One Cat, Approved

“If you were looking for stability, this ain’t it.” I told her from the front seat of my car, which was loaded with the majority of my earthly belongings. By this time, though, already two years into our lives together, Ike didn’t need the lecture. We were skedaddling on out of a Cragslist room-for-rent situation that had turned really weird really fast.

            To be fair, Ike’s life began with instability. Named after the hurricane that literally blew her into my life, she had been a three week old kitten with fleas and a homelessness situation when I agreed to take her in for a few days.

            Four years, five states, fifteen houses, and thousands of miles later, Ike remains a constant in the hurricane of my life. For every new place I live, I mark a check beside the "Cat" confession on the rental agreement. One cat, approved. We’ve spent the last five years on the racetrack, while I keep her in catnip by galloping Thoroughbreds on some of the most famous tracks in the country. They operate in conjunction with one another, so when one racetrack closes for the season, another opens, sometimes a few states away. The trainers follow the purse money, the horses follow the trainers, and the workers follow the horses. Kentucky, New York, Kentucky, Florida, repeat. And so Ike has learned the art of riding shotgun, leaning into the turns and discreetly using her travel-ready litter box at the appropriate times.

            What she lacks in conversational substance, Ike makes up for by being a remarkable listener. Watching yellow stripes blink by on the asphalt always makes me apt to take advantage of a captive audience, so I take her silence as an invitation. “No te muevas, Ike,” I tell her. “Todo bien, bambina.”

            I speak a version of racetrack Spanish that is functional but still makes me sound like a cheerful yet pitiably optimistic village idiot. But I love it, because every Spanish word I have was a gift from a specific person in this whirlwind. I learned the words “dry” and “dead” and “rat” from a Guatemalan groom in one spectacularly unfortunate incident during my first summer in Saratoga Springs.  

The first of those summers, the year before Ike joined me, I rented a room from an English rider/equine dentist who had been on the track since he was a teenager living in Italy, England, and up and down the eastern United States. In his upstate New York home, he has footage of himself as a gangly teenager in a British television special, a dog from his first marriage, and a box of old coins he found on the beaches of Pisa. These are the things that tie his life together, no matter how broken the geography becomes. If these were his constants, his footholds, then Ike soon became mine.

But please, also understand this: Ike is horrible. She knows this, prefers this, and makes no apologies for the red lines she leaves on my arms or for the puncture wounds she inflicts on people she doesn’t like. Like most problems of this nature, her antisocial and embarrassing behaviors are rooted in insecurity. By the age of three weeks, Ike was already familiar with loss, self-reliance, and the art of playing a sucker. She finds comfort in her own box of familiar items. Given a choice, she would prefer to sleep in her pet taxi instead of on the pillows I set out for her. She quickly rejects gifts from well-meaning friends to play with a ragged set of mini-foam soccer balls she’s been batting around for years.  These are her constants, the anchors in her hurricane.

The winter after Ike tumbled into my life, her social awkwardness made it impossible for us to stay with any of my past roommates and their pets. The season had once again shifted, and we were headed south to Florida. That meant we were flotsam again, in need of a roommate and a room for the winter. When I told my prospective new roommate about Ike, she said she wasn’t worried. She had Moxie.  

Moxie was a sleek, beautiful black terror. Though usually kind, Moxie was cunning, agile, defensive, and quick to snap. Maybe it was because life hadn’t been fair to Moxie. She had been a sick orphan when my roommate had taken her in off of a cold New England racetrack. I had initially hoped that Moxie would be a kindred spirit for Ike, a fellow wandering soul. Instead, the two cats paced the apartment like gunslingers, filling our home with tension for the entire four months of our stay. I wondered at times if it was life on the road that had turned Moxie into the ruthless creature she was. My roommate was prone to occasional bursts of vulgarities that, had she the means, Moxie would have also employed. This lifestyle of constant upheaval requires an existential calm, and an ability to body-surf on the waves of a tsunami. Maybe Moxie had simply had enough of it, or maybe she had developed a different skill. She didn’t surf the tsunami, she raised an angry middle claw to it.    

She and my roommate moved on, the way racetrackers do, and by the following winter, Ike and I found ourselves back in South Florida settling into a converted garage I had found on Craigslist. Things had stared out normally enough. Laura, my landlady and housemate, was in her mid-forties, glad to have a comforting ear to listen to her troubles about getting her 22 year old Ethiopian boyfriend into the country. They had only met a few times two years ago while he was visiting Chicago, but this, she assured me, over frozen wontons and box wine, was real. Gil, down the hall, went to high school with Laura. Funny thing, he would say often and loudly, he and Laura weren’t even really friends in high school. Back then, you know, he was the school soccer star. Life had slowed for him lately, though, and he spent his days with a tanning screen and a gold necklace in the back yard. A sorrowful matted Persian cat roamed the house, and I spent much of my time apologizing for Ike’s antagonistic behavior towards him.

One month in, I knew it was time to cut my losses. I’d packed my things the night before, and by eleven o’clock the following morning, Ike and I were on the move. Once again, I found myself in a mid-size car surrounded by the things that give my life the illusion of structure. My entire life was packed around me, punctuated by a sarcastic cat in the backseat.

“Lista, bambina?” I said.

Of course she was ready. I turned the key, and we were off.