Obituary for a Lost Cat
Honoring P-22
I grew up in Corona, California. The Inland Empire, they call it. Desert trash, Fox Racing townies, lake hicks, Monster Energy factory fuck-offs. I went to school in Fullerton, it’s barely Orange County. My great-great-grandfather founded San Clemente and they don’t know us from Adam. He lost it all in the Great Depression and save for a few street names our family doesn’t register as anything but footnote. We had orange groves until we didn’t. During college I started going to Los Angeles to see concerts, make some futile attempts at auditions. I fell in love. I never looked back.
When I had the opportunity I moved there permanently. A house on Clayton Street by Prospect, née Talmadge, Studios. Kind of behind the Vista Theater. El Chavo, rest in peace. The Tiki-Ti. The old KCET building turned Scientology broadcast center. Tangs Donuts. Anyway.
I was young, dumb, full of, well. And the same year I settled, so did P-22. Just a few miles north of me in the largest, most beautiful public park our city has to offer—bequeathed to us by a man with the same first and last name, who claimed to be a general, who shot his wife in the face and did a deuce at San Q. He gave us that land to restore his name. Same with the Observatory and what would eventually become the Greek Theater. Where his memorial is being held today. There were free tickets, dried up, and then the rest were scalped to high heaven. Parking issues abound. And as many have pointed out, the rich irony that an animal sequestered into city living, his life bifurcated by freeways, is remembered in a nearly unwalkable situation. Oh, Los Angeles.
Unsurmountable, the odds. To cross those treacherous freeways and survive. To up-end ones life in a new metropolis, in a city-forest of cedar and TikTokking hikers, and to thrive, in his own way. Why did so many connect with this displaced puma? Did they see themselves, lost and lonely, from Chicago or Boston or some umpteenth second-city? Now wildly domesticated in the confines of these bright dimming lights?
How fucked he was. Acclimating to a new environment and unable to return home. Even if he were relocated, they said, some younger alpha would take over. His ability to operate in his original environment stripped of him. And yet in his final years outlets would report his “unruly” behavior. His attacks on rich people’s unleashed pets. And from the aisle of logic a resounding chorus echoes, “well what the fuck do you expect?” He is wild, after all.
They could not tame him, they could not save him. He was lonely, lost, and loved. Without other option, they had to put him in the dirt. Who is wild now? Who is savage?
And in Hollywood fashion we will throw a party. A party that can be fenced and fought over. Un-stow the furs. Flex knuckles of precious stone. Claim charity, claim care. It doesn’t raise him. I don’t think it even praises him. It’s just for us. Or we who can afford it. Meanwhile, so many other lost and lonely souls roam the city uncared for. Without names, at least to those in higher position.
And this won’t be a lesson. It won’t be teachable. It’ll become cliche and graphic. T-shirts at Y-Que or some other cheap goods-of-the-time.
I hate myself for leaving town the day before he was killed. I’m a navel-gazing selfish writer, of course, but I can’t not see the similarities. Our bonded home. The timeline. The love you make when all you have is scenery. The amount of brutal confessions and desperate connections I made in Griffith Park…while the cat stalked behind me, maybe just in the shadows. I never met him, but I loved him just the same.
I wish he could come back tonight. Just one night. To tear the guiltys’ throats.