Lucius Bod | Rogue Diary

I love Pussy. Not many people know this, perhaps because I don’t post photos to flaunt it in my blog or upload it into the profile’s image albums. What an unexpected source of mirth and bewilderment in my life, this Pussy is.

When my close friends Claudio and Derek agreed to end their relationship both gave me their cat. She had a name, but I couldn’t think of calling her by it since we were now together. Without further ado, she became my Pussy.

As with all cats, she owns me. Already housebroken, she knows where everything is and what it stands for when she reaches for her bowls of water and food, claws the couches fiercely and runs through the hallway into the foyer to chase her toys.

“Meow!”

She likes to play after I give her catnip. I toss her toy a metre away from me and she runs back with it, to lay it at my feet. My feet have scratch marks from her, but I still refuse to clip her nails often.

Last Wednesday night I had a long conversation with my brilliant new friend Gunter, a hardcore Berliner who lives in Barcelona and works as an Art Director and Commercial Photographer for an advertising agency. His day had been stressful, and I could feel the heat from his anger through my headphones. We both decided to use an Internet phone service after we looked at our cellular phone bills. He was not using foul language for a change, and the aspersions were also witty, something I have always admired of him.

When we met he was just another photographer snapping shots at a runway show for a designer friend’s collection in Madrid. During one segment of it, he turned to me suddenly and whispered: “That model has a pack of cigarettes under her arm!” enunciated boldly with his accent, so I looked up to see a price tag the stylist had not removed. After nearly collapsing on the carpet with irrepressible laughter, I shook his hand and asked if we could go out for a drink to exchange more observations on the show. He gave a “Ja!” that thrilled me. I went back to New York, and he returned to Barcelona, but we formed a great bond with every phone call thereafter.

“Miau!”

I was multi-tasking, making storyboards for my friend Mario’s photoshoot in the morning and also on the phone with Gunter. As he ranted about an unprofessional actor on the set of the commercial he was working on, the cat jumped on my desk and sat in front of my monitor. Because I spend so much time in front of the computer every day, a male model friend advised sitting on a Swiss ball for some hours. I got up and dashed to the kitchen to refill her water bowl and sat down again.

My friend Gunter and I did our hefty amount of complaining about egos but we also acknowledged each other’s alpha dog characters in business and also in social situations. Mutual respect kept it all from becoming a brawl, choosing to experience and learn from what we both had to offer from our day.

­© Image: !fatima/Flickr

 This work by Orlando Barahona is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

I celebrated the tenth anniversary of my eighteenth birthday with Stephen, my new flatmate from Australia and the telly on a cold Wednesday in November in the East Village. No one else could come – or would come – but I wasn’t alone at my party. A feeling of abandonment haunted me until our last drink together. I watched the first snowfall through my window before I went to sleep.




One moulten candle in a carrot muffin on the bookshelf and my flatmate naked, snoring in my bathtub next to an empty bottle of gin assaulted my eyes and ears the following day. The gray dawn caressed my face tenderly, then it kissed my pile of laundry. A nightmare had awakened me to a hangover and mild dysphoria.

Hunger struck at seven o’clock in the morning. Our fridge was empty again, except for a pizza box with a chewed-out crust leftover in it. Reluctantly, I made the decision to walk outside our building and cross the street in the freezing weather to find some fast food. Nothing else was open for a few blocks and it gave me the chance to flirt with Chrissy, the new clerk.

Chrissy was off that day and I was greeted instead by Kat, a sylph with Dynel curls falling from a visor. Her rhinestone-studded acrylic nails and perkiness belied the symptoms of a person suffering from helium ankles syndrome, which is often triggered by drinks at a club. “How may I assist you today?” was smothered in a very charming, unplaceable accent. My bovine expression stumped our communication for a moment until I pointed at the Fish Patty Combo. “With fries?” Yes, please. I purchased a small coffee for Stephen as well. “Have a nice day!”

I walked in to find Stephen sitting in the buff on our couch with the heater turned on to scorch, as he watched the morning news on the telly. He waved at me and I waved in return. I sat on the minuscule patio set we used as dining room furniture and I took a bite out of the soggy patty. My expression must have been of such disgust that he got up from the couch and walked over to my plate. He grabbed the coffee and the meal, then said: “Let me do something for you, but close your eyes!”

An unceremonious thud on the table announced the return of my plate. It all looked the same to me. What had he done to it? The first bite and my glare of suspicion at him became distant memories once my tongue did somersaults as my eyes and sinuses were overpowered by wasabi. Bastard! We laughed together. However, I continued to devour my meal with relief. The subsequent high opened up the vision of a world for me where I could coexist in harmony with Thai spices, Tabasco sauce, and endless hot dressings. Flog me raw forever, you beastly hot sauces! Vile take-out food, you have never had it this good.

© Text: Lucius Bod
© Image: Jes/Flickr


 This work by Orlando Barahona is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.