“It’s hard to imagine you among the vegetables.” — Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000

Maybe it was actually Rocky and Bullwinkle, or possibly the Melvins song, but in my fantasy Boris-the-Cat was an homage to Boris-the-Band, sans irony, as opposed to his housecat-mate, the gregarious orange tabby Lee Majors, who was a sweetly funny index for the Other in a house of skinny straight edge punks.  Siblings perhaps, both cats were unusually large, more like stout little dogs in stature, really, than domestic felines. Years later, Lee Majors would live in a house occupied by my boyfriend at the time, and I would discover he was also friendly like a dog, and had a death wish for getting outside despite the little tray of indoor kitty grass his owner maintained, and that all of the boys and their girlfriends dutifully kept watch over his flights of fancy, and even more years later I would move a buddy into the room upstairs from where Boris had lived in the Square House, as it was once called, or I guess he might have lived upstairs for all I really know. Cats and other lives stretching out legacies of the occupants of a place to which, in its moment, I wouldn’t have had any real access, and so the conversation I might have had with Becky, a girl with short, bright red hair that I decided was natural–perhaps an employee at the burrito place where everyone seemed to work, or maybe at the pizza place where anyone else, even the junkies, kept jobs–about how this cat had come to be known as Boris, simply never happened. 

I said, I’m making a casket spray. And you, seemingly never serious, said “great band name.” Band names. Maybe that’s why I never warmed up to Boris’s keepers, and they never warmed to me. Passing by on the sidewalk every day, quietly watchful as they spray painted through the little cardboard screen onto the album jackets out on their massive, dilapidated wraparound front porch, the name of their band, another irony that happened to be the name of the town, 45 minutes east where, unlike any of the bandmembers, I’d actually grown up.  In Florida everyone is from someplace awful, but Palatka is a genuine shithole.  Locals slur the name in two syllables (“Plah-Kuh”), everyone else with three (“Puh-lat-kuh”). Originally it had five: “During the late eighteenth century, remnants of Creek and other tribes made their way to Florida. In a process of ethnogenesis, the Seminole tribe was formed. They called the location Pilo-taikita, meaning “crossing over” or “cows’ crossing”. Crossover. The name of the town I grew up in is a Native American word for crossover. 

Take a sort of Barry Hannah nightmare of race relations, then add strip malls, VBS, Wal-Mart, and all of the other filth of which one born in the 1970s gets to claim first generation status, and you’ll have the Puh-lat-kuh most people experience.  Paper mills and, to even continue this list dredges up such a bittersweet setting that sitting here in my tidy Williamsburg apartment I can’t really go on, which maybe sounds precious and bourgeois, but it’s really just that I guess I was never clever enough to establish protective ironic distance from any of it. A space my neighbors who, never having actually lived there, were able to inhabit.