A good joke to play on a friend.

Here is a good joke to play on a friend—this has to be a pretty good friend, and you must be willing to not talk to them for long stretches of many years afterwards, giving the joke the time to burrow in deep, to work its way down to the bedrock—what you do is you ask this good friend to watch your cat and your dog for a few months. While you take some time away to work through a mild personal crisis, is a good reason, if you need a reason, or maybe you’re just going to Europe for the summer, if things are going well for you. Anyway, the joke is that in 2007 or 2008 you tell the friend that you’ll be back for your cat and your dog in a few months, and then when you come back you say, “Oh, I can’t possibly take this cat away from you! She’s so happy here!” (This is less a lie than it is a foma—Kurt Vonnegut’s word for “harmless untruths”—because while the cat is fine, the cat would be fine almost anywhere that offered shelter and a regular supply of food and water. This is the nature of cats.) Then, you take the (very good, constitutionally sad) dog, and you say your goodbyes to the cat, and to your good friend. This is already, obviously, a pretty good joke. But the joke has really only just been seeded. Now you wait. You don’t even need to water it, or give it sun—the joke, that is. The cat requires both water and a sunny place by the window, and also food and a box to shit in.

I met Fred, who was a cat, in 2003 at Lauren and Andrea’s University Garden apartment, in Athens. I think Lauren found her—Fred, to be clear—in or around a dumpster at the apartment complex, though it’s possible I’ve internalized a false Fred-is-a-Baxter-Street-dumpster-cat narrative. Fred liked me—as most animals and young children do, upon meeting me, until they grow up and learn better—and as Lauren and Andrea’s friend, it was important to me that Fred liked me. (This was, with the benefit of hindsight, very obviously a mistake.) Young kitten Fred went in and out of that first floor apartment window basically as she pleased, as I remember. She and Lauren had a special connection, or so Lauren believed. Hell, maybe she did have a mystical or spiritual link with the cat—but this is when Lauren was fuckin’ twenty, and was always finding higher-level connections wherever she wanted, if she was in the right, uh, frame of mind, in TOOL lyrics or the Gumby’s pool table or Spinoza or, like, a really sweet poster. Regardless, Lauren could point at her from across the apartment and Fred would come loping over, rubbing her chin onto Lauren’s outstretched finger, purring and purring. I could also do this trick with Fred. I tried it just yesterday, and it worked like it always has. I had to call her first, to rouse her attention, but it worked all the same.

Fred and Stella (the good dog) moved in with me in 2008, I think, into my apartment on Bloomfield St. Lauren came back for Stella, Penny—who died almost exactly two years ago—moved in with us shortly after that. Fred has been with me ever since, until this morning, sitting in my car parked behind the vet’s office, which is where she died.

Visitors to our various homes through the years have often mistaken Fred for a very friendly, sweet cat. Fred could be sweet, in her way, but she was almost certainly not being sweet if you thought she was being sweet. Instead, she was dominating you. Her preferred spot, for many years, was the left leg of anyone sitting on a couch. She had the sharpest, most needle-like claws of any of our cats, and she would perch herself on an available left leg, face away from you, her claws ready to dig in if anything about your body language hinted at trying to adjust yourself or move her. She was there to be pet, not because it brought her—or you, certainly—any comfort, but because this was how you showed respect. This was how you knelt. To the fucking cat.

I would not have named Fred “Fred,” had it been my responsibility to name her. She had a spot on her upper chest, below her chin, that looked passably like a bowtie, and a big white patch that you could see just below her belly, if you dared risk flipping her over and exposing her to that indignity, and exposing yourself to five points of mortal terror. The bowtie spot and the cummerbund belly would have led me to “Suit” or “Tux” or something like that, which I think is a perfectly acceptable and cute thing to name a cat. But, probably, Lauren was right to go with Fred, beamed down via whatever celestial energies that powered the connection she felt with her. Fred was her own little creature, not really mine or Lauren’s, a consistent and massive and domineering personality that intrinsically rejected such cloying names that I would have come up with for the cutesy bullshit that they are. The most surprising moments of being around Fred was when she would, out of nowhere, become suddenly playful for about seven seconds, before remembering herself, and bounding off with some morose purpose.

If I were sitting at my desk, trying to write, Fred would jump into my lap, and bark her curt little meow into my face, demanding that I reposition my body so she’d have space to lay down. I would lift her off my lap, and put her on the floor, and she would jump back into my lap immediately, voicing her imperious little meow. I would do this perhaps a dozen times or more, and she would not give up until she’d been allowed to settle into my lap, my posture now all screwed up. On the couch, with my laptop across my left leg and the couch cushion, she’d just lay herself across my arms, meowing at me whenever my typing or scrolling bothered her. I’d pick her up, and swing her around behind my head, placing her on my shoulder and the couch. She would then walk down my left arm and plop herself across my arms again. Over and over again. Some nights, I won, and she fell asleep on my shoulder. Other nights, I’d give up, close the laptop, and endure her in my lap until she’d raised the temperature of my general crotchal region to something in excess of 340 degrees Fahrenheit. Her other favorite position was just directly on my chest, her face right in my face, forcing me to breathe her air. She would do this first thing in the morning, to establish the tone for the day, for many years.

How much spite this cat had in her, how much stubbornness and will, is that while I was sitting in my car this morning, waiting for the vet to walk out with my sedated cat, ready to be put down, I fully expected my phone to ring. I thought the vet would call me up and say, “I don’t know how, but she seems…fine, actually. She seems to have grown back two fresh kidneys. Her bladder is back! And she’s just kinda yelling at me.” The vet would tell me she’ll probably live another ten years. And I’d take her home, and she’d pee on me or in my laundry because I dared suggest she was at the end. And then she’d hot-crotch me for the rest of the night, yelling at me if I reached for the remote.

Instead, the vet walked out with her little black and brown and gray striped body, wrapped in a towel, halfway gone already. I held her, and I cried and I cried and I cried, and the vet did the last thing, and she was gone.

But getting back to the joke. What makes this a good joke is that for literal years, every time this good friend of yours is cleaning a litter box, or buying a pile of fucking prescription cat food, or getting peed on by a cat bent on revenge because he went on vacation for a week and had the neighbor stop in twice a day to feed the cat, or, or, or any of a hundred other annoyances and indignities that attend cat cohabitation, this friend will be subconsciously—and sometimes consciously, out loud, even—cursing your actual name. Because, seriously, what the fuck, Lauren. This is a good joke!

But the best part of the joke, the part of the joke that has gotten down to the bottom and taken root and makes the whole thing work, makes it worth it—the best part of the joke is that your old friend—that sucker!—he’ll thank you for it. For her. For giving him his cat.

I’ll miss you, Fred.