We played many games together, but our favorite was hide-and-seek. I don’t know if you know this, but playing hide-and-seek with a pussycat is like playing hide-and-forget. As we were playing hide-and-seek one day, I “hid” her (from myself) in one of those old wicker flip-top hampers. After hiding Muffin, I shouted, “OK, now it’s my turn to hide!” But I was a child with the attention span of a forest stoat. I forgot that I had hidden Muffin in the hamper. A few days later, my mother asked, “Have you seen Muffin?” I squeaked and then ran upstairs to the wicker hamper, where I found the glamorous Cherry Merry Muffin covered in her own piss and shit and yowling at the top of her lungs, “I’M A SHIT MUFFIN! HOW DARE YOU?!”
I have so much guilt surrounding my pets. I was a child, but I don’t believe that’s an excuse.
Once freed, Muffin decided to explore her sexuality. She’d say to me, “Muffin needs a Friday night,” and she’d disappear for the weekend, returning only to receive her Tender Vittles. After one of these sojourns, she got pregnant. As the last of my mother’s children, I had not yet seen anything, human or animal, with child. So to see my beloved and chic Cherry Merry Muffin so engorged was horrifying.
“Why is Muffin so fat?” I asked my mother.
“Muffin got married in a Catholic church and had consensual sexual intercourse with her husband, and now they’re going to have very spiritually enlightened children,” Nancy replied.
Muffin gestated for what seemed like three days, then hid among the Nine West high heels at the bottom of my mother’s closet and proceeded to yowl at unimaginable decibel levels. Instead of leaving the poor wretch to give birth in private, my mother laid a towel on her princess-height, king-size bed, placed the shrieking pussycat atop it, and said, “Witness God’s miracle!” My brothers, my sister, and I watched as a bloated Cherry Merry Muffin gave birth to approximately one thousand mini muffins. They were allegedly kittens, but I recall them looking more like discarded chicken gizzards. I swallowed back bile and thought to myself that “God’s miracle” was gross.
Over the next week, I witnessed the most adorable transformation of my life. The gizzards became hilariously proportioned fuzzy kittens. Their heads were enormous and their tails short and stout. They toddled clumsily over each other. Their cuteness as they mewled and yawned was eye-watering. There’s a reason why smitten rhymes with kitten.
Cherry Merry Muffin was a good mother. She carted her little nuggets around in her mouth and taught them to drink from the water bowl. She brought them to the litter box and taught them to shit with dignity. She taught them to display their anuses with the pride that only short-haired cats know. She’d proclaim to the world, “LOOK AT MY ANUS! ISN’T IT STUNNING?!” It’s funny that they’re called pussycats when they really should be called anuscats.
Cherry Merry Muffin went missing for a week or two, during which time we were very distressed. We had all these kittens and needed help taking care of them! Our prodigal pussycat finally returned, looking like a Picasso painting. She had clearly been maimed by some sort of machine—perhaps the same fate as Alice? One of her paws had been squished into two dimensions, she was caked with dried blood, and her tail was bent into an angular question mark, similar to a Super Mario Bros question block.
“My beloved Cherry Merry Muffin!” I wailed. “What have those brutes done to you?”
This time, I knew what was coming. Nancy placed the barely moving Cherry Merry Muffin on a towel, perhaps the same one the cat had given birth on weeks earlier, and drove her to the veterinarian’s office, where she was “put to sleep.” I was devastated. I had loved her, perhaps even more than television or my mother.
THE IN-BETWEENERS
Nancy gave away most of Muffin’s kittens, but we kept three: Pirate, Cassidy, and Cleo. I didn’t understand gender at that age (perhaps I still don’t), so I couldn’t tell you if they were boy pussycats or girl pussycats. I liked them well enough, but they couldn’t replace the bond I had with Cherry Merry Muffin.
Cassidy unfortunately drowned in the pool before we could find her or him a home. We woke up one morning and said, “Oh, look—Cassidy drowned in the pool.” It was an excellent lesson in the grammar and spelling of the word drown. While my buffoon classmates consistently said “drownded,” I’d smugly reply, “It’s ‘drowned,’ Alexis.”
Pirate, so named because he or she could open only one eye, opened his or her second eye a few months after being born. It ruined the name and made me resent her or him. I saw it as a betrayal. “How dare you not live up to your very clever name?” I thought. With two eyes open, Pirate died under my mother’s very high bed, of a heart attack or something equally inexplicable to a small child. I was bummed but fairly unfazed.
Cleo lived and died and I remember nothing about it, which is sad, because I adore Miss Cleo and frequently shout while I’m alone in my apartment, “YOU’RE A LIBRA, AREN’T YA, DARLIN’?!”
While the next animal on my journey wasn’t a pet, it affected my perception of wild animals and the way I react to them. During the post-Muffin era, we had a trampoline in the backyard. It was one of those paralyze-your-children types without nets or any protective barriers on the sides. My brother Andrew and I adored it and jumped on it daily after school. Like most things in our mother’s home, it was poorly tended, so it had incredibly rusted springs, maybe half-missing, and holes here and there that exposed the dead grass beneath. Nevertheless, we jumped on it like mad, not caring when our feet landed in the holes and we ended up submerged to the groin.
I was bouncing on it one day after school when I heard a manic chittering beneath me. I ignored it and kept jumping, but then I landed in one of the holes and a gray blur zipped toward me, hissing and spitting. I extricated my foot in the nick of time. A rabid raccoon had invaded the underside of my trampoline, like a troll under a bridge. I remember its eyes. They resembled Jack Nicholson’s eyes in the famous “Here’s Johnny!” scene from The Shining.
There I was, shrieking intermittently like Shelley Duvall, when Nancy shouted from the kitchen window, “Jimbo! Do NOT get off the trampoline! There’s a rabid raccoon underneath it! I’ve called Animal Control!” (She should have had them on speed dial at that point.) My bloodcurdling cries continued as I watched the little fucker bloodthirstily racing about beneath me, as if the Flash had turned to banditry. I caught glimpses of it in the holes of the trampoline and heard it hissing through a clenched jaw.
One hundred million years later, the Fairfield Animal Control unit showed up, lassoed the little douchebag, carted it away in a paddy wagon, and presumably put it “to sleep.” Poor wretch. I never used the dilapidated trampoline again.
GUS & CHLOÉ
By this time, my mother had burned through both divorce settlements, and we were forced to move from our Brady Bunch manor into a tiny cottage. My mother had a knack for ignoring her poorness. She pretended she was a Greenwich socialite till the day she died. Nobody had a flair for fantasy like Nancy. Twice divorced, with three kids out of the house in college or otherwise, it was just her, my brother Andrew, and myself. A sane person would have thought to themselves, “OK, it’s time to subsist on bread and water for a while,” but instead, my mother said, to our delight, “We’re getting a puppy!”
After the Mookie Disaster, Nancy decided to go back to golden retrievers. She took Andrew and me to a breeder in Connecticut. (Pet adoption had not yet been invented.) Breeder : what a word! As an adult, I’ve come to know its many meanings. A dog breeder is someone who churns out purebred dogs by carefully selecting which dogs to lock in a room together. These little doggie bang-fests result in puppies with the desired characteristics of whichever breed the breeder is trying to peddle. I’ve also heard of mixing breeds—like a goldendoodle, labradoodle, cavapoo, peekapoo pom, poopydoop, stinkydump, and the elusive Bernadette Petersdoodle.
Another meaning of the word breeder refers to people who have children upon c
hildren upon children. Some people find this offensive. I find it hilarious. The final meaning of the word breeder is my favorite. Mainly used in homosexual contexts, it is defined by the beloved Urban Dictionary as someone who blows a load or takes a load up the ass without a rubber. Some people find this offensive. I find it hilarious.
We settled on Gus, an adorable runt. He was the sweetest, kindest, most down-to-earth dog a family could hope for. He loved our family even though we, in true form, barely took care of him. We didn’t brush Gus or take him to a groomer, so his hair was left to fall out and cover the floor. There was a wall-to-wall carpet of Gus’s hair and a general scent to the home that said, “NOBODY CARES!”
My brother Andrew and Gus really bonded. But it never felt like Gus was really my dog. In fact, he irritated me. It was like having a spouse who was too nice. Gus would return from the office with a bouquet of expensive, tropical blooms and declare, “There’s my beautiful wife!” and I’d scream, “Leave me alone!” while crying in a bubble bath. He always wanted to lay his adorable golden retriever head in my lap. Ugh, what a nightmare! How irritating! I’d always hiss at him, “Gus! Why must you vex me so?” What I really wanted was another pussycat.
Nancy, being an enabler, took me to the mall to get a cat. The mall was where cats were made in the early 1990s. I selected a petite calico kitten and named her Chloé. I have no idea where I had heard or seen the name Chloé, especially with that ridiculous accent on the e. It was as if Bette Davis were an eight-year-old boy, living in Connecticut.
Chloé and I got along famously, but what I never expected was that Chloé and Gus would become best friends. They would snuggle together on the sofa all the time. It was outrageously adorable and warmed me to Gus a little bit. Chloé would sit atop Gus’s neck and knead at his shoulders, then burrow her face under his ear to sleep. They were the best pets an American family could hope for, and they lived long, cozy lives until they both died of old age. They weren’t “put to sleep”—they simply went to sleep and just kept sleeping. I miss them.
MAGGIE
Our next cat belonged to my mother and was a gift from her boyfriend. After a series of failed relationships, she met a nice fella named Paul and they got engaged. On my mother’s birthday, Paul presented her with a white Persian cat. My mother named it Maggie. A white Persian cat named Maggie! The woman was insane. Thus, Maggie joined the house with Chloé and Gus, who shunned the newcomer.
Do you know how much work Persian cats are? They’re like putting together IKEA dressers every day for the rest of your life. Either you struggle through it yourself or you pay someone else to do it, which my mother absolutely would not or could not do. And so, like many of our pets, Maggie suffered as her needs went unmet. She developed enormous mats of hair that dangled off her like heavy Christmas ornaments. Her eyes produced a steady stream of goo that tracked down her cheeks, making her look like she had just smashed her face into a tub of Vaseline. Feces would cling to the fur on her tail, which she’d wave around like some sort of shit pennant. All in all, I think Maggie was a sad lady. She didn’t like to be petted, because you’d inevitably run into one of her mats, which would tug at her skin, and she’d freak out.
Maggie spent most of her time “meditating,” as my mother called it. She’d sit up straight, with her eyes closed, for indeterminate periods of time, rocking back and forth subtly as if thinking, “This is not happening. This is not my life.” I could feel Maggie’s depression as if there were a real-life Eeyore in the room. It was devastating. She vomited all the time, and as she aged, she went blind and lost control of her bowels and bladder.
The irony is that this tortured beast lived the longest out of any pet our family had. I recall visiting my mother’s assisted-living apartment in Shelton, Connecticut, and dodging the little barf piles that had become one with the carpet. My mother had stopped bothering to clean them up. I think she figured Maggie would eat them anyway. Maggie lived to be 942 years old.
CALVIN
During ballet class one day, my mother called me on my new cellular telephone, a delightful Motorola flip phone I had recently purchased from Cingular Wireless. Upon snapping it shut, I’d say, “Snapping turtle,” with an effeminate flourish.
She was calling to tell me that Chloé had died. I remember crying quietly in the hallway, which really freaked my friends out. I am not a crier, and if I do cry, it’s usually at something inexplicable. The majority of my tears come from cuteness. I smile-wept through the first twenty minutes of Wall-E. I couldn’t handle the cuteness and beauty. I also sobbed uncontrollably when I saw A Chorus Line on Broadway, as well as the thirty minutes after the final curtain. I don’t know why, I just did. But frankly, when Chloé died, it made me sad . . . so I cried.
After some time had passed, my mother suggested I get my own cat. By this time, I had realized that pet adoption had been invented after all, and I went to visit the Animal Rescue League of Boston. I was twenty years old and wanted a kitten. I found the fluffy calico male equivalent to Chloé, filled out the paperwork, paid the fifty-dollar adoption fee—which to me, at the time, seemed exorbitant—and took my new kitten home.
I named him Calvin (I have no idea why) and he was so cute he made me cry. I wept-played with my new kitten in the apartment where I lived with my boyfriend at the time. What sort of dumbass moves in with his boyfriend at twenty? Me. I’m that dumbass. Calvin seemed vaguely unwell at the time of his adoption. He had very runny yet crusty eyes. Within a day of his homecoming, he began to have uncontrollable diarrhea. Before we confined him to the bathroom, he ran around leaving little fecal kisses on every surface of the apartment. He was unwell for a few days and then things improved. His eyes uncrusted and his feces solidified. He became a model pet.
Calvin was a sweetheart. He played, he liked to be held, and he loved to snuggle. His favorite place was under the duvet, tucked into my armpit. I, however, was a twenty-year-old monster. I decided that my furniture was too valuable to be scratched up by Calvin (when, in fact, I had found most of it on the streets of Boston) and decided to have him declawed. Declawing is the amputation of the last bone on each toe. This is a source of great guilt for me. I cannot believe I declawed my poor cat. I am still mortified. I was ignorant and foolish.
Calvin recovered physically, but he was never the same. He became listless, moody, and depressed. He was not as affectionate as before the surgery, and seemed to know that I was the cause of his pain. He ceased using his litter box. He began biting. I had maimed and traumatized my cat.
We went on in this way for another year or two. Eventually, with the help of my two best friends, Prince and Lia, I took him to the ASPCA. When I explained what I had done, they were appropriately horrified. I asked if there was someone who might adopt him, or a compound somewhere that houses tortured beasts. They were appalled by my ignorance. “No one will adopt a cat that bites and does not use a litter box,” they told me. “And we could not bring a declawed cat to some magical outdoor compound because it cannot hunt or defend itself. But we can put your cat ‘to sleep’ for a small fee.”
I began crying and ran out of the building, leaving my friends stunned. I was still weeping in a nearby meadow as if I were Sally Field in Steel Magnolias when I saw Lia emerge from the building. I knew exactly what was happening. In a way, maybe I left so it could happen. She said, “Prince did it. He paid for it.” The last sentence really tells you where we were at in our lives. Three friends in their late teens/early twenties, killing a cat, and all we could think about is the fee.
This is one of my life’s greatest shames. It makes me hate myself so much I can’t stand it. I now give money to the ASPCA every month in futile repentance. That I think throwing money at my guilt can change anything means I really haven’t changed at all; at heart, I’m still a selfish twenty-something who’d rather kill his cat than deal with a shitty situation. Perhaps people are the ones who should be “put to sleep.”
MS. BIT
That same year, after leaving Paul, my mother was scheduled to move in to a small apartment in Milford, Connecticut. Thrice divorced, she could no longer afford a house. This did not dissuade her from getting another kitten. She adopted a funny-looking, short-haired, black-and-white kitten whom she named Lil Bit, because she was so small. She was a kitten—of course she was small! But as with many situations, my mother had an uncanny prescience, and Lil Bit barely grew any bigger.
What a little freak! She should’ve been named Lil Freak! She was so small it was hard to tell that she was even a cat and not some sort of pygmy marmoset. Her eyes bulged from her face like she had the blood pressure of a middle-aged sumo wrestler. She had cheeks that looked as though she were smuggling nuts therein for winter. I still call this part of her face her “nuts.” It doesn’t help that they also resemble adorable little cat testicles. Lil Bit seemed like the most stressed-out cat I’d ever seen. She could move so fast! She’d zip along at ankle height, knocking things over and creating total destruction in her wake.
After the adoption, I received a phone call from my mother in which she feigned distress. “My new apartment doesn’t allow pets,” she said.
“What about Maggie?” I asked.
“Maggie is barely a cat. Will you take Lil Bit for a few months and then I’ll sneak her back into the apartment?”
I begrudgingly obliged. I was doing a guest performance somewhere near Hartford, Connecticut, and we arranged for my first dance teacher, Angie, to deliver the pussycat contraband to me before I returned to Boston. Apparently, Lil Bit wriggled free of her carrier in Angie’s car and shot about the interior like a bit of rogue flubber. Angie had to pull over to wrestle the creature back into its bag. When Angie arrived, she was covered in thin scratches, and her clothing was distressed like the garments in a Yeezy fashion show. “Here is your mother’s demon,” she said. “Enjoy.”
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