She was the runt of her litter, all born on my 27th birthday a quintillion lifetimes ago. Her parents, kept by my younger sister, were Hercules (a then year-old farm cat from Springfield), and Aphrodite (a much older lady cat with shaggy black and white hairs beautifully proportioned). Aphy suffered an irregular feminine cycle all her adult years, howling like a scorned toddler for days on end every other week,and somehow had trained all of her kits to wash themselves by hand from the water dish. My sister was at the time in the hospital for what would prove to be her first bout of meningitis, so the duty of watering plants and checking in on the very prego kitty Aphy fell on my shoulders. And I was so thankful for it.
Around a week after they were born, in a closet stuffed with jackets and the like, I claimed the smallest of the five, whom I named Gabriel and Auschwitz. Gabriel was the next to last, and was handsomely covered in black and white long-hairs like his mother. I named him such for the works of artist James O’Barr, who created the Crow. When O’Barr sold off the licensing rights to his character, his only two staples were reportedly that A) all stories deal in some manner of retribution, and B) that all stories entail an appearance of a kitty-cat named Gabriel. And sure enough, even years after the fact all stories pertaining to the Crow property whether comics, film or prose, involve some modicum of appearance of some Gabe or other.
Auschwitz I named at least initially for the color of her own calico fur. She was black and white like her madre, but also with (in the words of Tom Waits) “chimney red and Halloween orange” to the degree that as awkward as she generally appeared she more often than not looked as though she were more piles of ash than a cute little kitty.
I took them both in, tiny as they then were, although they’d hide behind my refrigerator for the first two weeks or so until I realized that playing any manner of piano-inclusive music would draw them out. We all quickly learned how to react to one another, with too many pleasant memories of the duo fur-balls perched on either arm of my green chair like adorable gargoyles. I had been hospitalized for depression on three separate occasions in the decade prior, and had usually been awkward in most social situations, resulting in minimal friendships and very regretful relationships. But these kittens helped me come out of that. They taught me.
When they were roughly two months old, and by then just big enough so that I could no longer fit the both of them into one of my combat boots for an “awww” moment, I was forced to make a hard decision. Gabes had too much of his dad’s roots in him, progressing into some bizarre form of ninja/acrobat/hitman. He would jump from furniture to shelves to digging his claws in for a mid-wall landing. He destroyed a lot of my stuff, as adorable as he frenetically was. What I could not deal with was his growing treatment of his little sister-cat. He bullied his smaller sis away from both the feed dish and the litter box. When he permanently removed her right eyebrow, young as they were, I was compelled to give him away to a friend living deeper in the country than I was then. And for the next few years, it was just me and Ashvy.
She quickly unveiled new meaning to the blasphemous name I’d given her. The conventional usage involves nothing but connotations of humanity at its absolute worst, but that little kitty cat gave me a different meaning for my own life: a reason to face each and every day, to get up and clean off and conquer the work-demons, to provide food for the both of us and a roof over our heads. She was the meaning of life incarnated for me, little thing that she was. She honestly preferred store-brand generic Cheerios cereal to actual cat food. She was afraid of the dark, so that should I ever leave for work forgetting to leave a light on I would return guaranteed to her hiding under my bed. But she was not at all afraid of water, to the extent that she’d always hop in the shower with me to clean herself people-like, and that I had to train all guests to leave the toilet lid down lest she hop in for a private sponge bath. She loved thunderstorms, and whenever one would pass through our windows would be open and we’d both be watching out for hours on end, magnetized to the raw power of nature at its most exciting. She had so much character, shy as she was. But ever taking her outside and she was all fetal position in my arms, scared of the big bad world.
My puppy cat, my puddy-tat, my widdle fang, my lil bit, my best friend ofthree too-short years.
In ’08, I had made the bad decision of renting a tiny house from a member of the Louisville police department. After a few months, she suddenly decided she’d rather have her new girlfriend living there instead. I did not realize this when I had a check returned in the mail uncashed. I presumed there was a postal mistake, and that perhaps she was just busy with her job. I was certainly busy with my own. But the next month, when my rent check again came back to me uncashed, I began to worry. Before I had time to start looking for another place, my landlord showed up with several off-duty officers and proceeded to bully me, physically moving all my belongings to the alley out back even though I had the full rent monies owed in hand. In the confusion someone had let my cat out, and a neighbor had called Animal Metro to pick her up, as she hated collars and so rarely wore her tags. My money had to go to a new place immediately, deposit and all, and when I located my cat the next day I learned they had fixed her (which I did not want), declawed her (which I did not want), and had placed a chip inside her for tracking (again, a thing I did not want. It took me a week to raise the money to pay for these procedures, which they demanded before she could come home.
When I picked her up, she was half the size as when I last saw her, weak and very sickened. I soon learned that in one of the unwanted procedures, her liver had inadvertently been sealed off. She literally could not eat or drink anything. She was with me for approximately 36 hours before finally dying in my arms. I buried her with a thunderstorm growing all around, her little form wrapped in a favorite Dr Seuss blanket and covered in a full pound of catnip, money be damned. She had done nothing wrong to warrant such a painful end. I have never had a pet of my own since, though I have babysat here and there.
I miss my little friend. I miss waking to this tiny creature cleaning my whiskers. She had more heart, more humanity, than (easily) 99% of the people I have encountered in all my travels. I miss my one-time meaning for Life.