I Hate My Cat

I openly admit that I’m a dog person, that I probably never should have saddled myself with a creature that offers so few pleasures for me as a cat. A good defense attorney would quickly submit this as evidence that my cat may be largely guiltless in the matter, and that I only have myself to blame. Point taken. My counterargument is that, while I did choose to bring this beast into our home of my own free will, this was a will twisted by the twin demands of guilt and courtship, the sad sirens responsible for the flotsam of many a man’s freedom.

I should probably introduce the subject of my diatribe. Our cat’s name is Delwood. She is most likely 13 years old. We’ve had her for over 12 years now. We found her one early autumn evening living under a dumpster for a restaurant in Andersonville, my wife’s old neighborhood, called the Delwood Pickle. Melissa and I were dating at the time. She had just lost her own cat, Courgette, and we had begun nightly searches of the neighborhood for him. While combing the area for Courgette, we found Delwood, meowing crazily for food, half-wild. We felt sorry for her and, after a lot of coaxing, managed to scoop her into a blanket and take her back to Melissa’s apartment.

That would be my first lesson from this story: be careful who and what you save, because you then become responsible for that life. Actually, that’s probably the second lesson. The first is that, at some point, there is a usually a price to be paid for extraordinary kindnesses made during the hot flame of courtship.

When Melissa and I began dating, I pretended that I didn’t hate cats. In fact, in order to pass muster, I almost convinced myself that I actually liked them a little. I can still remember when Courgette and I first came to terms with one another, after it became clear to both cat and man that I wasn’t just another brief romance in Melissa’s life and that the two of us would have to find some kind of arrangement. Courgette and I would eye one another. I would diligently feed him, pet him, let him in and out during the night. We’d negotiate for the good spot in the bed next to our mutual beloved. Then, one day, we both looked at each other and seemed to say, “You know what: You’re O.K.” After that, I was in.

Soon after taking in Delwood, Courgette returned home. Courgette was a typical tom, a wanderer, and I guess a gay couple down the block had locked him in their apartment, as Courgette looked a lot like a cat they had recently lost themselves. Fortunately, a neighbor recognized Courgette from the fliers we had plastered around the neighborhood. She literally stood there arguing with one of the guys in their doorway until Courgette had a chance to scoot through their legs and make his escape. It was a sweet homecoming. Unfortunately, Courgette had feline leukemia and had to be euthanized less than a year after his return.

Meanwhile, we’ve been stuck with Delwood for the past dozen years. Here are the particulars: Delwood is a long-haired cat, which I’ve never liked. Long-hairs can’t seem to take care of themselves, and Delwood is no exception. She barely even tries to groom herself, and her own crap sometimes hangs off the back of her ass fur, like a merry dingleberry tree. She is also dumb as a box of rocks and pretty uncoordinated for a cat, but with an odd defiance I particularly hate that is totally cat-like.

I should probably break my hatred of my cat Delwood into two categories.

Here are some of the things that I hate about all cats: they don’t really care about you; they can’t be trusted; they aren’t loyal, at least by any human standard of the word; they won’t protect your home; they won’t protect your person; they won’t’ protect anything that you value in your life, in fact they destroy your personal property and are secretly proud of it, even when they get caught; they kill cool animals like birds, lizards, rabbits and other wild things that should be left alone; you have to clean up their litter box, and both their piss and shit are among the most foul-smelling compounds on the planet; they spend most of their day just sitting around like a hairy flesh lump, offering the planet nothing but carbon dioxide; they have an unjustified arrogance that is absolutely infuriating; and I’m allergic.

And here are some of the things I hate that are particular to Delwood herself: she can’t groom herself; she prefers to spend much of the day in low, dirty places, in fact, if you allow her outside, she will look for someplace dark and ugly to go, like the crawl space under our breakfast nook, where her long fur will gather dirt and spider webs; she insists on scratching up our couch as soon as we leave the house, even though she has a scratching board; she is lethargic, even for a cat; she will let our dog Ahab manhandle her for long periods of time, but then in a random moment will strike out, aiming to scratch out his eyes; she is affectionate in a demanding sort of way that means nothing other than being an unfulfilled need of the organism; and we repeatedly have to clean her upchuck off the basement floor.

One of the problems that I never realized about cats until owning one is that cats seem to take forever to die. They just sit there, immobile most of the day, like some kind of monk, as if the continuance of a drab, minimal existence is a perverse type of triumph. In fact, if cats were people, they’d probably be monks, doing nothing other than making an occasional pronouncement about the Immaculate Conception or the Noble Eightfold Path, imagining that for some reason this puts them closer to God. Or cats would be members of an anarchist collective, debating how to fix the state of the world over coffee and then doing nothing about it other than casting their languid contempt towards the folks who actually work for a living.

As there is no one else to speak up for her, I will note that Delwood is relatively tolerant for a cat, and she has a relatively kind disposition (again, at least compared with the standards of her species). Considering how much we have neglected her, it is kind of amazing that Delwood has done none of the standard cat antics that tend to happen when they get ignored, pissing on the bed and that kind of thing. And she seems to be pretty chill in dealing with our baby, Milo, although I don’t trust her enough to give her the chance to do otherwise.

To paraphrase Charles Bukowski’s thoughts on humanity, maybe I don’t exactly hate my cat, I’ll just feel a lot better when she’s not around. And I guess that’s my cat’s biggest failing right now, that she just won’t fucking die.