# Tired of an overflowing litter box? Charles Mingus has a pamphlet for that: How to Toilet-Train Your Cat: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/04/01/tired-of-an-overflowing-litter-box-charles-mingus-has-a-pamphlet-for-that-how-to-toilet-train-your-cat-video-photos/
- Published: 2022-04-01T15:54:50+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Sometimes, at Charles Mingus’s apartment, you would have to wait outside the bathroom
as a cat finished using the toilet. The legendary jazz composer and bassist had 
grown tired of coming home to an overflowing 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 Toilet Training Your Cat” arrived in my mailbox
in the second year of the pandemic. I learned about it after Topos, a bookstore 
and small press in Queens, [reissued it ](https://www.topospress.com/products/charles-mingus-cat-alog)—
a piece of paper folded into three parts, its title in Cooper Black font, a photo
of Mingus’s tuxedo cat, Nightlife, on the cover.

It took Mingus three or four weeks to toilet-train Nightlife. His method, in a nutshell,
was to fill 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 affixed 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.”

![Video: Reg E. Cathey Reads The Charles Mingus CAT-alog | Studio 360 | WNYC](https://
i0.wp.com/media.wnyc.org/i/800/0/c/85/1/regecathy_mingus_catalog.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

Mingus then slipped the remaining cardboard under the toilet seat. Eventually, with
a magician’s flair, he disposed of it completely so that the cat was just using 
the toilet. “Don’t be surprised if you hear the toilet flush in the middle of the
night. A cat can learn how to do it, spurred on by his instinct to cover up.”

I first discovered Mingus in middle school. His music was spontaneous yet composed.
He took the listener to the brink of cacophony but always maintained a handle on
things. Now, years later, my five-year relationship had recently ended. I was lucky
to be employed, but I was definitely in the wrong job. My life was taking another
turn toward the unknown, and I didn’t feel I had much control over it. Mingus’s 
pamphlet seemed to be filled with little glimpses into his worldview and his creative
process. After all, a cat, like inspiration, is a mysterious force. It cannot be
commanded to sit or roll over, like a dog. Somehow, it felt as if Mingus could see
right into the mind of the cat, to work with the enigma.

I started buying copies for friends, as gifts. Then I decided to test the method
myself, to see what it might teach me about Mingus’s gift for making things happen
that shouldn’t be possible. I haven’t had a cat since we lost Cleo, the Abyssinian,
who went crazy, my mom claims, from licking the sticky side of Scotch tape. So I
enlisted the help of my friend Madden, a writer and organist who has a tuxedo cat,
just like Nightlife. She picked up a cardboard box, and the journey began.

The first hiccup came swiftly. Her cat, Reilly, didn’t want to go on torn-up newspaper.
And so, nary a week in, we reinstituted the Pine Pellet sawdust that Reilly trusted
and that Madden hoped would not gunk up her pipes.

The box crept closer to its destination, and Reilly began using it in the bathroom.
But three weeks in, when Madden put the box on the toilet, Reilly wouldn’t make 
the final leap.

![Let Charles Mingus help you with your cat poop problems | Dangerous Minds](https://
i0.wp.com/dangerousminds.net/content/uploads/images/made/content/uploads/images/
cat_toilet_mingus_2304932842_465_324_int.jpg?resize=640%2C446&ssl=1)

A few days before our four-week deadline, I texted, “Has he gone on the toilet at
all yet?”

“Not yet,” Madden wrote.

We had reached an impasse. What’s more, we seemed to be confusing him. At one point,
Madden scooped Reilly up just as he was about to do his business in a guitar case.

About a week before the experiment ended, the Charles Mingus Institute connected
me with Eric Mingus, Charles’s son. He told me he used to watch his father compose
at the piano. “People have this impression of him thinking about every chord and
every detail, but he just played,” Eric said. “And playing would lead to an idea.”
It was not something he tried to force.

Mingus also had a gift for inching musicians out of their comfort zones. He would
often arrive at rehearsals with unfinished compositions, according to the jazz scholar
Krin Gabbard, then sing the band members their parts, not allowing them the crutch
of sheet music. “He could read people very well,” Eric said. “And that goes for 
cats, dogs — everyone.”

But my conversation with Eric also complicated the picture. For instance, he told
me that, even for his father, the Mingus method wasn’t foolproof. “Sometimes the
cat would miss, and there’d be cat poop on the seat or on the floor.”

The creative process can be messy. And apparently, Mingus was ambivalent about this
messiness — about whether his method even _should_ work every time. When John Cassavetes
asked Mingus to score his 1959 movie, “Shadows,” Mingus agreed — but on one condition,
according to Cassavetes. Mingus told him he had all these cats that were defecating
on the floor and wanted Cassavetes to send some of his people over to clean it up.“
I can’t work,” he said. “They [expletive] all over my music.” So Cassavetes and 
a few others went to Mingus’s apartment with scrubbing brushes. Afterward, Mingus
said: “I can’t work in this place. It’s so clean. I’ve got to wait for the cats 
to [expletive].”

![](https://i0.wp.com/static01.nyt.com/images/2022/03/20/magazine/20lor/20lor-articleLarge.
jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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