# Fog Street Bookkeeper, 1994, and the Cat Who Wrote His Plays
My name is Walter Higgins, and back in the winter of 1994 I was the one everyone in the Boylston Street law office called "the copy guy." Not a paralegal, not a clerk with a future — just the man who ran documents from the back room to the mail cart, filed briefs at the Suffolk County courthouse, and typed depositions until my knuckles locked up in the cold. I want to tell this the way it actually happened, because there's a version of this story going around where I come off looking simple, or worse, like a fraud waiting to be caught. I wasn't either. I was just a tired man with a cat.
The firm was Dunn & Rourke, three partners and about six of us doing the grinding. My apartment was a five-hundred-square-foot walk-up above a laundromat on Chelsea's Broadway, fourth floor, no elevator, radiator that clanked at two in the morning like somebody was trying to get out of the wall. Rent was four hundred and ten dollars a month, and after that and the T pass, I had maybe thirty dollars left over most weeks. I ate a lot of tuna out of the can. Standing at the sink, so I wouldn't have to wash a plate.
They laughed at me at the office — not cruelly, just the way people laugh at a man who doesn't fit. I'd take my ten-minute lunch break out on the loading dock behind the building and split my sandwich with whatever stray showed up. There were usually two or three. The other clerks called it "Higgins and his congregation." I didn't mind. I liked something about it — the way a hungry animal doesn't pretend to be anything other than hungry. People pretend constantly. Cats don't bother.
I found the kitten in October, in the hedge outside the Stop & Shop on Everett Ave, soaked from the rain and so thin I could see the shape of his ribs through wet fur. Orange, with a white patch under his chin like a little bib. I put him inside my coat and rode the bus home with him pressed against my chest, and I remember the bus driver, a heavyset guy named Pete who did that route every night, looking in the mirror and saying, "That better not be alive, Higgins." It was alive. It's still alive, as far as this story is concerned.
I called him Sherlock. He had this way of tilting his head and narrowing his eyes like he was working something out — like the answer to a case was sitting right there and he just needed one more minute. Every night he'd climb up on the milk crate I used as a nightstand and sit there mumbling. Not meowing exactly — this low, rolling sound, almost like sentences with the words filed off. My neighbor across the hall, a night-shift nurse named Dolores, used to bang on the wall and yell, "Higgins, is that cat talking to you or at you?" I never had a good answer.
Here's the part people don't believe, and I understand why, because I didn't believe it myself until it happened three nights running. In December — the fourteenth, I remember because it was two days before the Whitford trial closed and Mr. Rourke bought the whole office a pot of hot cider spiked with something stronger, to celebrate — I went home a little warm from the cider, fed Sherlock his can of Friskies, talked to him the way I always did, and went to bed. And I dreamed. Not the usual nothing I usually got. A full story, in color, with people in it who had names and grudges and blood on their hands. I woke up at maybe three in the morning with my heart going and words already lining up in my head like they were standing in formation waiting for me to write them down.
I sat at that same milk crate with a legal pad I'd swiped from the supply closet and I wrote until the sky outside my one window went from black to that flat Boston gray. Then I put on my coat and went to work like nothing had happened. I did this for eleven straight nights. Sherlock sat there the whole time, on the corner of the pad half the time, purring like an engine, and every single night, I swear on whatever you want me to swear on, the story kept going exactly where the last night's dream had left off.
By the end of it I had a stack of yellow legal paper about two inches thick, and a play. I called it "The Andronicus Account" — I don't even fully know why, it just arrived with that title attached, same as the rest of it. And I had this thought, sitting there at four in the morning with cold feet and a cramping hand, that nobody in this world was going to publish a play about a Roman general's revenge written by a document clerk from Chelsea named Walter Higgins.
So I took two vacation days — first time in six years I'd used any — put on my one decent jacket, and walked into a small press on Newbury Street that did chapbooks and playscripts for local theater companies. And when the woman behind the desk asked my name, something just came out of me. I said, "Bill Shaw." It sounded like somebody who wrote plays. Higgins did not sound like somebody who wrote plays.
They took it. Not just took it — a theater company out of Cambridge wanted to stage it by spring. Then a regional paper ran a little piece about "the reclusive new playwright Bill Shaw." Then somebody from a bigger paper called the press asking for an interview, and the press told them Mr. Shaw wasn't doing interviews, which was true, because Mr. Shaw did not exist, and I had no idea how you'd go about un-inventing a person once he had a byline.
I kept thinking I'd fix it. I'd walk into Mr. Rourke's office on a Monday and say, look, there's something you should know about the file cabinet money, the play, all of it — and then the phone would ring, or a subpoena would need filing by four, and the moment would just walk away from me. Weeks did that. Then a month did that.
And every night, still, Sherlock sat on the milk crate. I'd come home more rattled each time — the play was getting a full production now, opening in April at a black-box theater off Central Square, and there were posters, actual printed posters, with a name on them that used to be nobody and now had my rent covered eight times over sitting in an envelope I hadn't touched. I'd look at him and say it out loud, quiet, because Dolores's wall was thin: "Sherlock. What do I do with this." He'd blink those pale brown eyes and go back to his low mumbling, like the whole thing bored him, like he already knew how it ended and was waiting for me to catch up.
What finally broke it open wasn't guilt. It was Mrs. Alma Petrakis.
She ran the front desk at the black-box theater, sixty-something, gravel voice from forty years of cigarettes, and she cornered me — cornered Bill Shaw — at the opening night reception in April, because I'd made the mistake of actually showing up, standing in the back near the coat rack in my one jacket, unable to stay away from watching actors say my words out loud in front of strangers who were crying at the third act. Alma had done the programs for that theater for two decades and she knew every writer who'd ever walked through that door, real ones, MFA ones, angry young ones. She looked at me for a long moment holding her little cup of cheap Chardonnay and said, "You're not a playwright. I've met a hundred of them. What are you?"
I told her the truth. All of it — the copy machine, the tuna cans, the kitten in the hedge, eleven nights of a cat mumbling on a milk crate while a story wrote itself through my hand. I expected her to laugh me out of the lobby. Instead she put her cup down on the coat check counter and said, "Then you're going to fix your name before this becomes a lawsuit instead of a nice story," and she gave me the number of a lawyer she knew — not from my firm, a different one, a woman named Carla Feenstra who specialized in exactly this kind of mess: copyright, false authorship, contracts signed under an invented name.
Here's what fixing it actually looked like, because I want to be specific, since the specifics are the only part that matters. Carla drew up an amended contract with the Newbury Street press and the Cambridge theater company both, replacing "Bill Shaw" with Walter T. Higgins in every filing, program, and royalty agreement, retroactive to the original signing. That took six weeks and cost me eleven hundred dollars in legal fees, which at the time was nearly three months of my old take-home pay. I sat in Carla's office on Tremont Street and signed my actual name to a stack of paper for the first time in my adult life feeling like it belonged to me.
The royalty checks that had been sitting — some cashed under Shaw through a PO box I'd rented with cash, most not yet claimed — got reissued. Total came to just under nine thousand dollars once the play's regional rights started selling to two other companies in Providence and Hartford. Nine thousand dollars doesn't sound like much today. In 1994, to a man who split tuna fish with strays behind a law office, it was a door opening.
I quit Dunn & Rourke on a Friday in June. I didn't storm out — I gave two weeks like a person does, finished the filing on the Whitford appeal, and Mr. Rourke shook my hand and said he'd always figured there was more going on with me than the filing cabinets let on. I used part of the money for first and last month on a real one-bedroom on Marlborough Street, the kind with actual heat that didn't clank, and I put the rest into finishing a second play, this one signed Walter Higgins from the very first page of the very first draft.
Sherlock came with me, obviously. He's older now, slower getting up onto things, but he still does his mumbling most nights, sitting near whatever I'm working on, head tilted, like he's still got one more case to close. I don't know if I believe a cat gave me a play. I know I believe I wrote what came to me and I know who I am now on every piece of paper that matters, and some nights that's enough of an answer for a man like me.
