To talk about Francis, it's necessary first to talk about my history with cats. My first one, when I was single-digits years old, was killed by the vet.
I don't mean put down because she was too old. I mean she went in for flu-like systems, the vet got confused, and marked her for lethal injection even though she wasn't supposed to be. My Chewbacca went in to get better and came back dead. I remember seeing her body in the trash, wriggling with maggots. Don't get mad at me for saying that --- if I had to see it, you have to read it.
Now, that seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen, to me. But this wasn't America; it was Ireland in the '70s. Lawsuits weren't part of the culture the way they were in the United States. Lawyers wore the foofy wigs and robes – you couldn't just call someone from an ad. The best way to deal with my grief, everyone figured, was to get another kitten from the same mom, who seemed to pop them out regularly. Chewbacca II was longer-lived, and even cranked out a litter of her own, all of which I named after Lord of the Rings characters because I'd recently become obsessed with the storybook version of Ralph Bakshi's animated movie. (By way of explanation – we not only didn't have video players; we didn't even have a TV. So I didn't get movies for Christmas and birthdays, but rather picture books and read-along records based on the movies. VCRs were for rich people, and TVs were for non-hippie parents who didn't think it would rot their kids' minds and ruin their concentration)
Raising kittens was pure joy; having to give them all away a bit of sadness, but we still had Chewbacca II. And then we moved.
The Chewbaccas had lived with us when our living situation was basically the wing of a Downton Abbey-style estate. It was secluded from any main roads, with lots of land for animals to roam free. The house itself was surrounded by gravel, so it wasn't like people would drive their cars right up to the front door. When the owner of the estate decided my mother was having a lesbian affair with his wife (not true, but she didn't exactly disabuse him of the notion either), we were evicted, and got our own house. It was a spacious, two-level, four-bedroom house in a rural area, next to a road on which traffic was not frequent, but fast.
Two problems became apparent. One was that we were very easy to rob, and the house got burgled at least three times. The second is that the fast traffic was infrequent enough that cats did not learn to fear it, at their own peril. Chewbacca II was one of many to die there, on May 1st, 1982. I remember that still because it was a personal “May Day!”
You might ask why we didn't keep the cats indoors, especially after, say, two of them got hit by cars. The answer is that wasn't a thing, except maybe for city dwellers. Pets were to be housebroken. Culturally, nobody in the countryside would have even considered keeping them locked inside. Although I did ask my mother years later why we didn't just keep cats indoors, and she said that one that was half-Siamese would YOWL so loudly we couldn't keep it in the house. Seems like her problem more than the cat's, to be honest.
Our half-Siamese run of black cats came from my friend Warrick's cat. Beezlebub, Sauron, and Hercules were an unholy trio, so to speak. Hercules was actually an adoption – Warrick named him and initially wanted to keep him, but I think he ultimately didn't get along with his own mama cat very well (considering I was present one time when she actually ate some of her own newborns, I can well believe it – again, I had to live it, you have to read it). Herc lived up to his name, actually surviving his first run-in with a car, only to disappear months later, and supposedly show up a couple miles away on the road, though we never saw the body. Sauron lasted long enough for me to write a series of horror stories about “Sauron, Cat of the Devil,” which I fully intended to turn into a movie one day.
By the time Hercules disappeared, he was prematurely dead cat #5, and I'd become a bit emotionally numbed. I didn't cry any more when they died – it was more like, okay, when do we get a kitten again? My mother did accuse me once of not caring.
When my parents split up, I developed allergies. First it was what we call hay fever, then it expanded to animals, and eventually just random environments. People without allergies don't get how debilitating it is to have nonstop violent sneezing and oozing and itching and swollen eyes, and in the '80s, there was no good solution. My mother insisted on homeopathic pills that did nothing, never having met a bullshit “natural” remedy she didn't think had to be better than chemicals. My Uncle Tim gave me DimeTapp, which was basically liquid Benadryl – it works somewhat, but it's also a massive sedative. And they wondered why I was “lazy” and not into sports, and always tired...Years later, Claritin would become the hot thing, and it did nothing for me either. I might have led a significantly different life if Allegra had existed 20 years sooner.
One could argue this was karmic. As a weak, picked-on kid, and an only child, I had nobody weaker to feel power against than the cats, so I bullied them, mirroring bad behavior. I'm not proud, even when in some cases it became just pushing a cat away when I was having a sneezing fit. If the cosmos decided I no longer deserved a cat, that was arguably fair. But there was one last one in Ireland: Gizmo, who became Garfield.
I don't honestly recall where we got the orange cat. What I do know is that we originally named him Gizmo after Gremlins, but about that time I started really getting into Garfield comics (Hey, I was 11), and kept saying, “We should have called him Garfield!” So we renamed him. He was our first baby male – Hercules was our only previous male, and he came to us fixed – so I can vividly recall him popping boners as puberty hit and the time to castrate him arrived.
What saved Garfield's life, in all likelihood, was my mother selling the house. Garfield went to my dad, at an estate in Dublin run by the university called Trinity Hall. It was pretty self-enclosed, so Garfield could roam, although there were a couple of unfixed males named Soxie and Flaherty that would kick his ass. Their owners insisted the cats were so neurotic that they needed the testosterone, but in fact that just made them bigger assholes. Garfield survived, though, and my dad took to him, developing a kind of baby talk that got really annoying – “Mr. Puss” devolved into “Meestar Booshk!” and later “Boosh-kar!” When my father left Ireland altogether, and with my allergies pretty evidently bad, we gave Garfield to a cat-loving neighbor whose other cat was fixed, and I heard she eventually took him to Scotland. He probably lived out a happy life there.
As for me, I became a bit of a cat-hater by survival. Not because I actually hated them, but because they caused miserable, debilitating symptoms in me. Same for dogs, if a bit less so. There were no more pets in my life, and heavy medication if I had to be around any. And cats fuckin' KNOW who has allergies. They go to you. Ironically, both my Zodiac signs are cats – a lion in the Western canon, and a tiger in Chinese.
You might imagine how unhelpful this was in my dating life. Like I wasn't bad enough at it already, I couldn't get involved with a pet owner, and that is 80%, maybe, of single women in Los Angeles.
And then came Julia...
[to be continued]