Episode 39: How to Choose a Pet

There are some stories that should never, ever be told. Things happen that should just pass by and never be spoken of again. Never alluded to, never joked about. This is probably one of those stories because every time I tell it my sister says "you know, you should really quit telling that story." So this is the last time!

When I first got my grey tabby cat Fanny from the pound (they had named her Ariel, which I quickly boycotted), she was approximately a year old. I had her at home for a few lovely days of new cat fun when suddenly she started hollering to beat the band and sure enough, turns out Sweet Fanny was in heat. I didn't have a car at the time, so I loaded her up in her cat cage and as she yowled out loud nonstop, I bicycled her over to the vet I had chosen, who turned out to be a hippie voodoo vegetarian veterinarian, who believed rubbing singed rosemary on an elderly cat would heal cat arthritis or whatever. That type of thing. I was into it back then, sort of. So I busted in with my yowling horny cat and said "make it stop! make it stop!" And Dr. Sensitive Manson Family said he wouldn't operate in the middle of a heat cycle, that it would unduly stress out the cat and also it was expensive and since I didn't even have a car, I probably couldn't afford it anyway, so why didn't I just put Sweet Fanny back into her cat cage, peddle home and masturbate her?

(I'll give you a minute here).

Okay, so I KNOW! However you just responded when you read that, multiply it times about fifteen; that's how I responded. I was advised to go purchase a super-nubby oven mitt at the grocery store and to put it on my hand and with the help of mood lighting, the dulcet tones of Natalie Cole and a can of Chicken of the Sea, I was to place my be-oven-mitted hand between Fanny's hind legs and let her, well, um... see, you can just finish thinking about it your own self. This is the part of the story where my sister says I can be a little vague, that people get the picture long before I say the phrase "stimulate your pussy," as the vet put it. I'm not making that up.

So that number-one-on-the-list psychologically shattering life moment came to pass and then when her heat cycle was over about a week later, I pedaled her back to the vet and got all of that ladybusiness taken care of because I threw that oven mitt away toot suite and didn't really want to have to go buy another one anytime soon. I just knew if I went and bought another one, the cashier would know that I was some sort of chronic crazy cat masturbator.

Anyway, now Fanny is a happy spinster cat. I have noticed all these years later, though, that when I'm in the kitchen baking or whathaveyou...anything that requires oven mitts... Fanny - now almost twenty - comes and sits in the kitchen doorway and looks at me with lowered cat eyelids and makes a low purring sound as if to say "you wanna go again, big fella?"