Veruca

For my first-ever pet, Veruca’s clock started running in December 1999, backdated by “at least” two years. We never knew exactly how old she was, only that she was at least two years old at that time, because she’d already had had at least one litter by then. The truth, though, was that she could have been two or she could have been five. There’s not a huge amount of difference between the two in a healthy cat.

That meant that, in 2015, Ruca was at the very minimum 18 years old, and probably closer to 20 or 22. On Saturday, I punched up a cat-to-human age calculator on the Internet. The formula is something like this: 15 human years to the first year, 10 to the second, 4 for every year after that. At 18 years old, the human version of Ruca would be 96 years old. At 20 or 21, the number is more like 105.

And she was fairly spry and healthy all her life. When she began her inevitable downturn late last week, it happened fast. She was done. And even though we weren’t at all surprised, you’re never really prepared – the timing is just never good.

But this morning, at the extreme age of 18+YourGuessIsAsGoodAsMine, Veruca peacefully passed under the exemplary care of our vet, Dr. Johnston, and so our zoo’s population has lessened by one cantankerous, fussy old woman who would have just been annoyed had it gone on much longer.

I’d gotten the phone call just before or after Christmas in 1999, from my friend Vanessa back in Orlando. At the time, I lived in Tampa and had been there about six months, working a contract tech gig that was projected to go three years but at the time we were still waiting to hear if it’d be extended beyond the initial six month timeframe. I hadn’t even bought furniture yet, sleeping on an inflatable mattress and deep down expecting it all to go to shit, propelling me back to Orlando and into the poverty-stricken bullshit darkness that had been my life since about 1994 or so. In all this, Vanessa asked if I wanted a cat.

Seriously? What business did I have with a pet, especially right now? I could barely take care of myself. I’d never had a pet, didn’t grow up with any pets, had no idea how to properly take care of a cat. Sorry, but it’s just not going to work.

Vanessa wasn’t in the mood to take no for an answer.

This little white cat had turned up in the fall of ’99 by a side entrance to the south Orlando Lockheed Martin plant, where Vanessa worked. The cat just sat out in the rain, day after day, crying for someone to take her in. The Lockheed underground cat lover network mobilized in a flurry of group emails, begging for someone to please for God’s sake take this pathetic specimen in and get her out of the rain and give her a home. Vanessa, the cat sucker she was, brought her home to her gaggle of four other felines and then ran her to the vet.

She named the cat Veruca, after the character Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka – the prim, whiny little princess that demanded everything to be her way. And it was a very fitting name. The little white thing with the mismatched eyes (one blue, one green) swiftly made non-friends of every cat in Vanessa’s house, as well as of her fiancee. No one liked Veruca, and Veruca was whiny and petulant and demanding; the other cats bullied and hassled her, blocked her access to food, forced her to come sneaking around at night to eat.

This went on for a few months while Vanessa tried to find a new home for the cat. As it became increasingly clear that Veruca was just getting more and more miserable, my friend called me and said it straight: I need to rehome this cat. You have space. Please take her.

To this day, I couldn’t tell you why I finally said yes. Seriously, I have no idea. But I did.

I drove into Orlando at around 7pm that night – an hour and a half drive – took Veruca in a cat carrier that had been hastily purchased on the way over, and embarked on the haul back to my Tampa apartment. And even by normal cat standards, Ruca HATED the carrier and the car. She cried from the backseat at high volume endlessly. Oh dear sweet Jesus.

I talked. I reached around and tried to pet her. Nothing calmed her until I started putting tapes into the dash player and hit on a Melissa Etheridge tape, at which time Ruca went solid quiet. She was fine after that until we got home.

I brought her inside into my ramshackle mess (six months in, and I was still mostly packed from the move, boxes and piles – my apartment more resembled an indoor homeless camp) and let her loose. She dashed out of the carrier and went into hiding for three days.

It was a long haul with this cat. She had issues. Veruca was extremely skittish, ready to go and hide at the first sign of anything unusual. She’d apparently been on the street for a long while, because she acted like a feral, particularly in her eating habits: she’d binge and purge, wolfing down large amounts of food and throwing it back up, only to go hit the food bowl again. She had never been particularly warm and cuddly. It took the better part of a year, I think, to fully gain her trust. Then she sort of locked onto me as the one trustworthy person in the world.

Not long after that I adopted a second cat, Tucker. Tuck and Ruca swiftly became best buddies, and they remained close until his death from cancer in 2010. Ruca had never really been the same after that. She’d never particularly bonded with our two newcomers, Monkey and Zion, and mostly ever just tolerated Kristi. She never gave Sam the time of day and wanted absolutely NOTHING to do with Eden. But I was always Dad.

As the years went on, we started calling her Methuselah Cat. Again, we had no idea how old she was, only that she was really, really old. We wondered how long she’d go. The world record is about 35, but that’s a really rare freakish sort of thing. But she was healthy and doing okay and just seemed to never really age. Ruca was forever middle-aged.

A few years ago, she started having trouble jumping up on things. She started slowing down. Started gradually losing weight. We knew that the years were becoming fewer.

Last year, she began high volume crying. Ruca would wander down the hall and just blast away, even if she’d just seen us a few minutes before. At first we thought she was starting to suffer from feline dementia, but gradually we arrived at a much simpler scenario that turned out to be true: she was losing her hearing. She was crying so loud because she couldn’t hear herself crying.

By the summer of 2015, she couldn’t hear a damned thing. You could walk up right behind her and she’d have no idea until she felt or saw you there. She was down to about five pounds at this point, super thin, skin and bones. But again, in human terms, she was about 104 years old, so that was to be expected.

Late last week she just gave up, lay down and stopped eating and drinking. We spent this weekend on close watch, trying to get Ruca to take food and water (which she vehemently refused) and hoping that she’d last until this morning. She did. So we wrapped her frail, crackling little white body in a towel for her last trip to the vet.

Veruca was the last of her generation of pets, the group that included Tuck, Sam, Shanna and Nikita (my parents’ cats, adopted at around the same time as Tuck). Ruca outlived them all. She was also the last one of the his-or-hers pets, the last of our animals who began as either mine or Kristi’s. All our zoo now were adopted by us as a married couple.

We’ll miss Ruca. But honestly, I have a hard time working up a good tragic about her passing. She was super old, had lived a very long, very good life. When you adopt an animal, the whole point is to provide a forever home – that one place, that one family, where the animal can live the rest of their days surrounded by comfort and love. Veruca had that. She had it as good as it gets.

Veruca was grouchy. She didn’t like people all that much. She picked fights. She cried a lot. She could be a right pain in the ass when she set her mind to it. Front declawed, she was the focus of our constant fears of escaping felines. She was a white-furred, nonstop shedding machine. She was a bit of an airhead. She’d look right at you, walk into the next room, and immediately start distress crying because she didn’t know where you were. She liked popcorn, but only Pop Secret Homestyle brand. If you said “High Five!” to her and raised up your palm, she’d high five you. She refused to use a litter box unless it was filled with her specific preferred brand of cat litter, Dr. Elsey’s Magic Cat Shit Sand. She liked wet food and absolutely adored the high calorie “goop” Kristi gave her at bedtime over her last couple of years. Without question, she was the sloppiest, slobberiest catnip drunk we’ve ever met.

She was Ruca. She had a good life. We loved her. And we’ll miss her.

Me and Ruca, circa summer 2007, roughly when Kristi and I first met. My home office in Winter Park, Florida. Pardon the feet: Ruca was often aghast at my uncouth manners as well.