I've had the pleasure of sharing households with three cats thus far, and the agony of sharing with one other who didn't really want to be there. My first husband was in the Air Force, and we agreed to "host" a cat for a friend of his when he was "PCS" (Permanent Change of Station) moved, after technical school, to an area where it was virtually impossible to find a rental that allowed pets. That cat was a brown/gray mackerel tabby with a bad disposition from being teased heartily, he bit first and asked questions later. I don't even remember if he had a name -- we pretty much called him Bastard or Shithead. He was your classic bad cat -- he'd only drink out of the toilet, no matter how cold and fresh his water bowl was, and if he fell in he'd crawl into bed with us to dry off and warm up. He loved to grab ankles from beneath the bed at night. He was an inside/outside cat, and nobody had suffered the cost to neuter him, so he was a real piece of work.

We couldn't find a place to live on the other end that would allow us to have a cat when we moved either, so we dropped him off at the local animal shelter. My husband told me this when he came back, because we were both upset about having to unload such a vicious, bad-tempered cat on anybody (or, for that matter, dump a cat that we knew would be so unfriendly he'd end up euthanized because nobody could put up with him): a farmer met him at the doors and asked if he was leaving the cat, because he was looking for a rat-catcher for his barn. He followed my ex in, let my ex pay for the shots, then he paid for the adoption fee and took the cat with him. It's a sweet story, so I prefer to believe it.

When the ex and I moved to New Mexico, we spent six months waiting for a cheap apartment to become available that would allow pets. We finally found one, and, within a month, a cat. It was sheer chance that he was a brown/gray mackerel tabby. His name was Norman Bates. He earned the name by crawling into the shower with my ex when I left the apartment for twenty minutes or so to get a bag of food and a litterbox. Even when evicted, he kept jumping back into the tub.

Bates was a lovable beast -- a lap fungus with a heart of gold. He killed anything living that he saw moving across his field of vision, from field crickets to field mice. He was neutered at the age of two, because he'd started spraying. He was an inside-only cat, so we decided we'd wait until that started, and take him to the vet immediately if he did so. Of course, most of them do -- neither of us had much experience with inside cats, but in New Mexico, you deal with rattlesnakes, scorpions and coyotes. If you have a cat, you'd better make it an inside cat, where we were.

When my husband and I split, he kept Bates. I'd moved into a one-bedroom apartment, and he kept the house, in which Bates had lived for several years. We thought it better if Bates stayed where he was happy and comfortable. I lived without a cat for four years -- the longest four years of my life, in some ways -- because I knew I couldn't afford vet visits and spay/neuter and I refused to put a cat through being sick without having the resources to do whatever it took to take care of it.

After about three years I started dating again. I met a wonderful guy who loved animals, and who wanted to try living with cats, though he'd never done it. I wouldn't have kept up a relationship with somebody who wasn't "into house pets" -- I was used to having a cat around, I wanted one again badly.

Tony and I were already talking about getting a cat when we decided to move in together. A month after we moved in, we visited the animal shelter in our county in southern Ohio. Can you beat the odds -- there were only two kittens available for adoption when we went, a few days before Christmas. One of them was a DSH brown/black tabby. When we drove home with her, she smelled of pee from having shared a litterbox with at least one, and probably two, other kittens for a couple of weeks. We started calling her Stink, which evolved into Tink, and has been Tink ever since. Of course, we also call her "Stinkus Maginkus", or simply "Magink," which we fell upon one night hearing the Beatles' song "Rocky Raccoon". The line "Her name was Magill but she called herself Lil," became "Her name was Magink, but she called herself Tink," and of course pet names will evolve. And evolve, and evolve.

Tink is rather aloof, and not much of a cuddler, though she will occasionally compete for my attention by crawling up into my lap when I'm on the computer, when it's just me here. She's sociable enough, though -- unless there's a lot of company, she likes to be in the same room, she just doesn't like to be held.

Tink (aka "The Great Gray Hunter") was about two years old when we brought in the invader -- Punk, who vaguely resembles John Lydon (Johnny Rotten, the singer for the Sex Pistols). She was hanging around under the shed at my mother's house for a while, where somebody had dumped her, when we went to Thanksgiving dinner. A brief break on the porch for a smoke brought her out of the woodwork -- she KNEW there were cat people in the vicinity, I guess -- and even though she insisted on using my lap for a litterbox on the way home to Dayton from my mother's (near Cincinnati, a fifty-mile trip) and biting through my thumb when we tried to bathe her before introducing her to Tink (occasioning a trip to the doctor and a week's worth of penicillin), she's proved to be a sweetheart and another lap fungus. She has almost no voice, and when she does make a sound we can hear, she sounds like she's learned to imitate a bobwhite. The cats seem to have made their peace, after three months. They chase through the house, banging off the walls, and occasionally stop to groom each other or smack each other, alternately.

Most of the places I've lived, it's not been an option to either not neuter or have indoor/outdoor cats. The house here, though, is large and has many windows -- neither cat has ever made a break for the door, or seems particularly dissatisfied with her lot being inside-only. Tink's always been a house cat, though, and Punk lived in the back yard under a shed for at least a week before we took her in, and from her condition, had been outside before that, so it's good that necessity and desire meet.

Stories to follow! Of course there are. I live with cats.

Copyright © Melinda Nowikowski
February 18, 2000