Or Why October Is A Shitty Month For Me

In October of this year I put my cat Screeechy down for the last time.  She was almost 21.  She’d been in physical and mental decline for awhile. In retrospect looking hard at the fact that cats cannot speak English or any other human language but Love I might have needed to let her go a lot faster.  October is also the month marking the anniversaries of two great artists and friends’ deaths from AIDS–Gene “Portia Manson” Barnes (1995) and Robert Blanchon (1999). First, to drift around the losing of Screeech and through the flurries rest assured we will land back on why this now on this World AIDS Day.

I came to the realization in trying to find the best time for Screeechy and for me I couldn’t because there wasn’t one.  It may be a pet owner’s responsibility to care enough about our pets to make those difficult decisions but it dawned on me in the most sun-casting-its-glow-across-my-brain-in-slow-motion timeframes that I was waiting for Screeechy to tell me or show me or I would find her dead because I DID NOT want to decide when it was time for her to die.  My friend Michele, a.k.a. Pinky who was my roommate in San Francisco and got her own black cat–punk rock Sid when Screeechy was a year old, came over to drop something off and we stood in the kitchen watching Screeech stumble around.  She told me she thought she looked like she was in a lot of pain and she reminded me of the time I helped her to make the terrible decision about Sid when he had cancer.  We hugged and I sobbed into her shoulder, “I can mark how long WE have been friends by Screeechy’s age!”

So that Wednesday I brought Screeechy to the vet to be euthanized.

My husband, Ben cleared his schedule so he could come.  I wrapped her in a towel in my arms for the drive over.  She struggled a little bit but also stuck her head in the crook of my arm.  Before we left the house I tried to reason with Smokes to say goodbye, resorting to putting ice cream in a bowl and locking Screeechy in the bedroom with the ice cream by the bed.  A few minutes later when I came back in Screeechy was in the same place, the bowl licked clean and Smokes further retreated under the bed.

Once we got to the vet, Dr. Limburg saw us in the lobby and quickly ushered us into a room.  Lights were dim, there was a blanket and Screeechy was pretty passive.  The vet explained the process–putting a catheter in her paw and how quick it would go once they injected the solution,an overdose of anesthetic; it would be 10-20 seconds.  She took Screeechy out of the room to put the catheter in her paw and it seemed to take forever.  I started to have doubts and then I could hear Screeechy.  Yelling, fighting Screeechy and my second thoughts intensified.  Dr. Limburg came back in looking harried but in her sweet mom voice said, “Screeechy’s a little stressed out, we’re having difficulty putting the catheter in so we are going to give her an injection to calm her down, relax her.  We’ll bring her back in, it will take a few minutes to  kick in and then we’ll get the catheter in and give her the final injection.” They brought her back in wrapped in the blanket and I pulled at her head the way I do, gazing into her eyes the way I always have. I sang her her Screeechy song. (Oscar Mayer tune)

My Screeechy has a first name,
It’s S C R E E E C H Y.

My Screeechy has a second name,
It’s K I T T Y.
I love to pet her little head and snuggle with her in my bed.
S C R E E E C H Y K I T T Y, Screeechy Kitty!

As I held her face at first she had her cross-Screeechy face and then the drugs kicked in and she was a barely breathing zombie.  I stroked her and talked to her. So did Ben.  I lay my head next to hers, pressing her face into my eye socket the way I do with her and Burl.  I cried.  The minutes stretched out.  I could smell the chemicals where they disinfected her shaved paw.  Suddenly her tongue lolled out and I began to panic.  I sobbed to Ben that I was freaking out and just when I wanted to ask him to go get the doctor, Dr. Limburg walked in with the injection.  As she asked, “Are you ready?” a technician walked in with the bill.  Ben immediately picked it up, folded it and said, “I’ll take care of this on our way out.”  Then Dr. Limburg says “If you like as our gift to you we can make an impression of Screeechy’s paw in clay with her name.  So that you an have something of her. (I had decided not to get her ashes.) It’s our gift to you.  Is this something you want?”  I barely understood her and looked confusedly at Ben who put his hand on my back and said, “Yes.”

Dr. Limburg likes to explain things as she does them and she said, “I am going to inject the anesthetic and then listen for her heart to stop.”  She put the needle in and as soon as she pushed the stopper in and reached for her stethoscope she said, “Her breathing has stopped.”” I touched her and called out crying and Dr. Limburg placed the stethoscope against her heart and said, “Her heart has stopped.  She’s gone.” She had warned me before that her eyes would not close.  She was right.  They didn’t. Ben was crying a little, too. “GOODBYE, SCREEECHY. GOODBYE,” I sobbed.  Dr. Limburg looked up and asked if I wanted a few minutes.  I’m crying.  “Yes.”  “Just come see me when you’re done.”  She left the room, I looked down at Screeechy but had to get out.  She was gone.  She is gone. She is dead and that long friendship is over.  I went straight out, leaned against the brick wall and sobbed.

More than sad I feel loss, the hole of the space she has been in for over twenty years and has now left, but mostly peace and relief.  Yet, I await a visitation from her Spirit.

This October, I also finished reading Fire in the Belly, the complete biography of, the artist David Wojnarowicz by Cynthia (C.) Carr.  A recent issue of Vanity Fair put the word tome in the disapproved column of overused words but if the last time I used it was to apply to this book that would be fine because no other word is necessary.  No other book about this amazing, complicated short-lived artist is necessary. It flushed out the story of who David was providing me with a complete background on he who had a huge impact on me as a young artist.  I remember sitting in a theater feeling impaled to my broken down old theater seat with an over-sized nail like the one used to hammer the Calvinist Doctrine to the thick wood door or the one through Jesus’ hand, it was that strong of an epiphany hearing “All I can feel is the pressure.  All I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.” and seeing the close up of the sown lips. A blueprint for how to make rage beautiful–how to use rage to channel change. Not to mention he used Krazy Kat in his paintings, a whole other story.

Anyway, when David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 I was living in San Francisco.  I was working on an issue of my ‘zine thorn.  I had a very vivid dream about him which inspired me to write a piece incorporating a collage by my friend Dave Jones.  I would work on my ‘zine with xeroxes and old layout boards I’d cobbled from my production job at California Bicyclist along with sticky letters, other ephemera and all kinds of supplies distributed around the floor.  Screeechy was a tiny kitten who had survived a shoebox in the rain in the backyard, me finding her sheerly on the power of relentless tiny lungs (source of the name, an extra “e”, indeed.)  She would come careening in a kitten gallop down the long San Francisco flat’s hallway, skidding across all the papers, a furry floor surfer of my ‘zine production.  My radical papers scattered.  I couldn’t get mad because it was so fucking cute, but I may have been a little cross and as she continued to grow and do this I would find exasperation a little quicker.  I mean, for chrissakes, I was cutting out page numbers among a printed list! Tiny tiny paper strewn by the now grown black cat. Fingers sticky with the residue of glue sticks quick to finding fur.  I hope in the conflation of these two memories into one, the piece on David Wojnarowicz and Screeechy, the collision is true.

What IS true is this little cat saw me through those years when it seemed every gay man over thirty I knew was dying or dead.  Walking from my house up to Market Street to hit up Copy Center or Kinko’s the store or a bar, if you saw a man from behind bent over a cane, chances were he was not an old man, but a young one living and dying from AIDS.  I moved away to graduate school here in Southern California and I will NEVER forget the answering machine message bringing news of my great friend, Gene’s death.  I collapsed to the floor and Screeechy was there with her little trill asking what was wrong. She was there for the weeks after and came with me to New York during the summer between year one and two waiting for me in the one bedroom apartment I shared with two gay men as I went on long walks with my camera, “interning” at Adult Crash, or some other odd job or shenanigan, escaping occasionally onto the fire escape or into the hallway.  She was there four years later when Robert Blanchon died.  He and I had become good friends and occasional collaborators when he moved to LA as a visiting artist at UCI. She was there through my years as a single girl and helped me convert my dog-loving, now husband into a cat guy.

Now, to mark this grave month of October again, fitting for it’s spooky last day of the month, I make note that yes, all those folks were lost and we who were devastated and left behind have not fully recovered and probably never will, but in the fading pain from almost twenty years since losing Gene, now it seems I know a lot of people with cancer, people who have died from cancer.  This old time music I play has brought into my life more amazing folks, now friends who are older and younger, too, and some of them are getting cancer. In the words of Lincoln, “Buzzards Guts!”

And then there’s my father.

Write, write, right.

October 26th my brother, Sean and I flew up to Alaska.  Our father has Stage 2 bladder cancer and was having surgery to remove his bladder and prostate.  Our mother does not drive and while there’s a bus that goes directly from nearby their house to just outside the military base’s hospital, it’s infrequent, it’s almost winter with freezing temperatures and we didn’t want her to be alone.  Plus, the last time our pops went under the knife to clear a coratid artery in 2009, he had a stroke, so we didn’t want to risk not being there.  It was an intense experience to be amidst all their emotions and responses as a couple, as individuals on their journey of life and as our parents who are moving into a stage of life which brings to the fore our role reversal as adult children who are not only dealing with our own lives and partners, but what we now face with this new and changing status of our small family. Here’s something I wrote coming home from the hospital post-operation while pops was still in the ICU:

Alarm Bells
and changes
A steady days
of a two to few
hours at a time
then out.
Then ids again to
get back in.
Fatigues, cammo
stranger, dancer
my father waking
up from his operation,
finding himself
in Vietnam. Placing
us there, too, although
disbelieving.  “What the fuck?
What the fuck is this? What the
fuck is this shit? An Inupiat in the
desert? How many made it? How many
of my guys made it?  Kelly, Sean, can you
get my guys a case of beer.”

Fall back, Winter down.

One day my brother and I looked up from our thumbs’ occupation with our smartphones to see our father suspended from the ceiling of his room in a hammock to move him from bed to chair and we both laugh out loud.  His first day home he tells us how hurt he was by the laughter. My brother who is usually quick to anger with his dad, our dad, communicates quite calmly while it was not our intention to hurt his feelings, we were indeed not laughing at him but at the absurdity of the situation.  The next day in the paper there was an article about moving sheep reminding me of this contraption. I clipped the photograph.

Later that same day we went to brewery/movie theater, the Bears Tooth which shows $3 flicks and serves pitchers of beer for a little relief. One of the previews was for How to Survive a Plague a documentary about ACT UP and I was immediately back again, fired up and firing the shuffle through my suitcase of photographs looking for Screeechy that day of her death when I came upon this whole roll of photo automat prints from Gay Pride in San Francisco in the summer of 1990.  I was still in college and Gene was still alive.  It was the time when ACT UP came careening down a side street off Market with clothes of black and banners and signs with pink triangles, shouting and chanting.  I was there.  I celebrated after with Gene and his Radical Faerie friends on the lawn of Civic Center with budweisers and Export As and Gene’s great laugh and long locks. It’s all there in the photographs. Those fiery, fierce times. Imprinted and printing, everyday.

Yes, sometimes October is a shitty month for me.