Cats in the Rainbow Arc of Fire series

Schnozz was something else.   Smart and sassy, she ruled the house at 6555 Palmer Park Blvd in Colorado Springs before I moved to Denver.  The drive to Denver when I moved, taking her to the small apartment on Humboldt St. in Denver, was traumatic for her.  The 1-bedroom apartment was so much less roomy than the 3-bedroom, 4-level house.  And when temporary roommate and not much of a BF Frank Massey brought to the apartment Sneezer from the Dumb Friends League, Schnozz was further distressed.  The two did not get along well but finally tolerated one another.

When I sent Frank packing back to Virginia but kept Sneezer, and we all moved to another small apartment in another building in the Humboldt apartment complex, relations were only marginally better.  They eased a bit when the three of us moved to a 2-bedroom apartment two doors down from the second small 1-bedroom, and each cat had his or her places to pass the time.  Sneezer took the spare bedroom and would sit atop a carpeted cat pedestal and watch the passersby on the sidewalk below.  Schnozz ruled the bedroom and the carpeted pedestal there.

It was the death of Schnozz that formed a centerpiece in the green book, Volume 4, Worlds Beneath Us.

Speaking of Sneezer:

I have never had a more lovable or loving cat.  He would curl up in my arms on that couch as I watched TV and fall asleep.  At one point he weighed 23.5 pounds, much too heavy.  I had to put him on a diet so that he returned to his regular weight of 17.5 pounds.  He was still a big, heavy cat, regardless.  When he was 20 years old, his kidneys had already been failing.  His weight had alarmingly dropped to barely above 6 pounds.  He would not eat solid food, so I drained cans of chicken and he would slurp up the juice.  But one morning, long after he'd confined himself to a spot between the toilet and cabinet in the carpeted bathroom, he came out to the kitchen one morning as if to eat as he had every morning at the condo on Franklin St prior to his extended illness.  While I was happy to see him, I was immediately shocked to see that he was walking on one of his front legs on the first joint instead of on his paw.  His paw was bent under, and it must have been painful for him to walk like that; but he seemed determined to get to the kitchen.  I was heartsick.  I believe he'd had a stroke and was reliving the past when he was younger and healthy and loved to have his morning meal before I left for work.  I had to call the vet and tearfully arrange to bring him in that afternoon.

He would always sound so mournful in the car on the way to the vet's office to get his regular checkups and shots.  He loved living in the condo and hated to leave.  But this morning he was silent.  I had wrapped him up in a favorite towel and he sat on the passenger seat, looking tired but determined.  After he drifted away on the table in the vet's office, I could not contain myself and cried like a baby all the way home and for hours after.  As with Schnozz before, I had him cremated and have his ashes still.

After Schnozz was gone, my friend Dino and his partner Larry were shedding their three cats in favor of dogs.  They gave me Miranda, the eldest.  Sneezer took quite some time to take to her in the 2-bedroom apartment on Humboldt after she arrived.  Miranda, like Schnozz, only lived to be about 12-13 years.  She had moved along with Sneezer and me to the condo on Franklin St.  At some point, she developed terrible tumors on the back of her neck from the rabies shots from the vet.  She then endured three separate surgeries, six months apart, to remove successive tumors as they aggressively developed, one set after another.  They would not stop.  I finally had to wrap a sock around her neck to keep her from scratching at the wound that the doctor no longer could find enough skin to close at the end of the third surgery.  Again, as with Schnozz, I had to contact the vet for a dreaded house call.  I let Miranda sit peacefully in the front garden amidst the foliage until the vet arrived in the early afternoon.  She left peacefully on that same living room couch pictured above.  Her death was mentioned in Olive Branch, the last volume in the series.

Strangely, a few nights later I awoke to a familiar sound from the kitchen.  I looked up and Sneezer was staring in the direction of the kitchen, around the corner from the bedroom.  A night light from the kitchen counter had put his curious head and pointed ears in silhouette.  We were both listening momentarily to the sound of Miranda, again scratching at the taped sock around her neck.  Of course, even though I checked the kitchen counter where she used to lay before she died, feeling the welcome heat from the back of the fridge, she was not there.  Take this haunting story as you like.  I have never seen a ghost before, but both Sneezer and I heard something from the kitchen that night that sounded remarkably like the sound of Miranda scratching.  

This was Calico Miranda in the Franklin St. condo before she started to develop the tumors.  She loved to sit atop the cable box for warmth:

After Miranda had gone, the sister of a woman I worked with had, with a coworker at Coors Brewery, rescued a few-weeks-old kitten at the site.  He needed a home.  Linda asked me and I said I would take him.  I named him Pudge because, when he would scrunch himself up, front to back, he'd look rather pudgy.  Again, Sneezer was not too keen on a new roommate.  But Pudge was smart and determined, even as a kitten.  Just as I was telling a friend on the phone that I did not see what I was going to do to help them get along, I looked down and Sneezer and Pudge were eating their breakfast together off the same small plate.  Pudge had figured out how to push open the folding bathroom door and was eating contentedly next to the much bigger Sneezer.

Pudge is with me still, as is Tabby, who replaced Sneezer.  Tabby was discovered going door to door in the sister's boyfriend's neighborhood in Denver, getting food wherever she could beg it.  She may have been owned by a family across the street from Linda's sister's boyfriend.  But when he saw Tabby sitting by a couple of the family members on the sidewalk and he asked if they owned her, they offered, "Yes, do you want her?"  One morning he catnapped her, put her in a cat carrier, took her to his girlfriend's house, and I picked her up there, where I had gathered up Pudge a couple of years earlier.  As with Pudge, I took her to the vet and got her fixed (that family had neglected to do what they were legally required to do regarding spaying a pet).  The vet told me that, even at six months old, she was fully ready to have kittens of her own.

Pudge and Tabby made their way on Mark's and my first long drive between Denver and Indio.  We drove non-stop to limit their suffering, only getting gas occasionally for the van we were using to transport the cats and our two TVs.

After such a small condo, only a bit more than 900 square feet, the 2100-square-foot house must have seemed  enormous.  I first found them curled up together in one of the litter boxes.  They seemed terrified of their new surroundings.  By our final night before Mark and I had to fly back to Denver, they'd entirely disappeared.  Numerous times I searched the whole house and the neighborhood (though how both had gotten out of doors was highly improbable).  We eventually had to leave for the airport, but I told my best friend and my sister, who would feed and look after them while we were gone, to keep laying out food and checking the litter boxes.  They confirmed that food was being eaten and litter boxes were being used, but no cats could be found anywhere in the house.

It was Mike a few days later who finally realized that they might have squeezed under the narrow opening in the back of a long, low chest in our new bedroom and would remain there until food had been left out and the unwanted strangers had departed the house.  He tilted the cabinet forward and found two surprised cats staring up at him.  They took off for the moment, but we were relieved after I got his call.

Here are Tabby (top) and Pudge in 2007 in the condo in Denver:

Category Six Books

I guess it's been well more than a decade ago--possibly two--when almost any city of any size had at least one gay bookstore.  For Denver it was Category Six Books.  They were first located on Capitol Hill on 10th Street.  Armistead Maupin drew crowds when he showed up for a book signing, most memorable was his signing for Significant Others, his breakout title.  The store was in the first floor of what had likely once been a large house and then, probably, an apartment building after it was cut up.  One guy who initially worked there in the 1980's recommended that I read Maupin's Tales of the City series and handed me the first four volumes, the only four that were then in print.  Eventually, the series ran to nine volumes, but the store had closed long before the final three appeared.  I would acquire Sure of You at Category Six Books' next location, along South Broadway.

At this point, James Dovali had purchased the store from the original owner not long after the move to the South Broadway location.  After my series began to be written, naturally the first owner and James were kind enough to carry the several volumes as they appeared.  And, even more fortunately, I was able to hold several book signings over the years, especially before Christmas when everyone was doing his holiday shopping.  (I say "his" because while Category Six carried current lesbian titles, they rarely sold because the store had few lesbian customers.  Eventually, a lesbian bookstore would open on 13th street, east of Josephine, making the segregation complete.  When I approached the manager of that store to carry my novels since there were prominent lesbian characters, I was flatly dismissed.)

The 1980's were the heyday of gay bookstores around the country.  That would continue into the 1990's.  But before that decade was over, the Internet was beginning to make serious inroads into sales.  James knew that the closing of the store he loved so much was going to occur, he just was not exactly sure when he would be forced to close it.  I knew that the closing would likely be the doom of my series, as well.  Independent book stores of all varieties were also closing.  As my series hit its stride, all over the country gay book stores were shutting down.  Stores that had been in existence for years were forced to face the reality of amazon.com especially and self-terminate.  Whereas I had once been able to send notices of the first volume to so many stores around the nation, I was getting more and more returns of notices sent to smaller towns and cities, and then bigger ones as well, when the subsequent novels were published.  My list of potential stores to carry my books was dwindling fast.

At Category Six Books, I had sold between 300 and 400 copies of all volumes in the series.  James was always very helpful; and the sales helped him, as well.   The seventh volume in the series even has the main characters visit Category Six Books as part of the plot.  

I used to visit the store most Saturday mornings after he'd opened the doors.  Since business was sometimes slow at that hour, we'd chat about everything:  music, book sales, whatever.  He admitted on several occasions that it was the porn section in back that was keeping the store afloat when regular sales began to slow.  Even as we would chat, a few customers would enter, stride through the interior of the store, and take up station in the very back, partitioned to keep the porn magazines separate from the rest of the store.  But, of course, as the Internet broadened, one could get his active porn there rather than just stare at a motionless photo on a page.  

Although he warned them not to, a gay couple badly wanted to own the store.  Despite repeated warnings, they finally bought him out for a tidy sum they really could ill afford, changed so much about the interior of the store that it looked like someone's grandmother's living room, and wasted money on such unnecessary purchases as a new cash register, among other items.  The sale of my books cratered--they were not at all as helpful as James had been.  Old customers who had hung on also seemed to disappear (though many had already abandoned buying books there).  

The other issue was that the original owner had believed that the South Broadway area was going to bloom as a new gay mecca in Denver.  And it appeared at first that it would.  There was a Heaven Sent Me novelty store a block or so away.  A pan-sexual café was a few doors down.  But even some of those places eventually died, and it really never became that gay area everyone would want to visit.  The rent at the original location was going up prohibitively, so he had to move somewhere; and this had seemed as good as any.  But the locale became not an oasis but a desert that was drying up after the relocation.

Unfortunately, for the newest, and last, owners, the landlord was redoing the front of the building a year or so later, which would have further discouraged the few remaining customers from entering the front door.  They simply sold out everything at a massive discount.  I got a call to pick up my remaining books that had always been on the shelves on consignment anyway.  They slipped away in the night and that was the end of a bookstore that had been around for likely more than 20 years.

A few months before they closed, they held a memorial for James Dovali.  He had drifted from one improbable occupation to another after he'd sold the store, but none seemed to suit him.  I had entirely lost touch.  Before he moved on, I had given him a spare carpeted cat tower since he'd acquired a stray he'd named Slim Shady.  This energetic cat that used to live at the bookstore, as well as the carpeted tower, were acquired by an older couple who had known James.  Rootless now with the store he had cherished gone for six months, James died of AIDS.  I saved his obituary from the newspaper for several years, but it may have gotten lost in my move to California.  I liked him, and I missed our morning conversations at the store.  He'd done what he could to push the sales of Rainbow Arc of Fire, and I appreciated that very much.

By the way, the title of the bookstore referred, if I am remembering correctly, to a category of books that were deemed gay, as well as controversial.  It was not a positive description but almost a clinical definition.  The first owner used to say that they probably should have changed the name at some point during its heyday but never got around to it.  Most customers had no idea what the name referred to even when they knew of the store itself.

Besides the gay bookstores closing, gay magazines and newspapers were also ending as the 1990's came to a close.  Gay novels and other titles were also either going mainstream or diminishing in number as major publishing houses were no longer making the kind of money they'd earned in the late 80's and early 90's promoting gay titles.  That's why my books did not get picked up by St. Martin's press, and I was eventually forced to self-publish.  And, of course, so many who likely supported gay stores and books and magazines and other gay-friendly businesses were dying off, of old age and AIDS, until the life-saving drug cocktails became available from 1995 on.  

But while the store still endured, as you can see by the Top Ten book shelf I photographed above, one week my first novel was #2 to Maupin's The Night Listener.  Especially after a signing, I might have two or three books on the Top Ten shelf.  But now that is becoming so many years ago.  

James and I would put out a coffee urn filled with hot cider, cloves and cinnamon, which gave the store a warm aroma, we'd lay out Christmas cookies and other sweet treats, and watch the numbers of customers increase as the days before the giving holiday dwindled to a precious few.  Usually, it was the weekend before Christmas that would be the most busy and I would do a signing both Saturday and Sunday.   

I think we lost something very precious and community-building when the gay bookstores closed.  Frankly, I wouldn't hear about new titles that I might be interested in reading, especially gay biographies and histories that I liked the most.  An owner like James who loved books and loved to read was always a good source for what was worth reading.  But those days are gone now and likely never will return.