Last month, after 3 ½ years of courtship, W. has moved into my apartment. The Problem is, we both have a cat. Where her mouser is a mild mannered male calico mix named Simba, mine is a crazy, cross-eyed, Siamese female named Aunt Suzy.
As far as cats go, Simba is as good as it gets. Aunt Suzy, however, is something else. Over the years she has intermittently pissed in various areas of the household. And she’s not reacting well at all to the addition of a male feline into a domain that has belonged to only her for over a decade.

So she has taken to pissing even more.

First, Suzy began urinating on the living room throw rug we had over the hardwood flooring. She did it so often, we abandoned the idea of having throw rugs.

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A few months ago I wrote an article about our cat Aunt Suzy who had taken to pissing on the connubial bed of W. and I. Since then, many people have written to ask how that whole Suzy-pissing thing turned out, the answer to which is this: “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Because now our other cat, Simba, is giving us the business.

Here’s the back story:

We tried everything to get Suzy to stop pissing. We bought some overpriced pheromone plug-in technology called Feliway, we conducted various psychological assaults on Suzy’s mindset, we even mounted dogheaded scarecrows on the bedposts – all to no avail. Not until my neighbor Jill and her cat Chef moved out of the apartment complex did the urinary mattress rampage of Aunt Suzy finally cease.

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Living in a home that smells like cat piss is more than just an inconvenience. After a while that odor, it defines you. It seeps into the furniture and the walls and soon you become: “Those people.” And you long for the day when you were a person whose home did not smell like cat piss – which you never really appreciated.

It’s like the Meat Loaf lyric, “It was long ago and it was far away and it was so much better than it is today.”

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