“Oh, honey; look how cute he is!” said my wife, Kim, while pushing her phone into my face with a picture of a small, softball sized fluffy orange hairball. “He’s a rescue cat from Palm Springs named Cheeto that was found in a hole in the desert. He’s already been neutered, and he needs a home; can we adopt him?” A rescue cat with a backstory posted on the Internet looking for a nice suburban home to move into already sounded dubious to me. Also, she asked as if she needed my permission for anything – Kim is going to do what Kim wants to do anyway, especially when it comes to cats. She grew up with cats and so I knew that it really was only a matter of time before she got what she wanted. My cat-free days were numbered.

Kim started scrolling through the plethora of pictures of Cheeto-the-homeless-feral-long-haired-orange-tabby-kitten-found-in-a-hole-in-the-Palm-Springs-desert like he was some A-List celebrity. “Awe, look at him sleeping!” She turned her phone toward me again. I really couldn’t make out his head from his tail and it reminded me of a furry creature from a Star Trek episode titled, The Trouble with Tribbles. Yes, he was undeniably cute. No, I didn’t want to adopt him or any other cat for that matter because it would interfere with my scheme to eventually be a pet-free household so we could travel the world extensively without worrying about any animals back at home.

“I miss not having a cat and Bagheera has been gone for 4-years now.” Bagheera was a fluffy black cat that had lived an indoor life of ultimate leisure with us for 17-years and was from a litter of kittens from another rescue cat named Avalon that Kim “found” wandering around the neighborhood. I sensed a pattern here. “Besides, Sydney needs a playmate.” Sydney is an Aussie-Doodle dog that Kim also “found” on the Internet.

Kim met up with an anonymous woman – who I was sure was a typical low-level Internet con artist – at a local park. Kim got the dog, and our bank account took an unexpected four-figure hit. Easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission, I suppose. Oh, and no documentation for the dog to prove her pedigree or vaccinations…not even a paper receipt for the cash transaction. I’m sure the anonymous dog peddling woman claimed the cash as income on her 2018 federal tax return.

And so, this is how Kim set me up for the Cheeto trap…

“We can drive down to Palm Springs on Sunday and have a nice lunch and Mai Tai’s at the Tommy Bahama Marlin Bar on the strip, then we’ll go over to meet Cheeto. If we like him, we can take him home.” She knew she had me at Mai Tai’s at Tommy Bahama’s. I caved. Kim called Cheeto’s foster parents and arranged the itinerary.

On the Saturday afternoon before we were planning our road trip to the desert to meet this homeless kitten, Kim said that she got a call from Cheeto’s foster parents and they had to change their schedule, and we had to pick up Cheeto before 10:00 AM on Sunday. Damn, the Tommy Bahama Marlin Bar doesn’t open until 11:00. Also, there was no way I was going to show up at a bougee bar for some day drinking in the triple digit desert heat with a kitten in a carrier; it would just be too hot for the little guy. Also, I didn’t want to field any nosey inquiries about Cheeto from any curious onlookers. I was immediately reminded of the quote “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” (translated) from To a Mouse by Robert Burns. Or was it that I was actually tricked? The jury is still out for deliberation on this.

It was a breezy 80-MPH early morning drive to the Coachella Valley, and at around 9:00 AM we met with Cheeto’s foster family, who were very nice people. They had other siblings from Cheeto’s litter that were also very cute, but Cheeto was the cutest of the litter with his long, striped, flaming orange coat and his already magnificent orange striped fluffy tail. Looking at him, what immediately came to my mind was that he is a warrior Viking Kattuz and he should have been named something more appropriate like Ragnar or Frode or Gorm. But since he already had a brand name, I didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of the legal system’s rebranding process and deal with its legions of lawyers and reams of paperwork plus it would be too stressful for him to go before a judge at such a young age to plead his case.

We donated some money to Cheeto’s foster humans to help cover the costs of his surgery and his room and board in Palm Springs, popped the little orange fluffball into a cat carrier that we brought along with us, and were on our way back home before 10:00 AM.

A tear rolled down my face as we drove past the exit for the Marlin Bar.

Twenty minutes into the drive, Kim took Cheeto out of his carrier and held him in her lap all the way home. They bonded while I was driving down the Interstate trying to avoid the sea of idiotic Prius and Tesla drivers going exactly 65-MPH while everyone else around them was going 80. We got home around noon.

Our dog of questionable origins, Sydney, went bonkers when we introduced her to Cheeto. Syd had never seen a kitten before and I believe, at first, she thought Cheeto was a new play toy…until the claws came out. The yelp that Syd let out the first time she got impaled on her nose by a sharp kitten claw was both of pain and astonishment.

Now the real fun begins – raising another kitten. The thing about kittens is that they have no sense of time, and they seem to only have three modes; sleep (80%), eat (2%), and play (18%). Three modes and no schedule means that anything can happen at any time of day or night.

If kitty wakes up at 2:00 AM and wants to play, kitty is going to pounce on your head or on your face or walk up and down your body with remarkably heavy paws for such a small animal. This nocturnal behavior was not exclusive to victimizing the humans in the house – Syd got her fair share of harassment too. Turns out that this little kitten found in a hole in the desert was an insomnia inducing, circadian rhythm killing fluffball from the Viking underworld.

You might be asking; how fluffy is he? For starters, he has thick fur growing out between the pads of his paws that requires constant trimming, or else navigating the hardwood floors is more like ice skating than walking. The long, downy soft fur under his belly turns into baby dreadlocks if you don’t brush it regularly, which he absolutely hates. He has tufts of long fur coming out of his ears like a 90-year-old man. But it is his tail that takes the cake; it is a tail of such enormity that it is nearly the size of his body, and he struts around the house with it proudly waving high in the air and with such dignity that it borders on arrogance.

I’m surprised we haven’t received a notification from the city to get a permit for his glorious tail (effectively a tail tax), but I’m sure somewhere deep within the bowels of city hall, a bureaucrat sitting beneath a flickering fluorescent light is scheming.

Cheeto developed his own little parkour course in the bedroom between the upper and lower levels of the nightstand, our bed, and the dresser, Sydney’s donut shaped bed, and the windowsills. Rattling the horizontal shades in the wee hours of the morning is his personal favorite. It is his way, I think, of saying, “Wake up hoomans – it’s time to play NOW!” This feline reveille is when the 18% play factor feels more like 100%.

We tried to discourage him from his naughty nocturnal behavior with a spray bottle filled with tap water mixed with a little bit of white vinegar, but instead of dissuading him from his little night terror habit, he gamified it. For example, he will rattle the blinds and look over at me to see if I was reaching for the spray bottle. As soon as I motioned that I was arming myself, he would dive under the bed…and then he would come back up and do it again within 5-minutes. Every now and then when I was stealthy enough to hit my moving furry orange target he would scurry off to some dark corner of the bedroom, and after sulking for maybe 5-minutes, he would start all over again. I think he actually liked getting nailed with the spray bottle.

And if you make the mistake of wiggling your toes while you’re sleeping or hanging your hands or feet outside of the blanket, Cheeto will quickly remind you of his presence with a fang or a claw – not in a vicious way, mind you – but man, has he interrupted some good REM sleep sessions. One minute I’m sailing the ocean blue toward an emerald-green tropical island and the next minute I’m being attacked by a Kraken.

We tried closing him out of the bedroom too. It took him about 30-seconds to realize that he could reach under the bottom of the door and hook it from the inside with his claws and rattle it. The problem is that he has no musical rhythm and it made it impossible to incorporate his door rattling with any piece of music that I could think of while trying to lull myself back to sleep. It seemed as if we had a little orange monster in the hallway. I think if we had a levered door handle instead of a round doorknob, he would figure out how to open the bedroom door in a nanosecond. Don’t think that he hasn’t rattled the doorknob too!

Cheeto has developed some unusual dietary habits. He does not like any canned cat food at all. He has rejected every brand on the market; sorry Morris, you’re apparently a mislead spokescat. But Cheeto does love his Lickables, that is, as long as it does not have chunks in it. If it has chunks, he’ll lick around them. He also loves…wait for it…raw asparagus! One day we were bringing in the groceries and temporarily put the grocery bags on the kitchen counter. One of the bags had a bundle of asparagus in it. Cheeto hopped up on the counter and beelined it to that grocery bag, dove into it, pulled out the bundle of asparagus and started chomping the tips off of the stalks. Needless to say, we had to change our dinner menu. What a weirdo.

Cheeto has also developed an unhealthy obsession for plastic bags and not just for playing with; he chews on them and bites off and swallows chunks of them. One day he was not feeling well and was vomiting here and there. Finally, a cat sized bite of plastic sheeting came up and he felt better. We forensically matched it with a bite taken out of a recently delivered Amazon package. I think this also indicates that Cheeto has microplastics in his body. We are now in the habit of keeping all plastic bags away from him but mostly for selfish reasons like not wanting to step in any more cat vomit with bare feet and not wanting to take him to the vet for emergency abdominal surgery at 2-AM.

In our efforts to make life enjoyable, we have purchased many cat related products like catnip laced stuffed toys, plastic balls with bells and feathers, an oversized fake cheese puff bag that crinkles when you touch it, balls of twine, and a laser pointer. A friend of ours gifted Cheeto a nice multi-tiered cat tower replete with scratching posts, a perch, and all sorts of dangly things to bat around. He loves it.

One day Kim brought home a tape roll core made of thick cardboard and casually tossed it onto the living room floor. Cheeto lost his mind for about an hour pouncing, batting, kicking, and chasing that thing around the house. The problem was that he also liked to pounce, bat, kick, and chase that thing around in the wee hours of the morning. This is what happens when you’re a spoiled suburban housecat with an all-access pass and zero rules.

I considered sending Cheeto off to a fancy boarding school somewhere like Shortridge Academy, New Hampshire, Hurtwood House School, United Kingdom, or Collège du Léman, Geneva, Switzerland, to knock off the rough semi-feral edges and polish him up a little bit but after seeing the outrageous tuition of those places I immediately changed my mind as it would quickly land me in bankruptcy court.

On the upside, Cheeto does have a sweet, loving side to him. He likes hanging out on the living room couch with us. He’ll nudge your hands relentlessly to encourage you to pet him. Sometimes he even cuddles with Sydney.

So, we’ll just keep our diamond in the rough gato diablo as he is and adjust our lives accordingly (as per usual) because we do love him despite his lack of a formal education and his overabundance of antics.

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