My Cats

Boo Radley and Nobody were born on June 21st, 2003. I learned of this through Amy, my girlfriend at the time. Her co-worker had three female cats that had all had litters at the same time, and Amy had volunteered to take one off her hands. I was Four Square against it, but in compromise agreed to visit the kittens.

This co-worker was some sort of hippie/Buddhist/pothead/slacker squatting in an abandoned store in Berkeley. The place looked and smelled as if a port-a-potty had tipped over inside of it. Semi-feral cats were free to roam in and out of broken and boarded-over windows. The urine-soaked carpeting had been ripped up from the floor and left rolled up in piles for the multitude of cats and kittens to play and shit in.

There was something like 13 kittens, all a few weeks old, and amongst them was a tiny grey thing too weak to fend off the others for milk. Fortunately, one of his brothers, who was grey and white, made room for him so he could nurse. Then these two bounced around and played together. This camaraderie was endearing enough to persuade me to agree to adopt both kittens.

When they were eight weeks old, the kittens came to live in our split-level apartment. They had fleas and ear mites, which Amy got rid of with frequent baths and q-tips, both of which the kittens enjoyed very much. While neither kitten was particularly shy, the grey and white one was more suspicious of us. The all grey one liked being tossed around and spanked. I ended up naming them after characters from two of my favorite American black-and-white movies: Boo Radley from To Kill A Mockingbird and Nodody from Dead Man.

I was eking out a living as a drummer at the time, so I spent my days practicing drums in the basement, watching Judge Judy and running around with a light bulb pull-chain which was Nobody’s favorite toy. They would hang around while I practiced, and were eerily unafraid of the noise of my drums.

There was no way we were going to keep these curious cats indoors, but they did seem to quickly understand that they were not to go into the road. I started opening a back window every day so they could come and go as they pleased. Our back yard was full of gopher piles, and Boo was soon bringing critters in and leaving their guts for us to clean up. Amy didn’t like the cats being out after dark, and the cats did not like to come in at night.

Nobody will copy any new thing Boo does to explore what he may have discovered, but they’ve had distinct personalities from day one. Boo’s favorite thing is to climb on top of people when they are in bed, and Boo’s favorite spot was on top of Amy’s head. Nobody’s favorite thing is to be spanked, and he’ll tap you with a paw incessantly until he wins your attention and then sticks his butt in the air. Nobody’s nickname is Tapper. When he gets bored he’ll provoke Boo by poking at his hind legs. Boo sleeps more than Nobody. Boo is more complex than Nobody in that he seems to have a greater spectrum of emotions. Sometimes Boo will get really excited and will adamantly demand affection. At other times he will be aloof. Boo has a more diverse repertoire of sounds and better strategies for getting his point across. He makes an amazing chattering noise at birds.

Boo is more particular about which humans he likes. There are certain people, usually girls, whom he seems to recognize and favor. Nobody will go up to random strangers on the sidewalk, and it’s very cute watching people stop to pet him- except I get nervous somebody’s going to walk off with him. Fortunately, Nobody does not like to be carried. Boo is very protective of Nobody, and has never met another cat he liked. He used to whine whenever he didn’t know where Nobody was, and he still tries to keep an eye on him when Nobody’s outdoors.

When Amy and I broke up, I cried for two days- because I was going to have to live without the cats. This is the truth. In an act of supreme empathy and generosity, and because she was sick of all the crying, Amy offered to let me keep them.

I rented a bedroom in an apartment where I left the window open at all times for the cats to come and go at their leisure. My roommates had four cats, One of the roommates’ cats would piss in a corner of my room, which I successfully remedied by moving the cat box to that spot. A bite from another apartment’s cat resulted in an infection that required Boo to wear a cone on his head for two weeks. He spent that time walking backwards. When our stay in Oakland came to an end and I started packing, Boo ran for it and hid. He delayed the move for 24 hours while I outsmarted him with food to trap him. They did a very good job moving to Portland.

I found a place to live with this condescending prick who Nobody was seemingly fond of, except that he pissed on his bed a few times when we first moved there. I got a cat door and built a wood frame to fit it into my bedroom window. Eventually the thing fell apart. I began dating Rachel, who quickly became Boo’s all-time favorite person (to this day). Seriously, Boo would snuggle with Rachel in the cutest positions ever. She was very fond of my kitties.

Boo and Casey did not get along, perhaps because Boo likes to sprawl out on paper and she likes to read. Casey openly did not like Boo, which I found both startling and annoying, and insisted Boo knew she didn’t like him, but she either thought that notion was absurd or didn’t care. Nobody liked her very much though (exactly why that’s such a fun name), and, while he generally taps people at every instant they are not petting him, he was content to lie beside her and watch her read. Casey liked that Nobody is more like a dog than a cat. My cats are deathly afraid of dogs, by the way.

When we moved cross-country through the desert/south this summer, I crammed them in the back of an SUV and rigged up tubing running from the air-conditioning vents to keep them alive and monitored their temperature with a remote thermometer I bought along the way. Nobody got really sick on the first day and pretty much turned himself inside-out all over the truck. One night we stayed in a motel and they were so disgusting I bathed them twice. I had to keep them shut in the bathroom because otherwise Boo would have crawled and hid in the box springs of the torn-up crappy motel bed, and the poor guy cried and cried in that bathroom pretty much all night. They were pretty miserable during the trip, but recovered quickly.

Both cats always sleep with/on me, and I guess I pretty much let them do whatever they want except scratch on things other than their scratch pad and climb on kitchen counters. I guess they’re kind of annoying- but not nearly as much as most humans. My cats have never lied to me. Whenever I move, someone inevitably asks, “Are you taking the cats with you?” This never ceases to be an incredibly odd question to me. Of course! I fail to fathom what the alternative could be.

Boo rarely goes outside these days; I suspect because he’s sick of dealing with new cats every time he moves. Nobody is just crazy about my brother, and whines at him constantly, which I’d never witnessed before. Both cats have generally been pretty quiet, except when they think they are about to get treated with moist food, which is rarely. They prefer seafood. Which reminds me- I haven’t fed them this morning. I don’t monitor how much they eat but they’ve always stayed skinny. But when Boo gets hungry he eats too fast and throws it back up….