The Cat Army of Koreatown

The gated community in Koreatown reminded me of a military installation. It existed, sure. Just like I did most days. It didn't fully mix, though, with the community surrounding it. The gates had spikes at the top and I had seen what those could do to desperate humans. My headaches continued, but not intense enough to make me throw up anymore. Everything was fuzzy even though I tossed the pills, avoided the booze, and jumped rope like a demon. I felt like I was living my life underwater, everything refracted and slow. I was a merman with legs in a city with a river without water, in a neighborhood that looked at me like a thief.

When my sister Ashley first let me sublet her one-bedroom bungalow I didn't understand how much rent had gone up in LA during my tours. A grand a month was a deal apparently. I had enough stashed away to last awhile but not forever. Nothing was forever. I needed to figure out what to do with my GI bill for starters. My sister, who now played the role of my mother who'd died from love . . . a love of cigarettes . . . asked me: What do you want to be?

We'd grown up in a small house in Sun Valley, a hot and dusty neighborhood without the yoga studios and overpriced cafés in nearby stretches of The Valley.

Neither of us could stand to return to the old hood after we weren't able save our mom's place from foreclosure. We drifted into the world without roots or plans past high school, Ashley getting pregnant the same month I enlisted. She landed on her feet before I did, scraping a living as a freelance bookkeeper for a few small businesses and living with her boyfriend Chris. My own skills in the infantry didn't qualify me for any gig better than rent-a-cop. Ashley kept hounding me to enroll in classes but I just couldn't see through to the other side. I set up shop at the cheap white plastic table outside my back door, staring out into space, unable to read, to focus, my head and heart still in another country, still waiting for a shot that never came.

Jesus, Oscar, you're scaring the neighbors, Ashley said, and I made sure to sift through the LA Times after that, pretending to read, but watching the comings and goings of the community, the schedule of daily activities not unlike my own routine in the army. I didn't tell her that the apartment was a tomb and that I sometimes shivered in the heat, swigging from a plastic gallon water container, living on the food she brought over every morning, each day the same as the one before. That all changed the day my niece Matilda brought over a gift with four legs and a pajama top.

My present was a tabby cat with more years than the little girl who carried it over to my outside table. The stray had decided to claim Ashley's yard in their Echo Park home a week earlier but her half-bulldog Honey was having none of the territorial incursion. The cat had patience enough to let Matilda dress him up in a baby doll's pajama top and my niece had given him a name, but knowing I'd been a soldier added an honorific: General Jammie Jam.

Now we had a focal point for our morning visits, a tradition of feeding the General, flushing him out of the apartment complex courtyard he now called home. Matilda and Ashley set him up with a basket on my back porch, and the General sure had a way with the ladies. And with cats of all shapes and forms. He was a leader—that much was certain the moment he brought order to the once silent visits with my family. Beneath those yellow eyes and pink polka-dotted pajama top was a cat with a plan to take charge of the neighborhood.

The second day brought us our first recruit...