Filed under: cats, family, happiness, mental health, pet peeves, spite peeing
At 4:53 this morning, I was awakened by the most god awful sound: The squeals and screeches and hisses of a cat fight. Jolting awake, I blindly and instinctively felt around my bed for my cats. There was Mischief, curled up in her usual fuzz-ball snuggle right by my side. Barely awake, I yelled, “Cricket! Cricket!” A few seconds later, the hissing and snarling stopped, and Cricket bolted into the bedroom, darting under the bed to bury herself in suitcases. And a few seconds later, she bolted out.
Mischief, like me, was peacefully sleeping at 4:52am. Then came 4:53...
What was going on?
For the past three days, Cricket—who our friends in Chicago only semi-affectionately refer to as “hissy pissy kitty”—has been huddled in the back of the closet in our guest bedroom, only emerging to frequent the litter box and the food bowl. If I pester her enough, she’ll come out for a few minutes to show me she’s still alive, but then goes right back into hiding. This from a cat who usually struts around, begging us to chase her and wrestle her and pet her, a cat who spends her days figuring out the best angle from which to pounce on her sister’s head, a cat who stares down and hisses down any visitor who might be encroaching on her space. This from a cat who has walked with a bow-legged swagger of confidence since she was barely the size of my palm.
The very first time Cricket met Mischief
What is going on?
We’ve been on the road for the past three weeks, so at first I chalked it up to the usual cat-pouting after time away. But then I remembered that from Wednesday until Friday, she was out and about in the house with us, even resuming her morning window sill snuggle perch and her, “No f*ing way you’re not paying attention to me!” seat on top of my computer. Nope—not your garden variety cat passive-aggressiveness. Then I thought it was Mischief: Maybe the big, loving, patient sister had finally whipped the little punk into shape; maybe she had been relegated for the time being to the closet so that Mischief could have some relief from the constant pouncing, swatting, biting, and wrestling. But then there was that 4:53 am catfight. And Mischief was no part of it. So scratch that one, too.
Mischief wrestling Cricket into submission early on in life.
Cricket has clearly been scared of something. When she does emerge from her little cat cave, she darts to the food bowl, hesitantly looking around to see if it’s safe. Then she spots something—lord knows what—and goes scrambling back into hiding.
So at 4:53 am, alone in the house with nothing but one clawless, lazy lover of a cat and another snarling her brains out in the living room, my imagination got the better of me: We’d been gone for three weeks…did something get in the house? A mouse, maybe? Well, at least those are harmless. What if it’s a rat, though, and it comes hungrily into my room while I’m sleeping? Ew. Ew. Or what if a bat came down the chimney and was flying around the living room. Ugh—they have invisible bites; I’d never know if it attacked me in my sleep. Or what if it was just bugs, roaches or something, and Cricket is as afraid of them as me? I mean, it could even be that big wolf spider that has been loitering around our front porch. Heck, maybe Cricket went rabid. Was she going to turn on me in my sleep? Her snarls and hisses and growls were pretty terrifying and worrying, and I wanted her to be okay and all, but I was just a little too scared to get up and go see firsthand what life-threatening creature she was wrangling.
Needless to say, I never did fall back asleep.
Come reasonable morning hours, I finally got up, a little afraid of what I might find in the living room—a rat carcass? A nest of wolf spiders? Ew all around. But there was…nothing. All was normal. Some stuff had been knocked out of the pantry—a plastic bag, some cat food. Nothing else amiss. Cricket was still in hiding, but Mischief was caterwauling for breakfast. At the sound of the tin can opening and the dry food on her metal bowl, Cricket came sheepishly toward the kitchen, lured out of hiding, until—Poof! Tail explodes and she hightails it back to the bedroom. I jumped and looked around: Where was that little mouse/rat/bat/roach/wolf spider/rabies carrier/Tasmanian devil that was terrifying my household? Where was the culprit? What was the culprit? I looked around for what had freaked little Cricket out so badly, and there it was, right in front of me:
A Ziploc bag.
My cat is petrified of plastic bags.
When Cricket was fascinated by--and not petrified of--bags.
And all of a sudden…the lightbulb goes off. A few nights ago as we were unpacking, Cricket got herself tangled in a computer cord. Ran around the house screeching and knocking about trying to escape its tangled grip, in the process knocking over a fan and some dishes and magazines. Come to think of it, she’d been in hiding pretty much ever since. And every time she came into the living room, where did she look before darting away? The coffee table—covered in laptops and cords that had yet to migrate back to the office. And what had happened right before she hightailed it out of sight this time? I’d moved the Ziploc bag, the one presumably knocked on the floor during last night’s brawl.
My cat, the tough guy hissy-pissy-kitty, is life threateningly afraid of inanimate objects. Cords. Fans. Bags. Computers. My cat is…. Insane.
Although she's always been a lover...
...there were some warning signs.
This is not the first insane cat I’ve had to deal with. Oh no: That honor goes to Harley, the adult adoptee whose former owner—a Cicero cop with a killer bowling game whose husband had died unexpectedly from a heart attack—told us nonchalantly as we were loading Harley and her sister Mischief into our car, “Oh and, ever since Michael died, she’s been having some trouble with the litter box.”
Did she ever.
It took a while for Harely’s insanity to ramp up, but once it did, watch out. She was a fear pooper and a spite pee-er. A little freaked out? Poop all over. Mad at you for going out to dinner? Pee…on your newspapers, in your purse, at the door. When I went away to Japan for a month and Fresh went to Guatemala, how was I welcomed home?
I was peed on in my sleep. At first I thought I was so jet-lagged that I’d wet the bed, too comatose to realize I had to go to the bathroom. But then I started wondering: How’d I pee on my stomach? And then I smelled it. That was no human pee. Nope: Harley had spite peed right on me.
That should have been the end of the line with the cat. We’d taken her to the vet earlier to figure out if there was a medical issue, but nothing was discovered. When she peed on me, Fresh was still in Central America, and I did not have the gumption to get rid of the cat on my own. So back to the vet we went. Harley was put on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs. Because, you know, she had some obvious mental health issues. It worked for a while, until we moved to Madison. The first few weeks were okay, a little pee by the fire (maybe for aroma?), a little pee by the closet (maybe the pile of unpacked clothes were calling?). We chalked it up to poor litter box habits—we needed to get another one, and we needed to clean them all once a day, and we needed to keep them in separate rooms, and we needed lids that were exactly 6.235 inches taller than the cat, and we needed organic matter for litter that was soft on her sensitive declawed paws, and… None of it worked. It was time. She had to go.
Harley...perhaps seeking mental solace in a Chicago snowstorm?
Nobody wants a spite pee-er for a pet, though, and so she stuck around a bit longer as we desperately tried to find her a home. The peeing continued sporadically, and we got frantic. We weren’t quite ready to do the unthinkable, so we took our cat-sitter and our vet friend’s recommendation: We called the cat psychic.
Yep, we called a cat psychic. We set up a phone date for us, our kitties, and Asia, the cat whisperer. We learned that Mischief wanted babies and wanted to come to school with me, and we learned that Harley, poor Harley, had pain in her spine. (We also learned that they didn’t like it when the room was messy or when the “bed bounced,” and that Mischief was hoping to eat herself into obese oblivion. We also learned that, for fun, Mischief liked to sit on Harley’s head, who would retaliate with a bite, the source of the mysterious scab on Mischief’s chin. But I digress.)
Suckers, you think? Ha! You should have seen these cats during that psychic connection. For the entire hour, they laid docile, ears slightly twitching, like when they’re dreaming. Our cats never lay docile. And Asia knew all sorts of things about our cats, their history, and our lives that she couldn’t possibly know without some kind of telepathic connection. So when, via the psychic, we struck a deal with Harley that we’d take her to the cat chiropractor if she would continue taking her mental health cocktail of Kitty Prozac and Xanex, we thought we’d hit the jackpot.
We made good on our promise, and so did she: We drove her the hour to the kitty chiropractor, who snapped and crackled her back and confirmed that little Harley had some vertebrae out of place. And she seemed to take her pills diligently every day, with wrestling and wrangling subsided. All was well in cat land. The peeing subsided.
And then we went out of town for a weekend. And when we came home, spite pee. All. Over. The. Sofa.
That, unfortunately, was the end of Harley. And Fresh and I pinky swore that we’d never live with an insane cat again. Psychic be damned! Chiropractor, vet visits, kitty drugs be damned! (Especially because, after Harley was put to sleep and we were scouring our piss-filled apartment, we found a pile of cat pills—never swallowed—behind the sofa.) We swore that, at the earliest signs of insanity, we would stop being saps and we would remove the cat from our eminently sane household. We would not be duped again.
Or so we thought.
Cricket, who joined our home a few weeks after Harley was put down, is having late-night cat brawls with Ziploc bags. She is cowering in a closet for going on four days. She shakes at the sight of a computer cord. After this morning’s bag encounter, she wouldn’t even come out to eat. I’m crossing my fingers that she’s still coming out to use the bathroom.
We have a crazy cat. I admit it. And we made a promise to ourselves.
But she’s so good, otherwise. And she’s funny. And adorable. And simultaneously a lover and a tiger. And she talks a lot. And she’s really good at hunting lady bugs. And she provides endless hours of entertainment. And I love her a little too much, cat neuroses and all. She might be a little crazy, but…
Maybe I oughta give that cat psychic another shot.
Look how cute Cricket can be...
