I read the following story as a performance piece in an amazing show in Denver called The Narrators. The theme was "Animals, Animals, Animals" and this was my take.
I was watching my cat earlier today. Carrying around his favorite toy, a short blue piece of rope. It’s twisted and knotted in a few places. Faded because he drags it through his water bowl for some unknown reason. He often meows loudly when he’s playing with it, and sometimes I think that it’s out of the frustration that he doesn’t have hands.
If you’ve ever watched a cat intently, you will notice their apparent frustration when attempting to pick up an object. Mine is no exception. He pokes and prods and stares forcefully, almost willing the object into the confines of his paws. He is loud and obstinate, whining at his own inabilities. His tendency towards frequent violence has led me to believe that if he were not the size of a typical housecat and he was rather the size of, let’s say, a bull mastiff, he would have killed me by now.
It’s not to say that I don’t love him in the way a pet owner must dutifully love their animal. There is something to be respected in an animal that lives so heavily in its own instinct yet so violently yearns to be something he isn’t. I can identify with him, really.
We live alone together in my sub-500 square foot apartment. He is very much a creature of the night, which heavily conflicts with not only my work schedule but my sleep schedule. His favorite way to wake me up is to sit as close to my face as he possibly can, until his breathing or his whiskers cause my eyes to flutter. At this first flutter of my eyelids, he open paw smacks the most convenient eye as hard as he can then flies to the other side of my apartment in a cowardly yet evil escape, eyes glinting in the metallic reflection of the low night glare. As he knows that it is between 4 and 5am and my unhappy ass is not, I repeat not, going to get up to whoop some ass.
If I’m reading a book, he is the first to come between me and the pages. And the majority of my most cherished read and re-read copies have the occasional bite marks and ripped edges, because destruction of paper reigns among his favorite activities.
My couch has also become his personal hallowed ground. Occasionally he will sweetly curl up in between my feet. Lest I move of course, in which my feet become the object of teeth, kicks, and claws. Which I keep neatly trimmed, much to his dismay. He does however appreciate a good film. And if I pop one in, he will watch the television with an attention span that I cannot even match. It’s moments like that where I question whether reincarnation is some kind of truth. But then I remember: He’s just a fucking cat.
I picked him out at the age of one day old, when he was a squirmy rat with perfect lilliputian black and white markings living in a crate with his cat family at the barn where my friend kept her horses. I dubbed him “The Wizard” somewhere in those first few wks, a joke name that stuck. The Wiz came home with me five wks later, a cuddly fat adorable little kitten, tiny enough to fit in the palm of your hand, such a baby that he would fall asleep mid-walk, and such a fattie I assumed that he would be the sweetest biggest fattest and laziest cat around.
I assumed wrong. A few months later, he looked like a ferret with a pinhead and his pre-pubescent psychoses were threatening my sanity. He climbed blinds, curtains, legs, and attacked everything that moved. He screamed all night like a colicky child, he violently attacked me at will, his sleep patterns managed to drive me to the bring of insanity with multiple nights in a row of only a few spotty hours of solid sleep. It was then I knew that I was going to be a really shitty mom for at least the first few yrs. That if I couldn’t handle the antics of a kitten that perhaps someone else should raise my kids for the non-sleeping yrs, if I should even be entitled to the duty.
In the past year that we’ve been together, he’s been posted on Craigslist at least three times, only to lead to me receiving angry email from PETA assholes and a few other people that I can only assume were seeking him out for cat stew. Maybe “This cat is an asshole” wasn’t exactly a selling point. I also sent out mass emails to my company to no avail other than my boss making fun of me constantly for being a cat hag. A friend offered for him to live on her Grandma’s farm in eastern Colorado, where he would most likely face death by coyote. I had him packed in cat carrier, ready to meet my friend’s mom who had said she would gladly schlep him the hour and 45 minutes to a near certain death that would be neither quick or painless. Both of which he probably deserves in his own karmic way.
And I cried. I couldn’t do it.
Maybe it’s the fact that he’s the only constant in my apartment that creates movement and noise and being other than myself. Life is lonely in a one bedroom apartment in Stapleton, aka where the fuck do you live again? So says my human friends.
Maybe it’s the fact that he’s finally turned the one year corner and is starting to resemble something that I may one day refer to more as a “pet” and less as a “monster”.
Or maybe it’s the simple fact that when this animal was no more than 24 hours old, I made a commitment, albeit a misguided one full of dreams of perfection and fat cuddliness and purring and whatever is supposed to be endearing about having a cat as a pet, and that as much as I’ve tried to escape that commitment, much like many commitments I’ve made previously, somewhere in my stubborn determined head, I made the choice to stick it out.
Is it the right choice, the right thing to do? Probably not. I just talked about my cat to a room of strangers for more than a few minutes. That in itself should be enough to convince me that not only have I lost credibility but I’ve probably lost my fucking mind.
Then again, the other day I realized that if this thing lives to be seventeen yrs old, I’ll be 42 when he dies. So if any of you are looking to increase your pet quota, see me after the show. I’ve got a cat that is free to any home.
