Homer's Odyssey

17 • “The Pussy Galore Tour”

Zeus takes all travelers under his protection, for he is the avenger of all suppliants and foreigners in distress.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

BY JANUARY OF 2001, MY THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY LOOMED ON THE HORIZON (technically it wasn’t until October, but milestone birthdays cast long shadows), and dark days had descended upon the dotcom industry. Internet companies everywhere were shedding employees or shutting down altogether, and Miami was no exception. The company I had originally gone to work for had closed its doors months earlier. I had quickly found a position with another firm, but a mere three months later, they shut down as well. I’d found yet another job within six weeks, but they soon lost their funding and cut my salary in half. I was hemorrhaging savings as I struggled to make ends meet.

It was a state of affairs that couldn’t continue indefinitely. I began to send résumés everywhere I could think of, but hiring in Miami had all but frozen solid. The fallout of the dot-com failures had spread its misery across most of Miami’s other industries—tourism, real estate, finance—and nobody was hiring staff for marketing positions. I didn’t get a single call for an interview.

The beauty of having nothing to lose is that you have everything to gain. My vague soap bubble of an idea about moving to New York had drifted aimlessly in the background of my thoughts for some time, but it had always seemed too impractical for serious consideration. For one thing, why would anybody in New York hire me from Miami? Moving would be expensive, not to mention how much more expensive it was to live in New York City than South Florida. And wasn’t I getting a little old for such a major life change? Starting over in Manhattan seemed like the sort of thing one did straight out of college, not when one was approaching thirty.

But as the Miami job market continued to dry up, I started e-mailing my résumé to companies in New York. Why not? I asked myself, and couldn’t think of a single good reason.

It was a shot in the dark, one that I didn’t really expect to hit its target. Within three weeks, however, I had requests for interviews with five firms in New York City. I flew up the following week to meet with them, and by the end of that week I had three written offers of employment. One was for a director of marketing position with a large technical recruiting firm located in Manhattan’s Financial District, six blocks from the World Trade Center. In addition to the generous salary they offered, they were also willing to offset my moving expenses. I had a friend who lived in an apartment building only a block away from this company, and he pulled some strings with his leasing office. Twenty-four hours later, I’d landed an apartment without any of the drama one normally hears associated with apartment hunting in New York.

It was almost disconcerting how easily everything had fallen into place. By mid-February, my whim of only a few weeks ago was a reality.

I was moving to New York.

ALL THE ARTICLES I’d read over the years on the subject of caring for a blind cat were united on one point: The most important thing was to create a stable and permanent environment for the cat. You were advised not to do things like move furniture around or change the litter box’s location. Moving homes altogether is unsettling enough for any cat—cats not being creatures who regard change favorably—and is especially to be avoided when the cat in question is blind.

Homer was about to undergo his fifth move in five years. Like the hero Odysseus, imagined by the poet for whom Homer had been named, perpetual journeying seemed to be his destiny.

I considered various options for getting my three cats to New York with a minimum of trauma for all concerned. I could drive the four of us up, but was reluctant to subject the cats to two full days in their carriers—which they hated—not to mention the logistics of litter breaks, finding motels along the way that would be willing to accommodate three cats, and so on.

Flying up would make the most sense—at least it would get the whole thing over and done with faster than any other option—but I flat-out refused to check my cats as baggage. The thought of them in a cargo hold, cold and terrified, was something I couldn’t even stand to think about. Nor was I eager to become one of those news stories you sometimes heard about, where a checked cat ends up as lost luggage, flying around the world for days and surviving by licking the condensation that forms in his carrier.

So I called the airline to find out if it was possible to bring the cats onto the plane with me. The requirements were both straightforward and daunting. A cat boarding a plane had to be contained in a regulation-sized carrier that would fit beneath the seat. The cat had to have a recent health certificate, which had to be presented to security personnel at the metal detectors and again at the gate. Each cat had to travel with a ticketed passenger, and only one cat was allowed per passenger. Only two cats were permitted in a cabin, and only four cats were permitted on the entire plane.

The carriers I already had and the health certificates wouldn’t be a problem, as all three cats were in perfect health and up-to-date on their shots. But if I wanted to bring the three of them onto the plane with me, I would have to find two other people willing to fly up to New York with me.

Hard as I searched, I was unable to locate a direct flight from Miami to New York that had room for three cats. There was a flight that connected through Atlanta, and if I cashed in all my frequent-flier miles I could just manage to upgrade one of the tickets to first class, in keeping with the two-cats-per-cabin restriction.

Then I called my friends Tony and Felix, two of the highest-energy people I knew and always up for an adventure. “How’d you guys like a free trip to New York?”

THE DAY WE moved was undoubtedly the most unsettling day of Homer’s life thus far. Our morning began just after daybreak, when the moving company I’d hired arrived to cart away everything we owned. I locked the cats in the bathroom during this process, where Scarlett and Vashti curled up warily in the bathtub atop some old towels I’d laid out for them. Homer meowed and pawed frantically at the bathroom door, hating his confinement and desperate to know the source of all the noise in the other rooms. When I finally released him he prowled compulsively through the empty apartment, unable to settle down and complaining at the top of his lungs for over an hour. Hey! Where’s all our stuff?! Homer had never been in a room completely devoid of furniture, and it was plain that he didn’t like it. Nothing that caused every familiar smell and texture to disappear could possibly bode well.

He wasn’t wrong.

The only things left in the apartment aside from a single suitcase were the three carriers for the cats. Scarlett and Vashti took one look at the carriers and fled, huddling defiantly in the farthest corner of a now empty walk-in closet. Fleeing at the sight of their carriers was something of a ritual, but I rounded them up within a few minutes and, cooing soothingly, loaded them in.

I always put Homer into his carrier last, because he was typically the easiest one to corral. Since he couldn’t see the carriers, he didn’t run as soon as they came out. And he was the one out of the three of them who was most likely to respond to commands like No! and Stay!

Maybe he was still unnerved by the mysterious disappearance of all our belongings, but Homer rebelled that morning in a way he never had before. No, Homer! I yelled. Stay! Even though there was nothing for him to hide under or behind, I still had to chase him for nearly twenty minutes. After I caught him he fought the carrier for all he was worth, clawing the fronts of my hands in the process. It wasn’t that he was trying to claw me as he struck blindly at anything within reach. In fact, it was my involuntary cry of pain that ultimately subdued him just long enough for me to gently press the top of his head into the carrier and zip it up around him. Homer immediately began to wail.

By the time the cats were finally settled, and I’d cleaned and bandaged my hands, we were running half an hour behind schedule.

“Hurry, hurry,” I said urgently to Tony and Felix in turn as I picked each of them up. We were driving to my parents’ house, where we would leave my car and transfer to theirs so they could drive us to the airport. Scarlett and Vashti were mewling in their carriers in the backseat, but their cries were drowned out by Homer, who yowled at full volume from his spot up front next to me. He struggled, poked, and punched from within his carrier, so that it resembled a container of Jiffy Pop left on the stove.

“I’ll take Vashti,” Felix said, settling her carrier onto his lap. “I like her. She’s the most glamorous.”

“I don’t have to take that one, do I?” Tony asked anxiously, eyeing Homer’s roiling carrier.

“I’m taking Homer,” I replied tersely. “Tony, you can take Scarlett.”

I raced desperately over the causeway, trying to make up the time I’d lost fighting with Homer. I couldn’t miss this flight. I just couldn’t. Trying to rebook for the six of us would be an unthinkable nightmare, and I was supposed to start my new job the following day. I was doing at least eighty, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise when police lights appeared in my rearview mirror.

“Dammit,” I swore in a loud whisper—although it was unnecessary to lower my voice. With all the noise Homer was making, nobody could have heard me anyway.

I pulled over, turned off the ignition, and rolled down my window. Homer was kicking up such a terrific racket, I could barely hear the police officer when he finally reached the car. “I’m sorry,” I said in a slightly raised voice as I gestured toward my ear. “I can’t hear you. Could you speak up?”

The cop raised his voice, too. “I said, do you know how fast you were going?”

“Oh!” I looked around helplessly as I handed over my driver’s license, as if the right answer would somehow materialize out of thin air. “Pretty fast, I guess. We’re on our way to the airport,” I added, hoping this would gain me clemency.

The cop peered into the passenger seat, where Homer’s carrier jostled around, seemingly of its own volition, like a thing possessed. “What’s in there?” he asked.

“My cat,” I replied. “It took me forever to get him in there and now we’re running a little late.”

The officer’s gaze took in the two other carriers containing Vashti and Scarlett, which now rested on the laps of Felix and Tony, who smiled winningly. “You should have left a little earlier,” he said, and trundled off to his car to write up the ticket.

“We’re going to miss the flight,” Tony said, as the minutes rolled by and the cop still hadn’t returned with what I had to assume was a lengthy manifesto on the history and future of traffic tickets—because why else was it taking him so long to write the damn thing?

“We’ll make it,” I assured him. “We’ll make it because we have to.”

The cop finally returned with the ticket and an admonition to “slow down,” which was wholly disregarded as I bore down on the accelerator once the police car had disappeared into traffic. Homer’s cries were beginning to sound a touch hoarse, but they continued unabated all the way to my parents’ house. Tony and Felix donned the headphones of the portable CD players they’d brought with them for the plane ride.

Probably the only person I know who’s more compulsive about punctuality than I am is my mother. She flung open the front door as soon as she heard my car pull into the driveway, with a cry of “David! They’re here!” to my father in the interior of the house. “You’re so late,” she clucked as I grabbed Homer’s twitching carrier and got out of the car, followed by Tony and Felix. They pulled their bags from the trunk of my car and loaded them into my parents’. “Why didn’t you leave earlier?”

I shot her a look. “Let’s just go.”

Scarlett and Vashti had apparently resigned themselves to their fate, for they remained silent on the car ride to the airport. Homer kept up his caterwauling, which had become a loud, continuous howl that only subsided when he ran out of breath.

Tony, Felix, and I were wedged in the backseat of my parents’ car. My mother turned around from her position in the front passenger seat and, raising her voice over Homer’s cries, said tearfully, “I can’t believe you’re leaving. I’m going to miss you so much.”

“What?” I replied. “I can’t hear you.”

“I said, I’m going to miss you so much!”

“Oh!” I responded. “Me too!”

My father made good time and, miraculously, we arrived at the airport within thirty minutes of our flight. “No time for big good-byes,” my father said as he hustled our luggage to a skycap. I slung Homer over my shoulder and fiercely hugged each of my parents in turn. Then Tony, Felix, and I pulled out our tickets and ran through the terminal for the metal detectors.

The people around us in line gave us a wide berth as Homer continued to howl and tear at his carrier from the inside. A few of them threw me openly disapproving looks, and I knew they were thinking, I hope she’s not on my flight.

“That’s a lot of cats you got there,” the security guard observed as we prepared to load the three of them onto the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt. I dug around in my bag and retrieved the cats’ health certificates, which I handed over to her for a cursory glance.

“We’re the Pussy Galore Tour,” Felix said brightly. “Maybe you’ve heard of us.”

“Oh, yeah.” A slow grin broke over the security guard’s face. “That does sound kinda familiar.” She peered into the carrier containing Vashti, who gazed back with abject misery scrawled on her face. “This one’s a beauty! Is she the star of the show?”

“There are no small roles,” Tony told the guard very seriously. “Only small cats.”

I rolled my eyes as I passed through the metal detector. “C’mon, guys,” I said as I retrieved Homer. “We have to hurry.”

We made a mad dash for the gate and were panting by the time we got to it. I reached again into my bag and produced a small vial containing the cat tranquilizers the vet had suggested I dispense before boarding.

Felix and Tony instantly perked up. “Are those for us?” Felix asked.

“No, they’re for the cats,” I replied.

“Don’t you think it would be easier if we tranquilized ourselves and left the cats alone?” Tony said.

None of the cats was ever enthusiastic about taking pills, but Scarlett and Vashti swallowed their tranquilizers with a minimum of fuss. I was half convinced they had some inkling of what lay ahead, and figured the best way to face it was unconscious.

Homer was another story. As soon as I unzipped the top of his carrier, he made a desperate break for freedom. I had to fight to keep him contained, and finally Felix held the carrier closed around Homer’s neck with both of his hands while I patiently pried Homer’s jaws open, placed the tiny pill on the back of his tongue, and softly stroked his throat to encourage him to swallow. I held his mouth closed for a minute or two, then released him.

Homer promptly spat the pill onto the ground.

“Come on, Homer,” I said. “Do it for Mommy.” I once again opened Homer’s mouth and inserted the pill. I once again held his mouth closed and stroked his throat.

Homer once again spat the pill out.

I was getting desperate. The events of the entire morning had frazzled me, to say the least, and if Homer was this unhappy now, I couldn’t imagine what he would be like unsedated on the plane. I tried three more times to give him his tranquilizer, holding his mouth closed for so long I was afraid I’d suffocate him. He turned his head vigorously from side to side in an attempt to shake me off. I sprinkled some catnip into his carrier, I rolled the pill into a small bit of turkey from one of the sandwiches I’d packed, I even tried dissolving it in a bottlecap of water, which Homer not only refused to drink, but nosed out of my hand so that it spilled on the floor. No! I don’t want it!

I’d always known Homer was stubborn, that he was a cat who knew his own mind, but this was the first time I’d seen that stubbornness turned full force against me. I had my agenda, and Homer had his, and the two were obviously not in sync.

But I could be as stubborn as he was. One way or another, the two of us were getting to New York that day.

By now, the plane had been boarding for several minutes and Tony, Felix, and I were the only ones left at the gate. “What should we do?” Tony asked uncertainly.

I took a deep breath. Steady, I told myself. “He’ll have to fly without it, I guess.”

The struggle over the pill had had the one benefit of quieting Homer’s crying. He wasn’t even rattling his carrier anymore as we boarded the plane. But as soon as I stowed him beneath the seat in front of me, and he felt the thrum of the plane’s engine through the floor, he started up again.

“Would you like a cocktail before takeoff?” the resolutely cheerful flight attendant asked as I buried my face in my hands.

“God, yes,” I replied. She brought me a vodka with cranberry juice, which I downed in a single gulp, hastily requesting another. Thank the Lord for first class.

THE FLIGHT FROM Miami to Atlanta, where we would pick up our connecting flight to New York, was brief. Homer’s cries by now had deepened into a low, mournful tone I’d never heard from him before. His ears were so much more sensitive than other cats’ to begin with, and I could only imagine how painful the change in air pressure was for him as the plane ascended. As soon as the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign was turned off, I pulled Homer’s carrier out from under the seat in front of me and cradled it on my lap. I unzipped it just enough to reach a hand in, and Homer cuddled and nuzzled against it with a desperation that surpassed even the occasions he’d believed me to be angry with him. His cries took on the contrite yips he made when trying to make up with me. Please let me out. Please make it stop. I’ll be good! I promise I’ll be good!

If I could have stuffed myself into his carrier, given him my seat, and borne his pain for him, I would have considered it a fair trade. How could he know, how could he possibly understand, why I was subjecting him to all this? “Good boy,” I murmured as I rubbed his aching ears. “Good boy, good boy, good boy …”

Once I’d had my third drink and the plane leveled, a soothing sense of inevitability descended on me. We were on our way now. I continued to stroke Homer’s head, which calmed him a bit. I ignored the filthy looks a few of my fellow passengers shot us as Homer’s cries continued, softer, yet unceasing.

The plane began its descent into Atlanta sooner than I would have liked. I tensed slightly; I had gone to college in Atlanta, and I knew how enormous the airport was. My hope was that our connecting flight wouldn’t be too far from where we arrived. To my horror, when the flight attendant announced the gates for connecting flights, I discovered that we were landing at an A gate and flying to New York from Concourse D. We had roughly fifteen minutes between flights—how could we possibly make it?

My seat was closest to the front of the plane, and I waited impatiently, bouncing on the balls of my feet, for Tony and Felix to emerge. “We have to run, guys,” I told them. “Like, seriously, we have to run now!”

Tony and Felix took off in one direction while I bolted in the other. “No!” I called to their retreating backs. “This way, this way!”

The three of us tore through the airport, each with a bouncing carrier slung over one shoulder. “Here’s the train to Concourse D,” Tony shouted, slowing down at the empty track.

“There’s no time to wait for it,” I said desperately. “We have to keep going. Hurry!”

We sprinted as if all the devils of hell were chasing us, past slow walkers and cleaning staff, and occasionally bumping into a hapless bystander who popped unexpectedly into our path. Excuse me, excuse me, we muttered breathlessly, over and over again. Vashti and Scarlett didn’t budge inside their carriers, regarding the passing scenery through glazed, half-closed eyes. Homer, who had never been in his carrier for more than forty-five minutes at a stretch, and who had certainly never been bounced around so vigorously, wailed piteously. “Who schedules these things so far apart?” Felix wondered aloud, gasping painfully.

“Some sadist who works for the airline,” I called over my shoulder.

We arrived at our connecting flight just as they were closing the gate. “Wait, we’re here! We’re here!” I announced to the woman behind the counter. I bent over to catch my breath and rub a cramp in my side as I shoved our tickets and the cats’ health certificates at her. My brow was slick with sweat, and I inadvertently dampened the papers as I drew the back of my hand across my forehead, trying to keep the sweat from dripping into my eyes.

“You really should try to arrive at the gate at least fifteen minutes before departure,” the woman at the counter informed me with cold asperity.

I was positive that my restraint in not decking her guaranteed me a spot in heaven.

This time, I was seated next to an older woman who was also traveling with a cat. “I see they put us together,” she said happily as I settled into my seat and stowed Homer in front of me, still fighting to catch my breath. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it was for us to get a seat on this flight! And I had to upgrade to first class! All the other spots for cats were already taken. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

I mumbled something indistinct.

“This is Otis,” she continued, indicating the dignified-looking ginger tabby who snoozed peacefully in the carrier at her feet. “He’s a good flier. We make this trip twice a year to visit my grandchildren.”

“This is Homer,” I told her. Homer was once again struggling furiously within the confines of his carrier. He responded to the sound of his name with an agonized lowing that was so loud, we almost didn’t hear the announcement to fasten our seat belts. “Homer’s never flown before.”

“Poor little thing,” the woman said. She lowered her head a bit to get a better look at him through the mesh of the carrier. “Don’t cry, Homer. It’ll be over sooner than you think.”

We chatted comfortably as the plane began its climb. I told her all about Homer, about his usual bravery and how out of character all the fuss he was making was. “I’m so sorry he’s making all this noise,” I apologized.

She laughed. “Wait till you’re traveling with a baby.” I suddenly realized, in a moment that had all the settling heaviness of a truth long known yet only now understood, that this wasn’t just a trip I was taking. I was flying into my future, a future so indistinct and shapeless as to be completely unrecognizable to me. I had lived nearly thirty years in the same city, and now, after only a few weeks’ thought and planning, I was grafting the entirety of my life onto a new and strange place. I had a vision of myself, sometime years and decades from now, traveling with a cat who wasn’t Homer to visit grandchildren of my own. I would pat the arm of some nervous young woman sitting next to me and tell her, Dahlink, this is nothing. You have no idea what the years will bring …

Homer wailed again, jolting me from my reverie. “Can’t you shut that thing up?” demanded an irate man behind us.

“Have some compassion, sir!” the woman next to me snapped. She turned to fix a stern eye on him. “The poor cat’s never flown before. What’s your excuse for bad manners?”

My eyes filled with tears, and I impulsively seized her hand. “Thank you!” I said.

She squeezed my hand back in a motherly fashion. “Some people act as if a cat didn’t deserve any sympathy at all.”

The moment I saw the Statue of Liberty and the towers of the World Trade Center pass beneath my window was one of the happiest of my life. Even learning—after landing and waiting forty minutes at the baggage carousel—that our luggage hadn’t made the connecting flight, and wouldn’t arrive until sometime the next day, didn’t faze me.

I felt as if I had spent the day being pummeled like a punching bag, but Felix and Tony were remarkably fresh. Scarlett and Vashti had been no trouble at all, they told me. I thanked them profusely for having made the voyage with me, and then they disappeared into cabs bound for the friends and relatives they’d be visiting while in New York.

I loaded my three cats into a cab of our own and directed it to our new apartment. I had purchased a litter box, litter, food, and bowls when I’d been in New York two weeks earlier to sign the lease, and had left everything with my building’s doorman. I had also ordered a new bed and sheets, and my friend Richard, who lived in the building and had helped me land the apartment, had supervised their delivery. The rest of my furniture wouldn’t arrive for a few days.

The doorman provided a luggage cart and helped me wrangle the cats and all their apparatus up to our apartment on the thirty-first floor. The second the door was closed behind me, I unzipped each of the cats’ carriers. Scarlett and Vashti were still groggy from the effects of the tranquilizer, and they ambled around in a befuddled way before falling in a heap together in front of the radiator.

Homer appeared bewildered, but grateful to be out of his carrier and on solid ground once again. Every other time we’d moved, Homer had sprung from his carrier, eager to explore his new surroundings. This time, however, he was more cautious. Something felt very different about this move, and it wasn’t just the day he’d spent in his carrier or the grueling trip he’d endured.

Once I’d set up food and litter, and carried Homer over to show him where they were, I tossed sheets and blankets onto the bed haphazardly and collapsed onto it face-first. We made it, I thought. We’re in New York.

Homer was still creeping slowly about the room. The air was dry and cold, and his fur crackled with static electricity. From my purse I pulled Homer’s stuffed worm, which I’d wrapped up and carried with me. I hadn’t wanted it to get lost in a moving box; I thought Homer would feel better if there was something immediately familiar that he could reconnect with once we arrived.

For once, though, Homer wasn’t overjoyed to greet his old friend. He gave the worm a perfunctory sniff and carefully dragged it next to his food bowl. Then he resumed his measured pace about the apartment.

It had been thirteen hours since the moving van had arrived that morning to start my day, and the only thing I wanted was another thirteen hours, uninterrupted, in the warmth and comfort of my bed. Vashti, Scarlett, and I dozed, but Homer had no intention of resting. There was still something about this place that didn’t make sense, something that had to be figured out. He couldn’t stop until he knew what it was.

He was a cat who hadn’t slept in the city that never sleeps. Homer was already a New Yorker.