Tillie and Alfredo Ricky Ginsburg - July 2008

My Aunt Tillie had been mugged three times, survived open-heart surgery (yet still smoked a pack or two each week), and outlived both her husbands. She blinked for the last time when Hurricane Phillip roared in from the Atlantic Ocean and tore up her ass on the last weekend of September 2003.
Now, I'm not saying it literally re-creviced her rectum, although the midair collision with the palm tree did split her britches. Thankfully, the ER doctor swore to me she'd died from the lightning bolt and hadn't felt a thing after it blasted her from the fourth floor balcony. Of course, that would be my aunt - going out with a flash and a bang, the same way she'd charged through her ninety-one years on the globe.
I wish I could tell you she was stone-cold sober, stepping out to check her orchids while the eye of the storm hovered over Miami Beach, but I found an open fifth of Bacardi on her tray table and an empty one in the trash can under her sink. For my dime, this was just another hurricane party for the old tooter, nothing she hadn't celebrated at least forty times in a decade of living on the beach. Tough break for Aunt Tillie that Zeus farted in her direction and she didn't have time to duck.

Our last phone conversation had come when her lights went out and stayed off that Saturday morning. To hear a woman of Aunt Tillie's age drop into the vernacular was funnier than the Comedy Channel, so I let her rant in that Minnie Mouse voice for almost five minutes before calling a time out. I had made my usual attempt to quash the looming crisis Thursday morning prior, with an offer to come stay at my apartment in Ft. Lauderdale - a much safer distance from the tidal surge and only one flight up in the event my power failed. At that point, the first of the feeder bands was already rushing over the city, slinging raindrops in short sheets with the occasional hat-flinging gust. All the local television stations had gone over to 'round the clock weather alerts; each warning a step more dire than the one fifteen minutes earlier, until the "hurricane specialists" had removed their blazers and were all whipping digital arrows across the screen in a frenzied display of psychedelic trails.
We'd fought the telephone debate enough times that I knew it was futile - she just wouldn't leave - but it was a requirement for my own peace of mind to know I'd at least played my part. Hell, if a team of surgeons and a bunch of thugs couldn't shut her down, I figured Mother Nature would probably call it a draw as well. In the five years I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, there was only one storm, Griselda in 2001 - a Category 5 with mandatory evacuation, where Aunt Tillie relented and slept two nights in my apartment. It took a Metro cop with a bullhorn to convince her, but eventually she came downstairs and let me drive her away.

Without electricity, Aunt Tillie had once again been deprived of two of her life's necessities - power to make ice cubes for her rum and Coke, and air conditioning to create a pleasant atmosphere in which to drink them. Since the governor had declared a state of emergency for both Dade and Broward County hours earlier, access to the beach was now restricted to emergency vehicles and teenage surfers, who never missed an opportunity for some "real" waves. As a lifeguard on the payroll of the city, I could still come and get her, but with the winds peaking at fifty miles an hour, it would have to be soon.
Giving up on the power company tirade, she ran through her usual repertoire of excuses not to leave, starting with the orchids, her most prized possession. They were tied to driftwood limbs and fingers that I'd bolted onto her patio walls: a magnificent rainbow of flowers, stalks, and thick green leaves that had twice been featured in the local papers. Aunt Tillie, who had grown up in Brooklyn, discovered orchids at a farmer's market a week or two after she'd moved to the beach. Enamored with their vibrant colors and intriguing shapes, she started collecting immediately and now had several hundred specimens on her balcony patio. Not being one to appreciate a plant that only bloomed once or twice a year, I was just glad she had a hobby, other than men, to keep her occupied.
Once again, with a storm now pounding its way on shore, she was convinced that she had to stay there to make sure the sheets I'd securely tied over her collection held on in the wind even though my riggings had never failed. Second on her list and only slightly less important, there was no way she'd leave Mr. Kartoogian, her seventy-six year old neighbor and most likely candidate for husband number three, alone in the storm. "Someone," she argued, "has to take care of the old bat." The image of the two of them, huddled together on her couch was quite touching until she mentioned he'd renewed his prescription for Viagra just in time for the weekend.

And then there was Alfredo, the old man's pernicious cat.

The hanging jungle of dendrobiums, phalaenopsis, and cattelyas were, for the playfully destructive feline, a source of endless amusement and a dangling display of swatable toys that were constantly replenishing themselves. There had been dozens of phone calls from my aunt, usually predawn and always on my day off, about how Alfredo had knocked the buds off a double Marie Lavage or a rare White Asian Moonbeam. She claimed that several plants had even been torn from their moorings and nudged over the edge of the fourth floor balcony by the furry cretin. At six-fifteen in the morning, I would have drowned the cat myself just to stop the phone calls.
There was a white metal railing dividing the balcony between Aunt Tillie and her neighbor; too high for either of them to step over, but wide open for a twenty-pound tabby to squeeze through with ease. Alfredo, unaware of property lines and condo association rules, wandered freely between the two sections of the suspended patio, usually at night. My aunt was convinced the animal had vampire in its lineage, as she never saw him on her patio in daylight. She told me that if not for his marriage potential and sexual prowess, Mr. Kartoogian would have lost his pet to her anger years ago. According to the police reports from those early days, there had been two instances where rum-infused sardines were left where Alfredo could easily find them, leaving the poor kitty so intoxicated that it passed out in the hallway. Another report, only a week later, spoke of the cat being stranded outside Kartoogian's door in a cardboard box with its mouth duct taped shut. And yet another where the cat had been stuffed into a burlap bag and hung from the condominium's flagpole. All of which Aunt Tillie vehemently denied with her hand across her heart.
Angered though she was, by the cat's insistence on demolishing her floral panoply, my aunt refused to let the beast come between her and a viable lover. At her behest, I raised the lowest plants to higher perches, tied a section of chicken wire to the common barrier, and moved the two patio chairs and the bamboo coffee table to the center of the ten-foot by six-foot space. Mr. Kartoogian stopped filing police reports and for a while, it seemed as though Alfredo was stymied.
However, in a battle between galvanized chicken wire and salt spray, the wire is going to lose eventually. It took less than a year and half before the exposed corner of my pet fencing dropped off the balcony and into the ficus hedge four floors below. Alfredo returned to Aunt Tillie's garden and reminded both of us that cats know how to climb.
Of course, by now, old man Kartoogian was a regular fixture in my aunt's life. They dined together at all the early bird specials and could recite the breakfast menus in every hotel between 163rd Street and Lincoln Road. They spent Friday afternoons at the movie theatre two blocks north on Collins and Tuesday nights at the bingo hall in Surfside. But it was deeper than just a casual relationship between a pair of senior citizens, and a lot more detail than I needed know. I caught them half-dressed more times than necessary when stopping unannounced to see if she needed anything or wanted to have dinner with her only nephew. Often times on the telephone, I could hear strange noises in the background and Aunt Tillie's voice would suddenly crack and she'd hang up.
Having lost my parents to a flat-footed llama and a rocky passage in the Andes when I was still in grade school, Aunt Tillie had become my substitute mother. The thought of her doing anything more with a man at ninety-one than holding hands was enough for me to consider therapy.
She was happy, though, even mentioned going for a marriage license before the end of the year. I didn't ask if she'd told him about her two previous spouses… both of which died on the downstroke; at seventy-six, the odds were against him anyhow.

From what the old man was able to recall, once his hearing kicked back in the day after Aunt Tillie's unfortunate demise - he having been just six feet away from her when the bolt hit - they had just finished eating dinner: Frosted Flakes and the last of his skim milk. Alfredo was sprawled out on my aunt's recliner, a thin stream of drool dripping from one side of his face. Mr. Kartoogian was certain she'd fed the cat a chunk of a sleeping tablet, crushed into the leftover hamburger Aunt Tillie had scrounged from the lowest shelf of her darkened frig. (I found half a pill and a butter knife in her bathroom but never told him about it, thinking that was what she usually took before bed.)
The old man said the hurricane crashed through in waves of thunder; windows rattled and shook with each hammering gust of wind until the sound was a continuous explosion punctuated by a hideous whistle as it found cracks to seep in through and sing its song of havoc. He swears they were too scared to do anything besides squeeze together on the couch; each with a throw pillow in their lap for protection should a pane of glass shatter and threaten them. Knowing my aunt, they were on the couch alright, but I doubt they were just huddling against the storm.
According to Mr. Kartoogian, it started getting dark as the winds calmed, announcing the arrival of the eye. He got up to try to rouse his pet, but Alfredo had regained his senses and left the recliner. With flashlights, they searched the apartment, under the couch, behind the chair, every closet in the kitchen without success. Aunt Tillie slid open the door to the patio to let the ocean breeze, a temporary respite, blow into the dank apartment. When she turned to relight the candles on top of the television, Alfredo crept from behind the curtains and skittered out the door.

It took a moment until they could swing their lights around to follow him, but finally they spotted the cat on the patio, relieving himself in the far corner by the fence. Aunt Tillie, a throw pillow raised over her head and screeching louder than a hawk diving for its prey, ran out to the patio swatting the air above Alfredo's head. Storm or no storm, the cat was not going to take a crap on her balcony.
She reached for the railing to steady herself and brought the pillow down fast and hard at the cat who was in mid-dump. Alfredo hissed back at her and scattered between my aunt's legs. She never had the satisfaction of knowing whether her aim was true or not, as it was her assault on the cat that scared it back into the apartment moments before the fatal lightening bolt that tripped Aunt Tillie's main breaker.

Mr. Kartoogian checked out less than a month later. My friend at the city morgue said it was an overdose of "blue boner pills." I went looking for Alfredo after the old man's funeral and found him in the arms of a silver-haired lady named Bryntha, who was now living in my late aunt's apartment. She told me she was going to have the maintenance man take down the driftwood and the orchids, but the cat liked playing with them so much that she decided to leave them there for his enjoyment.

I told her the cat enjoyed an occasional Bacardi and a tin of sardines.