Where It’s Only Reigning Cats, Galoshes Can’t Protect You
I, for one, am glad we finally have a cat owner coming into the White House. Dogs are fine, but their people tend to be a bit dogmatic. While dog owners expect pets, people and events to obey and be predictable, cat owners can be more flexible, more able to deal with the unexpected, such as bunches of sharp claws digging into their thighs.
At 5:30 a.m. this past Monday I was watching a navigable river flow through my garage, threatening to sweep away piles of electronics gear and several years worth of newspaper clippings (when you read these news accounts of deranged people being found in a house littered with heaps of newspapers, they never tell you those people first became deranged by writing those papers).
Slogging on through the Sisyphean task of trying to drain a flooded back yard with buckets--I eventually sealed off the garage with a combination of cinder blocks and Vox amplifier covers--I wondered what it must be like to have a dog. A good, loyal, steadfast dog raised on “Lassie” reruns, who at the first drop of rain would begin excavating a drainage canal around the house, pausing only to write this column for me by pressing his wet dog nose to the word processor keys.
Instead, I have a cat. After hearing enough clamor to think breakfast was in the offing, he arose from some of his finest stain marks on my down comforter, wandered into the garage, surveyed the wreckage and sprang into action, stretching to his full length and yawning. Until it got boring, he took to leaping from amusing perch to perch--”Ha ha, look! I’m Aqua-Cat!”--knocking more innocent boxes of stuff onto the garage floor, which by now was a major white-water theme park. Then he went back to bed.
He’s entirely gray, named Smokehouse. Here in Orange County people often pay upward of $1,000 for an investment status pet, coming with more paperwork than if you’d leased a Lear jet. But Smokehouse just wandered in our front door one day as a kitten and stayed. I have no idea what kind of cat he is, aside from king of all he surveys.
As often as not he sleeps under cars. The only work he does is as a shuttle bus for fleas. When he deigns to sleep indoors, he’s practically a living bolster, interposing himself between any two bodies that might be in a bed. Despite the removal of his Smokehouse almonds some years back, he still gets into huge yowling cat fights at every opportunity, and some years his medical bills are higher then mine. The only way he’d ever chase a Frisbee is if you glued chicken pieces to it.
But what do you expect? He’s a cat.
Like most pet owners, I’ve got reams of fascinating stories about my cat, like the ways he wakes me up, from patting my forehead with a paw, to knocking expensive things over, to, on special occasions, regurgitating mouse heads. I hesitate to relate these tales, though, being reminded of a work-mate years ago who regaled us every single day with his cat’s latest important decisions and functions:
“You know, I must have fallen asleep watching TV last night, and when I woke up guess who was licking my hand?
“I don’t know, Vern. The Shell Answer Man?”
“No, dummy, it was little Muffy.”
There was a time when little Muffy would have been worshiped as a god in Egypt, which may explain why that empire went to hell. Consider having to check your every move with a feline oracle:
“Oh Furry One, great choices lie before us. Should we:
a) Repel the Persian Achaemenids threatening our civilization?
b) Get drunk and make up hieroglyphics?
c) Get you some more cat food?”
The correct answer, of course, was “c.” It always was “c,” which is why Egypt made the first attempts at preserving cat food, though the Pyramids ultimately proved to be pricey and inconvenient.
The world has had its dog worshipers as well, and they were a pretty sorry sight, judging by the direct contact I had with one. In the mid-’60s Sky Saxon was considered the West Coast Mick Jagger, performing “Pushin’ Too Hard” with his band the Seeds at venues like the Hollywood Bowl, with teenyboppers clinging to his legs. By the time I met him in the late ‘70s he’d been through some “heavy changes,” if that’s what you call performing for cigarettes and looking like Charles Manson’s manicurist.
Sky somewhere down the line had got hung up on the remarkable fact that dog spelled backward was God. I don’t know if Sky did, but others in this limited cult reputedly took to following dogs around and learning from their simple ways, namely rooting through trash cans.
A friend of mine called out of the blue one night and asked if I’d like to play with Sky and the New Seeds, which turned out to be a burnt-out hippie guitarist named Rainbow, a rhythmically disadvantaged drummer and anyone else they could get to show up.
It was a truly awful experience. The gig was in an unheated former strip joint theater across from Tower Records on the Sunset Strip, and the scant audience mostly seemed to be old patrons expecting something in a G-string. Meanwhile onstage, nobody tuned, called changes or even said what key the songs were in. The fuzzy, grating noise would just start , and Sky would sing of his new canine consciousness. The one line I still remember was, “Dylan says let your dogs run free / Come on . . . be like me.”
It just went on and on and I got one of the worst headaches of my life. After we’d played every wretched note in the universe, Sky finally called a halt around 1 a.m. and exited, first mystically announcing, “Oh well, back into the tunnel.” Backstage, which was the parking lot, the owner actually paid him with two packs of cigarettes.
The moral to these tales is take what your pets tell you with a grain of salt. There are things we can learn from animals, like how to relax, how to live in the moment and how to whine. But for the really major things it’s best to maintain some interspecies distance.
Even our pets know to do that. My cat, I’m sure, only bothers with a dim conception of human capabilities, seeing us as good for opening doors and cans, and as a convenient source of warmth. I’ve had some earnest talks with him. I’ve tried to direct his attention toward worthwhile PBS programs, all to no avail. Sometimes he gives me a look that says, “Sure I’ll pay attention to you, next time you’re about six inches tall and trying to hide behind the fridge. I’ll pay plenty of attention. Now go away.”
