How to damage your child in one easy step.

My family was never one of those “pet families.” You know the type. Folks who name their animals with handles normally reserved for humans. The kind of families who will mercilessly let their dog or cat rot to pieces rather than having it dispatched in a more human way simply because “He’s a part of the family.”

Not that we didn’t like animals, it just seemed that we handled them in a far different manner than other families we knew. We seemed to have a revolving door of cats coming in and out of our house. We never actually went out and bought one or picked one up out a box marked “free kittens.”

“He adopted us,” my father would say.

Looking back on it now, I’m fairly certain that at some point in his life my father was jilted by an unfaithful family pet. He would keep these adoptive cats at emotional arms length by simply referring to them as “Cat.” Once when I was bout 12, we were adopted by a black cat with long vampire like fangs. I declared that we would name him Bella as I had just come off a Universal monster movie jag. It wasn’t long before Bella was just another “cat.”

As much as my father seemed to pretend that he had no connection to these animals I would come out into the back yard and find him conversing with another in a long line of “cats.”

“Where the fuck have you been Cat?”, He would ask as if it were a woman who had come home at 4:00 in the morning stinking of cologne.

After a days absence he would ignore Cat as if he was teaching the animal some sort of lesson for his or her transgressions. However, it wouldn’t be long before he was stooping to rub his putty knife behind the cat’s ears.

Perhaps it was his attitude a sort of self fulfilling prophecy but often the cats WOULD leave him for someone else. Once a cute and well-mannered black and grey cat disappeared for a few days. After some time she came waltzing into the back yard and my father played the same old game first yelling at her then turning his back as if his heart had been torn out. After the initial pain had subsided, he bent down to show his cheating bitch some affection. It was at this point that he could be heard screaming from the back yard, “What the fuck is this!? Where did you get this shit!?

Much to his horror the cat had been adorned with a collar presenting his name as Whiskers and ever worse…. A bell. She had been fucking around behind his back and actually had the nerve to show up wearing a gift from the adulterous piece of shit who had stolen her away. As far as I know that was the last time her ever opened his heart to a cat again.

Considering the fact that my father believed that house pets were nothing more than animals who could fend and provide for themselves it came as no surprise that he was almost never willing to spend any money on them. And he wonders why they always left him? Consequently our cats were never spayed or neutered and even worse he would often insist that he was perfectly capable of putting an injured or sick animal out of its misery. It would be this twisted belief that would often lead to interesting and horrifying situations.

When I was about 12 we had a male cat who was nothing short of apeshit. While in the house he would tear around the living room in circles moving at incredibly dangerous speeds. Behind the couch, under the TV, around the rocking chair. Round and round for hours at a time.

“Maybe we should have him neutered,” my mother would suggest as the cat tore over her yet again tearing a chunk out of her arm in the process.

“Bullshit,” my dad would volley “That’s a fucking waste of time. He’ll calm down when he gets older.”

Because they we’re free to come and go as they pleased this cat would often take off into the neighborhood with his swollen balls and invariably come back bearing the evidence of a tussle with another male cat or sometimes a small dog. Small chunks out of an ear or a couple of scrapes across the back but never anything life threatening. Fortunately for him, it was never anything that required veterinary attention. One evening as we sat watching Twin Peaks, my parents patiently listening as I laid out all the evidence which pointed directly to Laura Palmer’s true killer, we heard a sound which was not unlike an infant being drowned in pudding and gravel. It quickly became apparent that ‘Cat’ had gotten in a fight with something large and angry. A creature with no shortage of teeth or claws had handed ‘Cat’ his ass and it was almost certainly beyond being reattached.

There were copious amounts of blood flowing from a number of gaping crimson wounds. A missing ear, flaps of skin tenuously hanging from bits of sinew like ornament from a Christmas tree. It was the first time I had seen any gore of this caliber that wasn’t projected on a movie screen. I was all at once nauseated and fascinated. From the safety of my bed I listened to the cat scream all night long. Once morning had come my mother insisted that the cat be put out of its obvious misery. She pleaded in vain for the cat to be taken to a “proper facility” where they were “equipped to handle this sort of thing.” However, my dad would have nothing of it.

“fuck that! They’ll just charge me some sort of bullshit service fee. I can handle this myself.”

It was at this point that he hoped in the truck and took off for the hardware store to “equip himself to handle this sort of thing.” I had visions of hacksaws and blowtorches’ long-handled sledgehammers smashing cantaloupes. Unfortunately the reality of his plan would prove to be far more horrifying. Upon returning my dad carried two canisters of aluminum phosphide which in later years I came to know as nerve gas. My father explained to me in a matter of fact tone that this was the kind of stuff that golf courses used to control the gopher populations and was the most humane and painless method available for the dispatching of mangled cats in the home. Being a painter my father always had a large surplus of plastic five gallon buckets and was instructed to retrieve one from the shed.

“Paint can. Gas chambers,” it seems a natural progression to me. Considering that the next ten to fifteen minutes was one of those childhood defining moments which you desperately try to forget but always manage to remember I now envision it from a third person perspective as if I were watching a film about the kind of things you should under no circumstances expose your child to. In a few swift movements the gas canister was ignited and thrown into the bucket, quickly followed by the cat a plywood lid and a large. The promised quick and humane death was long and horrific we both stood paralyzed watching the bucket quake and rattle as the cat aware of its imminent demise threw its self about the confines of the bucket screaming as only a creature can when it knows its death is at hand.

After what seemed like an eternity the bucket grew silent and stopped moving at which point I allowed myself to exhale.

“Fuck!” my dad proclaimed. “That was a whole hell of a lot easier than I thought. Saved myself 15 bucks too.”

He looked down at me.

“Let’s dig a hole.”