by Thomas M. Pender
There are two kinds of people in the world: dog people and cat people. Cat people should stop reading right about here.
I’m not kidding. Stop reading now, and step away from the computer. Now.
Make no mistake: This is not a warm and fuzzy story about a cat. This is a story about a warm and fuzzy cat. That I tried to kill. That I tried with every fiber of my being to kill.
As a dog person, I have a theory about the origins of felines and canines. It’s fairly simple. God created dogs and Satan created cats. Dogs have brains, understand human language, answer to their names, learn and perform stunts, protect, defend, wrestle, and work for the police sniffing out drugs.
Cats, on the other hand, come in only two brands. Cats are either mean or they’re furniture. Throw pillows, to be specific. Little throw pillows that blink. If you pet them, they vibrate and make noise. Sort of an audible version of a snow globe, with about as many practical uses.
Useless furniture cats I can handle. If you’re really bored, or if your hand falls asleep and needs activity desperately, you can pet a throw pillow with eyes, and it will purr. Nothing much else, but it will purr.
Mean cats, on the other hand, have no purpose on this planet, save serving as bait for sharks and bears, or as target practice in the back yard for little Bobby’s new Daisy BB gun, or Daddy’s new bow and arrow. There are mean dogs, I’ll admit. The difference seems to be that if you have a mean dog and it hurts someone, the law states it must be destroyed. If you have a mean cat and it hurts someone, the victim is given a Band-Aid, and the cat is fed and pet by the owner. Mean animals in general should be eliminated, and I choose to start with the cats. In fact, I attempted to start with the cats.
With one cat.
Puss.
After graduation, my college roommate Mike and I spent a few months populating my mom’s house, then we got our first apartment. Thanks to my first adventure in professionalism, a $5.25-an-hour security guard extravaganza, I soon found I couldn’t afford rent and food at the same time. I opted for the food, and moved back to Mom’s for a time. When I moved on to bigger and better things (i.e. fetching for insurance company professionals), I moved back in with Mike. This was fine with him, because he had grown rather bored in his one-man kingdom.
So bored, in fact, that he acquired a new roommate in my absence.
Puss.
Puss looked normal enough. This means it looked like a mindless waste of oxygen with whiskers. When Mike told me that he’d gotten a cat, I told him jokingly that he should name it “Galore” after Ian Fleming’s character Pussy Galore in the James Bond novel Goldfinger. Mike loved the idea, but chickened out because he didn’t feel he could explain to people – particularly his parents – where the name came from . . . without breaking into a sweat, anyway. So as a tribute to the name he couldn’t name the cat, he named it Puss. When asked, he would point out the gray cat’s four white paws, and claim he named it after the fairy tale character Puss In Boots, but we macho insiders knew the real truth behind the name.
Puss and I established our relationship immediately upon my return to the apartment. By this time, the cat had gotten used to his world, which included him, his adoring owner, and not a single other person. When I came in, the cat slithered silently into the room, never taking his eyes off me, and never blinking. I could tell right away it wasn’t a furniture kind of cat. All they do is blink. There was only one other choice. This Puss had teeth, and was hungry to use them.
It started out in a simple, almost cute way. When I talk, I tend to use my hands. While I was telling Mike about some adventure I’d had in the dirty world that is office services, the cat pounced on my forearm like it was a live bird. Only for a second, and no weapons of mass laceration were used. It jumped, caught the offending object, and immediately disappeared into Mike’s bedroom.
Not a problem. I continued the tale, and a few weeks later, moved my stuff back into the apartment. I love my mom, but a 24-year-old man’s gotta do what a 24-year-old man’s gotta do. I had to be free. Free to stay up past my bedtime. Free to eat my dessert first. Free to keep a woman up past her bedtime! But I undress – er, digress.
There was definitely an adjustment period for both Puss and me. When he would come out of Mike’s room in the morning, there was always this little feline double-take when he first saw me. For my part, it took me quite a while to not stare at every move the cat made, with my shields set to kill at the first sign of fangs. Eventually, the tension subsided. A bit. The only remaining problem that I couldn’t ignore was the pouncing.
At first, the beast leapt on my arm only when it was in motion. Then, the offensive limb needed only to be present in the same room with the creature to be deemed pounceworthy. I could be laying on the couch, perfectly still, and the thing would rocket from the shadows, mark the arm with his Zorro-esque clawtrails, and disappear. Whenever I chased the warlock into Mike’s room, it would dive under the lowrider double bed, and stay there for hours, knowing full well I could not reach him there. This pattern continued for months. Attack, retreat, burrow. My only defense was to close the door the trap the bastard in his lair. Of course, this only worked when Mike was out, but Mike was dating at the time, so I found myself alone with the demon seed often enough to get my door-slamming technique down.
Then, one day – one day which will live in infamy – that hellion crossed his last line. While Mike was away for the day, I was attacked for the simple act of crossing the living room. This time, there was bloodshed. My blood. Lots of my blood. That thing sank his four fangs so deep into the skin and muscle of my calf that he couldn’t pull them out on his own. I had to yank its head off my leg. Immediately, it disappeared, thinking it would be safe. Ignoring the warm sticky sensation oozing down my leg, I walked to the bedroom door, and I calmly closed it. Then, I searched the entire apartment.
For a weapon.
(Continued next week)
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