It’s a battle to keep coming up with all the food for my feral cats every day. But I really enjoy it and get a lot of pleasure out of it. So I guess I’d call it more of a game than a battle. And in the 10 years that I’ve been feeding the little rugrats, there’s only been 2 or 3 days when I didn’t have enough food for them. On those days they looked at me like: “What the fuck, dude??” So I had to patiently explain to them that, no matter how many times they meowed at me, I still wasn’t going to be able to materialize any cat food out of thin air. But almost every other day I stuff them full of food.
Today I fed 5 big cats for $1. That’s the ideal. I like to keep the cat food budget at under $2 a day, or about $50 bucks a month. The feeding session started last night. Moo Cat was waiting for me at the foot of the trail by the road. And she really scored this time. I had a leftover dish of pasta from this Italian restaurant with big chunks of chicken slathered in this rich, gooey cheese sauce. As I was getting the food out, Moo Cat kept rubbing against my legs and purring loudly. And when I put the food down on the ground, Moo Cat was so excited she jumped right into the dish. Ha ha. I had to sit there along side her while she was eating to keep the raccoons from bullying her off the food. I work hard enough to get the food. I’m gonna make sure the damn cats get it!
In the morning the regular crew — Scaredy Cat, Mini Scaredy, and Mini Owl — were waiting at my campsite for their breakfast. They usually start meowing at me to wake up and feed them before it’s even light (and to hear them crying you’d think they were starving to death!). As much as I spoil my cats, this is the one area where I draw the line. You drink as much beer as me every night, you’re gonna wake up when you damn well feel like it. So I’ll pull my blankets over my head to drown out their anguished pleas and go back to sleep. But they’ll keep pestering me — their favorite trick is to sit right on top of my head — until I finally drag my carcass into an upright position.
Scaredy Cat always jumps right on top of my backpack where I keep the food. And I have to patiently explain to her that I can’t get the food out until she gets her fat ass off my backpack. First course today was a ground-scored chicken calazone. They went nuts for that (I think my cats have a little Italian in them). And then some leftover McDonald’s scrambled eggs and a sausage patty that someone had left on top of a garbage can (it’s amazing how much discarded food there is in this town). Then I dumped out some dry cat food (I buy a big bag of it at Safeway’s every month at bulk prices so it only costs pennies per serving). And for final course I opened up a 15 ounce can of mackerel that I get for a buck at the Dollar Tree. The salty, oily juice that comes with the mackeral is one of their favorite things to eat and they always go for that first, and lick up every drop. They’re not crazy about the mackerel, but they’ll eat it. I also had a carton of milk that I had found in a discarded bag lunch. And they lapped that all up, too.
Then Fatty showed up off in the distance. She’s afraid to come within 30 feet of my campsite because Mini Scaredy doesn’t like her and always runs her off. So I flung her a couple of ham-and-cheese sandwiches that I had ground-scored. That should keep her busy until the other cats were done eating. Then I took Fatty the leftover dish of food that the other cats didn’t want.
Then Moo Cat showed up off in the distance (like Fatty, she’s been banished from the tribe). So I brought her a plate of food. And again I had to stand guard while she ate because the wild turkeys were lurking and they’d run her off the food if I wasn’t there. Then Mini Scaredy came trotting over. She was already stuffed with food, but she wanted to run Moo Cat off the food just out of spite. Ha ha. So I had to shoo her off (poor ole Moo Cat, she gets shit from every direction).
And that pretty much ended the feeding session for today. But you can bet they’ll all be waiting for me again tonight.
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When me and Duncan used to do our vending table in front of Cody’s Books, our friend Christeen — who lived in the apartment building next door — used to often bring us food in the evening. Christeen loved to cook, and she was a great cook, so she’d bring us these delicious home-cooked meals. Food for the street people. Feeding the feral humans as it were. And she even developed this pulley system, where she could lower the dishes of food (wrapped in tin foil) down to us from her 4th floor apartment on a rope. And when Christeen’s head was hanging out the window of her apartment, looking down at me, I’d often get this image in my head of: “Rapunzel, throw down your golden home-cooked dinners!!”
Christeen always reminded me of this book title I once saw. “FOOD IS LOVE” (and you know what they say, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”). I always thought that’s how Christeen looked at food. As an expression of love. And I guess that’s the deal with me and my goddamn feral cats, too.
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Acid Heroes 