J-CAT

One night at the supermarket,  I got this customer in my line,  an aging party girl in her forties. A regular, she was usually in high spirits but not that night.  When I asked her if she was okay  she burst into tears. She was so upset she couldn’t get the words out.

“C’mere, let’s sit down.”I took her by the hand and led her off to a side table. “Want to take over for me?” I asked a supervisor, who looked over in surprise at the line of customers waiting at my register.

“What happened? You can tell me,”I said to the woman. “ You’re safe. You’re safe now. It’s okay. You’re all right.”

In a long, tearful monologue, she had told me how she had gone out a date with this guy. “He seemed really nice at first but while we we were driving around he got a call from his ex and he changed. I just got so scared. We were in the middle of nowhere. I got scared. I asked him to let me out. I was so scared.”  This was the gist of the story. She repeated it several times, still shaking.

“Why? Why? Why did I get so scared?” she asked me in terrified bewilderment.

“Maybe it was intuition, you gotta listen to it”, I said.

“But why? Why did I get so scared? I don’t know,” she wondered.

“A person’s got to be pretty brave to admit to being scared,” I told her.” You gotta be pretty bad-ass.”

That stopped her short. She even smiled. “You done this before? You some kinda counselor?”

“Not exactly, “ I answered, casting my mind back to the liquor store where I worked the late shift years before with an assortment of  graveyard shift guys, most notably a guy I’ll call “J-Cat”.

He was tall and skinny with a big busted nose, constantly bopping his head, literally listening to his own drummer.  J-Cat was an on-again off-again speed freak; he’d try to quit, go clean for awhile and then be right back in the mix. He lived in his grandma’s trailer in a trailer park a couple of hundred yards from my house. With such close proximity, and me in my own downward spiral at the time, we became drinking buddies, though we had little in common besides the liquor store.

He was a master-storyteller of his drug-fueled adventures, which often managed to be appalling and hilarious at the same time. J-Cat knew he was a character and he reveled in his over-the-top mannerisms and stories. He ‘d been convicted in the past  for drug possession and assault and so had been to county jail several times.

” I have rules,  J-Cat’s rules. I do not lie, cheat, or steal—sleep with my buddies’ girlfriends and I do not, do not eat the chicken in jail, “J-Cat told me. “You know how you have your medium eggs, your large eggs, and your extra-large eggs?” he asked me once.   “You notice how you never see any small eggs?  Guess who gets those? People in jail. Looks like a pigeon laid ‘em.” 

He always tried to make going to jail sound like it was fun, like it was a choice for him, instead of something he hated. J-Cat told me how the prisoners would play basketball, the players segregating themselves by size for the games: big guys, average guys, and then the smallest prisoners. According to him, these were usually Hispanic immigrants new to the game, who played basketball like little kids, dribbling by swatting the ball with flat open palms and shooting underhanded with two hands.  These games were the ones the other prisoners got the most excited about, since the players’ raw form made it tough to handicap for the spectators betting cigarettes and pushups with each other.

On another occasion, J-Cat pungently and indelibly summed up the incarceration experience for me: “Jail smells like assholes and dirty feet ”.

In his teenage years, he became a heroin addict. J-Cat and a buddy used to buy marijuana from the local dealer and he gave them free tastes of smack until they were hooked. “We had been recruited into an army,” J-Cat told me soberly. “And we didn’t even know there was a war.”

Late at night, standing outside the liquor store, he’d wave happily to passing patrol cars, the cops glaring back suspiciously. I asked  him why he did that.  “They used to bust me when I was a  junkie, ask me who was the President. I’d say,”Bill…’ ‘Bill who? Bill who?’ they’d be asking me. ‘Just Bill,’ I’d tell ‘em. I can’t remember which fuckin’ cop it was so I wave to ‘em all.”

One night on graveyard by himself, J-Cat found himself alone with a couple of cops reading magazines in front of the sales rack. “Hey fellas, I gotta go  take a leak. You’re not gonna steal anything, are ya?” he asked them.  Laughing about it to me later, “The look they gave me. It was great.”

How or when he switched from heroin to speed, he never told me, although obviously it fit his personality more, hyper and aggressive even he was straight.  Hard to tell, really, where his personality left off and the drug persona began, the two were so intertwined. I couldn’t always tell when J-Cat had started getting high again. With his speed habit came a full-time immersion in an outlaw lifestyle. Gang violence, enforcing the payment of drug debt, were things he hinted at and were not subjects I cared to pursue.

The two of us used to get loaded and end up at his grandma’s trailer, sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes in the middle of the night. If it was the latter, he’d cook us up some eggs and potatoes and we’d drunkenly stuff our faces. On occasion, we’ d hang with his grandma, Billie. She was a thin, weathered old lady, who’d draw deeply on her cigarettes while holding forth on how the world was going to hell or how J-Cat was messing up. He’d just hang his head and take it. It was obvious the two of them were crazy about each other. I always told him that I respected him more for how he treated his grandmother than all the bad-ass drug-addict gangster crap he ever did.

When he was out of town, I’d stop by to see how she was doing. Billie told me how terrible  J-Cat’s parents were. They were drug addicts and when they weren’t neglecting him, they were screaming abuse literally in his face, telling him how stupid and useless he was. “They were horrible to him”, she said. “Just horrible.”

He had multiple kids with three different girls. One was a neighborhood girl who had his first son. Despite a turbulent history together, she was still fond of him. Whenever J-Cat walked by my house,  day or night, he’d raise a fist high in the air and yell, “Chris Rules!” He trained his five-year-old son to do it. I’d hear this little kid voice: “Chris Rules!” and go look out my door and there the two of them would be, the little boy riding piggyback on J-Cat’s shoulders.

The second girl he had a child with was a nice girl with a good job from a wealthy family. How or why they hooked up, I never heard. The first time J-Cat met her family he tried breaking the ice, ” I haven’t seen this many sweaters since the Cosby Show.” Needless to say, they hated him. The girl dumped J-Cat when she found out he was using again.

The last girl he married after he cleaned up. Like him, she was a recovering addict. He moved to Washington state where she had relatives and a good job waiting for her and the two of them started a family. J-Cat got work as a line cook.

He called me up one day out of the blue. “Guess what I just did?” Knowing his checkered past, I was afraid to ask. “ I just finished mowing my lawn, “J-Cat said as we both roared with disbelieving laughter. “Dude, I live in such a nice neighborhood now— no sirens, barking dogs, screaming neighbors—at night on my porch when I open my beer, it’s so quiet here it echoes. Pffft.”

Of course, it was too good to last. Too quiet for him, too dull.  Once a year, he’d come back to California and cop some speed for old times’ sake, get into some gangster shit, and stop by my house for a beer and advice.

“They’re using you”, I told him. “You’re out of it and they want to get you right back to doing dirt like them. They use your reputation against you, what a bad-ass you were back in the day. Forget that bullshit. You gotta wife, a family, a good job, you got responsibilities now, you don’t need this,” I told him.

J-Cat laughed and thanked me for my “wise-dom”, purposely mispronouncing the word.

“Dude, what are you talking about?” I exclaimed.” I live in the middle of nowhere and talk to nobody most of the time.”

He leaned forward and pointed at me. “Exactly.”

The visits became more infrequent. The last time I saw him in person, he’d more or less made it clear he was through with married life, working 9 to 5, and living in Washington state (which he hated with a passion because it rained so much). It looked like J-Cat  was on a one-way kamikaze mission of self-destruction, speeding for days at a time and getting into some hardcore street violence.

A year or so later, I had a dream: someone knocked on my door. I opened it and there was J-Cat,  head bowed, with his shirt off,  and more serious than I’ve ever seen him. Not looking at me, he walked past me and up the stairs. I took the dream as a sign that he died.

Way back when, working together one night at the liquor store , a young woman showed up in a terrible state. Her attractive outfit was streaked with mud, her feet were bare, bruised and bleeding, her face was streaked with black lines of mascara and she was sobbing, in hysterics. J-Cat took control of the situation. While I called the police, he took her gently in his arms and told her, ” It’s okay, you’re safe now. You’re safe. Whatever it was, you’re okay now and it can’t hurt you.”

He took her outside for a cigarette. She told him she’d been filling up her tank at the local gas station when a man put a knife to her neck. He made her get into his car and drove out to the hills, telling her all the time she reminded him of ”Maria.” When he went to change the radio station on his car’s radio,  she jumped out of the moving car and made her way back to town.

When the two came back inside, she was much better. She apologized for crying and getting snot all over his sweatshirt. J-Cat  smiled and said, “That’s okay. That’s what your friendly omni-potent liquor store clerk is here for.” She laughed.

That incident really changed my idea of who he was and what he was about. It was after that happened that the two of us started to hang out. It was because J-Cat showed me how—all those years before—that I could talk a hysterical customer at the supermarket into calming down.

A more unlikely teacher of compassion is hard to imagine.  One of his favorite expressions was:”There’s one born every minute. And they always bring a friend.” We were once discussing a guy in the neighborhood and I said he seemed like a nice guy. “Everybody’s a nice guy”, J-Cat observed. “’Til you get to know ‘em.” J-Cat was sort of like that in reverse. I miss that guy. He was a good friend of mine.