My cat came out of nowhere and became my everything.
~Author Unknown
When I was a kid, my house was a cat magnet. My parents were both well known in the community and so were their passions, one of which was animal rescue. They were always adopting animals from the local shelter. At one point, we had six dogs, thirteen cats, an aquarium filled with lab rats saved from euthanasia, wild birds whose wings had broken (separated from the cat community in their own room), lizards, turtles, mice, two horses, and even a goat.
This might have been fine if we lived on a farm, but we didn’t. We had a large house — a grand 19th-century home that over time had served as a general store, a doctor’s office, a post office, and a feed depot — but even a house that large could feel small with the ever-growing menagerie of animals. Whenever someone in the neighborhood — or even the wider community — found a stray cat or dog, they knew it would find a home if they just dropped it off on the front porch of Raphael and Frances Mark.
I tell my daughter Emily these stories, and she thinks it sounds like a wonderful paradise, but it wasn’t always fun. I actually came to hate the cats because they were the most persistent presence. I’d open a kitchen cabinet in the morning for a bowl or plate, and there was a cat in there looking down at me. Going to sit down at the dining room table, I’d have to remove a cat from the chair — sometimes two. Cats on top of the TV, on the couches, on top of the refrigerator, on the stairs, under the coat rack, on the radiators — they were everywhere, like some awful vermin. My friend Betsy Jacobs, who loved cats, told me my problem wasn’t the number of cats, but that I hadn’t found my own. I had no idea what she meant.
One New Year’s Eve, we all came back from dinner to find the latest surprise on the front porch — a large black cat with enormous golden eyes and a red ribbon tied around his neck. He was in pretty poor shape. His coat was worn and dirty, and his tail was broken, twitching back and forth at an odd angle. Of course, there was no question what would happen next. My mother went to pick him up and bring him inside, but he wasn’t having it. He backed away, hissing and growling, into a corner of the porch.
The last thing I wanted was another cat, but I did want to help Ma, so I got down on the cat’s level and talked to him until he walked toward me. I picked him up and carried him inside. I got him some food, and he calmed down a bit until my brother Jason sat down near him. Then he attacked. He grabbed at Jace’s hand, scratched furiously, and then shot under a bureau in the dining room where he glowered and hissed at us. Jace said, “That thing’s like an assassin. You ought to name him Carlos,” referring to a villain in a novel that was popular at the time. The name stuck, and the cat stuck to me.
Since I was the only one who could handle him without being mauled, he wound up in my room and became my cat. He wasn’t like the other cats in the house. He would entertain me by leaping from the top of my bookshelf to the top of my open door and do a little tightrope walk across it, back and forth, before hopping down. He was a great nuzzler and loved to sit on my lap while I read. Every night, he’d jump up on the bed when it was time to sleep and, if I stayed too long at my desk working on something, he’d hop up and knock my pen away to let me know it was getting late.
He was also an uncanny judge of people. He finally warmed up to Jace, but I learned to trust his judgment about new friends I’d have over. If Carlos liked them, they were worth the time. If he didn’t, they usually wound up being a huge mistake. He liked most of my friends, but was especially fond of Betsy. Carlos lived a life of luxury in my room and wasn’t inclined to exert himself very often, but he always got up when Betsy visited, hopped onto the little table at the end of my bed for her to pet, and sometimes even climbed up on her shoulder. I knew I liked Betsy even without Carlos’s approval, but it was still nice to have it.
Carlos liked Betsy so much that, when I got a letter from her, he would purr and sit in my lap while I read it. If I got a letter from anyone else, he either wouldn’t come near or, sometimes, would slap at it. If he didn’t like someone, he wasn’t at all shy about showing it by allowing them to come near and then latching himself onto their hand, biting and scratching. But when someone met with his approval, he was the sweetest gentleman and most caring friend. When I was sick with mono, he wouldn’t leave me, not even to eat or drink. And when I’d come home from school at the end of the day, he’d jump off the bed and trot over to greet me at the door. He liked it even better when I’d come home with Betsy, and he’d climb up on her shoulder and nuzzle her ear.
One day Betsy said, “See? I told you. You just had to find your own cat.” She was right. Without even knowing I was doing it, I became kinder and more affectionate with the brood of cats around the house. Getting to know Carlos allowed me to recognize the personalities of the other cats. They weren’t just obstacles to sitting, walking, or eating anymore. Sam favored the top of the refrigerator because it was warm. Dwarfy liked sitting in laps because she was a people-cat. Mama liked the radiator in the downstairs hall because no one bothered her there.
Carlos was especially pleased when Betsy and I started dating and she spent even more time at the house. If I tried playing a board game with anyone else in my room, the cat would walk all over it and actually kick the pieces. When Betsy came, though, he just curled up between us and watched until he became bored and fell asleep. Carlos opened the world of cats up to me and showed me how fascinating, warm, and wonderful they can be. He was long gone by the time Betsy and I got married, but he lived on in the first gift I gave her in our first apartment: a small, black kitten.
~Joshua J. Mark
