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Like I said, I already had anxiety about what I might find the Fuzz Face Four had done to my abode.

Don’t worry, I’m not one of those guys who bore people with the details of my cats.
Yvette’s cats
. Mainly because when I got home the cats were beside the point.

My front door was splintered at the lock, pried open. That seemed a little more damage than even these four cats could manage.

The furry foursome were gone.

So was their food, the cat boxes, and the litter.

I guessed Yvette had come and taken the little darlings. But why had she wrecked my door? I hadn’t changed the locks because I hoped that one day she’d sneak back and take the beasts.

That’s when I found a paper towel on the kitchen counter by the black kitchen appliances. Scrawled on the paper towel in ballpoint was this:

There was this little skull and crossbones after the name Gustav.

Breathe slowly in through the nose; close the eyes.

Breathe slowly out through the lips; stroke back my face where the beard used to be.

Breathe slowly in through the nose; open the eyes.

Breathe slowly out through the lips; focus on the bar in the corner where the brandy was.

You can imagine the emotions that rumbled through me at that moment, especially after the day I had already had.

My first reaction was anxiety about the safety of the cats, that Gustav—whoever he was—would hurt the scratch-happy felines. I was relieved that he had taken the litter box and the rest of the cat stuff. To have taken that stuff, too, Gustav must be serious about taking care of them awhile. The idea behind the note seemed to be making Yvette contact him, to get something out of her, and that would only make sense if the cats were alive.

I took the brandy off the corner bar and poured myself a snifter. My anxiety about the cats was replaced by a slightly different feeling.

The cats were gone
.

The brandy tasted pretty good at that point in time, but it wasn’t clearing my head.

In times of distress like that, I found it therapeutic to go take a walk over to the scrap yard.

I poured my snifter into a travel coffee mug, rebuttoned my coat, and fit the door loosely back in place.

My neighborhood was a great place to walk because it went from commercial and residential to light industrial. I liked to walk south on Smith Street because you see it all. It started with the smart shops and hip bars and restaurants. Topping the hill at Carroll Street, the subway shot out of the ground and began to ramp up to elevated tracks on the right. On the left opposite the rising trestle, the apartments and shops gave way to open lots and vacant warehouses. The train trestle swung out and crossed over Smith before Ninth Street. This is where the serious industrial stuff started, like cement plants and fuel oil depots. In the sky ahead was an elevated portion of I-278. They call it the Gowanus Expressway. They call it that because it goes over the canal. It hummed and twinkled with traffic.

Below the Gowanus Expressway was Hamilton Avenue, and the intersection with Smith Street.

Before that intersection on the left, between Smith Street and the canal, was a concrete plant.

Before that was the scrap yard, where eighty-foot dump trucks delivered metal for recycling. One giant grabber machine put scrap from the trucks onto towering mountains of rust, and another giant grabber machine put scrap from the towering mountains of rust into a barge parked in the canal.

I liked those giant grabber machines. If you haven’t seen one, picture a toothy iron dinosaur, and picture it biting piles of metal and spitting it out into a steel barge parked in the Gowanus Canal. Makes a boatload of noise. Some of the workers had painted eyes on the grabbers. At night, the metal monsters chomped scrap into the night. There are lights mounted on the grabbers, so you see the iron dinosaurs’ jaws and pale eyes swinging in and out of illuminated clouds of dust.

I liked to watch the scrap, too. You could sometimes make out what different pieces were, whether an old fuel tank or a car fender or a metal trash can or a bunch of iron fencing.

It’s interesting, even karmic. No, I mean it. Circles within circles, but always circles. People run around in this life making money to buy stuff they throw away, and in the end, a lot of it ends up here only to be ground up and spit out, melted down to make more stuff. I sometimes wonder when I look at my toaster whether it’s made from parts of Pop’s old Dodge Polaris.

I’ll take that a step further. People are made of scraps, of fragmented experiences and emotions all melted together, and there’s a process where we in turn dump bad energies and forge them into something new and positive. Like getting Yvette out of my life, out of my heart, and becoming whole again.

Then there’s the whole death thing. No matter what, you end up being reduced to smaller pieces and being made into something else, even if it is worms.

Circles within circles.

Life is like a scrap yard
. That was my emotional center as I sipped brandy and watched the grabbers devour and gyrate in the dust clouds, eating tattered metal. My mind eventually drifted back to current events:
The cats were gone
.

Like I said, I don’t mind cats, I actually like them, I just don’t want them in my five-hundred-square-foot abode. Cat toys were still dotted around the floors—Gustav would be sorry he forgot those. The kitties, with nothing to amuse themselves, would be extra hard on his furniture.

That gave me a chuckle. This moron who busted up my door and wanted to extort Yvette now had four cats living with him. How’s that for justice?

Yeah, but who was this Gustav? Never heard of him. Then again, Yvette had a pretty haunted past there in Vegas, and maybe more so back in Eastern Europe where she was raised. The longer I knew her, the more ghosts appeared, and not just shady debtors. There were casual references to mobbed-up boyfriends, psychiatrists, probationary hearings, DUIs, and sexual harassment suits. Like I said, I fell in love with her, mostly because she was a stone cold knockout. At the same time, the longer I knew her, the more anxiety I had about her past. Delilah will tell you that certain people have conflicted chakras. What do I think? People with constant trouble are mostly those who make it. Yvette was one of these people. While she was still around, I knew this in my gut, though if you had asked I wouldn’t have said so. When she bolted, there was a note saying basically that she “had trouble coming her way.” I was sort of OK with the exit because I knew in my heart she would always be in trouble, and I didn’t want that in my life even if she was built like a mud flap girl.

On an emotional level, I was very upset when she left, don’t get me wrong. Rationally? It was good to have my closets, kitchen, bathroom, and life back.

Better if she hadn’t stuck me with the cats, of course. She’d always said they were the most important thing to her, so for her to leave them tells you a lot right there. She must have fed Gustav that line, too. How many jerks would kidnap cats? Or is it catnapping?

I had been wrong. The day wasn’t getting worse. It was getting better. I finished my brandy and saluted the monster grabbers. A tall kid with rosy cheeks passed by me and gave me an odd look. I guessed he had never seen anybody commune with a grabber.

Time to head home and take my abode back.

At home, I went to the stereo and put on
Havana, 3 a.m
. I’m just saying, but that’s Perez Prado’s masterpiece, his perfect album. The music is instrumental, from 1956, and nails the Afro-Cuban sound to the wall. To most people it would sound like Latin music, sort of like mambo, and there is some mambo on the album. Blaring brass, rolling congas, barking saxes, and guttural shouts; the music is regal, sexy, and robust. By robust I mean full of life force. I’m not Cuban or Latino or anything, but this music puts me in a really good place, makes me feel anything is possible. It makes me dance inside.

So I danced inside for the next three hours and ate baby carrots while vacuuming fuzz and litter off the rugs. Then I cleaned the floors. Then I rolled the furniture with no less than ten sticky lint rollers. The cat toys filled half a garbage bag, I kid you not. I also used my screw gun to piece the front doorjamb back together. The activity, the work, the dancing centered me. I couldn’t worry about Yvette’s troubles. About this screwball Gustav. About the kitties. I had my own worries. I had my inner dance.

I finished cleaning around one in the morning, drank more brandy than I should have, and watched a talk show until I conked out on the couch. I forgot to eat. Except for the baby carrots. Ate a whole bag.

When I flicked off the tube and stumbled to bed, I noticed something white on the floor by the front door. It wasn’t a toy mouse but the corner of an envelope sticking under my door. On the front was the word yvette. I was too tired and drunk to be concerned about Yvette’s privacy, so I opened it.

I had to use the bathroom’s bright light to realize that it was written in something like Cyrillic script. A letter from Gustav. The guy had the balls to come back while I was cleaning. Maybe it was a more formal threat written in her native language. Not long, just one paragraph. Maybe a love letter. Cute.

I tossed the letter on the table by the door and flicked off the lights.

Even if the day ended on a positive note, the sour ones played through the night. I can’t say I slept.

NEXT MORNING I FOUND A
stranger in my apartment.

When I passed the mirror on the way to the bathroom I saw a guy with a Kirk Douglas chin instead of a Tommy Davin beard. I about had a cardiac. Except for the shoulder-length hair, I looked a lot like Pop at this age.

The screwiness of that morning didn’t end there. Or was it a continuation from the day before?

To get my day off on a better track I put some Cugat on the sound system. He was a character, Xavier. Wore white suits, had a pencil-thin mustache, and carried around a Chihuahua. At some point I think he married Charo, that Latin bombshell you saw on
Laugh-In
or whatever back when I was a kid. Cugat was big after the Second World War, even made it into the movies. I stuck to his instrumental music, and it’s more refined than Perez Prado’s stuff, more elegant, and I wanted to feel a little elegant and in control. Mostly rumbas, cha-chas, like that.

I had to get dressed, and Cugat was helping me get over not only having a naked face but having to pick out a new wardrobe, one that wasn’t exactly elegant but I had to pretend it was and get over it. In clothes different from my usual suits, you know, like Delilah suggested. So I put on chinos, a white oxford shirt, and a rumpled sweater from a bottom drawer. Mom gave me the sweater for Christmas 1996. I remembered because she always gave me a stupid sweater at Christmas, but this was the last one, just before she died. That’s the only reason I hadn’t thrown it out like the others. This one had reindeer on it prancing across my chest with snowflakes. I had to laugh when I stood in front of the mirror. There was the stranger again, but he looked like an English teacher, or somebody from Vermont, either or both on a bad day. My collar-length hair looked funny without the suit and beard. I thought maybe I would drop in on my stylist to get a trim.

Made coffee, ate a slice of toast, and enjoyed the lack of an audience. No cats waiting to be serviced. Which reminded me about Tigsy’s shots for his diabetes. I looked in the fridge.

This Gustav guy even took the insulin and the hypodermics from the crisper drawer. He really knew these cats, alright. I could only imagine how he knew so much about them. It pretty much followed that if he knew the cats real well, he knew Yvette real well. Ex-boyfriend? I had a good little laugh at his expense and returned to my coffee. It figured she’d have some poor schmuck like Gustav in her wake. Exactly the kind of guy she would have creeping around in her past, which was all the more reason to keep her out of my life for good.

Anyway, the missing insulin eased my lingering anxiety about the Fuzz Face Four. Was it up to me to try to contact Yvette somehow, tell her about the catnapping? My masseuse said I was perverse using the word “catnapping” because it means sleeping for a short time, not the abduction of cats. OK, so I’m a little perverse. I think it’s funny, so shoot me. On second thought, don’t.

I was determined that Yvette’s problems remain completely hers. Now that the cats were out of my place, that was more true than ever.

On the coffee bar was my notepad in a slice of sunlight. I wrote down details of projects for work in that leather-bound pad. It was compact, slid into my inside jacket pocket. I would have written down details the little brown prep chefs told me the night before if they’d told me anything I didn’t already know. I slid the pen out of the side of the pad, clicked it, and began writing the day’s priorities.