I got some cash for Christmas, and I ordered a custom stuffed animal of Newcastle. I knew he didn’t have long (but to be fair, I was kind of hoping to get a little longer), and I wanted to have something to remember him by. I sent them eight pictures, and two months later, it arrived. I put it in my closet as soon as I unboxed it because I still had the real one. After Newcastle died, I left it there because whenever I had to get something from the shelf it occupied, I could see its tail, which was one of Newcastle’s defining features, and I’d be hit with grief.
It’s a shockingly good likeness, though they didn’t get his fur color right. (You can’t tell from the pictures, but Newcastle’s fur wasn’t black, but rather the color of black coffee.) It’s a little bigger than the real thing, but somehow the people at Cuddle Clones nailed that signature Newcastle expression (“Huh?”), which you can see as it puzzles over the queen mother. It’s got a pouch for his ashes, but I think I’m going to leave those on the shrine. This isn’t Newcastle.
Today is a month without my best friend, and I’m still in pain. I broke down in tears at my desk Thursday (don’t worry, that’s the first time I’ve ever done that), and I see and hear him through the apartment. I still have to remind myself when I come home that he’s not there, and I get nervous about holding the door open so he doesn’t get out.
But when I was trying to find my 2022 tax return, I saw that fake tail and decided to give it a try and see if I could handle it. And I can. It’s right next to my desk, on top of a podium, which is on top of a chest of drawers, and there’s no way I can’t see it. I was worried that I would confuse it with Newcastle out of the corner of my eye, like I did with a pillow this morning, but nope.
Some of you might think this is morbid or creepy or obsessive, but I’m finding it comforting. I will not be petting it or feeding it or anything unhinged—it’s just there, filling up an empty space.
If it does move, though, I will kill it with fire.
When the vet left my apartment, taking Newcastle with her, she left behind three things: his collar, his paw print, and a lock of his fur. Nicole was with me through the whole ordeal, and when she left, I looked at the three items on my kitchen counter and kept myself from sobbing uncontrollably by putting them on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet I only used to store his canned food. They have been there since. I knew I’d get to them eventually.
About a week later, I cleared out his food and water bowls and hid them in the cabinet on top of the refrigerator. Nicole didn’t take the canned food because I might decide to get another one someday, so I went into the cabinet to get it, and I saw a small piece of his collar poking out of the top shelf, and I realized I wasn’t ready.
A week later, the box I’d bought to display his hair was delivered, but I still wasn’t ready.
Last Saturday, I picked up his remains from the vet, and I’ve been experimenting in places to put him. Here’s a corner that is currently full of capsized Doctor Who action figures (that he knocked over), but that’s in a corner, tucked away from everything. Things tend to fall off of my desk, so that’s out. My dresser is covered in weird tchotchkes I haven’t sorted out. There’s a small metal shelf by the door, which would make a great location, but I use it to store art supplies when I work on my comic. I finally found the right spot.
Yesterday, I decided I would take his stuff out today. And I did. It was hard—it was really hard, but the spot I picked is perfect. It’s almost as high as the dresser, so it overlooks the whole apartment (which should tell you how big my apartment is). It’s a small chest of drawers that displays my owl collection (Newcastle always reminded me of an owl), and it’s close to my bed. No, I’m not going to cuddle with the box of ashes, but I will see it every time I turn off my lamp.
Here it is, my shrine to my best buddy.
Here’s Newcastle himself, in his coffin.
His paw print, which is nice to have, but it doesn’t make me emotional.
Here’s his fur. He was so matted in the end, but I couldn’t bear to shave him because I didn’t want him to die bald. The vet took this out of his tail, which was still fluffy.
Finally, his collar. This is the part I have a hard time looking at. It was mostly covered by his luxurious mane, but that lumberjack plaid was his signature look, and he’s had the tag forever.
He was such a big part of my life that I want him in a prominent place in my home. Typing this in bed, all I have to do is turn my head a little, and I can see some souvenirs from my friend. It hurts, and I’m okay with that.
We traveled to other countries together. He was with me through an entire marriage. He held on long enough for me to get used to living alone for the first time in my life. He was my friend.
Yesterday, I picked up Newcastle’s remains. I could have had them shipped to me, but I thought it was better to pick them up at his vet’s, so I could see the office one last time. I paid a fortune for his death, and I can see where the money went, from this hand-carved, sealed box to the kind, professional vet who came to my apartment seventeen days ago and took him away.
I don’t know where to put him. The other mementos they gave me when he passed, including his collar, paw print, and the lock of his hair are in a cabinet because I can’t bear to look at them. It’s like if I see them, I’ll have to accept that he’s gone.
There’s good days and bad. More often than not, I forget he won’t be there when I get home from my duties in the outside world. It’s the days when I remember that hurt the most. I’m not ready to accept his absence. Last weekend, we had a single spring day amongst the ongoing cold drizzle we’ve been enduring in the DMV area, and I thought about how I’d love to open a window, but I couldn’t because it was still too cold for him, even in his Wookie-fur coat. The same thing happened to me when I
decided to treat myself to a pizza last week because I was going to have to share my sausage with him. I didn’t enjoy the pizza. Too much sausage.
I’ve spoken to a grief counselor twice since he died, the second time when I had forgotten how his fur felt. I may have to call her again. Everyone has been so good to me, though. The girls in my eight-cubicle “pod” at work got me a card, and my boss got me a beautiful window ornament I have displayed at my desk. I have some friends I still talk to when I really miss him, but I feel like the rest of the world has moved on, even if that’s not true.
The worst day was last Wednesday, when I was so overcome with grief, I had to leave work. On the train ride home, I was struck by the image of Neil Gaiman’s perky, goth personification of Death picking the little guy up, scratching him behind the ears and whispering sweet things to him as she carried him where he needed to go. I burst out into tears. I still cry, even writing that sentence. I fell asleep at 3:30 in the afternoon and woke up twelve hours later. That was the worst day I’ve had since the actual day.
My neighborhood consists of a Walmart, some liquor stores, and a lot of fast food, so I went one stop past mine and discovered a beautiful area with a vegan donut shop, a vegan cupcake shop, and a vegan soul food restaurant. Most importantly, there is a café, called The Lost Sock for some reason, and on the rare moments when it hasn’t been raining, I’ve sat outside and drawn or painted. Now that I’m not eking out my last moments with my best friend, I have room to wander, and it’s calling out to me.
Last night, past my bedtime, I went to Artomatic, in which hundreds of local artists set up mini-galleries in a large, empty building. There’s seven floors of art, music, bars, and sandwiches from the historic Busboys & Poets. I made it through two. Also since he left, I’ve unpacked my books, the last remnants of the move, and hung up most of my wall art. It only took two months.
I’ve been drawing and painting a lot since he left. I’ve only managed one page of my comic before it became a burden, but I’ve been focusing my attention on my sketchbooks. I loved drawing and painting him. I have over a dozen works with him as a subject, from bad to good, from 2004 to 2024.
Last week, I rediscovered the hilarious “Gangham Style” video, and I recreated my favorite five seconds in any music video as a self-portrait, with him playing the part of Psy. Drawing him didn’t break my heart, so I think I’m going to see what happens if I do it again.
It’s still hard to talk about him without tearing up. The other day, I barely held it together as I told my sister Rachel about the night I was afflicted with sleep paralysis, and he stayed at my side the whole time, protecting me from the evil dark figure looming at the foot of my bed. He was a good boy. The goodest.
The weekend Newcastle died, I redid the page of MortalMan that I’d destroyed with paint. I don’t have time on the morning of Tuesday through Thursday to work on my comic (the set-up of my work area is a real pain in the ass, and I can’t concentrate when I’m watching the clock for when I have to leave.) However, I have plenty of time to do the Three Stories in One drawings I posted this week.
Yesterday, I designed a logo for a fictional newspaper, and I roughly sketched out a panel. Today, I was able to finish the panel and do the roughs on another panel, and that’s all I have. I spent the rest of the morning drawing this.
I am afraid if I put MortalMan down, I will forget about it because that’s my M.O. But I’m really straining myself to do the little work I’ve done so far. There’s no deadline, and no one is clamoring for more pages. So I’m coming to you to ask permission: may I extend the break I started when Newcastle got sick, even though he’s not here anymore? I’ll still be drawing, just not the comic. Can I be trusted to get back to the comic on my own time?
On Wednesday, 21 February 2024, at approximately 3:30 a.m., I made the decision to end Newcastle’s life. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the subject told me that I’d know it was time—that he’d tell me. I didn’t understand. I’ve spent the past three weeks in a near-constant state of stress. I spent mornings on work-from-home Fridays and Mondays, along with the weekends, begging him to come out from under the bed. In the afternoons, he would. He would walk to the food bowl, eat (less and less each day), drink some water, go to the bathroom, and yell at me to come pick him up like a baby. But after I got home from work at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday for a telehealth appointment, he had found a space under my bed that was dark and cramped, and he hasn’t come out.
Ordinarily, when I would lie down on my bed at night, he positioned himself at my feet like the lions at the New York Public Library (Patience & Fortitude/Hallelujah & Amen/Run & Hide/Rack & Pinion, whatever their names are). He’d done this since he was a kitten. I think he was protecting me from the monsters. After I was asleep, he’d go somewhere else until breakfast. He didn’t do this Tuesday night.
Last night, I dreamt that he was fine. He jumped onto a stack of boxes I still haven’t unpacked to get my attention. The dream faded, and I found myself on an empty bed in an empty apartment, and I remembered. I gave him one of those yogurt tubes that cats will maul you for, and he ate some. I was so happy, I gave him another one, and he turned around and faced the other way. That’s when I knew.
Between crying jags, I made the preparations. I reached out to a pet hospice that makes house calls; it’s expensive, but this was the last time I’d spend money on him. I found a pet grief counselor to talk to after. I canceled his quality-of-life appointment Friday, and I canceled his twice-monthly kitty litter shipment, and let the online pharmacy know we couldn’t be needing their services anymore. I scheduled some time off work and arranged coverage for my job.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with his stuff. Because it’s a handy place to stash art supplies, I’m going to keep the cat tree I’d planted next to my desk so he could take a nap with Dad while Dad was working. He never used it because he’d rather lie down on Dad, preventing Dad from working.
He’s never going to do that again.
I asked Nicole to be there, less for me and more for her and him. When Nicole lived with Kate and me in 2012, she and Newcastle had a pretty great relationship. When we moved in with her five years ago, she was his auntie, though I’m pretty sure he thought of her as Mom. She gave nicknames to all the cats she’s lived with as an adult, so Henry is Gibbon, Andrew was Gray Cat, Magik was Badgley, and Newcastle was Babycat, shortened to Bebe.
Newcastle was an ugly, sickly kitten. They were going to put him to sleep when Kate rescued him and nursed him to health. This was during the six weeks between my deciding to move to Bloomington and me actually doing it. As she was cleaning bloody snot off the walls and giving his greasy body baths, she told me that she intuited that he wasn’t her cat. She didn’t know whose he was. After I’d been living with her a while, she realized that she couldn’t separate us.
When he wanted to play as a young adult, he’d run up to me, meow, and do a backflip. He was like a dog, always at my heels, playing fetch. When I’d taunt him with the birdie on a string, he’d reach a point where he’d just grab it in his teeth and walk away. I always let him take it to his den. He’d earned it. It’s been a long time since he’s played with me. Until Tuesday, he just wanted to snuggle.
He also did this thing where, before guard duty started at night, he had to sit on my chest and massage my throat. This wasn’t exactly comfortable for me. It seemed to be a compulsion, and he always had a serious look on his face when he did it, like it was his job. And yet he purred the whole time. If he came to bed and found me spooning Kate, he’d tap me on the shoulder until I moved down to my back. I tried massaging his throat with my thumbs to see how he liked it, and it turned out he liked it a lot. It’s been a long time since he’s done that.
I saw a movie the other day. I’d put it on so I’d have something to listen to while I drew, but it turned out to be engrossing, and I brought my iPad to bed and pet Newcastle while I watched it. Ben Kingsley played a good-natured senior citizen who befriended an alien, and Jane Curtain played an elderly woman with a cat so elderly it couldn’t walk anymore. Another character tried to persuade her to put her cat to sleep, and she said, “He’s all I have.” She took a breath and added, “He’s all I had.” Newcastle spent his last three days under the bed, not eating, not going to the bathroom, and only coming out for water. When I looked for him, he was just a pair of yellow eyes just out of reach.
Newcastle loved me. He loved me when I was depressed. He loved me when I was manic. He loved me when I was angry. He loved me when I went on long vacations. He loved me when all I wanted to do was hide. He loved me. I’ve never had that kind of devotion before, and I can’t imagine I ever will again.
I’ve never felt as lonely in my life as I have this past month. My hobbies are reading what I want to read, watching what I want to watch, blasting whatever music moves me and me alone, and writing and drawing. These aren’t social hobbies. Even when I lived with Kate and Nicole, people with whom I spent most of my time, and even when I drew apart from both of them, I always had Newcastle.
I never doubted him, but after the move, I could never be sure how he was doing. When the vet gave me the diagnosis of his kidney failure, I watched him so closely I got headaches. The vet gave me a couple of months. It’s only been two weeks.
The thing that upsets me the most, as I sit here in bed without him, typing this, is that I’m going to get used to his being gone. I’m not going to come home from work or from the store and look for him. It won’t bother me when I sit down at my desk to work, and I don’t get interrupted by his begging for attention. That editors and coworkers won’t see him draped over my shoulder and ask after him. I don’t want that to be normal. I don’t want this pain I’m feeling to ever end. But it will. I will feel better. I’ll go back to work on Tuesday. My gas bill is due tomorrow. I need to run to the store to pick up half and half.
Today, 22 February 2024, at approximately 9:30 a.m., Newcastle died, his face in Dad’s hands.
When the cardiologist diagnosed him with congenital heart failure, he gave Newcastle a year. That was in 2015. I had twenty years with him. It wasn’t enough.
In the summer of 2000, I had grown apart from all of my friends. I was then, as I am now, socially anxious, but one day, I set a goal: I was going to have a conversation with one stranger every day after work in Manhattan before I went home. I succeeded, and a couple I chatted with about the band The London Suede (or Suede in their native England) invited me to a party. Then, as now, I couldn’t imagine a worse place to be than at a party where I knew literally no one, not even the hosts.
I made myself a deal: if I would go to the party and stay for an hour, minimum, I would go to the free concert with Mike Doughty, formerly of Soul Coughing. (There was another band playing after him, a little group no one’s ever heard of called They Might Be Larger Than Average? They Might Be Enormous People? They Might Be The NFC Football Team From New York? They Might Be Something.)
I went to the party, and I went to the concert (Mike Doughty was a huge disappointment), and keeping with my goal of talking to strangers, I forced myself to talk to the really beautiful woman dancing to the intermission elevator music like she was a marionette and her puppeteer had the hiccups. I walked up to her and internally smacked myself in the head when I said to her the following, “You must really like this music.” After a brief chat, she told me that my liking and wanting to illustrate comics was a deal-breaker, and she would not go out with me.
During our first date, she kissed me. Our second date, she tested me, and I passed. We saw X-Men in the theaters. Her last boyfriend, the reason for the deal-breaker that wasn’t, would not have found the humor in the movie that was unintentionally pretty goofy. (She tested me again later with my favorite movie, The Matrix, which has a surprising amount of comedy between the grab-you-by-the-lapels philosophy and the pointless bloodbaths.) Our third date found us on the Brooklyn Bridge and led to her falling off the bed when she was taking my pants off.
Her name was pronounced AND-ree-uh, but I pronounced it Ahn-DRAY-uh. I don’t know why.
Speaking of goofy, she was really goofy. That was one of the things I loved about her. Our honeymoon lasted the first six or seven months we were together, laughing, holding hands, being horny, and just having fun with each other. Unfortunately, the summer of 2001, I lost my job and sank into a deep depression, which led to me being unforgivably unpleasant, which I usually am between Memorial and Labor Days. Literally the day the heat broke and I started to recover was September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, her thirtieth birthday was September 13, 2001. We limped along as a couple until February 2002, when we were heading in different directions socially, and I put our relationship out of our misery.
The thing about her was that her last relationship was the worst relationship she ever head, followed by the one before it, so she exited us hating my guts. I had friends who had mutual friends with her, and my name could not even be mentioned around her without a meltdown. And that makes me sad. I’m one of those people who sees the past with rose-colored glasses (despite knowing how miserable I was through much of it), so I knew it was over, and I understand why, but I still remember how good it was when it was good.
For a long time, I thought the was “The One,” and she’s still one of the most important relationships I’ve ever had, even though we didn’t even last a year and a half. I remember walking with her through Prospect Park, listening to her laugh when we watched an episode of The Muppet Show for the forty-seventh time, spending a Halloween party dancing like we were the only people in the apartment. I was really, really in love with her, and that was a good feeling. I will never forget it, no matter how much she hates me.
That brings me to twenty-one years later and the Doctor Who fanfic I’m tinkering with. I’m not sure why, but I decided to base the Nth Doctor’s companion on her. Like my Andrea, she’s impatient, self-righteous, enthusiastic, and goofy. She’s also a gifted collage artist. When it came time to illustrate her, I found an album of pics that her professional photographer brother took and tried to use them as a reference. That did not work at all. So this weekend, I tried again, but did it entirely based on memory. This time I think I nailed it. Only a handful of people, including my parents and Barry, have any experience with her, and they have likely forgotten what she looks like, but this is how I remember her. I just wish there was some way to share it with her.
For the first few years, the mantra was “Never Forget.” Cruising through Facebook and Tumblr today, it’s clear we’ve forgotten. Last year, I wrote about how September 11 is fading because it’s not the worst thing that’s happened to this country in the past twenty-five years. But it’s the worst thing that’s happened to me.
After twenty-two years and an assortment of pressures in my current life, I don’t really have anything to say today. This wouldn’t be the first time. For the first ten years I only wrote two journal entries on this day, one in 2005, one in 2011. Since then, I’ve written about it inconsistently. All eight blog entries about it can be found here:
However, as I’ve noted the significance of the day receding in the public consciousness, I think it’s important for me to mark the occasion by not going into work and by writing something.
Last year, I penned a novel in need of a serious rewrite about a female assassin. I wanted to set it in New York, but I wanted to set it in my New York (see September 11, 2011), so I set it in 2001. And because it might be cathartic, I set it in September of 2001. As my memories of the actual event and the TV coverage become blurred, I wrote “Chapter 6: Living in Infamy.” It’s longer than my usual posts, but it would mean a lot if you took the time to read it.
I could say I don’t dream, but humans will die if they don’t dream, so I’ll say I don’t remember them. Every once in a while, I’ll get one that sticks with me and inspires me. In 2005 or 2006, I dreamt that a middle-aged mentor type was tempting me to smoke marijuana (which I hadn’t done by that point for over a year) in the library by saying, “Let’s take a walk on the green,” a phrase that I don’t think was used by a marijuana smoker at any other point in history. I was also a student in high school, and I was my age at the time (let’s see, 2005 was eighteen years ago, so that would have been twelve), and I had a thing going on with a fellow student. I took the imagery, reduced the creep factor, and penned my first novel, posting it on LiveJournal while I was writing it.
A side effect of marijuana withdrawal is vivid dreams, which would explain why I’ve woken up over the past few weeks, swearing I would write this down as soon as I finished brushing my teeth, then forgetting everything. The other night, though, grabbed me. It wasn’t the part where Kim Basinger came onto me and eventually kissed me. Of course not—I think kissing is gross. It wasn’t that I tracked down Clark so I could brag. Clark was a childhood acquaintance of my ex-wife who moved to Bloomington while we were there who turned out to have a lot in common with me, and we became good friends. Ultimately, he was Team Kate, and like everyone else I met through her*, he ghosted me following the divorce.
But what got me so much I didn’t forget, even after brushing my teeth, was what happened when I was lying in the hammock in my backyard. The hammock exists in real life, though I haven’t touched it in over a year, during which it rained an average of every third day. Approaching me from the alley on a dirt bike was a slight figure wearing a hoodie, hood up. The figure hopped off the bike, let it fall, and rushed over to me. It was dusk, so it took me a while to figure out it was a girl in her mid-teens, her face obscured by the shadows. We fell into an easy conversation. I don’t know what we were talking about, but it had to do with my book. Eventually, she pushed her bike home, and I walked with her.
We did this every day—she’d meet me on the hammock, always at dusk, and we’d walk together through the dirt road that cut through my neighborhood. The hood stayed up until the last trip together when she pulled it down. I don’t know what color her hair was because of the grayish blue of the sky and the amber of the street lamps, but she was pretty, with delicate features. She also had the scars of a Glasgow smile, which is one name for the Joker’s disfigurement in The Dark Knight. It didn’t upset me, and it never occurred to me to even wonder where it came from. All I saw was the girl’s unique face.
That wasn’t the reason it was our last walk together. She invited me over to dinner to meet her family, but when I tried to drive over to her house, I couldn’t find it. And in the way that dreams will change the subject, it wasn’t about the nameless girl anymore.
The scars aren’t the reason I haven’t stopped thinking about her for the past couple of days either. It was her positivity. She had a warm, friendly, energetic personality that made me feel at ease, the way no stranger, or most people I know can. Our conversations, even though I don’t remember what they were about, were intimate. She didn’t think of herself as ugly, and the scars didn’t get in the way of her finding someone to talk to. I feel like I could learn from that.
In the way I took the classroom and the relaxed mentor of that dream eighteen years ago and spun it into a long tale, I’d like to write about this girl, but I don’t have any ideas for a story. And on top of that, I don’t want people shipping the me character and the girl. I’m thirty years older than she is, and even the idea of being her friend is already kind of weird.
In the way that I dreamed about falling in love when I was young, I dreamed about making a close friend, something I have a dearth of. The day after I watched a goofy Marvel franchise descend into DC darkness, I could use a little positivity. I have a new character now. She just needs a name and she needs a story.
* With a pair of exceptions—though she actively reached out and tried to recruit them to her side.
** Which was the dirt road in front of the house I lived in in high school.
I just got a second opinion about Newcastle’s latest health crisis. He’s nineteen years old with a congenital heart condition and now hyperthyroidism. None of the treatments are particularly savory—either for price or how difficult they’re going to make Newcastle’s life. I don’t want to buy more time with him by making him miserable and confused. (“Why is father sticking his finger down my throat?”) And I can’t imagine he’s got long anyway.
When I asked my regular vet what would happen if I chose not to treat it, she gave me a huge guilt trip. When she was listing the treatments, she mentioned a topical ointment, but when I asked about it and told her it was the most appealing, she shamed me for not caring about my cat. A little discomfort a couple of times a day is better than all the suffering he would go through if the ointment didn’t work.
When I talked to my parents, they said, “He’s just a cat.” They didn’t say it in a derogatory way, but as a statement of fact. I trust my mother’s impartiality on this issue despite Newcastle earnestly trying to kill her.
So I got a second opinion. This doctor told me about the effect untreated hyperthyroidism could have, especially on his heart. She told me that cat could possibly live five or six years untreated, but not likely. She looked at his medical records and told me Newcastle could live another three years, but a lot less if the hyperthyroidism went untreated. She said it’s in the early stages, so I could just monitor him for a few months. I basically went to a second vet looking for permission not to treat him, what I got instead was peace of mind and total honesty.
I let Newcastle into my backyard this afternoon, and I monitored him the whole time so he didn’t get into any trouble. I watched him, clumsy, slow, and arthritic, explore. His feet walked on loose soil and packed concrete, and he picked and chose which plants to sniff and which ones to snack on. He escaped into the neighbor’s yard before I could stop him, but I lured him out, using myself as bait. I had brought my phone out with me because I expected to be bored. I was not. I was transfixed.
Overwhelmed, he sat down, and I understood what I want. I want my cat to be this happy until it’s time for him to retire. Nothing will ever compete with the jungle outside the back door, but I’m giving him extra scritches, longer cuddles, some human food, and maybe a spa day or two. And if this means making each other miserable for twenty seconds a day, then I’ll do it. I’m not ready for him to go, and if I can buy another three years, then here’s my credit card. On the other hand, I will not extend the life of a suffering animal just because of my feelings.
Newcastle is not suffering, though. He got to see the backyard. Life is good. I ordered the ointment.
When I was a kid in the mid-eighties in a neighborhood called Indian Hills at the eastern border of Gallup, New Mexico, there were these dirt ditches. One of them was behind my house, and it was like Disneyland for kids who couldn’t go to California.
Every August at that time, we’d get a monsoon, and the eponymous hills of Indian Hills (known colloquially as the Hogbacks) would disgorge thousands of pounds of mud, which would flow down the street, mix with the ditches, and pour down our cul du sac like a river, and when the clouds parted, all that was left was a thick layer of muck.
It was glorious. My friends, Eric from a block over would join me, along with Will, who lived on the other side of the neighborhood, and Max, the coolest guy I knew, who lived at the end of our cul du sac, would join my sisters and me in this celebration of unbridled ickiness. I remember finding cat poop buried in these ditches. When we got hungry, my parents hosed us off, and we could come inside again. It was the most fun we’d have all year.
In 1986, we moved away, but two years later, we returned to rent a house identical to our previous one, only across the street. And those assholes had paved the ditches and installed drainage so that the mud was directed in an orderly fashion into what passed for the Rio Puerco, the river that was technically not there. I was twelve at the time and on the cusp of being over that kind of thing (thirty-five years later, this is decidedly not true), but I still enjoyed the majesty of those mini-mountains gifting us kids with the thing we wanted most: to become utterly disgusting.
Never again.
I know why they did it. The mudslides crippled the neighborhood every year, like clockwork. It took countless dollars to clean it up, and as Indian Hills expanded and grew more popular, that kind of thing just wasn’t acceptable in a functioning city.
But I still remember getting shoved into the muck by Max, who would get shoved in return, and shouting and being a goddamned kid, and I remember it being taken away from me, and this being my first real taste of how adults can suck the fun out of everything.
