THE CAT CAME BACK

I’ve written a few times about my buddy, J-Cat. In my last installment I wrote that I had a dream about him which I took as a premonition of his death. A couple of years after I wrote that piece he showed up at my door. I told him,”I thought you were dead!” Completely unfazed, his response was,”No. Uh-uh.”

He had returned to California from Washington State after receiving a hysterical phone call from one of his exes, informing him that his son had become a heroin addict. J-Cat was determined to violently confront the drug dealer who had strung out his son, a horrifying echo of J-Cat’s own adolescent experience.  However, when he talked to his son, the kid told him he wasn’t an addict—he had foolishly tried heroin once and didn’t like it—and that the mom was actually overreacting to his marijuana use.

As J-Cat hung out on the balcony of my apartment, smoking cigarettes, moving about restlessly (as much as he could in the limited area), he regaled me with a few stories of living in Seattle.

He works as a chef for a restaurant chain in the Seattle area (a steakhouse-type place). There was a restaurant convention downtown and he and his fellow cooks were hanging out at the convention center early, bored out of their minds. So he was sent to pick up some booze to liven things up. As he walked up the street, there was a nutty street evangelist condemning all the people walking by him to eternal damnation for their wicked, unrepentant ways: drugs, alcohol, fornication.

J-Cat, always a troublemaker, and sensing a golden opportunity, jumped in with both feet. He began condemning people passing by with equal enthusiasm, echoing the sentiments of the religious fanatic. The nut job, having acquired a convert to his cause, redoubled his efforts, excoriating passersby for their sinful ways, promising them an afterlife in a lake of eternal hellfire. J-Cat and his new-found friend whipped each other up into a frenzy of religious fervor, pacing back and forth in a circle, trying to top each other.

After a while, J-Cat tired of this game. He said goodbye to his new buddy and went up the street to the liquor store where he bought a couple of six-packs and a fifth of vodka for him and his fellow cooks. Returning the way he came, the  wacko evangelist caught sight of a grinning and fully unrepentant J-Cat with his arms full of booze. “The look on the guy’s face,” J-Cat told me. “It was fucking great.”

J-Cat doesn’t own a car so he has to take two city buses to get back and forth to work. It’s apparently a pretty bad neighborhood where he has to transfer. One afternoon in November, at the end of a long, rainy, miserable day, getting off the bus, J-Cat did a complete face-plant on the sidewalk. His fellow commuters ignored him, stepping over and around him but  some  derelict crackheads came running over and helped him up, asking if he was okay. J-Cat was so touched by this gesture that a couple of weeks later, he cooked up a complete Thanksgiving dinner and shared it with his new crackhead friends, sitting around on milk crates in an alley. And a great time was had by all.

A few months after that, J-Cat missed his bus and was now stuck at night in this very bad neighborhood. As he watched with growing concern, the  local drug-dealing gangsters began to become very agitated by his presence on the block. The next bus wasn’t for another hour. Just then one of his crackhead acquaintances approached him to say hello.

Salvation dawned on J-Cat. “Say, how would you and your friends like to drink a case of beer with me?” he asked the guy.  While J-Cat ducked into the corner store to buy a couple of twelve-packs, the guy went off to round up his fellow drug addicts. To the chagrin of the gangsters looking to do him harm, within moments he was surrounded by his crackhead buddies, all enjoying J-Cat’s beer.

“You know when you’re a kid and you’re playing one of those games where someone’s trying to tag you and make you ‘It’ , but as long as you have your foot on the base, you’re safe?” he asked me. “It was like that. ‘Nah,nah,nah-nah-nah, you can’t get me…’ “

So it’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen him but until I hear different, J-Cat is still out there, living his crazy life.