Sleeping with Cats Read Online Free Page B

some of my friends lived, or housing projects, but most of the neighborhood was composed of what were called bungalows, tiny houses, or two-and four-family frame houses. Detroit has a wet climate and the sand must be fertile, as it is here on the Cape, for if a house burns down, within a couple of months, a jungle of greenery grows in its place. Nature is avid to take back any available space. When I was a child, thestreets of Detroit were lined with huge elms and an occasional oak. It gave me a vision of an alternate city of green over the grim and hostile streets. If my father cherished the minute front lawn, my mother grew vegetables, herbs and flowers in the only slightly bigger backyard. She used every inch she could pry from his vision of green lawns.
    Early on after we moved into that tiny house, my uncle Danny lived with us. Maybe he had got into trouble in Cleveland; maybe he was just out of work. He and my brother were only two years apart. My grandmother Hannah had eleven children before she finally left off childbearing, at fifty-three. Danny was the last child and the only one she had the leisure to spoil. He was an anarchist and believed in the power and virtue of the working class; he loved jazz and had a huge collection of records. He was the coolest of my uncles. Danny and my brother Grant gambled together, ran after women, borrowed money. When they had any money, they lost it immediately or spent it on loud clothes and louder women. I loved but never wanted to emulate them. But I thought them both the handsomest men alive.
    The first cat I remember was Whiskers, a gray tabby. My mother named all the cats. Danny brought home two bunnies he had won in a card game. They lived down in the basement until they chewed the insulation off the washing machine. Whiskers would wait on the ledge by the furnace and then pounce on one of the rabbits and ride him. Sometimes he would chase them, and sometimes one or both of them would chase him. I also remember the little raisiny turds they dropped all over the basement. Like most little kids, I was fascinated by shit.
    The rabbits were shipped off to Lucy and Lon, where, for all I know, we might have eaten them. I was far more involved with Whiskers. The cats of my childhood were not long-lived. They were all males, never altered, never taken to the vet and usually put out at night. They got in fights, they were hit by cars, they fought with the huge rats that inhabited the alleys. Boys shot them with BB guns. My mother was wonderful at nursing hurt animals, but it would never have occurred to her to try to prevent those injuries.
    I am enormously fond of the writings of M. F. K. Fisher and wasflattered and honored that she liked my novel Gone to Soldiers . However, when I read her memoir of her cat who was finally torn apart by other male cats when he could no longer defend himself, I could not help wondering what was with all those women of the older generations who insisted on leaving male cats intact until they were killed. It reminds me of guys who identify with the size and power of their dogs. When I was faced with that situation for the first time, with Jim Beam, Ira and I were sentimental and waited too long to have him altered—a lapse we were to regret the rest of his life. To this day, I will find some object in the house that stinks of male cat piss, and remember Jim Beam, who expressed himself on it. But somehow to that earlier generation, the sexual adventures of a male cat were more important than his health, well-being, or even his life.
    I grew up much closer to my mother’s family than to my father’s. For one thing, my mother and I were Jewish, and my father was not. There was a lot of intermarrying in the extended Bunnin family, and while my grandmother, who gave me my religious education, did not like that, she couldn’t do much about it. My father’s family was casually and relentlessly anti-Semitic, so neither my mother nor I was