As many of you know, I currently live with one wife (the formidable Duchess) and five cats. Your reaction to the cat population in my house probably varies in accordance with your own pet population; some people have one dog or other reasonable number of small animals, reptiles, fish, or birds in their home, and think five is, like, way too many. Others have a whole second apartment they rent just to house their brood of pets, and they think we’re amateurs.
The main downside to having pets, for me, is worrying about them when we travel. As hard as I work to not go on trips (and The Duchess will tell you—at length—how good I am at being so terrible a travel partner that she thinks twice before suggesting we go anywhere these days), I’m still dragged from my comfortable home onto economy-plus flights to various places, and we have to get a small army of people to take care of the critters. Most recently we had to do this for the Christmas holiday as we visited The Duchess’ family in Texas, where we spent a pleasant afternoon watching Cary grant movies with her mother. One of those movies was Topper, and that’s a whole thing because when I was a kid I named my very first pet Topper because believe it or not, my brother and I were huge fans.
No, Seriously, It Was a Thing
So … you might be wondering what in the fuck a ‘topper’ is. It was a 1937 film starring Cary Grant, Constance Bennett, and Roland Young as the titular Cosmo Topper. Grant and Bennett play rich ‘jazzy’ types who live fast lives and torture Cosmo with their frivolity and devil-may-careness. When they die in a car accident, they return as ghosts to haunt Topper, and turn his life upside down.
It’s a light, very dated story, but it was hit and inspired several sequels and a TV series. When I was a kid, I was delighted by the way the ghosts would fade in and out; they’d often get Topper into a zany situation and then disappear when someone else walked in, making him look insane. Great fun!
Yes, my brother and I were weird.
Anyway, when I was a kid I also got Pet Fever, which happens. My parents fought the good fight. They knew that any animal brought into the house would quickly become their third child, and so they worked super hard to fight off my desire for a thing to love. One gambit that was temporarily effective was getting me a goldfish, which my brother and I named Topper in honor of my unusual favorite story at the time.
Topper was … a goldfish. He floated. He ate. He excreted this long, thin poops that fascinated us. That was basically it, but he was pretty. He didn’t live too long, which obviously means we had no fucking idea how to care for a goldfish. We basically just put him in a bowl, changed the water occasionally, and fed him with zero plan. When he died we were very sad and had a ceremonious burial, placing poor Topper in a baby food jar and burying him in the backyard. I still feel badly about Topper; when I realized that he died like, super young and it was probably because we were idiots, I had a few nightmares, and I fully expect that when I die and find myself in hell, Topper will be waiting to extract his revenge.
We then promptly got another goldfish, who died a week later. We went through another bunch of fish who all died promptly, and things began to get a little grim around the Somers house.
Enter Pissy
Speaking of weird pet names, around this time our next door neighbors, who were German and Yugoslavian, inherited their son’s cat. They didn’t want the poor thing, and left her down in their basement and gave her no attention whatsoever. I started visiting that cat every day and she was ecstatic to see me each and every time.
The name they gave her sounded to our American ears like Pisshy. So when I heard that they were going to get rid of her and campaigned to save her by adopting her, my parents (glancing at the growing graveyard of goldfish doom outside) wearily agreed with the stipulation that we could not, of course, continue to call her Pisshy. So we renamed her Missy, and all was well. I had my pet, and a lifetime preference for cats was born.
This is a long way of saying this is how you wind up with five cats: You kill a bunch of innocent goldfish through ignorance and a lack of Internet (I swear, if Google had existed in 1982 Topper might still be alive), you save a sad, lonely cat from someone’s basement, and then you deny your formidable wife a dog in 2003 and she agrees to settle for a cat, discovers she adores cats, and begins collecting them like she collects shoes.