“A cat is not a dog” (a cat lover's warning when we got Brewsky)

I finished my work in the laundry room today, a project that would have gone faster had I not been obliged to continually stop to chase Brewsky through the house with a squirt bottle while screaming profanities, stomping my feet, and goosing him with my toes (I work nude). It would have been cruel to keep him locked away in a bedroom for two weeks, but not doing so allowed him to focus his considerable willpower upon helping me work. His thought was that I needed someone to track through paint spatters, play with tools, hide screws, bat objects off sawhorses, threaten to tip over paint buckets, and be constantly underfoot. All this occasioned persistent reprimands from me that culminated in murderous rages with him running wild-eyed toward the far end of the house and me running wild-eyed in pursuit. Five minutes later, the cycle would start again. How can anyone not admire that kind of pluck in the face of a raging adversary that really could kill you if you pushed him far enough?

With Peggy away, Brewsky has taken to sleeping with me. He’s not a cat that wants to be rubbed. Oh, no, he wants a deep tissue massage, and I give him one every night while he lies on my lap in bed. He becomes so positively orgasmic that the whole affair seems a little indecent, but what can I do? Now, he not only cries for food one hour out of every four, he spends one hour every night crying for me to hurry up and go to bed so he can get his massage.

Last night, I decided to smoke hashish with my Dilaudid. I forgot that a pinhead size drop of the caramelly substance is about the right amount, so I scraped a quarter of a teaspoonful onto a bed of bud and fired it up. I immediately found myself on the verge of an out of body experience, and the Dilaudid hadn’t even come on yet. I figured that the best thing for me to do was to get into bed and pet Brewsky to steady my nerves. Well, what does Brewsky decide to do but to yowl loudly and piteously from the darkness right outside my bedroom door. I lay debating whether he sounded more like a screaming demon in a lake of fire or more like an atheist being tortured to death by the Grand Inquisitor. When it seemed as if he would never stop, I started wondering if he had swallowed a screw or something, so I went into the hallway and said to him, “Brewsky, you just better not need to go to the animal hospital tonight because you’ll be shit out of luck.”

He looked at me with alien eyes as big as saucers, and then he went on one of his insane midnight tears in which he bounds through rooms, slides across furniture, and bounces off walls. So, there I am, not only having been disappointed in my desire to quietly pet my darling kitty in order to find an island of sanity within a brain that was threatening to explode across the universe like a supernova, I was being treated to god-knows-what kind of insanity on the part of the very creature I had looked to for comfort. I had heard of cats doing such things, but never having been a cat person, I hadn’t seen it until we got Brewsky, and it still unnerves me. It’s as if every veneer of tameness has been ripped away from a raging beast that I no longer recognize.

Brewsky's werecat performance was REALLY not what I needed last night, but it was sure what I got. When he finally succeeded in running his fit out, he jumped into my lap as I sat reading—I didn’t get far with that—and lay on his back waiting for his massage. I started laughing so hard over his Jekyll and Hyde performance that I was bouncing him up and down with my belly. He finally got up and looked at me dumfounded, as if to ask whether I had lost my mind. The more he stared, the harder I laughed until he finally jumped to the floor and stalked from the room, his tail twitching angrily.

Much of the time, I don’t feel that I have a clue what goes on inside a cat’s head, and other times Brewsky and I will be staring into one another’s eyes, and I’ll suddenly feel deeply connected to this little creature that I will never be able to tame. I don’t think I could ever experience the rapport with a cat that I have with many a dog, but I think that Brewsky is probably as good as it gets, cat-wise, because he has it figured out that my fits are 99% bluff. Otherwise, he would be neurotic as hell by now—like most cats of my acquaintance.