Noisy Balloonist Blog is the apprentice

For many years my next door neighbor was a twig-like old woman who collected garbage and never spoke. She lived on investment income and the landlord hinted she was fabulously wealthy. Occasionally her mail found its way to my box my mistake—there were thick packets of financial documents. We shared a kitchen wall and patio fence. Her side was a snarl of potted plants and trees with barely room to step. She crept out at night to water them. As best I could determine, her companions were cockroaches and a radio she never switched off. The roaches raided my kitchen through gaps in the plaster, where their corpses piled up in the silverware drawer. Sometimes I put a glass to the wall and pressed my ear against it to decipher the buzz from the radio.

The woman (I forget her name; let’s call her Ruth) had lived next door for decades. She didn’t sleep. Her metabolic baseline was so low she required only brief periods of hibernation; sometimes, through the porch glass, I glimpsed her in stasis by the radio, shrunken and still. Ruth operated a one-woman salvage operation, pushing a grocery cart from alley to alley, sifting through rubbish bins and claiming things she liked. She would return in the afternoon, park the cart at the curb and transfer the day’s take, piece by piece, into her apartment. Sometimes there was a night run. She wore the same clothes every day: drab skirt, stockings the color of dishwater, shabby navy down jacket and a shapeless hat that hid her face. The only person I ever saw her speak to was a wizened security guard at the Barrington Vons. He was reedy and tall and looked like the faintest puff of wind would blow him to powder—I don’t know what he was securing in his condition. I wondered what history he shared with the old woman. Under the circumstances it was easy to dismiss Ruth as senile, and that’s what I did. She was a shade. I was afraid to speak to her.

I was on my porch one evening when she spoke to me. She passed by and remarked, without acknowledging our years of mutual silence, “That’s a very special cat.” She motioned to Caliban, who was perched on the cat tower just inside the apartment. I saw her face clearly for the first time. It was sodden and blotchy, like wet cardboard. She looked desperately old, but her eyes were shining.

“I know,” I replied, trying to appear nonplussed. “Thank you.”

“I’ve known a lot of cats. I know cats,” she continued, “and that’s a very special cat; I can tell. What’s his name?”

“Caliban,” I said, in a mild fugue. “It’s from a Shakespeare play.” Despite her shriveled appearance and central-casting bag lady persona, Ruth was perfectly lucid. Ruth was staring through me like a benevolent wizard. Ruth was oracular. Inside her shrouds hid a clairvoyant soul. I was instantly ashamed of the assumptions I’d made.

“Oh, Caliban, is that right?” She nodded. “Well he’s a smart cat. I bet he takes good care of you. Do you take good care of him?”

Caliban listened. “Well I love him,” I said. “I’ve had him since he was a tiny kitten.”

“That’s good.” She smiled. “Take care of him. You have a very special cat. I can tell by his eyes.” She repeated: “I can tell by his eyes,” and walked away.

I spoke to her only once more after this encounter, about a discarded TV in the alley behind the building. Years past, interest compounded, roaches expired in the salad spinner and Ruth accumulated more stuff. I speculated about the condition of her apartment. One morning in 2007 there was a rap on her door and a sheriff’s deputy announced himself. Ruth was being evicted. She wasn’t home; I’d seen her plod by my window around dawn. She knew it was eviction day, and after painstakingly archiving the detritus of the city for more than 20 years, she walked away from her work with nothing but the clothes on her back. That is a literal statement. She betrayed no sentiment, and she never returned.

It took men two weeks to empty her unit. The landlord was a little cagey about why Ruth was kicked out, but he explained he had offered to help her clean. He had offered to help her find a new apartment. She refused all assistance. My landlord is a Los Angeles impossibility—honest and responsible—so I believe him. He seemed as bewildered as me. I googled her name and found nothing. I sifted through some of the garbage that had been removed from her place in an attempt to decode its value. It felt strangely voyeuristic. How had she managed to fill two bedrooms with stuff, like someone bricking in a tomb, and then casually abandon it? How did precious things become meaningless overnight? I was interpreting Ruth’s collection as a personal monument, but maybe she knew it was crap all along, and that someday it would wind up back in the dumpsters from whence it came. I haven’t seen Ruth since.

Rest in peace Goldie. December 24, 2008.

Oh jubilation, oh secret shame, oh glorious time-waster! Caliban has cuted his way to to the apex of the lolcat ladder! He’s at the top of the I Can Has Cheezburger homepage for the moment, but he’ll be immortalized here forever. Note that the cat is mine; the caption is not. My original offering was eevesdroppin kitteh heres u doing it.

I finally relented and read The Da Vinci Code. Less of a novel than a Swiss watch, so meticulously is it engineered to generate page-turns. Well shit; it works. Much to Dan Brown’s credit, I smoked its 454 pages in a single (more or less) marathon 24-hour session. Thus with thoughts of secret societies, sacred rites, and all manner of cryptic historical ephemera still pinwheeling through my brain, let’s say this entry is less about Caliban himself than his ever-widening cabal. The birds are sénéchaux to his Grand Master.

Introducing Caliban’s new avian accomplices, on loan from the Lightbearer Zoological Society. That’s right— I’m harboring Texans. Goldie’s in yellow, demure and accommodating. The lad in green is Zelda, named after the famous princess when his gender was still open to interpretation. He is quite talkative and prone to dramatic excess. As I have often insisted, Caliban lusts only for human blood; he and the birds get along fine. Which is more than I can say for that rogue kitty that stalks my front porch.