The cat that wouldn’t shut up

I don’t know if all girlfriends come with cats, but mine sure seemed to, most of them anyway.

And, being single for 53 years, I could write a lot about those girlfriends and as interesting as they were and probably still are, this is mostly going to be about their cats.

There was the meanest cat ever. The world’s dumbest cat. And the cat that wouldn’t shut up. It was not, although it probably could have been, the same cat.

The meanest cat was named Reno, although not originally. My girlfriend Marla had the name Fellini picked out for him, no matter what. She was all artsy fartsy and was into foreign films and the filmmaker Frederico Fellini.

The cat was a Persian Blue but it looked gray so I named him Reno for Reno Gray, who played guard for the Illini basketball team during the late 1970s. My friends would make the connection instantly. I told her that this cat was no Fellini for I don’t think Fellini went around biting ankles, chomping on wrists and slashing at people’s eyes. But, maybe he did? We had one of those vertical furry climby things that hooked over the top of a door (ours was the bathroom door) and had a perch for a cat to rest on. Reno would set up his ambush from there, batting guests on top of the head as they made their way to the bathroom.

Whose cat it was seemed to be linked to his real-time behavior. When he was batting our guests on the head and hissing from behind the commode, they would be told, “Oh, that’s Reno. Reno is Jeff’s cat.” The rare time when he was sitting on a lap being darling? Then she’d say. “Oh, this? This is Fellini. He’s my cat.” See how this works?

Marla and I quarreled over this cat’s name. Imagine if we had a kid. A friend of ours mediated the situation, noting the cat’s meanness and the Iranian hostage crisis that was in the news then (we were all journalists) and came up with this name: Reno Khomeini Fellini. Issue solved.

Reno got sick and we took him to the vet. Once out of his kennel, Reno went wild, hissing and grrrr-ing and coiling itself as if ready to tear the eyes out of something, anything, everything. A horror movie about to spring to life. Our vet was the kind, gentle yuppy-part-of-town type. The concerned man felt we maybe should leave the exam room for we might be traumatized to see our cat express such a menacing pattern of behavior — as if what we were seeing wasn’t normal. And it wasn’t normal. But it was normal for Reno.

“We think that would be a very bad idea,” we warned.

The vet tried but couldn’t get close enough to Reno to treat him, nor did he dare try. He took the syringe and aimed it, judging the distance and apoplying just the right pressure to shoot the knockout drug into Reno’s hissing mouth. It worked well enough. The next day when I came to fetch him, there was an aura of danger around the place, just like in Ghostbusters. Reno had upset the entire place. All the animals were acting possessed by this untamed force of nature. As I entered the kennel where the animals had been kept overnight, signs pointed toward Reno’s pen with arrows and black bold letters spelling “Danger!” and “Bites!” Reno’s hair was matted from his pressing himself into the corner of his pen and into its urine and feces. For added protection, I was wearing welding gloves, which are very thick. “Those gloves won’t help you one bit,” one of the workers called out. He was a big guy, too, one you’d think would have no fear of any cat, but evidently he was speaking from experience, and seemed very put out about it.

A year or two later we called to make an appointment. “They’re bringing in Reno!” I heard the woman on the line call out.

That’s just one of the stories about him. We, I mean the girlfriend, added a cat, a kitten named Houdini. He was spry but not that spry, for Reno, who was much older then, knocked the always taunting Houdini out of a third-floor window. So you get the mean part by now. And again, that’s only another small part of it.

The dumbest cat was named Dave, who was just a big, fat, lazy cat. But mostly it was dumb. My girlfriend then was named Mindy. To maintain her figure, she’d starve herself all day, smoke a few cigs and have a nickle bag of Fritos for lunch and sometimes not even that. When I’d ask her about it she’d say, “Well, sometimes I just forget to eat.”

Comedien Marsha Warfield, the large black actress who starred in Night Court, was doing the standup comedy circuit and we went to see her. She ventured into the fat jokes and then went into the thin jokes. “I know some women who say, “Well, sometimes I just forget to eat.”

Oh no. I waited with dread as fate aimed this relationship-killing punch line right at us. Almost as if in a Hitchcock movie, a couple in a crowded room where everyone is enjoying themselves and we, we’re in the crosshairs and know we’re in the crosshairs with no escape. I could see Mindy’s jaw set and her body brace as Warfield set up the joke.

“Forget your keys, forget your wallet? I get that. But forget to eat? Honey? You gotta be a special kind of stupid to forget to eat.”

The laughter around us shook the room. Me? I let that joke waft right over. I valued this relationship. Mindy could cook. She could design and make her own clothes and if Hollywood needed it, she could double for Natalie Wood. I was no fool.

One night she set up a romantic evening in the little bungalo she rented. Candles were lit to make the evening extra special. Dave is swishing around just a little too slow and way too close to the candles. His tail catches fire, except he doesn’t know it, his brain evidently being too far from his tail. Mindy sees it and shrieks about four “Oh my gods,” which sets Dave off to a corner near the lace curtains. The cat still doesn’t know. How dumb is this cat? I think. He doesn’t know about the fire on his tail until the fire on his tail also becomes the fire on the lace curtain. Then I let out about four “Oh my gods.”

I’m the son of a firefighter but that did not help with my dilemma. Save the world’s dumbest cat, who could set the whole house on fire, but by the time I douse out Dave, the rapidly rising flame on the curtain could spread throughout the house. We got out of it without any damage to the house or the cat. I don’t remember how. The dinner was ruined of course. We put out the candles, ordered some pizza, sat on the porch and got drunk. Mindy didn’t like it when I called her cat dumb. But this time when I said, “Honey, you really do have the dumbest cat in the world,” she didn’t stop me.

The cat that wouldn’t shut up was just that, the cat that wouldn’t shut up. I imagine it was born that way and I really don’t remember any more about it, except for the sleepless nights and mostly unhappy days and that it drove everybody nuts. Everyone, well, you know, except my girlfriend.