Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

In the process of this exertion, I inadvertently crinkle back the top pages. What to my wandering eyes should appear but the Classifieds section, the "Pets" part in particular. And what do I see advertised but another of these disgusting auction-block debacles for my kind: a purebred cat show at the Cashman Center. Now there is where a cacophony of cats could be found! What if some demented soul, some mad bomber, perhaps, was to strike while the clans were gathered, so to speak? Such a scenario would fit Karma's vague predictions of death on the grand scale.

I rise and go now, to enter an arena I hold in the greatest of contempt: a cat show. Let no one say that Midnight Louie does not give his all for his kind.

Within an hour after making my noble resolution, I am inside the Cashman Convention Center, crouching under an avalanche of empty cartons once home to bags of Pretty Paws scented, clumping cat litter. I do not know many cats, not even the clumping kind, that enjoy the aroma of mentholated grass, which is the after sniff that Pretty Paws leaves in its footsteps.

One would think that a prime specimen of rampant felinity like myself would be in-like-Flynn when it comes to crashing a cat show. I regret shattering any such delusions, but a cat show is perhaps the one venue most closed to one of my sort, for a very simple reason. These precious pussums--and I do mean "precious" in both senses of the word--are too valuable to be let loose on these vast premises. Hence any cat present is either caged or carried. Since neither condition appeals to me, I will indeed have to make like a feline Errol Flynn to storm this castle of kittydom without getting tossed into the nearest dungeon, i.e., a cramped cage with sanitary facilities that are much too conveniently close for one with my supersensitive sniffer.

So I peek out from under a Pretty Paws box and plot my course. At the moment, I shelter under the admissions table, where two-footed individuals are paying a pretty penny to get in and gawk at the creme de la creme of catdom. I eye the jungle of table legs surmounted by rows and rows of common cages hidden beneath enough pouts, swags and drapes to clothe Little Bo-Peep for a Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta.

I am not fooled for a moment: froufrou does not transform a steel-mesh cage into a pleasant site for Midnight Louie. But speaking of pleasant sights, I notice one such resident not too far away: a long-haired platinum blonde who has nothing better to do than yawn, with no one in attendance. l decide to begin my interrogation there. During a lull of passing shoes, I tippy-toe over the concrete floor and hurl myself behind a drapery intended to conceal the under-table clutter. I shudder to see a basket brimming with torture equipment: combs, brushes, powder and--my nemesis--nail clippers. Nobody gets near these retractable shivs unless I am forced to use them. I also spot something I recognize only from my brief sojourns in various veterinarians offices: a battery-operated clipper equipped with jagged steel teeth. Such an instrument is frequently applied to dogs, who, through thousands of years of domestication, have allowed humans to modify their body hair like topiary trees, and to some unfortunate feline souls who found themselves in circumstances where they could not attend to their daily grooming and ended up in one solid snarl. If you have never seen a clipped cat, you have been spared a terrible sight; most of my kind look best in their dress coats.

Since l dislike spending much time in the vicinity of these fiendish so-called grooming instruments. I slink out from under the cloth and vault atop the table.

I find myself lace to lace with the strangest creature I have ever seen: it is long, lean and the color of a nice dollop of kidney-and-liver pabulum--a taste bud-terrifying brown-gray shade. And it is wrinkled all over. I would take it for a shar pei, an ugly customer of the canine persuasion that looks like everything but its skin shrank in the wash, except there is no mistaking the scent of a feline.

It hisses at my sudden appearance, and the sentiment is mutual. I feel I am looking in a mirror and seeing the image of a ghoul. If it were a girl ghoul, I might be tempted to linger, but this is definitely a dude, and nobody so naked should be gawked at without somebody collecting a tee, usually at a side show.

I return unceremoniously to the cool concrete floor and resume my two-yard dashes from tablecloth to tablecloth, avoiding human feet----and eyes--with my usual subtle and almost super natural skill. I told you that these genes were A-1!

Never have I encountered so many weird-looking members of my species. The people on parade here are no prizes. either, but luckily they are oblivious to ordinary dudes engaged in surreptitious spying when they have so many extraordinary dudes and dolls, to whose every sneeze and sniffle they are attuned.

I do encounter one rather ordinary, albeit famous, face. This is a big, brown-and-black kisser of the variety called tiger-striped. I have paused to admire the solid-brass nameplate on the cage when I glimpse the inhabitant, who is almost as large as I am.

"The notorious Maurice, I presume," I say.

His ears perk up. "What do you know about my notoriety?" he asks in a throaty growl.

"I have seen your television ads. Is that Yummy Tum-tum-tummy stuff any good?"

"Naw," says Maurice, yawning. "They have to spice it with tuna fish in order to get me to look like I'm eating it. And with all the time those commercials take, the Yummy Tum-tum-tummy is half rotted anyway."

I wrinkle my nose as it smelling a rat. "That spokes cat gig pay pretty well?"

"Perhaps, you would have to ask my trainer."

"You have a personal trainer? What is the matter? Has the Hollywood life made you forget how to leap, look and listen?"

"Fame---even without fortune----is better than warming a cage floor at the Big House."

"You have been on Death Flow, too?" I ask, impressed. Not too many of us end up with a commuted sentence, and our own series of television commercials to boot.

"Plucked from the jaws of death," he affirms in a bored tone.

"My autobio is available in children's book sections everywhere. It is called 'Maurice, the Miracle Cat.' "He fans his nails--clipped, of course--in an affected way to examine them.

For all his down-home looks, this dude loves to put on airs.

"You have not heard any rumors of an attempted uprising against cats?"

"What nonsense!" Maurice says with a superior sniff. "I am told that cats are now more popular than dogs. Who would want to harm them?"

"You have been living the soft life for too long," say I, scowling. "The animal shelters work night and day shuffling cats out of their mortal coils, not to mention the random pieces of ricocheting metal that charge down the street, known as cars. You also overlook the bad old days, when our kind's association with what some authorities regarded as the wrong people led to a witch-hunt that consigned millions of our forebears to the fiery furnace."

"Ancient history." snarls the tiger-stripe before me.

Easy for him to say: he was not the wrong color in the wrong series of television commercials to boot.

Easy tor him to say: he was not the wrong color in the wrong century. Given that ancient history, it is lucky that a dude of my particular dark dye lot is here at ail.

I see that Easy Street has made Maurice--bet his original name was something simple like "Boots" or "Tuffy"--insensitive to social issues, and move on. it occurs to me, however, that any evil-deer wishing to do cats in general a public disservice could do worse than to begin with a visiting celebrity like Maurice. Perhaps I do not wish to stop this fiend.

But duty comes before poetic justice. As I wend my careful way between cages, avoiding cooing humans and raised stainless steel combs. I come across a strange rumor. It begins with a coy Siamese whose baby-blues hold a come-hither look. l have never cared for the oriental type--too skinny and too often cross-eyed and kink-tailed, and always temperamental--but I sashay over to find her chocolate-brown tail tapping impatiently outside the grillwork of her cage.