The boss around here

I'm not a pet person. This always embarrasses me, the same way it embarrasses me that I don't like small children or know how to cook. It seems, I dunno, sort of Cruella De Ville of me. I don't like to feel a kinship with characters that Glenn Close would play just for the paycheck.



It's not that I don't like animals. It's more that most of them make me sneeze. And I haven't grown up with them, so I don't know how to hold them or pet them or make them behave. This last problem is sort of a silly thing to worry about when it comes to cats specifically, as no one, but no one can make them behave.



For some reason, though, I seem to date a lot of guys who have cats. Why? I dunno. I also like to take up with Republicans right before major elections. There's got to be some deep-seated psychological reason for all of this, but I'm afraid to go poking around in my psyche looking for it.



Not too long ago, I was seeing a guy who had maybe the cutest cat in the world. His -- the cat's, not the guy's -- name was Boss and he was an elegant little orange gentleman cat with a teeny little face and a big mouth. He yowled all the time. The guy liked to do tricks with him, holding him up in the air and smooshing his little face up so his fangs stuck out and saying, "Look! Boss is a vampire!" The amazing part about this is that Boss let him do it and didn't scratch the shit out of him. He didn't even seem to mind all that much.



Theirs was a special relationship. Ours -- mine and Boss's -- was not as special.



The first time I stayed over, I passed out on the couch, only to wake up and find that Boss had peed on the rug right by my shoes. I got off easy. He could have peed on me. When I woke up, he was sitting on my chest, batting my right boob with his paw as if to say, "Let's get one thing straight, okay? I can hurt you." Anytime I stayed at the house after that, he'd spend the night walking up and down my inert form while the guy snored blissfully away unhindered. "I am the cat here," Boss said with his unblinking kitty eyes. "This is my boy. Do you hear me? Mine."



Maybe he figured out that I'm not a pet person. But I like to think that he was threatened by my grace and sophistication and was afraid he'd lose his boy to me, just because I don't have tuna breath and rarely torture mice.