My Cat Rosie

 

On my perambulations around the Web I found a forum full of answers to the question "What's the stupidest amount of money you ever spent on a pet, that turned out to be nonsense?"

It's story time.

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It was my first apartment, and I had just gotten rid of my first roommate, a girl who had been pitched to me by my mother's Bible group.  

...yeah.  

Naturally this girl turned out to be a twitchy, spooky suicidal-depressive who lived in constant fear that someone would come in through her bedroom window and kill her cat. Where she got this from I do not know, but she would work herself into fits of trembling every evening and rant about how she just knew someone was going to break in specifically to kill her cat. After two weeks she was calling home all the time sobbing, begging her parents to let her move back in, something that they seemed...oddly reluctant to do.

Finally, to my great relief, they relented.  Her father quietly apologized to me and explained how things were on his last trip in for her stuff.  And I forgave him. He seemed really stressed.  At the same time, I was happy to see her ass go down the road, so I didn't keep him chatting.

I did not miss her, and to this day I don't remember her name - but I did miss her cat.  I liked her cat. One of the reasons why I liked her cat was because her cat did not regale me with detailed descriptions of its suicide attempts. Unlike it's owner. 

...yeah.

Two weeks later I was out at the curb putting trash into the dumpster.  There underneath, crying, was a young Siamese cat.  It was starving and dirty, and had a horribly sunken eye.  

No thought was involved.  I was going to save this cat. I fed it, got it cleaned up, and took it in to the vets. On the bus. Wrapped in a sweater.

And I did it in menswear.     

$300.47 (in today's money) later, I had a freaked out young Siamese cat, less one brain tumor and its little kitty uterus.  The vet gave me a cardboard carrier for her.  I caught the bus home.  By the time I made it back, that carrier was shredded, and all that whole long, long way, stoplight to stoplight, that cat screamed it's Litany of  Murder.  I lunged off the bus at my stop, followed by laughter.

Things went happily uphill from there. Soon she was a nice, happy, shiny cat that I adored and that adored me, too. I decided to name my kitty 'Rosie Planetoid' because I was 18.  

Rosie quickly grew from a petite, rangy kitty into a hulking Neanderthal bruiser, all beetling brow, wide jaws and broad chest, the weirdest cat I've ever seen, even to this day. People began calling her the Flintstones cat.  

She adored my friends, probably because they reeked of pot, and would cuddle them whenever they came over, and she got petted and made over by everyone.   They would bring her A&W Baby Burgers, just to watch her snack them down in two gulps. Like I said, this was a big, hulking cat. 

Rosie was a sweetheart. She liked to follow me around the house and watch me do things.  She slept on the side of my bed, and she liked to snuggle and play and make comments about daily life.  She liked to take a turn around out of doors too, to go beat up the neighborhood cats.  Dogs, too. And she would bring me presents, as cats will. 

The ass is the best part! I saved it for you!  

But where other cats bring their owners things like dead mice, Rosie would climb on top of the dumpster, throw back the metal lid with one mighty paw, and fetch me back whole cracked crabs, leftover baked potatoes still in their tinfoil complete with butter and chives, and congealed lumps of spaghetti.  "Your cat's out shopping again," one of my friends would say, hearing the dumpster lid bang off the side.  And sure enough, there she'd be on the front step a few moments later with a dead plant.  Or a half a hot dog, complete with bun and mustard.

Because I'm mom's special cat.   

One day I was breaking down a pound of bud and weighing up bags on the triple beam, watching Sesame Street, high as balls. Rosie the cat came up on the back of the couch where I was sitting and draped herself over my shoulder.  I turned my head and felt something weird in her side.  Huh.

I lifted her off my shoulder and laid her on the couch and began feeling around.  I found what I hoped I would not find - a definite lump way back in her abdomen.  I remembered the horrible brain tumor the vet had removed from behind her eye, and I FREAKED.

By this time I had a regular cat carrier.  Once again I took my cat aboard the bus, and once again my nice kitty transformed into a thing from Hell, screaming, bashing around inside the carrier, reaching out the air holes, snagging a womans coat sleeve.  After three blocks the whole bus had gone silent. All you could hear were the baritone howls coming from my enraged cat, all the long, long way from 52nd and Powell to 4th.

I checked in at the vets.  The place was jammed. Little kids were playing. People were chatting about their pets. Dogs were whimpering.  I sat there holding a small box full of a large puma for all that anyone could tell by the sound.  As bad as the bus ride had been, this was worse. This cat was now making sounds never heard on Earth.  

"What have you got in there?" asked the man next to me. He had a cat too.  His cat was silent.  "A cat," I said. "Sounds angry," said he. 

At the time the phrase 'No shit, Sherlock' had not come into usage.  So I said "No shit, buddy." And he shut up.

Finally the nurse called us in.

The vet came into the exam room, took my story, and gave my cat an examination.  It took three nurses to hold that cat down, and finally the vet had them put her into a special immobilization thing like a cat-straitjacket, and still that animal fought and howled.  I could hear people outside the room going 'Listen to that animal!' and 'What is it, a bobcat?'  And I'm crying, thinking my poor cat has cancer and is in terrible pain.

"Well, you'll be relieved to hear there's nothing wrong!" said the vet.  "She's fine!"

What was the problem, you ask?

My cat had to take a dump.

I paid $200.00 to find out my special, special cat was full of shit.