Editor’s Note: Point Loma looks back on a parade of non-human close friends that enrich our lives. I was thinking of my first puppy the other day, and our next twelve was together. Having more time to think while under our Governor’s House is a marvelous mystery. I wonder how this clash of past and future will resolve itself. I will be interested to see how society adapts.

Meanwhile, I swear I hear some Beach Boys in the background when I hang out on the back deck above the pastures. And remember.

– Vic

Pet Sounds

Nibbles – Master and Ruler of the Universe

Unless you are a lizard, this one should jerk out your living guts. Strap in, and arm your ejection seats.
When’s the last time you got a cat to do anything that you wanted?

Why do we humans live with, and form bonds with “dumb” animals, like cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, tarantulas, iguanas, and boa constrictors? I know that there are all sorts of stupid asses who take their “comfort animals” on flights. Cats and small dogs are okay as well as service dogs, but I for one don’t want to see or smell a comfort pony or pet alligator taking a nasty shit in the middle of the aisle of a 737 Max on a long-distance cross-country flight; so why do airlines permit that singular form of absurd idiocy?

Pets do serve us with an essential comforting function – but doing it at home is better than inflicting your self-absorbed obsessions on the rest of humanity. Those of us who have chosen to lug our pets along with us during our military careers know what really caring about them means – they are special and not excuses for acting stupid. Once you adopt a pet or pets into your family, it is a sacred choice.

If you are young and single and like your freedom, then having a pet is not a real good idea – you own them and vice versa, and you probably will spend more time worrying about their well-being when you are gone and/or out and about. There are always kennels, but those are a cold choice. It’s better when you are married, and can rely on someone else to perform pet care at home since they all need it in one way, shape, form, or another. It’s like getting married – which is a good thing when you are ready for it, then pets are an option, but having kids is terminal as far as the rest of your life is concerned. I’ve done all three as many of us have – marrying the right life partner is important, your kids are eternal responsibilities – and your pets are the wild cards of life that will jack you up unless you are ready for their antics, and the rare theater that they can create.

There are all sorts of us pet owners – I’ll keep it simple and just talk about dogs and cats – I’ve lived with both, and prefer the latter. Dogs are needy and high-maintenance. Don’t get me wrong – I have friends who have dogs and love them and do what it takes. I remember when our elderly neighbors came back from an extended RV trip down South with a rescue dog named Amber. She’s a good dog, but now they have to take her out walking three times a day – okay if you’re retired, but a daughter-of-a-bitch chore when it’s 5 degrees outside and the streets are covered with snow and ice – love conquers all I guess, but I don’t think that was what they were intending when they adopted the dog as a humanitarian gesture down in warm and sunny south Florida. Still, they do it every day.
My wife and I are affirmed cat people, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love good dogs. If I am going to be a country music songwriter, that goes with the territory. I’ve got some personal favorites, like my college friend’s White Samoyed Mr. Ming – the most obnoxious dog I’ve ever met (more on him later); there was Smokey owned by a fellow lifeguard Danbo, who I rescued from drowning after some asshole guest kid I wanted to kick the living shit out of who purposely shoved him off the fishing pier into Mobile Bay; and a couple of B.E.’s good dogs – Boris and Bear.

Bouvier des Flandres
Boris was a huge hyperactive English sheepdog who would bite your head off – I remember the day that he guarded our drinks 40 years ago when B.E. got pulled over by the Nohope Police for some questionable driving antics, and was forced to blow the breathalyzer. We were out sporting in his dad’s yellow Caddy convertible on an early Spring Chamber of Commerce day downtown, and had to wedge our drinks between the front seats and doors. Boris was in the backseat and would not let the cops get anywhere near the car – they should have known something was up when we climbed out of over the doors. It was still early and B.E. passed the test, but we decided not to push our luck and headed elsewhere – being famous has its limitations. Bear as depicted above is still with us – a big sweet-hearted Bouvier des Flandres (Belgian sheepdog), whom I used to fooled some unwary female tourists in St. Pete one night a couple of years ago into believing that he was some kind of hybrid bear-dog tame monster from Canada. You can’t pull those kinds of pranks with a cat.

The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds Cover
Sonically, this may be the best Beach Boys album ever. They were competing for #1 with the Beatles, who had just done Rubber Soul, which Brian Wilson considered a challenge. I saw a special on the making of this album, and John Lennon’s commentary on how blown away he was with what they had achieved. Brian was and still is an incredible lyricist who invokes wonder in his vocal orchestrations and harmonies. He worked exclusively with a collection of LA session musicians back in the 60s and 70s who were loosely called “The Wrecking Crew.” His goal was to make the best ever rock album, and Pet Sounds was his vehicle to immortality. Amongst the list of unsung musicians who were the backbone of contemporary pop in the Wrecking Crew at the time were the drummer and documentarian Hal Blaine, trumpeter Herb Alpert who is still conducting the Tijuana Brass, matchless bassist Carol Kaye, and consummate guitar player, composer, and singer Glenn Campbell. There’s a great documentary out there on YouTube – do yourself a favor, and take a couple of hours to watch artistry in motion. Brian was asked why he called it Pet Sounds – he never had a real good answer to that; but it is a great, even historic work of art.

While the titles of albums and the lyrics of songs are always the draw, it is the bridge that makes all of the difference, and sometimes hides or reveals the real meaning of the composition. For example, listen to the Stars and Stripes forever – the brass interlude bridge is so masterful that even I don’t have words to describe how good it is, and what a powerful message John Philip Souza still sends to us and the rest of the world after more than 120 years – don’t fuck with the United States of America.

There are a lot of bad guys in the world out there who think we are weak, ineffectual. My message to them is the same as Souza’s – the Pet Sounds I want them to hear and experience is the roar of our avenging Eagles and Hornets delivering death from our Air Forces and Navy from on high, the burn of Hellfires from Reaper drones (take that Soleimani you dead yogurt-swilling sheep fucker), feel the hissing Cobra strikes of our air and ground artillery, the heart-rendering lacerations from the Lions and Tigers of our Special Forces and Marines, and the earth-shaking Good Vibration son your soon-to-be dead asses from the foot-stomping Elephants of our tanks and firepower delivered by our gallant infantrymen, who will grease the treads of our tanks with your living chickenshit guts. Of course we will afford you a decent burial, if there are any pieces big enough to find left on the battlefields of your bad choice – but I digress.

How’s that for a bridge?

The real bridge of Good Vibrations has been described by some music critics as “the best ever” which demands that you give it another listen. BLUFs are what bureaucratic fools focus on and while they may be important components to writing Intel analysis, it is in the funky breaks where intuition strikes that you make your money or reputation. That’s where Brian Wilson really made his magic by creating lyrics that purred truth in your ears – just like a cat. Some dogs may have pizazz, but cats have jazz. It’s pretty clear that dogs love you – its cats who are the eternal mystery.

I’m not trying to insult my dog-loving friends out there, but I would much prefer a 12-pound cat jumping up on the bed and curling up next to me, kneading me with his soft-paws, than a 72-pound dog panting and drooling all over me with dog-slobber, just to say they love you before collapsing in a hairy heap on your chest – just saying. Cats, on the other hand, make you feel like they are doing you a great honor by allowing you the privilege of spoiling them and know when and where to take a shit – no wonder they have been cast as evil creatures in countless novels and movies down the years.

Duhé– Dutch for “Hello”
We’ve had a lot of great, but also terrible cat experiences. After my wife and I moved in together in Puerto de Santa Maria, she had brought a kitten down with her from Portugal named Duhé, who was tragically killed on the road behind our house by some shithead punk on a motorbike. We later did a stint as surrogate parents for a program of pet adoption for five flea-infested kittens from the local animal shelter before they could find homes – we gave them our own nicknames; my favorite was Pinch, who was white with two grey spots on either side of his back that I used to remove him from some feline fracas during the six weeks that they were our charges. Since we were leaving for Japan soon, we couldn’t realistically keep any of them so they were all eventually adopted. Before they left us, they did get to witness a robbery when our house was broken into by local Spanish drug addicts. Then, there was Paint.

Paint was a coal-black stray kitten with a white chest forelock that somehow had gotten himself entangled with a can of white paint in the carport at a neighbor’s house across the street. The neighbor ran him off, and then he wandered over to our house. I was sleeping off a mid at the time, and my wife cleaned him up with some turpentine and had placed him between my legs so I woke up with a pleasant, albeit smelly surprise. He was a funny cat but we couldn’t take him to Japan with us either, so I foisted him off on a close friend, who owned him for something like 15 years afterwards – thanks Dale. Unfortunately I can’t find a picture of him.

When we got to Japan, I was going off to war in Desert Storm on Midway, and had to leave my wife there in Atsugi. I gave her my checkbook and three admonitions – get a car, a place to live, and have something left in the bank when I got back. She got a 2-cylinder 35hp Daihatsu mini-car and found a great two-story house right outside of the Sagamihara Army housing complex, where there were a bunch of alley cats scavenging the streets. Some of them were dumped cats, and one in particular was looking for a new home – he was an orange and white blotchy ring-tailed cat with a bold personality. She started out feeding him scraps of meat outside and he hung around, looking for shelter. I was getting intermittent letters from her during cruise and she asked about taking him in – I wrote back to tell her if she did and got him fixed so to speak, then we owned him. She took him to the vets at Camp Zama, had him tested for feline leukemia and when he passed muster, had his little kitty balls chopped off so own him, we did. He cleaned his dirty-self up and I took to him after I finally got home from the Gulf.

We called him Wang Dang Doodle, after a rock-n-roll song out there that my ex-squadron and former roommate the famous Harry O turned me onto – Wang for short. Hell, we were in Japan so why not give him an Asian name? He was a funny boy and had a bold rocker personality to match – during the cold winters on the Kanto Plain in a house with no central heating, he would crawl in on my side of the bed, wriggle his way down to my feet to warm himself, and then worm his way over to my wife’s side of the bed where he would stick his head out on the pillow but still under the covers and sleep like a human being, purring all the while – we only thought that we owned him.

Wang Dang Doodle
Unfortunately, he had developed an addiction to being an alley cat and would wake up around 0400 and verbally berate us until we had to let him go out and do his catting about thing – which ultimately led to his demise. Warning to you current and would-be cat lovers out there – don’t let them out of the house once they are domesticated – there are only bad things to come from that and we suffered greatly for it later.
We took Wang back with us to the States after I wangled orders to the Naval War College, but he did eventually succumb to a late-diagnosed case of feline leukemia and we had to put him away – it was a very sad thing considering the history. I was stationed in Japan for three years but was underway for two of those, so he had become my wife’s loving companion for the two years I was gone and for that I will be forever grateful and indebted. We were both shattered at losing him after all of that drama. That cat had a personality that never quit, and a way of sharing love that would crush your soul when he was gone. But, there is always the hope of a new day-a-dawning.

Kyle & Stephen – and some asshole on the right
We later adopted a couple of brother kittens whose mother had been killed out of the Newport Potter League ASPCA animal shelter where my wife worked as a volunteer. They only knew humans as care-givers, since they had to be bottle-fed at first. In a marketing move to promote their adoption, the Potter League advertised then as “The Tabby Crew.” Hell, I wanted all of them, as I do all kittens even to this day. Hemingway was like that – he surrounded himself with cats both in Key West and later at his Finca in Cuba. But we could only take two, so we chose the most interesting of the five. They were with us for a long time and endured moves from Newport to San Diego to Boston, DC, Key West, and then Annapolis, but both are now sadly long gone. We named them Kyle and Stephen after my close CAG-5 friend Dave’s sons. Stephen was mommy’s boy, but Kyle was my kitty, and slept cradled between my left arm and shoulder every night for his entire life which was almost 15 years. Kyle was the mischievous one, sort of like my college pal and fellow lifeguard Michael’s dog Mr. Ming.

Mr. Ming
Ming was a White Samoyed Husky, and particularly obnoxious just like his owner. He was a chick magnet, and had charisma – when they would come over to us at college parties and other outings to ooh and aah at his magnetic doggie-ness, he would lie down and roll over to display to them his family jewels without fail – he was like a hairy little frat brother, and I thought that there was something human in him given his sense of timing in his own version of committing social doggy mayhem. I remember well his prank one morning in New Orleans when I was trying to sleep off a bad Bourbon Street hangover at Michael’s parents’ house in the Garden District; Ming stuck his cold wet nose into the small of my back and jolted me almost out of the bed, and then backed off to regard me with head half-cocked and signature blue-eyed smirk. He knew what he was doing – asshole.

Ming sadly was killed while he and Michael were out jogging one afternoon a few years later – some asshole kid ran a red light and ran over him while Michael was watching it happen like some kind of super-bad awful no-fucking good day horror movie sequence. I was in Germany at the time and when I got the news, I wept. He was one special dog.
Stephen the cat was more solid and stolid; he had great powers of concentration in any task he took upon himself – like looking to catch the mice that, during a rare two-week summer drought in New England, infiltrated themselves into our condo in Newport, looking for water. Stephen would spend hours at his self-appointed guardian’s watch – hunkered down in front of a small crack in the wall and floor by their food and water bowls, waiting for a rodent to arrive. He would snatch the mouse but Kyle, sleeping in our bed, was instantly aroused and would jump out of the rack and take it away from him. Hearing the commotion, I would have to get up, put on a kimono, and retrieve the still wriggling creature from Kyle’s mouth, and then go outside to take it across the street and toss it into a patch of holly vines. One morning after performing this rodent rescue chore around 0400, I was walking back to our place and there was a skunk sitting smack-diddle in the middle of the driveway – oh shit oh dear!

Pets are family, and losing even one of them, much less both is, like Stalin said, a tragedy. Kyle contracted kitty cancer and died suddenly not that long after we moved back up to Annapolis from Key West. Stephen lived on to be almost 19 years old – an eternity for cats and it was sad to see his health deteriorate at the end game – they say you will know when it’s time. They both lived good pampered lives, and it was a wonderful thing to see the both of them sleeping together like they were still entwined in the womb – we called them the “sweet brothers.” They tussled as kitties do but never fought; just loved one another.

God knows that I have been directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of deaths – it goes with our professional territory and I have never felt any compunction about doing that – it was my job and a lot of those motherfuckers, like Soleimani, desperately deserved it. While euthanasia is considered a humane act for animals, it’s like killing a child when it’s your own personal cat or dog. Watching them die, at your bidding, just plain fucking sucks, even under the direst of circumstances. That long, lonely , last drive to the vet for the final denouement of your relationship is a killer to your soul – those of us who have been forced to make that sad journey know that there is nothing remotely good about it. It is emotionally devastating and a bad guilt trip that brings strong men and women to their knees. We always made sure that when the vet was administering that act of extreme unction to one of our beloved kitty boys, that the last sight he saw before he went to meet the Creator was our teary-eyed faces.
Fuck, it hurts to write this.

But like Gandalf said in the Lord of the Rings, “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”[1]And there can be silver-linings to those gathered clouds of imminent psychic doom that unfurl to reveal the sun of a new day. There are always plenty of pets out there who need, and deserve our love. Here’s ones who captured my heart:

Lucky Doodle – The former Ditch King of Dayton
We have adopted two more stray cats – the cat on the frontispiece was the runt-of-the litter whose mother cat left him to die in a fellow church-member’s backyard shortly after we had to have Kyle put down; Nibbles we call him since he likes to gently bite you. He was a feisty little chap back then, and I still remember the day when Stephen, who had grown into a 16-pound bad-ass by then had had enough of his BS, and put him in his place – just by a glowering look and menacing stance delivering a withering message from the Alpha Male to a young whipper-snapper – “enough goddamnit.” When Stephen succumbed to his fate, we went for a while being a single cat family, but always looking for the one who would come next; not trying to push it. Then along came Lucky the love pirate, for whom I moved my little pieces of Heaven and Earth to rescue out of a ditch behind a cheap hotel during a TDY trip to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio a couple of years ago – you maybe have read about him and that pretty cool story of how I saved his furry little ass from the alley cats, raccoons, and foxes that were after him with bad intent.

For those who missed that piece, I was standing outside at a picnic table one night in back of a cheap hotel in Dayton, across the street from the Air Force Museum (you should go there – it puts the National Air & Space Museum to shame), when out of the dark emerged this cartoonish white and black-spotted tiny character with his feather-duster tail twirling in his wake like a mini-tornado. He was emoting soft meows that echoed off the walls of the building akin to a feline sonar searching for a datum – well, he found one. I was enjoying a fine American tobacco product at the time, and sipping from a cup of cheap bootleg wine I had smuggled out of the fridge in my room upstairs, not wanting to pay the hotel bar prices. That little living thing, all of three pounds of him marched right up – rolled on to his side onto the top of my shoes, sank his tiny claws into my pants legs and then looked up to me with his warm plaintive amber eyes; he favored me with his now signature “meow” as if to say “You are mine, and I am never letting you go. Do we have a deal?” He was dirty, battered from fights he never wanted or deserved, covered with fleas and ticks and I was all in – it was smashing.

He is now sitting next to me on the couch of my living room on this late cold Spring night in front of the gas log fireplace soaking up its warmth while I write this. I know he will be my snuggle-puss later on tonight – yeah, he had me at “meow.” I am his chosen person – and he sleeps closely next to me every night tucked under my left arm, when I thought that I would never find another Kyle. Lucky purrs pure kitty jazz in my ear – Good Vibrations indeed.

God does work in mysterious ways.
I have to face the fact time is closing in and that these two little pieces of cat work may out-live me, so the tables may be turned in time – we’ll see. Now with COVID-1, all bets are off. Love your pets – they love you, and they are far from being just dumb animals. They have perfected the art of stealing your heart so give in and shamelessly spoil them in return. Pay attention to what they have to say – be it via barks, growls, purrs or meows. That’s how they communicate and tell us how much they love us – Pet Sounds.

I remain your faithful servant.

[1]
J.R.R Tolkien, The Return of the King.

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