Black Hawk Down

Are everyone’s pets weird, or just mine? If you think about it, the whole idea of having a pet is pretty weird. Normally, we try to keep animals out of our houses. You wouldn’t want a raccoon climbing in your dishwasher, licking your plates clean, would you? We tolerate more from our pets than we do from our friends and family. You can’t come over, eat my houseplants, puke on my floor, and take a nap. I would frown upon that. But if my indoor cats do it, I clean it up, and quickly too, so no one else has to complain about looking at a turd-shaped hairball. My cats are more than just gross. They are odd, truly bizarre critters, and if I didn’t love them so much, I would really hate them.

My younger cat, Moshe, is a three year old tuxedo short haired kitty with a solid body, a heart of gold and a head full of air. He doesn’t just look at you with a blank stare; he looks at you like he had a head injury, his eyes almost googly. He sleeps hard, like a man, and he plays hard, like a polar bear. He is not graceful or light on his feet or any of the usual things that cats are often considered, but he is annoying and curious, so you know he is all cat. To his credit, he is extremely gentle with children, who have been known to carry him around, use him as a pillow, put hats and clothes on him, and do other things that cats normally would not allow humans to do. So he pretty much gets a free pass on the other stuff, such as sitting on top of the refrigerator, opening closet doors to hide, and making biscuits in my armpit every morning around 4:30.

My older cat, Yoko, is less of a joy to have around. She is mostly black, with long hair, piercing green eyes, and shiny black cat lips. She looks like she is angry most of the time. It’s not like her ears lay flat or her tail wags angrily. It’s more like she is sneering contemptuously at you. She is the one that my children’s friends are afraid of when they come over, the one who growls when the door bell rings, bites you if you touch her without her permission, or attacks if a dog somehow makes it inside the house. She ranks herself as slightly higher in importance than one of my daughters. But she does care about us, and she is very protective, in her own way, of her family. We put up with her because she is our responsibility and because she has yet to destroy the furniture.

One of the things that I love about Moshe is that at three year old, he is still very playful. He will play fetch forever if only you would keep throwing his red foam clown nose for him. He carries his clown nose around in his mouth, spitting it near you, so you still have to bend over and pick it up before you throw it again. Yoko, on the other hand, doesn’t play well with others. Her idea of fun is to attack her reflection on the floor, or to hide and jump out at you when you walk past, or to try to climb the door frames and attack you. She is very fond of attacking.

Since she doesn’t get to go outside to do her attacking, pouncing, and killing, Yoko has to use her feline talents on things around the house. She has been known to disarm a skein of yarn, leaving it beside my bed so that in the morning, I will no longer feel threatened by the fact that I don’t know how to knit. She has also systemically killed a bag of muffins, a bedroom slipper, and countless Christmas ornaments, carrying them up the stairs and leaving them as offerings so that I can see what an excellent mouser she would be. If only just once, she could be given her freedom, to go outside, to capture and kill that chipmunk that teases her on the patio step, to feel the heat of his fur turn cold in her mouth. But she can’t because I didn’t spring for the feline leukemia shots, and I don’t like to brush her.

Every once in a while, though, she likes to kick it up a notch, as Emeril would say. She looks like she is sleeping, and then, Bam! your water glass is knocked over, soaking your stack of library books. Or the kids go back to school, so she feigns a bladder infection so she can pee in the air vent in the sun room. Or, she will take out a helicopter faster than a Somalian militia fighter.

I woke up last night, about 4 in the morning, to the sound of crunching. It wasn’t so much like a potato chip snacky crunch as it was a sort of chop-shop kind of crunching. Whatever kind of crunch, it certainly wasn't a usual bedroom noise, so I got up to investigate. I put on my glasses and stumbled around in the dark.

This was not the first time I have awoken to chewing in my room. One time, Moshe figured out how to open the pantry door in the kitchen. He found a bag of cat treats on the floor of the pantry, and he carried it up to my bedroom like a baby kitten, where he proceeded to chew through the package to get to the yummy nuggets inside, all under my bed at three in the morning.

Anyway, last night I found Yoko under the vanity space of my bathroom counter, eating my husband’s remote controlled helicopter. It’s a small copter, made out of Styrofoam and small parts, all coated in a bright green layer of (most likely) lead-tainted paint. Yoko had carried the copter upstairs in the dead of night, and she was busy dismembering it when I found her hunched over it.

Did she think a toy helicopter was food? Was there something in the paint that had a natural meaty richness in its taste? Or was she pissed that I went out of town for a night and left her home alone with the rest of the family? She didn’t even want to see Phantom of the Opera; at least, I didn't think she did. She never mentioned anything to me.

I was the bearer of bad news this morning. I was the one who had to tell my spouse that his beloved remote controlled helicopter, the one he liked to fly inside the house, was permanently out of commission, done in by the same creature that puts her butt in his face as a sign of affection. I did refrain from reminding him that if he had put his toys away, this would never have happened. No one likes an “I told you so.”

So we are down one helicopter, but the two cats remain at large, ready to strike again at any hour, when we least expect it. No wonder we have them in our lives. They certainly do enhance our quality of life.