The Silence of the Cats

On a stormy night in June, 1975, I steered our mus­tard-col­ored Pin­to sta­tion wag­on down the interstate’s off-ramp and head­ed toward an oval-shaped sign atop two tele­phone poles. Neon let­ters shin­ing through streaks of rain. “Dudley’s Motel,” the sec­ond “d” flickering.

I turned off the road, parked in front of a door marked “Office,” and wait­ed for the cats caged in the back of the Pin­to to stop scream­ing. Took them a full minute to go quiet.

The silence of the cats awoke Cindy. She sat up straight, rubbed her eyes, and looked back at the cage. “They okay?”

“They went still because we stopped moving.”

“Where are we?”

“Kansas.”

“What town?”

“No town.”

I got out of the car and went inside. An old woman with thin­ning gray hair sat behind a desk watch­ing The Tonight Show on a lit­tle black-and-white Zenith.

She pushed a guest reg­is­ter across her desk. “Howdy-do.”

I auto­graphed the book and gave her my cred­it card. “Room 3,” she said. “First door to the right.”

I glanced at a No Pets Allowed sign on the wall behind her. “Could we have a room in the back, away from everyone?”

She squint­ed at me, sus­pi­cious­ly. “Why in the back?”

“We’re new­ly­weds,” I lied.

She flashed a wrin­kled smile. “I getcha.” She hand­ed me a key. “Room 20. Back row. Far end. No one will hear you back there.”

I drove the Pin­to around to the back. Cindy went inside and cased the room. We learned a hard les­son the night Lazy Bones slipped into a hole around the plumb­ing under a motel room’s bath­room sink and climbed up inside the wall to the floor above. Took us an hour and a can of tuna to lure him back down.

Cindy gave me the all-clear. I got out of the car and looked around. No one in sight. I opened the Pinto’s rear door and wres­tled two cats out of the cage. Fight­ing off their crazed efforts to rip all the flesh off my arms, I threw them inside the room, returned to the Pin­to, grabbed two more, tossed them inside, then fetched the last cat, Geral­dine, the most vicious of the lot. Despite a head-fake, she raked my jaw. Yet again.

So end­ed Day 4 of our cross-coun­try trip.

We plant­ed the seeds of this ordeal in the sum­mer of 1969 when we rent­ed upstairs rooms in a farm­house in White Hall, Vir­ginia. A barn cat adopt­ed us as her par­ents. We named her Mousey. She had a kit­ten. They both had kit­tens. Then the whole brood had kittens.

When the cat count reached 18, we real­ized we had to cap the geyser or drown in a sea of black and white fur­balls. I gave away as many as Albe­mar­le Coun­ty could absorb, then emp­tied our sav­ings account to spay the five cats no one would take off our hands, leav­ing us with Mousey, Geral­dine, Lazy Bones, Vig­oro, and Marigold-Eater.

We all would have lived hap­pi­ly ever after in the coun­try if I hadn’t done bet­ter than we expect­ed in law school. Nation­al law firms opened their doors to us. At the end of a dizzy­ing recruit­ing process, I accept­ed an offer to join Lath­am and Watkins in Los Angeles.

I was excit­ed about our prospects, except for the cats. Crammed into a small apart­ment in a big city with five cats didn’t seem like an attrac­tive lifestyle to me. It also didn’t fit the typ­i­cal pro­file of a big-shot cor­po­rate attor­ney, which had become my goal.

My reser­va­tions about the cats didn’t mat­ter, though, because I knew where I stood in our fam­i­ly dynam­ic. If I dumped the cats, Cindy would dump me.

I called the Lath­am attor­ney assigned to help me with our tran­si­tion. Blither­ing away ner­vous­ly, I tried to explain how we got stuck with five cats and asked if he could find a place to stash them while we searched for an apart­ment in LA. A real­ly good guy with a sense of humor, he put me in touch with Ida’s Cat Ken­nel, and I made reser­va­tions for our herd.

Then came the daunt­ing chal­lenge of dri­ving the cats to LA. On a trip to Cindy’s home in South Car­oli­na, we learned that cats don’t trav­el well in cars. The scenery out­side fly­ing by in psy­che­del­ic panora­ma freaked them out. Their eyes bulging, they plas­tered them­selves to the plate glass and screamed the whole way, except for occa­sion­al­ly peel­ing them­selves away from the win­dows to pounce on my neck and sink their teeth into my shoulder.

Tran­quil­iz­ers didn’t help, so I opt­ed for com­pul­so­ry con­fine­ment. I built a cage out of two-by-fours and chick­en wire big enough to hold all five of them but small enough to fit in the Pinto.

The day of my law school grad­u­a­tion, we jammed the cats in the cage and head­ed west over Afton Moun­tain. In 1975, motels weren’t pet friend­ly, and the con­cept of “emo­tion­al sup­port ani­mals” hadn’t come along. Our choic­es were to sleep in the car, camp out, or defraud the motel clerks. I defraud­ed the clerks.

By the third morn­ing in a motel room, the cats knew what was com­ing. From there on, just before dawn, they dis­ap­peared behind cur­tains, under fur­ni­ture, and beneath the bed. Every morn­ing, I pried their claws loose from their hid­ing places and wres­tled them into the cage. Every day they screamed all the way through anoth­er twelve-hour bad LSD trip. And every night I dragged them out of the cage and smug­gled them into anoth­er No Pets motel room.

Sev­en con­sec­u­tive days and nights in Hell. For them. And for us.

On Day 8, we drove through down­town LA and on west over a nar­row twist­ing road through the bel­ly of Topan­ga Canyon to pull up in front of Ida’s Cat Kennel.

I would lat­er come to regard Topan­ga Canyon as a trendy, attrac­tive neigh­bor­hood, but in 1975 on his first day in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, the Vir­ginia farm boy per­ceived it as a cross between a nature pre­serve and a full-blown nut­house. Halfway between LA and Mal­ibu, jagged foothills lush with coastal sage and chap­ar­ral rise up steeply from a rip­pling creek. Mul­ti-col­ored hous­es of every shape and size are propped up on stilts, jammed into cliff-sides, crow-barred into rocky crevices, and strand­ed on islands in the creek. In those days, the canyon attract­ed a dis­pro­por­tion­ate share of nature lovers, free spir­its, and out­right loons, like Bob Hite, the vocal­ist of Canned Heat, The Fly­ing Bur­ri­tos, Charles Man­son, and the joy­ous res­i­dents of Ely­si­um Fields, a famous nud­ist colony.

Ida Bolin fit in nice­ly with that crowd. A plump eighty-year-old with a sweet smile and an iron-col­ored pony­tail, she led us into the bed­lam of her back­yard. A hun­dred cats ran amok inside a half-acre ful­ly enclosed in a wire-mesh bub­ble ris­ing twen­ty feet into the sky. Cats flit­ted through trees, climbed giant car­pet­ed posts, dart­ed through sew­er-pipe tun­nels, jumped in and out of card­board box­es, and pawed count­less cat toys of every kind.
No crates to sep­a­rate them. No col­lars. No name tags.

“How do you know which cats belong to the dif­fer­ent board­ers,” Cindy asked.

“Oh, I know them all by sight,” Ida said.

We turned the cats loose in Ida’s back­yard and drove to Bev­er­ly Hills to meet Tanya, the real­tor Lath­am hired to show us rental prop­er­ties. In her late for­ties, tall and slim with shoul­der-length brown hair, she was pro­fes­sion­al and cheer­ful. Over the next sev­er­al days she showed us a series of attrac­tive apart­ments. None of the land­lords allowed pets. I told them all the truth. They all turned us down.

After three days and 30 apart­ments, Tanya stopped being cheer­ful. On the fourth day’s sec­ond turn-down, she hit the wall. “Lis­ten to me,” she said angri­ly. “We’re get­ting nowhere. Don’t tell them about the cats. Just move in and take your chances.”

“They’ll throw us out when they find out.”

“I don’t care! It’s your only shot. Besides, evic­tion pro­ceed­ings take for­ev­er in LA. You’re a lawyer. Fight them off.”

I signed my name to a one-year lease with a No-Pets clause in bold-faced print, and that night we smug­gled the cats into an apart­ment on Gret­na Green Way in Brentwood.

Two weeks lat­er, I ran into the man­ag­er out­side our apart­ment door as I came home from work. I froze. Vig­oro sat in our liv­ing room win­dow fac­ing the court­yard, star­ing at him with her big yel­low eyes.

“You have cats,” he said.

“Yeah, we do,” I said sheepishly.

“More than one?”

I paused. What the hell, I thought. “Five.”

He shook his head and walked away.

For weeks, I lived in fear of being served with evic­tion papers, but mys­te­ri­ous­ly they nev­er came. We lived there to the end of the lease term, moved to Han­cock Park, and defraud­ed anoth­er land­lord, who didn’t throw us out either. After that, we bought a house and nev­er rent­ed again.

The cats lived with us for twen­ty years, mov­ing cross-coun­try three times, once in the Pinto’s cage and twice in the bel­ly of air­planes. See Cats! for more about them.

They were a lot of trou­ble. And a lot of fun. One by one, they passed away in the 80’s and 90’s. Each time, we cried and griev­ed for months. We miss them still.

Ida Bolin died on Cindy’s birth­day in 1983 while rid­ing in a truck that crashed into a tree. She was 87. She fell in love with kit­tens as a lit­tle girl in 1900 grow­ing up in Dead­wood, S.D. She opened Ida’s Cat Ken­nel in 1923 and kept it going for 60 years. By the time of her death, more than 50 cats lived there. All but three of them had been aban­doned by dead­beat board­ers. Liv­ing on noth­ing but her Social Secu­ri­ty check, she often went hun­gry to feed them.

They say Ida was cat crazy.

I’m not so sure. A lot of peo­ple, who claim to be sane, love cats more than they want to admit. I know a few of them. One of them thought he was a big-shot lawyer.