Mai Tran started pissing in 2021, while Tran was in pandemic unemployment, often staying overnight in people’s homes. Tran has now cared for twenty-two cats and traveled to ten apartments across New York, observing the inner lives of cat owners and soothing their nerves. From home vet visits to black eyes to stray cats, Chronicles of a Catsitter chronicles the most memorable days on the job.
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It’s late August and I’m lugging a bag to the Bronx to stay with my friend M. for a week. She is recovering from her breast augmentation and I will be taking care of her cats and helping with the shopping and housework until she can pick things up.
I arrive in the evening, the same day of the surgery. M.E.’s friend, a beautiful actress on strike, lets me in and takes me to see M. She is shy but has enough energy to show me her new tits, which look great, as they all do the tits. We order delivery from a burrito chain, and E. explains UFOs conspiracy theories at us until she has to leave, so M. gets up to explain her house to me.
The whole thing is set up with Amazon Alexa, to the point where the light switches don’t work. I’m learning that I’m so secondary that I don’t like telling Alexa what to do. I find her small, round body on the TV stand and get on my hands and knees to whisper, Alexa, turn off the living room lights.
The cats, Lizard and Darcy, are in the basement, where they have an automatic litter box. I see that they have exploded on the floor, and there is trash scattered everywhere. I do some sleuthing and realize that the Litter Robot has stopped spinning so the cats can’t get in. While I’m troubleshooting, saying “what does the Litter Robot blue light mean”, Darcy sits up and poops on the floor again. M. and we watch in silence. I can’t tell if M. is indifferent, not surprised or still high from the anesthesia. It turns out that the blue light is actually purple, but none of that matters because the solution is to just turn the robot off and then on.
The next morning, M. is more awake and shows me her dishwasher on the counter, which takes ten jugs of water to fill and can barely clean two people’s worth of dishes at a time, let alone one pan. Robots will never replace human labor anyway because the house is so full of dust and cat hair that I break out in eczema. I walk up and down the stairs and into the basement with a vacuum cleaner, trying to clear the air.
E. comes back in the evening, and we all eat more fast food on the couch. She hugs a stuffed animal she was given when she had bottom surgery this year, which she passed on to M., who will hopefully pass it on to someone else. A cis woman I had catsat for who had a breast reduction also passed me a pillow when I had top surgery. E., M. and we sit in a row and E. talks about how special it is to be together, with all our modified trans bodies.
The conversation turns to doctors, who are insured and whether or not they require referral letters. E. loves a Dr. Tran who performs trans surgeries, which leads us to watch Robin Tran’s stand-up bits. My roommate’s dad once texted them “how’s my trans health,” and I honestly thought he was interested in my trans health care until my roommate put in an apostrophe. Later, I text my friend about how safe I feel there, among the mountains of clutter and stuff.
What does what makes me feel insecure is the lack of coffee at home. I start going to the corner store below the subway station, until the women who work there recognize me. On my last day in the area, I think they can sense it, because they crowd together, laughing. They ask if I’m Thai, Filipino or Korean. I say I’m Viet and they go ah. They had guessed Thai or Filipino. “Yeah, all brown,” I say, glad they got to watch it.
Back on the couch, M. shows me the new selfies she’s taken, with her boobs in the center. We had met on Grindr and hung out for a while before calling it quits in that regard. We browse Her Feeld, a relatively new dating app “for open-minded people”. Sometimes, I can’t tell if it’s really that bad out there, or if every nice gay guy has already seriously partnered up and we’re left with white guys named Sock. “It’s harder for us,” says M., who is indigenous and has had a good time in her adult life.
There are the friends I love and the work I believe in, all the things I want to do, and still, I wonder about the mundanity of other people’s lives, the maintenance work that happens between the big ventures in the outside world. How nice, I think, to have a body next to your body, a person with whom you can fill all this time and space.
