The Legend Of Arnold Miller The Cat Killer: A Kid Story

When The Kid came back to Boston from California in the late 60's all over the subway walls was painted in big letters ARNOLD MILLER THE CAT KILLER. I thought it was a joke, something some prankster had made up. Little did I know.

That summer, the summer of '68 If you took acid in Boston, it more than likely came from me. I had a guy from Berkeley flying out with about 10,000 hits a week. I got it cheap and not being greedy, I sold it cheap. This pissed a few people off, in particular a Jewish guy named Lenny... a wannabe gangster from Brookline. We thought he was pretty funny and we called his "gang" the Kosher Nostra. Lenny had designs of taking over the acid business in Boston which would have been pretty difficult seeing that I had a 80-90% marketshare. If he was to succeed, I had to be eliminated.

One night up on Beacon Hill, somebody took a couple of pot shots at me and it wasn't too difficult to figure out who was behind it. I wasn't afraid, but you never know when one of these idiots might just get lucky. It was time for a proactive solution. I figured if I could lure Lenny into a meeting to discuss an equitable marketing scheme, some of my buddies from the North End could make him an offer he couldn't refuse. My friend Lurch knew most of the Brookline guys so I gave him a call.

Lurch, whose real name was Ricky was a big guy who...looked pretty much like Lurch, only with shoulder length hair. He wore a cap like Brian Johnson from AC/DC, only Lurch had a leather patch with a swastika on it. I mentioned something about the swastika one day and he launched into a diatribe about how it's an ancient symbol that the Nazi's stole. I told him that people that didn't know might get the wrong idea. "Fuck 'em" was all he said... so I left it alone. Anyways, Lurch said that Arnold Miller the Cat Killer was the guy to talk to- he mostly got his acid from Lenny, except when he got it from Lurch (who got it from me).

"Are you shittin me?" I asked him. "He's a real guy?" And this is how I learned the legend of Arnold Miller. He was a guy around 30 that lived in his parents attic. Now I have to tell ya... Lurch was a really good guy, but he was a brick or two short of a load so I wasn't sure just how much of this story to believe. For example, Lurch was convinced that he could conjure ancient Egyptian curses. If you pissed him off, he would do his best Boris Karloff impression and cast a curse your way... he was really convinced that it worked. So you can see when he started telling me the story about Arnold, I was more than a little skeptical. Arnold, according to Lurch, liked to take acid every day. To support his "habit" he went out at night with a piece of broomstick and a burlap sack. He would find a cat and whack it with the stick and into the bag it went. When he had a few he was off to Chinatown, to sell them to the restaurants. I shit you not!

Chinatown stayed open all night and it was the place to go to eat really late after the bars closed. There was one small place that always had a big, fat cat in the window. We'd go by to check and if the cat was there, we went in. Anyway, I got to meet Arnold Miller the Cat Killer... he looked just about like you'd expect. Thick horn-rimmed glasses, short hair- kinda nondescript. Basically, he looked like somebody that would kill cats and brag about it on subway walls. I hope he doesn't graduate!