Ten Little New Yorkers: A Novel

The cat had been gone and the lesbian dance had been silent for some time now. It had been a fairly rough patch for the Kinkster. Ratso was really starting to irritate me as well. "Starting," I suppose, would be the wrong word to use. Ratso had been doing a pretty thorough job of getting up my sleeve ever since the first day I'd met him. Maybe it was part of his charm. Maybe I never used to let it get to me. Maybe with the cat gone and no one around to really talk to, the full brunt of Ratso's personality was finally weighing down upon me. But Ratso was a guy you just couldn't hate, so you might as well love him. And when I think of all the shit the two of us have been through together, I see him as a natural and inevitable part of my own existence. The cat never liked him, of course, and that would be putting it mildly. The truth was the cat fucking hated him, and I believe you should never mistrust the instincts of a cat. But what the hell, the cat by now was no doubt safely across the rainbow bridge and I was standing at my window, waiting for Ratso, and watching the rain.

It was a hard rain, as Bob Dylan might say, but I didn't mind. In fact, I didn't really give a damn if the whole city floated away. Well, maybe it'd be nice to keep Chinatown. When it's raining cats and dogs I miss the animals and people I've loved in my life and I feel closer to them and farther away from today. Today is just a garbageman in his yellow raincoat. Today is the wet woman with the wild hair walking willfully into the white wall. Today's a goddamn vase without any flowers. Hell, give me a passably decent tomorrow, I said. Give me a handful of scrappy yesterdays. Give me liberty or give me death or give me life on the Mississippi.

Since my cat had disappeared I found I was talking to myself a great deal, and myself, unfortunately, had never taken the time or effort to bother developing her listening skills. Without the cat I was a starfish on the sand. A lesbian dance class without the music. A Japanese tourist wandering the world without a camera. I was lost in a swirling gray fog of grief and self-pity. What the hell, I thought. Being alone provides an opportunity few of us ever have in life, the opportunity to get to know ourselves. I mean you might as well get to know yourself. You're going to have to live together.