Old Cat of the Sea and uninitiated stranger
If it had only been grapefruit, I might have missed the lesson, but I could never have overlooked another interesting facet of Johnson’s many-faceted character.
He liked to swim in the ocean.
I mean, all the evidence so indicated. It may have been because he was gregarious. It may have been that he didn’t want to miss out on anything that looked interesting. That last possibility, too, has stayed with me all my life and I choose to believe that was Johnson’s reason for plunging into the surf whenever we did so.
Now, a cat swimming is not a pleasant object. No matter how high his degree of enjoyment, he still looks as if he is strangling. Eyes pop with a wild hysterical bulge; teeth grit under lips that gape back to his armpits; ears flatten back until he seems more like a hairy strangulated moray eel caught in a wringer than he does anything remotely feline. Cats also swim low in the water with just their gaping jaws and popping, evil, frightening eyes visible, leaving a slippery oily wake of gull feathers and grapefruit seeds.
Actually, Johnson must have thought his expression to be benign and friendly, and, to be sure, he purred reassuringly as he approached a swimmer. His purr, however, was underwater and the resultant sloshing and gurgling only enhanced the picture of a strangling creature spewed up from the Great Barrier Reef.
In those days, swimming suits for both sexes had partly covered shoulders, somewhat like a middy blouse, so when Johnson tired, his roost while at sea was the nearest shoulder—family, if available; stranger if need be. Strangers, he found, must be approached from the rear, since a frontal approach always resulted in hysteria. Johnson disliked emotional turmoil of any kind, yet he never quite learned that climbing on a stranger’s shoulder, even from the rear, was bound to have eruptive consequences.
Johnson with sister Dorothy and brother Charles, who obstructs a clear view of Johnson’s notorious brick cat house, Balboa, California, 1918
When people came staggering spastically out of the surf at Balboa beach, every nerve string jangling a chorus of gibbering fright, mouths sputtering in monosyllabic incoherence, we knew that Johnson had approached them.
Occasionally Johnson, with his grapefruit helmet stuck firmly on his head, would wander drunkenly down the beach picking up tar, bits of dead sea gulls, and, on one notable occasion, bumping blindly into a picnic of YWCA girls. These young ladies did not recognize Johnson as a cat in his space helmet. They fled panic-stricken into the surf and Johnson went in after them. The YWCA did not come back to Balboa again.
One day I had the misfortune to fall off the back porch and into the brick shelter we had built for Johnson. Three things resulted from this entirely innocent accident. My mother, horrified when she saw me holding my oddly limp right arm, called the doctor, who came over and set a broken bone. “Greenstick fracture,” the doctor said to my proud ears.
When my father came home that night, he asked my mother what had “happened to Charles.” When he found out, he took me on a long round of his favorite saloons, filling himself with whiskey, me with sarsaparilla, and boasting to everyone in sight that, at the tender age of seven, his son had broken his arm falling in a cat house.
The third thing that happened was that the following morning we discovered paw prints in the sand leading away from this semi-demolished cat house out over the wet sand to the sea. Perhaps that was where Johnson came from in the first place.
Johnson was indeed a cat for all seasons and all fortunes and I was generously allowed to share one summer season with him. I like to think that if I had not fallen on his house, breaking my arm and his contemplation, he might be with me yet. Perhaps not. But I am sure that on some grapefruit ranch by some distant sea, Johnson lives on. Although he wore a cat uniform, he contemptuously disdained all forms of feline behavior—an immortal, surely; an individual absolutely.
Strange when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
—MAX BEERBOHM
A dear uncle told me once, when I was deep in despair at some injustice by some bureaucrat, scholastic or familial, “Chuck, they can kill you, but they’re not allowed to eat you.” Exactly why this statement has since stood as the cornerpost of my determination to live my life as a life and not as an apology, only Ralph Waldo Emerson could have explained. And I hadn’t read much Emerson when I was eleven.
Uncle Lynn. The perfect uncle. The ne-plus-ultra uncle. Even his name was, and is, perfect. It never was Uncle Lynn, of course; it was Unclynn. Dogs and boys loved and trusted him. He thought like a boy, or a dog, and he was of adult size, which we were not, and could implement such thought with action. His fancies were those of a dog, or a boy, and he never questioned those impulses. If a mule-drawn dump cart passed, full high with moist red earth, he immediately engaged in comparing notes with the driver. He was always able to compare notes with anyone, human or animal. He always had something in common with every dog, cat, turtle, sea gull,
