Clearly, they own me – see how I run around doing their bidding. Keeping a litter box in the house is a form of slavery. Occasionally they seem to possess me. It’s a good thing the Inquisition is over, or we’d all be in trouble.
I’ve always liked cats. When I was a child, cats would follow me home. The backyard was as far as they could get; my father had allergies, so we couldn’t allow furry creatures in the house. I would sneak food out to the cats, and before long there would be an entire colony of them lurking in the bushes. One day I was practicing my cat impression (I was a weird kid), and my meow was so convincing that three cats began shrieking back. Then they started climbing the screens outside the windows, demanding to be let in.
My best friend Gail, who was my seatmate in the second grade, was allowed to keep cats. She had as many as 40 cats in the house. They had the run of the place; some of them knew how to open the refrigerator and fix themselves a snack out of leftovers. Even better, they could feign total innocence when Gail’s mother arrived and saw the mess on the floor. "What? Moi? Rummage in the fridge? How too tacky. Maybe the dog did it." And the dog, who had only come in for a little nosh, would slink away, looking guilty.
Dogs are terrible liars. They are devoted and affectionate, which is why they’re man’s best friend. Cats, on the other hand, are furballs of feral cunning. Eons of evolution have turned the cat into the perfect killing machine. Ever observed your cat around the house? She’s always plotting on killing something, or else she’s plotting on increasing her tribe so they can kill more efficiently. When she’s asleep, which is most of the time, she’s doing both. Whenever my cats catch a cockroach, they do not kill it immediately. They toy with it, practicing their springing and pouncing. There is basically no difference between the genetic makeup of a housecat and that of a lion in the Serengeti. However, urban house cats have adapted to their unnatural environment. After generations of living with humans, they have learned that their primary weapon in the city is not their hunting skills. It’s their cuteness. Why eat mice when the human is perfectly happy to provide cat food, clean water, catnip, a comfortable home, and toys? All they have to do is look adorable, maybe act fascinated with string. Or, okay, wear a costume. Did you know that cats don’t really meow? They do it because humans expect it of them.
The week before Gail died, her head cat left the house and never came back. I like to think that he was her advance party to the afterlife, and that he was there to guide her over the bridge. The last conversation I ever had with my best friend was about kitty litter. A week earlier, I had picked up a kitten on the street and brought her home. It was my first adoption; arguably, the kitten had adopted me. I had no idea how to raise a house cat – I just covered the floors with newspaper in case the kitten had to go to the bathroom. "You have to get a proper litter box," said Gail, who could barely speak at the time, who had to communicate by scribbling on a Magic Slate because her lungs had failed. "Where do I get kitty litter?" I asked. "In the supermarket," she said – said, not scribbled, because this was important. And my best friend of two decades who was lying on a hospital bed connected to a morphine drip and surrounded by beeping and blinking machines, told me: "Don’t give cats too much milk, it makes them poopy." You see, I do not have the constitution for tragedy, and in those moments when something profound and colossal must be said, I get poop.
So I live with three cats. I wake up every morning – well, noonish – and my cats Saffy and Mat are sitting on the bed, watching me expectantly. Koosi, the subject of that final conversation, is usually sitting at the window, watching the birds in the tree and occasionally swatting the glass. Or else she’s lurking under a shelf, waiting to pounce on my feet as I walk by. I get up and Saffy and Mat are already racing to their feeding bowls. The bowls are always full of kibble, but for some reason they will not start breakfast until I pour more kibble onto them. They don’t see the bowl as half-full or half-empty, only overflowing or nothing. Then I change the water in their bowls, splash water on my face, make myself a cup of coffee, and write my column.