The year of the cat

April 13, 2006 at 1:25 am (Uncategorized)

Somewhere in my weird archives, I have a photograph of a cat hanging by the neck. This was a sight that greeted me one evening years ago outside the Sun Journal. The cat had been lynched with a strap of leather and hung from a stair rail in front of the building. A grisly site. In my grief, I had someone take a picture of me with the hanging cat who, according to recent revelations in the court records, had been wrongly accused.

Terrible things happen to cats around here. They get shot with arrows all the time. They get poisoned or run over. The long suffering feline species of Lewiston see their kin get tossed into canals, hurled from porches and, if you believe some of the more gruesome local legends, subjected to deviant sex in downtown apartments.

Even the cat corpses are not safe. On Tuesday night, a dead cat was used as a sort of hackey sack. It was swung by its tail, tossed into the air and passed from one gleeful fiend to the other. The tail ended in a showdown that involved bats and an assault rifle. And frankly, I think this is the beginning.

Cats are pissed. If you listen late at night, you can hear the collective hiss of the enranged beasts. It's a sound that raises the hair on the back of your neck. I know, man. I know. And I sense an uprising. I'm not talking about cat poop on your front steps or scratched up furniture on the porch. I'm talking about Fluffy and Smokey and Snowball and Garfield meeting in empty warehouses and gathering artillery. And who can blame them?

When I was a boy, there was a story floating around town that a particularly nasty teen had tied two cats together by the tails and watched them fight to the death. This was not to be confused with the report of the retarded man who hung a cat from a clothes line and then skinned it alive.

Yes, terrible things happen to cats. But really, I'm just raving, now. In my defense, I HAVE been into the nip.