Jackie's story about getting bitten by her cat reminded me of my own cat attack trauma. I even wrote a little story and submitted it to the NYT True Life Tales. John Hodgman declined to run it, saying it wasn't "funny or fresh enough" for the page, conceding that it's hard to find a fresh take on pet stories. I don't find all the essays they do run all that funny, but hey, sour grapes! I did appreciate Hodgman's taking the time to respond. And now that I reread it, I suspect he was right. But since it's been sitting around on my computer, I figured I'd just post it, even though the chances are you've all heard the story and even seen me reenact the episode, bared teeth and all.
______
Flight Plan
Everyone knows that people who incessantly tell stories about their pets are boring. Even the people who tell the stories know that. It’s like a sickness. Someone relates a funny story about how their dog rolled around in the neighbor’s dog poop and the next thing you know, you’re off on some tangent about your cat’s fondness for raspberry popsicles and curling right up next to you in bed. Still, sometimes pet stories just need to be told.
This one involves a trip my cat and I took from New York to Minneapolis, and from the beginning things didn’t go well. First of all, Augie is vocal to begin with, and he’s insufferable when stuffed into a small Sherpa carrier. Imagine an Alvin and the Chipmunks CD that keeps skipping at regularly high-pitched intervals. And then imagine it’s playing in your ear as you’re standing on a busy New York corner in the rain, waiting for an elusive Super Shuttle.
We spent 25 unhappy minutes running around the Financial District with my suitcase bouncing around behind me as I chased down not one, but three wrong blue and yellow vans. When the third driver told me he was going to Newark and not JFK, I kicked his tires and cursed myself for being so cheap in the first place. Finally, my shuttle showed up, and I started to relax as a friendly camaraderie developed among the six women flying out of the city. Augie and I were going to make it in plenty of time, and was it my imagination, or were the chamomile/verbena soothing drops finally kicking in? His meows were getting softer.
My tranquility didn’t last long. As we pulled up to the airport, I had flashbacks of my first and only flying trip with my cat. He had gone crazy and scratched up my back as he tried to escape during the security process. I figured the experience had conjured up his long-forgotten street skills, when he was a scrappy young cat fighting off the neighborhood boys in the suburbs of Washington. I adopted Augie after a friend found him doused in gasoline and being peppered with rocks by those prepubescent future serial killers. Despite that early trauma, though, he had turned out amazingly well adjusted. He wouldn’t even kill a Box Elder bug at home. Still, to avoid a repeat of the last airport incident, I comforted myself with the thought that I’d brought a leash AND chamomile.
I bid my traveling comrades goodbye, checked in, and set off for the security line. In vain, I asked the TSA worker if I really needed to take Augie out of his carrier to go through the metal detector, but she assured me I did, so I started to unzip it and put on his leash. It soon became apparent that this would not go well. Augie crouched low to the ground and began to fight his leash, bare his teeth, and essentially freak out, thrashing this way and that, and even hitting his head on a metal bar. It didn’t take him long to squirm out of the leash, so I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.
In a scene straight out of an amalgam of The Exorcist and Cujo, he twisted his head around with a crazed look in his eyes and bit my hand. I continued to hold him up and he bit my wrist. “Where is the carrier? Where is the carrier?” I shouted. Hadn’t I explicitly asked them if it was ready before I brought him through? “It’s in the machine!” they yelled, as everyone around us gasped at my bloody hand and possessed animal. My sweet, affectionate cat got one more bite in on my arm before I stuffed him back in his carrier. Had that just happened? I thought maybe I was going into shock. TSA personnel soon surrounded me and sprayed me with some kind of sanitizer and haphazardly wrapped gauze around my wrist.
As in any horror movie, though, the killer wasn’t down for the count, and if someone in the terminal had a video camera I can almost guarantee you would have seen the whole episode on the Internet. Augie’s head popped back out of the gap in the zippers and somehow he escaped and ran over to an exit door, trying mightily to open it (he’s usually pretty good at getting doors open. I’m not saying he’s gifted…but he might be).
I was torn. I thought maybe that was the end of the road for Augie and me. If it had been my husband carrying him to our new home in Minneapolis, I’m not sure the cat would have made it alive. But Augie was my cat, and I really didn’t have a choice: there were lots of witnesses, including a few children who seemed to be screaming in terror or excitement. One of the TSA workers approached him and tried to coax him back into his carrier. I went over to help and a few minutes later Augie was magically sealed back into his bag, panting heavily.
The Port Authority police showed up and I told them I was going to faint if I didn’t sit down. “Didn’t you eat anything today?” one of them asked. “Uh, yeah, I ate,” I responded, instantly feeling like a pansy. They insisted on calling an ambulance and several EMTs showed up to tend to my deep puncture wounds.
Luckily, my flight had been delayed, so I didn’t miss it. I also didn’t miss the anxious looks of other passengers as I finally got on the plane carrying an animal and looking like the victim of an animal attack—or a failed suicide attempt. Just as I was getting on the plane, a Northwest employee came down the ramp and told me her boss hadn’t wanted to let me on the plane with my cat, but she had talked him out of it since Augie was just scared. “Here,” she said, slipping something into my hand with a wink. “For your troubles.” As I sat on the plane, my foot clamped down on the zipper of the cat carrier and my hand grasping a glass of whisky, I amused myself by pondering all the ways I could spend that five-minute prepaid phone card.
