Гвен Купер - Homer - The Ninth Life Of A Blind Wonder Cat

People magazine wanted photos of Homer for insets to accompany the full-page review of the book they planned to run. Ladies Home Journal was going to excerpt a portion of Homer’s Odyssey —from the chapter describing the night Homer had chased off the burglar—in their September issue. For this shoot, along with the usual crew they also sent over to our apartment a hair-and-make-up person and wardrobe stylist for me. They wanted shots of Homer and me together to accompany the piece—shots of Homer lying on my chest, shots of Homer in my arms, shots of Homer nuzzling my ear. In the end, though, they ran a photo of just Homer by himself.

“The problem,” as I would later observe to a friend, when the issue came out and I saw that I wasn’t in it, “is that I didn’t get out of the shot.”

Animal Planet did a segment on Homer for their Cats 101 show. The segment was only a few minutes long, but it took a grueling eight hours to get all the footage they needed. Even Homer was spent by the end of the day, when our apartment was in shambles and all he wanted was to use his litter-box without having a cameraman closely following his movements. At one point, he turned with an indignant hiss on the cameraman, who followed behind him with dogged persistence. Do you mind? I’m trying to pee in privacy! I will say, though, that nobody we worked with knew how to record cats more unobtrusively than the Animal Planet crew. They were even able to capture the notoriously camera-shy Vashti and Scarlett, and there was no way any of us would have made it through a day that long without their expertise.

The coverage for USA Today happened in three waves. The books editor—the person who decided which books USA Today would cover; which of their various staff and freelance reviewers would be assigned to cover them; and who also wrote the revered-within-the-industry “Book Buzz” column, which a month earlier had decreed that, “ Homer’s Odyssey will be huge,” causing bookstore pre-orders to quintuple overnight—was also a cat lover. (“So much for cat lovers not reading books,” I told my agent.). She wanted to do more with Homer’s Odyssey than simply have it reviewed, and she came over to our apartment to interview me personally—although I didn’t kid myself that so high-ranking a personage would have gone to all the trouble of coming to me if she hadn’t wanted to meet Homer as well.

Homer seemed almost relieved when someone came to our home wanting only to sit and chat, rather than putting him through his paces. He curled up in my lap for most of the interview, drowsy and comfortable as the editor reached out from time to time to stroke his head. “He really is a loving little guy, isn’t he,” she observed, and Homer rewarded this by pushing his entire face into her hand, his way of demanding that she rub him harder. For once, even Scarlett and Vashti ventured out, eager to feast upon the cat treats I’d scattered around liberally as a way of ensuring that Homer would stay in the living room throughout the interview and not head off to his “trailer”—i.e. the little cave in his cat tree. Homer, however, was more interested in the editor than in the treats, having had so many in recent weeks that he was becoming ever-so-slightly bored with them. (Ah, the ennui of stardom!)

A day later, a photographer from USA Today came to shoot Homer for the story—one lone photo-journalist and his camera, without all the rigging and light reflectors and duffle bags we’d become accustomed to. I was so used to being asked to…you know…get out of the shot that I was wearing work clothes, the hair I’d washed but hadn’t bothered styling that morning (because who cared what I looked like?) pulled back in an untidy ponytail. But the books editor had instructed the photographer to shoot Homer and me together—which is why, to my everlasting shame, Homer and I were immortalized in the pages of the nation’s biggest newspaper with me looking like I’d just finished moving furniture.

Homer, it goes without saying, looked sleek and shiny and impossibly perfect.

The day after that , a USA Today videographer arrived to film me reading an excerpt of Homer’s Odyssey while Homer scampered in the background, planning to post the video to the USA Today website and YouTube channel once the book had been released. I’d invested in a brand-new catnip toy for the occasion, in order to ensure maximum frolicking. Homer systematically demolished that toy over the course of the hour it took us to shoot, tearing it to shreds and releasing all the catnip into a giant mound in front of him, which he then rolled and flipped around in while his entire face became encrusted with ‘nip—until he looked like Al Pacino at the end of Scarface. The catnip made Homer talkative, and so that footage is one of the very few recordings in existence that captured the sound of Homer’s own voice—and, for that reason, I treasure it to this day.

Perhaps the craziest day was when we recorded the book trailer—the promotional video commissioned by my publisher for placement on YouTube and various other websites. They’d taken over a two-bedroom suite at the Hotel Pennsylvania for the shoot, across the street from Madison Square Garden, where many a visiting rocker had stayed and partied back in the hotel’s glory days.

They sent a town car to pick Homer and me up. Homer had been reluctant to get into his carrier, and it was raining as I dashed as quickly as I could from apartment building to car—although Homer did catch a few drops, which didn’t improve his mood. The driver helped me load in all the gear I’d thought necessary to bring along if we were going to be shooting out of the house for an entire day—a litter-box and litter, bowls for food and water and food to go in them, a sack of catnip, a bag of Pounce treats, and a large bag of rolling-and-belled toys. I was scheduled for an early-morning arrival—before seven—and I’d requested that as few people as necessary be there when we first arrived, so that Homer would have time to acclimate to a new place before it was time for the hair-and-makeup person to go to work on me, and the groomer to go to work on him.

There was a single cameraman there to greet us when we knocked on the door of the suite. He’d beaten us to the hotel by only an hour, having just arrived on a red-eye from L.A. for the purpose of recording Homer’s first hour of exploration. I set up food and water bowls for Homer in the kitchen, and placed the litter-box there as well, setting Homer in the litter-box first—as was our custom when I brought him to a new place—so that he wouldn’t have to wonder where it was.

“I’ve never seen such big aural canals in a cat,” the cameraman noted. “You can see all the way down into his ears. They’re huge!”

“Homer’s hearing is off the charts,” I agreed, as Homer’s head perked up at the sound of my saying his name, and he turned the ears we’d just been discussing in my direction.

“Are you sure he’s never been here before?” The cameraman was watching as Homer—nose to the ground—began to figure out the suite and its various rooms. He didn’t bump into a single thing, not a wall, not a sofa, not the cabinets in the kitchen or a lamp in the suite’s living room. Homer’s sensitive nose and remarkable whiskers gave him all the information he needed to navigate seamlessly—just as he’d done time after time in the many homes we’d moved in and out of, back in our earlier years of struggle and constant migration. After about a half-hour of thorough investigation, Homer happily took up play with a catnip ball, fascinated with the way it ricocheted off the bottom of the kitchen cabinets and into the living room. He chased it in and out of bedrooms, under tables, around the sofa and floor lamps, without losing track of it for even a moment.