The Hapless Life of Mister (F.) Scott (Fitzgerald)

When I grad­u­ated from col­lege, I wanted to get a cat to inau­gu­rate my grownup life. I was going to get an apart­ment, find a job, and have pets, like peo­ple do. My cat was going to be long-haired and gray and answer to the name Ender. Adult­hood was going to be awe­some. It turns out that long-haired gray cats aren’t as preva­lent at the local shel­ter as one might think, and so I was blessed with a scrawny gray and black tabby who loved to drink more than any­thing in the world. In light of this habit he was named after F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I was fine with call­ing him Scott for the time being. The woman who ran Asheville Pet Sup­ply called him Scotty, as have sev­eral oth­ers who’ve met him over the years. My secret hope was that he would grow into a more stately name, Mr. Fitzger­ald. This opti­mism was misplaced.

My part­ner Amy found Scott in a cage with his feral mother at Asheville Pet Sup­ply (a fan­tas­tic shop that suc­ceeds despite hav­ing no web­site even though it’s 2009). She was such a wild cat that oven mitts were required to feed her or, as was unfor­tu­nately nec­es­sary, to coax her into nurs­ing her kit­tens. Scott was only 6 weeks old but the kind pro­pri­etor of Asheville Pet Sup­ply felt it would be best if he was weaned a bit pre­ma­turely. Too soon or not, Scott was sent home with Amy.

By “home” I mean to say that Scott went to live in a col­lege dorm, where he was kept hid­den from me (because he was a sur­prise grad­u­a­tion gift) and from UNCA’s res­i­dent advi­sors. He spent finals week pass­ing from one dorm to another, each inhab­ited by stu­dents some­what frayed by the end-of-semester slog. The long-term impli­ca­tions of his time under the care of col­lege stu­dents of ques­tion­able san­ity can­not be accu­rately gauged, but I believe this was a for­ma­tive week.

It soon became appar­ent that Scott’s mother had, in addi­tion to phys­i­cal mal­ice, the enmity to with­hold the basic life lessons one expects a cat to learn early in life. He knew that toys with col­or­ful feath­ers were for killing, but his pre­ferred method of attack was to sit on them and smother them. This became some­what more effec­tive in later years, when his bulk ensured he was capa­ble of smoth­er­ing any­thing smaller than a tod­dler, but as a kit­ten he just looked con­fused, but pleased with him­self, when he tried.

Scott strug­gled a bit in our first apart­ment. For an entire year, he jumped every time the cen­tral air came on. He became over­fas­ci­nated with a burn­ing can­dle and spent a few weeks with­out the whiskers on one side of his face, dur­ing which he would only walk along the walls his good whiskers could touch. At one point he dis­ap­peared for an after­noon until we heard a muf­fled, plain­tive mrreaw? that sounded like it was com­ing from the dish­washer. We found him in there, stuck under the bot­tom rack.

Now, I’m not great with geom­e­try, so I can’t explain how a cat whose head is smaller than the spaces between the dish­washer rack wires could get his head stuck between them. I just know it took two peo­ple to res­cue one very small kit­ten from the bow­els of a dish­washer, and the oper­a­tion involved lift­ing both Scott and the rack out of the dish­washer, then forc­ing his head into a posi­tion that allowed him to slip through the gap. Scott was lucky that this par­tic­u­lar impasse wasn’t irre­versible.

Kit­ties are Fre­quently, Secretly Fond of Each Other

In our sec­ond apart­ment, Scott met and fell in love with two cats. First was a huge orange tom­cat (Sher­bet) who lived with our neigh­bor and could come and go as he pleased. Per­haps Scott envied Sherbet’s indoor-outdoor lifestyle, or per­haps he just found Sherbet’s mangy fur irre­sistible, but what­ever the attrac­tion, it was clearly unre­quited. Sher­bet would have noth­ing to do with Scott, and he even­tu­ally moved away, leav­ing Scott to mope on the front porch all day, star­ing down at Sherbet’s favorite step.

Even­tu­ally a new suitor showed up, and Scott for­got all about Sher­bet. He was a flame point siamese, a stray, and for rea­sons I can no longer remem­ber, his name was Blue. Scott and Blue were thick as thieves. They slept together. They groomed each other. They spent hours at a stretch just star­ing at each other’s impos­si­bly long legs.

Blue was, how­ever, a demon. He seemed to need to be an only child, despite his love for Scott. When he climbed onto the bed while I was read­ing, pawed at me to get my atten­tion, then pissed in my lap while star­ing me down, I knew it was time for him to go. He lives on a farm some­where in Raleigh now.

Not All Cats Are Meant to Live Outside

Scott wasn’t always hap­less. There were a good few … weeks … when he could safely cavort in the lit­tle jun­gle behind our house, and (con­trary to kitty nature), he always came run­ning up to the slid­ing glass door when­ever we called him. Even­tu­ally, though, it became clear that Scott’s time would be best spent inside.

The first time Mr. Scott ven­tured untended into the great wide world, he jumped from a mov­ing car. I’ve for­got­ten why he was being trans­ported, but I do remem­ber the rear driver’s side win­dow of the car had mal­func­tioned. The win­dow was stuck not quite halfway down, and it had been sealed well enough, we sup­posed, to pre­vent any kitty hijinks. I wasn’t in the car at the time, but the report I got was that Scott made a break for it in the mid­dle of a dirt road and ran into the nearby underbrush.

We’ll never know what he sought out there in the wild, or whether he found it. Ten min­utes after he escaped, he scam­pered back to the car, soak­ing wet and smelling dis­gust­ing. A week later he was favor­ing one of his hind legs, so we took him to the vet. Evi­dently in that 10 minute excur­sion Scott had man­aged to find a fes­ter­ing swamp and get bit­ten by a nearby crea­ture, and because he was Scott, the wound had abscessed.

The Big City Takes Its Toll

Scott fol­lowed me to grad school in Boston. We lived on the top floor of a brown­stone not too far from the river. Scott was fond of my room, which fea­tured a huge win­dow where he could observe the mun­dane goings on below, but he espe­cially loved my roommate’s room, because he was not allowed inside and because it had a win­dow that opened onto the fire escape.

Scott wasn’t the most affec­tion­ate cat in the world but he did like to sleep on my bed, curled up behind my knees. I woke up one April morn­ing and knew that he hadn’t slept there all night, the way you miss the warmth when your eyes are closed and clouds block the sun. He wasn’t in any of his usual hid­ing places.

At the bot­tom of the stairs was a sign: “Found, FAT gray cat” with a phone num­ber. A cou­ple in a nearby apart­ment was already on their way to the vet with the cat they’d found on the side­walk the night before. He was pretty beat up, they said, and not very respon­sive. Since I didn’t have a vehi­cle in the city, they offered to swing by and pick me up. We were all relieved when I looked in their card­board box and Scott imme­di­ately started purring.

It was easy in Boston to believe that every­one was too busy to think of other peo­ple, too focused on get­ting ahead to help out some­one else. This cou­ple, whose names I have for­got­ten, drove me to the vet with my cat, waited there with me to find out how he was doing, drove us to another vet when the first one con­fessed they weren’t equipped to help, and called to fol­low up every few days until Scott was bet­ter. And they weren’t even cat people.

Even vets eval­u­at­ing trauma can­not resist mak­ing the obvi­ous joke about how cats are sup­posed to land on their feet. It seemed clear from his injuries that Scott landed on his head. He could no longer see out of his right eye. His mouth wouldn’t close for a week after he fell. He got three dif­fer­ent kinds of eye drops for a month, admin­is­tered by me and a help­ful room­mate. He survived.

How To Tell Whether Your Already Hap­less Cat Is Brain Damaged

One-eyed Scott was slower around the house, and less inter­ested in play­ing with his toys, but he didn’t seem to be in any pain. His diges­tive sys­tem, never a mar­vel of effi­ciency, became the source of room-clearing, eye-watering vis­its to the lit­ter box. And some­times, just lying on the floor, Scott would start, as if he’d just fallen down.

His dis­po­si­tion became at once sweeter and more com­bat­ive. He decided that he liked sit­ting next to peo­ple (but sel­dom directly on laps). He renewed an on-and-off bat­tle with his kitty neme­sis Ella. This time around, though, Scott had an unfair advan­tage: Ella wouldn’t fight back. Whether out of pity for the gimp or fear that Scott’s obvi­ous ail­ments were con­ta­gious, Ella wouldn’t raise a paw against him.

Maybe He’s Just A Jumper

Last month, Scott decided he wasn’t going to eat any­thing any­more. Sev­eral trips to the vet were incon­clu­sive, though we ruled out all the obvi­ous stuff. Granted, he needed a diet, but it’s bad for cats to stop eat­ing alto­gether, which is what he did just before Thanks­giv­ing. His ribs and spine were much too vis­i­ble beneath his flabby skin, and as the month wore on, he became weak and dis­ori­ented. He turned up his nose at every imag­in­able kind of food and bev­er­age any­one could think to put in front of him.

We came home from the vet armed with a syringe and the most deli­cious purée of kitty food you’ve ever sniffed and gagged at the smell of, and for that Sat­ur­day morn­ing I tried to coax him into eat­ing some­thing. I got more on the car­pet than down his throat, but at least some­thing was going in his belly.

It was the first sunny day in ages, so I thought we’d both like to sit out on the bal­cony for a while. Scott sniffed around the edges of the rail­ing while I read a while. Then this cat, who was too weak to jump into a chair, leapt up 3 feet to the top of the rail­ing, then down another 20 to the ground. Maybe he’d finally found some­thing he wanted to eat. Maybe he caught wind of Blue’s scent, all the way from Raleigh. By the time I got down there, he had dis­ap­peared. I haven’t seen him since.

He was 8 and a half years old. He had the sad priv­i­lege of watch­ing me muck my way through my entire adult life. I see him every­where in shad­ows now, and I try to hope that another absurdly kind stranger has picked him up and drib­bled some­thing tasty into his con­fused lit­tle mouth and called him their own.

I know, in the quiet part of my brain, that I have been a good stew­ard to such a small and bewil­dered crea­ture. Still, there are days now when I think it might be bet­ter to hope that he found a warm hole to crawl down where he could go to sleep and never again wake to the starved and sight­less world that was left to him in the end.