My stepmother and father were both hoarders, which is Latin for “crazy person who has to have ten million of everything, plus a maid to take care of it all because they can’t be bothered to” in my opinion. Unfortunately, they hoarded cats. Yes, you heard right, cats. And, to be perfectly honest, these cats scared me. My father, a sheriff, would bring them home from evictions that he did of houses and apartments and it was my job to feed them, make sure that they had water, and clean their litter boxes. Every. Single. Day. Now, if you wonder what that made the house smell like, let me give you a little hint: the next time you go to the grocery store, go into the house cleaning aisle and find a bottle of ammonia. Then put it right up into your nose. And if you’re wondering what the house looked like….if you’ve ever seen the movie Gremlins, with the cute fuzzy animals that ended up having cocoons, that’s kind of what it looked like every time that they got sick and hacked up a hairball.
It was my responsibility to take care of the cats. I had to empty the litter boxes every. Single. Day. Now, a note to all of the bodybuilders out there: if you are ever really, really hard up to go work out, just go to my parent’s house. They’ll have you hauling fourty pound boxes of cat litter and twenty pound bags of food at least twice a week. At least it was good cardio. And speaking of a workout- another good workout in that house happened every time that you went to get anything to eat. If you got a box out of the pantry to get food out of, or a container of leftovers out of the fridge, you had to be quick. It was like what they called the “washing machine” when I was in middle school; there was a certain method to how to do it so that you didn’t end up with your food all over the floor. You also got very limber in that house; especially when you had your back turned and one of the cats decided to go all Japanese kamakazi pilot on you, jumping on your back and holding on for dear life. This is why I think that cat’s are much smarter than humans give them credit for: the cats always knew exactly where to jump on your back so that you couldn’t reach them. Like that one spot on your back that you can never quite reach to scratch, that’s exactly where they would jump and hang on to. And then, to make it even worse, while you’re writhing around in pain due to the ten razor-sharp fingernails that are making a permanent tattoo in the skin around your spine, all of the other cats would gather around and starting screaming! It’s like they all got together one time and decided, “Hey, let’s take down the humans and we can rule this house! Today, the house, tomorrow, the world!” It’s like they all decided together that they hated us and wanted us dead, and probably with good reason. All of the cats had inbred so much that by the time that I left, they were starting to look like a bunch of Virginian hillbillies (or Kentucky ones for that matter). There were the cats that had perpetual ear infections, the ones that always had runny eyes or noses, and the ones that were just totally fucked up in the head. We had one, that we called Toes, that John delicately called our “retarded” cat. Poor Toes, he would get into the corner right between where the back door and the wall were and just turn in circles. He would circle and circle and circle. It was like one of those Roomba robot house cleaners that hits the wall, backs up, hits the wall again, backs up again, until you get up and turn it another way. And, the poor guy, my father would sit there and laugh at him long after my OCD had kicked in and I had picked him up, moving him just so that I wouldn’t have to sit there and watch him circle and circle the same place over and over.
One year, my parents got the idea that someone had called DHR on them and they were going to have their house investigated. So, the two brilliant, college-educated adults that were legally in charge of taking care of me decided that they were going to take about three-quarters of the cats (so that we’d only have one hundred instead of three or four hundred) to a farm outside of town and let the cats go free. Keep in mind that these are cats that have never been outside of a house (albeit a horribly disgusting run-down house) in their short lives and many of them, from years and years of inbreeding, had defects- blindness, constant stuffy noses, if they had been children they would have been the “special needs” kids that get set apart from the rest of the class. So, the two adults who had been put in charge of my welfare backed my brother’s car into the garage and made a chain: my stepmother ran in and grabbed two or three cats, then handed them to my father, who ran them out to my brother, who stuffed them into the back of the car. By the time they were done it was like a clown car: the entire back and most of the front seat were piled with cats: brown cats, black cats, red cats, blonde cats, short cats, tall cats, fat cats, thin cats. Here a cat, there a cat, everywhere a cat-cat. (Sorry, just had a Dr. Seuss moment there).
The cats in the house were also, as strange as it seems, segregated cats. Yes, we had Jim Crow laws in the house. And people say that parents in the South aren’t teaching their kids about their heritage. There were the cats that were only allowed to be in the kitchen. Then there were the cats that were only allowed to be in the rest of the house. Then there were the cats that were only allowed to be in John and Lesley’s room. Even though this didn’t keep the cats from continuously getting pregnant (what can I say, they were whore cats), it was rigidly enforced and would cause both of them to go into absolute conniption fits if one of the “kitchen cats” got out into the rest of the house or vice versa. However, someone should have taught Lesley about the facts of life (for all animals, not just humans) horny girl plus horny boy equals babies.
When I was in the eigth grade, my father went on a home improvement jag. He ripped up all of the carpet in the downstairs of the house, and ripped up the linoleum in the kitchen. After piling all of the living room and dining room furniture into the dining room, he tiled the hallway and the living room before he gave up. For the next five years that I lived there, the kitchen floor was solid concrete. Then, about two weeks before I graduated from high school, he went on another home-improvement jag in the kitchen, tearing out the baseboards and the chair rail, to redo them. Replacing all of the doors (during which I was stationed about three feet behind him with a water bottle to keep all of the cats that were supposed to be kitchen cats away from all of the cats that were the “rest of the house” cats.)
One weekend, my father came home on another of his excursions with “the blinky lights”- he was going to run the four day marathon called Memphis to Mobile, a run for St. Jude’s Children Hospital where the participants literally ran the entire way from Memphis, TN. to Mobile, AL. I thought that he was crazy but shrugged it off, realizing that I could leave on Friday night, while Lesley was asleep, and sleep most of the day Saturday, while she was busy working on the welcome back celebration that would take place on Sunday. So, on Friday night I showered, dressed, and laid on my bed reading until it was time to leave. I crawled out of the front window without a hitch, and ran down the street to where I agreed to meet my boyfriend, Donald, half an hour from then. Realizing that I had left my watch on the porch outside of the window, I walked back, only to find that the screen that I put back into place when I crawled out of the window had been pushed out by one of the cats. There were cats everywhere! Desperately, I tried to herd them all back into the house, but most of these cats had been left alone for so long (because, realistically, how much time in the day did any of us have to give all three hundred of the cats in that house? Answer: not very much.) that they just ran when I tried herding them. I tried everything: running at them, my face contorted like a Halloween mask to try scaring them back toward the window, crouching down coaxing them with a pathetic “here, kittykittykitty”, running up behind them and grabbing them (not a smart idea, if you ever want to try it. All that you will get from that is some deep scratches). I managed to get all back into the house except one, but didn’t give it much thought. Honestly, I thought that the cats were much better out in the wild then they would be in the house where they were literally humping to death. So, without another thought, I went to the beach with my boyfriend, staying out all night. The next day, things were going dandy- well, as dandy as things could go in that house, which generally meant that my ass wasn’t burning from the PVC pipe, that I wasn’t in the kitchen doing exercises that could put an Army recruit to shame, and my eardrums weren’t ringing from being screamed at for five hours straight. That is (insert dramatic music here) It happened. Lesley was leaving to go downtown to start setting up the welcome-back ceremony that would be held the next morning. The good thing was that she was leaving for a few hours, so I could take a nap since I’d been out until about five that morning and had gotten up at eight. The bad thing was that she slammed back into the house all of five minutes after she had left, demanding why there was a cat sitting on the front porch. My answer? “Well, maybe he needed some fresh air.” For some reason, she didn’t find it that funny, and had me running up and down through the drainage ditch that ran behind the house for at least three hours looking for where the cat had gone. As if that didn’t make me look enough like a psycho, she had me out there after dark with a flashlight, walking the ditch and calling the cat’s name.
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