Knifemaking: on the grace given to us by our small friends, and Every Man Jack

“The mist across the window hides the lines,

But nothing hides the color of the lights that shine”

Joe Jackson- “Steppin’ Out”

Everyone has had terrible neighbors at some point. If someone tells you they haven’t had terrible neighbors, then it’s entirely possible they are the ones who are terrible. When I was growing up there was a family a few houses down who fell into the category of ‘bad neighbors’. They had a large and unruly German Shepherd with a proclivity for shitting in everyone’s yard with a reckless abandon. Their three kids would terrorize myself and my two brothers, and I would be remiss in not mentioning that we did a good amount of terrorizing ourselves. Perhaps in some sort of dysfunctional samsara we alternated in which house was precisely villain and victim.

There was one summer day when the oldest of the terrible neighbor brothers was doing a proper bit of terrorizing on my younger brother. He had been in some karate or taekwondo classes and was running through some katas on him. I ran to tell my mother and my mother, most likely exasperated from dealing with an entire summer of these sorts of shenanigans, told me to just go hit him with a stick. I went to the tool shed in our backyard and retrieved a crude gardening implement, with a five foot oak handle and a rusty steel fabrication on the end for digging up God-knows-what. I immediately found the oldest brother and hit him over the head, making sure the rusty steel bit was the first point of impact. Then I ran like hell.

Not more than ten minutes later there was a knock on the door of my parent house. The mother and the boy I had just brained were standing there. He was bleeding from the head and teary-eyed, but otherwise ok. Their mother was some sort of attorney in town and though I don’t know what her particular discipline was, I find it to be a small miracle that no charges were filed. Everybody ended up alright, and while the terrorizing did not stop, weaponized garden tools and pre-pubescent kung-fu no longer made an appearance. Eventually everybody got older and found better things to do, and eventually moved on to life and adulthood.

Almost three decades later I would find myself doing contract work for an event company, and one of the brothers from that family was the vendor relations manager and in charge of contracting crew. When I found out who it was that was hiring me I was mortified. I told him I was sorry for being such a shit and he just laughed and said he was an awful kid. I was always his first call for festivals and events, and he was my favorite person to work with. He eventually took another job out of state. He grew up into a real good guy and I miss working with him.

As a result of all of that, I have made a decided effort to be a quiet and unassuming neighbor.

…………

A few years ago my girlfriend and I had noticed an elderly black cat hanging out in her flower beds and her porch. In her neighborhood there were always half a dozen or so cats roaming around and we were never quite sure if they belonged to anyone or were just feral or stray. Oftentimes we could hear them fighting at night- they sounded like wildcats. None of them had collars or appeared to have homes. We thought her visitor was a stray and she certainly looked the part: slightly feral with colossal paws and claws, and a disheveled coarse coat like a saber-toothed tiger. She appeared to be going blind but managed to exist just fine. She would pop up every few days, then disappear for a couple weeks. It was always nice to see her.

It turns out she belonged to the people living a couple houses down. These people were also what you would call terrible neighbors. The main offender was a gentleman who wore not one but two ankle monitors- the kind the State uses to monitor people under house arrest. We called him Hot-Pants because every time we saw him he was wearing some of those super short soccer shorts. The police were a common presence at their house. There was one morning years ago, when my girlfriend left her house to take her children to school she found police cars blocking her driveway. Several officers were behind their car doors with weapons drawn pointed at toward the terrible neighbor’s house. Apparently Hot-Pants had gotten into a narcotic-fueled altercation and tried to set one of the women living there on fire, culminating in violent resistance when the authorities arrived.

They did have really good fireworks though. Every Fourth of July we’d sit on her porch and watch. These weren’t Roman candles or bottle rockets. They had the ones you’d see at baseball games, the big repeating ones launched from a mortar tube. Whenever they launched them we could feel the concussion three houses down. They must have had a police scanner because, from what I could tell, they never got caught. They’d be firing them off, one after another, and then all of a sudden they would stop. We’d hear what sounded like an angle grinder on metal piping. They were most likely destroying evidence. Ten minutes later two police cars would come by and we’d see them turn their lights on, and then leave after another five minutes. My girlfriend and I would sit on her porch drinking bourbon and watch all of this go down. These were some of my favorite Fourth of July’s.

Every couple weeks for the next several years we’d see the police there. One time, my girlfriend was sitting on her porch when she saw Hot-Pants in a minivan speeding down the street, with a woman clinging to the hood and beating on the windshield, all while shrieking like a banshee. While the terrible neighbors did tend toward the dramatic, most of the dysfunction manifested as late-night screaming matches, punctuated with relatively (to all the other the other dysfuntction at least) civil police visits.

After several years, the wild black kitty that apparently belonged to Hot-Pants moved onto my girlfriend’s porch full time. We were pretty sure the cat had gone completely blind by that point because she was always bumping into the furniture. I’m not sure what kind of stuff the cat was made of because she was still catching birds and making it through the cold winters that we get. My girlfriend started putting out food and water for her, and inadvertently started supporting an entire ecosystem. We’d see possums and raccoons at the food dish in the mornings and evenings, as well as Mockingjays, Cardinals, and Bluejays. Hot-pants would occasionally be walking down the road and would ask if he could have his cat back, to which my girlfriend would reply that the cat could leave anytime it wanted to. It never left.

…….

Once the pandemic hit, we started seeing a lot more of the neighborhood cats at the food bowl on my girlfriend’s porch. Honestly they had probably always been there but we just hadn’t noticed until lockdown and quarantine. Apparently Hot-Pants had five or six cats that he didn’t really feed or take care of. Among this group of cats there was a younger scrappy-looking orange kitty who started showing up more and more. He had a mangled little ear, and what looked like a little staph growth on his shoulder. He was a little fucked up and kind of skinny, but I really liked his spirit. Whenever I was there I could usually find him hiding in the flower beds. Though Hot-Pants said it was his cat, he moved onto my girlfriend’s porch with the old black kitty. I always looked forward to seeing him when I went to see my girlfriend.

Nearly all of my work had been cancelled. All of my music gigs, production work, and knife shows- all gone. The unemployment system in our state is a joke, and I never received any of the PUA money. I was still paying an ambulance bill, several ER bills, and a surgery center bill, and they could all give less than a fuck about a global pandemic and people just not being able to generate income. There were riots happening a block from where I live, complete with curfews, tear gas, and buildings being set on fire. It was a stressful time.

The only thing that hadn’t been cancelled was my part-time warehouse gig, which has always tided me over when the work I actually care about is slow, and whose federal withholding helps me take care of taxes on the knives. Anyone who works in warehousing and logistics will tell you that you are not going to be working with the best and the brightest. I spent most of the time I wasn’t working with idiots trying to figure out how to pay rent and not get sued by private medical companies. As a result I found myself cranky, resentful, and more than a little bit bitter. Everyone has been in their own little personal hell because of this debacle, save maybe Jeff Bezos and whoever is running Pfizer. I learned a long time ago that doing work that connects me to the world has always been part of my purpose, and that purpose was taken from me.

On top of this there was the virus itself. The biggest priority was staying healthy and Covid free so I could work and not get sued by private medical companies. My girlfriend and I don’t live together and we were trying to figure out what the best way to keep ourselves and the kids safe. There was a period of two to three weeks when we didn’t spend time together in person, just to see what was going to happen. I was usually sitting at home pissed off, or playing Witcher 3 (I developed a video game habit to keep me out of trouble.) About this time she starting subtly suggesting that maybe I might want to take the little fucked-up orange kitty home. She said it might be nice to have a little friend with me while we figured how to operate in this new virus-filled dumpster-fire world.

I told her no way. My little apartment is more workspace than living space and the cat would hate it and run away. Maybe he didn’t want to be inside. I told her I am a lot of things, but a nurturing caregiver is not one of them, and honestly I’m surprised she even lets me around her children. But she kept gently mentioning this kitty, and delicately placing the idea of me having a cat in my head. She told me I wasn’t working long days, or weekends, or going to the shop or making knives. She told me that maybe I had some space for this little fucked up kitty.

The smartest of women are able to do this- shepherding their partners to a decision of action, all while allowing their men to think it was their idea all along. I am not naive to this, but eventually I found I didn’t have a good reason to not bring this cat home. Even her kids told me to take him because we were so alike- we were both orange, slightly mangled, kind of diesel, and a bit cranky. So one Saturday I went to the pet store and got some kitty supplies with some of my stimulus money, and went and got the cat off her porch and took him home.

The first thing I did was set the cat carrier in front of the litter box. I took him out and set him in it. I told him this is where he would piss and shit and that was rule numero uno. No cat tinkle in the corners or little surprises on the floor. Then I took him and put him in front of his food, and told him he didn’t have to be hungry anymore. I set him on my bed and told him this was his bed too, and that he didn’t have to sleep in flower beds.

Then he went and hid in my closet for eight hours. This was probably a bit of a shock and perhaps a bit traumatizing, and I probably had less than a gentle touch. He eventually came out and settled in. I named him Jack Knife. Something simple but elegant, and with a story to tell. I called him Jack for short.

I had gotten him this super fancy raw freeze-dried gamebird cat food, because I’m pretty sure he had been eating rocks and dirt his whole life. He hated it, wouldn’t touch it. I went back and asked the guy at the pet store what to feed him and he said just to give him kitten chow. It’s not bad for cats, it just has more calories and nutrients but can lead to unhealthy weights in adults. He told me when he starts to put on weight, switch him to adult food. Man could this cat eat. I would wake up, put a scoop in his empty bowl, and go to work. I’d come home from work and his bowl would be empty, another scoop. I would get ready to go to bed and his bowl was empty again, another scoop. Every single day.

He wanted to eat whatever I was eating. He hadn’t even been home a week one night when I was having a cheeseburger. He wouldn’t leave me alone so I gave him a decent-sized chunk. He spent the next two hours throwing up all over the place and I spent the next two hours cleaning it up. Viking kitty or not, cooked and seasoned before probably wasn’t good for his digestion. You just don’t know what you don’t know.

For my birthday my girlfriend payed for his vet appointment to get shots and looked at. He wasn’t very old. The vet told me you can pretty accurately age a cat by their teeth, and Jack was only about eighteen months old. He had a small ulcerated growth on his shoulder from a tough kittenhood. The vet said it wasn’t bothering him but I could schedule an appointment to get it removed if it became an issue. The vet techs, young women in their mid to late twenties, told me he was the absolute sweetest guy. I found it amazing that a creature could have such a brutal beginning and yet allow himself to feel safe and cared for. No bitterness, no resentment, just love. I was his person, and he was my little friend during a very lonely and uncertain time.

About this time I got really into making spaghetti bolognese, with pancetta, ground pork, and veal when I could afford it. You deglaze everything with a dry white wine and finish it with heavy cream. I would give him some of the sauce in a little dish. He always purred when he ate, always. He just wanted to eat, sleep and snuggle.

Jack eased the loneliness and existential anxiety that came from the torrid state of the worlds. I would come home from whatever stupid job I had been doing that day and he would be sitting on my coffee table waiting for me. He would follow me around until I sat down and then he would climb onto me and fall asleep while I played Nintendo. I would talk to him while I worked on the very occasional knife commission I would get. He was a terrible knife maker.

He was a quiet guy, never really meowed, didn’t claw anything, and didn’t ever bite. He did particularly enjoy knocking my water glass off my nightstand, watching satisfied as glass bits and water went all over the place. He would never run away afterward- no shame in that one. I would just clean up the glass, mop up the water, and fill up his food bowl (which was perpetually empty despite my best efforts.) I lost half a dozen glasses.

For a good three weeks, I was really into making sandwiches. I would make a quickie aeoli, and use the aged smoked cheddar that they sold at Aldi. I would always give Jack a bit of the cold cuts as I was making these breaded works of art to take to work, or for dinner. Even when I got tired of artisan sandwiches and moved on to other things, Jack thought that every time I went into the kitchen I was making sandwiches and he wouldn’t leave till he got his cold cuts. So I always kept some in the fridge.

I started noticing that Jack was getting a little bit lethargic and reclusive. I called the vet to get his small growth removed, and scheduled his procedure. I felt a little guilty about not doing it sooner, but he was a tough little alley cat, and I always tried to let him be. I had gotten my second stimulus so I scheduled his procedure for the same day i got my Covid vaccine.

The vet said he did really well and he just needed to rest and take it easy, which is what he usually did anyway. I picked him up and took him home and kept an eye on him for a few days. He was not getting better. His surgery wound was great- clean, dry, and healthy. He was hiding in my closet most of the time, and one evening I found him sleeping in his litter box, which Google told me was usually the sign of a very sick kitty. The next morning I noticed some swelling in his little face. I was afraid he had an abscess in his tooth and I made an appointment with my vet to have a look at him the next day.

I got home from work that evening and he was having trouble breathing. His front legs had started to swell and he was lying on my kitchen floor. I was really hoping to make it through the night to get to my vet, whom I just love, but around 11p I gave him some cold cuts and took him to the emergency vet.

I think it goes without saying that nothing pleasant happens at an emergency vet clinic at 11p on a Wednesday evening. As I was standing in line a lady was filling out a ‘do not resuscitate’ form for her dog in surgery. When they took Jack back I sat down to wait and I could hear a lady sobbing uncontrollably in one of the exam rooms.

When they called me back to the exam room it was not good. Cancer had ripped through his little body and the vet told me he was more than likely sick even before I took him home from my girlfriend’s flower bed. The reality was, the vet told me, was that he was probably just looking for a safe place to lie down. He was also anemic, which was why he could eat so much and didn’t really gain any weight. I asked the vet if I fucked up somewhere along the line and she said no, sometimes life is just incredibly brutal for outdoor cats. She also said it was probably good I didn’t get his little growth removed sooner, because the trauma of that procedure most likely exacerbated his illness. I asked if he was hurting and the vet said no, he was just uncomfortable but there wasn’t anything that could really be done for him. She told me in so many words that Jack would not live to be an old cat and I just sort of lost it.

It sounds really silly to say because most everybody I know, including myself, lost big things during those years. Time, people, relationships, careers, opportunities- things that are just gone and can’t be gotten back. But living under the backdrop of chaos, duress, and uncertainty for an extended time can leave us a bit fragile and worn out. Things that might have been an emotional inconvenience at worst suddenly loom large. This was one such instance: in a lonely little exam room at two in the morning where nothing good happens, we put Jack to sleep.

The silver lining of shithead neighbors and devastating pandemics is that you can find big things in the smallest of places. In spite of everything that little cat was loving and sweet till the very end, and a good friend. If that isn’t grace, then I don’t know what is. I sure do miss that little guy.