Tribute to Leroy

The best word to describe him was regal, though other words come to mind: august, glorious, majestic, noble, proud, resplendent. Whether sunning himself on a shelf or strutting through his domain, he knew well how to carry himself. His tail a tall splendid plume as he marched from bedroom to dining room to kitchen to feast on his tender vittles, his soft pink foot pads tapping lightly on the linoleum, his mezzo-sopranic meows echoing through the empty house he guarded with his life. His name was Leroy, a white Turkish longhair cat with a couple of large brown spots, and he was our pet.

Born in that turbulent period of time we now refer to as the “early-70s,” he was subsequently abandoned into the violent grinder of the streets. His brother, Knickerbocker, had lost the tip of his tail in some unimaginable nightmare skirmish, but our pet found his way into our arms unscathed. In very short order he took an extreme liking to domestication. There was no hair brush, no nugget of soft table food, no paper bag worth exploring that he said “no” to. In fact, the only thing he did say “no” to was a bath.

One time he accidentally dipped his paw in his water dish; my brother and I hauled him room to room, his soggy limb dangling, resigned to such an ignominious fate, as we searched in dire panic for our mother. We found her, mourned that Leroy’s paw was wet, and she said, simply, “Just put him down.” Another time, during the hot Northern Jersey summer, we decided that Leroy should enjoy the freedom of the outdoors. Our pre-adolescent minds deduced that the best way to do this would be on a leash, like our neighbor’s dog was walked with. So we secured a loop of string around his neck, cut off about twenty feet of length, and took him outside. No, the cat’s neck didn’t snap, but it was the one and only time I saw a running feline do a backwards somersault.

As the years – and his belly – grew, he still retained regality, though perhaps of a type somewhat more “queenly” than “kingly.” By stages, he became more and more gentle, soft, then timid, arguably sissified, perhaps muliebral, possibly epicene. Perched atop his favorite window sill, keeping tabs on the birds who dared trespass on his lands, his girth swelling to fill the entire ledge, our cat ruled the apartment with the combined wisdom of the Old Testament deity and the goddess Gaia.

But I refute this alleged effeminacy in our pet! That cat could throw down with the best of them. He was brave and loyal to a fault. Never one to ignore the promise of an open door and a distracted human, he would swish out – I mean, rocket out – and sometimes disappear for days at a time. Those nights were unbearable; if you listened closely, you could hear the piercing, blood-curdling howls between the thunderclaps as felines did battle in our yard. Front legs declawed, Leroy needed a new tactic to defend his turf, and by gum that cat came up with one! He would fall on his back and kick out with his strong, chunky hindlegs, claws honed razor sharp from … well, they were sharp. Anxious and excited, my brother and I would scavenge the perimeter of our backyard early those following mornings, collecting tufts of white fur strewn about like an explosion in a cotton ball factory.

As we entered our teenage years, Leroy inevitably found himself in the crosshairs of those parties that happened not too infrequently when our parents were away for the weekend. Sometimes he made it through with only a blue magic marker moustache; sometimes he survived on toilet bowl water as we poured Zambuca in his dish to “get Leroy drunk”; most times he hid in secret places only he knew about. Perhaps a younger cat could have hung with us during those crazy 80s, but age was making its mark in his expanding torso and loss of grace. Once I assured everyone at a party that cats always land on their feet when dropped; sadly, this was not the case with the old sport.

College beckoned, and I saw less and less of my aging friend. Then, the inevitable. Leroy’s corpulence drastically disappeared; over a shockingly few months he grew thin, then emaciated. He lost command of his bowels, and we knew it was time. In some bizarre right of passage, I felt it my duty to take him to the vet that one last time. But I was not quite a man, yet, if by being manly one means suppressing all one’s feelings. That hard, cold November day we clawed at the frozen ground to put our friend in his taped-up cardboard coffin a foot or so under, next to his brother Knick, who passed away a few years earlier.

Images still – and always will – float through my mind every now and then of Leroy. How you would be playing cards on the floor and he’d nonchalantly walk over them, and pass gas as he passed. How we decided to “take Leroy for a Sunday drive” and the cat, terrified, crawled under the driver’s seat and released his bladder. How every Thanksgiving, which we assumed was his birthday ’cause that’s when we got him, I would brush him fifty or a hundred times, to his purring ecstatic delight. How we’d throw a paper bag under the Christmas tree, because if caught in the right mood he could spend a good chunk of time exploring it. The time when, as a young cat, he bit my brother, and my brother, as a young toddler, bit him back. The time when, also a young cat with young cat’s reflexes, he sniffed the corner of an end table. My mother kicked it, accidentally, and that cat leaped backwards lightning quick you’d think he heard a can of tuna being opened in the kitchen.

He was regal, though other words come to mind: august, glorious, majestic, noble, proud, resplendent. He was our pet, a great pet. Leroy was my friend.