However, Tony is still alive, I discovered last year [1974]. My cat had begun to behave in an odd way, keeping watch over me in a quiet fashion, and I saw that he had changed. This was after he ran away and returned, wild and dirty, crapping on the rug in fear; we took him to the vet and the vet calmed him down and healed him. After that, Pinky had what I call a spiritual quality, except that he wouldn’t eat meat. He would tremble whenever we tried to feed it to him. For five months he’d been lost, living in the gutter, seeing God knows what; I wish I knew. Anyhow, after he was changed — in the twinkling of an eye; that is, while at the vet’s — he wouldn’t ever do anything cruel. Yet I knew Pinky was afraid, because once I almost shut the refrigerator door on him and he did a three-cushion bank shot of himself off the walls to escape, and clocked a velocity unique for a pink sheeplike thing that usually just sat and gazed ahead. Pinky had trouble breathing because of his heavy fur and what they call hairballs. Tony had asthma terribly and needed it cold. Pinky would sit by the door to get the cold air from under the crack, and struggle to breathe. I will not write a teaser article here; Pinky died of cancer suddenly; he was three years old, very young for a cat. It was totally unexpected. The vet diagnosed it as something else, which could be cured.
I hadn’t realized Pinky was Tony Boucher, out of love served up by the universe again, until I had this dream about Tony the Tiger, the cereal box character who offers you Sugar Frosted Flakes. In my dream I stood at one end of a light-struck glade, and at the other a great tiger came out slowly, with delight, and I knew we were together again. Tony the Tiger and me. My joy was unbounded. When I woke up I tried to think who I knew named Tony. I had other strange experiences after Pinky died. I dreamed about a “Mrs. Donlevy,” who was incredibly tall — I could see only her feet and ankles — and she was serving me a plate of milk on the back porch and there was a vacant lot where I could roam at will, forever. It was the Elysian Vacant Lot, which the Greeks believed in, just my size. Also, the day Pinky died, at the vet’s, that evening as I stood in the bathroom I felt my wife put her hand on my shoulder, firmly, to console me. Turning, I saw no one. I also dreamed this dream: I had the album notes for Don Pasquale and at the end the conductor had added a note: five strings of catgut like a cat’s cradle, like a musical stave. It was a final hello from Pinky, who was Tony Boucher; in the dream the album was an old 78 one, a rare classic, a favorite of Tony’s.
Tony or Pinky, I guess names don’t count, was a lousy hunter all his life. One time he caught a gopher and ran up our apartment stairs with it. He placed it in his dish, where he was fed, because that was orderly, and of course the gopher got up at once and ran off. Tony felt that things belonged in their places, being an obsessively tidy person, his enormous collection of books and records was arranged the same way — each object in its proper place, and a proper place for each object. He should have tolerated more chaos in the universe. However, he recaught the gopher and ate it, all except the teeth.
Tony, or Pinky, was my guide; he taught me to write, and he stayed with me when I was sick back in 1972 and 1973, lying beside me day after day. That’s why my wife, Tessa, brought him over, because I had pneumonia and needed help and we had no money for a doctor. (I think now in that regard I lucked out; he would have told me I had a bruised rib.) When the pain was really bad, Pinky used to lie on my body until I realized that he was trying to figure out which part of me was sick. He knew it was just one part, around the middle of my body. He did his best and I recovered but he did not. That was my friend.
Most cats fear the clattering arrival of the garbagemen each week, but Pinky detested them. Under our bed fixed, set eyes, but no Pinky was visible. Just the eyes, waiting for the bastards to go.
Four nights before Pinky unexpectedly died, before we knew he had cancer — I started to say, before he had been diagnosed as having a bruised rib — he and Tessa and I, as was our custom, were lying on the big bed, and I saw a uniform pale white light slowly fill the room. I thought the angel of death had come for me and I began praying in Latin: “Tremens factus sum ego, et timeo,” and so forth. Tessa gritted her teeth, but Pinky sat there, front feet tucked under him, impassive. I knew there was no place to hide, like under the bed. Every child knows that. And it looks bad.
It never occurred to me that death was arriving for anyone but me, which shows my attitude. I saw us all as painted ducks, on a painted sea, and thought of the thirteenth-century Arabic poem about “Once he will miss, twice he will miss. All the world’s one level plain for him on which he hunts for flowers.” We were as conspicuous as — well, anyhow, finally I gave up praying, but I remember in particular I kept crying out, “Mors stupebit et natura,” which I thought meant that death stood stupefied, as if in surprise (as in, “I was stupefied to learn that my car had been towed away.” It means just standing there impotently. That maybe is not what Merriam-Webster 3 says, but it is what I say).
Pinky never noticed the pale white light; as was his custom he seemed awake, but dozing. I think he was humming to himself. Later when I slept, toward morning, I dreamed a disturbing dream: The report of a gun fired close to my ear: a dreadful shotgun blast, and when I looked I saw a woman lying dying. I went for aid, but got on to one of those electric trolley buses by mistake, along with three Gestapo agents (I dream that a lot). We rode around forever while I tried vainly to short-circuit the power cables of the bus or trolley car, whatever it was — no luck. The Gestapo agents remained confident in that smug way they have and read newspapers and smoked. They knew they had me.
“The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer” (1976)
I would like to speak to my friends, here, to let them know that (1) all the dreadful things they have heard have befallen me have indeed befallen me, and (2) I am fine anyhow. In February I had a heart attack. The paramedics came — I was alone in the house at the time — and it was just like a scene in the TV program Emergency. They arrived two minutes after I phoned them, and pretty soon they were monitoring my vital life signs, and then it was to the county hospital to the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit. I hovered between life and death, telling jokes and falling in love with one nurse named Beth, who always wore pink.
But I write this to say that I recovered completely, until I saw the bill for $2,000 anyhow, which brings up the point that it was to the county hospital that I was taken; I didn’t have any money, and none of the other Orange County hospitals would accept me. My view here is, Thank God for a hospital that will take you if you’re broke, asking no questions, just saving your life and billing you later. But. . .
When I was sprung eleven days later I had forty cents, no more. Some food at home in the freezer. My total income for that month was nine dollars. March was no better, and by mid-April they were going to shut off the utilities. Every phone call was someone wanting money. My agent, God bless him, loaned me money, and here is where I want to say something that at the time didn’t affect my head, but that when I told it later to a dude, he got really funny and said, “That sums up the situation of the artist better than I’ve ever heard it summed up before.” There was a French royalty check on its way by mail from Paris to my agent, and I phoned, desperately, to see if it had arrived yet, since much of it was to go to me. The check arrived, the previous day. My agent could hear the fear in my voice, the shaking; I was three months overdue in my child support payments — and he said, in an oddly soft voice, “You know, Phil, you are one of the most respected writers in the world.” I barely listened; all I knew was that I wouldn’t be spending thirty days in Orange County jail for nonsupport, as Jim Croce says in one of his songs.