18 Photograph by Robin Schwartz
Letter of Recommendation
Tired of an
overflowing litter
box? Charles
Mingus has a
pamphlet for that.By Brent Katz
Toilet-Training a Cat
Sometimes, at Charles Mingus’s apart-
ment, you would have to wait outside
the bathroom as a cat fi nished using
the toilet. The legendary jazz composer
and bassist had grown tired of coming
home to an overfl owing litter box. So
he devised a solution. And in 1954, he
wrote it up on a single sheet of paper and
began handing out copies. A pamphlet
version followed.
‘‘The Charles Mingus CAT- alog for Toi-
let Training Your Cat’’ arrived in my mail-
box in the second year of the pandemic. I
learned about it after Topos, a bookstore
and small press in Queens, reissued it — a
piece of paper folded into three parts, its
title in Cooper Black font, a photo of Min-
gus’s tuxedo cat, Nightlife, on the cover.
It took Mingus three or four weeks to
toilet- train Nightlife. His method, in a nut-
shell, was to fi ll a shallow cardboard box
with torn-up newspaper, instead of litter,
which can clog the pipes. He placed the
box far from the bathroom to start, then
began inching it closer. ‘‘Do it gradually,’’
he writes. ‘‘You’ve got to get him thinking.’’Step 2 was to start trimming down the
brim of the box as he moved it. Eventually
he affi xed it atop the toilet with string.
‘‘Don’t bug the cat now,’’ he writes, ‘‘don’t
rush him.’’ The third step was to cut a
plum-size hole in the box. The cat came
to expect the hole. ‘‘At this point you will
realize that you have won.’’
Mingus then slipped the remaining
cardboard under the toilet seat. Eventu-
ally, with a magician’s fl air, he disposed of
it completely so that the cat was just using
the toilet. ‘‘Don’t be surprised if you hear3.20.