Creek Running North

A week ago I finally dusted off my old turntable and plugged it into the Mac. I have spent the last few evenings playing LPs, digitizing the music for more convenient listening.

I have not listened to some of the albums in many years.

Elissa, with whom I lived for most of the 1980s, disliked my music intensely. This was not particularly a character flaw; I like some odd stuff. Last night I had on one of the LPs, field recordings of folk musicians in Chile from the early 1970s, and the first track was an elderly woman with an accordion, and a voice that both wavered and wailed all over the place. Coming into the room, Becky listened for a moment and asked “Are they serious?”

Elissa liked her R&B, a few early-1980s Los Angeles bands, Grace Jones, Romeo Void, and that was about it. She eventually made it clear that she would be happier if I never played my music in her presence.

In 1984, waiting for my niece to be born and reeling from the loss of someone I loved, I lived in my father’s basement for a summer. I had no money. I spent my time borrowing old LPs from the local public library and recording them onto six-for-a-buck cassette tapes. That summer, in between complaints about my sponging off him, Dad bought me a small boombox. I wore it out — and the tapes as well — in the next few years. I’d taped Andean folk music, chants of Indians of the Brazilian Amazon, old recordings of Pete Seeger before his voice changed, jazz remastered from 78s, angry 1970s feminist and labor folk songs, obscure and more or less untalented Cajun fiddlers. By the time four years later when I bought a 70-dollar turntable-cum-tapedeck, Elissa had long since gotten utterly fed up with my cheap, hissy, wavering music collection.

But she was in law school, so I had plenty of time at home alone to listen.

Well, not alone. There was Zoom, the orange cat who had adopted us in that neighborhood in West Berkeley, and who followed us to another house cross town and then across the country to Arlington. He sat on my lap as I listened. A few months after we’d moved, in late November 1984, I realized he wanted to do nothing but sit on my lap. It was kidney failure, and he died the day after my 25th birthday.

An appropriate period of mourning passed, and we went to the District of Columbia Animal Shelter. Two cats there caught our eye. One was a tiny gray female, the other a big orange male who nearly busted open the cage with his head in his urge to be stroked. The social workers came to interview us at home, decided we were worthy, and approved the adoption. Elissa named the cats, of course: the female was Phoebe, the male Jasper.

Jasper had lied to us, in his desire to be sprung from the hoosegow, about his actual sweetness content. No sooner was he let out of his carrier at his new home than his real personality became obvious. He attacked Phoebe, not a trivial matter given her recent spaying and attendant sutures. He attacked Elissa when she had the temerity to try to pick him up. Worst of all, he attacked me. He would lurk atop the refrigerator and attack passing scalps.

In short, my new cat was a dickhead.

Over the next few weeks, he and Phoebe reached an understanding. Their treaty split the house between them, upper floor for Phoebe and lower for Jasper, with safe passage allowed for each to the kitchen food bowls and upstairs litter box respectively. When we moved back to California two years later to a studio apartment, they were able to inhabit the same coffeetable without blood being spilled.

Jasper and I had our rapprochement as well. Months of sitting together in an empty house, listening to Andean melancholy, and drinking beer warmed him to me. By our six-month anniversary, he would head-butt my knee and scrape himself along my shin about once a day. Within the year, he would sit next to me on the couch, only hissing when I foolishly attempted to move in any direction whatsoever. By eighteen months, he would actually purr when I petted him, and there was a spot on the couch where, if I sat there at the right time of day with the right music when we were alone in the house, he would run over and jump into my lap, curl up and go to sleep.

He was in my lap one night when Elissa came home early. She walked in through the front door. Jasper turned, glared at me, and hissed nastily. Taking only a moment to shred my forearms, he was off the couch and racing for the top of the refrigerator.

As I write this twenty years later, I can still see the scars in my arms from that night.

I should point out that Jasper, while he had not a single extra ounce of fat on him, weighed in excess of twenty pounds. Oddly enough, only about half a pound of that was teeth and claws. The rest was muscle. angry, bitter, livid muscle. And fur.  I was forever pulling Jasper’s little white hairs from my clothing. Jasper’s fur was tenacious, infiltrating into every available crevice, able to work its way into airtight containers.

His menace did not, of course, keep me from babying him. Nor did the giant red sticker on the outside of his file at the vet’s office. Alone among the six billion people on the planet at the time, I was able to pick him up — pointing that half-pound of teeth and claws away from my face and viscera — and kiss him on the head, on the back of the neck. He would growl threateningly, drop to the floor and rub against my leg. Then it was off to the row of LPs, to shred the covers just a little more. I would scold him, then kiss the inverted “V” on his forehead, where white face met orange head.

That studio apartment, with a vegetable garden overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, was just up the hill from an excellent world music store. I walked past a few others ever day on my way back from work. A dollar here and a dollar there, and evenutally I had a bit of a collection. I could gauge their tenure in my possession by the intactness of their spines. The older ones were a wad of shredded paper pulp.

We moved LPs and cats and ourselves to a house in East Oakland, and within a year Elissa had asked me to move out so as to provide her new boyfriend with unlimited Elissal access. Our angriest fight ever concerned custody of the cats. I lost. Jasper stayed with Elissa and the new boyfriend.

The last time I saw Jasper I was in Elissa’s yard picking up the last of my garden tools. We’d arranged it for a time when she and her jealous now-fiance wouldn’t be there. Jasper was sitting in the window sill, and I talked moosh to him through the screen. He looked affronted, hissed nastily at me, vanished into the dark of the house.

It was a year before the last of his hair vanished from my clothing.

At Matthew’s wedding a few years later, Elissa took me aside and told me that Jasper had contracted FIV. She’d started to let him roam outdoors, and he fought with every cat he met. She was afraid for her other cats. she gave me that look, and said “I think it’s time that Jasper went to live with his Dad for a while.”

It took me a moment to realize she meant me.

“Not gonna happen,” I said. “Becky’s seriously allergic.”

She glared at me, walked away without another word. We’ve spoken since, once or twice, and on relatively friendly terms. I assume Jasper is dead. I haven’t asked. I want to know how his life ended up. I just don’t want to have the conversation.

This weekend I ripped an LP by Facio Santilan, forerunner of the urban panpipe bands that seem to play in every major city. I hadn’t listened to the album in a while. The music was nostalgic, sweetly familiar. On the last cut on side one, the record started skipping.

I went to investigate. The needle was clogged with fine white hairs.