The Story of Neelix

“Your son needs a therapist,” I told my husband, Bobby, when he came home.

“That’s what the vet said, he needs a therapist?”

“A behavioral therapist.”

It was no surprise. Just the previous week, Bobby had called me at work to tell me he could barely get into the house. “Your son knocked over the lamp and it blocked the front door like a barricade. I had to go in through the back door. And the stereo speakers were knocked off the shelf.”

Again, it was no surprise. He had also knocked a Pyrex tray of brownies off the kitchen counter, broke four sugar bowls, two glasses, a telephone, and a half dozen plates and saucers. If he can reach them – and somehow he does – he swings the photographs and bulletin boards on the wall until they come crashing down. Entire jars of spaghetti sauce have gone flying. I rush into the kitchen to find glass marinara.

I don’t know why he’s destroying our house when we have been the most superlative, doting parents to him. We took him in as an orphan when he was three weeks old and near death. We spared no expense to nurse him back to health. He sleeps in our bed, entwined in our hair.

He demands and receives three to four cans of whipped cream a week, and it cannot be a cheap brand. It must be the extra creamy with the blue top. What better life could a cat want?

We were living in a rented house surrounded by woods and I was employed in the job of my dreams, editor and jack-of-all-trades at a community newspaper. The work was a pleasure, the people in the office not so much. Many publishing jobs are not about producing a good, entertaining newspaper that equally inspires and enrages the citizens. Too many are about selling advertising and enriching the owners, and anything controversial in the paper that might lose a single advertiser becomes a crucible.

The first year, the managing editor who hired me was on my side. Then he left and I was fighting the good fight alone and suspected every issue would be my last. I survived one more year without him. As a comfort against the misery of knowing my days were numbered at the greatest job I ever had, I took home a cat who was hanging around outside the office. Lola was not the least bit attractive. Her coat had a little bit of every color in the cat hair universe, and the choice of colors around her face made her look dirty. But she had a great personality, friendlier than any of our three cats. She slept in our bed from the first night.

Before I realized how much I was going to like Lola, and how well she would fit in with our other cats, I wrote a story about her for the newspaper. Several people offered to adopt her. Then I got a call from a woman who claimed Lola was her son’s cat and actually named Harry, although it was a female. It seemed likely since they lived on the other side of the woods behind the newspaper office.

My heart sank when I returned Lola to them because it wasn’t a good environment for her. This woman and her small son were feeding a feral cat colony that lived in the woods. Lola, aka Harry, was the only tame cat in the colony and because the little boy could touch her, she was his favorite and mom wanted the favorite back. Lola had no chance of a good life in this environment, but I could hardly turn around and run off with her. The woman knew where I worked. I figured Lola would find her way back to the newspaper office and this time I would take her and tell no one. But she didn’t return until after I was fired. Employees I kept in touch with would send me emails about Lola-sightings from time to time. When I heard she was limping around and might have been injured, my heart broke, but I was still so humiliated at having been fired from the one job I was really good at, I couldn’t be seen hanging out there, waiting for Lola to show up. That was too pathetic.

All this set me up for Neelix, that and a charming little video of a fuzzy gray kitten falling asleep in a sitting position and then toppling over. Brenda, a co-worker at a former job, emailed it to me, with the note that she just happened to have a kitten that looked exactly like the one in the video and needed to find a home for it.

The kitten had the kind of desperate history that made it impossible for me to say no. Brenda’s son found a litter in the warehouse where he was working that summer. All the kittens were dead except for two. The mother was nowhere in sight. The boy brought both of them home, but Brenda already had two cats, so she carried them to the county shelter.

The next morning she had misgivings, so she called the shelter to retrieve them. One kitten had died during the night but the other was still alive, and barely. She picked him up and took him to the vet, got medicine for his worms and various ills and washed the fleas off him. When her husband put his foot down, she emailed me. (The next year she got rid of the husband.)

I met her in a shopping mall parking lot halfway between our houses. She handed me the tiny kitten, all his medicine, and wished me luck. He raced around in the cage all the way home, screaming to get out, until he had a small bowel accident, and then he settled down, confused about what had just happened.

We named him Neelix after a character in Star Trek: Voyager. There’s Neelix, a lizard-looking man, and then there’s another guy back on Earth who named his cat Neelix, and if you’re a Trekkie, you understand what I just said, and if not, then I’m sorry. I let my husband pick the name since naming privileges would make it easier for him to accept a fourth cat in the house. It worked.

I spent the next few weeks frantically calling vets to find the closest one opened at all hours of the day and night because Neelix was always on the verge of dying. His breathing was labored, his nose and eyes oozed green gunk. He slept either on my pillow next to my head or in a little bed full of Beanie Babies that were bigger than he was. Two different vets thought I was crazy trying to keep this kitten alive. There were plenty more kittens if I wanted one. And once the nasal cavity is damaged, it’s permanent. He would always be sickly, I was warned.

But we convinced ourselves that since Neelix has never felt fine, he doesn’t know he’s sick. If he could live this way, breathing noisily like Darth Vader, we could deal with it. Neelix had no idea how to eat and would stick his whole face in the food, and then open his mouth, so we were constantly wiping dried food out of his nose. The only food he would eat was the cheapest, a Wal-Mart brand called Special Kitty, so for the next few years, we were regular Wal-Mart customers, buying out their cat food inventory because Neelix had to eat every time he woke up and the food had to be fresh out of the package. If things weren’t perfect, he howled and knocked things over.

I had hoped one of the female cats would adopt him, but none of them would have anything to do with him, so whatever kittens learn from their mothers, Neelix didn’t learn. For a sickly kitten, he was a dynamo of destruction, as if he had to represent for his entire doomed litter.

Prior to being fixed, Neelix developed an intense relationship with a stuffed orange pig doll about the size of his head. He would carry Orange Pig around in his mouth, howling at the same time through clenched teeth. Then he would hump whatever pillow or blanket was available, holding on tightly to Orange Pig. We thought this would cease after his operation, but he and Pig still carried on, especially at bedtime. As soon as we shut down the house for the night, Neelix would find Pig and carry it up the stairs and join us in bed, humping the blankets in a manic little dance. Sometimes Bobby would get aggravated and wrest Pig out of Neelix’s mouth and toss it across the room.

We miraculously found a second, identical Orange Pig at Target, but Neelix made it disappear, probably by dropping it into a wastebasket. Pig was his sexual release and he took care of it. He’d leave it in his empty food bowl, or in his old Beanie Baby bed. Sometimes he’d put it in my purse or the bath tub. Pig is still with us, years later, always available for his next anxiety attack. At night, when we suddenly hear him making that strange yowling somewhere in the house, we’ll say simultaneously, “He’s got Pig.”

As for getting on the kitchen counters and knocking everything off, there was no cure. We kept water pistols and spray bottles at hand, but they only distracted him for the moment. Loud noises didn’t bother him. He was the only cat who didn’t run from the vacuum cleaner. In fact, he ran toward it. He followed it along as I vacuumed from room to room. I thought maybe he was deaf, but every time I brought up the possibility, Bobby would make a noise and Neelix would turn his head to look. I think he just feels the noise. You can sneak up behind him and grab him. He never hears you coming.

Sometimes when we are cleaning up yet another mess he made, we speak the unspeakable. Maybe we should find another home for Neelix, but how could we knowingly inflict him on anyone? It would be like giving a weapon of mass destruction as a gift. And the next unwary owners might not be so accommodating. I’ve heard of people putting cats down because they sprayed, which Neelix does.

But he is the only one of our rescued cats that lifts his front legs up when we come home and literally hugs us around the neck. Until the second crowd of cats came, he was the only one who slept in the bed with us, wrapped around our heads, purring like a motorized fur hat. You wouldn’t give away a bad child, and the cats were our children.

Neelix has no sense of direction. Whenever he managed to get out of the house, he’d take off for the woods, and then had no idea how to get back. When he was tired of exploring, he’d just sit wherever he was and look sad.

So an escaped Neelix was always a disaster we needed to attend to right away. Finding a small gray cat in an acre of dense underbrush and woods is no easy task, especially when he won’t answer you or come when he’s called. One day while I was searching the woods, I noticed the cars on the highway in front of our house had all come to a stop for no reason and were honking. I ran out to find Neelix sitting in the middle of the road, not moving, sad, lost, and oblivious to the line of cars waiting for him to get out of the way.

Another time, we searched for hours and found no sign of him. I put a transistor radio on a chair in the woods, hoping the music would draw him back toward the house. (Yes, I know. I do stuff like that even though I think he’s deaf.)

“Well, maybe it’s for the best if he’s gone for good, he’s so much trouble,” I sighed, which upset Bobby. He didn’t want me to see him cry, so he went back inside the house to take a break from searching.

I stayed outside and prayed that wherever Neelix was, my guardian angel would pick him up and drop him back into our yard because even though he was an ordeal, I didn’t think Bobby could stand to lose him. It would traumatize him and our relationship. Things would change between us, like a marriage goes sour when a child dies. One person is always harboring blame against the other.

I said my amens, and just then the motion detector light on the shed turned on. I turned around and there was Neelix, in the center of a pool of light, crouched down and looking sad, as if an angel had just picked him up and dropped him in our yard.

If you would like to donate to Neelix's cancer treatment, go here.