EBEarlier in the week, while extolling the many virtues of Rachel Shukert’s Everything Is Going to Be Great, I mentioned that there would be a forthcoming guest post from Rachel about the family of mafia cats that lived in an abandoned building in her Nebraska hometown. Yes, I know that mafia cats sounds like a weird subject, but trust me when I say that this post is hilariously absurd.
Hello. My name is Rachel Shukert. I’m a compulsive shopper, a gay icon, a Harper Perennial author, and a cat lover.
It is in this last capacity that Erica Barmash has asked me to address you today. I am going to tell you a story about cats. Not Cats, as in Rumpleteazer and Mungojerrie, who as we now know are actually people wearing unconvincing cat outfits, but actually, mewing, scratching, indiscriminately-peeing-on-things felines. (I guess I could tell you a story about the time Rum Tum Tugger got drunk and tried to have his way with Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat, despite never having displayed any previous homosexual tendencies, but I’ll save that for another time, although I suspect the market for erotic fan fiction based on Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is vastly bigger than anyone thinks it is.)
Here is my story about cats.
I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, which is a lot different than growing up in New York City. New York City kids, or at least the ones I’ve known, are over-monitored and overscheduled, every waking hour seen as an irreplaceable rung in the ladder to dazzling achievement. That isn’t to say that people in Omaha don’t accomplish anything interesting: they do. But basically, you figure that if you’ve got a couple years of college under your belt, a house with a foundation, and don’t spend your days marooned on your sofa smoking Doral menthols with a much younger boyfriend named Spud that you’re afraid to leave alone in the house with your kids, you’re doing okay. It’s sort of like what George W. Bush (remember him?) called “the soft bigotry of low expections,” except in this case it also applies to white people.
The nice thing about nobody expecting much from you is that you wind up with of free time, to hang out in condemned buildings and make up elaborate stories about feral cats. The condemned building came first. I had a friend, an older guy who had the deed to an abandoned bungalow in South Omaha that he was trying to convert into an art studio, and I used to drive there sometimes after school in nice weather, to keep him company while he worked.
Then the feral cats moved in. One day they were just there, a male and a female, huddled together inside a pyramid of clean pine boards, bedding down together in the sawdust, hissing like maniacs whenever anyone came near them. My friend, with the touch of Frances of Assisi, managed to wear them down, cooing lovingly into their furious faces and tempting them into submission with albacore tuna and leftover stew. Before long, the female gave birth to three male kittens, tiny and blind and covered in soft black and white fur. Shortly after that, ostensibly as the female was nursing and focused solely on her newborns, another, younger, suppler feral female appeared to enthusiastically attend to the male’s needs. Mysteriously, the second female never seemed to conceive, which the first female My friend was philosophical about this. “It might be due to her promiscuity,” he said reasonably. “She could have something wrong with her. Gonorrhea, for example, builds up scar tissue in the fallopian tubes and can make you sterile.” “You think there’s kitty gonorrhea?” I asked, incredulously. “Why not?” he shrugged. “There’s kitty AIDS.” Whatever the case, the first female was pretty smug about her rival’s sterility. I guess I would have been too. With all this domestic drama, it was inevitable that for us, they should start to take on human properites. Less inevitable, perhaps, is that they would be the properties of an Italian Mafia family, but if you met these cats you would understand. The male was Don Domenico Gatti (which sounds like “Gotti” and is also Italian for “cat”). Don Dom for short. Don Dom was a huge ginger tom, with hard hazel eyes and an resplendent ruff of coarse fur that stood on end when he was angry, which was often. He ruled his family with the same iron paw with which he ran the entire Gatti crime syndicate. Don Dom could be tender, but he was also shrewdly manipulative and often selfish. He took the best hunks of tuna for himself, the choicest bits of stew. His family both feared him and craved and his approval. His authority was absolute. Don Dom’s wife was Louisa, the large, sour-faced tabby he had first appeared with. She was a difficult woman, overbearing yet cold, effusive but impossible to satisfy, in the manner of a certain kind of Mediterranean matriarch. The DSM was not written with feline psychology in mind, but borderline personality disorder seemed to fit with the way she took everything personally, how she would mewl on and on about the ingratitude of her sons, the faithlessness of her husband, only to rebuff their conciliatory advances. There’s just no pleasing some cats.
Louisa’s greatest ire, naturally, was reserved for Sophia, her husband’s mistress, a voluptuous Sophia Loren type with a gleaming brown coat, piercing green eyes, and a lithe body and delicate bone structure that hinted at distant Siamese ancestry. Louisa detested Sophia, and Don Dom seemed to take a perverse pleasure in stoking the flames of her rage, insisting on copulating with his mistress in full view of his wife, growling in encouragement from the sidelines of their frequent battles. “Why are you doing this?” Sophia would yowl plaintively, as Louisa lunged at her, claws bared. “You have the name, the money, the security. What do I have?”
The answer, to all but Sophia, was evident.
Sophia had the Don’s heart.
The three Gatti brothers were fond of both mother and mistress, and were growing into fine prospects for the family. Eduardo, the oldest, was the hothead of the family, prone to bouts of good-natured violence. He would prove to be a valuable soldier one day, his father thought, if only he could learn to control his temper. His brother Luciano, however, was the golden child. Precocious, charming, intelligent, he was the only one who could defuse the conflict between Louisa and Sophia, make peace between Eduardo and Don Dom during one of their frequent quarrels. With his father’s connections and his own intelligence, he would go to a top university, Harvard or Princeton, then on to law school, and eventually shepherd the Gatti family into mainstream legitimacy. And then there was the youngest brother, Ernesto, quiet, sensitive, bordering on the mystical. Ernesto would disappear into dark corners for days, and emerge looking thin and pure. He would sit for hours in perfect meditative stillness, his head cocked to one side, his eyes fixed mistily on something known only to himself.
Ernesto was the brother who became a priest.
Ernesto was the first one to die. Perhaps, as my friend said, when we laid him to rest in the backyard, clumsily reciting passages from the Latin mass and laying a tiny cross fashioned from two twigs and a bit of white twine, perhaps Ernesto was never really of this world. But what of Eduardo, fiery, passionate, earthbound Eduardo, who fell next, of the same mysterious illness? And when Luciano went, Luciano, the hope of the family, the pride of the Gatti, things could never be the same. How could they be? You can go after one death, maybe two, but three? And entire line, wiped out an instant? Who can survive that?
The bungalow; the piles of sawdust, the stacks of unvarnished pine, all swathed in death. Don Dom and Louisa, their petty squabbles long forgotten in the face of such devastation, retreated to separate corners to mourn. They could barely muster the strength to eat. My friend tried his best to tempt them with duck and liver pate that cost $17 a pound, but to now avail. Sophia prowled helplessly, uselessly around the floor, an interloper to their grief. For Don Dom, even her charms could soothe the pain of losing three sons. Defeated, she finally crept out one night, never to return. She was still beautiful. She could start over, make a new life, have a family of her own, maybe, a family where she would not be destined to exist on the margins, adored but never loved. I liked Sophia. Whatever she did, I hoped it made her happy.
I can’t remember exactly what happened to Louisa. I think my friend found her in the crawlspace after a blizzard, which had kept him away from the bungalow for a few days. I do remember he told me she looked peaceful. “She’s with the boys now,” my friend said, wiping away a tear. “She’s out of her pain.”
Don Dom stuck around for a little while after that, and then he too was gone. He was too tough, too ornery to do what Louisa had done, to slip away serenely into frozen oblivion. Maybe with his wife gone, he went to find Sophia, to try to put the terrible past behind him. Maybe he entered the witness protection program, and lives to this day in some abandoned garage in Florida, playing bocce ball and going to strip clubs with other undercover mobcats.
Maybe he went back to Palermo to die.
My friend never finished his renovation project. I graduated from high school and went away to college.
Adulthood is all about numbing the pain of the past with the minutiae of the present. We do our best to forget, or we get overwhelmed and forget to pick up our dry cleaning and harass the finance lady for our 1099 forms. I did a very good job. I forgot all about the Gatti, until I was in the Harper Perennial office the other day, and Erica and I started talking about cats.
