The Cat Got Her Tongue ~ Based On A True Story

Going back to college days, and a house full of hippies – this is a true story about my roommates, and Rudy the crazy cat.

My third year in the nursing program in Calgary, I took out a student loan, and moved into a house with about eight others.

Before moving, my share of the apartment rental was sixty-five dollars a month. When I moved into the house, the rent dropped to thirty dollars a month. The house was full of laid back partying hippies, who did as little schoolwork as possible.

I would go to the hospital practicum, shoot some hoops, take a couple classes, and come home to find them all still sleeping. It was like they were in a different time zone. They jokingly made fun of me because I got up early and wore makeup.

One afternoon my roommates were already partying when I got home from school. One of the girls had a beloved cat named Rudy. I came in to find them all sitting on the floor in the kitchen in front of the oven laughing hysterically. They said, “Look! Rudy’s famous. He’s on T.V.”

They had put the cat in the oven without turning it on. The oven light was on, so they could see him in there, and pretend he was on television. They found it to be hilariously entertaining.

His owner Robin would habitually put food in her mouth, chew it up, and then stick her tongue out so Rudy could eat food off her tongue. It was kind of gross in a way. 

I had nothing against cats, but this one was molded into the most outrageous pet I had ever seen. He was an acidic cat, a hippy, trippy, college cultured citified tomcat, compared to the feral kitties back on the farm. Robin’s mouth was his dish, and he seemed totally cool with that. 

When they let him out of the oven though, he went completely psychotic. I asked roommate Tom if they had given Rudy a hit of acid. He said, “ I dunno, he’s acting like it”. Robin and the rest of us had moved into the living room to watch Rudy go berserk.

After racing around the room, then jumping straight up and clinging on the blinds, he leapt from the table to a bookshelf.

Then suddenly he stopped the manic movements, and sort of crouched on the top of the bookshelf. He had positioned himself above, and behind where Robin was laying on the floor talking and laughing.

He stared at Robin for a couple of seconds with bulging eyes. Then like a true hunter, he tensed up, and took a flying leap through the air, and landed right on her face, with all his claws out. He scratched her face, and bit her lip, and tongue.

For Robin, his feat was a sandbagger right out of the blue. He had never acted like that before. He was generally quite docile. Cat psychologists can only speculate (not that I am one) why Rudy did that? He loved Robin and vice versa.

After he jumped on her face, she stopped letting him eat chewed up food off her tongue. I don’t think they put him in the oven again either.

But even so, there were cat hairs in the oven for quite some time.

Another roommate cat story, was equally bizarre, but not funny. We were living in a small log cabin up north, working our first jobs in the local hospital, after we graduated. 

The cabin was very old. It had a dark cellar with a wobbly wooden staircase, and a dirt floor. I never once went down there to even look around. We kept the door closed tight. 

I came home from working a night shift, and noticed the door to the cellar was ajar. I heard a strange sort of gurgling sound. I was totally freaked out, wondering what was down there.

The door was slowly creaking open. I peered into the cellar, and looked to where the noise was coming from. On the top stair there was a mangy, half dead cat. It had a huge wound on its’ head and face. It looked infected, deformed, and absolutely grotesque. At first I was not even sure what kind of animal it was. 

My first thought was that it had been down there the whole time, and took three months to crawl to the top of the stairs. It was kind of horrific, wondering what happened to it, and how it got in the cellar?

My roommate had days off, and had been out partying the night before. I called her, and excitedly told her this cat had been in the cellar. To my surprise she said, “I know, I put him there, until I can get a bed, and some antibiotics for him.”

I said, “What! You brought this half dead, infected cat home with you from the party?” She said she had found him on a trail to the outhouse. Apparently some guy had shot the cat in the face a week or so prior to her finding it.

I asked her what she was going to do with the cat, and told her it needed to be put out of its’ misery. There was no way it could get better. His jaw was shattered, so he could not eat at all. It was dripping with pus, and looked miserable.

We ended up having a big fight about the cat. Brenda was determined to nurse it back to health. She grew up in the city, and in my opinion, was not the least bit realistic.

The following day, she went to the hospital and brought home some supplies for the cat. She had a couple of syringes, antibiotics, and other paraphernalia to treat the cat. She got a box, lined it with an old blanket, and put the cat in it. When she tried to feed it, the milk would run out of the gaping hole in its jaw, along with dripping pus.

It got to the point, I told her, in all fairness, the cat had to be euthanized. She was not doing it any favours. She got really mad at me for being so callous, and cried, “You just don’t care about the poor cat.” I told her, “I am not the one who shot the cat in the face.” “Go blame the guy who shot him. Everyone knows who did it”.

After we had the big showdown, she finally agreed, the cat could not survive, and was dying slowly. It could not eat, see, or swallow, and was starving on top of everything else. 

Once we made the decision, we did not know who to call. There was no vet in the town to properly euthanize it. So we called the RCMP.

A few minutes after we called, a young RCMP officer came and knocked on our door. Brenda was cradling the cat, and sobbing. She handed it to him, like it was a baby. The look on his face was priceless.

He did not want to take the cat, and get pus and mangled hair all over himself, and his car. So he gently said to her, “Can I have the box? “And umm err – would you mind putting him in the box for me?” She obliged, and put the cat in the box, before handing it to him a second time. 

He was very professional about the odd request, and took it somewhere outside of town, to end its’ sad life. Sometimes the police or fire department get calls to rescue cats. But this one was the opposite. 

After trying to feed it a few times with an eye dropper, and then a syringe, Brenda understood it could not survive the injury.

We got over the disagreement, and carried on. We never brought it up again. Thankfully.