by Gwen Cooper
But that was before Homer learned that a rubber band, stretched taut around a rolled-up newspaper and plucked by a single claw, would produce a sound.
As with so many great discoveries, this one was an accident. I had left the paper, with its rubber band, on the coffee table one morning while I retrieved my toast and juice. Homer leapt onto the table to investigate. From the kitchen, I heard a ping! There was a pause, then another ping! The next pause was shorter than the first, and it was followed by a Ping! Pi-ping ping! Ping! I came out from the kitchen to find Homer cocking his head curiously from side to side, as enthralled by the reverb of the still-vibrating rubber band as he’d been by its initial sound. He plucked the rubber band again and pressed his paw over it while it vibrated. Upon realizing that doing this made both sound and vibration stop, he plucked at it once more.
“I’m sorry, kitty,” I said, and I really did feel bad. He was having such a good time! But I wasn’t about to forgo my morning paper fix—and I certainly wasn’t leaving Homer in possession of a rubber band. I unrolled the newspaper and threw the rubber band into the trash. And there, I thought, was the end of it.
Like most cats, Homer was a creature of habit. Being blind, he was even more wedded to his habits than the average cat. Homer, for example, would only curl up next to me on my left side. He may not have even known I had a right side, so ingrained was his habit of sitting to my left. If I adopted a position on the couch that made only my right side available, Homer would wander around, meowing in nervous confusion, until I shifted over.
When I added a set of squat wooden candlesticks to the coffee table, it took Homer weeks to learn not to bump into them. This wasn’t because he was slow in figuring out how to avoid solid objects; he’d learned his way around the entire apartment in under an hour. It was because once he’d learned the exact number of steps left and right that took him from one end of the coffee table to the other—like learning where immovable things such as walls and doorways were—it was difficult for him to get past the ingrained habit of his memorized routine. When I tried to replace Homer’s stuffed worm—which was, by now, hardly more than a few tufts of fabric clinging to a tiny, dented bell—with an identical new one, he sniffed it once, gave it a single toss into the air, and stalked away in disgust. He slept in the same spot on my bed every night, for exactly as long as I slept. Scarlett and Vashti would also pile into bed with me, but they would leave in the late-night hours to scamper around the apartment together. Homer had trained himself to sleep as long as I slept, and to remain there until I awoke.
Waiting for the predawn thonk! of the newspaper against our front door immediately became a new Homer habit. The joys he’d discovered in making his own music were so great that they overrode his three-year-long old habit of sleeping as long as I did. No matter how I tried to wean him from the newspaper and its rubber band, no matter how I tried to distract, cajole, or plead with him, he would sit with his nose flush against the crack of the front door at exactly five thirty every morning. Once he heard the paper land, he’d paw at the door and meow frantically (The paper’s here! Mom, hurry, the paper’s here!) until I stumbled out of bed long enough to bring it in and drop it at his feet. My reward for this act of mercy was a solid hour of Ping! Ping! Ping! Pi-ping pi-ping ping!
It was maddening.
Finally, to preserve both my sleep and my sanity—because the constant strumming of that single note, over and over again, was killing the latter as surely as it was the former—I did something I remembered my grandmother doing for me when I was a child. I took an empty Kleenex box and wrapped five rubber bands of varying thickness around it. I then handed this impromptu guitar over to Homer.
He was utterly enraptured. Each rubber band played a completely distinct note. The hollowness of the empty Kleenex box added depth and resonance to these notes. The best part was that, since this toy was available all the time, I was able to put it away while I slept and Homer resumed sleeping the whole night through with me, knowing it would be there waiting for him when he woke up. If I was reading or talking on the phone, Homer entertained himself with it for endless, rhapsodic hours. Our home became a veritable philharmonic, where ad hoc concertos of Ping! Ping plong BOING! could be heard.
The only thing that interfered with this affair of the heart was the occasional breaking of a rubber band. It would snap up into Homer’s face so suddenly, and with so little warning, that Homer leapt back a good foot and a half, grimacing horribly, his fur standing straight up on end. What the …?!!? He would approach the box again cautiously, cocking his head from left to right, and smack it quickly and firmly with his paw. Hit me and I’ll hit you back. Then he’d leap away once more, as if afraid what the consequences of his own daring might be.
Homer would sulk for hours after an incident like this, refusing to so much as go near the thing after he’d smacked it back into submission. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Art is suffering,” I’d tell him. But he loved his tissue-box guitar too much to stay angry with it for very long. The next morning would find him plucking away as if nothing had gone awry.
I wish I could conclude this chapter by saying that Homer eventually learned to play something recognizable, like “Oh! Susanna” or anything from side one of Led Zeppelin IV.
But if he had, you almost certainly would have heard of him before this.
13 • Lord of the Flies
He looked like some lion of the wilderness that stalks about exulting in his strength and defying both wind and rain.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
ASIDE FROM THE SAFETY CONSIDERATIONS I’D HAD—FOR MYSELF AS well as for Homer—in eschewing garden and ground-floor apartments, there had also been that secondary, but persistent, reality that dominated so much of Miami living.
I’m talking about the insects.
To live in Miami is to learn, the hard way, that the human population is on the losing side of a never-ending war with the insect kingdom. It’s a battle in which you know you’ll never gain any ground; the most you can do is shore up your defenses and try to hold the line. I might as well have set out cookies and featherbeds for six-legged intruders if I’d decided to go the garden-apartment route.
It was spring when we moved into our new apartment, and now we were in the thick of summer, that buggiest of all South Florida seasons. It was particularly rainy that summer, with thunderous tropical systems moving through practically on a daily basis. It was the kind of weather that drove outdoor critters in, looking for relief.
Living on the eleventh floor went a long way toward controlling my apartment’s wildlife population, but there were always those hardy souls who were more than equal to the climb. Chief among these were the flies—huge suckers bigger than my thumbnails and excruciatingly annoying.
For Homer’s sake, I made something of a religion of getting in and out of the glass door leading to my balcony as quickly as possible. But—no matter how quickly I slid the door shut behind me—flies always managed to get in. If an influx of flies ran the risk of compromising my enjoyment of our new apartment, however, they added immeasurably to Homer’s. Once all the boxes had been unpacked and thrown away, Homer again found himself unable to launch a successful frontal attack against Scarlett or Vashti. With the influx of flies, finally, there was something Homer could track and hunt without having to encounter either Vashti’s passivity or Scarlett’s scorn.
The first time Homer caught a fly was a few months after we’d moved in. I was shelving some new books in the living room when I heard a loud, angry buzzing from somewhere in the vicinity of just over my head. Looking around, I saw all three cats lined up—as if in formation—trailing slowly behind a fly zigzagging madly about five feet in the air.
Homer’s head was raised and it pulsed rapidly back and forth in perfect time with the fly’s irregular movements, his ears pricked up as high as they would go. Scarlett and Vashti’s pupils were hugely dilated, so that their eyes seemed to be all pupil. They didn’t unfix th
eir gazes for even a second. It looked like they were making up their minds to pounce—but while they were still thinking about it, Homer, without any warning, was airborne.
He sprang straight up, rising and rising until the top of his head was higher than mine. The lower half of his body curved beneath him in a graceful arc. He hung in midair for a moment, an Olympic gymnast at the crest of a dismount, and I heard his jaws snap shut. He landed nimbly on his hind legs and rested on his haunches.
The buzzing had stopped. The fly was gone.
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed involuntarily. Even Scarlett and Vashti blinked, looking impressed despite themselves. Did we just see what we thought we saw?
The only one who didn’t seem surprised was Homer himself. His jaws worked furiously, like a child chewing taffy, and I realized that—having never successfully captured anything before—he hadn’t considered that catching a fly in his mouth would mean he’d … well … end up with a fly in his mouth.
I’d bought a swatter and some fly strips when I first moved in, but they were destined to remain unopened, gathering dust in a kitchen drawer. I didn’t have the heart to deprive Homer of the joys of what soon became his favorite pastime. And to be honest, any efforts I might have made in the direction of fly control would have been superfluous anyway.
Homer honed the catching of flies into an art form, experimenting with different styles and strategies as necessity, or boredom, dictated. Sometimes he would leap up, as he had that first time, but rather than catching the fly in the air, he would slap at it energetically with his front paws, like a swimmer doing a doggy-paddle, until the fly was forced to the ground. Then, while the fly was struggling to take off again, Homer would back up a few inches and pounce on it. Sometimes he would chase a fly toward the balcony until it hit the sliding door. As it banged helplessly against the glass, Homer would press one paw against the hapless bug and slide it down into the corner where the door met the floor and hold it there until it stopped moving.
If a fly landed on the wall behind the sofa, Homer would stand on top of the back of the sofa with his hind legs and, lightning-fast, whap out a front paw to pin the fly against the wall. Then he’d lift his paw just enough to wedge his head in and scoop the fly up in his mouth. One time, I saw Homer dart up the back of a chair in pursuit of a fly. Balancing on three legs on the back of the chair, he used the fourth one to swat at it feverishly. But it flew to a spot just behind Homer’s head. Homer—I swear—propelled himself off the chair into a spectacular backflip, a head-over-tail pinwheel of a cat, catching the fly in the air and twisting his body around so that he landed, perfectly, on all fours.
“Okay, now you’re just showing off,” I told him. But I couldn’t help laughing at how remarkably pleased he looked with himself.
It got to the point that I didn’t have to hear any actual buzzing to know there was a fly in our midst. Out of the corner of my eye I’d catch a black blur of speed and sinew zipping by, and I’d know.
I used to entertain myself sometimes by imagining conversations among those flies who observed the particular indignity of their compatriot’s being caught by a blind cat. In my head, the dialogue went something like this:
FIRST FLY: Did you see Carl get caught by that eyeless cat? And Carl had, like, a hundred eyes!
SECOND FLY: Yeah, well, Carl was an idiot.
It wasn’t only the flies that Homer felled in his new capacity as our home’s head gamekeeper. He proved himself equally adept at dispatching all manner of pests: ants (which were so easy for him to catch, it was almost an insult to his abilities), mosquitoes, the occasional moth.
And then there were the roaches. I live in New York now, and I’ve seen what passes for a “roach” here in the Northeast. But let me tell you—some of those southern bad boys were so big, you could saddle them up and ride them in the Kentucky Derby. Living on a higher floor meant we weren’t plagued with a full-fledged infestation. Given, however, that the larger ones—the ones we call palmetto bugs in the South—were able to fly, more than a few managed to creep their way in. And the ones that did always lived (briefly) to regret it.
Even big roaches are fast, but none of them were as fast or difficult to pinpoint as the flies Homer routinely caught. So the only thing that made catching roaches a real challenge for Homer was that flies announced their presence with loud buzzing, while the roaches were soundless. Or so I thought. But Homer’s hearing was infinitely more sensitive than mine, or even than Scarlett’s and Vashti’s; on numerous occasions, I’d catch Homer cocking his head to listen to something I couldn’t discern. Then he’d leap toward a particular spot where a bookcase met a wall and, sure enough, an enormous cockroach would come scuttling out.
Homer tended to eat everything he caught, except for the roaches. Those he saved for me. During a particularly rainy two weeks, I woke up every morning to find a neat pile of two or three palmetto bug corpses stacked in front of my bed.
As soon as he heard me stir, Homer would jump from the bed to stand over the pile of dead roaches, meowing in an inviting, anxious sort of way. (It would have been irrational in Homer’s worldview to assume I would find, unassisted, anything soundless.) Look, Mommy! Look what I brought you! Do you like them? Do you?
“Thank you, Homer,” I always said, grateful he couldn’t see my reflexive grimace of disgust. “You’re a very thoughtful kitty. Mommy loves her new roaches.” Homer would stretch up his front paws and clutch my shins in a gesture that meant he was eager for me to pet and praise him, which I did—lavishly.
Now that I had my own place, I was entertaining friends on a fairly regular basis. Homer would always greet them with his customary friendly interest, but nothing ever diverted his attention from a six-legged intruder on the loose. “That is so crazy!” people would say upon seeing Homer snatch a fly out of five feet of air. “I mean, he’s blind!”
“Don’t tell him that,” I’d reply. “I don’t think he knows.”
“He’s like Mr. Miyagi catching flies with chopsticks in The Karate Kid,” my friend Tony observed once. “I wish I had a whole box of flies and roaches I could release in here for him to catch.”
I shuddered at the hideous prospect. “I’m incredibly glad you don’t.”
Homer hadn’t yet bagged his biggest game, however. That was an honor still to come.
14 • Mucho Gato
Ill deeds do not prosper, and the weak confound the strong.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
IT WAS AN UNCOMFORTABLY HOT NIGHT IN MID-JULY WHEN I AWAKENED, startled, at four o’clock in the morning, to a sound I’d never heard before.
It sounded like a cat growling, but the only one of my cats I’d ever heard growl was Scarlett. I knew it wasn’t her, though. And it couldn’t possibly be Vashti—Vashti who was so polite and unassertive that her meows came out as tiny squeaks; Vashti didn’t have it in her to growl at anyone.
That could only leave Homer.
The mere fact of Homer’s growling—Homer, who was friendly as a puppy, who was always so happy-go-lucky that I’d never known him to be so much as grumpy—already had me frightened. I squinted and struggled to see him in the darkness.
Faint light streamed in through the blinds from the streetlights outside. But Homer, black and eyeless, was completely invisible. I could tell, though, that he was close by, somewhere on the bed. I sat up and reached over to flip on my bedside lamp.
The first thing I saw was Homer, standing in the middle of the bed, puffed up to about three times his normal size. His back was completely arched, and every hair on his body stood straight up, his tail bristled and stiff as a pipe cleaner. His legs were set wide apart, and although his head was tucked down low, his ears were at full attention. He moved his head and ears evenly from side to side with the precision of a sonar dish. His front claws were extended farther than I’d ever seen them, farther than I would have thought physically possible. His growl continued, low and unbroken—not completely aggressive yet, but a
definite warning.
Beyond Homer, standing at the foot of my bed, was a man I’d never seen before in my life.
In the disoriented way you think when woken out of a sound sleep, my mind rapidly considered and discarded all innocent explanations for this man’s presence. Visiting friend? No. New boyfriend? No. Drunken neighbor who’d stumbled into my apartment instead of his own?
No, no, and no.
I felt every muscle in my body stiffen and tense, my very eyelids snapping open so wide and so fast that the muscles twinged in pain.
All I could think was that the buried nightmare of every woman living alone—the doomsday scenario that had spawned a thousand horror movies—was playing out right here, right now, in my bedroom. I also realized that, having never really believed it could ever happen to me, I had done nothing in the way of arming myself against such an encounter. My eyes plunged wildly around the room, considering what value each object I saw might have as a weapon.
The intruder looked as startled as I felt and, for a crazy moment, this struck me as highly ridiculous. Surely, among the three of us, he must have been the most prepared for whatever was about to happen. I mean, who had broken into whose apartment?
But then I realized he wasn’t looking at me. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Homer.
Like me, he had obviously heard Homer growling but, also like me, been unable to distinguish any visual evidence of Homer’s presence. Unlike me, however, it was taking him a second to figure out why this cat—who gave every indication he was preparing an attack—had been so completely invisible. There was something weird going on here, something off about this cat, something wrong with this cat’s face …
