Remembering Miss Cocoa

Miss Cocoa in Salt Lake City, 1996

On May 27, 2003, I discovered that my nine year-old Siamese, Cocoa, had vanished into thin air from my farm in Arizona while I was away at work. I spent weeks looking for her, handing out flyers to neighbors who would invariably shake their heads and say, "Ya know, them coyotes is real bad 'round here." I had to resist the urge to kick each and every one of these fine folks directly in the balls. I consider it one of my finest moments of self-restraint.

Cocoa wreaking vengeance on a doctor doll in Moses Lake, WA, 1998

Many of you will remember I was undone for weeks, if not months, as a result of her disappearance. Of all the animals I have shared my life with, none was closer to me than Miss Cocoa was.

Miss Cocoa and friend in Moses Lake, WA, 1998

When the pain of missing her started to become more than I could bear, she began appearing in my dreams. In five years, she has never left them. She is with me nearly every night, and I am more grateful for her company that anyone will ever know.

Cocoa with her buddies Stinky and Harvey, SLC, 1997

The following is the third chapter of The Agoraphobic's Guide to Cairo, my overly-written but well-intentioned book about the year I lived in Cairo. Cocoa chose me from all the foreign nationals milling the crowded streets shortly after I arrived, and when I left a year later, she (and her bosom buddy Mubarak) left with me. Though Mubarak took up residence with a good friend I met in SLC in 1997, together Miss Cocoa and I traveled the United States for nine years. She was, without question, my best friend during those times.

This post, and the novel that goes with this chapter, are for her.

RC Cola (1994-2005) and fellow humiliatee Miss Cocoa in Brawley, CA in 1999

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Al-Qitta (The Cat)

You could read the temperature in the faces of the young security guards draped at the entrance of the American University of Cairo (AUC) as I left my classes one early September afternoon. Melting in their white wool uniforms of summer, they did not have the strength to stand without leaning on their Kalashnikovs. I returned their drowsy nods as I passed their makeshift post of wood and cardboard. I was not ready to face my new home across the Nile with nothing but several hours of Arabic homework to pass the long evening hours. My married roommates lived a fairly self-contained existence. The last thing they needed was a new roommate complaining about being lonely. So rather than hailing one of the million or so black-and-white taxis filling the streets, I headed east down Mohammed Mahmoud Street. Thousands of Egyptians, Americans and others of all nationalities shared the broken and uneven sidewalks. The overflow, and those in a hurry, strode with purpose on the bank of a stream of ever-moving traffic, where they were uninterrupted by the ankle wrenching breaks found everywhere in the “regular” sidewalk.

My goal was the AUC library, filled with books I could only read achingly slowly, if at all. Just a few days before, I had dared myself to seek out the Arabic translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I found it easily enough on the well-organized shelves and pulled it out to run my eyes over the first few paragraphs. After a minute or so, I gently closed the leather-bound cover and carefully replaced it on the shelf. I acted in a deliberate manner such that anyone watching me might have imagined that was all I had really planned to do, anyway. Two and a half years of Arabic may have been enough to help me find the book, but it was not enough to get me much further than that. Baby steps, I decided. Al-Harb wa al-salaam would have to wait.

But I never made it to the library that day. Instead I found myself drawn through the crowd towards a small shop I had noticed while exploring some days before. Next to the nearby sundries store, where my daily Cadbury bar awaited me, this store would prove to hold my greatest temptation yet.

Cocoa melting in 108 degree heat in Cairo in 1994

Stepping out of the flowing crowd, I paused at the window of the small shop. I was immediately transfixed by a white Siamese kitten imprisoned in a ten-gallon fish tank. The rays of the sun drove through the outer window of the store through the glass of the tank without mercy, creating an Easy-Bake Oven within. Two enormous, aquiline orbs dominated the perfectly round head of the highly indignant occupant. Her face strained with the effort she had summoned to proclaim her injustice, and her bright red tongue was an exclamation point on each terrible scream—all of which were completely muted to the outside world by double layers of glass. To this fierce feline, escaping that tank was not an empty hope: it was a foregone conclusion.

A young clerk spotted me from the cool, dark recesses of the store and moved instantly in my direction. I quickly assumed a confident air of indifference, looking around as if I might, at any moment, step back into the stream of the passing population. To this day, I am convinced he was completely and utterly deceived by my calculated actions. I nodded in the direction of the fish tank.

“Twenty pounds,” he stated in clear English. (About $7.00 US dollars.)

“It is a half-dead cat with no tail,” I said, to no one in particular. She was in fact more than half-alive, but I have never been one to shy away from profitable exaggeration. In her weepy eyes I could see the beginnings of a typical kitten virus, and her tail—something was seriously wrong with that tail. It traveled only an inch from her body before ending abruptly in a tragic little hook.

Our Egyptian matchmaker stepped briefly behind the store window and scooped up the miserable creature in question. Her cries ceased immediately, and her eyes remained fixed upon mine like two tragic blue moons. She appeared overall as if some hand had rolled her in bleached flour, then carefully and deliberately dipped her paws, ears, tail, and the very tip of her nose in dry cocoa. The young man abruptly tilted her nose to the ground to better display her deformed tail.

“It is the highest fashion for the male Siamese to have the shortest tail possible.” He spoke with the highest authority on feline fashion. Craning her head out of his grasp to keep her eyes locked onto mine, she all but dared me to give this man any reason to lower her back into that stifling aquarium. Something in her eyes suggested that she doubted I even possessed the power to do so.

Feeling myself drawn deeper and deeper into a discussion with only one possible outcome, I tore my eyes from hers and directly faced her captor. “First of all, the kitten you are holding is female. Secondly, mutilation should never be confused with fashion in a Siamese cat.” When he looked down at her in momentary confusion—which probably had more to do with linguistic barriers than anything else—I saw my window.

“Ten pounds.”

The young man shrugged. He knew when he’d been outsmarted by a wily American tourist. I fished a ten-pound note from the pocket of my jeans and handed it to him in exchange for one cutting-edge female kitten. The pads of her tiny feet felt like fresh marshmallows in the palm of my hand. Her brilliant white coat was as velvety as the lightest chocolate mousse. Her eyes, which seemed to grow only bigger as each minute passed, had never left my face, nor had she ever blinked. I began to wonder if she possessed eyelids. Were Siamese cats without eyelids another bizarre trend I was heretofore unfamiliar with?

Finally, I had someone to pass the long evening with—a reason to go home. Knowing I had at least thirty minutes of weaving and riding through traffic to reach my apartment, and having nothing but a burgeoning book bag to transport my new ward in, I begged a small Snickers Ice Cream Bar box off of the store owner and gently placed her inside it. She slid weightlessly to one corner of the box, which I closed as I flagged a passing taxi.

Sitting in the backseat of the typical Cairene cab, one could experience for the first time what it must feel like to be a baked potato. The black roof of a taxi worked even better than aluminum foil to heat its contents. The dry, still air would be just on the verge of taking your breath away when a fresh, hot blast of desert wind mixed with car exhaust would burst through the open windows of the car, carrying just enough oxygen to hold you over until the next breeze. Though nearly every cab I rode in during my stay was brightly decorated with turquoise-colored charms to ward off the evil eye, along with Quranic or Christian sayings (depending on the faith of the driver), it was highly unusual to climb into one that was air-conditioned. It turned out to be just one more cannot-live-without American habit that proved to be unnecessary once you grew accustomed to it.

I may have been getting used to the heat, but I did not want my four-legged ice cream bar to melt before I got home. As we began to work our way through the cars and buses entangling Midan Tahrir, I slowly lifted one corner of the Snickers box to check on her. The instant she caught sight of me the cab was filled with an ear-splitting howl. People passing along the street on foot turned to look in our direction. I give my driver tremendous credit for not driving our vehicle directly into the face of oncoming traffic and/or pedestrians as his head snapped around to see for himself what wild creature was preparing to rip me—and quite possibly, him—limb from limb in the back of his vehicle. I slammed the lid back down on the box—instantly silencing the protest—just as he looked over and, seeing nothing but a guileless tourist, slowly turned back to face the road.

He did not say a word during the entire trip—though from that point he glanced frequently at me in his rear view mirror. I signaled him to stop when we reached my street corner and I handed him about twice the typical cab fare, hoping to buy his silence with a monetary apology. As I juggled my bag, box and loose change, Cocoa pushed her nose through a corner of the box, landing her gaze directly upon my startled driver.

“There’s a KITTEN in there?”

Before I could answer him, she let loose with another earth-shaking howl of protest. At the sound of it, he threw my fare on the seat next to him and shook his head, peeling out of sight. I tucked my friend carefully under one arm and climbed the never-ending stone flights to my fourth floor apartment.

Cocoa voicing a litany of complaints in SLC in 1997

Cocoa Bean, my official new back up, weighed less than a pound when her feet first landed on the floor of my apartment. She could not have been 6 weeks old. Size, I soon learned, has no bearing whatsoever on vocal strength or lung capacity. I was taught within seconds that she not only knew exactly what she needed from me, but that I would pay a dear price should I deny her. I had not even fully straightened to a standing position after freeing her from her Snickers box when she hit me with her opinion regarding personal space. As far as she was concerned, mine was to include her at all times. I tried to walk slowly from room to room to show her new home, but she stood firmly rooted where I had placed her and just cried. Loudly. So she got her first tour riding on my shoulder. For the first several months, in fact, I could go nowhere in the apartment without Cocoa affixed to my neck or shoulder. If I accidentally left a room without her, she would not stop crying until I returned to pick her up. In my high school science class years earlier, we had learned about imprinting by having live baby chicks follow us around the halls of the school. Even those impressionable young minds had had the presence of self enough to merely shadow us: Cocoa insisted upon living her early kittenhood wrapped around my neck like a living stole.

Mubarak and Cocoa in Cairo, 1993

I was not the only creature in the apartment to which she attached herself. Cocoa Bean was actually the second kitten who had moved in with my roommates and me in those first few weeks. While returning from a late night chocolate run to the neighborhood shop, I witnessed a small tail sticking up like a flag out of a nearby trashcan. I was wearing a loose jumper with equally loose pockets that night, and I dropped the chocolate in the left one as I reached over and lifted the tail, and everything attached to it, up into the air.

Cocoa and Mubarak swap beds in Seattle in 1995

I found myself eye to eye with a wild-haired brown tabby attached to what was left of a quarter of baked chicken. I gave the ensemble a hardy shake, and the chicken fell into the garbage. I dropped the angry kitten into my right-hand pocket. Once I had made my way back upstairs, my roommates were thrilled about the chocolate, but lukewarm about the cat. The cat had an even lower opinion of the situation, and jumped from my pocket to run as quickly as possible to the darkest recesses under the nearest sofa. Near as we could tell from peering at him on our hands and knees, the recluse was maybe 8 or 10 weeks old. Once a dish of tuna had enticed him back out into the light, we tortured him with his first bath, washing what seemed like a pound of raw garbage and fleas from his long, wild hair.

Mubarak and Cocoa eye a grad student's mainstay of orange juine and ramen noodles in Seattle in 1995

Mubarak, named after the president of Egypt, bore silent witness to the introduction of Cocoa to the household just three days later. Mubarak, it turned out, bore silent witness to just about everything. He was above getting involved in the petty affairs of humans, and only suffered us so long as we continued to leave unguarded loaves of bread on the kitchen counters, or lids off of the trash basket. Those were his happiest moments, where he was freed from the fetters of self-dignity. I had hoped early on that he might enjoy snuggling under the mosquito net with me in my room at night, but he preferred the company of married folk and had promptly moved in with my roommates, guarding the space under their bed from unwary creatures of the night.

Cocoa, however, would not have dreamed of separating herself from me by such an unbearable distance. That first night, she fell asleep curled in my arms under the sheet that served as extra protection against the rhino-sized mosquitoes. Given her size, I figured it was not entirely unthinkable that one of the heavier insects might succeed in carrying her off should she work her way back outside the net during the night. I needn’t have worried. When I awoke, she was still asleep under the net, wrapped tightly around my neck.

And while Mubarak showed only a mild interest in this bundle of fur (purported to be) of his own species, to Cocoa, Mubarak was clearly the cat’s meow. After witnessing her somewhat unusual emotional demands during those first few hours, my first instinct had of course been to skip every day of school for the rest of the semester in order to ensure she never have to endure a minute alone. My roommates had brought me back to reason, and we three left her in the capable paws of her foster brother while we ventured into town for some education the following morning.

Most of the day’s education was received when we returned home. Siamese kittens who have been taken too early from their mothers have some significant issues not only with abandonment, but also with nursing, or so it seemed. We opened the door of the apartment that afternoon to see two small kittens waking from a nap on the sofa. Cocoa Bean immediately let loose with a barrage of complaints, mostly concerning our lengthy absence. As she stretched and stepped away from Mubarak, we had a chance to witness what his day must have been like. His long and wavy fur had been fashioned into so many little peaks all over his body as if some hairstylist, locked in a room with only a cat and a handful of hair gel, had gone utterly and completely mad. In her anxiety at being alone, Cocoa had “nursed” her poor companion senseless.

Mubarak and Cocoa in less co-dependent days, SLC in 1997

She did not stop this behavior, despite endless counseling on the topic, for weeks. Nor did she draw the line at nursing Mubarak. A few days later, I awoke to find a pronounced hickey on my neck. Try explaining that away to curious onlookers at school. Let them think what they will, I decided. I had at last found a devoted companion to help me navigate my way through this confusing and overwhelming ice cream social.