When I lived in
New York, there was a very
pregnant, very messed up
kitten - one year old tops - living in the lot behind my
tenement.
She'd apparently been on the streets for the entire
winter before I noticed and started feeding her. She had
sores, was missing
fur and couldn't use her right rear leg. The
animal had clearly used eight of her
nine lives, and was rapidly pissing through the last.
So I grabbed her with the idea of taking her to the vet, getting her fixed up and finding her a good home. Didn't work out that way
(they grow on you!) and we were still together over
ten years later. The animal was
totally attached to me, and would follow me around like a
dawg.
Back then I owned an
Art Gallery in
the East Village, and I lived in a small space in the rear. I'd have these
huge openings once a
month, with perhaps one hundred people milling around.
Even so, the animal would insist on staying right next to me as I worked the crowd. She was pretty
insecure, since I was her
meal ticket.
She was quite good
company though, and with a lot of time on my hands back then (the art business is NOT one of your more
fast paced and
dynamic fields) I even taught her several
tricks; if I made a
psst psst noise, she would rush to me from where ever she was, since roughly one time out of three she'd get one of these
kitty treats that she relished.
Another trick was to slap my thigh twice sharply. With approximately the same reward ratio, she knew to jump up into my lap.
She was actualy
bright enough to recognize that TWO noises were necessary to be rewarded.
I thought it was pretty cool, and it made for good
entertainment when my friends from back home in the country would visit, and brag about how smart their dawgs were, and how cats 1) were dumber, or 2) couldn't be trained.
I moved to
London about three years ago, and Sam - that's her name - got a really good home with a guy who
totally spoils her.
She's
balloned up to about twenty pounds, looks more like a
butter ball turkey than a cat these days, and seems happy as hell.
But I don't think she was ever too
keen on the whole tricks 'thang. I tried when I visited her in New York last
Christmas; "psst psst". Sam just looked blankly at me from across the room,
yawned and went to back to her
cleaning.
Bitch.