Eartha Cat

“I used you as an excuse,” I told Eartha last night. She sat there on the console, watching me pick away pieces of bubbled plastic from the ceiling. “Obviously it was a dumb thing to say. I’m not really sure what I was supposed to do, though.”

She broke her lock on me to follow blackened specks break from the seared cabin and fall into my lap. For a while I had been bouncing around different beach communities, just sleeping wherever. My second night in this spot, I had the back window rolled down to let in fresh air. I thought it was the smell of charred upholstery that woke me up, as occasionally that hot chemical smell does. Instead I saw it was a ten-pound gray tabby sitting on my chest, lowering her neck to stare at my face, as if I were a toy she wasn’t sure worked.

"Dad thinks I hate him." I stopped picking at the ceiling, working out the extra bits from underneath my nail, then running my fingers together to work off the grit. “Does that make me bad?”

Eartha blinked, that thick blink she does, her eyes slowly closing and opening. If people blinked like she does the expression “in the blink of an eye” would be used to describe how long to boil an egg. She turned towards the window.

“I don’t like Tim,” I said. “Why can’t a straight person hate a gay person without being made to feel homophobic? Dad always looks at me like I hate Tim because he’s gay. Like it has anything to do with it. I feel like gay men look at straight men and just wait for them to be homophobic. Like I have to approve of everything, not just sex stuff, but hairstyles, clothing, movie choices… Every time I say I don’t like something, one of them acts like I’m judging them. They tell me ‘I don’t understand’. Like because I’m straight my opinion is invalid. Tim loves those cooking shows on TV. Loves them. Man has never made dinner once in fifteen years, but if he turns the TV on, he leaves it on cooking crap until he falls asleep. But if I say anything, it’s because ‘straight guys don't understand cooking shows’. I’m the one who cooked in that house! Until I graduated high school, I was the one who made dinner every night I stayed there.”

Eartha had begun smelling the back of the driver’s seat, where I had bent that girl over the night before.

That girl who had knocked out that guy in front of me.

That girl "spilled" what was left of whiskey bottle into my lap only to be soaked up by what is left of the cushions in my backseat.

That girl who didn't seem to care what my name was or be very flattered when I asked hers.

 

After a while of her straddling me across the backseat, after that first bite she sank into my lip and all the ones that followed, my heart rate got away from me. I pushed her off and turned her around, bending her over the driver’s seat. It was defensive at first, I just kept thinking she was about to rip away my skin. But pinned over that chair, her mouth open taking deep, quivering breaths... It was tremendously uncomfortable, stuck between her and the low ceiling. I just kept kissing the back of her neck rather than finding a better position. Somehow she was able to reach down and pull the reclining lever, the seat dropped forward, giving me better leverage. Every time she bit me, my lip, my ear lobes, my neck… Jesus Christ, I thought she knew. I thought she knew who I was and, like that fucking kid, was working up the courage to really bite into me.

How fucked up is that I didn’t care in that moment? God, she tasted so good, I was willing to see where anything went.

But the fear and the excitement had built so sharply in me that the buttons on her pants ripped away as I yanked them halfway down her thighs. I didn’t even think to apologize. I just stepped down with my foot, forcing them to the ground.

As we went, she’d throw the condoms out the back window. It was a reprehensible move in my mind, even drunk and horny enough to fuck a woman I thought was about to eat me. But I wasn’t about to complain about littering.

Afterwards she just lied on top of me, her back against my chest, her legs bent upwards while mine folded against the side of the Bronco. I didn’t think she’d want to be touched, but she pulled my arm across her like a safety belt. “I’m sorry,” I’d said first. “Jesus Christ…” she cut in as I did. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Does your dick get soft and turn into a pussy?”

“Does yours?” I asked. She hit me in the ribs with a backwards thrust of her elbow. “I just mean, you were drunk. I shouldn't have... taken advantage of the situation.”

“It was my idea,” she reminded me.

“Right, but… I just mean, I guess I should have been looking out more for… whatever.”

“Why? You think because I was drinking you raped me? You were drinking. Did you stop to think I was raping you?”

“I try to have a feminist view point."

“Shut the fuck up or I’ll leave,” she said to me. “You think you’re somehow more responsible than me because you have a penis? You think that alcohol makes me helpless but it makes you irresistible?” I began to open my mouth to respond, “Remember what I said about shutting the fuck up.”

So, I did. We both lied there, sobering up. In the morning she borrowed a pair of gym shorts I bought on sale from Old Navy. I offered to walk her to her car and she reminded me once more to shut the fuck up. I didn’t even get her name.

Eartha doesn’t have a name tag. I just call her that because I think “Eartha Cat” is an awesome name. I never had a cat, though. I’m not even sure why comes around. I don’t feed her. She just comes around and sits, listening to me talk.

 Her big, yellow eyes reminded me I had been quiet for some time, thinking about the girl the night before. “I’m sorry,” I said to the cat. “I just saying, Tim’s not a bad guy. I just can’t forget what he did.” It had been my hope that talking it out with Eartha would give me some kind of insight, help me figure out what to say to my Dad to make things better. As my mind returned to the subject, I felt less motivated. “Why should I need to?”

On the plus side: I got a text from that girl from the night before, though I’m not sure how she got my number. Her name is Sam.

So, I Met a Girl...

Since running out on my dad, I’ve had a hard time… I don’t know. I’m trying not to think too much. 

So I left the Bronco and wandered through the old homes and poorly lit streets until I reached the peach-lit crowds of idiots that make up this neighborhood. I found my way into a bar, one close enough to hear the waves breaking down the block, sat down at a table and did quiet a nice job of not thinking of anything until a young woman in front of me threw a punch.

It was refreshing to see the punch wasn’t directed at me, but the man in front of her. He was almost a foot taller than she was, but it was a good solid punch and I don’t think I ever saw him get back up. People were standing so closely together, he hit a clump and slid down to the floor slowly, like a thawing sheet of ice.

By the time he had disappeared from view, she was looking back at me from the other side of the table. “Are you next?” she asked.

It seemed very likely she would decide the answer was “yes”, no matter what I said. It was to my great surprise that not long after we were holding each other up as we walked back through the old homes and poorly lit streets. “I’m telling you, you don’t want to go back to my place,” I said to her.

“I’m telling you, I don’t like to be told I like,” she said back to me. The unreal color of her skin seemed more natural in the street lights, and the faded green color of her sleeve tattoos seemed then to be a shimmering, fresh black color. Her hair was long and tightly wound to the back of her head with dark red chopsticks protruding out. She looked lean, but I had no idea how really strong she really was until she grabbed me by the collar and pinned me to the Bronco.

I thought maybe she’d kiss me. Instead she looked over my shoulder into the cabin. “What the hell is this?” she asked.

“Someone burned my house down,” I said to her. “This is… just what I have now.”

She nodded slowly, either she was falling asleep or resigning herself to the rest of her night. “Get in the car,” she said.

“Don’t you have a place you’d rather go to?” I asked unlocking the door.

“Yeah, I have a really nice place with an infinity pool and a third floor balcony. I just really love fucking losers who live in their car,” she said crawling into the driver’s seat in front of me.

“There’s a charm about you that’s hard to place,” I said, getting in.

She sat in the passenger’s seat and pushed her foot against my chest, driving me between the chairs into the backseat. “Yeah, I’m a charmer,” she pulled the driver’s door closed and crawled back, straddling me. Her breath smelled like the whiskey we’d bought at the pharmacy on the way back, but her neck still smelled of sun tan lotion. It was salty, and firm against my tongue. She leaned into me, working her fingers into my hair, until taking a hand full and pulling me back.

She held me there, looking down at my face maybe twenty or thirty seconds. “I have to admit,” I said, “I’m not really sure what’s going on right now.”

She looked to the left and right of me, to towel that has begun to collect cat hair draped across the back. “Are you sure it was your house that burned down?”

“It’s been kind of a bad year,” I told her.

She looked down at my lips, tracing her tongue against the rim of her lower. “It’s only February,” she said.

I sort of shrugged my shoulders. What a depressing thought.

She continued to hold me by the head, shifting left and right on my lap, either content to slowly work her way closer into me or like a cat wriggling its tail before it’s pounces. “Why did you punch that guy?” I asked.

She leaned in, biting down on my lip. I’m sure you can imagine how scary that is for me. I could feel it where my nipple used to me. But she didn’t go down too hard at first, but slowly got there, sliding her hand down the side of my face, breathing into my mouth.

This is a bad idea, I thought as I placed my hands upon her waist.

My heart began to pick up, I could feel it in my wrists as her wriggle became a forceful rocking.

Good ideas aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

On the plus side: I managed to stop thinking about whatever I had set out to stop thinking about.

Red in the Face

“Where have you been living?” Tim asked me. I hadn’t had lunch and our food wouldn’t be arriving for some time. I was determined to be nice, give Dad the happy family he wanted to believe we were, but Tim’s voice. Oh my god… I was still waiting for the server to come by so I could order another beer. Tim’s question felt like an attempt to embarrass me.

“A cul-de-sac in Ocean Beach,” I said flatly. “Not too far from the water, no homes. No one really comes through other than a few bums. No one seems to give a shit that I’m there.”

“Language,” Tim said.

Fuck off, was the response I bit down on. I was determined to be a good son.

“It doesn’t really sound safe, son,” Dad said.

“It doesn’t sound…” Jesus Christ, it’s not safe but I can’t live with you. I scratched that response. Oh, my god, it’s safer than people trying to take bites out of me. Though it had been a week or two since that had happened so I kept it to myself rather than temp fate.

I was working on a third response when Dad continued, “We want you to come live with us. At least until you can get your own place.” I looked at Tim. Tim didn’t seem at all welcoming, but he didn’t seem against the idea, either. There was a crawling sensation in the back of my neck, something pulling my face back. “Look, the truth is, the doctor says I’m really responding well to my therapy. He says there’s less risk of me of me catching something I can’t shake.”

“Until now, I felt it was best to minimize your father’s exposure to other people, to anything they might not realize they were carrying. Now that he’s getting stronger, we agree it’s for the best to bring you in out of the cold. Like your dad says, just until you’re not sleeping in your old Bronco anymore.”

There wasn’t any response ready for that. I sat there, uncertain what they expected me to say, hoping that each moment they didn’t say anything meant it was more likely they never would. “So how ‘bout it?” Dad said. “Do you want to come by after work Friday and move in whatever you keep in there into the living room? We don’t have a lot of space but it’s better than sleeping in your car.”

“No…” I began. “I can’t then. Actually, it’s really no problem. I’ll be out of the car soon enough.”

“Do you have a place yet?” Dad asked. No. “How much money do you have saved?”

“Seven hundred,” and my words got caught as I wished I hadn’t been honest about it.

“Son, it’ll be weeks before you have enough to get out of the Bronco. Why don’t you just stay with us?”

Normally I’m smarter than this, faster with my words. I’m good at evasion. Now I felt sincerely trapped. “I’ve moved around a lot,” I said. “The last couple months have been really turbulent for me but I’ve found a spot I like and I don’t want to give it up. I just… I want some consistency.”

“I want you to have consistency. I want you to have consistency some place where I know you’re safe, where there aren’t bums wandering around outside looking at you through the window.”

I want that, too! I couldn’t figure out what my problem was. “There’s a cat that comes and stays with me. She’s a stray but she comes and sleeps on the center console next to me sometimes.”

“So bring the cat.”

“I can’t just bring the cat! It lives around there. What if it belongs to someone?”

Tim leaned in, driving his pointer finger into the table, “Andersen, when are you going to accept your father for who he is?”

“Tim, how many times am I going to have to tell you to shut the fuck up?”

“Stop!” my father shouted. I couldn’t bring myself to look, but I knew the other tables were turning to us. Even the manager across the floor had stopped what he was doing and was assessing the situation.

I wasn’t sure what to do or say. Knowing everyone was looking at me, my face started to burn. I couldn’t bring myself to meet my father’s eyes.

I just stood, said I was sorry and left.

On the plus side: My dad loves me better than I know how to be loved, I guess. I don’t really know what the plus side is to this.