The Alley
Porkchpo
When I moved back to New York City in 2014, I did it for the woman who would become my wife. Before meeting her, I’d sworn off urban living after trying it for three years as a law student downtown at NYU forever changed by my first year, which coincided with 9/11. I left New York for Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love rolled out a red carpet of roaches. “That’s the price of city living,” was the luxury high-rise exterminator’s shrug of a reply. It was a price higher than I was willing to pay.
I happily returned to Princeton, New Jersey where I’d spent my undergraduate years and where my college girlfriend still lived. But not for long. Soon, she went out West and the relationship went bust. Through it all, my love for Princeton never waned. I stayed behind taking bike rides through tree-lined neighborhoods and jogging through a campus so bucolic it felt like a utopian dreamscape. But even Princeton was no match for the arrow of OKCupid; the online dating site where I would meet my future wife.
My wife loves the City.
When we met, she was still making peace with leaving Manhattan for Brooklyn. I saw little meaningful difference between the two boroughs, even though we lived on a tree-lined street, blocks away from Prospect Park. We were the lucky ones. I could admit that on my best days.
In the beginning, my best days were few and far between as I found myself commuting by subway into midtown; stuck in the crush of commuters - human and rodent alike. The roaches came out once in a while just to remind me that even though we lived in a cushy townhouse apartment, we couldn’t ever truly escape them.
There was one animal who made New York better.
Harriet.
My wife’s cat; who on our first date, came out of hiding to look me over. She took her time. When her inspection was over, she turned on her paw and left the room. I had passed.
I think.
Once I moved in, Harriet became my tutor for surviving city life. Harriet was a survivor herself. Before joining up with my wife in 2008, she had lived in the Bronx. Her adoption papers have her listed as Altonio, a male. I’m guessing Harriet kept her claws out to prevent a close inspection.
By the time I met her, she’d lived with my wife in a variety of New York neighborhoods from the West Village to the Lower East Side. Prospect Heights was just another stop along the way. She spent most of the first year I lived with her on an area rug in the kitchen, strategically positioned between the refrigerator and her food dish. She graciously accepted my offerings of cardboard to bat around, bites of fried chicken from the local joint, and a backpack.
The latter wasn’t really an offering so much as a surrender. I’d find Harriet snoozing on it in my office and found the lint roller was no match for her soft silken fur.
On the weekends, Harriet and I spent a lot of time together as my wife painted in her studio, facing deadline after deadline. Saturday mornings, we’d lay out on the couch catching up on the television we’d missed during the week.
As Hilary and I readied to gut renovate a new apartment a mere two blocks away, we made sure to note the features that would appeal to Harriet, including a big picture window with an unobstructed view of the gardens (and cats) below.
Somewhere along the way, Harriet started to figure into my short stories. Meditative scribbles to help me tune out the subway noise and smells on my way to and from work.
In my fiction, she resumed her life as Altonio (but still a female, albeit with a male name), a street cat adjusting to life as a pampered housecat. Just as ennui was setting in, a little girl who was a sidekick, a ward and a domineering dervish rolled into one was adopted by her humans.
Soon, Altonio assembled a staff to help keep track of the little girl and her friends. It was pretty motley, her staff - this was a Brooklyn story after all - of a carrier pigeon, an alley rat and a roach. Soon a dog joined in on the fun.
And there it was, my cast of characters - larger than the lives they lived on the pages, they jumped into everyday conversation with me and my wife. She indulged my love of these characters and went along for the ride.
She despaired when they got hurt, she laughed when they double-crossed one another and she encouraged me to keep enlarging the world. And soon, the little girl and her humans were left behind. The animals had work to do on their own terms.
Porkchpo Alley was born.
I’ve been writing these stories on and off since 2013 with little aim other than to tell the stories that enter my mind when I shut off the engine and let nature take its course.
I’ve added more and more characters as vacations across the globe have shown me the ingenuity of ants in Costa Rica; the feistiness of cows in Switzerland; and the fearlessness of the dogs that run in San Francisco’s dog parks.
I’ve added locations beyond the Brownstone where Altonio rules with an iron claw to give the animals ample room to convene, carouse and on occasion, conspire to commit criminal acts.
The deaths on the page were no match for the crushing grief I felt when my four-legged muse and mentor Harriet passed away toward the end of 2019 after an extended illness.
After months of seeing my fierce little buddy’s world get smaller and smaller as she became too weak to leap and too frail to cuddle, I wept over her litter box as I bagged it up for the last time and left it on the curb. The apartment went quiet for the first time since we’d moved in. It felt like a space compromised without Harriet’s regular patrols.
We didn’t know how to feel about new minutes gained without a third member of the household. We took trips, often waking in a hotel room with a guilty start. Had we checked in with the cat sitter?
And then, we’d remember.
In November we welcomed Matilda, a semi-feral cat from Brighton Beach who has her own set of quirks and needs. She is teaching me the art of patience, compromise and street smarts. Harriet watches over us from the lofty heavenly heights where Ceiling Cat resides with cats we’ve known and loved.
As I write this introduction in the Spring of 2020, there is a global pandemic raging. The world’s humans have been relegated to their homes and the animals are having a field day. Peacocks are walking around Prospect Park, just a few blocks away while dolphins are swimming in the canals of Venice, thousands of miles away. There are reports of rat turf wars. I saw a raccoon outside my window.
Matilda sleeps on the desk, where I sit typing. We have a big picture window that looks out onto beautiful gardens, a carriage house and the brownstones across the way. She keeps her clipped ear perked up in case her “boyfriends” two ferals who have the run of the four backyards outside our window, decide to show up on the fire escape steps.
The pergola has been cleared for the season and the bumble bees are feasting on the blooms. The birds are chirping day and night; drowning out the ambulance sirens in the distance.
After all these years, I don’t know if I would say I love the City. But I am grateful for the animal stories it has helped awaken in me and the mindfulness those animals have instilled in me. Today, the world outside is peaceful and yet, I am watchful. I am writing.
The animals of Porkchpo Alley have never been busier. To quote one of America’s favorite long running crime procedurals: “these are their stories.”
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