The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The seatmate peered distractedly about the subway car and then asked the man what he fed this cat.

  “Hot dogs and coffee,” said the man. “Nothing else. Just plenty of hot dogs and coffee.”

  | 1975 |

  In 1997, a model house was built on the land immediately east of the Maraseks’ compound, and in the next two years thirty more houses went up. The land had been dense, brambly woods. It was wiped clean before the building started, so the new landscaping trees were barely toothpicks, held in place with rubber collars and guy wires, and the houses looked as if they’d just been unwrapped and set out, like lawn ornaments. The development was named The Preserve. The houses were airy and tall and had showy entrances and double-car garages and fancy amenities like Jacuzzis and wet bars and recessed lighting and cost around three hundred thousand dollars. They were the kind of houses that betokened a certain amount of achievement—promotion to company vice-president, say—and they were owned by people who were disconcerted to note that on certain mornings, as they stood outside playing catch with their kids or pampering their lawns, there were dozens of buzzards lined up on their roofs, staring hungrily at the Maraseks’ back yard.

  “If someone had told me there were tigers here, I would have never bought the house,” one neighbor said not long ago. His name is Kevin Wingler, and where his lawn ends, the Maraseks’ property begins. He is a car collector, and he was in his garage at the time, tinkering with a classic red Corvette he had just bought. “I love animals,” he said. “We get season passes every year for the Six Flags safari, and whenever I’m out I always pet all the cows and all the pigs, and I think tigers are majestic and beautiful and everything. But we broke our ass to build this house, and it’s just not right. I could have bought in any development! I even had a contract elsewhere, but the builder coaxed me into buying this.” He licked his finger and dabbed at a spot on the dashboard and laughed. “This is just so weird,” he said. “You’d think this would be happening in Arkansas, or something.”

  I drove through The Preserve and then out to a road on the other side of the Maraseks’ land. This was an old road, one of the few that had been there when the Maraseks moved in, and the houses were forty or fifty years old and weathered. The one near the corner belonged to the owner of a small trucking company. He said that he had helped Joan Byron-Marasek clean up her facilities after the state inspection. “I knew she was here when I moved here fifteen years ago,” he said. “Tigers nearby? I don’t care. You hear a roar here and there. It’s not a big concern of mine to hear a roar now and then. The stench in the summer was unbearable, though.” He said he didn’t think that the wandering tiger was one of Byron-Marasek’s, because her tigers were so dirty and the tiger that was shot looked clean and fit. He said that, a few years before, Byron-Marasek had come by his house with a petition to stop the housing development. He didn’t sign it. “The new neighbors, they’re not very neighborly,” he said. “They’re over there in their fancy houses. She’s been here a lot longer than they have.” Still, he didn’t want to get involved. “Those are Joan’s own private kitty cats,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “That’s her business. I’ve got my life to worry about.”

  The tiger that had walked through Jackson for less than eight hours had been an inscrutable and unaccountable visitor, and, like many such visitors, he disturbed things. A meeting was held at City Hall soon after he was shot. More than a hundred people showed up. A number of them came dressed in tiger costumes. They demanded to know why the roving tiger had been killed rather than captured, and what the fate of Byron-Marasek’s tigers would be. Somehow the meeting devolved into a shouting match between people from the new Jackson, who insisted that Byron-Marasek’s tigers be removed immediately, and the Old Guard, who suggested that anyone who knew the town—by implication, the only people who really deserved to be living there—knew that there were tigers in Holmeson’s Corner. If the tigers bothered the residents in The Preserve so much, why had they been stupid enough to move in? Soon after the meeting, the state refused to renew Byron-Marasek’s wildlife permit, citing inadequate animal husbandry, failure to show theatrical or educational grounds for possessing potentially dangerous wildlife, and grievously flawed record-keeping. The township invoked its domestic-animals ordinances, demanding that Byron-Marasek get rid of some of her thirty-odd dogs or else apply for a formal kennel license. The homeowners in The Preserve banded together and sued the developer for consumer fraud, claiming that he had withheld information about the tigers in his off-site disclosure statement, which notifies prospective buyers of things like toxic-waste dumps and prisons which might affect the resale value of a house. The neighborhood group also sued Byron-Marasek for creating a nuisance with both her tigers and her dogs.

  (illustration credit 15.5)

  Here was where the circus began—not the circus where Joan Byron-Marasek had worked and where she had developed the recipe for “Joan’s Circus Secret,” which is what she feeds her tigers, but the legal circus, the amazing three-ring spectacle that has been going on now for several years. Once the state denied Byron-Marasek’s request to renew her permit, she could no longer legally keep her tigers. She requested an administrative review, but the permit denial was upheld. She appealed to a higher court. She was ordered to get rid of the animals while awaiting the results of her appeal of the permit case. She appealed that order. “Tigers are extremely fragile animals,” she said at a press conference. “Tigers will die if removed by someone else. If they are allowed to take our tigers, this will be a tiger holocaust.” Byron-Marasek won that argument, which allowed her to keep the tigers during her permit appeal, as long as she agreed to certain conditions, including preventing the tigers from breeding. During the next couple of years, two of her tigers had cubs, which she hid from state inspectors for several weeks. She declared that the state was trying to destroy her life’s work. Through her Tigers Only Web site, she supplied form letters for her supporters to send to state officials and to the D.E.P.:

  DEAR SENATOR:

  I am a supporter of the Tigers Only Preservation Society and Ms. Joan Byron-Marasek in her fight to keep her beautiful tigers in their safe haven in Jackson, New Jersey.… We should all be delighted with the fact that these tigers live together in peaceful harmony with their environment and one another right here in New Jersey. If anything, the T.O.P.S. tigers should be revered as a State treasure, and as such, we citizens of New Jersey should all proudly and enthusiastically participate in this State-wide endeavor to keep the T.O.P.S. tigers in New Jersey.

  If we are successful … future generations of constituents will be eternally grateful for your efforts in keeping these magnificent creatures living happily in our midst for all to enjoy.

  In the meantime, legal proceedings dragged on while she changed attorneys five times. Her case moved up the legal chain until it reached the state’s appellate court. There, in December, 2001, the original verdict was finally and conclusively upheld—in other words, Byron-Marasek was denied, once and for all, the right to keep tigers in New Jersey.

  The Byron-Marasek case reminded some people of the 1995 landmark lawsuit in Oregon against Vickie Kittles, who had a hundred and fifteen dogs living with her in a school bus. Wherever Kittles stopped with her wretched menagerie, she was given a tank of gas and directions to get out of town. She ended up in Oregon, where she was finally arrested. There she faced a district attorney named Joshua Marquis, who had made his name prosecuting the killer of Victor the Lobster, the twenty-five-pound mascot of Oregon’s Seaside Aquarium who had been abducted from his tank. When the thief was apprehended, he threw Victor to the ground, breaking his shell; no lobster veterinarian could be found and Victor died three days later. Marquis was able to persuade a jury that the man was guilty of theft and criminal mischief. He decided to prosecute Kittles on grounds of animal neglect. Kittles contended that she had the right to live with her dogs in any way she chose. Marquis argued that the dogs, which got no exercise
and no veterinary care and were evidently miserable, did not choose to live in a school bus. Vickie Kittles was convicted, and her dogs were sent to foster homes around the country.

  “Cat, anyone?” (illustration credit 15.6)

  The Kittles case was the first prominent suit against an “animal hoarder”—a person who engages in the pathological collecting of animals. Tiger Ladies are somewhat rare, but there are Cat Ladies and Bird Men all over the country, and often they end up in headlines like “201 CATS PULLED FROM HOME” and “PETS SAVED FROM HORROR HOME” and “CAT LOVER’S NEIGHBORS TIRED OF FELINE FIASCO.” A study published by the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium says that more than two-thirds of hoarders are females, and most often they hoard cats, although dogs, birds, farm animals, and, in one case, beavers, are hoarded as well. The median number of animals is thirty-nine, but many hoarders have more than a hundred. Hoarders, according to the consortium, “may have problems concentrating and staying on track with any management plan.”

  On the other hand, animal hoarders may have boundless energy and focus when it comes to fighting in court. Even after Byron-Marasek lost her final appeal, she devised another way to frustrate the state’s efforts to remove her tigers. The Department of Environmental Protection had found homes for the tigers at the Wild Animal Orphanage in San Antonio, Texas, and come up with a plan for moving the tigers there on the orphanage’s Humane Train. In early January, the superior-court judge Eugene Serpentelli held a hearing on the matter. The Tiger Lady came to court wearing a dark-green pants suit and square-toed shoes and carrying a heavy black briefcase. She was edgy and preoccupied and waved off anyone who approached her except for a local radio host who had trumpeted her cause on his show and a slim young man who huddled with her during breaks. The young man was as circumspect as she was, politely declining to say whether he was a contributor to the Tigers Only Preservation Society or a fellow tiger owner or perhaps someone with his own beef with the D.E.P.

  Throughout the hearing, Byron-Marasek dipped into her briefcase and pulled out sheets of paper and handwritten notes and pages downloaded from the Internet, and passed them to her latest lawyer, who had been retained the day before. The material documented infractions for which the Wild Animal Orphanage had been cited by the U.S.D.A. over the years—storing outdated bags of Monkey Chow in an unair-conditioned shed, for instance, and placing the carcass of a tiger in a meat freezer until its eventual necropsy and disposal. None of the infractions were serious and none remained unresolved, but they raised enough questions to delay the inevitable once again, and Judge Serpentelli adjourned to allow Byron-Marasek more time to present an alternate plan. “Throughout this period of time, I’ve made it clear that the court had no desire to inflict on Mrs. Marasek or the tigers any hardship,” the Judge announced. “But the tigers must be removed. I have no discretion on the question of whether they should be removed, just how.”

  “We want to register a domestic partnership.”

  Before the state acts, however, there is a good chance that the Tiger Lady will have taken matters into her own hands. Last fall, in an interview with the Asbury Park Press, she said that she was in the process of “buying land elsewhere”—she seemed to think it unwise to name the state—and suggested that she and her dogs and her tigers might be leaving New Jersey for good. Typically, people who have disputes with the authorities about their animal collections move from one jurisdiction to another as they run into legal difficulties. If they do eventually lose their animals, they almost always resurface somewhere else with new ones: recidivism among hoarders is close to a hundred percent. In the not too distant future, in some other still-rural corner of America, people may begin to wonder what smells so strange when the wind blows from a certain direction, and whether they actually could have heard a roar in the middle of the night, and whether there could be any truth to the rumors about a lady with a bunch of tigers in town.

  I had been to Jackson countless times, circled the Maraseks’ property, and walked up and down the sidewalks in The Preserve, but I had never seen a single tiger. I had even driven up to the Maraseks’ front gate a couple of times and peered through it, and I could see some woolly white dogs scuffing behind a wire fence, and I could see tarps and building materials scattered around the house, but no tigers, no flash of orange fur, nothing. I wanted to see one of the animals, to assure myself that they really existed.

  One afternoon, I parked across from the Winglers’ and walked past their garage, where Kevin was still monkeying around with his Corvette, and then across their backyard and beyond where their lawn ended, where the woods thickened and the ground was springy from all the decades’ worth of pine needles that have rained down, and I followed the tangy, slightly sour smell that I guessed was tiger, although I don’t think I’d ever smelled tigers before. There was a chain-link fence up ahead. I stopped and waited. A minute passed and nothing happened. A minute more, and then a tiger walked past on the other side of the fence, its huge head lowered and its tail barely twitching, the black stripes of its coat crisscrossed with late-day light, its slow, heavy tread making no sound at all. It reached the end of the fence and paused, and turned back the other way, and then it was gone.

  | 2002 |

  (illustration credit 15.8)

  THE CLOISTER

  The last light of a July evening drained

  into the streets below. My love and I had hard

  things to say and hear and we sat over

  wine, faltering, picking our words carefully.

  The afternoon before I had lain across

  my bed and my cat leapt up to lie

  alongside me, purring and slowly

  growing dozy. By this ritual I can

  clear some clutter from my baroque brain.

  And into that brief vacancy the image

  of a horse cantered, coming straight to me,

  and I knew it brought hard talk and hurt

  and fear. How did we do? A medium job,

  which is well above average. But because

  she had opened her heart to me as far

  as she did, I saw her fierce privacy,

  like a gnarled, luxuriant tree all hung

  with disappointments, and I knew

  that to love her I must love the tree

  and the nothing it cares for me.

  —WILLIAM MATTHEWS | 1998 |

  CAT FANTASIA

  * * *

  THOMAS BELLER

  For several hours one afternoon last week, the unremarkable interior of the Southgate Tower Hotel, in midtown, was transformed into a kind of cat fantasia for the nineties, previewing some of the more exotic and genetically up-to-date entries in the ninth annual International Cat Show, which was held at Madison Square Garden this past weekend. Cats were perched on chairs and couches and windowsills, and a few even deigned to step on the floor. Their owners mostly stood over them, fawning, and some waved what appeared to be feather dusters lined with sparkly sequins while the cats jumped up, stared inquisitively, or assumed some other quintessential cat pose provoked by this mystery object, referred to, appropriately, as a “cat tease.”

  Though beautiful, most of the cats present would not be mistaken for regular house pets. One, named Battle Hymn, a Persian that had been groomed to resemble a lion (or a poodle), spent the afternoon resting languorously on its own divan, which was decorated in a cheetah pattern—a pattern that matched a bow tie around its neck and also the skirt, bracelet, and earrings of its owner, Lise Girard. On a windowsill, nestled in a cat-size playpen lined with pink fur, a father and son Sphynx team curled up, the father diligently licking the wrinkly infant. The Sphynx differs conspicuously from most breeds of cat; indeed, one is likely to pause a moment before deciding that it is a cat at all. Their owner described the Sphynx as “a cat with no clothes on,” the fact being that the Sphynx has no hair, only a stubble so faint that any skinhead could be proud of it, and a worried face. The Sphynxes’ owner suggests that in order
to best appreciate their beauty you might “think of them as Yoda or E.T.”

  The stars of the unusual cat sweepstakes, however, were Maxwell and Cotton, which belong to a breed that was making its début at this year’s cat show. The Longhaired Munchkin is a breed that owes its existence in large part to Dr. Solveig Pflueger, a geneticist who counsels “both humans and cats.” The Munchkin’s major distinction is that it has very short legs. “It’s the cat equivalent of a dachshund,” Dr. Pflueger said as she twirled her cat tease above Maxwell while he vainly tried to leap up after it. Dr. Pflueger suggested that, because the Longhaired Munchkin had legs too short for jumping, it would be ideal for someone who didn’t want to own a cat that would leap up on counters and sofas. Joan Rivers has dubbed the Munchkin, for reasons that are unclear, the Dr. Ruth cat.

  Some of the cats fit a more conventional definition of beauty. Victoria Garvin, an administrator in the Paintings and Sculpture Department of the Museum of Modern Art, is the owner of Ursa Minor, an Ocie, whose main distinction, in addition to a lithe, sleek body, is a spotted coat closely resembling that of an ocelot. Ms. Garvin, who lives in a house in northern New Jersey with eight cats and a brother, suggested that the “jungle look” was enjoying a bit of a vogue among cats.

  Perhaps the most low-key cat/owner pair was Fred Andrews and Hermes. Mr. Andrews, who happened to be the only male owner present, sat quietly in an armchair throughout the afternoon. He was wearing a purple crewneck sweater, and Hermes, an ash-gray Chartreux, huddled against his purple stomach, which provided a bit of a perch. “He’s terrified,” Mr. Andrews said of his cat. “It’s his first show.” The Chartreux is a rare breed in America; it apparently originated in France centuries ago, and the first Chartreux didn’t arrive here until 1970. Mr. Andrews, a thirty-one-year-old native of Staten Island, entered the world of pedigree cats in 1989. After consulting Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Cats, he settled on the Chartreux because it was beautiful and also “because that was the one that looked the most normal,” he said. “I wasn’t interested in any of the funky-looking cats.”