If on a Winter’s Night a Kitten Part One

By Steve Bartholomew

 

I looked about the living room, taking in the newly bought thrift store furniture, and it was our living room, our home, a concept as novel to me as the fusty green sofa. You put things, household accessories, whatever, in a place to feel connected to it. And this act of material assorting seemed like an achievable benchmark of adulthood, the life stage I’d just entered.

 

Learning how to be sensible meant shaking off the hoodlum flair of curb-serving weed sacks, the shrouded theater I could still sense just beyond the apartment’s entrance. A kid could easily mistake the shrisking drama of streetlife for free life.

 

Not me. Not anymore. I’d finally graduated, not from school but from the Ave, the Silk Road of the University District, rebranding myself as the sort of weed connection to be called and met, not found on a crowded sidewalk.

 

As an adult, I needed to be taken seriously, by the Ave rats, sure, but mostly by Paige, I took deep breaths and absorbed the heady potpourri of new carpet and fresh paint. Let it coat the brain, conjuring possible motifs for the decor. Maybe we’d feng shui the walls with, I don’t know, Iron Maiden posters. Or whatever kind of rock posters a sophisticated girl like Paige would like. As it would turn out, I’d never be any better at equipping my own future than I was at decorating interiors.

 

I wanted the word home to make sense, to convince me of its permanence, maybe somehow authenticate itself by mortaring the gap in my identity where family had been. I adjusted the angular alignment of the coffee table to precisely parallel the sofa. The logic of tangible order was something I could believe in. I have made it, I thought. No one will yell “Check out time” through this door. Real life is made of hangers that come off the rod.

 

Since becoming a streekid at 15, the notion of putting down roots had seemed as far-fetched as any other feature of the impregnable world inhabited by Other People, people who definitely didn’t come from the Ave. But here I was three years later, the legitimate occupant of a one-bedroom apartment as palatial as any ever built, and with beautiful girlfriend to share it with me. Every time I looked at Paige, my heart trembled and reached over like a sunflower.

 

I’d taken small pride in obscuring myself from the girls who came before, hiding my keepsakes of rejection and loneliness behind dropcloths of thuggish inscrutability. But Paige saw me somehow, made me feel felt, and in her fine-grained way she accepted my history as just another ingredient, no more or less defining than her own. Even now, after the glory-smeared months we’d spent huddled in generic spaces, our togetherness enduring the trifles of nomadic turmoil, I still questioned the structural integrity of us. How could I not wonder when she would realize how much better she could be doing? She made me feel lucky, and luck only ever failed me when I believed in it.

 

I knew my status as semi-successful weed dealer didn’t factor into Paige’s reason for staying with me. Or at least I figured it probably didn’t, because we’d gotten along best the times when I’d gone broke.

 

Sure we fought, sometimes. But even afterwards, when I should have been angry at her for storming off to sulk in high-risk areas, I missed her dumbly, in a rubbery dread until she came back. Sometimes our spats felt engineered, a feminine technology beyond my grasp, some deft method devised for inferring my level of devotion. True love is liquid panic burning up into your throat.

 

She knocked on the front door and called out for me to unlock it, which meant her hands were full. I rushed to open it. She carried in a basket and a bag of cat food. In the basket a tiny calico fur ball nestled in a towel. The pleading sparkle she beamed at me said this little addition wasn’t really open for discussion, not unless I wanted to miss out on two kitties at once. She handed me the basket and I brought it up close to my face. The kitten stared back, scrutinizing me for what, trustworthiness, maybe. Her wobbly kitten gaze unmoored in me some unbeknown urge to become the father I didn’t have. Pets make you feel anchored to a life, a tiny piece of nature you can hold up as evidence of being less unreliable. Besides, the complex had a rule against dogs: A testament, I figured to the classiness it kept as well hidden as the wood bridge it was named after.

 

I gently lifted the mewling kitten out of the basket, held her to my chest and patted her with two fingers until she purred her way into my heart. We found some string and played with her on the living room floor, impersonating a real family. I sat back and watched the two of them at play, scratching my calf absentmindedly. The kitten started scratching too, and it occurred to me to pick her up and inspect her. Beneath the fur her skin was crawling with fleas.

 

The itching spread like syrup across my midsection and marched down my legs. Within an hour I was as out of sorts as an armadillo folded up the wrong way, scratching compulsively. By some chemical quirk of blood tanginess I have always been far more attractive to insects than to humans. At any given time I could tell you exactly how many mosquitoes are in an outdoor area by simply inspecting my appendages and counting them. By nightfall my legs were poxed with flea bites.

 

“Where’d she come from?” I asked.

 

Paige picked up the kitten and held her protectively. “Remember me mentioning that Donica’s cat had kittens? Like a couple weeks back? You know how I am with time.”

 

“No. I don’t remember that.”

 

“Well, I stopped by over there earlier, and Booboo Kitty was the darlingest one. I know. I should’ve checked her. But when I saw her I just couldn’t not scoop her up. Are you mad?”

 

“Danica.” I examined the bleeding flea bite on my shin.

 

Danica was an exotic dancer, the only one I ever met who didn’t just pretend to enjoy her job. I figured stripping satisfied some indiscriminate need of hers to be head-to-toe itemized by men with transparent intentions. When she came over, usually to buy a quarter ounce, she preferred the optics of promoting the strupclub by wearing it’s t-shirts. In conversations she bandied about her tradecraft secrets as matters of self-dramatizing pride, as if auditioning for a lap dance infomercial. Her influence seemed contagious and she made me feel guiltyu for wanting to fuck her while telling her how much I despised her.

 

“I didn’t say anything because I know you don’t like her. Paig said. But that’s not Booboo Kitten’s faut,” Paige said. “I’m sorry. I asked her about shots. I didn’t know…”

 

“Know what. That Danica’s fleas probably have crabs of their own? I’ve been telling you this since day one.”

 

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

 

I stared at the bracelet of welts adorning my left ankle. Fleas are the Navy Seals of parasites. Impervious to much, they advance relentlessly, as silent and inexorable as plague. Within days our new apartment had fallen, an occupied territory. Our only remaining option: scorched earth. We would flank them, seal off their egress and fleabomb the place.

 

Paige opted to visit her family in Eastern Washington rather than endure another night in a motel room the likes of which we’d stayed in for so long. Besides, I couldn’t shut down my business for days on end.  Shockingly enough, potheads’ memories are often, well, breezy. If they can’t reach you for a week, your existence as a connection is in peril. I drove Paige and our newly flea-dipped Booboo Kitty to the Greyhound station and checked into Andy’s Motel on 99, just across the line into Snohomish County.

 

After unpacking the few items I’d brought into the room I walked to the payphone a block away and answered my pager. Count on heavy usage of the room phone to cue the manager to call the cops. Room traffic is another surefire way to burn the spot, so I spent all afternoon driving a delivery route that crisscrossed Seattle and its suburbs.

 

Weed dealing isn’t like it is in the movies. It’s mostly dull phone calls rendered painfully nonsensical by way of blatant codewords–well, that and immeasurable hours of circuitous driving and waiting for people to show up. The following morning I hung the “do not disturb” sign from the doorknob and left to drive around all day, return calls and wait around some more. By the time I’d sold the last of my two pounds of weed, it was past midnight and I was tedium-fatigued. Once in the room I went straight to sleep.

 

I awoke to an authoritative pounding at the door and sat up, startled. Gray of dawn bleeding through the threadbare drapes. A baritone voice barked from outside the door., “Snohomish County Narcotics Task Force! We have a warrant!”

 

No reason for the cops to be there, since I’d taken such countermeasures against detection. I figured it had to be my buddy Chris. Real fucking funny guy, that Chris. He’d pulled this gag before, and I valued his sense of humor then about as much as I did now. I swung my feet out of bed, fully prepared to cuss him out in my underwear, which I felt would make it more impactful. Then I’d make him buy breakfast for being such a dickhat. I reached for the doorknob and the frame exploded into splinters. A concussive force drove the door inward to collide with me. I sprawled flat on my back, stunned. Even before the door settled on top of me, I’d deduced that it had definitely not been Chris outside. A crush of jack-booted feet stormed past on either side, choking my narrow view from beneath the shattered wood. Booming commends overlapped and filled the airspace, fierce bellowing from multiple sources.

 

“Get on the fucking ground!”

 

“Don’t move!”

 

“Hands where I can see them!”

 

“Face down!”

 

“Hands behind your back!”

 

“Don’t fucking move!”

 

I lay there, pinned. Fear and shock seized my skeleton. My mind swarmed with incoherent thought fragments clamoring for space. I was incapable of following any command except the ones having to do with not moving. I heard someone kick in the bathroom door, then yell that it was in fact Clear. A dozen black-gloved hands lifted the door off me and tossed it aside. Six figures in black, each stepping back to train a pistol or shotgun on me. Red laser-sights sliced the dusty air, constructing abstract geometries that converged on my chest and face. Behind the weapons a wall of menace in black masks bore down on me, faceless and nonhuman.

 

Terror is a tool for breaching your sense of order in the world.

 

They flipped me over onto my belly, the hand on the back of my head grinding my face into the carpet. It reeked of long-dead cigarettes and rot. Two cops flanking me each drove a knee into my back and wrenched my arms behind me. Handcuffs ratcheting into my wrist bones. Four gloved hands clamped onto my spindly upper arms and hoisted me off the ground. Deposited me onto a chair set just inside the open doorway and shackled me to it. A generous display for the benefit of curious onlookers, I supposed, the ones filing past and giving a hearty poop-eye to the scrawny public threat shivering in his tighty whiteys.

 

They were sure to leave, I thought, once they found that the only weed I had left was my personal stash, in the drawer of the nightstand. A few loose buds, less than three grams. But, as it turned out, the Ohaus Triple Beam scale discovered beneath the bed elevated my indiscretion into a felony. This development elicited a resounding round of triumphant exclamations and high-fivery. I could hear the unmitigated glee in the voice of the detective reading me my Miranda rights. Eventually they let me put on pants and shoes, and perp-walked me–shirtless and sockless–to a marked car waiting outside. On the way to jail a detective in the front seat informed me with great gusto that I’d be looking at five years. I was booked in for Possession with Intent to deliver a Schedule I  Narcotic.

 

The holding cell was chilled, supercooled air jetting from the small vent. I hugged my knees for warmth and tried to imagine five years of shivering in a tiny concrete box. My mind went to Paige, the desperate stirring of blunt regret and longing. An hour passed, one elongated minute at a time. I heard a dimly familiar voice appealing to a cop outside the cell door, citing some arcane legal mythos regarding entrapment.

 

The doorlock popped and one of my more infrequent customers was ushered into the cell. He looked at me with murderous gall, all neck veins and flexing knuckles. Spittle flew from his mouth as he blamed me for his misfortune, the seizure of his precious Fiat convertible and his freedom, the indignity of being arrested. I commiserated with him emphatically, outlining my own violent awakening and how I had no knowledge of anything that had happened afterward.

 

Finally, he calmed down and acknowledged that he, not I, had been the one foolish enough to set up a drug deal over the phone with a complete stranger and then show up to buy from said stranger a quarter pound of weed far stemmier and seedier than any I’d ever sold. Or so he assured me. I found a dark sliver of satisfaction in that news–I couldn’t imagine anyone I knew well settling for poopweed. No self-rspecting dealer wants to fins out his weed is no better than cop weed.

 

One of the detectives was out there answering my pager, telling my customers that  I had entrusted my business with him while I was out of town. My friends and regular customers either hung up on him or told him to suck it and then hung up on him. He would meet those who fell for the ruse, offering them each a bag of confiscated poopweed and arresting them no matter whether they refused to buy it. Over the next few hours four more of my less savvy customers would end up in the cell with us, each of them having lost one vehicle and gained one felony.

 

Because this was my first offense as an adult, the jail released me on my own recognizance. The task force had seized all my money and my car as gains from illicit drug sales. I had nothing left, and didn’t see much reason to rebuild my business. My life as I knew it had an expiration date, my days borrowed. Five years in prison sounds a lot like imminent death when you’ve only lived eighteen years.

 

I learned later that the War on Drugs featured a community outreach program that provided bounties for tips. Every motel employee in Snohomish County was on the Task Force’s payroll, each with their own confidential informant number for the hotline. The maid who’d turned me in had been paid $250 to disregard the “do not disturb” sign and search the room on behalf of the task force.

 

 

Months passed. My arrest and its aftermath rearranged my priorities, tarnishing the luster of pursuing a career in the field of weed sales. I wanted a life with Paige far more than the relatively easy money of dealing. I exited the game and entered the working world, landing a couple of jobs no one else seemed to apply for. Graveyard shift in the deep freeze hold of a fishing tender. Digging irrigation ditches. Working made me feel vaguely purposed, industrious and coglike in my placement among the masses. I worried that Paige would grow bored with the inglorious realities of a laborer’s prospects and attenuated lifestyle. But she seemed more attuned to self-regulation then I was, and these were the things we argued about now, the nuances of scarcity and how I shrank from trivializing my herculean efforts with pedestrian concerns like budgets and balanced checkbooks.

 

Paige and I got married and while she was pregnant I took a job as a  brake and tune up tech at a repair shop. I worked like I was trying to outrun time itself. The owner respected my work ethic and “uncanny knack” for salesmanship, and fast-tracked me into management. We began buying a home shortly after our son was born. I was bent on emulating regularness, tracing its outline with desperate markings to prove somehow that I was cut out for the complexities of family life. I ached to stop carrying around my streetself, throwing myself headlong into suburban civility, mowing on Saturdays and waving at the neighbors. I’d let the soul-scorching despair of that morning and Andy’s fade like someone else’s nightmare.

 

An envelope arrived one day, when my son was almost two. In it a notice of arraignment in Superior Court. In Washington State, the statute of limitations for most crimes is 36 months. I did the math quickly while swaying beside the mailbox, my vision warbling. It’d been 35 months and one week since that morning. At some point I’d convinced myself that the state must have changed its mind about the seriousness of the incident, about how deserving of prison I was. Now I let myself fancy that maybe three years of living legally would register on the scales of justice. But the prosecutor had zero interest in what I’d been doing after I’d been arrested. As did the judge.

 

I found out the detectives had been embellishing when they’d told me I was facing five years. Evidently they’d figured the occasion wouldn’t have been properly momentous without varnishing it. The judge gave me 90 days. He said I deserved the high end of the range given that I’d been knowingly and feloniously possessing with such agregious intent, and while staying in a family-oriented motel, making a mockery and so forth.

 

From where I sit now, 90 days barely merits mentioning, one way or the other. But to a man struggling to provide for his family and living hand-to-mouth, 90 days is 90 months. Each day in jail was interminable, the nights mostly sleepless. Paige brought our son with her to visits, and he would stand on the counter and look through the glass at the 100-man tank behind me. He called it the “Big big room,” and asked why I was in the big big room and when could I come home. I hated myself for disappointing him for the first time, it would turn out, of many.

 

When I got out, my boss wouldn’t let me come back to work because I was now a Felon. We fell behind on our mortgage. Decent jobs in the area were now Out of Bounds. Financial stress curdled our marriage, churning it into a sludge of acid remarks and irreducible distance. When around each other calculated movements spoke of two people unable to bridge a divide, one that eventually became difficult to survey or even properly name. I felt like a failure as a father, inadequate as a husband. My resentment toward the system took on mass, a measurable force shaping my interactions with the world.

 

I took a job doing oil changes at a shop owned by a Persian who treated me as if I owed him an hourly fee for the privilege of working there. My workdays felt like eight hours of envelope licking.

 

One friday afternoon I came home from work with a friend, intent on barbecuing in the backyard, maybe tip back a few frosty ones. I opened the front door onto a living room cleared of every item except my stereo. In our bedroom the alarm clock sat on the floor, still plugged in and centered in the impression left by the nightstand. My friend suddenly realized it was getting late, he had a thing to attend. Paige had enlisted her friends and family to remove every last household accessory, every trace of her and our son.

 

I walked into the bedroom, sat down cross-legged on my side of the queen-sized rectangle of unworn carpet and stared at the alarm clock. The digital hours marched past with the rest of the outer world. There was no telling where she’d gone, where she’d taken my little boy.

 

I curled inward, self-enclosed, sorting snapshot memories and reweighing them moment by moment in a futile attempt to ferret out a cause for her ghosting. I stared dully at nothing, suspended in my own calamity. No calculus available to my immature brain could bring me to the conclusion that for her the trajectory we’d been on for months had become generally unbearable, a cumulus of dissatisfaction expressed through a physical language I didn’t entirely understand.

 

I didn’t know how to look at the house now. Stripped of all connectability, it felt like a hostile reminder of my own failure. So I moved out and wandered about, looking to vacant spaces and lonely roads for the gist of meaningful self-abatement.