Old Willie Boy’s Gone Now- A Black Cat Story

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The rhythm of the life cycle takes strange twists and turns sometimes. Back in the mid-1970s I did a fair amount of freelance research for my old friend from back in high school days in the 1960s, Peter Paul Markin. I gathered true life stories, or some kind of stories anyway, that he would sent on to his writer friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin whom he had met in the later part of the 1960s out in California during the heyday of the summer of love/hippie/communal experiments that flamed out in the early 1970s.

Josh Breslin, whom I would subsequently meet and become friends with, would use these stories, dolled up a bit, for his by-line in the East Bay Eye out in Northern California where he lived at the time.Josh’s idea was to grab stories from people who had been touched by the turmoil of the 1960s, had experienced whatever had been experienced, drugs, communes, music, politics, alternative life styles, stuff along that line and who had not made it back to “real” society after that wave ebbed about 1970. Not psychos and screwballs but people who were left adrift after the ebb, maybe had a drug habit, had been in jail, were some kind of outlaws. He would later do a series based on the same premise around guys who had been to Vietnam and who had not adjusted when coming back to the “real world” and found themselves living as best they could down in the ravines and under the bridges around Los Angeles.

The reason that Markin asked me to help Josh out back then was that he had moved to some Podunk place in Maine to get away from the cities for a minute (he rushed back pretty soon but don’t tell him I told you), not exactly the center of the counter-cultural movement, and did not have access to the kind of stories Josh was looking for. Whereas I had moved to Boston, a center of that movement and a place where there were plenty of people who had been burned out by the 1960s flame. One of the guys that I ran into in Boston back then was Adam Jamison whose story is the subject of this sketch. He had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Nashua, New Hampshire, had gone to school a while (Lowell Tech, now merged into U/Mass-Lowell), had dropped out, and listed as 4-F for draft board purposes (chronic knee problem caused by a serious fall when he was twelve) gone to Boston in 1966 and immersed himself into the budding communal scene there.

As the 1960s turned to the 1970s Adam had developed first a large alcohol problem and then a large cocaine problem. Such problems, or the satisfaction of such needs, led him to small-time larcenies, robberies, and also rip-offs of each and every friend he had ever met by the time I ran into him at the Boston Common one afternoon in early 1976 when he had hustled me for some spare change. From his demeanor, despite his unkempt look, I sensed a story and so I offered him a couple of bucks if he would tell me his story and he agreed. Some of it sounded right but some of it sounded like it was just trade-puffing by some half-bent junkie. I also spent a few weeks talking to him each time I was at the Commons until one day when we were supposed meet to finish up he never showed and I never saw him again.

That story, in any case, is not what concerns me here since I believe that Josh used it in one of his columns, although he does not remember whether he did or not. What does concern me here is that via Facebook this Adam Jamison whom I had not heard from for maybe thirty plus years wanted to tell me a story.

Not a rags-to-riches story because that was not the case, that had not been his fate. Not a victim story all dressed up and ready for pity because he had grown up poor, without much in the way of the world’s goods, with heavy wanting habits, and without any rudder to guide him. Adam had knocked down that idea a while back he said. Not a survival story as such although he did survive, had had his share of life’s up and downs like the rest of us, a couple of failed marriages and one that lasted, will last to eternity he said, had a couple of kids whom he was able to keep on the straight and narrow, had gone back to school and got catch up early on in the high tech computer wave, got himself and his a nice little house in the leafy suburbs and had recently retired with a reasonable pension and an okay 401k account. Oh, and lived some days on the edge, the edge of a cocaine meltdown. All except the last not worthy of any ink, not worthy of the ink spilled back forty years ago when his generation’s ebb was newsworthy. What had him agitated was about how cats, particularly black cats, had saved his bacon after I had lost contact with him. Here is the way he told it to me, a little dolled up, when we met at a restaurant, Not Your Average Joe’s, up in Newburyport one sunny afternoon a few weeks back:

He, Adam Jamison, had long been disheveled in appearance by the time he decided to dry out that time, that time in late 1976, although it could have been late 1970, ‘72, or ’74, in all cases long after the summer of love wave to give it a name that he had used to describe the experience of the 1960s to anybody who would listen [including me] that had hovered over the land and which he had been caught up in ran its course. There he was in raggedy second -hand faded chino pants, a too large short-sleeved checkered shirt also faded and floppy shoes, brown, all picked up off the rack at the Salvation Army Store over in Cambridge, and needing a shave and a haircut badly. The drying out this time, by the way unlike say 1970 when it was from booze, was from a bout with cousin, you know, sweet, sweet cocaine. As he sat in a chair in the waiting room, waiting to be processed into the shelter, which shall remain nameless since he has been long past needing those kind of services, where he would be staying to recuperate, to get well, that time, he looked out the open filmy window of the back alley when he spied a black cat, a black cat that looked to be like himself homeless and in need of some help.

Adam had chuckled to himself that here was another waif in the world trying to make do with what had been dealt. Scrounging for whatever it could to survive another day in the mean urban streets. He was partial to waifs ever since he walked away from his home, his home town and his home town interests in order to search for what he described as the search for… The “search for” aided and abetted by the 1960s summer of love frame that had hovered over the land and that he had wanted in on. So out of some sense of romance, or hubris, he always considered himself a waif, a loner in this wicked old world. He would seek out such types as well for female companionship, seeing kindred. And more often than not he would find one to share his time.

[He went on endlessly about all the ”chicks,” lost soul chicks he called them that he had run through in good days and bad and how many he had ripped off, ripped off to feed his various habits of the day and show not an ounce of remorse. I could see where he had a certain rough charm that would appeal to lonely women, for a while, although the waif part seemed just some romantic self-aggrandizement.]

But all of that was past, had all turned to dust since Adam from old sturdy New England stock up in the river towns of New Hampshire had inherited some bad genes that had caused him to spit up everything that mattered to him once he got his wanting habits on, wanting something for nothing habits. So he ran through women, through friends, through 1970 booze, through 1972 booze, through 1974 cocaine and then 1976 cousin again. And so that waif thing, that free spirit spitting on what he called bourgeois society wore pretty thin by the time he sat in that barren waiting room looking out of that murky window at that fellow waif black cat.

That cat, black cat suggesting witches’ delights and evil, that damned black cat, triggered thoughts in Adam just then of cats he had raised as a kid. He had to laugh about the first cat back in the mid-1950s he was not sure of the date, but not black he was sure, not by a long shot but white and gray, a cat they had named Smokey as a result of that coloring combination, who had terrified he and his two brothers the first night after being brought home from the animal shelter. Smokey had been carried in a small box, maybe a shoe box, over to their grandmother’s house where they had been staying over Christmas vacation and that night letting him out of the box he had jumped around, jumped around like kittens will do. They, at wit’s end, tried to get him back in the box but to no avail. What did they know of cat behavior though and in their fright they, taking turns, had guarded against Smokey getting on the bed and doing who knows what to them. By dawn’s early light they realized that Smokey was just a gentle playful kitten.

And so it started, the cat thing started. Later after his family had moved across town with Smokey they had adopted a pregnant stray cat, black, who begat her litter in their basement and for many seasons until he reached manhood and left home (or was thrown out depending on whose version of the story you wanted to believe) to seek the great American night various generations of cats were hither and yon around the house, the most memorable one, the one he was attached to was a frail black cat named Sorrowful who died young after producing several litters of kittens. Those thoughts, those reflections back to sunnier days though were suddenly cut short by a rush feeling that he needed a line or two of cousin to get well, needed it kind of bad. That feeling passed, a little, since there was nothing he could do about it just then, penniless and sitting in a detox center.

[When I asked him why the family did not get the cats neutered to spare the endless turmoil of litter after litter of cats Adam said they were poor, poor as church mice, and so things like neutering or going to the vet were out. He also remembered that his mother had argued in a Christian Science kind of way that one should let pets follow nature’s course set for them unaided by whatever science had come up with by that point.]

Once he was given a bed, a bed in a room that was on the same side of the building as that first day waiting room he would look out his equally filmy open window, looking for something, looking for that waif black cat as it turned out. One day he spied her, knowing that her was the right gender since she was showing her pregnant condition, something he knew from kid times around his home. He saved some milk from lunch for several days hoping that he would see her again. One day she showed up just underneath that open bedroom window, open since the room was too stuffy closed with the excessive heat from the overhead pipes that ran through the room, and he placed his opened carton of milk before her. She lapped it up quickly and left that way as well. Next day she showed again, same thing. This went on for a few more days until one day she jumped up onto the window sill meowing like crazy. She wanted to be petted. And so Adam Jamison entered the world of cats again.

She would come back daily sometimes for a while and sometimes if the window was open would jump the window sill and lay down on a cushion Adam had found. Given her condition he named her Mums and when she had her litter he took charge of getting them to the Animal Rescue League Center to hopefully be adopted. Later after the appropriate wait he had her neutered. A few months later after Adam checked out of the shelter Mums went with him to the half-way house that was to be the start of his new life.

Mums would stay with Adam through thick and thin the next nineteen years. Through another bout with cousin cocaine a couple of years later and through his last drying out. One day having snorted one too many lines, sitting on a rooming house bed wondering where he would get the dough for another eight- ball since he once again had run through and ripped off whatever new series of friends he have developed since that shelter time in 1976, Mums had sat across from him on the bed. As he looked in her direction she gave him a look that he took for pure contempt like she was ready to forsake him too. He stopped that day cold, although it was a close thing, would always be a close thing.

She stayed with him through his finding a real fellow waif woman who would not take his nonsense and who loved Mums as well. Stayed with him through some bad mental depression times, through changes in housing, through no money times, through having dough times so he could get her veterinary help as she aged (no mother Christian Scientist he), through ups and down until she passed away of old age and weariness. She rests in her last home, Adam’s current home up in Amesbury, out in the back yard where he still looks out the window at her grave.

The passing of Mums left a hole in Adam’s heart. He could not shake the feeling that Mums had been his lucky charm and without her he again had the itch for some cousin, for reaching for that high white note again. That despite that waif love and two kids to feed and support as well as that eternal mortgage around his neck in order to stay in the leafy suburbs. The feeling passed maybe out of some remembrance of Mums’ scorn, although it was a close thing. Instead he went to an animal shelter to find another, well what do you think, black cat, a cat that he, they, would name Willie Boy.

For the next fifteen years Willie Boy got him through some hard times, another bout of no dough times, some waif woman problems hard times, some thinking about mortality times, and some good times too. This Willie Boy would keep the household laughing with his constant desire for attention, with his patented whining, with his being everywhere there was something to get in trouble over. Mainly though it was that he was Adam’s shadow when he was in the house, a boon companion once the kids left. Willie Boy had died recently of medical complications which helped explain Adam’s desire to tell his story. Willie Boy too is buried out in that back yard. “Yes, old Willie Boy is gone now” Adam said with a lump in his throat as we finished up our talk. He too had been a lucky charm.