So long, kitty.

Contents of my backpack today:

A pad of yellow legal paper and a pen (evidently free with my employment in a communication studies course!). I love yellow legal paper so much, I don't know why.

***

1: Eulogy.

I write this, still slightly damp, after my first successful bath in this apartment. I’ve been here for a year and, because of the fact that I was constantly struggling with the clean up after a completely and unrepentantly incontinent cat, before this week the bathtub wasn’t fit for anything better than a quick shower.

People who are not as sentimental as I am might well wonder why I held on so long to an animal that made it impossible for me to ever place an article of clothing on the floor without it getting pissed on the moment I left the room, an animal that pissed regularly on the furniture, who once pissed on the stove element right before a dinner party so that when I turned on the element to start cooking the entire house filled with the stench of burning cat piss and the whole soiree had to be evacuated. At my old house the floorboards in the bathroom, were given over to a permanent warp from the layers of piss that soaked into them, and more than once on a date or, worse yet, between the sheets with a lover I would be subject to a sudden uncomfortable pause followed by the inevitable question: “is that cat piss I smell?”

Every form of discipline I could imagine from the most harsh to the most gentle was a complete failure with Gangus. He was going to piss wherever he wanted to and that was all there was too it. This meant that for years I was constantly mopping piss off the floors, scraping up wet scattered litter, suffering the taunts and complaints of family members and friends who just assumed that I was a slovenly person (well ok I am, but the cat made things seem way way worse) and other indignities too many to list now.

And the epicentre of all of this misery was always the bathroom; a toxic hellhole reeking of urine and crunchy underfoot with cat litter. No cat was ever as messy as mine. Here at my present apartment, where Gangus reached the highest levels of his artistic expression, I often found myself mopping the bathroom floor, and the hallway outside the bathroom, and the kitchen floor to the right of the bathroom, four, five times a day. I started putting down newspapers sheets and once a day I would have to heave them in the trash because they were soaked through with urine. If I left the sheets for more than a day the piss would soak through to the floor and these strange jumping bugs and also tiny moths would start breeding in the wet paper. Horrible!

…anyhow I could go on with this, but I want to get to the point, which is that I put up with his behaviour because I felt a great deal of affection for that cat. I raised him up from the time that he could fit in the palm of my hand, and I nursed him through all kinds of troubles and worries. In his way, too, he was a good cat. He was very affectionate and used to sleep with me under the blankets. He was very nurturing and he used to sleep close to me and nuzzle me when I was sick (or too drunk to stand up, which I suppose seemed like the same thing to him).

Gangus was a champion mouser, and for this alone he more than earned his keep. I even forgave him all the baby birds and snakes he dragged into the house because of the number of mice he executed in his time. Gangus, too, was a tough sonofabitch and he once killed a stray tomcat that had been hanging around outside the house. I remember he came in one day, tracking blood everywhere. He was bleeding out of his paws and sides and I figured he’d been fighting because I had heard all kinds of screaming and hissing out in the street. The other cat (I’d been seeing it around) was slinking away, half of its face was missing. It didn’t live long after this.

Gangus twice (that I know of) fought dogs, too. Once he went toe to toe with a Doberman and cut its nose wide open before thinking better of it and going up a tree. I had to get a ladder to retrieve him from the highest branches. While I was shimming along a high branch to grab him he casually ran down the tree and left me stranded up there. He had quite a large tooth puncture wound in his head that day, but he lived. Another time, a large mutt was chasing his sister, Bathsheba, down the street. With all his fur erect he went after the dog, four sets of claws flying, and sent the beast yelping away.

Gangus, too, knew love; however briefly. When he was very young he fell for a grey Persian who belonged to my then girlfriend, Michelle. The Persian wanted nothing of this young buck, though, and even one time turned in a rage and swiped a chunk out of his ear. But then one time before I got Gangus fixed and while the Persian was in heat the two cats got together and fucked each other’s brains out. No kittens got formed, thank goodness.

…but back to the point: the bathtub was always a place for me to keep the mop and often it was just to revolting to contemplate sitting in but, now that Gangus has passed away, I’ve gradually been cleaning the house and trying to come to terms with my new (potentially less malodorous) lifestyle.

First among my life changes was the bathroom. I’ve actually put a bathmat down on the floor for the first time ever. I’ve actually cleaned the tub. I’ve actually taken a bath in the tub. I’m actually damp; though less so than when I began writing this.

2: Apology

So the truth is that even though I loved that cat a ton, and even though (knowing how sick he was) I tried to take him to the vet four different times to have him put to sleep before turning back and going home again almost on the verge of tears about the whole thing, with the words that I had to say in order to have him exposed to the needle sticking in my throat and unable to come out over my tongue, and even though I have to admit that I miss having him around in certain ways, I also have to admit that I’m relieved to be through with this whole pissing ordeal that has defined my life over the last…well however many damn years I had that cat.

3: Elegy

I went today to the bulk spice store and I spent an hour looking at each little bag of spice and reading what each bad did when it was brewed up in a tea. Wormwood and St John’s Wort and marigold leaves and everything else and everything else: everything that you can pull up out of the ground. This one is good for insomnia, one warned, but not to be taken if you are depressed. This one is to help evacuate your system, said another, and this one is a laxative. This one will give you sexual energy. This one will help you kill your boring wife.

I made my way through the big plastic boxes of chopped dried apricots and powered chicken soup stock and crunched up walnut bits and coffee grounds and pasta types and dried beans and lentils. This is the way to live, I thought to myself, vowing to come back and get a whole lot of dried things; a whole lot of dried beans. I don’t know why I’ve been wasting my money on the cans because between this store and the Jean Talon market I think I could eat and eat well for so much less than I’m paying now…and probably be healthier, too.

The whole place smells heavily of powder and I wonder if it all must get into the shopkeeper’s lungs after a while and he coughs up mucusy cakes of cumin into his white handkerchief when he awakes in the morning, I wonder if he always smells vaguely of curry and cinnamon and so people are strangely attracted and repelled by him at exactly the same time. I was once like this myself, strangely covered over with the musk of cat urine; a vile stench in and of itself, yet somehow I still managed to find lovers mad enough to want to be by my side all the same.

But whose lips will I kiss now with my smell neutral and my bearing much like everyone else’s? Perhaps I should roll in the excrement stained grass like a dog in order to make my scent more dashing? Well, anyhow, I know whose lips I want to kiss right now and when I do kiss them lips it just entirely makes my day and all in all I feel pretty happy to be clean today and when I got out of the tub I didn’t want to drain the water even because the silence under the surface was so lovely and the flickering red candle made everything seem so sacred. This is my farewell to my cat and I hope he is happy wherever he is now.