3/16/23
Newsletter #277
The Crack of Dawn
I’m a sixty-four-year-old, single, never married, no kids, cat guy. In the past thirty years I’ve had ten cats. For a while various old friends left their unwanted cats at my house, which became known as, “The Cat Dump.” I have a cat door, and the cats are free to come and go. Therefore, I don’t “have” cats; cats have me.
For a decade I had three sister cats: Anna, Alice and Bridget. Alice was the sweetest, and she lived to be nine. Bridget was a snotty bitch, and she lived to be twenty. When I say she was a snotty bitch, I mean to the other cats, not to me. Bridget was a terrific lap cat. All she wanted was to be on my lap, petted by me, and would hiss at the other two cats if they took her spot. Of course, I loved all three equally, but whichever one got to my lap first was the winner, and that was usually Bridget. Being the supercilious diva bitch, Bridget outlived her sisters by almost ten years – possibly out of sheer spite.
Anna was a black cat with one white dot on her chest. She was the most self-actuated, self-realized living creature that I have met in my life. Anna knew exactly who she was and why she was alive. Her job was to kill (or just catch) something every day, then present it to me, and rare was the day she failed. Unsurprisingly, her victims were primarily mice. For over a decade, in the exact same spot in the living room, Anna laid before me literally thousands of bloody mouse corpses. In every case I petted and praised her, saying, “My little predator.” I would recite a short prayer in Hebrew, then flush the mice down the toilet. Eventually there was a three-foot bloody stain on the carpet that looked like a person had been murdered there, and after many years my cheap landlord finally replaced the carpet. Anna was also very good at catching chipmunks. She brought them into the house entirely uninjured, showed me her catch, looking foolish hanging from her mouth, then let them go. I’d spend the next hour tricking an overly-excited chipmunk out of my house. If Anna wanted to be petted she just pushed Bridget off my lap. I suspect that Bridget hated Anna.
At the age of nearly twelve, Anna caught and killed a mouse, brought it to me, went into the shower and dropped dead. I buried her in the backyard. I made a wooden tombstone that reads: “Anna, 2001-2012, A great cat; a great predator.” It also used to say below that, but has worn off, “If I die, many will die before me,” Col. Saito, The Bridge on the River Kwai.
About five years ago, after Bridget died at the ripe old age of twenty — fat, and seemingly content to have outlived her sisters so that she was petted all the time — I needed another cat. I attempted to get a kitten from the usual places: the Humane Society, the township animal shelter, another shelter, and all of them demanded that I sign a document stating that I would not let the cat out of house. In good conscience I couldn’t do that; my cats are free, as they ought to be. Cats love going outside. How else would Anna have fulfilled her destiny? It’s unthinkable.
Thankfully, my sister Pam took charge of procuring me a new cat. Me, Pam, and my 88-year-old father, near-death and in a wheelchair, went to a pet store selling a litter of kittens in the distant suburb of Howell. They too demanded the signing of an oath to not let the cat outside, which Pam happily signed. I tried to take one minute to look at a black and white kitten and Pam said, “Forget that one, I’ve got your cat.” It was a tabby with an infected eye, and that is Ike, who sleeps on the bed behind me.
About three years ago I decided to get another cat. For some reason I felt that it had to be a girl cat. Maybe I was trying to replace Anna. I went to a crazy cat lady who lives across the street from my old girlfriend Susan near here. I told the cat lady I wanted a girl cat, and she said that there were six in the litter and two were girls. We sat down in the living room with six kittens running wild. I said, “Let the universe decide. Let’s see if a kitten likes me.” We sat and talked for 15-20 minutes, and a gosh darn if a tabby kitten didn’t climb on my lap, curl up and went to sleep. I said, “That’s the one.” The cat lady said, “It’s a boy,” which is the first line of the Who’s Tommy, “It’s a boy, Mrs. Walker, it’s a boy. A son!” So I named him Tommy.
Tommy was defective from the outset. He loved me, and that’s all I ask, but he and Ike hissed and fought, then ignored each other for a long time. Tommy would not come out and meet anyone, as Ike always did. Tommy stayed under my blankets most of the time. He was also a very picky eater, turning up his nose at the food half the time. Of course, then Ike ate it and has grown fat.
I would say to Ike, “Maybe we should trade Tommy in on a functional cat.” Ike, meanwhile, grew to love Tommy. The highlight of every day was the two of them playing, chasing each other around the house, rolling around, fake biting each other, licking each other. Not a hint of animosity.
Maybe four weeks ago, I gave the cats a new, expensive, all-natural cat food, that looks completely edible, with bits of chicken, carrots, and greens, that Ike immediately tore into. OK, maybe I’m making this up, but as I recall it, Tommy took on e sniff of the food, looked up at me with an expression that said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” turned and very deliberately walked out of the house, and has not come back. That was a month ago. Tommy is gone. He doesn’t have a collar or a tag, so anything could’ve happened. My cat in L.A., Stevie, got run over. Who knows? You can speculate anything you want. Tommy’s gone.
Me and Ike were here before Tommy, and we’re here after him. Mostly, Tommy was a lump under the covers that I would squeeze a couple of times a day. Still, Ike and I grew to love him.
So, now I’m absolutely going to get a girl cat. A black cat, because nobody wants them. And maybe she’ll be like Anna, but probably not. All cats are different. But she’ll certainly be free to come and go through the cat door. As my friend Rick said of Stevie, who I inherited, “He’s not my cat; I’m his human.”
I got Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster on the box, I got at least one cat snoozing behind me, I got a blunt burning, I got a tasty wave, and I got rhythm. Who could ask for anything more?