Pet Owner Finds You Can Take the Cat Out of the Alley, but . . .

This is the trashy tale of an unmarried couple known as the Garbages. They live with me. Often, when it’s cold, they sleep with me--outside the covers, on the edge of the bed, of course.

In the morning, when he’s most hungry, Mr. Garbage takes it upon himself to wake me up. My eyes pop open to find his furry face inches from mine.

He’s purring. “I’m hungry, pal,” he’s saying. “Get up. Now.”

His sister, Ms. Garbage, is a bit less demanding, except when she’s using a bedroom pillow or the space under my office desk as her litter box.

The Garbages are my cats. At age 14--that’s 98 in human years--they’re amongst my best and oldest friends. They’re also my twin alarm clocks, sources of sanity and insanity in my life.

While browsing in a local bookstore recently, I came across a collection of essays by famous writers--including the incomparable E.B. White--expounding about their dogs.

It was in the Dogs as Literature department, as I recall: The minds of great men and women turned to sentimental mush writing about the family pet, using all their powers of personification to portray Fido as Mankind’s most loyal friend.

They wrote about their dogs with all the passion of a first love.

Well, I thought to myself, if dogs are great literature, the Garbages are at least pulp fiction.

After all, dogs get far too much press in this country. Sensitive men are cat lovers, they say, but real men dig dogs: Dogs go hunting with their man. Cats, on the other, er, paw, stay home to scratch up the furniture.

You could say that cats are a thinking man’s pet. But we’re talking about the Garbages here--and that’s too lofty a claim where they’re concerned.

Because the Garbages are decidedly lowbrow pets, showing the worst qualities of both the dog and the cat.

Come dinner time, Mr. Garbage sits at my feet, tracking every movement of my fork as I eat--like the most badly trained of dogs.

Ms. Garbage--also known as Ms. Gee around my place--has an independent streak akin to the snobbiest of show cats.

In that way, my pets are almost human: They’re flawed. As a friend once said, the Garbages--like their owner--have stunted personalities. Another gave them an even higher compliment: Vile pelts, he called them.

Take Mr. Garbage. As swaybacked as some old glue horse, with a gut that hangs floorward, he inspires most people to ask incredulously: “Is that cat pregnant?” The answer, of course, is that Mr. Garbage is just lazy.

He gave up chasing things a decade ago. Most days, he lies listlessly in the backyard as the entire neighborhood--birds, squirrels, rival cats and possums--help themselves to his bowl.

It’s almost embarrassing.

But pity Mr. Garbage: He’s a sick old man. A few ears back, he developed diabetes, and I spent the better part of a year ferrying him back and forth to the vet. He almost died on more than one occasion.

More than $3,500 later, the symptoms have abated--for now. Diabetes has a way of returning in cats.

Ms. Garbage has fared no better. As a kitten she contracted a mysterious respiratory illness. One Friday, the vet told me to take her home and make her comfortable: She would die over the weekend, he said.

Well, Ms. Gee didn’t die. But her survival came at a price: She’s deaf.

Now she spends her days lurking around the roof of my house, a lunar-surface haven from the suburban predators who would no doubt eat her alive.

At night, she often lets out a lonesome, contorted howl, sending shivers down my spine, making me feel a bit like Edgar Allan Poe.

Worthless as they may seem, I just can’t rid myself of the Garbages. You see, these cats and I go way back. While living in Norfolk, Va., in 1981, I got bored one day and went browsing at the animal shelter, where I encountered a mama cat who had just delivered a brood.

“Take as many of them young’uns as you like,” the attendant told me.

So I picked the hungriest-looking one, a rambunctious, solid-gray kitten--as well as the gray-and-white runt of the litter, just to keep him company.

The moment I got them home, I put both cats on the kitchen floor for the lie of the land. Immediately, the male cat’s nose went straight to the air, sniffing as though savoring the aroma of some fine restaurant.

Then he walked over to the garbage can.

*

And so Mr. Garbage was named, and his sister to boot.

They have become an odd couple of sorts: Mr. Garbage was my male model for a photography course. Sometimes, on hot nights, we play a game of shark attack--I hold out a half-eaten chicken leg and hum the “Jaws” theme as he gorges himself with the gusto of a Great White.

Ms. Garbage has always neatly filled the role of the woman of the house. Daintily, with the feline flair of a great huntress, she moves about the house and back yard slowly, with stealth, a predator afraid of her own shadow.

And so we’re a happy family, the Garbages and I.

Except for those sickly moments when newcomers ask about the names of my beloved pets. This invariably happens after they introduce their new kitten, the namesake of some erudite-sounding Greek god or goddess.

Then the shoe falls.

“So, what are your cats named?”

My response: “Don’t ask.”