For it cannot be denied that Johnson was a patsy for grapefruit. Many a battered mouse owed his life and his continued livelihood to an unknown grapefruit offered to Johnson by my mother. Johnson would leave a Bismarck herring, a stick of catnip, or a decayed sea gull for a single wedge of grapefruit. For a whole grapefruit, he would have committed fraud or practiced usury.
I can only suppose that some vital juice necessary to cats was in short supply in the muttering Ferrari-like bowels of Johnson. He could easily devour a grapefruit a quarter his size at a sitting. Mother discovered this curious facet of Johnson’s metabolism one day at breakfast when Johnson sauntered up to the table and suggested sharing her breakfast, with his most ingratiating “Mckgnaow.” Mother, who was easily flattered, offered him a bit of bacon, a scrap of buttered toast, and the edge of egg white that remained on her plate, but Johnson insisted that she misunderstood his needs. After a brief conversation in different languages, my mother reluctantly offered Johnson the remains of her grapefruit.
Johnson and the Great Grapefruit Wars
There are historic moments, similar in nature to the Curies’ quantum leap from the sight of glowing pitchblende to the discovery of radium. That morning our family witnessed just such a moment. There was a sudden electric blue crack in the atmosphere like those preceding a tornado, as Johnson went at that innocent grapefruit like a tangerine-colored buzz saw: as the stripped shell of the fruit spun slowly to a stop like a twisting coin, Johnson sat staring dreamy-eyed, dreamy-grinned at Mother. As the reamed-out grapefruit rind whirled to a long loping stop, Johnson’s lox-pink tongue tenderly flicked a final golden drop from a whisker and whispered to Mother the single English word he knew: “More.”
Johnson’s normal “Mckgnaow” had the same lisping slur later made popular by Humphrey Bogart, and like Bogart, his vocal impediment was due to a deadened nerve in his split upper lip. This honorable scar left a small Gothic window through which peered a scythe-like fang to inform the world that Johnson was not a cat to be trifled with. Mark Twain said that if you carried a cat home by the tail you would get information that would be valuable to you all your life. Such information could more conveniently be obtained by meddling with Johnson’s tongue depressor.
Whatever else it represented, that bit of tongue depressor was Johnson’s sole possession: his entire estate, his chattel, his treasure. It was all he had to leave to his eldest son, and he treated it as a sacred object. Any attempt to remove it resulted in what can only be described as a physical threat of the most nerve-racking implications. Touch his treasure and Johnson simply went into a lightning somersault, coupled with a full-bodied, four-footed karate chop, in which the meddler suddenly found his hand caught in an inverted cat vise of sixteen needle-pointed claws, the offending hand flat against Johnson’s stomach, his eyes cobra-like, scythe-like slits of pure malevolence—one of Johnson’s feline canines caught on his lower lip, its amethyst point devoid of dentine, sharp as a scalpel, blue as a diamond. At this point the disturber of sacred tongue depressors was unharmed, but the slightest move elicited a corresponding slight extension of those sixteen curved stilettos. It was not unlike having one’s hand in a boxing glove full of fishhooks. If one wanted to get out—and one did—it would require the minimal help of four fearless human assistants of fantastic manual dexterity. It was possible to escape only if these assistants moved with split-second, simultaneous accuracy to pull Johnson’s paws apart. This method allowed one to escape with only minor wounds, but the safest yet and most unnerving way was to wait it out until Johnson had made up his mind that you were only kidding. This might take from five minutes to a half hour and few people had that kind of courage or were that free of panic or hysteria. So most unfortunates tried to snatch the hand free immediately upon being trapped, with results too bloodily ineffectual to be described. Only a half grapefruit gently dropped over his face like an ether cone would relax Johnson enough so his claws, like spines of a cactus, could be individually picked from the threatened extremity.
In dubious combat
Johnson’s invention of the space helmet
While half a grapefruit would anesthetize Johnson, the most interesting way of serving Johnson his passion fruit was to present it to him in its glorious entirety: a whole unsullied, uncut, large grapefruit. The curved surface was too difficult for Johnson to achieve an effective toothhold, or clawhold; its broad surface was as difficult as it would be for a human being to try to bite a watermelon. It took him many frustrating hours of chasing grapefruits fruitlessly around the house before he recognized the wisdom of trapping it by dribbling this elusive adversary to the nearest corner. There it became possible for him to scratch a small flap of rind and thus burrow greedily in, ripping the innards out of the hapless fruit, often ending up with three-quarters of the rind cocked over his face like a small space helmet.
A cat swimming is not a pleasant object
On such occasions he seemed to enjoy this raffish adornment and would saunter out onto the sand, often with only one eye visible under the overhang, a curious sight to many people, a delight to our family, and a source of sheer terror to small dogs and old ladies.
And so Johnson’s first lesson to me as a future animator was this: Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected, such as a cat hooked on grapefruit. Somewhere along the line I realized that my insatiable and seldom-satisfied appetite
