Brooke and Pontchartrain

A man kicks down a door in slow motion. He wears all black under a black trench coat, and shades purely for the aesthetic. It is after midnight. You hear a guitar riff to set the tone. You see neon lights from the ceiling to set the mood—flashing green and purple that flirts with the room. From his hip, the man lifts his weapon: a fluffy, orange cat wearing a black spiky collar. More guitar sounds. Very grunge. Fits his loner vigilantism. He holds the cat like an assault rifle, but this cat doesn’t care about nothing—you can tell by the look in its eyes. The tall, dark man goes “pewpewpewpewpewpewpewpew” from one end of the room to the other all typewriter style and the vibrations visibly verberate through his body and the guitar solo suddenly goes wild with rage and intensity and your teeth file each other down to nothing like they’re your parents. The whole room is filled with mobsters, drug dealers, terrorists, flailing and shaking and contorting in epileptic horror on their way to the ground, possibly to hell after that. This goes on and on, until you wonder when he’ll point the cat at you, and if you’ll be ready when he does.

Stacy, Krystal, and Valerie burst in the laughter. You remember you’re watching a movie. Your name is Brooke, and it’s movie night at Stacy’s house. They can’t get over the orange cat, how out of place it is in the movie, why the man pretends it’s a gun, why the bad guys die from this. It is the beginning of the movie and they think it’s a comedy. But you know they’re missing the point. The scene—perhaps the entire movie—it a metaphor for violence imbedded in innocent things, to grow and develop and hold endless potential. This prospect is very real. Both exhilarating and horrendous. The man, obviously, represents you, or anyone, while the dying criminals represent everybody else. These carefully selected avatars are simply easier to digest for the audience of an action-thriller DVD rental. They could have picked a better leading actor, you think. One with longer hair and less muscle tone for a more gender-ambiguous appearance. Perhaps someone with a tan. 

“A cat for a gun? Like, what?” says Valerie.

“Yeah, like, no lasers or bullets or anything,” says Stacy. “He just went ‘pew pew’ and everyone dropped. Like, what the hell?”

“You guys, this movie is stupid. Like, my brain is fried watching this.” says Krystal.

“Doesn’t this mean that Pontchartrain can double as a gun?” you force yourself to say, wanting to add to their fun, to fit in with them. They get excited at this prospect, yet you don’t really care. You wonder why you even agreed to come to this movie night in the first place. Could you think of nothing better to do for tonight when Stacy invited you to her home yesterday during lunch break? Were you curious to see how much you have in common with other blonde girls?

Pontchartrain, Stacy’s black and white cat, rests on the living room sill. You make eye contact with him, but you aren’t sure which one of you initiates it. Stacy rushes past you and the smell of jasmine and hyacinth tails her. Is Pontchartrain a gun? everyone wonders. Stacy tries to shoot Krystal with him, but the cat scrambles out of her grasp when she lifts him. Pontchartrain scurries about the floor while you and the other girls shuffle behind him with hunchbacks and outstretched fingers and girlish giggles.

He lunges at you and you catch him. You dare not let go because the way he stares at you makes you think he’s trying to tell you something.

“Uh-oh, Brooke, are you gonna shoot us?” Stacy teases. She stands with Valerie and Krystal in a portrait that took seven days to craft. Some hyperrealist painting of blonde hair falling like autumn leaves to create an image that matches the color of the sun, over pink, overdeveloped breasts and jeans shorts gliding up the smoothest pairs of legs. And you think, these three are interchangeable. Perfectly proportioned pretty teen girls produced in a factory for societal consumption. Rearrange them, and Stacy can be Krystal, or Krystal can be Valerie, or Valerie can be Stacy. Or are you looking at a young Alicia Silverstone, Christina Applegate and Rachel McAdams? Are you sure you’re not looking at a colidescope of gold and light rose and sky blue, alternating to the beat of a cackling tune, each movement fanning flowery perfume in your face?

And then you think, nothing makes sense, other than Pontchartrain letting you hold him in your arms as if he’s an assault rifle. You point him straight ahead, staring down the scope of his fuzzy back, and go “pew pew.”

“Oh, God,” you hear someone say. You’re pretty sure it’s Stacy. The laughter quiets. The smell subsides. The colors reorganize into three solid shapes. Stacy staggers back, balances herself on the curio, staggers forward, turns. Her hands clutch at her chest. Her tongue hangs out of her slack jaw where strange sounds seep out. Finally, she tumbles to the floor. She lies seemingly unconscious, the fallen damsel, her hand precariously over her forehead as if overwhelmed by the pewing. 

More laughter from the other two. They’re laughing so hard their legs wobble and they need to balance themselves against the wall or the couch. They laugh at you. They laugh at Stacy. “Oh my God, that was sooo random,” one of them says. 

Pontchartrain wiggles from your grasp and leaps to the floor. He climbs onto Stacy’s stomach, turns, and looks at you. “Mrow,” he says.

 You are not laughing. In fact, you stare into Pontchartrain’s eyes and you wonder if you’ll ever laugh again. In those yellow feline eyes you notice yourself in a future where you stick up all the preppy girls in the bathroom for their cigarettes and spare tampons, where you force a cute boy at cat point to be your date for Homecoming.

And you know that he knows that you know that this is a metaphor.