I read that Bad Bunny was born in Bayamón, and that is where I lived as a child. My sister, brother and I all went to Academia San José, which we would walk to each day going down streets that had houses interspersed with abandoned, overgrown fields teaming with wild grasses and shrubs. It was at Academia San José where I sold donuts to raise money for the nuns and their charity. I would eat hot glazed donuts as I walked down the hallway looking to sell them to other students. I remember the nuns, but not really any one of them in particular, just women in habits. I remember the wooden student seats but only vaguely remember what we were learning other than I recall the math seemed to be behind what I had already learned in New Orleans where we had moved from.
What is vivid for me was the walk to school with my brother and sister, where my brother usually had a ball he was playing with and sometimes it would land inside the overgrown fields and one time I went to get it and I saw an iguana crawling out from the grasses. This has been my memory for as long as I could remember.
Scratch that memory, I spoke with my brother, Rafael this morning and it turns out we lived in Villa Caparra Heights, and my sister and I went to Academia San José, but my brother went to Island School. This is all near Bayamón but not in Bayamón. And he said he remembered mom drove us to school but he walked. Anyway, my memories sometimes come pouring in, in phrases, not full sentences. We did walk down the street – Calle Genóva – our street and there were fields of wild grass and iguanas – but these are pieces parts of the narrative that will never be complete as I remember it.
In 2008, I traveled to Puerto Rico for a business perk trip, it was three years after Katrina, it was two years since I divorced, it was one year after I had moved into the LaLa on Bayou St. John. It was on a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, and I had asked my friend Lisa to join me – she lives in California. I didn’t recognize the island, so many tall buildings had been erected, it looked as if the city had had a population and building explosion. It was a very different place from the one of my childhood memory.
I was there with colleagues and had met up with new friends, Ivette, Nancy and Olga, who I had met through a new neighbor and friend back home on Bayou St. John, Jeri Young. My friend Jeri died during a knee operation – it was one of the saddest pieces of news I’ve ever received. Her ex-girlfriend, Ivette, who is from Puerto Rico, and I still lament together her passing.
I give this all as background as to why I named the cat I recently adopted Benito. Bad Bunny’s full name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio and he was born in Bayamón. And I have fallen in love with Bad Bunny because of his great love for Puerto Rico and because of his Superbowl half-time performance and because I believed that I had lived in Bayamón. I’ve also been falling back in love with my heritage and my culture and although I ran from anything that smacked of my complex ancestry, I now look at all of it as a tremendous gift.
In 2016, my dog’s veterinarian posted on Facebook a beautiful Siamese kitten that she said was going to be euthanized because the mother had feline leukemia and had already been euthanized. I immediately googled Feline Leukemia and learned it was possible the test could read positive with only a trace of it in the kitten’s system because of the mother’s milk. It also said there was a possibility for a cat to live a few years even if they did positively have Feline Leukemia.
Tin and I discussed this for a minute – we both had cat attachment issues – my brother Bill has a cat name Little, who never comes out of his room when anyone is over, and Tin had fallen very much in love with Little the times we had visited, and cried when we left both cat and family – and so we decided we would adopt this kitten, and name it Little, and give it the best life possible no matter how long it had to live. I had already become accustomed to adopting geriatric dogs and knew that even a few years meant the world to them (and to me).
Sadly, Little did have feline leukemia – for real, not just traces of it – and he lived for only fourteen months. Enough time to fall madly in love him. During his time with us, he would sit in the window and Tin’s school was next door, and all of the school children and parents would pass and say hi to Little on the daily. As Little grew sicker (unbeknownst to us he was so sick) he became more affectionate, more limp, more malleable, he became more like an accessory and he basically lived in the bathroom sink – when not in the sink, he would drape himself on my neck, on my lap, and even draped himself on a fellow writer’s head in a writer’s group. When Little died – I cried and sobbed. Tin cried. And the entire school inquired about what happened to the cat in the window. We taped a sign up with a photo of Little that said he had passed away. Everyone stopped to read the sign, and they all walked away sad.
Not too many weeks later, there appeared two kittens near my front stoop. I began putting food out for them and water. One kitten disappeared so I was feeding the sole kitten who remained. I was hoping to make friends with him, but I couldn’t get close. One day, I came home, and the kitten was dead in the street having been hit by a car. I sat on the curb and cried so hard I couldn’t get up. My neighbor came out, a big burly guy, and I pointed to the kitten, ugly crying, and asked him to please help me get his body out of the street.
It was then I decided to never, ever adopt a cat again in my life. I think cats and their lives bring out all the grief you have not processed and all the love you have not given and it is too much (for me). So a few weeks later, when there was a hard freeze over a couple of days in New Orleans, and a woman posted a tabby looking cat who had been left out in the freeze – I told myself I’m not caring about that cat and kept scrolling. Then I was haunted by the cat as it got colder outside while we were in a 100-year-old house that could barely keep a temperature of 60 degrees going.
I went back and commented on her post to let me know if the owners didn’t turn up. She posted that she had made a bed with a heating pad on her porch because she had other cats inside that would not get along with this stranger. I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor cat and why he would be outside since he was such a handsome cat. I told her we would “foster” this cat. But by then, she had taken him to her vet, gotten his shots, and found the owner who said they didn’t want him. What? I said, okay I’ll take him. We were not in a financial position to have a cat or any pet or even have a conversation or even to pay her back for her expenses for having done all this for a stranger cat.
She brought the cat over and that is how Lord Chill came to live with us. Oh, how we loved Lord Chill after saying we would never love a cat like we had loved Little. We loved Lord Chill so much, and when we moved to Mississippi later that same year, Lord Chill, Chilly, Chilly Willy Bang Bang, became a country cat, the Hall cat – roaming the area, boxing with foxes, and making friends with the neighborhood cats like Panther and Indie. Chilly became the 100 Men Hall mascot. He was everywhere and he was the PERFECT companion.
Then before his 13th birthday, Chilly was killed by either my neighbor’s pit bull or a coyote. My next door neighbor found him under her house and my friend, Terry, crawled under there and retrieved his body and we buried him. Oh, that was a sad day. That sad day became sad week and now months. And when I would go out of town and come home and there was no Chilly to greet me, I felt bereft of that certain kind of gentle love that Chilly provided. And I swore I would never have a cat again.
I spoke to my therapist about Chilly. I said I just miss him so much. I really had a deep loss heart ache over Chilly. He was such a great cat. My friend, Michelle, created a plaque for Chilly to put in the Hall much like the sign we had made for Little in the window – because everyone loved Little, and everyone also loved Lord Chill. But no more, I was done with that kind of heart ache. No more cats!
And then a friend posted a photo of an orange kitten; I had always been smitten with orange kittens, but never had one. In her post, she said someone come get this kitten. So I DM’d her, what’s wrong with the kitten? She said she had a small house, a large German Shepherd, a large cat, and kids and a husband and no room for another pet in their house. I said, I’ll come look at him to just have a look see.
I walked up to her front door and when it opened, Benito strolled out, then a German Shepherd, then another cat followed. My friend said that the cat had just appeared out of nowhere, someone said it had been living in the barn by her, and no one claimed it but it was so loving and seemed like a cat that had belonged to someone. She had posted all around her neighborhood and no one claimed the cat. I had stopped at Walmart on the way and bought: food, bed, litter box, litter, treats, carrier and on the way home had called my vet to make an appointment to bring him in for shots.
They had an appointment the next day. So we went home. I was going to separate the dogs from the kitten, so that they could smell each other through the doorway to get to know each other. I had put the dogs in the Hall and carried Benito inside in the carrier, but before I could get the door closed between them, Benito strolled out underneath the dogs like nothing. Wow, I stood back, trying to see if when the dogs poked their noses in his face if he would scratch them, hiss, react, but nothing.
Then as I continued with my day, Benito followed me everywhere, draped himself on me, slept nonstop, and in a few hours of this kind of behavior, I began to freak out. I began to suspect that he too, had feline leukemia. And this opened the floodgates – I saw similar behavior to Little – the lethargy, draping of his body when you picked him up or he was near you, the lack of concern of the dogs. I even inspected his gums to see if they were pale and they were! I freaked out. My kitten had feline leukemia! I text my friend and asked if her cat was vaccinated because I suspected this kitten, who had played with her cat, had it.
A friend had asked me to walk that morning but I said I was in Pass Christian doing something and because of the mysteriousness of my response, I later sent her a photo of Benito and said this was what I was doing. She planned to stop by and meet Benito. But soon enough I became convinced that Benito had feline leukemia and would need to be euthanized at some point and I didn’t want my friend to meet this beautiful orange kitten and know he was going to be gone soon. I even started trying not to care about the kitten anymore because I didn’t want to get my heart broken again.
At one point, my critical parent (a term from my Adult Children of Alcoholic’s group) appeared and questioned my deserving a healthy orange cat’s love. Luckily, our last Tuesday ACA meeting was steeped in replacing the critical parent with a loving parent. So I was trying to say you don’t know. You don’t know. The next morning, I woke up and said I might be wrong. I might be wrong. I hope I am wrong. I called my vet and said before any vaccinations are administered, I want to have him tested because I suspected he has feline leukemia. Turns out my vet had run out of tests, they were on order, and they would have to send bloodwork out to a lab and it would take a few days to get results. So I cancelled the appointment and called the Hospital in Diamondhead – they did have tests and could see him at 3PM.
By the time I brought him into the vet, 30 hours after meeting him, I knew he had feline leukemia, I hoped I was wrong, but he had been sleeping nonstop, he draped himself over my lap, foot, head, or any body part that was still, and he rarely opened his squinty eyes. I told the front desk person about my diagnosis. I told the vet tech about my diagnosis. So when the vet walked into the room 20 minutes later and told me the test was negative, I said, What? Wait, what? I was so confused and had already been crying because he would have to be euthanized maybe even that day.
I asked the vet how come Benito behaved the way he did. He weighs nine pounds, he is probably nine months old, he is healthy, and she said, he is an orange cat. A male orange cat. They are the most chill cats in the world. You have yourself a male orange cat, welcome to the club.
I felt a flood of emotions but perhaps the singular feeling was overwhelming love I already had for this cat, this orange cat, this kitten who is now called Benito, or bad kitty, or bonito Benito, who is a ginger like I was when I had hair, who has already claimed my home as his place and we are all good with this updated version of the story. Not necessarily happily ever after, but happily in a better place than 29 hours ago.
Also, one more thing, my brother Rafael said in our rambling memory lane conversation this morning, something not about Puerto Rico, it was that he thinks what attracted my mother to my father was one part my dad’s intellect and the other part was his music.
My father’s music is a topic we will explore at another time because this has indeed followed me into my now life.