Dedicated to the Game

I didn’t seek a share in the house or anything that went along with it. I was drafted for it by my friend, Tim. I had been living in Seattle after graduating from college and came back to southeast Tennessee to help my parents after my mother became ill. The move was abrupt and left me renting a basement room from my parents. Mom’s health stabilized over the next few weeks, and I began looking around for alternative accommodations. I had a lead on a new job by that time too. I had been working on a landscaping crew in Seattle. Landscaping work, however, was harder to come by in the South, so I checked in with a former employer, the local Hibachi steakhouse. I had parted ways with the restaurant on good terms. I thought maybe they would be willing to take me back doing kitchen prep and cleaning up alongside Tim and two of his brothers. I was ready to settle for the same, but lucky for me, Tim stayed with the restaurant after I left, and subsequently got promoted to bartender. He put in a good word for me and may have exaggerated my mixological experience. Soon, I was blending daiquiris in a dress shirt and shiny shoes, behind an air-conditioned bar, for about the same wage as I got for kitchen work, plus tips.

While Tim was orienting me to the new job, I mentioned my living situation to him. He perked up immediately. Destiny must be at work he told me. He was just finishing up a successful house hunt and needed people to sign on for rooms and shares of the rent and deposit. I said yes without a second thought.

The landlord was more responsive than most to cash payments, and we had the place within a week. By that time, 3 others had joined the enterprise. Like me, they were on intermission. They had well-paying jobs. In different circumstances, they might have committed to those jobs and the brands that came with them and become Dan the Welder or Jim the Waiter, for instance. The last step, where the aspirant gave up their soul for security was always semi-voluntary and taken under pressure from various directions. We could put off the big moment because we had education, a little bit of family wealth, and a friendly social network. We were destined for more than socioeconomic stagnation at a decent wage. We had little insight into our fortunes, yet we behaved like we were well aware of the backstop between us and total disaster. The barrier meant that we could be a little lax, take a break from expectations and explore socioeconomic alternatives, like voluntary communal living.

The house sat on the corner of an intersection between a numbered street and a dead-end, frontage road. The single story, brick residence started life as a duplex at some more hopeful time in the distant past. It predated the ‘race riots’ the city strove to deny or, better yet pointedly forget. It was old enough to come with a warning that lead might be present in the paint flakes that fell from the windows whenever we opened or closed them. The floor was not level and sagged in spots to boot. The adjacent houses, as well as those on the next block down, were of similar construction and in similar shape. At the time, my only means of transportation was a motorcycle, and I was glad for it, because the driveway was tiny, and the parking on the street was crowded. Though they looked functional, somewhere around half of the cars parked on the curb never appeared to move. The frontage road dead ended to the west, where it disappeared under a freeway off ramp. Beyond the frontage road to the south, a fence topped with barbed wire secured the railroad tracks.

I was not with Tim when he went to pick up the keys,. He was determined to assimilate to the neighborhood as much as possible. He said that he wanted to set the tone before everybody moved in, and he told me that he wanted to begin the process by introducing himself on behalf of all the tenants, to the neighbor who lived across the numbered street from us. The neighbor was an older gentleman whose ancestors had likely been brought to the region as slaves. He sat on the front porch when I rode by to have a look at our rental before signing my copy of the lease. He did not look particularly interested in what I was doing. He did not look particularly interested in making new friends. Yet he was still probably the best point of contact for the neighborhood. The house up the street from us was vacant, as was the house up the street from his.

The neighbor’s house was smaller than others on the block. It was 2 bedrooms at most. The rest of the space on the lot was taken up by a much larger than normal side yard. At least, we assumed that it was a side yard. We could not see directly into the area, as it was obscured by an 8-foot-high strip of chain-link, unsupported in the middle and leaning towards the sidewalk under the weight of several sheets of three-quarter inch plywood laid loose across the inside of the fencing for its entire length.

I doubted that our neighbor had ever had much of a break from anything, and although none of us asked for our status, and none of us could change it, his experience may have engendered some resentment towards those who could indulge in an intermission. Though I favored my friend’s intention, I suggested that we might let the man across the street make the first move. Tim later informed me that he had paused for a few seconds on the basis of my advice before he went to knock on the door.

We worked evenings, so he picked up the keys for our rental late in the day. It was dark when he crossed the street. No one was on the porch, and all the windows were black. He had just stepped across the sidewalk when the plywood sheets slammed against the chain-link fencing just a few feet to his left. Horrible growling, snapping, and scrabbling sounds followed the impact . He bolted back across the street and hid in the rental house until the sounds died down. He never went back to knock on the door, and he never wavered in his assessment that whatever lurked behind that plywood, it was no dog.

Once everyone moved in, we quickly stopped bothering with the neighborhood. We lost interest partly because we found other, more immediate concerns, and partially because we realized that the neighborhood was not concerned with us, or anybody else, who lived there. The occupants of all the nearby houses were bound by a tacit agreement to, more or less, mind their own business. For our part, we took care where we parked. I never cranked the throttle until I got my motorcycle out of the area. The bimonthly parties stayed in the house, including the ethanol fireballs, card games, and fighting.

We gave nothing and we took nothing. After a few months, when our commitment to the pact of benign indifference, was unquestionable the neighborhood sent us a liaison. Tim insisted that he heard a knock, but when he opened the door, all he found on the threshold was a somewhat undersized, sick looking, black-and-white male cat. Without a sound or an upward glance, the animal just walked right into our kitchen, limping on his right front leg. When he reached the middle of the room, he flopped down on the linoleum and looked up at us. We stood by for a minute or two with the door propped open while he failed to find a reason to go back outside.

It became apparent over the next 48 hours, that he was there to stay. He was a good cat. He was very calm and would sit by you on the couch without ever inviting himself onto your lap. He never stole food from the counter or squeegeed your face with his tail. Tim invested in a vet visit which revealed that the cat did not have feline leukemia virus, but did have a bite wound which had healed over a bone infection in his right elbow. The cat even took the pills for his infection without too much fuss. Since he had obviously been socialized before he arrived on our doorstep, we made a reasonable effort to find out if he belonged to someone else in the vicinity. We put up signs on a few telephone poles, but never received any inquiries.

Once he was clearly ours, we set about finding him a name. Nothing really seemed to fit though. His personality was thoroughly feline, so something like “Jim Bob” or “Melvin” was out of the question. He wasn’t particularly fat or bony. He didn’t have any really distinctive markings. He wasn’t especially lazy or rambunctious. We decided to table the matter until something happened to show us the way. We would not have to wait long.

The cat was getting a drink from his water bowl, which sat on a windowsill at the far end of the kitchen counter. In the garbage can below, the empty bottle of antibiotic sat atop the trash. The kitchen window looked out across the alleyway to the building behind us. Another cat appeared in a lower-level window of that building. The interloper showed no signs of hostility, and judging by its behavior, may not have even seen us watching it. Our cat exploded in a screeching, growling, hissing fury. He slapped at the window as if blows to the image could transmit the force of his hatred indirectly to the other cat. He remained transfixed by rage until his enemy jumped down from the windowsill and disappeared into the neighboring house.

The sounds of murder had drawn a crowd in the meantime. We stared dumbfounded at our mascot, who now sat calmly licking his foot.
Tim spoke for the crowd in summary, “Jesus fucking Christ!”
And so our cat had a name.
In the interest of comity, we agreed to limit the use of his full name to conversations between housemates alone. In all other circumstances, JFC would suffice. His transformation repulsed the others. I was fascinated. Something so dramatic must mean something. I could not imagine what force could completely and immediately overturn a personality, especially without an existing foothold in the nature of the affected individual.

At that point, we should have kept JFC inside. But the concept of an indoor cat was unfamiliar to us, so we did not block him when he slipped between our feet as we left the house, and some of us even let him out when he begged at the door. I’ll admit, I should have restrained myself, but I was one who let him out whenever he asked, and I took every opportunity to follow him when he went out. He never travelled far. Sometimes he would just slink around the backs of nearby buildings and alleyways. More often, he would duck under the railroad fence. The vast majority of his excursions consisted of sniffing tours around curbs and stairwells punctuated by an occasional spritz of urine on the walls. Sometimes however, he encountered another cat and that was why I was along. Inevitably a fight ensued. The sheer violence was compelling enough, but as I became accustomed to the shrieking and the swirling chunks of fur, I discovered a pattern in these conflicts. I needed to learn more, so I began to venture into the alleyways and through holes in the railroad fence without JFC in the lead. This was easy enough in the neighborhood. I’d take a beer with me and sit down on one of the garbage cans to wait for the action. If someone walked by or came out of a door, I was protected by the pact of benign indifference. As soon as people recognized me they went back to their own business. The same was not true of the railyard. I had to skulk around like the cats themselves when I went there. Security was easy enough to evade in that era, and the very best fights happened in the isolated corners of the yard, so I ended up spending most of my nights out sitting in the shadows of stacked ties and surplus freight cars listening for yowling or footsteps.

I learned a lot. Of course, cat fights basically depended on angle and anticipation, like any other fight. There was much more beyond the basics though. All fights began with growling and shrieking. Intense scrutiny accompanied the noise and prompted subtle shifts in position. Each cat was waiting for the other to experience a brief lapse in concentration. Cats are prone to such lapses, so it was a worthwhile tactic. When the other cat’s nose twitched or their gaze shifted slightly, the aggressor leapt. An ideal pounce would land the jumper on his enemies back, well positioned to deliver a bite to the spinal column or the back of the skull. A cat’s long, relatively thin, and gently curved canines were perfect for that purpose, and it was how they killed larger prey.

The bite never worked on other cats however. The defender reacted by rolling onto his back and fending off the leap with his hind legs, while attempting to get a grip on the opponent’s upper body with his front claws. When the defense worked perfectly, the combatants ended up on their sides, facing each other. From that position, they both launched raking attacks with their back feet while attempting a bite to the shoulder. Since the claws on the back feet got used for running and jumping, the tips were not very sharp, and the raking attacks resulted in loss of belly fur, and not much more. The biting option was fraught. A successful bite on an opponent’s shoulder left the attacker open to a similar move.

Sometimes a cat would just accept the return bite and try to work their teeth deeper into the opponent’s shoulder, wagering that the additional pain would make the other cat let go. However they played it, the position was unstable. Most of the time one or the other would try to break out of it and get back on his feet. Several maneuvers were possible when escaping the face-to-face, recumbent position. The best ones ended up with the attacker standing perpendicular to the defender with the defender on his back. From that position, the attacker had a couple of options. First, he could try for an elbow bite. If executed safely, an elbow bite was much more effective than a shoulder bite. It stood a better chance of disabling the leg, and it was much more painful, since it meant teeth digging into bone. Though the cats could not factor it into their strategy, by the same token, an elbow bite would frequently result in a bone infection like JFC had suffered.

It was difficult to achieve a safe elbow bite however. Positioning for the bite left the attacker open to a similar bite in response, like the situation with the shoulder bite. And as with the shoulder bite, some cats would simply accept the return bite to deliver the attack. More often, the attacker went for a neck bite instead. From the standing, perpendicular position, the front and middle of the opponent’s neck were theoretically accessible. Because of the anatomy in the area, a bite to those structures was very difficult to achieve in practice. All the defender had to do was tuck his chin a little bit and the bite would land on the cheek or the side of the face in front of the ear. That outcome was still a good one. A face bite could injure the jaw muscles, and typically resulted in quite a bit of bleeding. Moreover, it blocked the return bite.

The fights carried on for anywhere from half a minute to half an hour. I typically had trouble predicting who would yield based on injuries sustained. Both cats came away with bite wounds. Often, it was simply down to which cat was more enthralled by its own aggression, and so willing to suffer the injury. As an outsider examining the phenomena objectively, I knew that it all boiled down to territory, which really meant access to female cats. But the combatants couldn’t see that. They felt the push and pull of fury, pain, and fear, which were driven in turn by chemicals in their bloodstream and in their brains, which were driven in turn by genes.

The genetic forces would balance themselves out across the population regardless of what happened to the individual cats and even if someone could wave a magic wand and bestow clear and complete understanding of the situation upon the cats, they lived for the sensations and would do no different. Now, it was my turn to feel repulsed.

I stopped going to the railyard, which towards the end of my catfight investigations, had become an almost daily event. As a result, I was hanging around the house a lot more, and noted some deterioration in the atmosphere. Camaraderie had taken a beating. None of the housemates would deny that, but none of us understood the implications. We didn’t understand that camaraderie, as the sentiment resulting from a commitment to the well-being of one’s fellows, served as the foundation for any group effort, including communal living.

The decay of foundational sentiment began where it always does, in the refrigerator. At the beginning, when the household was solid, we shared food with each other, and even prepared group meals on occasion. As the novelty wore off, extravagant meal prep came to feel more like a chore than a celebration. Inequities in food sharing developed. A couple of the tenants began eating out almost exclusively. If they needed a snack, there was no recourse other than what was in the fridge, which was necessarily other people’s food. Eventually, those of us who still ate at home resorted to hiding our supplies. Most of us accepted that nothing was safe in the refrigerator and switched entirely to nonperishable foods. Two of us continued to stock the fridge. One of those diehards secured his food with padlocks attached to ammo cans from the Army surplus store. For things which did not fit the containers, he attached the following note, “Would I poison something just to prove a point? Have a taste and find out.”

The next thing to go rotten was the housework. When everyone first moved in, we drew up the customary list of chores to be assigned on a rotating basis. When food violations progressed to the point where some housemates resorted to dining out exclusively, dishes began to accumulate in the sink. Additionally, fast food bags, plastic utensils, and pizza boxes built up on the counter and on the tables. The backlog of cleaning got worse and worse until somebody broke and took care of it all themselves in a single Herculean effort which left them resenting all the slackers. By the time I had finished my research with the cats, the chore rotation calendar, whose completion constituted the final chore, was blank going back several months.

Occupancy of the house grew progressively unstable. Some of those who were paying rent, barely came by anymore. To them, the place had become an expensive shower and closet. As the main signer on the lease, Tim had to track these people down and get the money from them in person. That wasn’t easy, because most of them were sleeping in various places on a weekly or even nightly basis. Our house became one of those places for other people. If friends of friends had come over the night before to drink or throw darts or wrestle on the living room carpet, it was not surprising to find several of them still there in the morning, sleeping on the couch or the floor, or perusing the fridge for breakfast items which appeared least likely to be spiked with strychnine.

JFC was a constant in the flux. Stuck with the household through its devolution. He didn’t seem to mind strangers picking him up. He would help with the cleanup of edible scraps, and when his litter box got full and did not get cleaned for a week at a time, he would go outside instead of making a mess in the house. Yet he was becoming a problem at the same time. Unlike me, he had not stopped attending the cat fights. He kept coming back with hematomas and abscesses. Some of these injuries required expensive veterinary services. Evolutionary forces had shaped the cats to survive their fights. Those same forces made him a good companion which pushed us to care for his health and so inadvertently ensured that he was in tip top shape for the next round.

A similar set of forces propped up the house in its devolved state. From the outside, it looked like one out-of-control, endless party. It had such a large pool of prospective occupants that on any given night someone with some claim on the right to flop would have steam to blow off. For those of us who still slept there for most nights of the week, the transient population became a concern, because most of them did not know about the pact. Neighbors up the street had to come by a couple of times to ask us to keep the volume down. The visits were brief, and not overly friendly, but through those brief conversations, we solved the mystery of the others’ relative invisibility. They were working up to 3 jobs each. Some of these were combinations of full and part-time jobs, and some were multiple part-time jobs, all carefully stitched together so that, in theory, if a person immediately fell asleep at the end of their last shift, they could get a full 8 hours of sleep before the next shift began. When they got home, they went straight to bed, and when they woke up, they went straight to work.

Without any conversation or formal agreement, several of us took it in turns to referee nighttime activities. We did whatever it took to keep the noise down. For reasons less clear, our devolution piqued the interest of the neighbor across the street as well. We never exchanged a single word with the man, but he took to sitting out on his porch again, almost every night. He drank from a Mason jar while he stared at the goings-on and chuckled to himself now and then. He would sit there until late in the night or until someone waved to him. He would then return the gesture with a wave hello which turned into a wave get lost, whereupon he stood up laughing quietly and shaking his head, as he staggered back into his house. I kept it to myself, but I knew why he kept watch over the disintegration across the street. Somehow, he knew bootleggers who brought him moonshine to power his vigil. He somehow survived in the face of malicious neglect meted out by the society writ large and his relations in particular. He kept the embodiment of blood thirsty rage in the side yard, just for spite. He watched chaos overcome until he became it himself. Our comedy alone brought him satisfaction, but It seems he lost interest after a couple of months, because he returned to his hermitage, and nobody saw him ever again. We wouldn’t have noticed except a 2nd generation housemate, who had formally taken over rent payments from one of the originals, mentioned it to us. He brought it up because he was planning to walk across the street and check on the old guy. He had exchanged waves with the man once or twice during the emergence, and had the weird notion that there was some kind of bond between them.

The conversation with the 2nd generation fellow came about in the first place because we were trying to formally hand over responsibility for rent by that time. During the slide into disorder, most of us had quietly been looking for alternative accommodations. We’d seen the writing on the wall. The situation was going to continue to deteriorate until some disaster ensued, or the remaining housemates were evicted. Intermission was over. It was time for the backstop to gobble us up. None of us were ever going to feel compelled by cat-like sentiments distilled from indifferent evolutionary forces, not in that house or anyplace else. Better to get it over with. Before he ended the conversation, the gen2 guy mentioned that no one had seen JFC for a couple days. They had set his food and water outside, and it had been consumed, but they couldn’t be sure by who.

Tim decided to stay over to try and find the cat. He heard about the results of the welfare check on the old man across the street. The monster was still behind the plywood. Nobody answered the door. Our detective even had the guts to walk around the side of the house and knock on some windows there. He had seen no sign of life.

On the morning of the 3rd day, the cat returned. Tim found him on the back porch by the door, laid out on his side, panting. The vet confirmed a recurrent bone infection. It was in the same elbow as before, but it was much more extensive. He could take antibiotics again, but even then, there was no guarantee that the leg would not need amputation. The whole process was going to be expensive. Tim was exasperated. He was not going to go on subsidizing the cat’s stupidity. He was also unable to find some sucker to take JFC off his hands.

So, JFC died by lethal injection. Really, it wasn’t the potassium infused directly into his heart that killed him. He died from a shift in those indifferent forces which drove him to fight and us to take care of him. He was a martyr because of that, but he was a sort of champion as well. No matter the consequences, JFC heeded the call of those forces and stayed true to the end. I am sure that if we amputated his leg, he would have hopped right back to the fights.

A week or so after we killed JFC, the remainder of the original housemates packed up and formally vacated the premises. We went on to various occupations and living situations, but wherever we went, we became more and more subject to the expectations of other people. With time, martyrdom and triumph passed out of reach entirely. The original housemates did not keep in touch. The whole enterprise felt more like a bad experience as it faded into the past. For my part, once adequate time had elapsed, I felt the desire to watch cat fights again.

It was different upon return, and more like what I imagined that the Romans felt when they watched slaves and captive animals tear each other to pieces. I wanted to see them fight despite themselves. I wanted to see them driven to kill an enemy who had inherited the capacity to survive all their attacks. And when they walked away with their bite wounds festering, I wanted to feel sorry for them and feel for a moment like I was above it all.