#i think susie would gnaw on hair like a cat

[fragonreal]

playing with the charcoal brush and felt pen

[textales]

“A Curious Cat”

The Egyptians had a thing for cats. They even had a religion where they worshiped the feline gods. And If any one of those elusive feline gods had been even remotely as bewitching as my childhood cat I totally understand why.

She was a Seal Point Siamese…with deep blue eyes and a shimmering coat with blonde and brown fur, and even a strand or two of blue and silver mixed in. She was unlike any “normal” cat you’d see loitering in back yards or on front porches – this cat was downright exotic and stuck-out like a fine French restaurant in a trailer park. Great Falls was a simple “all American” blue-collar town, best suited for plain cats like Morris, the fat orange thing from the TV commercials for 9 Lives. Weird cats belonged in places like Missoula or Seattle with hippies and tie-dye and lesbians. She was clearly an outsider and a total anomaly. She might have been imported from Egypt or the land of Siam - wherever that was.

We lived on the right side of the tracks….but only by a few feet.  As a matter of fact, old railroad tracks remained in our back alley, abandoned since the 1950s when trucks replaced rail cars for local delivery of freight. We were on the last street where the old residential area met the industrial zone, with a giant three-story warehouse and tire repair shop on one end of the block, and a family-owned lumber yard across the alley. Our teeny home was built in 1916 when Great Falls was a thriving metropolis.  I’m guessing it was originally occupied by workers from the copper smelter or one of the many hydroelectric dams that were built in the era. Another set of tracks, about a half-mile away between our street and the Missouri River, carried the Burlington Northern freight trains which rumbled by a couple times a day.

Sometime in the mid-1970s my dad remodeled and we got all fancy with expensive Masonite paneling and a velvety couch and love-seat combo purchased from the House of Furniture for $499. We had multi-level shag carpeting and recessed lighting on dimmers, and the cottage-cheese ceiling had shiny silver sparkling bits.  

Ours may have been one of the nicer homes on the block - but just barely. I’m pretty sure the only reason it looked as good as it did was because my dad was always trying to out-do his sister who lived across the river in a double-wide. Hers was a very nice, color-coordinated double-wide, with full skirting and tip-outs. But according to my father it was still a “goddamned trailer.”      

My dad worked at a glass shop a block away. There was a vacant gravel lot between the shop and that three-story tire store/warehouse, and two tiny old houses between the warehouse and our place. His commute was better than that of a modern day “telecommuter” – his 30-second walk provided a little exercise and just enough separation between work and home to give him a decent “work-life” balance.

The glass shop was essentially our “second garage.”  We spent tons of time there when we needed to do big projects that required more space and the big air compressor. I have fond memories of that place. We painted our old Ford pickup in that shop…twice.  We did multiple overhauls on multiple engines for motorcycles, snowmobiles and lawnmowers, and we rebuilt at least one transmission in that space - all on nights and weekends after my dad had spent a solid 40 hours working. Who knew a glass shop would be such a good place for honing cylinders and grinding valves?  

I was in that shop with my dad and friends Lloyd and Wes the day Elvis died. And it was there where my dad and I had a big one sentence talk about “the birds and the bees” after my teacher sent me home with a note to advise the class had viewed the sex education film that day.  “Well, if you need to know anything about any of that shit, you just let me know.”  Thanks, Dad. 6th grade was so awkward.

Nobody seems to remember exactly when, but a Siamese cat showed up at the shop and didn’t want to leave. She didn’t need a new pane of glass for her cathouse - she was lost. My father took a liking to this adorable thing and offered up a little food and some attention.  

An exotic animal like this must certainly be someone’s pet. Perhaps it crawled from the back of a station wagon when its human came to get a makeup mirror fixed?  “Someone will come to get her” my dad explained as he poured Friskies into a makeshift serving dish fashioned from a decorative glass block.

After a couple days and no reports of a missing cat, Red decided he’d take this thing home. It would be easy to retrieve her should the owners come looking, and it couldn’t live at the shop anymore because the manager was allergic.

I was maybe five or six years old and hardly qualified to name a pet, but for whatever reason my parents gave me the opportunity so I decided her name should be Susie.  Where that came from I have no idea…it’s not like Susie was the name of a famous movie star, super model or even a family friend. In retrospect, and knowing her personality, that name was way too plain and simple for this enigmatic feline who had few characteristics typical of a domestic house cat. Susie was my spirit animal, and honestly I think she belonged in a circus.

She was a curious cat. Susie didn’t like milk, refused to eat Tuna, and loved the vacuum cleaner.  At least once a week my dad would spend an hour grooming her with the old Filter Queen, a beige-colored canister unit the size of a modern day shop vac. She’d come running the second it was brought out of the closet and would lie down in front of him, letting him suck her tail into the tube before extending her legs spread-eagle style waiting for the suction to take away whatever excess hair she would otherwise shed onto the carpet.  

Susie didn’t use a litter box. She’d hang by the back door and would announce with a polite meow when it was time for her to do her business.  Even if it was ten below zero she’d go outside.  The smell of her fur when returning from the frozen outdoors was something I wish I could bottle – I know I’d make millions on that magic scent.

We had a clothes hamper at the bottom of the stairs where she’d hide until we walked by. Then like a Jack-in-the-Box she’d pounce and start gnawing on your Achilles tendon. You’d think we’d have gotten used to it but it was always somehow a surprise.

My father would tease Susie by wagging a finger until she exploded and jumped from the floor into his arms.  She’d purr like the engine of a freshly rebuilt Mercury Cougar until she decided she was done with it, then without warning those beautiful blue eyes turned into fire, the fangs came out and she swiped with a vengeance.  Felines are so fickle.  

Canine Kryptonite.

Susie was like one of the guys. Far from being feminine, she wanted nothing to do with girlie things and could outfox and outrun any of the dogs in the neighborhood. She was far more masculine than Lloyd’s dog, Velvet, who played with rocks. She was far fiercer than Grandma’s Chihuahua, Cubby, and she had bigger balls than Aunt Kathy’s French gay male poodle, Shante.   

Neighbor Doug had a police dog, a German shepherd that looked like Rin Tin Tin. Susie scared the shit out of him – he knew to steer clear when she was on patrol.  

Susie and our cock-a-poo Peanuts loved to watch my dad and I work in the garage. They had a favorite spot on a 4-foot-high wooden ladder. The dog would sit on the top rung while Susie hung out on the tray intended for the paint can. Peanuts usually slept. Susie, on the other hand, paid close attention.  She was probably taking notes on how to operate the equipment and would be preparing a report for her alien overlords on the mother ship.

My brother and his wife were school teachers in the far-away lands of the Tri-Cities in Washington state. Just like the Egyptians, my brother’s wife had a thing for cats.

I recall one trip when they came thru town with a bizarre hairless cat like Mr. Bigglesworth from the Austin Powers movie. This cat and Susie had a lot in common (both being exotic and suitable for the circus) and Gloria fawned over Susie.  I can only imagine how pissed-off she had to have been, having spent thousands on exotic cats imported from breeders.  And we got ours for free because she was essentially a homeless drifter, rescued at the glass shop.

“Turn Me Loose, Set Me Free…Somewhere in the Middle of Montana.”

It made little difference where we were going, but on the weekends we just had to get out of town. In the summers we’d pack-up the pickup, hook on the travel trailer and head to a campsite somewhere. Whether a forest service campground or a gravel parking lot in a town 20 miles away it didn’t really matter - my dad just had to escape. Maybe something about the glass shop and our house being so close together didn’t provide the separation from home and work that he had hoped for? Hell, I don’t know…

Susie and my dog knew the routine: they’d wait patiently near the back door at 5:15 PM every Friday after work as we prepared to embark on another adventure. Peanuts knew instantly where he would sit in the cab of the truck between my mother and I on the bench seat. Susie usually jumped up onto the dashboard where she could sun herself and enjoy the view.

Susie was a swimmer - not to be left on the sidelines when the guys went fishing, she would jump in the water, “cat paddling” to the rubber raft floating out in the lake.  A cat that swims? Yes. And she would jump in the bathtub every so often.  This cat was crazy.

Once on a trip to Canada with my Aunt Ruby we met an Australian woman who really took a liking to Susie. When we went to leave the cat was nowhere to be found and my dad was convinced that the Australian chick had stolen her. She insisted she hadn’t, and joined our search party.  After an hour of panic and calling her name we’d almost given up. All the while she was in the tree directly above us, sprawled out with her legs hanging over the tree limbs. Immediately upon hearing the truck start she started meowing. Twenty-seven seconds later she returned to the dashboard and international peace was restored.

“Too many motors.”

My mom had reached a breaking point. “We have too many motors,” she exclaimed, slamming down the glass of “Chillable Red” she just filled from the box.  She then took a drag from a Newport menthol and promptly called the Tribune to place an ad in the classifieds.  We’d be having a big garage sale that weekend, to offload some excess items with engines that included at least one lawnmower, a go-kart, and the Honda 50 mini-bike I’d outgrown.  

Other goodies for sale included a collection of my mother’s hand-made doilies - you know those round frilly things that go underneath lamps or get used as an emergency potholder just once until you burn the shit out of your hands?  And we’d be offing a ceramic cookie jar, a creation of “Kathy’s Busy Bee Ceramics,” the studio for which was in a trailer next to the one my Aunt Kathy lived in across the river. This cookie jar was in the shape of a Christmas tree.  I hated that effing thing, especially when it sat on the counter well after the season was over.  I thought, but didn’t dare say out loud: “It’s not Christmas in July for Christ’s sake – so let’s get rid of this goddamn thing.”

The Garage Sale attracted all kinds of bargain shoppers including one family who arrived in a 1971 Plymouth Satellite Sebring station wagon plucked right from a Brady Bunch episode, complete with wood grain paneling, driven by a woman with a black bouffant hairdo and looking a lot like the country singer Loretta Lynn.

Susie got bored hanging out on the paint tray on the ladder and decided she’d explore the mysterious world of the Plymouth. It was warm, with strange smells and plush carpeting.  Its humans were different, and there were “stink sticks” (incense) from the Import Depot. A leftover wrapper from Burger Master smelled interesting, but after wondering “Where’s the Beef” she quickly went to sleep in the Sebring.  Nobody took notice and Susie went for a ride for a while, cruising the Garage Sale Circuit all over town.  

Of course she woke-up and started howling. She was not for sale. The kids wanted to keep her, but she wanted nothing to do with them now. She was agitated, and wanted to get back to her native habitat where she could guard the roost - even if it had too many motors. Those motors belonged to her and she needed to watch over them.

They had to back-track, returning to all the garage sales in reverse order until they found us. “Is this your cat?” asked the Loretta Lynn look-alike.  Susie was returned annoyed and unharmed.  Like a wayward teenager busted drinking at a party and retrieved by her parents, she was reluctant to show any emotion and quietly leapt from the tailgate of the Plymouth and returned to the paint tray on the ladder in the garage.

“Houston Means that I’m One Day Closer to You.”

In my junior year of high school I took my first trip on an airplane to see my sister who lived in the northern suburbs of Houston.  It was around Christmas of 1982 and I’d finally go inside a real building taller than ten stories.  I’d go to NASA where astronauts would say they had a problem if there were one, and I’d shop at a fancy shopping mall with an ice rink inside. Everything was fascinating and I tried not to stare, but I’m sure I made a quite a spectacle and an embarrassment of myself.

When I left Montana there was snow on the ground and it was maybe in the 10s. Since I was in the blistering hot warmth of Texas, I could get a little tan before returning to the frozen tundra up north. The neighbors had to wonder WTF as they looked through the shutters at some albino kid wearing shorts and laying out on the side lawn in the middle of winter.  It was maybe in the low 60s the day I tried to tan.

At the mall with the ice rink I remember looking for stuff you just couldn’t get in Montana.  I was kind of bummed I couldn’t find the platform tennis shoes like those worn by Stewart Copeland of the Police, but I did buy a cool, slightly “off color” dark-comedy cartoon book from one of the novelty stores there. I’m not sure what motivated me to buy it other than wanting at least one souvenir from Texas, and the book was easy enough.

Later that night I called home to check-in.  I was having a great time, and I told the parents I’d see them in a week. This town was fascinating and it was fantastic to be in a “real city” with 8-lane freeways and tall buildings and radio stations that played more than classic rock or country.  

“Your cat’s been moping around, so we’re going to take her to the vet.”  This message didn’t really alarm me.  Susie was getting old, but she was bullet proof. 

When I got back to Great Falls a week later I was greeted at the door by Peanuts but no Susie. “She was sick so we had to put her down” said my father as he fought back the tears. “She had feline leukemia” my mother said.

It was a bit of a shock, but really….Susie was no spring chicken (I think she was at least ten years old at that point) and it’s not like it was devastating.  Cats die. We all die.  And it’s not like I hadn’t thought about it.

Oh, and what was the name of that book I bought at the shopping mall with the ice rink?

“101 Uses for a Dead Cat.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the book?