Our cat Biscuit caught a cold in February, and by Thursday he'd turned the whole apartment into a hospice ward. He lay on the kitchen rug with his paws folded like a tiny Victorian mourner, eyes half-shut, tail stretched out flat — the whole pose said "I'm sorry for whatever I did to deserve this." My daughter Maya, sixteen and freshly obsessed with becoming a vet, spent two hours on the phone calling every animal hospital within a twenty-mile radius of our place off 71st Street, demanding someone tell her how to save him.
Eventually a friend of a friend dropped off some pills — little orange tablets barely bigger than a Tic Tac. We figured getting one into him would take thirty seconds.
We figured wrong.
Biscuit, half-dead as he supposedly was, fought like his life depended on not swallowing that pill, which I guess technically it did. He whipped his head side to side, spat the thing across the linoleum twice, and let out a yowl that could've drowned out the fire trucks that go screaming down our street every other night. My husband Danny tried holding his jaw shut. Didn't work. Then Danny suggested — I still don't know if he was joking — that maybe we approach the problem from the other end.
Before we got that far, my mother-in-law Carol, who was staying with us that week, had a gentler idea: dissolve the pill in a splash of vodka. She'd read somewhere that a little alcohol could mask the bitterness. Nobody stopped her. She dug through the liquor cabinet, mixed up a syrupy little cocktail in a bottle cap, and set it in front of him.
Biscuit perked right up. Sat up straight. Drank the whole thing like he'd been waiting his entire life for someone to offer him a drink at four in the afternoon. Since he'd been "sick" since morning and hadn't eaten a bite, it hit him fast — the cat equivalent of a shot of tequila on an empty stomach.
Within twenty minutes he was strutting around the living room like he owned the mortgage, rubbing against table legs, purring in this low, warbly hum that honestly sounded like he was humming along to something on the radio. We all relaxed. Crisis over, we figured. Maya went back to her homework. I started making dinner.
We were wrong about that too.
About an hour later, the hangover set in. Biscuit connected the dots between "drank the thing" and "feel like garbage" faster than any of us expected from an animal whose entire vocabulary consists of meowing at the fridge. He collapsed back onto the rug, folded his paws, rolled his eyes back — the exact same death performance as before. Carol, still convinced she'd found the cure, poured him a second round.
By the time the sun went down, my cat was a full-blown mess. He yowled nonstop, some kind of drunken feline aria that had our neighbor Mr. Ferris banging on the wall by nine o'clock. Then he decided he was a mustang. Galloped down the hallway, clipped his skull on the doorframe going about fifteen miles an hour, gave us this loopy, lopsided grin like he'd just told the funniest joke of his life, and then just — dropped. Out cold on the hallway carpet.
Morning came and Biscuit wasn't fully sober yet. He tried the same routine one more time — flopped himself out, paws folded, the works — except this time he pulled it on the balcony. We didn't fall for it twice in one week, but we also didn't think much of it either way. Danny and I had a farmers market run planned out toward Broken Arrow that day, and in the scramble of finding car keys and a cooler bag, somebody shut the balcony door and nobody remembered he was out there. We were gone almost five hours.
When we got back and slid the door open, there he was: sitting bolt upright next to a carrot he'd apparently found rolling around from a bag of vegetables I'd left out there to cool, mostly chewed down to a nub, stone-cold sober, and looking like the single most miserable creature in the state of Oklahoma.
The vodka lives on the top shelf now, behind the cereal boxes, where a cat with a death wish and opposable-thumb envy still hasn't managed to reach it.
