Loner. Crotchety old man. Writer? Born: ? Died: April 16, 1983, in Toronto, because he was really old.
They say it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for. I don’t know. I’m one of the quiet ones, and nobody ever needed to watch out for me. Ask Patronia (one of my cats) – she’ll tell you that I’m harmless.
Frank Zaffa was another one of the quiet ones. I never heard him come and go. The only time I knew he was about was when he would accidentally step on Mister Buggles (one of my cats)’ tail – why Mister Buggles seemed so devoted to the man I’ll never know.
I…I snuck into his room the one time after he squashed Mister Buggles’ tail. I’m not proud of it. Mister Kilkelchian had passed on a few years earlier (may he rest in peace, by which I mean may he rot in hell for leaving me alone) and, well, I was always looking for a hobby. And, anyway, I was angry about Mister Buggles’ tail and thought that if I could find evidence that Mister Zaffa enjoyed torturing small animals…well, I don’t know what I was thinking.
Maybe I’m not so harmless. Patronia isn’t always, you know, the best judge of character.
Mister Zaffa’s room was small and dark. On a desk was a typewriter and a chess set in the middle of a game. Stacked all over the room, on every available surface and in large piles on the floor, were sheets of paper. Manuscripts, I guess. The bigger ones had titles like The Trial and The Procedure and Amerika. I picked up one of the smaller bundles and started reading it. It was about a man who tried to find out why his car had been repossessed, but nobody he talked to – in the insurance company, in the agency that regulates insurance companies, in the government – could tell him. Weird.
Mister Zaffa walked into the room while I was in the middle of another weird story – about a man who had eyes in his walls. All over. They were watching him all the time. But, he didn’t mind. He was putting eyewash in one of the eyes that was looking kind of pink when Mister Zaffa caught me. I did what any person in my situation would do – I demanded that he explain what his writing was all about. Mister Zaffa laughed and said that if he knew what it was about, he wouldn’t have to write it. Oh, and, if he ever caught me in his room again, he would call the police.
Crotchety old bastard.
The papers say Mister Zaffa wasn’t Mister Zaffa at all, that he was actually a famous writer who had faked his own death and come to live in Canada. Erin PhatBuoy (one of my cats) doesn’t trust the papers; he makes a point of scratching up the editorial pages before doing his business on them. Me, I don’t know what to think.
Sure, there was that one time I ran into Mister Zaffa in the fruit market. I was walking Deleterious Sasquatch (one of my cats); my doctor told me that the animal needed the exercise, and I would do anything for my darlings. You couldn’t miss Mister Zaffa: tall, thin, wearing a long, heavy coat in the middle of summer. I was going to ask him how he felt about cats when he saw a young woman walking past. She was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a man’s head on the body of a cockroach and some writing I couldn’t make out. Mister Zaffa spat on her, shouting something in a language I didn’t understand, until Mister Spackler had to come out from behind his zucchini stand and calm the man down.
Now, I will admit that the face on the t-shirt looked like a younger, although not much healthier, version of Mister Zaffa. Does that make him a famous writer, like all the newspapers say he was? I couldn’t say.
Then, there was the time Mister Zaffa shouted, “Kafkaesque? What does that even mean?” so loud on the telephone that I couldn’t help but hear him. Me and Edgar (one of my cats), we don’t know what the word means, either, but neither of us ever got up the nerve to tell him. Who knows how things might have been if we had?
The papers say he was born in the Czech Republic back when it was called Bohemia. That would explain his accent, I suppose. Me and Madame Blavatsky (one of my cats) always thought it was French.
Mister Zaffa was definitely one of the quiet ones. Maybe he was a famous writer. Elfelina (one of my duaghters) and I are withholding judgment. If he was, though, we don’t see how that would make him dangerous.
Charry Kilkelchian
Charry Kilkelchian was Frank Zaffa’s neighbour for over 20 years. That doesn’t mean she knew anything about the man, you understand – she’s just saying.