Magneto & the Bad Cat

Long time no write.... something happened tonight that prompted me to go back and re-read all the Bitey posts (more on that later). It's been over a year (more than...more than! says Roberta) since Bitey died. Lots of things have changed, mostly for the better.

• I'm a freelance widget-ist, no longer tied to the rapidly foundering destiny of the widget factory for whom I once worked
• The boyfriend is now the fiance.
• I'm still carrying the debt from the Bitey-care.
• It was still worth every penny.
• We have the Zohan. (more on her later too).

And yet, the subject header for this post has been rattling around in my head all year. It sounded like some kind of Kitty Western. So here, finally, from a rusty writer, is the story of:

Magneto & the Bad Cat


When Bitey was young and healthy, we moved from an apartment where he was not technically allowed to a small house with a garden. Bitey made the transition from indoor cat to outdoor cat in about, oh, 3.5 seconds. It was our goal to keep him in the yard and under our close supervision, because we didn't want our FeLV+ cat contaminating the neighborhood.

And Bitey was, in those early days, content to hang in the yard. At a firm 16 pounds he didn't have the lithe graceful body needed to scamper up a tree onto a roof, so it was merely a matter of bricking up the holes that led under the house, and blocking off the garden gate.

But one day, Bitey saw the Bad Cat. Now I don't have a picture of the Bad Cat, but he's a big brown lunk, with the black markings of a python. He appears silently, and stares at you with flat and wary eyes. I don't know his real name, because I certainly have never gotten close enough to see his tag.

In short, the Bad Cat is your classice 50's rebel; he's got slicked back hair and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his white t-shirt. And the Bad Cat taught Bitey to smoke.

No. Not literally.

The Bad Cat never deigned to visit our yard, except as a means of transit from whatever sock hop where he'd spiked the punch to the midnight street race down Main Street. But Bitey watched this Big Boy haul himself up various fences and posts. In no time at all, he had learned all the secret ways a fat cat could escape the garden. And escape he did.

Ultimately, Bitey was too pretty, too langourous, too...silky, to be a rebel, but I'm pretty sure he idolized the Bad Cat all the same.

And we spent the rest of Bitey's four- legged life coaxing him off the roof.




Now, Magneto was another stray who wandered into our lives in the last few months of Bitey's life. One cold and rainy winter night, a small black and white tuxedo cat with no collar meowed on our doorstep. He was remarkable for his absolute absence of fear. And, for two people so attuned to the needs of a cat with reduced mobility, he was a vibrant, almost intoxicating, picture of health. He jumped, he scampered, he was affectionate in a goofy unforced kinda way.

Bitey, of course, was unamused.

Now this young cat had a habit of disappearing under our house, only to come out with something attached to his face. Cobwebs, mostly, but sometimes it was a leaf. Sometimes food. But whatever it was it clung to his face like a magnet. Hence, Magneto.

We knew we couldn't adopt this little X-Cat. To have a happy bouncing kitten permanently invade the house would have been offended Bitey's dignity in the sunset of his long quiet goodbye. So when the rains ended, we let him go, hoping he would find a good home.

On January 17th, 2007 Bitey died, a fact that is well chronicled in the previous posts. In the ensuing weeks, one of the hardest things to deal with was the emptiness of a house that was previously filled with the common purpose of survival. The boyfriend and I wandered around the too-clean house, picking things up, putting them down, and learning not to do a double-take when we saw something white in the corner of our eye.

The neighborhood cats avoided our empty yard.

Except, of course, the Bad Cat.

I was doing dishes when, for the first time ever, he jumped down onto the cover of the defunct hot-tub...Bitey's favorite spot. He strolled around unapologetically, then looked me dead in the eye. He didn't hiss, he didn't run away, he just stared.

And after that, he came around a lot more. Was he staking out new turf? Yeah. Was he pissing on everything in site? Yup. But did he always stop and, in his own way, check in on us? Yeah, a little bit he did.

But at a distance. He certainly wasn't about to give us a kitty hug or anything.

Then one particularly sad day, another one of those cold L.A. days when you wished for a cat to keep you warm, Magneto reappeared. He looked well fed and was wearing a collar. He sniffed around, looking for Bitey. He jumped in our laps, and purred. We felt graced by his warmth, and a little sad too. We checked out his collar...what name did his ultimate benefactor chose for our Magento?

Lil' Homie.

After a while, Homie, whom we chose to keep calling Magneto, jumped off the couch and disappeared back into the neighborhood. But every so often, he would reappear, usually when the boyfriend or I was alone, and a little sad.

One time, when I was in New York, and BF was alone in the office on the computer, Magneto hopped up onto his shoulder and wrapped himself around BF's neck like a mink stole. A purring mink stole.

Late one night, coming back from a movie, when we both craved the comfort of our home, but still secretly dreaded the moment when we opened the door on a dark and silent house, we saw Magneto, lying in the middle of the sidewalk, as if to say, 'hey.'

We started referring to him as an empath. He made our lives a little happier when he stopped by.

And he always had something stuck to his face.

Magneto & The Bad Cat. These two cats, each in their own way, helped us through those first few Bitey-less months, when we couldn't ever imagine owning another cat, yet still craved the swish of a tail in the corner of our eye.