Here’s another funny story:
Because my parents owned a chain of pet stores, we had a larger-than-usual menagerie at home – always a dog, a few cats, birds, fish, etc. For a while I bred hamsters and gerbils that I would sell to the pet stores until the giant cages loaded on my bedroom bookshelves caused them to collapse, spilling 100-plus rodents into my room. Even with the dog and cats working overtime, when we sold the house a year or two later there must have been dozens of the little buggers still living inside the walls.
That’s not the story, though. One time around 1984 or so, Terry, my father, brought home a tiny, squirrelly and pissed-looking cat. He looked like he was eight weeks or so, but it turned out he was almost 6 months old. That was because he had climbed out of his pen and into the mall ceilings. He spent months up there, living on the occasional bug and drippy pipe connection. Because of this, the cat was malnourished and developmentally stunted. Not to put it crudely, but for all intents and purposes, the cat was mentally retarded and feral.
So of course my dad caught him and brought him home to his children. I named him Louie.
Louie was bananas, but because he was a sucker for food, if you had treats you could do whatever you wanted to him. Stephanie used to dress him up and put him to bed in her doll crib. I was not so actively evil or cruel, unless you consider injuring his pride.
I was looking at him one day when I had too much time on my hands and decided he needed some grooming…
Later Mom told me she and my Dad were watching television in the rec room when Louie came down the stairs and walked into the room, sitting down on the rug directly between my parents and the tv (Louie was “special”, but knew where to sit when he wanted attention) and sat there, glaring at them. Mom said it took five minutes of them staring at the damn cat before, according to her, Terry very nearly pissed himself laughing and could barely tell her what they were seeing.
I’d decided Louie’s whiskers were too long and uneven, and trimmed them a little to even them out. They were still uneven though, and so I trimmed them a little more, and more, until the cat had a neat little toothbrush mustache that was absolutely useless for helping him navigate in the dark.
The end of it was: a) I was sent to my room for a while and b) for weeks Louie would occasionally wake us up in the middle of the night when he walked into a wall and went “bonk”.
