The Fourth Time Around

The voice on the other end of the phoneline didn't sound familiar at first. But she knew me. It was obvious. Why? My mind began an automatic search, racing through the voices in memory associated with cat situations. About five words into her plea for help, the memory search program running in my brain hit paydirt. It's the lovable alcoholics. "Oh shit," was my brain response.

"Ah, shit."

I first encountered them in a run down Albany trailer park years ago. They existed there. B began her day like she ended it---sipping bourbon from a red plastic picnic cup. Mid day was spent watching soap operas and cheap game shows. She rarely ate and was skinny as a rail. She had bad teeth and a soft voice, that got louder and more confident as the day progressed and her bottle emptied.

By evening her husband joined in, slugging down beer after beer, mixing it up with vodka, straight, from a plastic cup and sometimes a joint was roled, sucked down and soured the mix altogether. The fighting began usually around 7:00 p.m. and didn't stop until someone passed out or the cops showed up.

Both repeatedly lost jobs until they just gave up trying. No matter where they lived, they ran a constant garage sale out front, trying to raise money to support their habits.

In the third habitation I encountered them in, they had hung blankets from the ceiling to cordon off one area and used a space heater to warm that during the winter. Their credit was bad and they had no money. Their power more often was shut off than not. They rarely had heat. They had huge amounts of unpaid debt and owed everyone. They borrowed from this person to pay a bit to that person, always with an eye to saving some aside for their various addictions. They were at the mercy of their addictions. It was painful to watch.

I encountered them always over cats. They fed strays or took in cats, and never fixed them. At the trailer park, I got 30 or more fixed, about ten of those were attached to them.

I remember B telling me she took care of her mother until she died. She had breast cancer for over a dozen years, but did not seek treatment. She found out her mother had it when driving her to the store. There was this awful smell to her. Turns out it was the tumor--rotting dying flesh. B was horrified.

She took me once to where her mother lived, in Brownsville, when they invited me to camp out with them at the Pioneer Picnic. This was a mistake on my part. The Pioneer Picnic is really an event for alcoholics. This is why they wanted to go. This is why they went.

All night long, in the campground area, fights broke out among drunk underage drinkers and old drinkers. Sooner or later, some began smashing things, including car windows. Sooner or later, there were screams from the river side.

We went down. There had been a big fight. A teen lay bleeding and unable to move on the sand beside the river. I was the only one sober and ran back to find someone with a cell phone to call the ambulance. I also had a flashlight and led them down the trails to where the injured teen, attacked by a drunken group of teens, lay.

This was enough Pioneer Picnic fun for me.

The house where B's mother once lived, well I"ve been back there again since then. In fact, I've been there again since then many times. It's a run down shack over run with cats, like almost everywhere in Linn county is over run with unfixed cats. People feed their addictions here. They don't fix their pets.

The pair told me their place there at the trailer park was haunted. Then they told me stories as to why. I believed them pretty much. They talked and told stories while I waited on traps to catch cats, offspring of the unfixed house cats, owned and left behind there at the godforsaken trailer park.

It was ill maintained. The outside water was turned off. Later on, a trailer caught fire and the old woman's trailer next to it caught fire, also. Nobody could protect their own trailers because they had no water to do it with. Slumlord owned that place. Figured these were people nobody cared about and he could get away with shit. And he did. He got away with shit.

There was an old woman who lived there, too, with her husband. She was a nice woman and a very very big woman and she fed the strays. She had some fancy rich inlaws come up once, from CA, and they were very snobby and mean to her. She told me about it and was crying.

So I came over when they were there, in their fancy sports car, and I told them in front of her, what a saint their relative was and how I wished very much there were more people on this earth like her, instead of selfish people, then I kind of stared at their fancy sports car with a look. Later on, old Lou told me how much that meant to her and then we laughed at how stupid they looked all painted up in makeup and fancy clothes in a slum trailer park in Albany, Oregon.

She died a few months after that, right after getting a flu shot. I went to her funeral. For some reason, I couldn't stop sobbing at that funeral and I had to leave.

Way way later on, this last winter in fact, I ran into an old woman who also had lived there, only now she was living in another Albany trailer park. She and her 88 year old husband, whom she'd only been married to for seven years, were feeding a bunch of strays again. I trapped them all again and got them all fixed, even though it took about a month. That was this winter, right in the middle of my own eviction and move. It's kind of a small world.

The alcoholics told me all sorts of stories. Both used to be into the high tech stuff, but the money they made, after starting some company with some now sort of notoriously prominent Philomath man, who still owes them money they claim, got them into deep addiction trouble, like it got a lot of the company people into trouble with addictions. It fell apart quickly.

They once tried to steal some daffodils from a nice house, for B's mother's grave, and when caught, they claimed to be looking for a cat and volunteers with the FCCO.

The next place I ran into them, was in their new rental house, after their eviction from the trailer court, in Albany. The house was ugly, very ugly, with this disgusting strange fountain right in the front against the house. I suppose that ugly fountain is why the landlord couldn't find a renter maybe. S said it was because he was seriously impaired. He had tried to kill himself once by shooting himself in the head and missed. He just sort of knicked his head instead, but it gave him even more damage to his mind, S said. I didn't know what to believe.

Anyhow, more cats there, too. They got and then some they fed. Next door, a retarded woman lived and you could see the jam packed collectors situation she was in through the windows, clogged with filth. You could sometimes see an oppossum inside the house sleeping in the garbage against a window.

She'd sometimes let homeless people camp out in her backyard. Once, I saw her in the tent and the homeless people were just sort of standing on the sidewalk looking at their hands. I was looking for a big tom cat when I went by and saw that. I asked the homeless people what she was doing in their tent. He said, looking down, she kicked us out and said she liked our tent and wanted to spend the night in it.

She took to burning garbage, including rotted meat, in a big burn pile out back. Then she'd leave, with the fire stinking up the whole city. B and S would call the fire department because the stench might bother potential customers of their perpetual garage sale.

I caught a lot of cats at that place. Then were evicted again. Failure to pay rent. I don't think they ever paid a dime.

Unbelievably, they got another place only a block and a half away. That was one stupid landlord. Must not have checked them out at all. This was the place where they ended up that I let them out of my life, forever I had hoped. I couldn't fix them. The last I saw them they were screaming at each other, while huddled in blankets in a blacked out house. I couldn't watch them do this anymore, cats needing fixed or not. And now they've called again.

I always went to help them before. They knew they could count on me. Nothing's changed. I'll help them again.

I can get very high and mighty sometimes. Nobody's perfect. These two people are quite the characters. That they have remained together through all their extreme difficulty navigating life, is rather touching.