Hearing about Martha Stewart losing her cat today got me thinking. It sure is fun giving your pets people names. In my single digits I was blessed to have a chicken named “Kevin”; he loved to roam the neighborhood and harass the Schwan’s Man. As if being known as the “Schwansman” wasn’t humiliating enough. Many a summer’s night around “supper time” the neighbors would hear my tiny voice calling out for “KEVIN” (kiss-kiss sound) “Kevin!” And that chicken would always stop what he was working on and come flying down towards our modest cul-de-sac for the evening. I look on those sweet days fondly(getting misty). But one day in my ninth year I beckoned, and Kevin never appeared. For weeks my older sister Shannon claimed that our neighbor, the voodoo tinkering witch who ran the H.R. department at Saks, had gotten him. So after that I would picture Kevin up in heaven being fast friends with Lisa Bonet’s character in “Angel Heart”. And that was good enough for me. 

But I swore that if I ever procured another animal it would have a gosh darn human name. So now I introduce “Ted the cat” from the first 5 chapters of Cooked in LA. Life can be tough for an autistic feline who has changed homes 8 times. Most cats are permanently grooming, Ted couldn’t care less. On Bastille Day 1998 we decided to make a purchase intended to give his life some life. “The Litter Box - Litter Robot” came with a 90 day money back guarantee and 2 replaceable rakes. The idea is that this contraption is a self cleaning kitty box. Twice a day the Litter Robot beeped a small sound to alert the house cat that its rake was about to do a fly by to clean the box. Ingenious, right! Three consecutive days after the purchase my wife and I did a happy dance after getting home from the long work day to find a completely clean box, more perfectly raked than an Asian garden. Ted looked worried, but that wasn’t new.

It was that forth day I’ll never forget. Ew, the horror! I knew something was wrong when an odd mix of fluoride and feces entertained my nostrils as I jiggled the lock. On the other side of that door stood what looked like the remains of a contained 5 day petting zoo rave and a feline version of downtown Beirut. Matted clumps of kitty hair and 3 days of dumplings decorated every inch of the carpet. Much of the Litter Robot’s “special” litter was still air-born awaiting inhalation. Ted was in the corner bashfully licking his Bastille Day gift; they appeared almost connected at the waist. After some investigation, I discovered that with his parents off at work, Ted decided to grab a relaxing session with his new kitty box. At precisely this time the Little Robot figured it was all systems go for a cleaning. Ted didn’t hear the beeping. As the slow rake approached our squatting kitty he must have been going over a to do list in his head. Time surely stood still as Ted’s tail got rolled up in the Litter Robots mechanisms. A confused and furious fit ensued and Ted flipped and dragged that box of poo all over our apartment, deciding at one point to try and ditch the attachment in the bathroom. How in the hell he picked up the open tube of toothpaste I’ll never know.

Ted successfully made 5 more moves with us sporting his new cat hearing aid. That was the only apartment that gladly held on to our appartment security deposit. Really that was just the beginning of the fun we enjoyed with Ted “the human named” Cat. If he had only known that he would become a character in a book maybe he wouldn’t have planted those drugs on me.

Paul Cook

CookedinLA.com