For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was in her sandbox. Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street were her domain. Every night she’d sit in the window among the avocado plants waiting for me to come home (my arms full of canned liver and love). We’d talk into the night then contented but missing something, She the earth she never knew me the hills I ran while growing bent.
Sloopy should have been a cowboy’s cat with prairies to run not linoleum and real-live catnip mice. No one to depend on but herself.
I never told her but in my mind I was a midnight cowboy even then. Riding my imaginary horse down Forty-second Street, going off with strangers to live an hour-long cowboy’s life, but always coming home to Sloopy, who loved me best.
A dozen summers we lived against the world. An island on an island. She’d comfort me with purring I’d fatten her with smiles. We grew rich on trust needing not the beach or butterflies I had a friend named Ben Who painted buildings like Roualt men. He went away. My laughter tired Lillian after a time she found a man who only smiled. Only Sloopy stay and stayed.
Winter. Nineteen fifty-nine. Old men walk their dogs. Some are walked so often that their feet leave little pink tracks in the soft gray snow.
Women fur on fur elegant and easy only slightly pure hailing cabs to take them round the block and back. Who is not a love seeker when December comes? even children pray to Santa Claus. I had my own love safe at home and yet I stayed out all one night the next day too.
They must have thought me crazy screaming Sloopy Sloopy as the snow came falling down around me.
I was a madman to have stayed away one minute more than the appointed hour. I’d like to think a golden cowboy snatched her from the window sill, and safely saddlebagged she rode to Arizona. She’s stalking lizards in the cactus now perhaps bitter but free.
I’m bitter too and not a free man any more. Once was a time, in New York’s jungle in a tree, before I went into the world in search of other kinds of love nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy. Looking back perhaps she’s been the only human thing that ever gave back love to me.