments. No "aren't you a good lil' boy?" coos. Nat is warmly abrasive like a little league coach.

"You gonna eat buddy? Huh? How bout some grub?"

Aroo is unreachable.

"What do you think, Nat" I ask glumly.

And I ask everyones' opinion - Spiro the doorman, my sister, my neighbor Tina.  And each person I ask, I hope will unveil the ideal solution - that they'll launch a strong objection to my haplessness - take over, heal the cat, and I'll be off the hook. "Nat seemed to feel he needed some kind of a shot?- I guess?.. and whisked him away, he's fine now," I'd say to anyone who asked.

But all Nat offers is,

"Charlie, I think Aroo's having sympathy pains" - (meaning, the cat is sick because I'm sick).

Ugh.

We concentrate on Aroo.  We stare at Aroo like hopeful vacationers scanning the sky for a break in the bad weather.

But the delirious cat dissociates and slinks back to the black beneath the bed.

Pier 84

Pier 84
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

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!!!"