I did win my war against Chaucer. Mr C was no match for the power of love. Perhaps I was lucky again. When I met him, Chaucey was dying of vaccine-related cancer. I did extend his life. I learnt Chaucey had started to eat less and less. Once I was in the house, he began to eat more. His selfishness was so enormous that he ate in a futile effort to deny me food. He also, like most right-wing cranks, tried to blame his cancer on vaccines. Now if you’re a right wing-crank listen up. And even if you imagine you’re not a right-wing crank, listen up, for it is rare for a right-wing crank to know he is a right-wing crank. Repeat after me: Vaccines can cause illness, even killing illnesses, even though vaccines are beneficial on the whole. Repeat that. You should know it. You believe that about guns. It’s what right-wing cranks say when anybody dares mention the number of people blowing their own brains out or shooting dead family members, rather than burglars, every year.
Now being inside had plenty of advantages. Free food, a nice sofa, pets, a nurse to care for me, and leisure to think and write. Now anybody with a brain knows cats can’t type or hold a pen. They don’t need to, provided they have a scribe. The house came equipped with a “mike.” He became my scribe. I also use him as my amanuensis. Don’t tell him. He likes to imagine he is writing fiction when he is just channeling me. Without mike, my career in journalism would have gone nowhere.
Walt read this house by the Zen center right. My future staff included a nurse and a psychologist. Not everything was perfect. Another cat, a brutish eunuch, whose name was Chaucer (aka Chaucey & Mr C) already lived there. He wasn’t the sort of kitty to welcome anybody new. To get in, I played my wounds for all they were worth. The nurse, a kinder person than the psychologist, took me in. She set up an infirmary in the back of the house with a comfortable sofa that I turned into a bed. She bound up my wounds and began to heal me. The psychologist was in Mr C’s thrall. Despite my wounds, he showed more attention and love to Chaucey. Chaucey also wouldn’t suffer to share the whole house with me. I was confined to the infirmary. I bided my time. After a while, I had the nurse wrapped around my forepaw. My lobby for full access to the house was ceaseless. One day, whilst sitting on her lap in the living room, the psychologist saw something in my battered demeanor that reminded him of an old hit of the Miracles, “I’m just a loved machine.” He sang a riff from it and moved my shoulders in a way that won the nurse to me. She declared I was the Love Machine. Being battered and weak is not always to a cat’s disadvantage when running with big humans. I knew it was just a matter of time before she expanded my beat to the entire house. Chaucer was doomed to lose
Please allow me to introduce myself. I am not Satan. So, few of you will know me. I am Crockett, though friends often call me Crockey. Nobody knows the exact time or place of my birth. I like that. Sorcerers can’t write horoscopes on me. It would be pure guesswork. Everybody must judge me by what I do.
By the time I was one, I had arrived in San Antonio if I was not already there from the start. The hard truth about a cat-like me is that we tend not to know we don’t know where we are. It never matters. Instead, the thing is to have a home with cozy spots, good food, and gentle servants.
Let me tell you how I came to have a home like that. I was living in San Antonio, the very same city where my namesake never managed, despite all his bold talk, to win a fight. Santa Anna’s gang got ahold of him, and that was that for that Crockett. I did better. When I was about one year old, bad luck put me in the center of a huge battle. Few people have ever heard of this battle, the Battle of Martinez Creek. The battle zone was a stretch of the creek that runs a wee west of Fredericksburg Road. If you ever drove down Woodlawn Avenue past the Road, you’d take a bridge over the creek. Almost as soon as you did, in those days, you’d see the San Antonio Zen Center on the south side. The first house after it, I met my destiny. My buddy cat Walt took me to the house, assuring me the suckers, I mean people, living in it would serve me. I had sustained grievous wounds in battle. An Army of Toms, crazed Mollies, snakes, low-life raccoons, and god-knows-what other evildoers had traveled down Martinez Creek from the north. Walt, my current wives Bart and Fielding, and a gang of good cats that Walt, Bart, and Fielding had summoned waged war on the northern invaders. Nobody was going to take their stretch of the creek. Bart and Fielding were ferocious warriors. They made a stand at key runs and cut down the marauders as they tried to come ashore. Let’s be honest. I got dragooned into service in this battle, but I’m no fighter. It didn’t take long before the enemy overwhelmed me. I was wounded. Somebody had mangled my left eye. Some other fiends had broken a couple of my ribs. Walt noticed my wounds. He left off his killing work to help me. That is when he took me to the house on Woodland. “Stay here, comrade. These clueless humans will be your corpsman. Pretend to be terrified and in pain!” As if I needed to pretend. Of course, Walt said what he in the kitty dialect used in that area of Martinez Creek. It was easy to understand. It went something like “Meow meow, meow. Meow meow meow . . .” In Kitty speak, meow is meaning rich word, polysemous as big-worders might say.
