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

I shook my head in amazement as I took it all in, thinking, Well, I guess we’ve finally arrived. Homer had trashed his first hotel room. He was officially a star.

The World’s Cat

The Muse brought to the minstrel’s mind a song of

heroes whose great fame rang under heaven.

-HOMER, The Odyssey

HOMER’S ODYSSEY WAS PUBLISHED ON AUGUST 25, 2009. I had traveled to Washington, D.C. the night before to do an interview on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show” on the morning of launch, and didn’t get back home again until the early evening. Homer spent the night of the book’s release feasting on the lobster salad Laurence had prepared for me as a congratulatory surprise, but that I was too wound-up to eat. Scarlett and Vashti didn’t care as much for lobster, but Laurence had bought them a tin of fancy canned tuna from our local gourmet shop—which Homer consumed his fair share of as well. I spent the rest of the night refreshing the book’s Amazon page every hour, so I could watch as its sales rank rose. (This is something every writer does on the day her book is published, and any writer who tells you she doesn’t is totally lying.) Eventually, I moved my laptop computer over to the couch, so I wouldn’t have to keep jumping up to see if the numbers had changed. Homer, full of lobster and tuna, snoozed happily beside me.

With all the pre-publication craziness, I’d thought that life would calm down once the book was out. But, soon after it appeared in bookstores, there came a second, smaller wave of press rolling through our apartment in order to meet Homer—the bloggers, vloggers (those with video blogs), and internet radio hosts who hadn’t required the longer lead times of magazines and newspapers, and who were thus able to wait until the book was on shelves before planning their coverage.

This second wave of press was much mellower than the first had been, requiring far less of Homer and me. Usually it would just be one person with a hand-held recording device, or perhaps one additional person to hold a video camera. Homer was able to interact with these people with nothing more than his usual level of friendly interest—although I do remember one blogger in particular for whom Homer went absolutely wild.

I had never been nearly as aware of different people’s differing smells as Homer was, but this specific blogger had an especially…pungent…aroma that even I could catch from across the room. She smelled strongly of patchouli mixed with insufficiently masked body odor—which is really only worth mentioning because Homer was fascinated by this woman as he’d never been with anyone before, and as I would never see him be with anyone again. It was impossible to keep him off her, to prevent him from crawling up and around her as he tried to take in her scent from all conceivable angles, burying his head in her hair and inserting his nose deeply into more private areas.

“He’s certainly a friendly little guy, isn’t he?” the blogger observed, trying to angle Homer’s nose unobtrusively away from her crotch.

“That he is.” I was mortified. “Homer! Homer! Come…here! ” I spoke in the guttural-voice-through-clenched-teeth tone my own mother had used to rein me in when I was small, whenever my childish high spirits had seemed in danger of causing public embarrassment.

Homer, however, was not to be deterred. “I’m so sorry,” I apologized. “I don’t know what’s come over him.” Homer’s head was still immersed in our guest’s nether regions, and finally I went over and lifted him from her, one hand under his breastbone for support while the other took the scruff of his neck in a manner meant to indicate, I am NOT kidding around!

But Homer wriggled out of my arms and boomeranged right back to his intrusive examination of every square inch of the blogger’s body. “I can put him in the other room, if you’d like,” I offered.

“No, don’t worry about it!” I may have been appalled at Homer’s bad behavior, but the blogger herself seemed unruffled. “But maybe we should open a window?” she added. “Your face looks a little red.”

Of all the people who came and went through our home, convinced that during their time with us they’d formed a special bond with Homer unlike anybody else’s, this was the one occasion when that was likeliest to be true.

There were perhaps a half-dozen or so of these visitors over the course of a couple of days, and then Laurence and I hit the road. Publishers weren’t as apt to finance book tours as they’d been once upon a time, but I scheduled a few readings on my own. I did one in New York, of course, where we lived. I did one in L.A. where, after nearly two decades as a film journalist, Laurence had many friends. And I scheduled one in Miami where my parents and some of my old friends still lived. Laurence had given me a necklace to celebrate the book’s publication, featuring a tiny cat-shaped pendant made from small black diamonds, and I wore it for luck whenever I made a book-related appearance.

In Miami, I did an in-studio interview at the local NPR station the morning before my reading, and an article about the book and my upcoming appearance was published in the Miami Herald the same day. Still, I wasn’t expecting much of a turnout beyond my family, my friends, and my parents’ friends. Part of the reason why publishers were reluctant to underwrite book tours was because it had become increasingly difficult to get people to turn out for them, even when a book was popular and an author event had been well publicized.

So it was overwhelming to arrive at Books & Books in Coral Gables and find that nearly three hundred people had come. Three hundred people! The lead book reviewer for the Sun-Sentinel , whose work I’d been reading since I was a teenager, was the one who stepped up to the podium to introduce me, and it was one of the great nights of my life.

I don’t think it really hit me until that moment that a lot of people were going to read Homer’s story. It was one thing to see sales figures projected on a spread sheet, but an entirely different experience to see three hundred individual faces turned my way as I read from the book. There was even a cat in attendance—a tiny blind kitten named Galileo, only a few weeks old, with the two people who’d found him abandoned a few days earlier. They’d brought Galileo to the reading in the hopes that somebody there might be able to help them figure out what to do for him—and, sure enough, representatives from several local rescue groups were on-hand and able to take charge of the situation. (Galileo eventually found a forever home with a reader in Ft. Lauderdale.)

I also realized something else that night that I’d never thought about before—the deep chord that Homer’s Odyssey would strike in the animal-rescue community. Homer represented any number of cats who rescuers would cry themselves to sleep at night thinking about—cats who were sweet and friendly and loving, cats these rescuers worked with every day, and who they knew would make a wonderful companion to anyone lucky enough to adopt them. But cats (and dogs) who, nevertheless, were consistently passed over for adoption because they were blind, or deaf, or needed extra care for ongoing medical issues, or simply because they had aged out of kitten-hood and were now “too old.”

I wasn’t the only one who stood vindicated by the publication of Homer’s story. And, despite having cared for him for more than twelve years, I wasn’t even close to being the one who’d put in the most time and effort—who’d fought the most battles or broken her heart the most often—trying to prove that a special-needs animal was just as capable of loving and being loved as any other, and just as deserving of a chance.