Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

As for this author doll, what is to say? She leads a dull life compared to mine. She now hangs out in Fort Worth with the same husband, Sam the "D” (as in Douglas), she’s had since they met acting in some play in St. Paul. He is an artist who makes unique acrylic kaleidoscopes. Ho-hum. If I want to see something colorful running around in a circle, I would prefer a spray-painted punk gerbil. This writing doll also collects dainty vintage clothes, which are not good for anything but running my nails through, at which point she gets hysterical for some reason.

Unhappily, I am not the sole feline in her life; also count two alley bozos, Longfellow and Panache (sixteen and fifteen pounds respectively—no threat to my heavyweight title), and a pair of platinum Persian purebred dolls, Summer and Smoke, who are more than somewhat luscious, but have undergone this awful involuntary operation and pay me no mind at all. Their loss.

But there is only one top cat in Las Vegas and in this Douglas dame’s books. Remember that, and I will refrain from reminding you by initialing your epidermis.

 

   Very Best Fishes,

                                                           Midnight Louie, Esq.

 

If you’d like information about getting Midnight Louie’s free Scratching Post-intelligencer newsletter by mail or email-attached color PDF, contact Carole Nelson Douglas at PO Box 331555, Fort Worth TX  76163-1555. Email cdouglas@catwriter.com, or visit www.carolenelsondouglas.com and wishlistpublishing.com.

Tailpiece

Carole Nelson Douglas Strikes Back

 

First of all, Louie’s description of our relationship should be called a “Tall Tailpiece.” He owes his current fame and good fortune solely to my literary efforts. In fact, Midnight Louie was on the auction block for a dollar bill when I found him in 1973 in the fine print of the classified ads.

This “big, black Tomcat” was obviously a handsome fellow, and just as obviously had been a discipline problem. His current custodians described “a con artist and eighteen pounds of cuddly pussycat, very versatile and equally at home on your new couch or in your neighbor’s old garbage can.” They admitted that he’d been reared on “purloined goldfish” and claimed that he “understood,” but didn’t speak, English.

All they asked was that Louie’s new keepers allow him roaming room and that he remain the ladies’ man he (also obviously) always was. Unsure where a roué like Louie would fit in the Family Life section where I wrote feature stories, I called his foster parents for an interview.

They were frank to a fault. At two a.m. one morning, Louie had attached himself to the wife near the Coke machine at a respectable Palo Alto motel where Louie was copping carp when he wasn’t playing gigolo with the female guests. The motel manager was about to change his place of residence from goldfish pond to city pound. So the infatuated wife air-freighted Louie (in a borrowed puppy transport he much despised) to St. Paul.

Once there, Louie accosted her lawyer husband; tried to molest their altered Siamese female, Pooh; engaged in a rumble with the resident Hoover vacuum; and decided that the litter box was the nearest route to China but no place to commit an act of personal hygiene.

Soon the couple noticed that domestic security had reduced Louie to a mere fifteen pounds, as well as their apartment to rubble. They advertised, at length. Readers were shortly clamoring to adopt the disreputable feline. Louie graduated to an obscure, bucolic existence after I wrote my feature story. My first mistake was letting Louie loose in his own words for most of the piece.