The Life and Times of Cerebus Hobbes Welch

Cerebus is named Hobbes for a week, because everybody who read the newspaper in the 90s has an instinctive urge to name cats Hobbes. At the end of that week, I remember I’d always meant to name my next pet Cerebus, so Hobbes is shunted to middle name status. There are few fictional characters more divided in temperament: a pseudo-imaginary, endlessly thoughtful stuffed tiger, and a baby-killing barbarian aardvark. From there his name evolves as pet names do. Cerey. Cer. Cerbussey. Cerey McBerrybus. Cerbus. Cereeeebus. Snail Bus. Cere Berry. Berry. Cere Bear. Bear. Baby Bear. Cerebus Hobbes Welch. CH Dubs. Chubs. Disgusting Monster. Most people call him Cerberus, being more familiar with three-headed hellhounds than barbarian aardvarks. Some hospital staff make heroic attempts with CeREEbus.

I meet Cerebus in March of 2002 before he opens his eyes. A grade school friend I’d reconnected with in college had some house cats, and one of them had given birth, so she invited me to adopt one. I pick out Cerebus instantly, to the amusement of the surrounding humans: Out of four roommates, three cats, and five kittens, I’d pointed to the only male mammal in the building besides me.

Most cats I’ve adopted have an adjustment period, where they scurry around the corners and hide under the bed for a few days before they’re comfortable enough to mingle. Cerebus sleeps on my pillow the night he moves in. Most nights he jumps up on my bed right after I turn out the light, and pushes his way under my arm.

The defining characteristic of Cerebus the Tiny Kitten are his enormous balls. Everybody notices the fuzzy yellow blueberries adorning his backside, and everybody comments. Even the person who ultimately cuts them off comes out to tell me, “Those are the biggest goddamn balls I’ve ever seen on a cat.”

Cerebus becomes an outdoor cat by accident. College is over, I am freshly evicted and semi-employed, and the best thing to do seems to be move into my parents’ garage apartment while I save up money to get to a city.

My mom is working as executive director at a local non-profit, and is in the early stages of consolidating power, and I had taken over her secondary office, so she is often rushed and annoyed in the morning. One morning she bursts in, grabs something she needs, and neglects to shut the door behind her.

I panic. I print the lost cat posters up around town in two hours. The cashier at The Hancock Grocery swoons at the sight of him. I don’t even think to ask her out.

I leave a window open for him and have dinner, nervously checking the windows at my parents’ house when the rain starts. By the time I get back I can hear him meowing from the upstairs. I dry him off and decide if he knows where home is, he can go outside. He knows the sound of my bass, so when I need to go to bed and shut the windows, I play a few low notes and he’s home a few minutes later.

Thus does Cerebus the Tiny Kitten become Cerebus the Death Bringer.

In the beginning I don’t even know he’s hunting. One day, several weeks after his newfound freedom, I step on something that upon further investigation proves to be a dead mouse.

“Good Cerey,” I say, unaware of the devastation. I grab a paper towel and bend down to pick it up and throw it away. Upon bending over, I see a dead vole under the couch. Upon retrieving the vole, I see two more mice and another vole.

37 dead rodents later, I line up a few victims on the ground outside the front door, grab Cerebus by the scruff of his neck, push his head at them, and say, “There! Leave them there!”

From that moment on, every morning I find three or four new bodies in that exact spot outside the door. God alone weeps at the number of bodies Cerebus left in the woods.

Cerebus only gives me gruff once, and it’s all the training I need.

At about two years of age, I fall asleep without feeding him, due to an abundance of beer. I awake to him standing on my chest, face hovering over my face, emitting tiny mews. When I finally open my eyes and keep them open, he pulls his head back, slowly puts a paw over my face, extends a single claw, and stabs me in the forehead.

He gets tossed across the room for this, but when the coffee kicks in and I’ve filled his food it occurs to me: He wanted me to see him do it.

His food bowl is never empty again.

Cerebus lives in a few apartments as I try and try again to get a career started. He gains a reputation for sweetness and shedding. No cat I’ve ever met can shed like Cerebus: He lives with two longhaired cats for a month and outsheds them both by a margin. His jumps are hair explosions that obscure his movements from predator and prey. Everybody’s first petting session with him invariably ends with, “Jesus Christ this cat hair.”

Matt reiterates variations on that theme for the full eight-hour drive from southern Maine to Greenpoint we take in 2005. Matt’s agreement to hold Cerebus was made sight unseen and I admit I might have been more forthcoming about the hair. The arrangement suits Cerebus.

Cerebus meets the Brooklyn apartment he will live in for the next twelve years, amidst my constant and ever emptier promises to get him back to Maine before he dies. Not exactly Fiji, but it’s me plan.

He is pretty mad for the first few years. He’s already mad at me for introducing his sister Olive, and is two years away from curling up with her in secret. Only near the end of Olive’s life will he deign to allow humans to witness their cuddling. His hundred acres become four rooms. He hunts the mice to extinction within five years. The outdoor life in the city terrifies him.

But he meets a lot of new people, and this is what brings him around. He loves almost all new people, and after a quick sizing up, goes straight for their side as soon as they sit down. Every girlfriend and roommate I have eventually says “Cerebus is really my cat” with a smug smile. I let them believe it. I know that’s what Cerebus wants.

He is about ten when the first health scare comes. He is about ten for five years because I’m busy staking my claim in the city and about ten is easier to say than remembering his actual age. One night he starts meowing. Loudly. He’s never been a meowy cat; since three he’s only meowed to let me know he’s home or I’m stepping on him. He’s never made a sound like this.

I take him to the hospital where he has to spend the night. The next morning, an old college acquaintance I hadn’t heard from or of in a decade brings him out. I’m so shocked to see her I have to ask her to repeat everything she spent two minutes telling me after she gave me a hug and introduced herself as the vet tech. Cerebus has a serious bowel obstruction, and he will go on to have it twice more before we settle on a medical grade fiber cat food that keeps it in check. That’s all he eats from now on, aside from treats and catnip.

I’ve seen a number of cats react to catnip, but none of them treat it like the mixture of potato chips and meth Cerebus seems to think it is. At one point, he manages to get the whole bag out of a kitchen cupboard, and I find him rolling in it, mouth open, pupils dilated out of his head. There is never, could never be enough.

Cerebus gets big somewhere in the years of being about ten. I think he tops out at eighteen pounds and change. People who brag about their own big cats generally introduce themselves to Cerebus with a polite, “Holy shit that’s a big cat.” He never seems to mind; to him it means more belly for rubbing.

It’s Leah who notices he feels a little bony. Just after his 14th birthday, I take him to hospital for testing. The doctor says there might be a number of things wrong with him, but they’ll test for lymphoma, and “because of where you live, we also want to test for some more exotic cancers that pop up in that area.”

Cerebus tests positive for small cell lymphoma and starts chemotherapy. He’s already on steroids at this point to assist with stomach issues. I take him home and start looking for a new apartment.

Next year, I find a miracle: an affordable two-bedroom railroad with a private backyard, and not even in the middle of a superfund site. Cerebus goes straight to the yard, kills a bird, drops it off at the back door, and proceeds to sleep on the grass for the rest of the summer.

Cerebus has hyperthyroidism by now to go along with the bowel issues and cancer, so that’s another medication. Treat pockets stop working for medications, so the vet teaches us how to pull his head back and drop them in. He hates this, but it’s quick and followed by lots of treats, so he adapts.

He loves his doctors: At 15, he starts purring as soon as I put him in his carrier because he knows he’s going to the vet. There is an ongoing issue with trying to listen to his heartbeat because he purrs so much when he’s on the table. He takes needles without twitching. He develops a heart condition, which means another medication. After one of his visits, I do the math and discover if Cerebus’s blood were 24 karat gold, I’d have more than paid market value for it.

At the end of 2018, Cerebus falls over on the morning of New Year’s Eve. I rush him to the hospital. Acute kidney infection. He spends the next two nights in the hospital and recovers. There was a bit of kidney damage, but he’s walking around and avoiding his sister again. Another medication.

He’s been on chemotherapy for so long the doctors don’t know if it’s still a good idea. He wasn’t supposed to make it through 2017. Every time I take him to a doctor I expect to go home alone. But he keeps eating, keeps purring, keeps walking, keeps jumping up on the bed at night for a belly scratch. I keep asking the vet if it’s time, and they keep telling me if he’s doing all that, he’s a happy cat.

He likes to sit next to me in the backyard and watch storms. When I throw parties, he likes to sit on coat pile and get ear scratches from anybody passing by. Every time we order sushi, he makes wide eyes next to the table and manages to look like a kitten. We know he’s living on borrowed time, or possibly the souls of neighborhood cats, so he gets whatever he wants: prosciutto, bacon, sushi, cheese, potato chips. He’s always had a soft spot for junk food. Once, he leaps on the table, smacks a bag of Cheetos to make the opening face him, reaches in, grabs one, and eats it out of his paw.

At the beginning of 2020, he starts struggling with an eye infection. He drips pus and blood out of his face almost constantly. He’s mostly blind now, so he’s not using that eye anyway, but I keep track of it because he’s too old and sick to survive anesthesia, so if something gets so bad it needs surgery, that will be it for him. Eye drops three times a day goes on the medication schedule.

Immediately after lockdown, his eye takes a bad turn. A resurgence of cancer destroys his left eye, leaving a growth protruding out of the socket that alternates between bloody and crusty. It is a horrifying, Cronenberg nightmare. I try to not look at his bad side, which is of course the side he pushes into my face when he stops by in the morning to wake me up. My actual nightmares blend seamlessly into reality when I wake up in a cold sweat to a zombie cat in the epicenter of a pandemic.

When the infection rate starts to slump, I pack Cerebus into a new carrier and walk him over the Williamsburg Bridge to see his vet. They tell me there isn’t much to be done. But he isn’t yowling. He isn’t hiding. He’s still eating.

People ask me why I kept him alive through 2019. They ask me if I’m doing it for him or doing it for me. I don’t know how to answer that. I do it for both of us. He always seems happy, if a little stodgy in his old age. I don’t want him to die, but I check every day for the littlest sign that he’s in pain. I’ve been ready for him to die since the second year he was supposed to be dead. I’m not going to kill him for being ugly. I don’t want to kill him because I’m not handling the state of the world very well, and he still stumbles over to my side and holds my hand when I’m sad.

Leah and I buy a car when the infection rate falls far enough that we feel we have a safe corridor up to Maine. My parents live in a town of 2400 people, you can walk the roads for hours without seeing any of them, and we can quarantine in the garage.

Cerebus must think he’s going to the vet, because he purrs and sleeps in the back for nine straight hours.

We keep him inside for the first few days until we get our negative COVID results. Once he gets out, he seems to remember the lay of the place and walks straight down the driveway to the house, jumps on the couch in the living room, and gets pet by my dad for four hours until he starts meowing for food and I carry him back to the apartment. This is now his daily ritual. It’s more walking than he’s done in all of 2020 prior. His eye even seems to get better, the growth receding. He’s too weak to hunt, but seems to watch his sister’s experiments with approval.

On the morning of July 16th, Cerebus jumps on the bed with a small but insistent cry. I pick him up and carry him downstairs to the couch. I put him in the crook of my arm and pull a blanket over us. He’s purring when I fall asleep. Just after dawn, I wake slightly to Cerebus arching his head deeper into my shoulder. He never moves again.

I don’t know it yet. I wake up fully a few hours later, and check to see if he’s breathing the way I’ve checked every morning for three years. He isn’t. His body has stiffened into his last snuggle. I carry him to the house and bury him in the garden.

I miss him.