365 Days Since El Gato Primo Called it A Life.

Mr. Kitty was by far the coolest cat ever. He hit all the typical cat highlights. He was smart enough to solve problems; dumb enough to get stuck in places too small for him to fit, he approached everything in life with a berserker blood lust while at the same time remaining aloof and uninterested, and not quite asleep for eighteen hours a day. If Arnold Schwarzenegger could have pulled off Sean Connery’s James Bond in Dr. No cool with Nat King Cole’s voice, that would be Mr. Kitty. He was a fourteen pound badass tom in his prime. And like 007, he was always dressed to the nines. We didn’t get him fixed until he was almost two years old, so he had a chance to develop the tough tom cat skin and hyper tom cat aggression, but he left the psycho stuff at the door. MJ handled him like Elmira from Tiny Toons and he never scratched or bit her on purpose, at least not out of anger. If she was slow giving him something he wanted, generally off her plate, he would “remind” her that he was waiting. A feline polite clearing of the throat if you will – or even if you won’t. He did everything with a sense of dignity. He would hear me open a can of tuna from his post in the bedroom, but he wouldn’t come running, he would walk. It reminds me of the young bull looking down into a valley of cows and saying to the older bull, “Hey, lets run down there and f*^k one of those cows!” and the older bull schooling the young bull, “No, let’s walk down and f*$k them all.” That was Mr. Kitty’s vibe. In the pantheon of cool there’s Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, and Mr. Kitty. No one else can hang.