Richard Gere, you whispered in my ear—well, maybe I pretended you were whispering directly into my ear, thinking what would Richard Gere say and do?—Tell him you want to hear about his cat. Lessen his pain. Be compassionate. Remember the Dalai Lama’s teachings.
I remembered a line I read in the Dalai Lama’s book A Profound Mind. “It is important that we understand just how truly all-pervasive suffering is.” I remembered the Dalai Lama saying it is easy to feel sorry for an elderly beggar, but it is much harder to feel sorry for a young rich man. He also said that all “conditioned existence is characterized by pain.” And that all types of people are “enslaved” by “strong destructive emotions.”
And so, heeding your spiritual leader’s advice, I said to Max, “I’d like to hear about your cat. Alice. I really would.”
He examined my face for a second or two, probably trying to decide if I meant it, and then said, “Alice was the best fucking cat that ever lived.”
I began pretending again, and you, Richard Gere, in my imagination you whispered in my ear and said, Look how his muscles are relaxing. Note the slope of his shoulders. Relaxed. He needs to talk. Listen. Ease his suffering. Be compassionate. And compassion will come back to you. Heed the words of the Dalai Lama.
Max went on to talk about his cat for more than a half hour straight. He told me that he found her in a Dumpster in Worcester, Massachusetts, behind the movie theater where he used to work before he moved to Philadelphia to live with his sister. He was taking out the nightly trash when he heard a kitten crying. He had to tear open “a million fucking bags” before he found it. There were six other kittens inside but all of those were dead. “I wanted to kill the fucking scumbag who put kittens in a trash bag. What the fuck, hey? Who does that?” He was very worried that someone would find him standing next to the dead cats “with fucking trash and dead kittens all around my fucking feet” and accuse him of killing the cats, so he stuck the alive kitten into his coat and headed to the nearest convenience store so he could get some “fucking milk.” It was late at night and the woman working the convenience store behind “thick fucking plastic glass” saw the kitten and excitedly exited her glass box to pet it. She made such a big deal over the kitten and was so nice to Max, showing him where the cat food was and letting him feed the kitten in her store, that Max decided to name the kitten after that convenience store worker. “What the fuck, hey? I thought,” Max said. “So I asked what her fucking name was and she fucking said Alice. So that’s what I fucking named my cat.” Max went on to explain how—using a feather on a string and catnip—he trained his cat to meow on command and also run through an obstacle course full of hoops and mini-jumps “like what fucking horses jump, but smaller for baby cats.” And he said that as Alice became an adult cat, he taught her how to speak to him.
“Really speak to you?” Arnie said. “Or were you only pretending Alice could speak with you? Like most people do when they talk to their pets.”
“Yeah, like fucking that, hey. Pretending,” Max said.
I became very interested in Max at this point.
He talked a lot more about Alice, listing what types of food she liked—“Canned fucking tuna was her favorite!”—and how she liked to chase red dots of light that he projected onto the wall with “a fucking laser pointer” and how Alice “jumped and ran and pounced for fucking hours,” how they both enjoyed watching the library’s box-set DVDs of the original Doctor Who and how he thought about Alice whenever he was working, ripping “the fuck out of tickets” at the “fucking movies,” because that was “his fucking job”—being a “fucking ticket fucking taker” at the “fucking movies,” and it was “really fucking boring, hey!”
I told him that working at the movies seemed like an interesting job, especially since you could see movies for free, and Max said, “Going to the movies? Fuck that! You have to sit with fucking asshole strangers and you never know which one has a fucking cold or what fuck is going to bring a fucking crying baby. And working at the fucking movies fucking sucks. You end up watching parts of every fucking movie and then never seeing the rest. Fifteen minutes of this fucking film, fifteen minutes of that fucker. All the fucking parts get mixed up and make a never-fucking-ending Frankenstein film. You never get to see the whole thing start to fucking finish. Not fucking once. And you know what’s the worst fucking part?”
“What?” I said.
“No cats allowed. What the fuck, hey? Alice loved movies! Why can’t you bring your cat? What the fuck? That’s why I always preferred watching fucking movies at home.”
“Do you enjoy Richard Gere movies?” I asked.
“Richard Gere? Richard fucking Gere?” Max said. “Fuck Richard Gere! What the fuck, hey?”
“He’s actually my favorite actor,” I said, sticking up for you, even though you technically were one of Mom’s favorite actors. “And a brave humanitarian.”
“Oh, I like Richard Gere,” said Arnie, who had been listening to Max and me talk with a satisfied look on his face. “He was great in Chicago.”
“Fuck Richard Gere,” Max said once more. “Fuck going to the fucking movies. I miss Alice. I really fucking miss Alice. Fuck!”
There was a long silence here.
Max looked like he was melting.
You were compassionate, you, Richard Gere, whispered into my ear. You let go of the self.