Current mood:

sad

Catzilla: In Loving Memory
Scooter was, according to my calculations, 18 years old. Let me say that again: eighteen freaking years old. This is quite an advanced age for a cat, especially one with latent homicidal tendencies and delusions of grandeur. At the height of same, in his youth, he weighed in at 23 pounds, all of it muscle and attitude. His mother was half siamese and he had the accent and the sense of humor, but apparently there was a maine coon cat in the mix as well as some sort of large, irate mutated persian. He looked like a grey bobcat someone had put through the fluff cycle. He once walked too close to a candle, burned a good two inches of fur off his side and never noticed - the heat never got close enough to actual cat meat. The look on his face when he started to groom and got a mouthful of charred fur was priceless.

Years ago I had to send him to a new home after (future) Spouse moved in. He (the cat, I mean) was less than enthusiastic about sharing my attention, and he chose to display his displeasure with a truly astounding campaign of dedicated mayhem and repeated attempts at assault and battery. At the time we were temporarily living with two homes worth of crap wedged into a largish studio apartment, and the resulting maze of boxes and furniture was a sort of kitty version of Castle Wolfenstein, with Spouse cast in the role of the Giant Robot Nazis Who Must Be Destroyed. I once woke up just in time to catch him perched on top of an eight-foot stack of boxes, crouched and vibrating to pounce. I sort of shoved Spouse over just before the cat landed, screaming like a kamikaze, 23 pounds, four feet and extended claws, precisely where Russell's crotch had been a moment before. Another time I caught him just as he crouched on the arm of the sofa, tail extended in take-a-shit position over Russell's forehead as he slept.

The sofa - that's another story. He destroyed a brand new sofa, basically by spraying it until it melted. No amount of kitty discipline or outright threats of kitty pot roast could dissuade him. He tended to wait until Russell walked into the room and then do it while staring right at him and growling under his breath.

Finally Scooter went to live with our friend Jimmy, a mechanic with a shop beside his house. It was close enough to our old house that he got to keep his territory - it saved him the trouble of terrorizing an entirely new neighborhood full of cats and dogs. He lived out his middle and later years receiving proper tribute from all comers and supervising engine rebuilds from a comfy carpet remnant atop a filing cabinet. He survived the fracture, infection and eventual amputation of his glorious tail, as well as the removal of an ear and a half after a particularly nasty border dispute which ended in a draw. (Jimmy says you should have seen the doberman.) He had settled into comfortable extreme old age, a 10-pound shadow of his former self, moving slowly and arthritically but with great dignity.

The neighborhood cats still didn't screw with him. I suspect they invoked his name to frighten their kittens into behaving.

If the witnesses are correct about what happened, then there is a special pit of hell being prepared for that redneck bastard who swerved out of his way to hit him as he was walking beside the road. What sort of festering black pit of a soul do you have to have to snuff out a life for a moment's amusement? What kind of a shit-hearted coward do you have to be to kill an animal, an innocent stray or a beloved pet, leaving you'll never know what kind of heartache behind you as you drive away chortling through your remaining teeth and stewing in the stinking effluvia of your own testosterone? Will someone for chrissake tell me why?

If the witnesses are correct about what happened, then I consign the murderer's black, rotten soul to the gentle ministrations of the Lords of Karma, and I take great comfort in imagining the motherfucker rotting in hell, staked out in the middle of the Beelzebub Freeway while laughing demons drive sulfur-burning 18-wheelers over his fragile bones every thirty seconds for the rest of eternity.

I have no interest in an afterlife with a no-pets policy.

Rest in peace, hairy little monster. I know you have gone to a place where the mice are fat and slow and the garbage cans are full of fish. I know your joints don't hurt anymore, and I know you have your beautiful tail back. And I wish the gods better luck at keeping you off the sofa than I ever had.

All in all he was a cat, and we shall not see his like again.