In Memoriam: Poopster

I got Poopster when trading in a cat named Muck Muck.  I’d adopted Shango and Muck Muck together.  Shango was a bold charmant until the day he died.  Muck Muck was nuts, not suitable as a pet.  The final straw came when, for no discernable reason, he bit the woman I was living with at the time.  It was bad.  She was bed ridden for two days as the infection spread north from her ankle.  One of those things where if they hadn’t invented anti-biotics yet, she might’ve lost the leg.

In my way of thinking, the best thing would be to turn Muck Muck loose.  He probably wouldn’t last long on his own, particularly where I lived in the Bronx at the time, but he’d have a fighter’s chance.  Instead, however, I decided to return him to the place I’d gotten him and Shango a couple of weeks earlier: the ASPCA in Harlem near Lexington Avenue.

That was in 1995.  The Harlem ASPCA was a hard place.  Rows and rows of cages stacked one atop another in room after room.  I felt no remorse when I told them he wasn’t worth saving.  I figured, as fast as they’re killing animals, why should he get a reprieve?  Let some other cat live another day instead.

For the trade-in they suggested a female kitten from a litter they’d just received.  Two and a half months old, gray and white.  “She’s very sweet,” the woman told me.  We put her in the complimentary cardboard cat carrier, and I took the train back to the Bronx.

She was very sweet.  Doe eyed and innocent.  And over the course of her long life, she would never lose that quality, never become hard or nasty.  She just didn’t have a mean bone in her body.

At two and a half months, she was at the odd age when the tail sticks up like an early 1990s car antenna; you can pull it down, but it just sprouts right back up.  Shango, who was about a year old at the time, immediately took her under his wing.  He protected her from the other animals in the house (two more cats and a dog), set about cleaning her, and generally showed her the ropes.  They were soon inseparable.

Also quite the sweetheart, Shango was an extrovert and quite capable of taking care of himself.  He was a natural alpha, and Poopster quickly fell in line behind him, happy to let him take care of business when they weren’t playing or sleeping together.

Poopster got her name the old fashioned way: she earned it.  For all her days she would have a habit of going to her litter box, digging a little hole, and squatting down in it without realizing that her ass was hanging over the side.  She’d then inadvertently deposit a nugget or two on the floor for me to find later.  After finishing her bsuiness, she’d smell the empty hole, cover it up with litter, and walk away from the box with her head held high, proud that she’d done a good job and that apparently her shit didn’t smell.

Shango and Poopster saw the country with me.  After New York City, we lived in Nebraska for five years, Arizona for one, and then to Baltimore in 2001.  In late March of 2003, still shy of his ninth birthday, Shango passed away unexpectedly while I was away for the weekend.  When I found Poopster, she was in the upstairs bathroom, cowering under the claw foot tub.

After that trauma, however, Poopster started coming out of her shell.  She began standing up for herself.  Instead of always running away from other animals, she would stand up to them; she’d puff herself up and emit a satanic growl in an effort to hold her ground.  She got pretty good at it, and scared a few off, though she’d invariably run before actually fighting.  Poopster also became more sociable after Shango’s death.  Whereas she’d always hidden from company before, now she slowly began to relish people other than me.  Laps became something to be sampled and enjoyed.  During the second half of her life Poopster was comfortable in her own skin, or hide the case may be, and her shyness gave way to confidence.  Through it all, she was always supremely sweet, a good natured feline who never flashed anger or displayed irritability.

In the end, it was her kidneys that gave out.  Her finicky eating habits had probably contributed.  When she was a small kitten I’d once fed her an entire frozen fish roughly her own size, and was amazed when she ate the entire thing save the tail.  But as an adult she was steadfast.  Dry food only.  She had zero interest in wet food, or anything else for that matter, save her beloved dry.  She couldn’t be tempted by tuna, milk, catnip, or any of those contrived cat treats.

Either way, the diagnosis arrived late last summer.  A few weeks or a few months they said, but there’s no cure.  Prescription food and a sub-cutaneous drip of 10 cc of fluids every other day made it a few months.  But eventually her balance got wobbly, she lost half her body weight, and most of her appetite.  After a few false starts, I had a friend help me bring her to the SPCA to be euthanized.  I wasn’t as strong as I thought.  I couldn’t do it by myself.

She had many names: Poopster, Poo, The Poo Cat, The Grande Dame, and a dozen others I’ve since forgotten.  In the end, she was just Sweetie.

Goddamn that was hard.