Latch is fine. He’s probably napping in a sunny spot right now, blissfully unaware that he may have inadvertently sent one man into heart failure, put a car through that same man’s house the following year, and left another man’s ribs in pieces on the pavement.
Latch, of course, was1 Whittier Bar’s beloved bar cat whose namesake festival, Latch Fest, has grown into a multi-day fundraiser for T-Town TNR. Every dollar goes to the cats. Nobody—not the bands, not the guy who booked them and then got his car repossessed, not any of the volunteers—sees a cent.
But somebody always pays.
Laura Voth and Bradley Metcalf organized the first Latch Fest in 2023. “Every year it happens, something bad happens to one of the people who are organizing it, and it’s usually, like, not fun cool shit,” Bradley said.
Whittier Bar regulars suspect that Latch’s neutering unleashed a curse on the festival. Until this year, the victims have all been men, which has led some to believe that the curse only comes for people with testicles.
2023: A Cough That Turned Into Heart Failure
Around the time Latch got neutered, Bradley started coughing so much that he lost his voice. Allergies? Maybe, but this hack was relentless. Laura Cook remembered sitting at Whittier Bar with him: “He looked, like, his skin was not the color that a person’s skin is supposed to be.”