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.
There’s something about Three Stories in One. Of all of my intellectual properties, of all my ideas, it has to be the dumbest. It wasn’t just my idea, though. Severian (nee Boone) was there with me in drama class, and when Ms. Lindberg told us to take out seats, we discussed how hard that would be for me, who came to school on my bike, or Boone, who took the bus, and it took off from there. Suddenly, Severian is (kind of) hooking up with Amber, the most popular girl in school, and I was racing cars in the Indy 500.
When I sat at my desk after school that day and wrote it all down, along with some of my own embellishments (there was lots of flying), I inserted Severian’s friend (who I barely liked), Luke, inspired by a Doors song I had just learned, and later in the tale, Wendy, who I’d had a crush on at the time. The storytelling was unique, in that, instead of chapter or scene breaks, each main character’s adventures were presented as a separate story, woven together with titles and “To be continueds.” Severian wrote a sequel to the collection, and we took turns writing them.
Three Stories in One became a mini-phenomenon. This was in the early nineties, so there was no internet to share it on, but it spread anyway. Severian typed it up, printed out a few copies, and they circulated, even coming into the hands of Amber herself (who I’m pretty sure was horrified, though the only hooking up Boone and Amber did was to play games like Ping-Pong). Severian and I were celebrities. In 1995, I condensed my contributions to Three Stories in One into a single collection (which can be read here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OciHzg8YdB8wyjGZNZx509v1nCvXPMIO/view) When each story fragment is put on a separate page, it came out to seventy-eight pages. In 1998, I started to teach myself how to draw, and by 2005, with four comics under my belt, I decided to illustrate Three Stories in One. I wasn’t great with faces at the time, all five of us had a distinctive look that was easy to cartoon. I made it fifty-six pages before I started making friends in the town I had just moved to and abandoned the project. However, those illustrations stuck with me, and every once in a while, I like to come back to them.
When we were kids, we talked about Three Stories in One like a pop-culture mega-hit, and I still do, even though I’m only Facebook friends with Wendy and Amber, and we don’t ever interact. The less said about Luke, the better. As for Severian, the last time I saw her was January 1, 2000, and she was presenting as Boone. She and I had a difficult relationship, as we were both mentally ill and not receiving necessary care, and she had a number of issues on top of that. After Newcastle passed away, I sat down and worked on a watercolor to take my mind off of everything. As is the case with most of my sketchbooks, I let the picture tell me what it wanted to be, and it became a dramatic drawing of Wendy. Next thing you know, I made movie posters of all the main characters.
LUKE: A total sleazebag
JEREMIAH: A miserable nerd who rides his bike everywhere
BOONE: A surprisingly cheerful and innocent goth
AMBER: The most popular and perky girl at school
WENDY: The Worst Driver in the World
I’ve made attempts to reach out to Severian, but no luck. I don’t want to do all seventy-eight pages again, but I’d love to do something smaller with these characters, and I’d love for her to writer. Though, if she chose not to, I’d completely understand. It was a difficult time in her life, and one of the main characters uses her dead name. For me, though, it was an innocent time (even though I was unhappy for at least half of it), and I’ve never written anything as bananas since.
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.
This is a hell of a big find for me. Sixteen years ago, I wanted to do a three-to-four-panel comic strip about my sleazy reporter character, Max Fuentes. I filled out this really great chart I found on DeviantArt, mostly as an effort to draw the same face over and over again, something I’ve never been able to do. I wish I could find this challenge again.
Eventually, all of these storylines came together in the novel I entitled The Grind, as I’m a better writer than I am an artist.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I approached the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild in 2004 with the idea for a newspaper-style strip about the Bush Administration. They turned me down because there was “No way he’s winning reelection.” This was a big part of the reason I moved to Indiana that summer.
While excavating some old sketchbooks, I found my character drawings for it. See if you can remember twenty years ago and all the wacky characters.
First is Li’l Georgie, the rootin’ tootin’est president ever. His alien friend Li’l CheyNee is always by his side. Li’l Rummie never lets him down, and neither does Li’l Collie. Girls are gross, but Li’l Condi is the exception. And finally, their nemesis is Li’l Frankenheinz. (This one is a little obscure, to be honest—can you guess who he is?)
I’ll be honest, I had zero ideas for actual strips starring them. I was hoping to get other people to write it for me.
Most of my heroes and villains in MortalMan are based on someone I know. This is M, Scourge of I-80. She jumps from automobile rooftop to rooftop on I-80 through the Midwest, stealing the change from people’s ashtrays. In this way, she is no longer relevant because who keeps change in their ashtrays? Cars don’t even have ashtrays anymore. Anyway, She’s based on my dear friend Emilie, who used to sign her notes “M,” which strikes me as something you could do with a sword. And if anybody I know in this world swashbuckles, it’s her.
I’m not good with likenesses, but I do a lot better when I’m not consulting a reference.
Here’s a few more work-for-hires I did over the years. The first one is the most recent, from 2022, when my former roommate, Will, asked me to design a pair of avatars for his baffling username “Rocks in my Socks.”
Next, in 2014, my sister, Rachel, hired me (don’t worry, she got the family discount) to design a logo for the annual charity scavenger hunt she participates in, GISHWHES. I don’t recall the theme, and I’m not sure I want to.
In 2012, Michele paid me to make her look awesome in the desert, which I did.
And finally, in 2012, Whitney asked me to help her design a logo for something SCA/pirate-related. I feel like I did a great job with this one (I also designed a business card and a flag), but I’m not sure they used it.
I was told under no uncertain terms will I be allowed to include the first 3 lines of “I’m Too Sexy” in my upcoming novel. The reason I given is that the music industry is insanely litigious. They gave me several examples of the charges they’ve levied for the use of even “one lyric” (I assume they mean line because a lyric is a word). Note that I didn’t say “musicians” are so litigious. It’s the people who own the songs, which is not them.
I wrote Right Said Fred personally and asked them for permission to use the lines, and their assistant told me that to talk to the licenser. Now, “I’m Too Sexy” is not a work of art. The lyrics are uninspired, and the beat is childishly simple. It’s catchy, though, and most importantly, the brothers who make up the band wrote, performed, and recorded it. It’s their song. They don’t own it.
National Comics, which would one day become DC Comics, bought the rights to Superman from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars is worth a lot more than in the forties, but even then it was incredibly cheap. Superman launched an entire genre. Even before comic book movies became mainstream, the work of superhero creators inspired the movies. Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Lando leads Han, Chewy, and Leia into banquet hall with Darth Vader? That scene happened over a decade earlier in The Fantastic Four:
Jack Kirby, the artist of that scene (and cowriter; without going into detail, the Marvel method of storytelling leaned a lot more on the artist than the writer, contrary to what Stan Lee’s hype machine will tell you), did not get to keep his own art. Timely, which became Marvel, got to sell it at auction, and Kirby didn’t get a dime. This went on until the seventies, when Kirby and Neal Adams and other artists fought tooth and nail for the right to own what they created. Likewise, in the nineties, Todd McFarlane was the superstar artist whose work was selling literally millions of copies of Spider-Man comics. Marvel went nuts selling merchandizing with his art. McFarlane got nothing. (He rounded up other superstar artists to form Image Comics, in which creators were allowed to keep their creations until they didn’t want to do that anymore and did the same thing.)
Sorry I’m hitting you with the comic book history, but it’s all I really know. I know that Disney and the Creator’s Syndicate (which owns Peanuts, among its extensive catalog) are so litigious, they will send cease-and-desist and even subpoenas to daycare centers that paint Charlie Brown or Mickey Mouse on their walls. Every time I see a place with a Garfield hanging around, I wonder who’s going to squeal on them and bring in the lawyers.
All of this goes back to my book. It’s set in 1995, and while “I’m Too Sexy” was released in 1991, it was still fresh on our minds at that time. My twenty-seven-year-old work friend told me the song was a banger when I mentioned it to her, but in the nineties, it was kind of annoying. Really, really catchy, but annoying. The people I hung out with hated the song, myself included, and hearing the acapella “I’m too sexy for my love; Too sexy for my love; Love’s going to leave me” meant we were in for a very difficult three-to-four minutes. One of my friends thought it made him cool to play that song in the Kristy’s every time he came in. (For reference: if most of the people in Gallup, New Mexico were Power Rangers, Krristy’s would be the juice bar where everyone hangs out.) It was not cool. In fact, we all kind of hated him.
Kristy’s is a major setting for my novel, and a character does the “I’m Too Sexy” thing. I happens repeatedly, but I can easily edit the subsequent uses out. That first use, though, is supposed to capture the despair those first three lines brought in me every time I heard them. Why the fuck can’t I use those twenty-one words without paying out a fortune?
Greed. That’s all.
Music is ingrained in us, from catchy ad jingles to that guy whistling on the elevator. We sing the lyrics to ourselves or other people all the time. It’s a part of our lives, and denying writers the right to use these words is denying us the right to properly chronicle how we live, how we talk to each other. My novel is about teenagers, and what do teenagers care about if not music? That used to be the first question I’d ask of anyone I met when I was that young, even before learning their name: “What kind of music do you listen to?” How does that count as “Fair Use?”
When I wrote this novel a year and a half ago, I had come to terms with Right Said Fred. Their one-hit wonder was a classic by that point, and I had begrudgingly accepted that. Even though I haven’t exchanged a word with the asshole who heralded himself with that song like it was fucking “Hail to the Chief,” I kind of love his chutzpah in retrospect. But after talking to three lawyers and Neil Gaiman (relax, it was on Tumblr), and now the legal department of my publisher, I kind of hate it again.
If he’d had the right, would Fred have approved of my use of the lyrics? I don’t know. The characters’ reaction to them isn’t positive. But I can use the title, so it doesn’t matter anyway. I have to rewrite the paragraph or the entire passage so I don’t just say, “She heard the first words of ‘I’m Too Sexy’ and slammed her head down on her book.” I’m too good a writer for that, all so some rich douchebags can charge me a thousand dollars or more for their use, douchebags who have never a created a thing in their lives except enough money to buy a yacht. I am so mad right now.
Jeremiah Murphy 