To Jerome

In 1999, before we met and long before we were married, my wife was living in Giles County, Virginia. In need of a pet, she answered an ad offering a litter of barn cats to good owners. One of the cats was a strong, aggressive little orange tom. She fell in love and took him home, naming him "Jerome" after one of Morris Day's backup singers.

Over the years, my wife has told me many tales of Jerome's feats of strength. One of my favorites is the story of the bird: my wife swears that she once saw him pluck a bird out of the air. According to her, Jerome jumped between fifteen and twenty feet straight up, grabbed a bird, took him down, and killed him. Another great story involves Jerome's complete domination of a raccoon. According to my wife, she once saw Jerome drown a raccoon in a creek.

I don't know if either of these stories is completely true, but I'm inclined to take my wife at her word. He was an amazingly strong cat. Besides, the image of our sleek orange cat pulling down a bird or taking out a wily raccoon has never failed to amuse me.

When I first met Jerome, he was an outdoor cat living in the wilds of Giles. Although he was a little standoffish, I was immediately impressed by his considerable strength. Even after he was neutered, he was still a brawler; lifting him, I could feel that he was twenty pounds of solid muscle. Frankly, it was hard to make Jerome do anything that he didn't want to do.

When my wife moved in, Jerome came with her. We initially had a slight adjustment problem, as it took him a little while to figure out that he was no longer the dominant male in the household. I convinced him of this by grabbing hold of him and snuggling aggressively, refusing to let him go until he stopped struggling. After a few days, he learned to just give in. We became great snugglebuddies, and he decided that he loved the life of a housecat. He would often bug me to pet him, and regularly climbed in my lap when I sat down.

However, I was also loath to try to make Jerome do anything that he didn't want to do. For example, I never clipped his nails, as doing so involved wrapping him in a towel, pinning him to the ground, and getting my wife to release, and clip, one paw at a time. Besides, Jerome was pretty careful with his hygiene; he would gnaw off his nails and spit them out when they got too long. It was a little disconcerting to come across discarded cat nails, but the alternative was pretty miserable.

When my wife went to New York, Jerome and I bonded still further. We both missed her, and he got used to curling up in bed with me every night. On our own ride North, he was a total sport, sitting for two days in the car with a minimum of yowling.

As I mentioned previously, he acclimation to New York was not nearly as easy.

A couple of weeks ago, Jerome became ill. He had been listless for a couple of days, and stopped going to the bathroom. We called around to a lot of local vets. Before we even had a chance to tell them what was wrong, the doctors offered to euthanize him. Their rates were very competitive, but we told them that we preferred to give him a chance at survival.

We finally found a doctor in Riverdale, a ritzier section of the Bronx, who offered to see what he could do. We had to give him an initial deposit of $450, as he had a lot of customers who had run out on their bills. This was more than we could afford, but Jerome was a special cat, and we wanted to do everything we could for him.

He kept Jerome for about a week. It turned out that our cat had crystals in his urine. This, in itself, was not that big a problem, but he had caught an infection that had caused his urethra to narrow. The crystals had caught in his urethra, causing urine to back up into his bladder and kidneys. His kidneys had shut down, and he had been near death when we brought him in. Over the course of the week, Doctor Cedeno gave Jerome a large quantity of antibiotics and bladder medication, constantly retested him, and ultimately pronounced him stable, if not exactly healthy. We were tasked with giving him a daily bladder dilator and continuing his course of antibiotics. The doctor was honest with us; Jerome wasn't out of the woods, but he had a good chance of survival. If he continued to get worse, the only other course of action was an operation that would effectively turn him into a female cat.

We compared notes with a good friend who is in vet school. She assured us that Dr. Cedeno did everything by the book. In fact, according to our friend, he ended up charging us about a quarter of the going rate for the work he did. Even so, Jerome's medical bill cleaned us out. Still, as long as he was willing to keep fighting, we were going to do everything we could to help him.

Over the next few weeks, we gave Jerome his medication, an often miserable task. He was clearly suffering, but was also fighting hard. As his energy was low, we set up a bed, food, and water for him in the bathroom, where he could relax and not have to deal with our other cat, Bagheera.

On Tuesday, Jerome stopped fighting. He went quietly, on his bed. I was petting him, and he was using the last of his strength to purr. Finally, he closed his eyes and stopped purring.

Jerome was a strong, friendly, amazing, and oddly vulnerable little guy, and I am grateful for the time I got to spend with him. In a household filled with women, he was my sole male companion and consistent co-conspirator. He brought a lot to my home, and I'm going to miss him a lot.

Interspecies Communication

A year or so ago, when the wife and I first determined that we were moving to New York, I began to contemplate the return to apartment living. I knew that, for me, this was going to be the most difficult part of the transition, as I had spent the previous decade living in a succession of townhomes and houses. I was used to spreading out my stuff over a very large space, not to mention having enough real estate to separate myself from my fellow tenants. The idea of moving into a three-bedroom or even a (horrors!) two-bedroom space was daunting.

I spent the following months paring off large portions of my life. I joined a gym, eliminating the need for our health equipment, and I sold off or gave away my woodworking tools and machines. The wife and I got rid of about half of our books, as well as our king-sized, four-poster bed, and most of our other furniture. We made hard decisions, shedding blankets, old clothes, memorabilia, and all the other detritus that had begun to fill our lives over several years of sedentery living.

By June, we were ready, and could easily fit our lives into a few small rooms. As hard as the shedding process had been, we felt great. We were smaller, sleeker, and ready to roll. No longer carrying layers upon layers of dead weight, we were definitely built for speed.

We didn't count on the cats.

Of course, there had never been any question about keeping them. Jerome, our orange tabby, and Bagheera, our black Siamese mix, were part of the family, and we never even considered giving them away, much less abandoning them. It would be simple, we decided. Just as we would learn to live in a much smaller space, the cats would also adapt.

I'm not sure that the word "adapt" is in the cat dictionary.

Bagheera and Jerome initally seemed happy with the move. They were pleased to see Virginia again and liked the added attention that they got from Georgia. They approved of the sparse decoration of the apartment, and quickly found spaces for themselves. For the first few weeks, they were clearly in heaven. Then the furniture arrived.

All of a sudden, the apartment got a lot smaller, and the cats found themselves desperately trying to stake out their personal space. The walk-in closet where they had previously set up camp was now filled with storage items, and the bedrooms were packed with furniture. The kitchen had things in every cupboard, and all the bedroom closets were filled with clothes. Needless to say, the cats freaked out.

It's worth mentioning that our cats were used to indoor/outdoor living. Whenever the (three bedroom, two storey) house got a little too small for them, they would exit through a back window that we always left ajar. This is also how they went to the bathroom during most of the year, preferring the wide-open spaces of nature's sandbox to the cramped facilities under the stairs.

Now, all of a sudden, Bagheera and Jerome were confined to a tiny apartment and forced to use a smallish litter box in a shared bathroom. Prior to this, the cats had always been fans of the bathroom, viewing it as a venue for a (literally) captive audience. To put it bluntly, they have long since figured out that it's difficult, if not impossible, to shoo them away when one is busy on the toilet. They take advantage of this situation by hopping on the user's lap and demanding to be petted. Visitors to our house soon learn the value of checking the bathroom for cats before attending to nature's call.

The cats were disgusted to discover that the privacy that they had always taken for granted was no longer available. The shoe was now on the other paw, so to speak, and they were quick to voice their complaints. They initially did this by peeing all over the bathroom floor. This, however, did not have the desired effect of making us move back to Blacksburg. Rather, it led to endless cleaning and swearing, accompanied by the occasional veiled threat about a desire for "fur-lined mittens" or "authentic Korean food."

Cats don't easily accept failure, so Jerome and Bagheera upped the ante. They pissed on a few pairs of the wife's shoes and my bookbag. In my case, this required a visit to the laundromat. In the wife's case, this led to the purchase of new shoes, which was a somewhat mixed punishment.

Unsatisfied with the continued miseries of apartment living, Jerome uncovered his master-stroke: he peed on me. One morning, as I was preparing to get up, he climbed into bed, positioned himself, and took a leak on my drowsing body. He then gave me a couple of off-handed donkey kicks and stalked off.

This was a pretty effective wake-up call, and I bounced out of bed. I immediately grabbed the cat and gave him a quick physics lesson as I hurtled him across the apartment. After showering and scrubbing my skin until it glowed an angry red, I bundled up the bedclothes and went to the laundromat.

Jerome and Bagheera soon had a refresher course in species hierarchy as we took off the gloves and dug out the spray bottles. They found themselves barred from the bedroom and the furniture and generally unwelcome in any room that I occupied. Since our apartment has five rooms, this involved a lot of feline scurrying. After about a week of this, I calmed down somewhat, and permitted the cats to again curl up in my lap. However, it was over two months before I let them in the bedroom again.

That was the low point. Since then, my brilliant wife has discovered puppy pads, absorbent sheets that we position near the litterbox. For some reason, the cats are loath to pee on puppy pads. However, if they do, clean-up is very easy. We have also become religious about our catbox hygiene, cleaning it every day. In general, the humans and cats in the apartment do their best to avoid getting on each other's nerves, and interspecies relations are now on a pretty even keel. In fact, last night, I found myself going to the bathroom at the same time as Bagheera. I discovered an interesting fact: cats, like humans, prefer to keep to themselves while peeing. Bagheera stared at a spot on the wall, determined to avoid eye contact. I, of course, obliged.