the saint of desperate situations
A cat sunk its teeth into the flesh of my left calf muscle when I was on month four of unemployment. It was right there in the corner store, next to the trident gum and the bell by the door that announced each visitor. I felt the small sense of control I had left ooze from my body at the hole in my leg the cat left behind. Warm. Sticky. Red. Poisoned with fear and contempt. But more importantly, poisoned with Rabies.
I have always feared animals the same way I fear men. It’s not about the known threat their presence alerts. It’s the weariness of knowing you can’t predict what they’ll do next. They are speaking in a language that I, not only don’t know, but don’t possess the capacity to learn. I like to blame my blind spot for animals on my parents, as they never allowed us to have a pet. However, in truth, it's a piece that I know is missing from me inherently, bestowed on me by God. I get the sense when I meet a dog or cat that they can just tell that I’ve never had one of my own. I see a glint in the animal’s eyes that says, “You don’t get it and you never will.”
Although my parents did not allow for any animals, I did grow up in a house overflowing with young men at all times. And yet, I don’t understand men either. My two older brothers possessed a never-ending carousel of friends who felt like fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth siblings in their own right. In my time living among them and writing various reports of their goings on in my journal, I came away with no firm conclusion. “You don’t get it and you never will.”
I found myself molding into their lifestyles to gain access to their world. Wearing their hand-me-downs, trying to find Family Guy funny, jumping out of windows, and wearing Axe body spray. This undercover operation of my formative years left me with nothing but more resentment than I had had to begin with. I was grasping so hard at something (the inner worlds of men) and still, it slipped away. Still being evaded by understanding, even after having years to live among them, like Jane Goodall and her apes, proved to me that once again, it’s not a connection that could be bridged by circumstance. The ability to tune into the wavelength of men was left out of my brain when they were packaging and folding it up.
I stood stoicly in the aisle of the bodega where they had the boxed mac and cheese and canned soups. Out of the corner of my eye, a little white paw appeared, then a head, then, Minx, the bodega cat, rounded the corner. She regarded me for just a moment, I imagined her thinking, “ah
not a cat person” and then, heading for the frozen section to find someone more suitable to give her attention.
At the counter, with my box of Kraft and Blue Frost Gatorade, I felt something graze my leg. To my surprise, it was Minx, rubbing her back against my calf as she moved back and forth. A hope swelled in me for a moment. Perhaps I could be a cat person. “It’s never too late to change,” I thought. After all, Minx was the one who wanted to say hi. Maybe she knew I was ready. I reached down, gently petting the top of her head. She didn’t seem to mind. I picked up my hand and made the fatal mistake of patting her on the back the way you would a dog (See? A cat person would know that cats don’t like that). Without missing a beat, Minx spun around and sunk her teeth deep into the meat of my shin. I jerked my leg back immediately, trying to free myself from her. Her teeth, still bared, dragged across the surface until I could pull free. She gave me a look that conveyed something as close to a shrug as a cat could get and turned around to walk back down the aisle. I was left with two separate and distinct cuts that made the formation of an 11. It turned red and just a little bit of blood began to push through. I had failed once again.
The man sitting behind the counter didn’t seem particularly disturbed or alert. He muttered something about how she doesn’t usually do stuff like that and pushed my items back across the counter. I heard myself apologizing for some reason, as blood began to trickle down my leg. I gathered my items and scurried away. I started to imagine myself creating a sequel to Metamorphosis, slowly growing tufts of fur. First on the back of my neck, then it would crawl down my arms. Then my hands, with a sudden pain, would shrink into paws with sharp nails jutting out. It wouldn’t be so bad if that did happen because at least then I’d be a cat and wouldn’t have to worry so much about my future and finding a job.
A week and four different shots later, I sat in the offices of my brand-new infectious diseases doctor, George. Based on the decor of his office, George had traveled the world, helping to treat various rare and deadly infectious diseases. From each place, he returned with a small piece of art or photography as his reward. There was one blurry photo of his grandsons standing in front of the Washington Monument. “What an interesting life George has lead,” I thought, as he flooded a syringe with the rabies vaccine. I imagined one of those “reluctant mentor” style movies where George and I become unlikely friends. He teaches me about life, and I teach him about independent filmmaking and how to heal his relationship with his daughter.
“Are those your grandsons?”
“Yes.”
George has no interest in becoming my friend or telling me anything more about his grandchildren. He drives the needle into my arm. I feel it wiggle around in the first few layers of skin before I’m filled once again with the rabies-preventing juice. I wonder if there was a different question I could have asked him to make him talk more. Why is it so bothersome to me when men are monosyllabic? I can’t break even through with my infectious diseases doctor.
A half an hour later, I’m walking at half my normal pace, slugging towards the 6 train. I’m trying my best not to replay the feeling of the needle wiggling around in my skin over and over and over. I think I might faint. I look around for refuge: A coffee shop? A park bench? A particularly clean part of the curb? But no. I’m in front of a church. A Catholic church. My ailment overtook any hesitation I had about crossing the threshold and bursting into flame.
Through the open double doors, it was as if I’d been thrown through a vacuum of space. I had to admit I did love the stained glass. A woman sat alone in the second row, her head hung low and her chin pressed into her collarbone. I slid into the first seat in the back row and watched her for a while, her shoulders only rising up and down with her breath. I caught myself trying to align my breathing with hers. I wanted so badly to feel the way this woman felt. Not in a literal (and Christian) sense. But I wanted to feel so moved by something that I just had to raise my hands above my head. The longer I sat, the more people trickled in. I counted them as they entered and subtracted as they walked out, trying to see how many people were there at any given time on average. The more I played these games, the less I felt that I would pass out. When the number dipped below average, I began to feel something like pity for God. A type of pity I could only akin to what it feels like to watch an actor who was only on a successful sitcom keep talking about that one sitcom for 15 years and then sign autographs for a small line of people at conventions. The pity told me it was time to leave. It told me, “you don’t get it and you never will.” On my way out, I swiped a prayer card from a table. It read:
“ Novena to St. Jude”
Saint of Desperate Situations and Hopeless Cases: Must Be Said 6 Times A Day for 9 Consecutive Days.
YOUR PRAYERS WILL BE ANSWERED
Something compelled me to shove it in my pocket, as I considered myself to be in somewhat of a desperate situation, what with my rabies injections, the insane medical bill that accompanied them, and the growing likelihood that I would have to give up and move home soon if I didn’t get a new job. I imagined myself in my hometown coffee shop, explaining the last shred of myself away to anyone who would listen. I’d say things like, “New York is so overrated, overcrowded, and overpriced” to make people think that it was my choice to leave.
The next day, I lay prone in my room, shrinking deeper into nausea and aching in the aftereffects of my rabies shot. The corners of my room have darkened and stretched out. It’s hard to remember a version of myself that wasn’t unemployed and filled with rabies. Weren’t your twenties supposed to be fun? Was I supposed to be this worried about money and this educated on the history of rabies cases in New York City from 1978 to today? There were only a few records, by the way, one being led by a particularly violent raccoon in Staten Island. The phone rings and there was a man on the other end. It was my friend, inviting me to a last-minute concert. Against my better judgement, I agreed to go because my twenties are supposed to be fun, aren’t they?
Coming up from the subway, I saw my friend. He’s one of the few people I call a friend that is a man. He was waving and gesturing me over, pushing his bright red glasses over the bridge of his nose, annoyed that I had kept him waiting. Men are like cats. You can never tell what will set off their irritations. However, there are very few beings, unknowable or not, that like to be kept waiting. So that one’s on me. I don’t have many male friends because, when men speak to me, I find that I am the rabies-infested cat in the scenario, passing them by, without regard, thinking, “You don’t get it and you never will.”
We entered the dark, humid room of a club, my eyes glossed across the room and quickly realized it was filled with men —Brimming even. In every corner, all the same brand of relentlessly cruel, insufferable young men of Brooklyn, New York. Very few of them had jobs, even less of them paid for their own rent, and they all made being against astrology a large, if not central, edict of their personality. The lights went down. Two men standing at the heterosexually-sacred height of 6 foot 2 inches shoved themselves into a non-existent crevice directly in front of me, forcing me to arch my back so that it wouldn’t touch the shoulders of the man directly behind me. I felt a venomous rage cooking in my stomach. The smallest things make me feel this way these days. Maybe it was a symptom of rabies? The older I get the more I see all the silent layers of the world that men get to weave in and out of that I will never touch. Like when a cat disappears all day and you think you’ve lost it, but it was just hiding between two walls in some place you’d never think of. And it’s not that the cat is smarter than you, but it does fit better into all those little places.
The show begins and the little bit of space between me and all the men begins to compress once again as they push to the front with a confident and gleeful force. I get the feeling that I’m being knocked over ceaselessly by a high tide. Even if I was able to fight against it and make my way to the shore, I’d be dry heaving from swallowing salt water.
I felt my claws growing out from the ridge of my knuckles where the skin is thinnest. I felt myself shrinking down to size, becoming almost unnoticeable and able to weave through the smallest openings, quickly and seamlessly biting each man on their ankles. Their legs would swell and rise to a plateau just as mine had. I wonder if then I would feel better, undisturbed even.
Suddenly, I felt something like seasickness. My stomach made an ungodly noise. A force rushed down through me. I recalled that George had said one of the side effects of the vaccine was diarrhea. The tide of men became a riptide. I had no choice but to throw myself against, pushing, shoving, and grappling through, lest I be moments away from the humiliation of a lifetime. Moments later, locked away in a stall in the gender neutral bathroom where people usually do cocaine, I was shitting my brains out. Any humor I had about the situation faded quickly as I looked to the left and realized I had selected a stall with not even one single square of toilet paper left.
Sometimes it’s hard to define what exactly pushed you over the edge. The eternally referenced, Rock Bottom isn’t a well-defined, physical space. It’s blurry and sometimes hard to recognize when you are truly there. To me, it seemed it was easy enough to say Rock Bottom was right here, in the grime-covered Cocaine Bathroom, having explosive diarrhea, without a square of toiler paper in sight.
I reached into my pocket to take out my phone and, with shame, texted my friend that he was going to have to bring me toilet paper. I found that I, of course, had no service. As I shoved my phone back in my pocket, I felt the soft edge of a piece of paper graze my fingers instead. I pulled out the Novena to Saint Jude. I had not removed it from my pocket. I stared at the card. The card stared back at me.
YOUR PRAYERS WILL BE ANSWERED
I read the sentence over again. This was not the way in which they intended that sentiment to ring so true.
I stepped out of the bathroom ten minutes later, escorting myself back into the room just in time to hear the band’s most popular song. I looked around at all the men who just couldn’t seem to matter to me as much as they had a half hour ago. I was too steeped in my own shame and relief to remember. I flung and thrashed myself around, moving enough to raise my hands at least slightly above my head like the lady in the church. They couldn’t scare me now. I had just wiped my ass with a prayer card.
A couple of weeks later, I had my final rabies injection appointment. I almost felt sad to be leaving George. When would I ever see him again? Maybe I’d contract Listeria from some expired deli meat next time. George told me the good news that the rabies vaccine worked for 2 years but for some people it made them immune for life. He said I wouldn’t know until later if that was true for me — that I’d have to get tested. But for now, if I got attacked by a raccoon in Staten Island or something, I would be invincible. To men, cats, and God alike, I assumed.
Kay Dooner Scinto is a writer, filmmaker, and production freelancer based in Brooklyn, NY. Scinto's writing centers around topics like the body, gender, spirituality, and New York City. Scinto is currently in post production for their film, "Hen House" and their webseries, "Just Be Nice" can be found on Vimeo.