Pico

the cat who saved me

When you’re homeless, you carry all your most precious belongings in your backpack. Everything else gets stolen, or thrown away by the cops, or destroyed in the rain. My friends on the street carried electronics, power banks, jewelry. I carried an assortment of scarves, and cat food.

It was rare that I had a chance to pet a cat I found, but I wanted to be ready to entice one over when the opportunity arose. I had few real friends on the street, and had estranged myself from former friends and family alike. Ambushing street cats in order to give them head scritches was one of my few sources of connection.

Everyone who heard about that kept telling me I should get a cat - there was an old lady we knew who had one, carried it around in a pet carrier on a stroller.

“I can’t even take care of myself,” I’d tell them, shaking my head. “I have no business adopting a cat.”

But nearly two years in, something happened. A light switch I didn’t know existed flipped, after nearly dying at the hands of my partner at the time, Payam.

The story of Pico begins months after that switch flipped, after the moment where suddenly it felt like everything was okay, and everything was going to be okay.

I was making better choices. I moved my tent to an area no one else was staying, kept away from people I knew to be dangerous. I spent my days fulfilling silly quests for myself - ‘make a snack out of ingredients found only in the next three dumpsters’ or building out stories in my head about the lives of people whose trash I found, or just walking and singing for days. One day I stumbled on the unprotected shopping cart of a dear friend everyone called Demon, and I sneakily covered it in little magnetic butterflies I’d collected from a dumpster, their wings fluttering in the breeze. I never found out if he figured out it was me.

I was, in an odd sort of way, happy. There was a deep fire there, a delight and a lightness, that had been absent the rest of my life.

I could take care of myself now. I prided myself on being skilled enough at dumpster diving (and yes, there is skill to doing it well) to be able to go from nothing but the clothes on my back to pretty damn comfortable within a span of days. I was no longer hungry, I was getting enough sleep.

I decided it would finally be okay for me to adopt a cat.

At some point during this stretch, Payam tracked me down again, flipping a U-turn in the quiet hours of the night to pull up next to me. I’d been hiding from him for so long that I’d grown less cautious, and was walking along a main street instead of sticking to the alleyways. I found out later that he’d spent the intervening month or two stalking the city trying to find me, all day every day, instead of working or even keeping up with basic hygiene. But I had learned - I was taking care of myself now! I was making better decisions! I told him to fuck off and ran away.

Knowing what part of town I was in now, he befriended a campsite of people I knew. He would bribe them with food and cigarettes to bring me gifts. They knew I wanted nothing to do with him, that he was dangerous. But, hey. Free cigarettes, amirite? I considered all of this annoying, but ultimately harmless - because I was taking care of myself now. I was making better choices. I wasn’t going to let him hurt me again.

However, I needed a physical address to write down if I wanted to adopt a cat, and Payam had one. So I had him bring me to a few shelters. That shouldn’t be too dangerous, right? The dogs knew better, though. Walking past the kennels, I could hear the barking and the snarling trailing behind me as he passed them by.

All cats are wonderful. All kittens are wonderful. But it took me three visits to different animal shelters before I met one that was, well, the one. I remember the Haven Humane staff bringing in this oh-so-tiny grey kitten, a few days over a month old. He was so scared, he was visibly trembling. But he explored the whole room. That’s real courage, I remember thinking. Not the absence of fear, but the determination to keep moving forward despite it.

We belonged together. When I brought him out with me, he purred so loudly and so often, I kept joking with everyone about how he was just that happy to be out of the shelter. He stayed with me, walking behind me as I moved from trash can to dumpster. I remember one lady offering me supplies from her porch as he bounced along behind me and feeling a little defensive about it - something deep inside me knew I was doing wrong, but couldn’t look at it yet.

But I did want better than the street for Pico, so I brought him with me into an abandoned building (they called them ‘bandos’ for short) operated by someone with the 18th St gang. ‘Operated’ here means they collect taxes, and offer some amount of protection. Protection that did serve me well - Payam took to coming to the building and yelling my name outside of it. Bringing attention to some people who very much wanted to stay in the shadows. He was eventually brought inside and told by an actual gangster, at gunpoint, that there would be consequences if he came back. Of course he came back, just made less of a scene.

Staying in gang-run territory tends to not go very well for people who don’t pay their taxes, and after I came back one day to find all of my belongings ransacked, the most valuable items gone, I left.


Where to take Pico? Payam had a car. It felt like my only option - now Pico was used to not being fully outside. We were only in Payam’s car for around a month. I have few concrete memories from that time, but it got real bad real fast. Nothing like the gradual escalation of the first round with Payam. He kept supplying me with meth, and we argued all the time. I’d had a practice with my ex-fiancé of taking a walk when I realized I was getting heated, and coming back to tell him what had hurt instead of lashing out. Payam wouldn’t let me out of his sight. He’d use his body to force me back into his car, drag me down the street by the arm or hair. Once I managed to get away, and I ran between parked cars, crouching to hide, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning, his car engine revving and the brakes squealing as he tore up and down the residential streets. Hunting me.

I told him I was leaving. I hadn’t fully learned the first time around how dangerous that is. How lives are most at risk when telling an abusive partner you’re leaving. He was in the driver’s seat and I was behind him. He threw his seat back and pinned me under it, with my knees up to my chest. He grabbed my head and yanked it sideways, pushing my face into the back seat of the car as he screamed at me. Luckily, he didn’t weigh very much, and didn’t have a lot of upper body strength. My neck remained intact.

I made it out of the car, somehow. But I didn’t make it out with Pico. The next thing I remember, I was standing next to the driver’s side window of the locked car. Payam was holding a scrabbling Pico up to a gap too small for him to get out of. Was it raining? In my memory it’s dark and rainy. I was sobbing, reaching through the gap to try to offer what reassurance I could to this poor kitten.

I knew then that it wasn’t just my life at stake, Pico’s was as well. I knew I had to be smarter. I spent the next week or two being chipper and lovely, putting every ounce of social manipulation skill I’d picked up playing games like Werewolves and Diplomacy into assuring Payam that Everything Was Okay, that he could trust me to stay with him. That he could trust me with Pico. Payam was working for DoorDash at the time, and I’d take the food deliveries out for him, since he didn’t want to leave me alone with Pico. I made it sound like I wanted to date him again. We started having sex again. In the meantime I’d learned that the ASPCA in Long Beach had a program where they’d take in pets of domestic violence victims while they worked to find shelter. After a while, Payam’s watchfulness relaxed. I placed a call while he was asleep, and the ASPCA ordered an Uber for me from LA. I left, with my backpack and my cat.

Why didn’t I leave sooner? Why the whole charade? That couldn’t have been the first time he was asleep while I was awake. Was I waiting until I could have an exit plan in place, so I didn’t repeat the cycle? Was it simply the cumulative effects of terror, meth, and sleep deprivation preventing me from being more strategic? At this distance, I have no way of knowing.

---

When I arrived at the ASPCA, they told me I would not be able to visit Pico until I’d found shelter, that it was too distressing for the critters to see their humans if they couldn’t leave with them. “No problem,” I thought. “This was domestic violence! It’s clear cut! I’ll be able to find shelter for myself.”

After I dropped off Pico, I walked the streets of Long Beach belting out songs - The Family Crest was a big one then. Longing, dizzying, vibrant cellos, violins, and choirs. I sang, and I danced, and I jumped in puddles. I was free.


But shelter after shelter said no, we have no room for you.

I’d left a phone I’d rooted (one of my meth-projects was teaching myself how to root old phones I found in dumpsters) in the car with Payam, and I kept getting notifications that my Google password was being changed. He was trying to track me. And yet, when I’d get a shelter on the line, they’d ask if I was in danger. “Well, uh, not imminently.”

I was not able to communicate to them the severity of the situation, that this man was trying to come down to Long Beach to get me.

After around a week, I decided to read the paperwork that Haven Humane had sent with Pico. I think I wanted to feel more connected with him. It had managed to come with me in my backpack. I had joked so flippantly about how happy he was to be out of a shelter. But it wasn’t a joke. It was pages of notes along the lines of “Kitten is depressed. Kitten will not eat. Kitten is vomiting, returned by foster family.” It was a litany of suffering, lasting the entire month he’d lived before our lives intersected.

And I - I had put him in another fucking shelter.

I lost it. I lost my mind, I collapsed. I called my ex-fiancé - and in all our years together, I had never heard him sound that sad. Not even the time I’d told him I was planning on killing myself. I don’t think he thought I was coming back from this: the weight of the realization crashing down on me that I was not making better enough choices. I had adopted a kitten, and then put him through Payam, and then ultimately back into another shelter. I cried, and I cried. I broke, I shattered.

And then I dusted myself off. I had to save this poor little kitten. It was all my fault - I had to find a way to make it right.

The only way to save him, I realized, was to call my parents. We’d been estranged for almost two years. Early on in my time on the street, I didn’t really consider reaching out to them for help as an option. They’d declined to help in the past when I’d tried, and I believed that I’d have wound up killing myself if I’d gone back to Redding, the small town I’d grown up in, before I was ready. I’d done court-ordered rehab programs before, and none had helped. I didn’t see a way out through institutional or family aid.

But mostly, it was pride. There was a lot of strife in my household growing up, and I felt justified in putting up walls. I’d responded to hurt by developing a toxic degree of self-reliance, never letting anyone in close enough to care for me. That pride, that independence, ran deep. Too deep for me to surrender for my own sake. It took a kitten needing more care than I could provide to even begin.

So I called them, words pouring out of my mouth in what I’m sure was a nonsensical jumble. But they heard that I needed them, that I was ready to come home, and my dad drove down California the next day to pick up Pico and me.

My last night in Long Beach I spent sleeping under a bridge, in the dirt and spider webs. I actually did that sort of thing very rarely - but this was it, my last night homeless. All I needed to do was wait. I sat in a Starbucks the next day, writing in a journal to mark the moment as my dad made his way down the state.

I’ve since looked for that journal, but we’re in the middle of a move, and it’s either gone or tucked away somewhere. I hope it turns up before I finish writing all these stories.

My dad showed up with a donation for the ASPCA, money and some cat supplies - a thank you for helping me when I needed it. They were so happy to see my story turn out well. I imagine it must be challenging to run a program like that, that at least some of why they don’t allow visits is because many people never make it to a place where they can come back to collect their pets. Maybe I’ll send them this story.

On the car ride home with my dad, I began telling him everything. About the years of heroin use. The sex work. So many of the things I had kept hidden all this time. This process, with both of them, went on for weeks. And now I have a better relationship with them than I’d ever had before. We still have friction, of course. I still have hurts never mended, and there are some conversations I think we’ll probably never have. But I hide nothing for fear of punishment now. My dad and I even love to make jokes about the drug use now, which can sometimes shock my friends.

Pico is still with me. We’ve gone through so much together, he’s my little shadow. My best friend, really.

He’s still scared of everything, and still doesn’t let it stop him.

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A note about process: an LLM was used for structural and grammatical feedback only. Every word in this essay is mine - except the name Payam, which I took from Claude’s suggestions. Thank you to Joe, Austin, and Malcom for feedback, and to Renee, Snav and Chair for encouragement.

Thanks for reading <3