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I've been putting this off for years by this point. Now, after having looked for pictures and poring over anecdotes in my memories, in checking over the notes I jotted down at the beginning of the summer, I remember why.
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Corrie and I were moving into our own place for the first time, and had ideas about living abroad later, but still wanted a cat. We figured rescuing an older, more mature cat and giving them a solid twilight period would be our plan.
I went to the rescue shelter off Hwy 1 between Cuesta and Morro Bay. Maybe it was before Cuesta? The same place as the drunk tank, but somehow I never ended up there.
Inside there were some mellow older cats, as well as lots of middle year cats. Eventually I came upon a big kitten run. It was the upper level in like, a cat room. Maybe a half-dozen kittens inside, feisty and---
---eyes, green and powerful, piercing, telling me something, coming from the absolute Platonic Form of Cat, kitten-dom specifically. This cat's little head shape was the most ideal, the most ridiculously perfect shaped head I could have imagined. The white goatee, white whiskers and eyebrow whiskers that looked like wise-man eyebrows, framed by pure shiny blackness. His white chest mane was what I noticed next. His legs were black, as was his back, but his feet and belly were white. He mewed to me and with his eyes he said, Hey...you...it's you...you and me...it's you...
I think I was saying something like, "Hey, there..." when the worker came around. He said, "Oh that guy? His name's Tuxedo. It's on his tag. We found him on the road and called the number on the tag, but nobody answered."
Whether he said that exact thing or not, the deal is that was the essential story of how they came to have this tiny black and white kitten. That kind of thing breaks my heart, but I had already steeled myself for a trip to the rescue shelter, an event that was going to be tough for me emotionally anyway.
I waved buh-buy with my finger through the cage before cruising off to look at other, much older cats.
After catching the last few cats, and making mental notes that I would take back to Corrie, I decided to come back and say goodbye to that beautiful little Tuxedo. I remember thinking that it wouldn't be possible to imagine a more perfect looking, or more beautiful cat.
He did the same thing with his eyes: Hey you...(Meow) it's you again...it's you...you and me (Meow)...we're like...it's you...you and me...(Meow)
That night I talked to Corrie. Oscar seemed like the most reasonable old cat there: he was mellow, he was older, he hadn't been abused or injured in some way, was okay with kids. But I did mention about the very charismatic and beautiful kitten named Tuxedo, which is pretty perfect considering he's black and white and all.
The next week we made it back over to the shelter and went to see Oscar and the other elders, and again we swung by the kitten run and had a look-see at our charismatic little boy.
This time he was bigger than I remember. I remember it as twice as big, but that can't be right. But he was bigger, and now he had Corrie to play with.
Immediately, seeing us together, he went right for her: the looks, the mewing, the head tilting, the even cuter mewing. She was totally smitten. Since we hadn't seen everybody else, we decided to push on. Corrie leaned in to say goodbye, and he gently put his paw through the bars onto her cheek. His eyes were pleading. Corrie choked up. "We'll come back by before we leave, okay?" she pleaded back.
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Act One
San Luis Obispo
We weren't taken by any of the other great cats they had, and came back around to say goodbye to this kitten, and this time he went right for it: paw on the face again, with a cutesy mew thrown in for good measure.
That was that. He'd picked us; he'd found us; we'd found him...whatever the case was, we had each other.
We filled out the adoption paperwork and paid the fee to have him neutered before we could pick him up, which is the state's policy.
I'm pretty sure all that happened before school started in late September 2004, and we didn't actually get him until October 12th-ish. He was still kinda stony on the meds for his surgery:
That's him with Corrie on that first day, and he was already obviously bigger than the last time we saw him. His goatee and whiskers, and the way his chest and belly hair work out with is feet...Tuxedo was a ridiculously prescient name, an almost too obvious name, and we didn't make it up!
Look at the way it came together between his neck and belly:
Sometimes Tux would follow us, staying in the grassy yards of the houses along the street. He was a good boy---he never crossed the street. Cars were definitely something that should be avoided.
It was always so sad to see him and have to say goodbye. I mean, this is what it looked like:
Bullit and Cous-cous would come over to the door, we'd let Tux out, and wouldn't see him again until the evening. It was very...suburban...?
He loved hanging out in the hex-table, a piece of furniture that my brother and I would store our toys in at my grandmother's house in San Carlos.
It was around this time that he started to balloon in weight. His eating habits were the stuff of legend. Corrie and I got home once and found him passed out on the couch, covered in crumbs. That's...odd, we thought, and then we saw that high up in the pantry the cat had scaled, climbing to reach the loaf of bread. He had chewed a head-sized hole in the bag, and proceeded to eat a head-sized volume of sliced bread.
As he got older, or more mature at least, his body didn't look so plump at every angle, as here he is at the door, trying to escape a drizzle (as I giggled and took a picture before letting him in):
We would always joke that he was trying his best to be something fierce, a food-hawking, grass-prowling, killing eating machine:
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| On the prowl |
When we went to Europe in 2005, we'd had Tuxedo for nine or ten months, and then we left for seven weeks. I came home first to take an exam, and I remember his terror at seeing me coming in the house when I finally got home. I didn't take it personally, since he didn't like strangers, and I was essentially a stranger. But what I remember most, especially once he warmed up to me after ten or fifteen minutes, was how much he'd grown and matured in those two months.
He looked like a little-boy-kitty instead of a big-baby-boy-kitty.
Act Two
Brooklyn
And then we moved across the country.
After spending a month in Kingston, ninety minutes north of New York, we landed our two bedroom place in Brooklyn. We lived there for three and a half years, times in which Tux finished up any remnants of kitten-hood, and became a fully realized cat:
In fact, this is when we finally got his weight under control, and he rounded into form as possibly the most beautiful cat I ever had the privilege to be associated with:
On steamy Brooklyn summer days, his spot and position, seen in the two pictures from above, taken months apart but during the same summer, was one of always in service of locating the most comfort.
Whereas he had little friends in SLO, in Brooklyn, his outdoor time was...different. No tall grass to prowl in, just debris and crud to avoid:
His eating habits changed a little...as in he was better about lying and lulling us into a false sense of safety, only to pounce on our food once we were out of the room, or out of sight.
We finally implemented a set eating time for dinner in Brooklyn, and this cat...this cat! Dinner was at 6pm SHARP. Around 3 he would start his screaming for food, and was relentless.
Also, the way he ate was much closer to that of a dog: he'd eat every single morsel just as fast as he possibly could. (That would only change in the last year of his life.)
Act Three
Austin
And then we moved halfway across the country.
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| At Dwyce |
Once we moved to our own place after 8 months, he seemed more at peace with his surroundings and made himself at home, just like me and Corrie.
But those were few and far between. In the very beginning of our adoption of Picasso, Corrie finally told her job to go pound sand. She set up shop to study for her last licensing exam and start her own architecture firm. But Tux was in BAD shape.
Act Four
Long Beach
And, for the third time in a kitty's life, we moved halfway across the country, this time returning to the same coast upon which we rescued the big guy. Not in San Luis, but a few hundred miles south, to our first apartment in downtown Long beach.
He and Corrie would do synchronized yoga in the sun, and he really seemed to like scratching the carpet all up. Tux always did enjoy a good carpet scratching.
We spent half of his life in this apartment, and as we got older, our ideas of what Tux's personality was didn't really age, and this period all mostly blends together in our memories.
One of his more wonderful traits was his nursemaid status, as whenever Corrie would get sick, or when she went into labor, Tux was there in her lap, letting her know she was loved.
After my leg break, he hung out with me all summer:
And so, as things change, we change.
We decided at some point, as the less-young overeducated types that we are, that we should start a human family. We thought, for some reason, that if we were to have kids while having Tuxedo, that he would begin to feel ignored, left out. This led us to get a second cat, a kitten just for him, one he could play with and shape in the ways he saw fit.
This...was a mistake. It was a calculated risk, and we paid for it. NOW we have a cool, mellow whirlwind, a biter that I still call "kitten" even as he's the eldest of the kids in the house.
But it wasn't always like that.
We decided to adopt a second cat, a kitten for Tux to have before we decided to have a human baby, and knew that we needed a kitten with a BIG personality, someone who could run with the Big Boy, who could claim his own food, who could grow and complement our little family.
We got Picasso (named for his "le Demoiselles d'Avingnon" held-tilted face caused by an un-treated ear infection as a tiny kitten) for Tux, and it took a while for it not to feel like a mistake.
They had moments of beautiful tenderness:
The first night of the bad time he'd hidden under the bed, and when I was able to retrieve him, his face was deformed and horrific. He needed special attention and a special syringe fueled diet. Corrie took to this with vigor. She'd just quit her job, declaring each day the new "Best Day Ever," and here she was, studying like crazy, giving a five pound kitten a ton of love and attention, and nursing our Tuxedo back from the edge.
One of the changes that came about as the dust settled and Tux finally grew accustomed to a feline roommate was that he wasn't a screamer for food for multiple hours every single day. I know Corrie and I've said that often, that "Tux screamed for food for multiple hours every day," and I know some people would laugh and mentally chalk that up to hyperbole. BUT NO, HE LITERALLY SCREAMED FOR FOOD EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR AT LEAST TWO HOURS FOR MORE THAN A DOZEN YEARS.
But then he got sick, and when he was better, he stopped all that. Food was out, and for a while he would eat all of it, and we'd have to sneak food for the kitten. Eventually he stopped even that, like he was resigned that this little five pound asshole tornado wasn't going to be leaving. This was the new normal.
I should say, to Picasso's credit, he only wanted to play with and tend to his big kitty brother.
When Corrie got pregnant with Cass, we weren't sure how he would react to another perceived usurper. But of course Tux was too classy for all that, "all that" being problems of any sort. He looked like an old man who became smug that his little shit of a brother finally got his comeuppance.
Picasso was the one who felt usurped and lashed out way more than Tux ever did with Cassius in the mix. Meanwhile, when Cass finally started eating solid foods, he'd drop bits for the cats, and "for the cats" really just means Tuxedo.
It didn't take long for Tux be like: Aww, this ain't so bad.
We tried to keep his quality of life up near the end, but his guts had suffered for longer than my memory would like to admit. He would track little drips of diarrhea all over: your lap, the couch, your bed...and when he'd have a bowel movement, he would spray the foulest pancake-batter you can imagine all over the litter box and usually the wall too. And this went on for two years. That's the part I don't dwell on, since how can he be feeling okay with that going on, and, on a related topic, how could we have kept him having to?
He had a twitchy skin issue that we could never get resolved, nor could we fix his gut issue, and they happened simultaneously for two years. And don't think we didn't try! Oh man, I was buying live rabbits and having them butchered just to make him special homemade cat food. We spent a small fortune trying to get some answers. The final result of all that work: he may have some allergy or intolerance for something.
Oh really? A probable intolerance for something? I have an intolerance for wiping down diarrhea every single day.
When my mom came out to visit for Cass's second birthday party she asked about Tux. In my head I was thinking It may be getting close to time to let go. Then I showed her a picture I'd taken of him from above while he was walking around. She gritted her teeth and grimaced and said, "Ooh...sorry."
Looking back at the picture it makes a certain sense, since my mom worked for years in veterinary clinics. His large frame looks skeletal aside from the hardness of his gut section. When we brought him into the vet for 2nd-to-last time, the dude did the exact same gritted teeth grimace. The gut hardness was cancer, and his time on this rock was not for long.
We made the arrangements and called Victor. He needed to come say goodbye. He'd looked after Tux while we were in Europe when he was an older kitten, and they'd bonded. He was one of the few people that Tux really liked outside of our household.
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| Near the end |
The end came on Friday, June 15th, 2018. We had our appointment and held him as they administered the shot. He was gone much faster than any of the vet techs were guessing, to which they said, "Wow. He must have been ready."
Memory is a funny thing. He spent as much time dealing with gut issues, twitch spasms, and pancake batter messes as he did living with us in San Luis Obispo.
So much of our ideas of him, the basic foundation of our parenting of him and his adoption and entrance into our lives, it all took place in a whirlwind of nearly two years when Corrie and I were at very different places than we are now.
While we watched him grow and mature, he watched us grow and mature, going from crazy college kids to married career-focused parents. Tuxedo never got to meet Camille, but Cass tells her stories about him. Which is sweet, because how much could he really remember? I never discourage it though, because the memory should live on.
Especially when my son holds the last picture I'll share here, which is in their room, and says, "Aww...I miss Tuxedo SO much!"
Me too, buddy, me too.
Tux was the first pet Corrie and I had together, and in that sense he was the first pet that I felt a parent of, and as such: he was the first fur-baby that we outlived. And that's both natural and heartbreaking.
What can you do, close your heart forever and not enjoy the love while it exists?
Anecdotes
At the Palm St house we had people over and were having a good time in the living room, and Tux came to the door as he always did, only trying to keep slightly out of sight. I let him in and he went where he always did, only trying to be more hidden. We all realized pretty quickly that he had lost his collar and seemed to be trying to hide the fact.
At the Palm St house again one late morning I was eating a bowl of cereal while Tux was chilling in my lap. The bowl was clear glass, and as I was eating, the strangest thing was happening: it started to feel heavier, then go back to normal, then get heavier again, on and off like that. When I moved my thumb, I could see through the glass that Tux had his paw hidden under my thumb, pulling down on the bowl, trying to cause it to spill so he could get at whatever was inside. That instituted the No Laps While We Eat rule.
He was a lap kitty, for sure. He'd jump onto your lap, give you a funny look, curl up and get comfortable and start licking himself. After about ten or fifteen minutes of bathing, he would go to sleep. He would sleep until you moved him, ten minutes later or ten hours later, he didn't care. Unless dinner was approaching.
At the first Long Beach apartment I let him eat on some roasted chicken, and he got a piece of bone stuck in his throat. This was terrible and I had to rush off to the night pet ER. They took him in the back, gave a shot of ketamine and popped it out. He was all good. They said he was going to be loopy for a bit. NO. He wasn't loopy, he was trippin' balls, and he stared at the flames coming out of the bottom of our old dangerous furnace for hours, all the way from 11:30 until he came down close to 5 in the morning. I remember him looking at me with eyes I've seen and projected myself and I said, "Yeah, buddy. I know, I know."
That incident prompted the No More Sampling on Dad's Food rule (as one can see, over the years the rules softened). So one night after making a whole batch of chicken wings for dinner, Tux was begging as usual. I adjusted how I was sitting and a chicken wing fell off my plate, the dual-bone type which are my favorites. "Oops," I said and bent down to get it. Tux pounced on it, with his first bite he halved it and swallowed the back half, and before I could even pet his head, his second bite was more him swallowing the other half and looking at me, licking his chops.
I usually talk about Tux in terms of him being the most beautiful cat I ever had the pleasure of knowing. Once I read an article about ways to tell about how smart a cat is. Corrie read it, too, and asked one day: "Does he hide his toys?" I said that I had read that as well, and wasn't too concerned, since I'm not sure I've ever seen him hide anything. "This dude lies to us, regularly attempts to deceive us, and is always scheming for food. He's easily the smartest cat I've ever been associated with," I told her. So there was always that, too. He was the most beautiful and the most intelligent cat I've ever met.
On his lying: in Brooklyn we would buy pizza on the occasional Friday night, and when we'd hit a break with whatever DVD show we were watching (Simpsons or Futurama most likely), we'd head out to the stoop for a smoke. Tux would pretend to be asleep, and then pounce on whatever pizza remnants we'd left on our plates. He essentially trained us to be less careless with food. He would also try to trick the other one of us in the mornings if one of us was still asleep when the other left for work: Oh, please, I'm a starving little kitty! Of course, we had always fed him first thing once getting out of bed.
Tux was such an indelible part of our lives that we still call Picasso, who'll be 8 years old this September and our lone kitty for the last four years, "kitten," as if his relation to Tuxedo is still one of his defining traits.
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I've been planning in me head for years now a Studio Ghibli-style animated feature featuring three cat buddies: the young and hefty Tuxedo who won't cross the street; the sleek and silver Bullit; and the fluffy yellow ringleader Cous-cous. It would be amazing.
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Friday, June 15th of 2012 I sheared off the distal condyle on me left femur. Friday, June 15th of 2018 we said goodbye to our first little boy.
We will always remember you, Tuxedo Cartman-Katt! We will always love you, you Platonic Form of feline!
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| Tuxedo 4/20/04 to 6/15/18 Rest in Power |
This is a beautiful tribute for Tuxedo, very worthy of the beautiful soul that lived in that feline. He was loved, and he is missed.
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