Patrick Cleary - The Accidental Cat

 

Thanks. So in the last year of her life, my cat Rita had a vomiting problem. She vomited everywhere. Now, she didn't like to vomit on anything hard. She liked to be on soft surfaces. So she would jump up on the bed or on the couch, and all of that was a little bit difficult to clean up. She was a lady, though. She would warn you. She had this meow. She would go, “weow, weow, weow, weow, blah,” you know. [audience laughter] And she had not only trained me, she trained all my friends and family that if we were, like, having people over to dinner, if you heard, “weow, weow, weow,” everybody would get up and run to wherever she was and put her on the floor. [audience laughter] 

 

Now, Rita was the first of what I call the indeterminate cat sitting adoptions, which is, if anybody says, “Could you take care of my cat, but it's for an indeterminate amount of time?” You've adopted a cat. It's now happened to me multiple times, and I fall for it every time. It's like we just don't know. Just a couple of days. And then a long time later, you're like, “This is my cat.” And I got her from a friend of mine who I had never met. This was back in the days-- [audience laughter] Well, it was back in the days when the internet was new and it was bulletin board system. And a woman who lived nearby said, “My husband, I need to leave him.” And he said, “If I leave, he'll kill the animals.” And so I said, “Okay. Well, I'll take in your cat.” And she also had a little dog and I took care of them for a couple of weeks. And then when she got herself established, she came back and she said, “Well, I can take the dog. But even though my husband's now in prison, he got me pregnant and I can't clean a cat box because of toxoplasmosis.” Pregnant women aren't supposed to clean out cat boxes. And so what I didn't tell her was that I wasn't supposed to be cleaning cat boxes either because I had just been diagnosed with HIV. And toxoplasmosis is really bad for people with HIV as well. 

 

But she said Rita was a 17-year-old cat, she wasn't going to live for very much longer. And at the time I felt like I might not live very much longer either because my CD4 count wasn't doing so well. And because I'm really a drama queen, I figured we would just sit on the couch, [audience laughter] the two of us wasting away, and they'd find us because we had died exactly at the same time. So I figured a 17-year-old cat, a guy who's probably going to perish, we're probably made for one another. Now, Rita was declawed. The woman who had her before me didn't declaw her. The woman before her had declawed the cat. But Rita also liked to pretend that she was scratching the furniture. And she'd look at me, [audience laughter] and because I'm a good guy, I'd say, “Stop that.” And she'd be like-- [audience laughter] and she'd walk away. It made her feel good, it made her feel dangerous. 

Now, because Rita was 17 years old, she only lasted eight more years. [audience laughter] And we went through a lot together. I went through a really hard time. Not only had I gone through HIV with a lot of medications that didn't work out for me, I also had lost my house, I had lost my job, I had lost my car. She was with me the whole time, just pretending to scratch the furniture and throwing up on it. So it worked out really well. But eventually it was her time and I was in a much better place. And so I did have to make the decision to put her down after reaching 25, I mean, that's 630 in human years. I would want to go too. But she did teach me a number of lessons. 

 

One is that if anybody ever tells you, “Can you take my cat for a few days?” You own a cat. The second is if someone wants to feel dangerous, just let them. And the third is if you are going to feel like a badass and throw up, be a lady, and warn people about it. Thank you.