I Was Here(11)

             “Can’t you bring the cats to a shelter?” I ask her. “You seem to have it all worked out.”

             “I have a Women’s Studies paper I need to work on.”

             “What about after you finish?”

             She falters for a second. “No. Those cats were Meg’s thing. I don’t feel right sending them to a shelter.”

             “Oh, so you’ll leave the dirty work to me?” I hear the anger in my voice, and I know that it’s not Alice who’s left me the dirty work, but when she cringes, I get a grim twist of satisfaction.

             “Dude. I’ll drive you to Seattle,” Stoner Richard says. “We’ll get the felines settled, and you can come here and get out of town first thing in the morning.” He seems like he wants to be rid of me as much as I want to be rid of him. At least it’s mutual.





5

             Seattle pet shelters, it turns out, are harder to get into than the hippest velvet-rope night clubs. The first two are full, and no amount of begging works. The third one has space, but it requires an application and a copy of the cats’ vet records. I tell the pierced girl with her hipster no-leather shoes that I’m leaving town, that I have the cats in the car, and she gives me the most snide look in the world and tells me that I should’ve thought of this before I went and adopted a pet. I almost smack her.

             “Wanna smoke that bowl now?” Stoner Richard asks after strike three. It’s eight o’clock and the shelters are all closed for the night.

             “No.”

             “You wanna go to a club or something? Blow off steam? Since we’re in Seattle?”

             I’m exhausted from the night before and I don’t want to be here with Stoner Richard and I’m trying to figure out how I’ll get vet records when tomorrow is Sunday. I start to beg off but then Richard says: “We can go to one of those hole-in-the-walls that Meg liked to go to. Once in a while she’d deign to let us tag along.” He pauses. “She had a whole klatch of friends up here.”

             I’m momentarily stunned by Richard’s use of both deign and klatch. But the truth is, I do actually want to see these places. I think of the club we were meant to have gone to the weekend I came to visit. All the clubs we were meant to have gone to all the weekends I didn’t come to visit. I know how excited Meg was to be amid the music scene, though after the time I visited her, the breathless emails about it all started to taper off and then stopped.

             “What about the kittens?” I ask Richard.

             “They’ll be fine in the car,” Richard says. “It’s, like, fifty-five degrees tonight. They have food and water.” He points to Pete and Repeat, who, having squealed and yowled the entire drive up, are now quietly nestled together in their carrier.

             We drive to a club in Fremont by the canal. Before we go in, Richard lights up a small pipe and smokes out the window. “Don’t want to give the kitties a contact high,” he jokes.

             As we pay our covers, he tells me that Meg went here a lot. I nod as if I know this. The place is empty. It smells of stale beer, bleach, and desperation. I leave Richard at the bar and go play pinball by myself. By ten o’clock the room starts filling up, and by eleven the first of the night’s bands comes on, a very feedback-heavy outfit whose lead singer growls more than he sings.

             After a few okay songs, Stoner Richard finds me. “That’s Ben McCallister,” he says, pointing to the guitar player/growler.

             “Uh-huh,” I say. I’ve never heard of him. It takes a while for the Seattle scene to filter all the way down to Shitburg.