Free Cat: 8 Days Only

I remember the first time I thought about Meshai being a little wacked out… it was the day about a year ago when Christine called my cell phone and asked me how you could tell if a kitten was rabid.

Christine and I had been walking through Baldwin Park late at night when a thugged-out man who we initially took to be a mugger emerged from the bushes. He walked toward us, thrust out his hand and just as they were starting to freak out said with a kind of embarrassed air, “Can you do something with this? I found it sitting in the street and I didn’t want to see it get run over but I can’t take it with me.”

The guy had a tiny little two-week-old kitten in one hand, and Christine snatched the kitten out of his hands and took it home and fed it with a bottle and all that good samaritan shit.

She called me up a week later asking if I thought it was rabid because, in her words, “It chews on my fingers and falls over sometimes.” I told her that in my experience that’s how kittens basically spend most of their waking hours and thought she was overreacting.

Well, the kitten wasn’t rabid, but neither is she normal. Because she was separated from his mother so early,s he’s emotionally stunted and doesn’t like getting petted and will tolerate it for a bit but then start biting and scratching. The only times I ever hear her purr are when she pretend-nurses on something soft; there’s a scarf of mine she particularly enjoys making out with.

Because Christine didn’t knock her around like a mother cat would have when she was nursing in late summer she never really learned how to play nice, so by fall, she was this tiny little bouncing ball of teeth and claws and aggression who would only react to attempted discipline with the cat equivalent of “Oh yeah? Oh YEAH?? FUCK YOUUUUUUUU!!” She is just not cowable, as ridiculously outsized as she was and still is. Now she is larger (about 8 pounds, I’d say) and less aggressively hyper but still kind of destructive when she gets bored.

I was not present the first time she took the cat to the vet, but Christine warned him about the cat’s temperament. The vet laughed it off, said he’d seen everything. When we picked the cat up, the same vet brought out the cat all sedated in his kitty carrier, and he looked pretty harried.

“Well,” he said, “She’s certainly RAMBUNCTIOUS.”

Another story: when Christine’s mom and sister first came over to meet the kitten, they were so amazed at how “rambunctious” she was that they suggested that she had to be the the result of some sort of bizarre and possibly depraved feral street cat/ocelot sex.

So here’s the deal:
Christine is leaving for a few days at the end of the month and she can’t take the cat with her.. which means I will be taking care of her AGAIN…. and since Christine will be traveling most of the summer.. it won’t be just one week of risking my life at Christine’s house..

So if you like a challenge, or healing troubled cat psyches, then take this cat. In the spirit of full disclosure:

Things which may be off-putting about the cat:

• She doesn’t really appreciate being petted other than occasionally being scratched under the chin when she’s sleepy
• She never really learned how to do the mutton-leg form of licking her own butt/genitalia (one leg straight up in the air), and so devised her own method, which is: sit back on his ass like a fat man, spread her legs and wash her junk directly AT you
• When she wants attention or is bored, she will stare deliberately at you while knocking over things like glasses of water.
• If you have small pets suchas rodetns or fish, she will probably find a way to kill them.
• She will stare at you intently while you’re making out with someone on the couch

Things in the cat’s favor:

• She never pees or poops outside her box
• If you have any sort of pests, she will ruthlessly kill them. She loves spiders but don’t tell her Christine.
• She seems to get on well with the male cats that live thoughout the building.. especially when Christine is on vacation.
• She is absolutely fearless, which I find endearing (you can vacuum her and she just sits there and looks at you quizzically)

Please hurry she will only be available for 8 days then it’s gone.