Homer's Odyssey

8 • The Ballad of El Mocho

Bless my heart, how he gets honoured and makes friends whatever city or country he visits.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

EVEN WITHOUT THE CATS, MOVING BACK IN WITH MY PARENTS WOULD have been an enormous adjustment. Would they treat me like I was still in high school, questioning me every time I went out and inquiring about who I was meeting and when I’d be back? Would they attempt to exercise parental authority over things like the tidiness of my bedroom?

Adding the cats to the mix would make things even more complicated. I wanted to figure out practical ways to keep the cats out of my parents’ way, and to keep the cats and dogs separated from each other, while still allowing everybody as much liberty as possible. Throw in all the standard confusion involved in a move—boxes to be unpacked, closets and shelves to be stocked, items to be sorted through and placed in storage—and it was clear that, ideally, there would be a time buffer of a couple of weeks between the day I arrived back on my parents’ doorstep and the day the cats joined me.

So I decided to make my second difficult phone call in as many weeks. I called Jorge.

Jorge still lived in the home we’d shared when Scarlett and Vashti were adopted. The two of them knew the house, and they also knew Jorge. Homer didn’t know either, but Jorge was part of a large extended family that was, collectively, even crazier about animals than I was. He’d grown up with more cats, dogs, birds, gerbils, hamsters, and goldfish than anybody I’d met.

We had communicated a few times since the breakup, in that strained and awkward way you end up talking to your ex during the early weeks after you’re no longer together—when your argument is, Hey, we can still be friends. Such conversations had decreased as the months went by. I never ended one without a strong sense of remembering why it was we’d broken up in the first place. I was positive Jorge felt the same way.

Nevertheless, if somebody had asked me to name the one person I would have trusted with my cats if I were unable to take care of them, I would have named Jorge without hesitation.

Jorge was more than accommodating when I pitched the idea of having the three cats stay with him for two weeks while I got things set up at my parents’ house. “I’d love to see Scarlett and Vashti again,” he said. “And I’ll take good care of Homer.”

I gave Jorge the basic rundown of Homer dos and don’ts (“My advice to you: Don’t keep tuna in your house while he’s there”) and some new issues that had cropped up in the past few months. It turned out that moist cat food gave Homer tremendous gas—it was astounding that one small kitten could produce such huge, horrible smells—but Vashti had been through a recent bout of colitis and was temporarily off dry food, making feedings more complicated than they used to be. I promised to stock Jorge with everything he’d need to care for the cats, as well as some written instructions.

My only concern was how Homer would bear the separation. He hadn’t been apart from me for so much as twenty-four hours in the six months since I’d brought him home. The day I dropped the cats with Jorge, I pretended to leave something behind half a dozen times so I could run back and peek in on him before driving off. The last time I tried it, mumbling something about a lipstick I was positive had tumbled out of my purse, Jorge said in exasperation, “Go! I’ve been taking care of cats longer than you have. We’ll be fine.”

I waited two days before going over again to check on everybody, although I called Jorge nightly to ask how the cats were doing, particularly Homer. “He’s fine,” Jorge told me. “He’s having a great time here, actually.”

I soon discovered why. When I arrived at Jorge’s house for my first visit, the first thing I saw was one of Jorge’s friends with a palm high in the air, upon which Homer rested on his belly, all four legs dangling down. Jorge’s friend was spinning Homer around and around rapidly, making airplane noises as he spun.

“Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed. “Are you crazy? Put him down now!”

Jorge’s friend, looking both startled and shamefaced, hastily complied. Homer staggered, punch drunk, for a moment (as well he should), but after recovering his balance he stretched his front paws beseechingly up the side of Jorge’s friend’s leg. Again! Again!

“You see? He loves it!” Jorge’s friend insisted proudly. Then, affecting the mock-deep intonations of a wrestling announcer, he added, “For he is El Mocho, the cat without fear!”

I raised an eyebrow at Jorge. “El Mocho? Is this what we’re calling him now?”

Jorge grinned and shrugged. “Well, you know how these things take on a life of their own.”

Mocho was a Spanish word that meant maimed or referred to something that had been lopped off like a stump. To call Homer el mocho was, essentially, to call him “Stumpy” or “the maimed one.”

It doesn’t sound particularly flattering, but among Spanish speakers the giving of nicknames is tantamount to a declaration of love. Things that would sound insulting outright in English were tokens of deep affection when said in Spanish.

“He likes his new name,” Jorge’s friend chimed in. “Watch this. Ven aca, Mochito.” Homer’s ears pricked up and he trotted right over to Jorge’s friend, sitting on his haunches at full attention.

“Oh, Homer,” I said mournfully. “Have a little dignity.”

“He has nothing but dignity,” Jorge’s friend protested, his eyes alight with humor. “He is El Mocho. It is the code of El Mocho to meet all opponents with dignity and honor on the field of battle.”

Even I had to laugh at that one.

Homer adjusted to Jorge’s home with an enthusiasm I found almost unsettling. Jorge reported that, after the first day or so, Homer was able to find his way around without bumping into anything. And he absolutely adored Jorge’s friends, all of whom insisted on calling him El Mocho.

Homer had been used to living with a bunch of girls, none of whom—as it turned out—were willing to play as rough-and-tumble with him as he would have liked. Jorge and his friends were more than happy to chase Homer around the furniture in elaborate games of tag, which ended when Homer sprang out from under a bed or behind a table leg to attack their ankles. They tossed and spun him a good six feet in the air (I learned of this later, because after that first incident they were careful not to do it when I was around), or flipped him onto his back and wrestled him around. During one visit, I noticed that Homer, as soon as a couple of Jorge’s friends walked in, rolled immediately onto his back and pawed frantically at the air with one leg, in a posture that practically begged, C’mon … rough me up!

“He walks around the house at night crying,” Jorge told me after the first week. “He won’t sleep with me. He’ll only sleep near Scarlett. I think he misses you.”

I felt a twinge of guilt—although, I’m ashamed to admit, it was reassuring to receive some small sign that Homer missed me, at least a little.

“And where’s Scarlett sleeping?” I asked.

“Anywhere I’m not.” Jorge gave a rueful laugh. “You’re the only one she was ever friendly to.”

“One more week,” I said. “I promise.”

But the cats wouldn’t end up staying at Jorge’s house another week. On day nine, I got a call from him. “Somebody’s been peeing all over the house,” he said.

“Hey, I’ve told you for years that you shouldn’t let your friends drink all that light beer.”

“I’m serious, Gwen.”

I sighed. “All right, I’m sorry. Which one and where?”

“I haven’t caught anybody in the act, but whoever it is peed on the sofa, my laundry bag with all my clothes in it, and my new leather jacket.” He paused. “I think it’s Scarlett.”

“It’s not Scarlett,” I responded immediately. “It’s Vashti.”

“Has she done this before?” He sounded annoyed, and I could tell he was wondering why, with all the minutiae I’d prepped him with beforehand, I hadn’t bothered to mention this small problem.

“No, she hasn’t. But I’m sure it’s her.”

“If she hasn’t done it before, how can you be sure?”

“A mother knows,” I said wryly.

It was a simple process of elimination, really. I knew why Jorge thought it was Scarlett—because Scarlett, as I mentioned earlier, had a definite perception problem on account of her unfriendliness. Scarlett was so “mean” that, presumably, she was exactly the kind of cat who would pee with abandon all over somebody’s house out of pure malice.

But Scarlett, mean though she was (to other people), was fastidious about her litter box. There were minimum acceptable standards of cleanliness, specific brands of litter that had to be provided, and a modicum of privacy that she absolutely insisted upon. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything as plebeian as urinating out in the open like some common street cat.

As for Homer, this was clearly a spite peeing—Homer didn’t even have a concept of spite.

That left Vashti. And it made sense, when I thought about it. Vashti had been the worst off of any of them when I’d taken her in. Homer and Scarlett had come to my home after spending days at the vet’s office, where they’d been treated and fed before being sent to their new family. Vashti had been found by a co-worker of my mother’s at the elementary school where she taught. They’d locked her in a toolshed to keep her from wandering off while my mother did the only thing she could think of to do for a kitten. She called me.

I’d gone down to my mother’s school on my lunch break, stopping at the pet store for a small carrier and some Similac, and brought Vashti back to my office. I’d honestly thought, that first day, that Vashti’s pink nose was black, so encrusted was it with dirt. Through the bald patches on her skin that the mange had left, I could feel her bones poking through, and her ears were bloody and swollen from ear mites. I’d kept Vashti warm on my lap throughout the afternoon, feeding her the Similac through a dropper, until I was able to get her to the vet’s office that evening. She’d come home to live with us the following morning.

In a way that was different from Scarlett and Homer, who’d come to me through other hands, I think Vashti truly believed I’d saved her life. It was Vashti who always gazed at me with undiluted hero-worship in her eyes. I hadn’t considered the difficulties she might face in being left at Jorge’s house, which was the first home she’d ever known. Insofar as I was her “mother,” Jorge was her “father.” We had adopted her together, and I knew he loved her.

Vashti loved him, too. But after one too many visits to Jorge’s house, when I’d ended up leaving without her, something must have clicked in Vashti’s mind. She must have thought she’d been taken back to Jorge’s and left there forever, that I was never going to live with her again.

My guess was that Vashti was sending a message. And the message was: I’m not living anywhere without Mommy.

My suspicions were confirmed the next day when Jorge called to tell me he’d caught Vashti in the act of peeing on his stove. Since she had failed to communicate her point the first few times—as evidenced by the fact that she was still with Jorge and not with me—she’d obviously decided to escalate matters. I marveled at the idea of Vashti jumping all the way up to the counter-top stove—Vashti who, to my knowledge, had never once jumped half that height in her entire life.

“I’m sorry,” Jorge told me, “but she has to go.”

“I’ll come get them tonight,” I replied.

Loading the cats into their carriers was never an easy task, but for once Vashti climbed in as eagerly as if she were crawling into my lap. I put Homer in last; since he couldn’t see the carriers, he didn’t run and hide the second they were brought out. He spent his last few minutes in Jorge’s house playing with Jorge’s friends, charter members of the El Mocho fan club, who’d come to see him off. They held small bits of the tuna Jorge hadn’t been able to resist buying high in the air, encouraging Homer to leap straight up and grab the tuna from their fingers. “¡Salta, Mochito!” (Salta being Spanish for jump). As I deposited Homer into his carrier, Jorge’s friends cried, “No, no! The other two, they can go, but El Mocho can stay!”

“You know, he is welcome to stay if that would make things easier for you,” Jorge said.

For a kitten nobody had wanted, the offers to take Homer off my hands certainly seemed to be piling up.

“Sorry, guys,” I said. “They’re a package deal.”

“There really is something special about that cat,” Jorge observed fondly, giving Homer one last rub behind the ears before I zipped the carrier closed around him.

I smiled. “Let’s hope my parents feel the same way.”

The one profitable outcome of this episode in Homer’s life (I use the word profitable loosely, because I practically bankrupted myself repaying Jorge for the damage Vashti caused) was that I was decidedly less anxious about Homer’s ability to adjust to life in my parents’ house. With all the concerns I had for Homer over the years, I never again worried about his ability to adapt to new spaces and new people. Even my parents’ dogs no longer felt like the impassable barrier to Homer’s happiness I had been agonizing over.

For he was El Mocho, The Cat Without Fear.

¡Viva El Mocho!