Beautiful Blemish (8 page)

    
Joseph rubbed some of the black marker from his eyes onto Helen's shoulder blades.
 
"Bang me," he blurted, then started laughing more freely.

    
Helen turned
around,
put her hands around his throat, an imaginary choke hold.
 
"Well, we're almost to that point, aren't we?
 
You better watch out next time or you might be the slut."
 
They held each other for a moment and felt their breathing synchronize.
 
"Your birthday's coming up.
 
I'll make sure to put a dildo on the list," she told him.
 
"For the man who has everything."

    
Between the cracks in the blinds, they saw the early night darken.
 
Each of them could swear that they could hear the other's heart beating.
 
"It'll be too bad when we get old," said Helen.

I Heart Frankenstein

I'm not sure why, but there was a time when I kept compiling cats.
 
I think one time I had seven but most of the time it was just three or four.
 
Most of them wouldn't stay for long, so my apartment was more like a
cat motel
.
 
The thing is, I would take them for walks and they'd kind of run off.
 
I didn't have the energy to chase them all the time. Another thing that happened is I had friends who borrowed them and never gave them back.

    
I was good to those cats though.
 
Pretty damn good.
 
I'd talk to them, watch TV with them, play hide and seek.

    
I was young and had a boyfriend at the time, thought I was gay, didn't really know what I was doing.
 
His name was Alfred.
 
We only saw each other for two months.
 
He was full of tattoos and piercing.
 
We'd go out to these big gay parties and that's when I started to feel out of place.
 
I knew sooner or later I'd have to come out of the closet and tell everyone I was straight.
 
I was 22 years old and had a cute little butt.

    
One night after I got off my shift at the radio station, Alfred and his gay cousin Ralph met me in the parking lot.
 
They both came from families that awarded their children terrible names.
 
"God, you sound so butch on the air," said Ralph.
 
Our plan for the night was to go pick up a cat that Ralph's sister had to give away.
 

When we got to the place we took a look at the free cat.
 
It had some kind of defect that made his fur grow in rough patches around his lopsided body.
 
Also, one of his eyes
were
really big, like one of those Japanese cartoons. His other eye looked wet and glossy, he had a crick in his neck, and some things that looked like testicles dragged on the ground as he scooted around the dirty carpet.
 
"He's depressed," said Rachel.

    
"Well sure sis, we can see that," Ralph said grimacing.
 
The cat howled like a wolf and fell down flat on his chin.

    
"Is there something else wrong with him?" I wondered aloud, spotting empty beer cans littered among clipped coupons and
People
magazines.

    
"Well," Rachel admitted, "he hurt his head once trying to commit suicide."

    
The three of us looked at Rachel as if she were unraveling a cruel joke for us.
 
I slowly looked back at the cat and figured out what it was that Rachel didn't want to say.
 
"He's a retarded cat," I said.

    
The strange animal stumbled over to Alfred and tried laboriously to climb his corduroys.
 
We named him Frankenstein.

The depressed cat seemed to have its spirits lifted a little by the other cats in my apartment.
 
The middle-aged cats especially seemed to look after the new member despite two of the younger cats running scared every time that Frankenstein entered a room.
 
China Flag, so named because she looked like a Chinese flag, seemed to enjoy playing with Frankenstein by jumping off the highest shelf in the living room onto his scruffy ass.
 
This charming courtship was ended when one of my friends came over and borrowed China Flag and then of course never returned her.
 
No friends were interested in borrowing Frankenstein.
 
I knew that he would be with me for a while at this point because even his occasional attempts at running away during outdoor walks were thwarted whenever he'd eventually run headlong into a telephone pole and then flop over twitching on his back.

    
I got the feeling that even Alfred started to harbor an animosity toward me because of my loyalty to the sad cat and my ever-shortening ventures into oral sex.
 
I'm pretty sure he was seeing someone else, someone "more gay" than me.
 
He was staying out late at parties and coming over to my place all drunk and talking about some guy named Gary Garry, a young man with a tight abdomen and an allergy to cats.
 
I'd give him a hand job and he would pass out on my bean bag chair.

Perhaps it was their diet that made some of the cats crazy.
 
The usual crunchy cat food from the store was disliked by some and I knew that they had to eat some kind of hard food or their breath and teeth would become atrocious.
 
I'd have four bowls out for them: One with water, one with regular crunchy cat food, one with potato chips, and another with
Cap'n
Crunch.
 
They seemed to be happy and fit and would often play so aggressively that the person beneath me would pound on his ceiling to get me to quiet things down.
 
I guess I never thought it would make them crazy.
 
My diet, after all, was somewhat similar: lots of chips and junk food with the occasional taco, pizza or cheeseburger for protein; and needless to say, I wasn't a spastic.

    
Once when I was out taking Frankenstein for a walk, he got loose from his leash and darted across the street for a pigeon.
 
He was hit by a car, bouncing his mangled body against another car and landing directly on the double yellow center line.
 
I ran into the street and got clipped by a
Vespa
.
 
My leg was broken but Frankenstein, I found out later, was okay.
 
When I got back home that night there was a message on the answering machine from Alfred telling me he had Frankenstein at his place and he needed to bring him over when I got back from the hospital.
 
In the background, I heard someone sneezing and wheezing continuously.

    
Around
midnight
that night, Alfred came over with Frankenstein and Gary Garry.
 
The fact that he brought along
Gary
was a sure sign that we were not really a couple anymore.
 
Gary
stepped five feet into my apartment and took a quick, cautious, and curious look around.
 
He was wearing one of those white masks over his mouth like doctors sometimes do.
 
I was a little jealous of his dark tanned skin and thick sexy eyebrows.
 

    
Frankenstein waddled to where I sat and tried unsuccessfully to leap into my lap.
 
I leaned over and picked him up
gingerly,
still unable to believe he was unhurt by the car hitting him.
 
I looked into his eyes and felt, for the first time in a long time, that feeling when you make a deep connection with an animal.
 
It was as if he was sad for making me run into the street and getting hit by the seventeen-year old girl with the skinhead haircut in the
Vespa
.
 
It looked as if he was going to cry, so much sadness filled the room.
 
I eventually fell asleep in my chair with Frankenstein on my lap.
 

In the middle of the night I dreamed I was going out with Gary Garry.
 
We had to always stay at his house because of the cats that constantly came and went at my apartment.
 
I was soon discovered to be the first man to get pregnant.
 
After ten sweaty months my labor was induced.
 
As the nurses kept my veins flowing with pain-killing drugs that made everything seem slow motion, I began to push out the child.
 
Everyone smiled and wiped tears from their eyes as the doctor held Frankenstein up by his hind legs and slapped him on his gimpy ass.
 
Alfred screamed, vomited and began choking to death right there in the delivery room.
 
A large-breasted nurse undid her blouse and began feeding the young cat her nipple.
 
When I woke up from this dream I had an erection and that's when I had the suspicion that I was probably straight.
    

    
What had awoken me from my dream was the weight of Frankenstein sliding off my lap.
 
I rubbed the half-night's sleep from my eyes and watched Frankenstein lurch mournfully to the window sill.
 
I tried to call out to him but he ignored me and threw himself against the mesh screen, jarring it loose.
 
Frankenstein moaned a low meow as he looked outside and then back to me.
 
It sounded more like he was saying "Wow, wow, wow."
 
I pulled myself up and fell forward.
 
"No
Franky
,
no
!" I pleaded with him.
 
He looked at me sadly, as if he blamed himself for my injury, as if he was trying to do me a favor by killing himself and it backfired.
 
He launched himself into the air.
 
I remember the moment as if it was a photograph; the exact look on his face, his skewed whiskers, his large eye full of passion,
his
small eye shedding a tear that throbbed on his dirty black nose, his front legs shorter than his back.
 
It was probably the happiest look I'd ever seen on his face.
 
It is a look that still flashes in my mind from time to time, so vivid, so urgent.
 

    
I crawled to the window and leaned out.
 
Frankenstein was eight stories down, on his four flinching paws. He moved his head from side to side as if he was looking for someone to help him.
 
I grabbed my crutches and hopped down the hall to the elevator.

    
Once outside, I scanned the lighted courtyard for Frankenstein.
 
He was not where he landed.
 
"
Franky
!" I called.
 
"Frankenstein?"
 
Silence met my ears with an almost deafening volume.
 
Without Alfred, without Frankenstein, without the use of my left leg, I began to feel a surge of sadness.
 
Sure, I had three other cats up in my apartment, but I felt a loneliness so deep I'd have to eat pudding and ice cream for a week.

    
As the light of the moon placed an unpleasant spotlight on me, I wondered if I should bother the landlord for a flashlight or maybe call Alfred to break the news that would eventually get back to him: My sorry life made the retarded cat commit suicide.

    
My wooden crutches swung forward, opting for the landlord.
 
I felt something brush my right leg.
 
I looked down and saw Frankenstein.
 
He sat there looking up at me.
 
My breath was gone.
 
I couldn't believe it. I whispered, "
Franky
, is it really you?
 
Are you really still alive?"
 
He seemed frozen for a moment and then said "Yow."
 
I eased myself down and touched him on his chest.
 
I felt his small breath on my fingers.
 
I held him up to my face and noticed that the crick in his neck was gone and his small eye had stopped seeping the watery fluid I thought to be permanent.
 
The eight-story fall seem to actually improve his physical state.

    
"You're alive," I whispered to him, and then repeated it to myself, "You're alive."
 
I held him toward my open window.
 
"He's alive!" I shouted in defiance.
 
I held him to the moon.
 
"It's alive!" I roared.
 
"It's alive!"