I grew up in a multi-cat household. My family always had two cats, starting with Ding, who actually beat me to the first-child punch by nearly a year. My parents have lots of pictures of me and Ding together from my babyhood – Ding would creep up and try to steal my breath, my parents would see her lying next to me on my blankie and say, “Awwwww, look at the girls – let’s go get the camera,” and then Ding would have to pretend that she didn’t hate me for horning in on her lap time with my dad and flop down all innocent-like to pose for a photo. Below, yours truly in my carseat…and Ding, a.k.a. “Dingo,” about to take my face off.

Shortly after I turned a year old, Blecket came into our lives. Ding and I eventually became best friends (she used to follow me and Agent Weiss around the neighborhood), but she always loathed Blecket, and despite the fact that we lived in a big old Colonial and the cats spent most of their time outdoors, Ding would spot Blecket on the other end of the property and start hissing and getting all bristly. But we had enough space for them to co-exist relatively peacefully.

Ding and Blecket lived to fine old ages, but eventually they passed away, and when they did, Dusterico Fellini joined the Bunting clan. Dusty, a big old barn cat the size of a small pony, came to us as a tiny kitten. Few pictures survive from this period, because Dusty spent his kittenhood bringing new life to the word “hellion,” and our ankles lived in fear. You know the scene in Dead Alive where the zombie goes stomping through the hall and she has all those strips of skin peeling off of her? Well, now you know what we all looked like from the knees down until we finally had Dusty fixed.

When we’d had Dusty for about a year, I prevailed upon my parents to get a friend for him. A girl in my Spanish class had a cat that had just had a litter of kittens, and my therapist had told my parents to go along with the kitten idea to promote family unity or something, so my grumbling mother and I trucked over to the Wights’ house and I picked out the bittiest kitten in the litter. Here’s Caboodle the day we brought her home. (Not shown: Dusty, fixing her with a livid glare.)

Minutes after we took this picture, Dusty hopped up on the couch. I braced myself for the inevitable snarling and yowling, but he picked her up and carried her into the kitchen to get her a snack. Awwww. Then he helped her take a bath. Awwww! Then they took a nap together…

…AWWWW! Dusty and Boodle adored each other immediately. At dinnertime, Dusty would trot
towards the kitchen, and Boodle would run along beside him like a little cow-patterned
pilotfish, hopping over him now and then. Of course, now that the household had two cats,
the household also had to cope with an exponentially larger incarnation of The Midnight Crazies
at around 11 p.m. each day. For those of you not familiar with the habits of the domesticated
feline, cats tend to sleep for the bulk of the daylight hours, stirring only a few times to
eat a bit of kibble, stretch, shred the odd shoelace, and wind themselves into your legs while
you attempt to cook (or clean, or carry something extremely heavy, or step out of the shower –
you get the idea). Then, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. each night, the cats become possessed by
the irresistible desire to dash around the living space at maximum velocity while “talking” and
knocking over various porcelain valuables, frail end tables, plants, and the like. This inexplicable
galumphing usually sounds something like this:

parrump parrump parrump parrump…parrump bump bump

[clonk]

“Prrrt. Prrrr…RRRT! Meeerrrrt? Prrrt. Fffft.”

parrump parrump parrump [Bonk!] parrump parrump

“Prrrt?”

“Fffft!”

“Yow. Yow?”

parrump parrump parrump parrump parrump PARRUMP BUMP BUMP

“Meeeerrrt flerow. Rrrrrrr.”

[thump]

parrump parrump [short silence, which the humans mistakenly view as the end of the skirmishing] [Crash! Boom! Pow! Bif!]

Lather, rinse, repeat.

It isn’t the yowling that tends to turn The Midnight Crazies into a reign of terror, or the crazed thundering about that prompted me to rename my apartment “Pamplona” late last week, or the suspicion that you, the human, should probably smell ozone. It’s the fact that it usually takes place in the dark, mere moments after the last light is extinguished, and you can’t tell exactly where the cats have gotten to in the silences between the parrump parrump-ing, and you know something has gotten knocked over and quite possibly broken beyond repair but you can’t tell exactly what, because it landed on the carpet, and did you hear a clink with that thud? Did the alarm clock get unplugged by a tail passing at top speed? If that “sssssss…[bink]” didn’t signify a feline booting it past the bed, slipping on a magazine, and ricocheting off the bedpost, then what exactly did it signify?

So you lie there for a while. You listen as hard as you can, the way you used to when you’d watched too many horror movies while babysitting, trying to figure out where the next “rrrrih? ffffft” will come from. You hear a soft “pfffmmmp” from the end of the bed, and you fool yourself into believing that the cat has come up onto the mattress to go back to sleep. Then the next sound you hear – usually a “RRRRRRRIH!!” or a “Yow. YOW.” – comes from right next to your ear. You twitch. The cat launches himself from your kidneys back onto the floor. You hear what can only be a carefully organized stack of paperwork fanning gently to the floor as a cat races through it like a convertible down a lane covered with autumn leaves; moments later, a lapping at your other ear which means the cat has once again decided that “water glass” is much preferable to “water bowl.” At last, when a particularly pained “wwuuuu-AOOW?” emits from the kitchen, you can’t take it anymore and you click on the light. And you see…nothing. You see a cat, or possibly cats, but you don’t see them doing anything, oh no. They just stand there, cats of the damned, trying to pretend they’re waiting for a bus.

You ask them if they would, you know, mind. They blink. You ask them to pipe down. More blinking. “I mean it,” you say. One of them has the gall to roll its eyes and walk off to get a snack. The other one lies down and tries to look cute. You turn off the light. You allow your muscles to relax.

“FFFFFFFT!”

“Wuaow. Rih. [cllllllllang!] Prrrt?”

“WUUUUUUUAAAOOOOWWWWW!”

The light goes back on. You hear yourself yelling at the cats, and you realize that you sound like a phys. ed. teacher – “All right, CUT THE CHATTER!” – but you can’t help yourself. The cats once again fail to look chastened, or even to try. You turn the light back off. The cats clamber up on the bed. Just as you begin to relax, the scuffling for the coveted behind-the-knees position begins. “What did I just say? Stop it! I said stop it!” you yell. A brief silence.

“Fffft.”

“Stop it!”

“Fffft.”

“Stop it!”

“Fffft.”

“Stop it!”

“Fffft.”

“Stop it!”

“Fffft.”

“Stop it!”

You turn on the light again. One of the cats gets smart and disappears down the side of the bed. When you see the other one’s face…

…you realize you have lost the battle, and the war, and at least an hour and a half of sleep. You snatch up your blanket and a magazine and decamp to the couch. The cats, of course, settle right down on the queen-size Serta and go to sleep.

As you may have read, I recently acquired another cat. The new arrival, Little Joe, is absolutely adorable. Little Joe is also rambunctious, energetic, loud, and unable to distinguish between toys (a feather attached to a stick, say, or a sisal mousie) and my hands. Or my feet. Or my hair. Little Joe, as a diplomatic kindergarten teacher might say, has a little problem with boundaries – specifically, the boundaries between him and my chicken salad, or him and my grilled cheese, or him and my soup. I have pried boxes of cereal off of his head; extricated him from the crisper, the salad strainer, and the garbage can; brushed Brie out of his tail. Shown below: a humiliated Little Joe after refusing to heed my warnings on the subject of Tandoori chicken.

The other day, I found myself out in the hall, eating a yogurt and hoping that none of my neighbors would come along and wonder what in the Sam Hill I was doing skulking around the ninth floor eating Dannon. But Little Joe is very sweet. He loves to lie in my lap and weave around my feet, and every morning when I wake up, I see this:

(Note to self; buy breath-cleansing cat snacks for Little Joe.)

But Hobey can’t stand him. Hobey finally stopped hissing at Little Joe yesterday, I believe, after a month. Hobey is a strange animal with zero people skills, but he and I got along fine. He tolerated my bizarre taste in music, and I viewed his predilection for napping on unsuitable surfaces, like my desk…

…or on top of large shipments of office supplies…

…with a certain fondness. But still, the Hobe needed a friend. He did a lot of bored yowling and lonely claw-sharpening, and I knew he’d hate the idea, but I thought he’d do better with another cat. The other cat loved the idea; Little Joe follows the Hobe around everywhere. When the Hobe lies down, Little Joe lies down. When the Hobe goes into the kitchen, Little Joe goes into the kitchen. When the Hobe takes a bath, Little Joe copies him. When the Hobe twitches his tail, Little Joe pounces on the tail. That’s where we run into problems.

Hobey has learned to tolerate Little Joe’s existence, but only to tolerate it. Little Joe wants to play, but Hobey will have none of it. Little Joe lands on Hobey like a ton of bricks and starts licking Hobey’s ears, and Hobey shoots me a “See? See what I have to deal with?” look. Once in a while, he’ll put up with it for a second or two, but it never lasts long. Here’s Little Joe giving the Hobe a smooch while the Hobe is asleep:

And Hobey has gotten pretty clingy himself. Hobey can’t stand it if Little Joe gets attention and he doesn’t, but I can never give Hobey any attention without Little Joe wandering over to see what we’ve gotten up to, and then he wants attention, and then an argument starts, and the next thing I know they’ve rolled across the apartment, locked together like an orange-striped yin and a grey-striped yang, hissing and gurgling and trying to kill each other. Fights keep breaking out, in sensitive areas like my lap; fights have broken out in my lap while I’m on the toilet. Now I know how my mother felt all those years, dividing up pieces of cake exactly, supervising the drawing of a line down the precise middle of the backseat – if I give Little Joe one half a scritch more under the chin than I just gave the Hobe, Hobey storms into the bathroom and starts spraying litter all over the place in protest. Then Little Joe follows him, because Little Joe idolizes him, and then the growling and hissing starts all over again, and Hobey gets Little Joe in a headlock and starts pummeling him with his back feet, and they roll all over the place like high-school wrestlers, and fur is literally flying around the apartment, so I run into the kitchen to get the box of catnip to distract them, and they run after me, but someone has to go through the kitchen door first, and that someone hisses at the other someone, and then they start squabbling again.

We’ve made some improvements in this area. Each cat has his own toys, his own food bowl, his own litter pan and his own area on the bed, so they both feel a little more secure now. But I’ve got to move to a bigger apartment. I can’t move around without a feline attached to my legs. Hobey is a big fan of walking in front of me and then stopping short, thus ensuring that I either tromp on his tail or stumble over him and fall into the bookcase. Little Joe favors a run-into-my-leg-and-bonk-his-head-on-my-kneecap-and-get-mad-and-nip-my-ankle strategy. This probably sounds cute, but it isn’t. I prepare my meals while wavering on a pair of stilts. See this picture, taken at dinnertime? My kitchen is actual size in this picture.

I have to break up arguments. I have to haul cats back-end first out of the cabinets. I have to help cats get down from the top of the closet when they maroon themselves up there (and start fighting in the sweater shelf). I have to dump cats out of boxes. I have to hook two inches of my ass onto my desk chair at night, because I don’t want to wake the Hobe, put him on the floor, let Little Joe pounce on him, and have to dump a glass of Diet Pepsi on them to break up the scuffle. I have to remove cats from the paper tray. I have to shoo cats off the lid of the scanner. I have to keep cats from falling into the tub while I bathe. Everywhere I turn, there’s a cat. Showering? There’s a cat hanging from the curtain. Shaving my legs? Cat, supervising. Talking on the phone? Cat, gnawing the cord. Working? Cat, entering a file drawer without authorization. Going out? Cat, escaping. Chasing cat? Other cat, escaping. Chasing both cats? First cat, locking me out. Coming home? Cats, waiting. Cats, not moving away from the door so that I can come inside; cats, lingering around as if some of the mail in my hand is for them. Watching TV? Cats, patting the screen; cats, unplugging the cable box with their tails. As I write this, I have had to pee for over an hour, but what happens to be lying rug-style behind my chair, his tail directly in the path of the wheel of my chair? Yes. A cat. A cat which refuses to wake, a cat which just last night gave me a huffy look when I dared to turn the page of my magazine a bit too enthusiastically but which has now entered a coma. This cat does not drink out of the toilet, but the other one does, and is probably doing it right now, but can I prevent him from doing so? No. No, I cannot. Because the cat can hear a can opening in Des Moines, yet the cat is deaf to the word “no.” And the phrase “get down.” And “stop that.” Why? Why have I done this to myself?

Oh, right. Because for every time they make me want to drop-kick them to Pennsylvania, there’s a time when they curl up next to me on the floor while I paint my toenails, and we all enjoy the AC and watch “Survivor,” and they get excited when there’s a snake on the show and they hiss at the snake, and I hiss at Jeff Probst, and I order a pizza and they sleep in the box. Because I adore them.

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