THE CAT WHO ADOPTED ME

Charlie was a very special guy.

I first met him one evening in the spring of 2007, when I heard scratching on the wall beside the front door, and a plaintive “meow.”

I opened the door and there was this big white cat with honey-colored blotches. His fur was very long. I opened the door to step outside and check him out, only he dashed inside.

Once inside, he went directly to the kitchen, found the bowl of crunchies set out for the other residents of Le Chateau du Chat, and chowed down. He drank half the bowl of water.

Finished, he came back out in the living room, sat on the floor looking at us, and meowed again. I reached out my hand, and he came over, sniffed it, and let me rub him behind his ears. This went on for several minutes.

And then he went over to the front door, glanced over his shoulder, and meowed again. A question: open the door please?

I went over and opened the door and he left.

Over the next couple days, I saw him and discovered he lived next door. The people who had just moved in there were a collection of Latinos that didn’t all seem related. Eventually I would discover they were “squatters.”

The cat came back several times. We eventually named him Charlie. Once, he spent the night inside. He got along very well with the other cats, none of whom perceived him as a threat, despite his being twice the size of the females

Our then-landlady had a very large nAtive plants garden in the back of the property, and I saw him in there frequently.

Finally after a month, he asked to come in and made no move to leave for a week. We decided he had found us suitable and adopted us. It made sense, because I had already figured out that what we had to offer was superior cat-wise to where he came from.

The people next door became more of a problem. They were renting out to guys who were sleeping in the attic and using the back of the property for their “rest room.” This was during a period of high “undocumented immigration” here in Los Angeles, and we had just ended up at Ground Zero.

One night there was a knock at the door. I answered and it was the guy from next door who seemed to be in charge of things, with a young boy. He informed me that the cat who was living with us belonged to his son and would we return him? I was tempted to tell him to fuck off, given everything else going on there - like calling the fire department one evening when they had a fire out on their back patio so big the flames nearly caught in the low-hanging branches of the large tree next to the patio.

But Jurate told him we would let the cat decide. We opened the screen door, the boy called to him, and after several minutes, he strolled out the door.

I figured that was the end of that.

Things came to a head a month later when the absentee landlord discovered his house was “occupied” when he got a bill from the LAFD for the “house call.” There was a confrontation where the landlord announced they had a week to move out before he called ICE.

Over the week, first the “attic renters” were gone, and then others in the house departed. That Saturday night, there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, the boy was there. With the cat. He said the cat hadn’t really wanted to come home and wanted to come live with us. I thought that was quite a brave thing for a kid to do - to consider the wishes of the animal and try to comply with them.

I told him the cat was welcome. He put the cat down and I opened the door, and Charlie ran inside.

The boy and the others were gone in the morning.

Charlie settled in. Jurate called him “The Gentile Giant.”

He quickly became the King of the Garden.

And then one morning two months later, I went out to get the newspaper and he was lying on the front porch, bloody.

We were living on a very busy street, and several of the ferals on the property had already been victims of cars. As first, I wasn’t sure he was alive. But when I touched him, he moved

.

I immediately brought out a blanket and carefully lifted him into it. We wrapped it around him and put him in the back seat of the car and sped off to our vet.

It was quickly determined he had a fractured pelvis. The vet told us the only way to care for it was for him to be immobilized for six weeks. This was before the hospital was taken over by @#$%$#@!! VCA Inc., and our vet knew we knew how to take care of cats, so instead of trying to sell us on hospitalization and several thousand dollars we didn’t have, we worked out an alternative.

We brought Charlie home and installed him in the large dog carrier, placing it in the writing office. The vet had given us enough pain killer to knock him out for as long as it took. Basically, he lay there in a pain killer fog for the next six weeks, not moving, being fed liquified wet food with an eye-dropper. We put him in a Onesie so we could handle him without touching his wounds.

At the end of the time, he stood up. He was a little woozy from the pain killer. We cut it down to nothing over several days and he recovered. When I saw him walk into the bathroom and jump up on the counter, I knew he was OK.

But his days as the King of the Garden were over; he was now an Indoor Kittie. Needless to say, he was not happy about that and we had several arguments over the issue over six months, before he realized we were not going to relent.

Charlie made the move with us to this house, and he died in his sleep atop my futon with the sun coming in the window to warm it, last summer, after several months of decline that saw him sleeping more and more. He’d been with us over 15 years, and I think he was somewhere between 18-20.

He was always a sweet guy, good friends with all the kitties, even the kittens that eventually replaced the cats he first met when he walked through our front door and adopted us. He and Cookie, who came into our lives about the same time, were close friends

.

I like to remember him as the King of the Garden, Lord of All He Surveyed.

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