Goodbye to Mabel

RIP Mabel Hult

November 2002-January 16, 2019. 

My ex Colin, who is a veterinarian, hooked me up with Mabel in early 2003. He invited me to his vet clinic where she was waiting in an exam room. I didn't really like the looks of her: she was kind of brown and basic, with a mishmash of stripes and patches and swirls; a street kitty. Which I was informed that she actually was -- pulled off the street, around 3-4 months old, probably born in November. She'd survived the winter outside. She had just been given an abortive spay, as in they had taken out a litter of kittens with her uterus. It was unknown if that was her first litter. "She's a mess," I said. 

"She's special," said Colin.

So I hung out alone with her a while in the exam room. She silently meowed at me and I leaned in. Then she bumped my chin with her head, and I thought, Okay, we're going to do this.

Young Mabel was a demonic hellbeast. Pushy, mean, short tempered, fiery, demanding, screechy, easily bored, hungry, and annoying. My other cat, an older marshmallow of a British shorthair named Gladys, didn't know how to handle her, either. We sat together on the futon, staring at Mabel tearing around our tiny apartment, wondering how we were going to survive this furry dervish.

It was years before Mabel chilled out. Gladys got so stressed about their battles that she licked her tail bald. But the secret with Mabel and me is that she was mean but she was deeply loving. She wanted to be near me, lie beside me on the futon and purr with her deep rumble, soothing my aching smoker's heart in those years when I still smoked. When she was done cuddling, she'd bite my wrist and run off, or scratch me severely for daring to hold on a second longer than she wanted.

Still, we all slept together, a cat on either side of me, and nine years passed pretty quietly in that tiny SoHo apartment. There were a few adventures: mice getting in, new boyfriends to dislike, fights between Mabel and Gladys. 

Once Mabel was on the windowsill, kkkkkk-ing at the pigeons on the fire escape in the dark courtyard, partially hidden by the blinds. I touched her furry butt, accidentally surprising her, and she flipped up in a loop through the blinds, screaming. I screamed, too. She landed backward hard on my shoes on the floor, breaking her tail at the base. The vet said there was only one surgical fix for a cat's broken tail -- and we weren't ready for that -- but they often heal on their own. So we got through it with glucosamine and painkillers. Maybe she was a bit more subdued after that? 

Certainly her attitude changed a little when, after surviving years of abuse from Mabel, Gladys suddenly snapped one day, jumped on the bed, and swiped a claw into Mabel's left eye. The claw broke off, sticking out of Mabel's eyeball. It took another trip to the vet to get the claw removed. Her eye survived, but it always had a hole in it after that, and that eye got progressively crustier as the years went on.

We moved from SoHo to a spacious Washington Heights apartment in 2011. Mabel and Gladys loved the space and the streaming sunlight, but Gladys was probably 18 years old at that point and died of a quick heart attack in the first few months in our new home. Mabel was not sad about it. She loved being my only animal, and reveled in finally being the Queen.

But I got a new cat. Again from Colin, I found Bernie at the ASPCA. He was a sweet and dopey kitty, only 8 weeks old.

Mabel hated Bernie on sight. She hated him so much she would shake with loathing. In a three-room apartment, she did everything she could to never be closer than 20 feet to him. She stopped sleeping with me, and was furious for years.

And then when Bernie grew up and started to stand up for himself, she got sad.

It was quite unseemly how happy Mabel was about the death of Bernie. She practically danced, rolling on the floor and stretching out and purring. Such mean bliss.


After I more or less got over Bernie's death -- with no help from her -- I couldn't get behind the idea of getting another cat. Bernie had been wonderful, and any cat was going to suffer in comparison.

Bernie was always a strange and goofy cat, but it turned out that his oddball brain had serious problems. He died of sudden seizures in 2016, when he wasn't yet five years old.

So I got a puppy. Henry. I was so worried that Mabel would never forgive me, that their introduction would be as awful as it had gone with her and Bernie.

But she didn't hate Henry. She didn't like him, to be sure, but she taught him to be polite to her and he was always respectful and she tolerated his existence. Maybe it was because he wasn't a cat. Especially a male cat. Especially a male cat with brain problems.

In 2017, I had to leave NYC. I packed up the Washington Heights apartment. 

With Mabel and Henry in the car, we drove for three days to get to Texas. I thought Mabel might have a hard time with it, but she handled it well enough. I guess she realized it was better than being left behind. And she enjoyed the hotels. On Day 3, she started to cry about the drive, but I was pretty grumbly about it by then, too.

Life in Houston was pretty cushy for Mabel. For the first time in her life, she had a backyard area to explore. My parents' big house had plenty of soft spots to sleep, and a big kitchen to hang out in. Plus now my father fed her, too, and we had to coordinate to make sure we didn't feed her twice. She was good at pretending to be unfed.

  

Then one day Mabel was out in the backyard doing her slow sniffing inspection of the perimeter when the yard workers arrived with their leaf blowers. Terrified, Mabel vaulted the fence and disappeared into the suburbs.

I put up postings and signs and wandered the neighborhood shaking food and calling for her. She had gotten pretty deaf in her later years so I wasn't sure if she could hear me, but still I wandered around, putting out leaflets with her picture on them, checking for glowing eyes in the bushes with flashlights at night, setting up a cage that only caught an opossum. There was a tropical storm while she was gone; I was so worried that she'd hidden in the storm drains and had been washing into the bayou. After eight days of searching for her, I had pretty much given up hope.

But the next evening, a neighbor on the street behind ours spotted her in his garden.

Who knows how she survived nine days out there? Eating lizards and mice? I'll never know. She was certainly skinnier. And no longer allowed out in the yard alone.

In 2018, her teeth started to rot, and she became quite uncomfortable, sleeping and hiding more and more. I brought her to the vet for dental extractions several times, but those were stopgap measures. 

In November, she stopped recognizing any of us for a few weeks, and she'd cower and scream whenever we came near. That cleared up, but the teeth got worse, and she started living under a bed or in a closet, or sleeping in her litter box. She stopped cleaning herself well. The vet said she was declining.

A canine extraction and steroids helped for a few weeks, but eating began to cause her too much pain, and Mabel was ripping at her mouth and face with her claws. I switched her to a liquid diet, which helped for a few days. Then she stopped eating altogether. 

For the first time in years, Mabel consented to sleep in my bed with me and Henry. She was very sweet and cuddly in her last days, letting me know she was ready to depart.

It was time. I asked the vet if I should say goodbye in the clinic or take her home to let her die in comfort, but I was told there would be nothing comfortable about her starving herself to death.

So Mabel was put to sleep. It was quick. She didn't have far to go.

Goodbye, Mabel, you mean old cat. You were always contradictory: soft but sharp; friendly but standoffish, quiet but yowly; fastidious but untidy; low-maintenance but difficult; loving but mean.

You always reminded me of me.

Highbridge Park

Across the street from my apartment building is Highbridge Park.

Officially, Highbridge Park, named after the High Bridge, an old pedestrian aqueduct that is the oldest bridge in the city, begins at 155th St. and continues all the way up to Dyckman St. in Inwood.

Where I live, it's not much of a park, really. It's a cliff between my street and the Harlem River Drive far below, winding along the Harlem River between Manhattan and the Bronx. A single path traverses the park, which is occasionally used by joggers and cyclists and park rangers and more often used by drug users and dealers and teenagers escaping prying eyes.

Unless you lean over the rock wall along the upper edge of the park, the path below is invisible from the sidewalk and hidden from the highway, too. It has very few exits back to the street, and most of those have been closed by the city, or there are police barriers blocking the steps. So it's too isolated to feel safe down there. I've only walked the cliff path a few times, as the feeling of being trapped is overpowering.

It's pretty clean, though, and well-tended with beautiful flowers and lush greenery. Ignore the empty drug bags scattered around, and the ubiquitous blue cigarillo wrappers.

About 10 blocks downtown, the park widens into a recreation center, and a little further down than that, a large public pool. About 10 blocks uptown is a busy playground and basketball courts that are always packed with hardcore players and semi-pros and their fans, with blaring music, hookahs, and a general party atmosphere. The low path along the cliff surfaces toward the street just past the courts, and winds through a well-manicured park where people picnic and have birthday parties, and just up past that is a terrific, big dog run where I take Henry in the evenings to romp with his doggie friends.

Since I've gotten Henry, I've become very well acquainted with the whole stretch of the park uptown from my apartment, as I walk at least six blocks of it five times daily, and walk the full 11 blocks to the dog run at least three times a week.

I have a great fondness for the old-fashioned rock wall that separates the top of the park's cliff from the sidewalk and the street. It's the same style as the rock walls surrounding Central Park and various other city parks, and feels classic New York to me.

Along with the beautiful and varied trees, plants, and flowers, I've seen quite a lot of interesting wildlife in the area, too, including skunks, squirrels, chipmunks, large families of raccoons, possums, and of course lots of mice and rats and colonies of cats, as well as birds beyond my abilities to recognize.

This week I saw a bright yellow snail on the rock wall eating lichen the same color as its shell. Manhattan may be paved from top to bottom, but life finds a way. I'm expecting to see a coyote any day now, or maybe a fox. Updates as they occur.

Early AM Yearning

Nothing remains to believe

except the possibility of belief—

lessening the definition of hope

into nothing more substantial

than bones and skin and

the terror of daybreak.

In the silence of the overnight,

the refrigerator's sudden buzzing

in a muted alarm, a warning cry

of omen and portent as I leap

from futon to coffee table to loveseat,

afraid of the ravenous piranhas

lurking beneath the surface

of the gray industrial carpeting.

I am tired

of proclamations of doom.

The damp cold is an uninvited guest

boring me with oft-repeated tales

of miseries more dire than my own.

My constant self-imposed solitude

has bewildered the boundaries

of the real and the actual,

like this snowy mountain peak

I hold in the palm of my hand.

While rainwater rushes down the slope

of my urban street transformed into falls,

the city lists, slumping alarmingly to the left,

jittering in a woozy double take.

Beautiful, glorious—I love you, Rosie—

the weather rolls in over the hills

like the foam frothed on a winter sea.

The true amazement:

that any madness intersects

with the obsessions of another,

that a common ground may

ever be reached. Yes,

I expect to be special,

but no preparation was possible

for the awestruck gape, the unique moment

of honest interpersonal surprise.

What do you believe in?

Don't leave me alone

adrift on this dinky dinghy,

riddling with constant curious inquiry,

believing there’s always more to believe.

The names of inks and archaic typefaces,

the word for the new feathers

on a molting mallard, progress

of geographical boundaries and canals

stretching the width of home states

into dead celebrities who may still be

kicking, details of unconsciously memorized

minutia must be taken on faith.

Gaps of knowledge demanding

specialized expertise—not only

can everything not be known,

there are always endless realms

of experiential information

to which I will never be exposed.

Inventing data in the trenches,

Canyons of hypothesized grout

flaking in the sunshine

like the sloughing amberized surface

of early miracle polymers.

I cannot ford these crevasses

with the achy stiff length of my body,

or devote my life's passions to creating

Gothic suspensions of stone or steel.

Creating a virtual analogue

to hypnotize the psyche into believing

in the level surface of the walking path

is derangement, an ignorance

of the possibility of scattered palm frond

underbrush and dusted branches

disguising a dug pit, footfalls

plunging onto befouled bungee sticks.

And yet the carpet is composed

of unnamable woven petroleum fibers

spun in a process I cannot describe.

Whispered answers suggest themselves,

wapiti, grafted seedless grapes, Marisa Tomei,

snippets of skimmed trivia

longing for an enzyme-protein connection

triggering a synthetic catalytic reaction

of what might momentarily stand as fact.

Another day has shimmered past

as today blurs to become tomorrow.

The collective scope of our project

is as generational as a cathedral.

Seasonal View

This gif was created with two years of pictures of the view from my east-facing bedroom window in Washington Heights, uptown Manhattan, NYC, distilled into a single seasonal rotation.  

Beyond the cliff of High Bridge Park across the street, that's the Harlem River down there, with Morris Heights in the Bronx on the other side.  

The bridge is the Washington Bridge, which connects 181st St. in Manhattan to the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Bronx.  The Washington Bridge should not be confused with the George Washington Bridge, the much larger span that connects Manhattan across the Hudson to the mainland on the west side of the island. 

Along the shoreline of the Bronx side, the Major Deegan Expressway and the Amtrak and MetroNorth train lines can also be seen when the trees are bare.

Click the gif to open a larger version on a new tab.

Bernard

So, a couple of months ago, I got a new kitten and named him Bernard. Mostly he gets called Bernie. Or Boogie, as he seemingly never stops running and jumping around. He's a sweet little guy, really, with gorgeous topaz eyes, but he's also a pain in the ass right now because of his completely reasonable kitten hyperactivity. My most common utterance to him is "NO!"

My older cat, Mabel, officially hates his guts, but Bernie chases her around and it's good that she's getting some exercise. I also think she secretly likes him a little, certainly more than she liked my previous old cat, Gladys, who died in July. Mabel loathed Gladys for nearly a decade, and couldn't walk past her without whacking her in the face. I pulled claws out of Gladys's chin on a weekly basis. So far, Mabel hasn't clawed Bernie seriously, and I've even spotted them sniffing one another's noses in relative calm. This gives me hope that perhaps they will one day get along, maybe even cuddle when it gets quite cold. I think it helps that he's a male kitty, and so the female feline dominance struggle doesn't apply like it did with Gladys.

So Bernie's a cute, sweet kitty, very smiley and loving, although part of me wishes he'd grow up and calm down already, while another part of me is sad that he won't be a kitten forever.

Here are some videos I made of Bernie, with a special appearance in the second one by mean ol' Mabel.

Meet Bernie


Bernie and Mabel Share a Moment


Bernie Dance

Art!

Bland?

So after surviving a three-month run finishing writing four books, barely leaving my apartment the whole time, I had become heartily sick of staring at the wide blank wall on the other side of my living room, directly across from my computer desk. There's a weird three-pronged crack branching out in the middle of the wall that kind of reminds me of some sort of spirochete, but focusing on that while in the throes of a writing fugue state is more depressing than inspiring. That wall's been blank since I moved into the apartment, just about seven years ago. For a long while I was thinking of hanging a giant poster of Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in that space -- it's the scene when they're on a motorcycle together from My Own Private Idaho. But, 1: TOO GAY; 2: Perhaps it's too depressing to hang posters of dead idols in your living room; and 3: I don't really want an image of Keanu in such a prominent location in my life.

So I decided to buy art! My apartment living room is extremely honey-colored, with shades of woody brown everywhere, plus a sepia staining on everything due to cigarette smoke. The only brighter color accents are a blue curtain and a blue pillow on the espresso-colored couch. So I wanted to brighten up the room a bit with a lighter hanging print, and hang an image that I wouldn't get thoroughly annoyed by in the coming years. So this picture seemed to fit the bill -- it's whitish and blandly inoffensive without being totally boring, it has blue accents and a blue frame, and it adds a little soft roundness with the front vase to an otherwise extremely angular room.

Now I'll have something else to stare at while I'm writing other than a spirochete-shaped crack.

And I'll leave the River and Keanu poster rolled up in a tube in my closet.

Trump Is Stealing My Sky!

New backyard view, March 2008

A week or so ago, I opened my curtains for the first time in a long time, and saw that Donald Trump's new SoHo condo/hotel, on Spring St. and Varick St., had eaten a big chunk of my visible sky.

When you live on the second floor facing a courtyard, sky is a valuable commodity. I get barely any light in my apartment anyway, and the little patch of blue I used to be able to see was pretty minimal as it was. Now it's going to have a new glass tower blocking a big chunk of it. Bummer.

My view in October 2006.

I wonder how this is going to affect my light levels in the spring and summer. I generally lose any direct sunlight in any season except winter, because the tree canopy gets so thick that it filters all the light. In deep summer, the leaves are so dense that the light I get is a dim green color by the time it reaches me. I hope this tower doesn't make that even worse. The trees are gorgeous, especially in autumn, but nobody would call my place "bright" as it is.

An artist's rendering of the completed tower.

The condo/hotel probably will be a good thing for that stretch of Varick St., which was rather dead and forgotten, and even a little sketchy a night. It's the fact that Trump built a glass tower that unnerves me. One of things I like best about SoHo is the human scale of this neighborhood, the old-world European feel of this small town within a city, the beautiful masonry and antique iron, the cobblestone streets and rough-hewn cornerstones. Glass and steel is a new flavor, and not quite welcome. This isn't midtown. This isn't Dallas. This is SoHo.

My view in December 2005.

A wide swath of Spring St. and Prince St. are already taken up by the world's most expensive outdoor shopping mall, filled with flagship designer stores and thronged with hordes of tourists on the weekends. My section has been a lot more low-key, just old tenements and Italian restaurants, with the occasional dog grooming salon and dry cleaner. I'm hoping the mall doesn't extend further west to connect to Trump's hotel. But it sure might.

When discussing your living situation in NYC, one of the big questions is, "Do you have a view?" Yes, I had a view of a cute, tree-lined courtyard, and a small slice of sky. Now I also have a view of a basic glass tower.

Trumped.

I wonder if the inhabitants of the condo/hotel will be able to see me.

Maybe I should invest in a telescope so I can spy into this new wealthy aerie. Hmm... now there's a thought!

Mouse

Mabel performs the feline drive-by maneuver.

Last week, I sequestered myself in my apartment for three days, working on a preteen copywriting project. In this rarefied, heightened, and deeply internal state of being immersed in putting exciting, upbeat, and informative sentences together, I become hyperaware of everything occurring in my tiny apartment as though I were working from inside an echo chamber.

I saw the mouse for the first time on Saturday afternoon. I was watching TV, feeling itchy because I should have been at the computer instead of on the couch, and a brownish blur zipped along the baseboard in my peripheral vision. Even though the blur had barely registered, my internal mouse alarm went off.

Lost for the second time. Bad Gladys!

As the breadwinner primate, it is not my job to deal with vermin. I went into the bedroom and gathered my cats. Gladys, the fat gray marshmallow one, protested as I lugged her off the bed. But she seemed to get the idea as I placed her in the middle of the living room -- something was up. As I figured, Mabel, my skinny, hot-tempered cat, also followed us out to investigate the commotion.

The mouse did not re-emerge, but I told the cats that they should be on high alert and that mouse-hunting was their reason for living in such pampered conditions. Really, I assume that I'm responsible for everything in the apartment over a certain height, but their duties concern what occurs on the floor. I went back to watching TV, and after a few moments of sniffing around, Gladys returned to the bed where she stays 95% of the time, and Mabel took up residence on my desk chair.

I flushed out the mouse.

Usually I'm annoyed if Mabel sits in my desk chair while a writing project is on the front burner as her presence there seems a rebuke that my own ass isn't in that chair, and it also seems to block instant seating if the lightning of an idea should suddenly strike, but there was a mouse loose and the chair was certainly a better vantage point for Mabel.

A few hours later, the mouse popped up again, zipping between the rarely-used stools that flank my kitchen island counter. Mabel did not react, so I swiftly stood and grabbed her and flung her at the mouse. The mouse ran, and Mabel hopped into action, chasing it into the kitchen. She appeared around the island with the mouse in her mouth. "Good kitty!" I cooed. Then she batted it around a few times, leading it into the bathroom, and I figured death for the rodent was imminent.

No hope now.

Gladys sauntered up the hall to the bathroom to partake in the death scene. Now, I have to tell you that my cats do not get along. In fact, they hate each other, and have violently reacted to each other's proximity since the day Mabel arrived, nearly six years ago. I heard hissing in the bathroom, and Gladys came out with the mouse. She dropped it, chased it a little way down the hall, and then stopped. The mouse zipped behind the litter box, which abuts a bookshelf, my desk, and a filing cabinet.

"Gladys," I groaned. "You let it get away."

Mouse? What mouse? Did it move yet?

Gladys seemed ashamed by this -- as ashamed as cats get, anyway, which isn't very -- and Mabel was bewildered by this turn of events. I moved the litter box so the cats could get access to the back of the bookshelf, but the mouse had taken secure shelter. This is an overladen bookshelf, triple-shelved with books, and moving it would necessitate taking all the books off of it, which would take hours. I tried to smoke out the mouse, using an old incense stick, but eventually it seemed like a bad idea to be jamming a lit ember into the dust bunnies under my bookshelf and I quit that. Mabel took up sentry atop the litter box, but there was no action for the next day.

Every time the cats came out to eat or rub against my feet, I asked them, "Catch that mouse yet?" We were all at Orange Alert.

I've got it locked in my high beams!

Sometime AM or PM on Sunday (time loses meaning for me when I'm writing), I was watching TV again and the cats were on my bedroom windowsills. The big brown mouse climbed up my desk chair, rooted around in the papers on my desk, and then zoomed back behind the bookshelf. This was untenable. Mabel on my desk chair is one thing, but a mouse in my paperwork? It is a violation, highly verboten, and punishable by death. I went and grabbed Mabel and told her to catch that mouse -- now!

Mabel hung out by the bookshelf for a long while, reaching in occasionally across the computer wires behind the desk. About an hour later, she made a sudden move, and came out with a mouse in her claw. Gladys entered from the bedroom, waiting by the doorway. I pulled my feet up onto the desk chair while Mabel smacked the mouse around under the desk, then I moved over to the couch to watch the murder.

Mabel poses proudly with her prey.

My cats have never actually eaten a mouse (that I've seen) -- they just slam it around like a toy until it dies and then they lose interest and I flush it.

So Mabel toyed with the mouse, whacking it, and then lounging next to it until it gathered its breath and made another break for escape. Under the desk chair, Gladys reached for the mouse, pulled it toward her, and then stopped again, allowing the mouse to zip behind the filing cabinet. I groaned, and Mabel smacked Gladys in the face. Usually I yell at the cats when they fight and tell them, "Be nice!", but after Gladys had let a mouse escape for the second time, I told her, "You deserved that!" and I let her slink off into the bedroom, sulking. She used to be a great mouser, especially when the restaurant was still open in the storefront underneath me. I couldn't help wondering if she was getting old.

Alien kitty loves her battered mouse!

Later, concerned, I even checked a website about how to tell the age of adult cats -- it had been estimated that Gladys was approximately five or six years old when I adopted her six years ago, but nobody at the shelter really knew for sure. So now she could be anywhere from eleven to fourteen or so, which is getting up there for a cat, although she generally seems in good shape, or content with being entirely out of shape.

Anyway, I decided that my cats needed help, so I grabbed the cat toy that consists of long plastic rod that has a string and a fake mouse dangling from it, and I used to rod to root around behind the file cabinet. Lo and behold, the mouse ran out from behind the cabinet and darted beneath the couch. Mabel was on it. She snagged the rodent again, and continued with its torture. Gladys came out to watch, but I warned her not to get involved, and she didn't.

It's not dead yet!

Mabel smacked that mouse around for a good hour, and I went back to writing. Eventually, the chasing sounds and slamming into walls subsided. The mouse was dead. I got up to pick it up.

Holding a paper towel and faced with the crumpled brown ball of fuzz, I felt sad for the mouse. I don't want mice in my house, for sure, but I'm trained by a lifetime of Disney movies to root for the mice and vilify cats. Mickey Mouse was my first beloved licensed character, and in movies like Cinderella, the mice are the heroes and Lucifer the cat is the one to avoid. As a child, I had white mice as pets, along with hundreds of hamsters and gerbils. My moniker, personal totem animal, and tattoo is also a rodent. How did I get to this side of this equation of these natural enemies? Why are mice the ones we root for, when nobody wants disease-carrying pests in their home? Our mouse-hunting for shelter compact with cats dates back to Ancient Egypt. We have no such Magna Carta with mice.

Oh, I get that mice are cute and small and the underdog, but I'm not sure that explains their prominence in the pop culture pantheon.

I flushed the dead mouse down the toilet with no fanfare and once again returned to writing.