Banzai Suite, Part 3:
Three Blankets

5 August 2001—There is a photo of Banzai, taken when he was maybe a year old, in which he is laughing. I don’t have the photo anymore; an ex of mine took it with her when she went off to law school, and I never saw it again. But I will always remember the photo: in it he is laying on his back, on top of my bed. Under and around him are the folds of a blanket I had when I was growing up in Los Angeles. The photo is black and white, but the blanket was vibrant, golden yellow, made from heavy wool that made you feel enveloped in warmth. Banzai loved to curl up in it. He was so sleepy that day that I was able to roll him onto his back, and he just stayed like that. His paws kneaded the air, one at a time, and he let out a huge toothy yawn every thirty seconds. I got my camera and positioned myself above him, and with his paws just so, and in the full expanse of his yawn, I released the shutter. When the photo came out it looked like he had thrown his paws back and was having the best laugh of his life.

On my twenty-fourth birthday, roughly eight years later, I was on Interstate 5 in my parents’ six-wheel truck, riding shotgun as my stepfather drove us north to Emeryville. I was reading Like Water for Chocolate. He was on his way to Oregon to have work done on the trailer that we were towing.

Between me and my stepfather were Kitty and Banzai, who were coming to live with me. They took turns moaning low, plaintive sounds. My folks had sold the old house in Los Angeles and were going out on the road full-time, and my mom had had horrible dreams related to her fear about giving Banzai, her darling, to a stranger. She begged me to take him in, and I couldn’t take him without also taking Kitty (who hated Banzai so much she had pretty much gone to live with the neighbors, but they didn’t want full custody of her), and so we all climbed in the truck and headed for their new home. I felt for the cats: I didn’t want to lose that house either, though I never planned on living in Los Angeles again. It was the place where all three of us grew up.

The consolation prize for losing the house was one of the big reading chairs that used to occupy two corners of the living room. It was a cream-colored leather recliner, a sort of sleek, almost futuristic design, at least futuristic in a late-seventies sense; it didn’t look all that different from the command chair in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” It was strapped to the box that spanned the truck bed just behind the cab, tied town with rope, with a blanket underneath to prevent the box from being scratched. This blanket was unbeloved, midnight blue and quasi-quilted on one side, white and rough on the other, made of thin cotton and in a bizarre shape that I never could figure out, a very long rectangle but with no discernible corners, and it never did cover me very well, but still, it too was a reminder of a home that was now gone.

Just over the Grapevine, about twenty miles into the flat expanse of the Central Valley, we heard a whipcrack and then a violent rattling. We pulled the truck and trailer over to the shoulder to check it out, and we saw that the rope had snapped in one place, and the blanket had vanished. All that was left were wisps of cotton on the road behind us. I couldn’t see the blanket at all.

We retied the rope and put an old towel underneath the chair. The towel wasn’t quite large enough, but it would do, and we set off again. There was still rattling, so we pulled over again but couldn’t find anything wrong. As we drove again, I peeked my head out the back window of the cab to hear where the sound was coming from. It sounded like it was down below, and I could see little wisps in the crack between the cab and the bed. We pulled over and I crawled under the truck, and there, underneath, was the old blanket. Somehow it had gotten sucked down that crack and twisted irredeemably around the drivetrain of the truck. There was no amount of tugging and pulling that would free it, and armed with only a flashlight, a steak knife and shears, as the sun began to set and eighteen-wheelers rumbled by barely fifteen feet away, I slowly began to snip away at the old blanket. Little pieces fell away one by one until, an hour later, I had cut the thing to bits and freed the truck from the spread’s desperate clutch. Perhaps it didn’t want to leave the house either. Back in the cab Kitty and Banzai were still moaning every so often.

In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita, the heroine, was crocheting a bedspread over the course of a year, in anticipation of her marriage to Pedro. I thought it was ironic that as she was essentially making a home by creating a bedspread, I was letting go of mine by destroying one.*

Kitty was never at home here, passing away the next year, but Banzai had a remarkable ability to adapt, if you don’t count the three weeks he went missing at the beginning of his stay here. He loved this house. He made friends with almost everyone who came over. It was home.

In his final weeks, Banzai took up refuge in my closet, curling up on a soft baby-blue cotton blanket that had also come from my bed in the Los Angeles house. I had taken it with me when I went to college, but it was relegated to the closet as it fit a twin size bed, which I haven’t slept on in many years. He looked comfortable sleeping on it. Happy, maybe. It became his blanket, and I put it in the carrier whenever he had to go to the vet, which was often in the last weeks.

I wanted him to have it when he passed away, but it wouldn’t all fit, so I got out the old shears and cut out a piece of it for him to lay on. At least this time it was being cut up so that he could take a piece of both homes with him on his next journey. He was curled up on it, not laughing anymore, but he was at peace again.

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