Oddly enough, the cat never had a name other than The Old Mean Cat. No idea where it came from and no idea how it passed from our lives. But in between I had a very intense relationship with that strange little animal. My middle brother Dan was at the point where his interests didn’t jive too much with his dorky little brother and parents were doing their thing, so I was pretty much on my own for many hours of the day. And I teamed up with The Old Mean Cat.

I think the reason it got its name is that it would climb into your lap and sit there. You would be charmed by its attention and start petting it, but you were not allowed to stop. If you stop petting it would turns its head and bite you, not hard enough to send you to the bathroom for bandaids, but hard enough to make its point: you had failed to satisfy what the Old Mean Cat saw as the rightful role of its humans.

At one point The Old Mean Cat disappeared for days. My mother and I looked for it and made our “kitty-kitty-kitty” sounds, with no results. The cat did go outside to pee and poop, but was not an outdoor cat in general. So we waited and kept busy with our human activities.

One day my mother opened the linen closet on the second floor and out came a very sick, dehydrated cat, sliding out of the sheets onto the floor, barely able to stand. We brought it water and food and it slowly started eating and regained its health. It had never meowed once while stuck in the closet. Come to think of it, perhaps it never meowed; perhaps it could not speak at all.

There were two ways that The Old Mean Cat and I particularly bonded. One was the stairway battles.

The cat would often sit near the square wood vertical posts of the bannister. I would step down two or three steps on the stairs till I was about even, facing the cat through the slats. We would then begin great battles through the slats: I would run my hands left and right along the slats to tease her and she would try to catch my hand with her paws. But then when she was facing left to grab one hand I would reach in with the other hand and try to grab her belly. Hardly any cat wants its belly grabbed, so The Old Mean Cat would grab my hand with teeth and claws and hold it captive. I would then try to carefully extract my hand, slowly as her ferocity faded. Then when my hand was safely on my side of the bannister we would start all over. Don’t know how many hours we spent on stairway battles, but they were rich passages of human-cat-mammal interaction. I can still feel her claws and jaws on my hand, just tight enough to immobilize me, but not enough to cause big damage. Many cats know just how hard to bite to engage without going too far, just as dogs will play-bite each other without breaking the skin.

The other big interaction was that every night The Old Mean Cat would sleep in bed with me, but before sleep it would groom me, licking my head as if I were another cat requiring grooming to cement our bond. It would start at one side of my hair, near my neck, then work its way side to side, then move up a bit and work its way along the next row of hair. It would work its way up to the sides and top of my head and not quit until it had shampooed every square inch of my scalp. With its rough tongue it would occasionally encounter some skin, but that was kind of a sandpaperish pleasure as well.

Years later I wondered if the nightly cat grooming sessions were the reason I went totally bald while my two brothers kept most of their hair for their whole lives. Or perhaps it was the nuclear testing which was very active at the time.

As mentioned, I have no idea what became of the Old Mean Cat, when and how she disappeared. I think there may have even been some other cats around from time to time, but they were outdoors cats who preferred to never come inside, whereas Old Mean Cat was clear that she was the queen and empress of the house.

Once, when running from the house to the barn in great excitement I let the kitchen door slam shut behind me. The Old Mean Cat had run after me out the door, but was a step behind me. When the clunky wooden door hit the doorframe behind me it took off about an inch of the cat’s tail. Nothing changed about her behavior, but she had a slightly shorter and more stubby tail after that which actually seemed more appropriate for a cat with a feisty James Cagney attitude towards life.

(The photo is not The Old Mean Cat; there are no photos of her; but this reminds me of her: black and white patches, and contentious attitude.)