Chapter 2

Larry didn't mention the gallery opening in his column, but another review had a lot to say about it and the little scene at the soiree. Fortunately, that was in an East Bay paper and nobody read about the sudden confrontation and accusations in Marin. Did she steal someone else's work? Was she sixteen? My name wasn't mentioned, and Larry's review was worded around the laws of libel very carefully.

There is no such thing as bad publicity, and that had set off a lot of people coming into the vibrator store to see for themselves what the Hell this was about. Nancy had told the store folks that she was the Cat's agent and three or four requests for interviews came along and were said no to. But along with the requests for interviews came inquiries from gallery owners asking about seeing some more of her work and hinting at shows.

Terry got his ass kicked out of the house he'd been living in, but he landed on his feet with another situation where he was more comfortable and the Cat began to spend more time over in Berkeley and we got less wet spots on the living room furniture. (Private joke.)

She and Nancy became a team, going off and taking beast with two backs pictures. Her dad had wrecked so many cars in his career as an alcoholic, there was no way that she could get insurance under her parents' plan and was stuck for a driver and Nance had come through for her.

"I swear, T, that little bitch really gets off on bossin' me around." She told me once. I laughed, then told her she was a great roadie and I'm sure the Cat appreciated what she'd done for her. This was after she had told me a few stories about some of the scenes that the Cat had shot. There was one night in particular, when they had walked out the door with the last of the gear, and a lot of clothes tearing and a really down and dirty "fuck me bitch!" hot and heavy scene went down on the back seat and camera cases on the floor just inside the wide open side doors of the van. This was in a house over in flatlands of Berkeley and you would be surprised at how big a crowd can gather at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night on a residential sidewalk. Yeah, five or six isn't much of a crowd, but when they looked over after just getting their rocks off, and five or six people are standing on the side walk and watching you both curiously, it's quite a shock. I just had to laugh hearing about one of the women calling out, "Bravo, sisters!" and starting to clap and then them noticing they were all women and the rest of them started clapping, too. The electrical charge from some of the scenes... yow! Some of the photographs were really amazing. It was a hell of an education in all kinds of kinks that people had. Not only had, but wanted documented!

Ah, San Francisco: Land of the fruits and nuts!

This stuff was mostly just a couple, or maybe someone wanting some shots for posterity, or to act out a fantasy. There was a referral thing going on, and I am not sure if it was just the thing to do, to be shot by a two girl photography team doing the nasty, or what it was. Hand over fist doesn't even begin to cover it.

One stipulation. Four photographs would be chosen that would be signed off on. Some people stipulated no faces, or had a clause about a buyout of model releases. Most people just wanted to have someone shoot them looking hot. One guy wanted her to do a Diana Arbus thing, with black and white. The Cat turned that one down. She rented my studio quite a bit, twenty or thirty bucks or whatever the hell it was. Pretty soon, she can afford her own insurance, but she wasn't eighteen yet, so no can sign. She had a guy looking into how to form a company, so she could get a company car. No dice, minors can't sign stuff legally, so sorry. Nance, are you doing something Tuesday night?

Nancy and I had some great loving during this time, but it was kind of a disjoined kind of deal. I was working my gig, and that took care of most Friday and Saturday nights. Then I was sometimes out of town for two or three days to weeks. Once I came in from a night flight and there the Cat and Nancy were, faces wet and both looking like they had just finished a marathon. "Come here and fuck me," Nancy said. "God damn batteries dead in the vibrator and I need something inside me moving around, right now!" I took one sniff of the lust in that living room and tore open my pants and slid 'em down and was jumping Nancy's bones, slipping it in in one slosh. She was so wet, that's the sound it made. And have you ever had a woman tear your clothes off when you're fucking? Throws off your rhythm a little, especially the getting the jeans off your legs part. There's supposedly a phrase in Texas. It's called "gas masked." I can tell you what that means.

I can also tell you that you can half drown being gas masked, not to mention your neck almost being broken, and finally, if the girl gas masking you starts to really get her cookies and starts jumping around, you can end up with really strained muscles in a lot of strange places and a serious set of slashed in racing stripes on your rib cage and somewhere along the line, a pretty nasty bruise on my leg that I think came from the coffee table. Oh yeah, and you can almost get your spine snapped if your old lady gets off on her guy choking and the girl gas masking him splashes her like a bucket of water when she comes. Cause my old lady sure did and that's about the fastest quickie I ever had.

Terry couldn't handle it on one level and he was also having to really hit the books. I have the feeling that he might have appreciated having a Cat in heat to deal with some of the time, maybe once a month, but when they "dropped by" unexpectedly and the Cat dragged his ass out of his study group in the kitchen, it was a bit much for him to cope with. "I need fucking and I need it right NOW!"

There were three dumbfounded students looking at the doorway the Cat and Terry had vanished in. The guys were envious, obviously, and the girl looked a little wistful.

"Sorry to break up your schoolwork session, but since I'm in the same boat, anyone up for getting their ashes hauled?" Nancy pulled off her shirt and they looked like they were stop framed, she told me later. But she was hot and horny, I was somewhere else and the Cat was going to be getting her cookies. Nancy looked over at the boys with their mouths open. "How about you hon? You up for a lil' college experimentin'? I'll be jillin' off in the living room, unless you all would care to join me?"

I can kind of imagine the scene. The two guys must have exchanged looks of shock. This had all happened in probably less than a minute. No way! I don't know what the girl thought, but she followed them in a minute or so later.

One of those things, y'know? I do know that a good time was had by all and the Cat missed school the next day. Terry made it to a class around noon, and I had to chuckle at the idea of Terry not trying to melt down into a puddle at his desk. The Cat was a jock and she was into real "ride 'em cowboy sex," to borrow a term from Nancy. I think having Nancy's stark naked ass decorating the living room was a bit much for one of his other roommates, who walked into the coat tree and knocked it over on his way to the kitchen in the morning. Or maybe it was one of the other three asses, I don't know. But the guy was cool about it and made her some coffee and gave her some breakfast, joking that he really couldn't open his eyes until he's had at least two cups of coffee. She sat there and talked to him until the others woke up and walked in dressed. Then she went back to the living room and got dressed herself.

The times they had together were certainly interesting; I'll say that for sure. One set of photos had this really rough looking guy, who they both swore was a total sweetheart. That was the shoot where Nancy came in after I was in bed and said, "Honey, I am so stretched out right now it isn't even funny. I just got fucked by the biggest dick I ever had up my cunt. And if you don't mind, I'd like to share some of the feeling and see if I can suck your tonsils out through your dick." Tonsils? Hell, she got most of what remained of my blown mind!

And later on, I heard about what had happened. What surprised me was that it was a couple of gay guys doing this stuff with this guy in bondage. Nancy had been amazed at the guy's schlong, which was over a foot long. She'd heard about dicks like this, but couldn't believe it when she saw it live. The gay guys had teased the hell out of her about being a size queen and let her handle it. "You guys mind if I just see how much of this I can get into me before I yell uncle?" Mind? These two bullet headed leather freaks in chaps (and nothing else besides nipple rings) not only hadn't minded, they had held her up by the legs and the Cat had her head and they "plugged me like a light socket." And the guy hanging on the ropes had lost his virginity to her.

"I kinda felt sorry for the guy. No wonder he was gay; not many girls in high school could appreciate something like that." I finger fucked her very carefully, as she was sore from it. Just little rubs around the clit, saying nice things to her without saying a word. "Seems to me like it wouldn't be what they would expect. Bigger than life doesn't even begin to cover it." I must have made a doubtful sound, because she took my hand and pressed it around on my knee. "Feel right here? Where your knee cap bone is? That's where his dick ended."

"Holy shit!"

"Yeah. You gotta check this guy out, T. Un-fuckin-real."

"I think I'll just take your word for it," I said rather dryly. She was about to drift off to sleep and I'd slowed my hand way down and stopped. She murmured into the pillow as she spooned back at me.

"Don' hafta. Cat's got the pics." And she was asleep.

Summer time came around and the Cat had a birthday and a full summer of being confronted by various surrealistic things. She started turning down commissions of stuff that she'd done before and began to be able to pick up on people she was interesting in shooting, rather than just accepting everything that came her way.

The shots she'd taken of bondage scenes and guys going at it and couples and all had a hell of an impact. I could see why Nancy and she'd put on that little sidewalk show from the photos and I begin to wonder about if she was in over her head. Nancy was along as a chaperone, and she told clients right up front that they weren't going to have sex on a shoot with them or anyone else, and if there was a "friend" hanging around trying to get lucky, she'd shoo him off or leave herself. Nancy said she was dealing with it okay, but shooting in the East Bay was certainly wearing Terry's ass out.

Terry had taken off on a summer internship job and the Cat had missed him badly, but it gave her more time in the summer and she had more work than she knew what to do with. She'd had very few bad experiences, mostly some couple trying to lure her and Nancy into the sack with them, but occasionally just bad chemistry between the people being shot having performance anxieties and blaming the other for it. She didn't get raped, didn't get molested, and the scariest thing was some boys down in the Mission trying to mess with them one night, and Nancy laughing them off with wise cracks and put downs. They wound up passing her lighting cases into the back of the van.

This lucrative little summer job of hers had brought her in almost twelve hundred a week on average, after expenses. In three months, she'd raked in close to fourteen thousand dollars. She'd spent almost six thousand of that on equipment and had moved on to two and a quarter format to get better resolution.

Her senior school year put a cramp in her income, as she could only get out to shoot on the weekends and an occasional shoot in Marin. No East Bay or San Francisco stuff and it had to fit into her schedule. Her income from shooting dropped way off.

Just around the Thanksgiving holidays, she had a one-woman show at a gallery in the Mission. I was home and over the frazzle of the summer tour schedule of shows. I wasn't working any advertising accounts right then and I didn't have a lot of stuff filling my schedule, so we made plans to go to the gallery opening with her.

This was the Cat's third or fourth show, the other two being group shows that she'd gotten into. "Artistic erotica" had been the most common term in the reviews.

The Sunday after the opening, Larry had an article about the mysterious woman photographer who had so suddenly appeared on the scene. A rumor of shots being fired at her gallery opening in Berkeley, accusations of her fronting someone else's work as her own, lying about her age to cause controversy and "other tricks she tries to manipulate what she thinks is a gullible press" The Cat's logo was dissected, "a quasi-twenties logo that she must think is the Cat's A, but is shamelessly trying to appeal to prurient interests." Then he snuck in a suggestion that it was my work being displayed, because of my fear of losing some advertising accounts.

Being accused of being a fraud is a big, big deal with an artist. Yeah, so I'm a hack ad whore, and a "well full of rock and roll clichés", but you just accused The Cat of being a plagiarist, Larry, and that is libel, pure and simple.

I called my agent, who called a law firm, who looked at the article and said that I didn't have any right to sue, as I was just "suspected" of being the photographer. However, as far as The Cat was concerned, it was wide open season on this guy.

Yeah, and what happens then? Courts, publicity, a whole bunch of hoopla that nobody was ready for: "And you knew she was only sixteen when you let her take those pornographic pictures of you and a woman you say isn't your sister? Can you tell me her name, please and how I get in contact with her?" Oh, shit. Katrina's company is so straight arrow that she'd be on the streets as soon as that hit the paper. And hit the paper it would. Welfare or Child Abuse or someone would be stepping hip deep into her business, and The Cat would be really talked about at school, a world she was barely tolerating putting up with. Terry and she had sort of gotten back together, but I think her wild summer photo journey through thirty or so bedrooms had kind of put them off kilter with one another. When he heard about this, he started making excuses. Nancy had called him up to invite him to a party and talked to him for a bit about what was bothering him. He had a couple of scholarships and they could be taken away and he'd lose Berkeley. The Cat was the best thing that had ever happened to him, but he had to be a good little boy to finish school. Having a hot girlfriend was one thing, but when push came to shove, having a hot girlfriend spread all over the tabloids was really going to fuck up his plans for law school. The Cat had grown by leaps and bounds, while he'd been spending the summer learning how to file briefs in his uncle's law office in Santa Monica. He hadn't signed on for the stuff now about to blow up in all of our faces.

The Cat was kind of pissy for a few days about it, then she shut up about him. I think she realized that she'd moved past him. I think maybe it was a sense of relief finally set in. The simple fact of the matter was that she'd outgrown him, but he would always be her first real boyfriend.

We were there for The Cat about this strange problem her life had just become to us all. I was balanced on the cusp of becoming a straight on rock and roll shooter. I could give up the account stuff and be okay. The VW was Nancy's as I'd gotten a big V8 gold Chevy van to haul my gear in and had a five figure bank account. I didn't know if it would stand up to the legal expenses a lawsuit could be: It was some serious shit we were being forced to eat.

Cat didn't make her show opening. Snide things were said by Larry in his column; "adding more fuel to the speculation that she's a front for a more famous photographer who is worried about losing a major advertising account over his sniggering pictures." Lawyer, hell, I wanted to take a fire ax to the guy at that point!

It was a jumpy kind of winter. The flurry of holiday shows, a trip to Hawaii for ten days in late January. We wanted to take her with us. But how do you sell the "a ten day all expense paid vacation to Hawaii is a valid reason to skip school" argument to her parents?

We came back to Fairfax and had a good reunion. The Cat had (ahem) not had her itches scratched while we had been gone and she was very damn happy to see us both. Four a.m. happy.

February rolled by and there was this kind of "who the hell is this chick?" buzz on the rock and roll gossip line. About a hundred people confidentially told me they knew who she was because they had been at the opening. You know, where the guy got shot? Over a picture of his girl with another girl was the way I heard it. Yeah, and the girl he was with was his sister! Oh, brother; the rock n'roll rumor mill in action.

There would be little bits in the columns. Herb Caen had a 'name The Cat' contest, but dropped it after a week or so. Some of the names were way too funny and dirty to print. I got a copy from a guy who got it from a girl that worked at the Chronicle. And none knew exactly who she was.

I'd had a bad experience with not getting the rent to a landlord on time and there went a whole bunch of nice letterhead stationary with my address on it. So when Nancy was having cards made up for the Cat, she just put the logo and a number at Katchina answering service on it. The Cat had a PO Box and that left only the gallery. And the one person there who knew who the Cat really was had the valuable and quite rare talent of keeping her mouth shut.

Then two weeks before school ended and she graduated, Terry's sister found out from him why he broke up with Katherine. There were a few lifeguard jobs open at the pool during the summer and she'd casually asked the Cat if she was going to apply for one. In her "trying to appear like a normal kid" role, she'd said yes.

Terry's sister a couple of years later would be diagnosed as paranoid after some weird shit went down. But back then she started to think that the Cat really wanted the lifeguard job and would beat her out. So she started spreading rumors around the school and the Cat had to trot her hot little ass on down to see the principal.

The interview went into some disturbing rumors he'd been hearing. The Cat looked at him and waited for the shoe to drop. "What rumors?" She finally asked after a long pause.

He'd hemmed and hawed and asked her about this thing being going around the Bay Area about a "sixteen year old pornographer known as the Cat?" She looked at him blankly for a moment and acted it perfectly. She'd practiced it in front of the mirror about a thousand times while Nancy and I were in Hawaii and we coached her a little when we got back. She went from puzzlement to a frown of concentration and a head tilted, glance at him sideways, look to see if she could read any clues in his face. "Yeah, I heard the rumors. Why? Is it because my nickname's Cat?" Then a wide open mouthed look, followed by a gasp and then a hell of a laugh out loud laugh. "You think I'm the girl that took those photographs everyone's talking about? Wow! Wait'll I tell Jane and Bev about this!"

And a quick exit is made by the Cat from the scene of the crime.

Supposedly.

Well, someone phoned in a tip to the paper. A cameraman showed up and gave a kid a few bucks to point her out. A teacher told him to leave and he went away. Then the school office started to get some phone calls. "We can't hand out personal information on any student, it's against the law. And please don't call again." Another few bucks changed hands in the schoolyard and two cars and a motorbike appeared in front of her house down the street. I called the cops to have them removed. They started hanging out in the parking lot of the supermarket at the bottom of the hill.

The Cat told her mom that someone had thought she was the mysterious Cat. "You know, that chick that's supposed to be in high school everyone's looking for?" and that everyone in the Bay Area was wondering about. Her mom had known about it from reading Herb Caen. The Cat moved into our house. I took the precaution of clearing the guest room bed off and letting her have closet space. I told her she could have the desk when she had it all in the files. She took a stab at it, but dealing with my concept of organization needed way past a stab.

There were some photographers that started staking out the school: Old vans with clean windows. Cat had a talk with her guidance counselor and "challenged" five of her classes and got to take her exams early. It was widely believed that she was visiting her aunt.

The Cat had always had a split life. Between her alcoholic father making it not cool to bring classmates home with her to hang out with, and semi-living with us, she'd been moving in our circle for several years. We were all in our twenties or early thirties and a mixed bag of nuts. A couple of lesbians, a lesbian couple, a couple of gay guys, the odd group grope once in a while. She'd been exposed to a lot of different lifestyles people live by and those were the more or less normal people. I'm not counting all of our heterosexual friends we sometimes had sexual encounters with. We didn't think of ourselves as swingers, just people who were rather loosened up in their outlooks on sex and love and rock and roll. I'd been to bed with a lot of my woman friends and so had Nancy. Plus she'd slept with most of our male friends. Our house was a place where people would hang out in the summer, and a lot of fairly famous people stopped by now and then and would hang out and smoke weed and kick back and climb in the tub and bring over beers and we'd have a lot of fun without even having to leave the house. (In one period of time, I once had six girls in four days without leaving the property.)

The Cat had kicked back with famous guitar players. She'd rolled weed with guys from the Dead, Santana, Doobie Bros, and a dozen groups you've never heard of. She'd schmoozed with the famous and the unknowns. It was generally known that she was a photographer and she'd sometimes take candid snapshots without being obtrusive. About maybe, oh, say fifteen or less of our friends had ever seen her work and known it was hers. Everyone had seen the one of Gwen, but her face was so scrunched up in orgasm, you just didn't make the connection. And that picture of Gwen didn't have that lil' cats ass logo on it, either.

That logo had been dreamed up one giggly day on some kind of shroom and there was a guy there that had sketched it out. Then taken out a brush and did it on black paper with gold ink. A spray of something in a can and it was a shiny black paper with a gold cat on it. Dropping it into the corner of her work as her signature had seemed cute. "It's the Cat's Ass pictures." Maybe it was the drugs, but it sure seemed funny at the time. And then she used it. No signature, just that little cat in the corner.

Some clever guy had taken a lot closer look than any one else and saw the little r in a circle. You know that the US Patent and Trademark Office? Everyone thinks it's just 'the patent office', but it's the USPTO. Oh, you didn't know that, eh? Neither did we.

Old eagle eye wrote and sent in a picture of the trademark and found out who it was registered to it. Hello, Kitty!

There were forty press reporters there, counting the camera slingers. A TV crew lugging a huge shoulder mounted news camera. Caen wrote about the groan that went up from the press section when her name was called and the principal said, "She can't be here today because of a family emergency." Herb said that the press people made an impression on the occasion, but didn't mention what four letter word was shouted by one of the frustrated members of the Fourth Estate. Some video cameraman had been off to the side and gotten a shot of the press section when that was announced. It made the ha-ha section on the ten o'clock news. They bleeped the word, of course, but it was a great reaction shot of the audience turning around to look for who'd said it.