I used to take Carmen up and down the highway from my mother's house in L.A. to my college in Portland in my VW bug. He came everywhere with me. I snuck him into motel rooms, where he found his litter box in the shower, and he ventured out of the room in the morning cold when cars and trucks were still. He took a walk in the redwood forest and explored rest stops. Once he escaped on the college campus.
He was a wild thing, tuned to a hostile world. There had been no gentleness in his kittenhood with a timid black mother and starving brothers in the pipe rack at the ranch. Maybe six months old when we caught him, he screamed and bit, scratching his own eye in his frenzy. I slept in the room with him and dreamed of his sniffing me in the night. I woke to find a pile of shit beside my head. I had won his trust. The next morning he came out of the room and let us all touch him.
He was so scared of everything. When I carried him to the car or into the vet's office, he lost his nerve, screamed and scratched. When he jumped out of the car on the campus and disappeared among the bushes going down to the canyon, I thought I'd never see him again. With woods around him he would forget everything but running, hiding. I called his name sadly, and his ghost voice returned from the fog. There were worms in his lungs, so that he coughed all the time, and had a miaw like scraping rocks. He came back from the woods, to the car and the world of manmade things he never understood, because he loved me.
Only he stood by me when I gave my friends headaches with my misery. He clawed at my pen when I wrote, and sat on me when my trance carried me toward pure whiteness. Only he kept me down. When I got furious at him for walking on my hair and swept him off the bed, he jumped right back up again. He teased me in my vilest moods. His claws on the window screeched through my dreams, and when I leaped up raging and opened the window for him he wouldn't go out. I would rush back to bed, trying to reform inner lands, but minutes later they were destroyed by that terrible scratching. Up again, even more furious, shivering and hunched in the false dawn, I would decide to feed him. Mischieviously, he'd jump on and off the chair. His eyes were faded blue, the scar almost gone by then. They pleaded like a dog's eyes. He only wanted some attention, for me to show some affection. But I was too miserable. I had no time at all. I tried to be nice, to play with him a little, but soon I could stand it no longer and ran to bed, leaving the window open.
Every morning it was the same. Carmen put up with my outbursts, glad for what little companionship I had to give.
The only other one Carmen loved was a big black-and-white cat who stole his food. His devotion to that cat amazed me. Once, Carmen and I returned to the apartment after a week's vacation in Los Angeles. Carmen didn't rest after the long car ride or eat the food I set out. He scratched at the window, and vanished into the snows of Portland. A half hour later he returned with his friend, who wolfed down the food, growling
Carmen didn't like other cats. He screamed and chased a white cat. His friend and he stood together against a black tom.
I paced in the basement apartment and wrote of my horrible need for love, and only Carmen understood. He would love me, but how could I love a cat? Why did I try? Was it because the young man I had idolized in vain was gone, and because I had seen Carmen in a dream, flying in an airplane with me and my fictional character Lleellaatt?
In the only memorable dream I had during the summer before I went to college I forgot who I was and became a movie star.
"Carolina and Carmen" said the maquees. We flew in a green-and-yellow airplane.
That dream came true when I started to chase my idol and lost myself in a fantasy life. But it was the ending of the dream I waited for, because in the end I would find myself. "She'll remember when she's naked," were the prophetic words.
But naked in what sense? I try to expose myself in every way, try to make it happen.
In my journal I had a little sketch of Carmen along with notes about the dream. It was on the same date two years later when my brother saw him hiding in the pipe rack. Carmen grew up to look just like the cat in the sketch.