Today we had to say goodbye to our 15 year-old furry friend, Fizz the Cat. Here’s a photo of him as I choose to remember the little guy:

Fizz was rescued from a kill shelter in rural Pennsylvania by my son and his girlfriend at the time. Fizz survived college life with a bunch of rowdy kids. After my son graduated, he took Fizz, sans girlfriend, on a year-long VISTA program adventure in eastern Montana. There, my son was an EMT on a rig in the oil town of Sidney, and Fizz spent his days with another, lesser, cat in Section 8 housing.

After his hitch, my son returned to Brooklyn just as my wife and I were making plans to pull up stakes and move to the northwest Bronx. It was a time of turmoil, as one can imagine, as we were ripping our lives up by the roots after 25 years in the borough of churches.

But there was another wrinkle. Our brave 12-year old boxer doggie, Genghis, was failing. He never made the trip with us to the promised land, but he did get to meet the youngster that was Fizz.

Genghis and Fizz did not hit it off that steamy summer of 2010. Genghis looked up from his green Cabela bed with an expression that said, “who’s this little jerk?”

Fizz looked at the 85-pound muscled monster that was Genghis and took a swipe at his face, switchblade claws out and ready to rumble.

The problem did not last long. On July 22, just a few weeks after Fizz arrived in NYC and days before we moved, we had to put Big G down. He was riddled with cancer. His demise was a shitshow. He fought off the narcotic with every last bit of his waning strength.

Finally he succumbed.

And we moved. Fizz loved Bronx life. He ran around the apartment like a nutball from the time we moved until just a few days ago. As The Doors famously sang, “No one here gets out alive….” True enough, for over the last few years, it was Fizz’s turn to incrementally fail. Now a senior cat, he had developed diabetes and I had to watch his weight, check his urine, and shoot him up with 2.5 units of insulin twice a day, making sure he ate his food first.

Our lives were enmeshed in Fizz’s medical metronome.

And things were pretty good until just last Sunday. As I said, Fizz had been in decline. He could no longer jump onto tables and beds like he used to but, hey, I don’t shoot hoops anymore. We age.

But the lives of our pets are so compressed. Sunday, he would not eat. Monday he refused food. Yesterday he wouldn’t even partake of his water-play at the kitchen sink. Not drinking OR eating? Not good. I made an appointment with our vet.

Last night he yowled all night. He would only stop when one of us would say “it’s alright, Fizzy; we’re here. Go to sleep.” Then he’d relax until the next round of yowling in a way that communicated: “Mom? Dad? Help me, I’m scared!”

Today was even worse. He couldn’t move about, had trouble navigating his litter box, hell — he could barely lift his head. This was Genghis Redux. We’d seen this movie before.

This morning I called the vet first thing. I mentioned that this may well be an end-of-life visit. They moved up our appointment.

In his transporter, Fizz — the little nut that once could hop from the dinner table to the high dining room window sill, and leap recklessly from chair to chair — just laid there, still as a stone.

We poured him onto the stainless steel exam table. The vet tech turned on some new age music that he said was to keep Fizzy calm. But Fizz was already beyond calm. The music was probably for me and my wife.

The vet talked about options, sussing us out to determine if we really were bound and determined to play God. My wife and I agreed to leave Fizz a shred of dignity. Modern medicine could have patched up his issues in the short term, but I suspected that in months to come we’d be lurching from crisis to crisis until the inevitable finally occurred. My thinking was that I’d opt for being a week early than a week late.

Fizz rested quietly as the music played and his fate in the book of life was sealed. I think (I hope!) he was good with it. Fifteen years, starting with an escape from a kill shelter, then on to dealing with college kids in their ratty dorm, followed by a cross-country schlep to Montana, then back to Brooklyn, then on to thirteen-plus years in the Bronx.

I marked today’s date, November 29, on my calendar. Now I have two pet Yahrzeits to commemorate. Genghis was on July 22, 2010 and, now, Fizzy’s.

“Take care of yourself today,” the vet said as I gave the cat that was Fizz one last kiss on his grey fur keppy.

And now, I stare about our apartment. I look for Fizz on the dining room table. Nope. I look on the terrace, where he’d find a sunny spot and snooze. Nope. I wait to hear his little bell as he comes over and meows: “Daddy, it’s dinner time. Gimme my grub and shoot me up.” Nope. Well, maybe the little asshole is sleeping on my bed. Nope.

There’s his scratching post. There are his toys. There’s his box of syringes. But no Fizz.

It’s amazing how attached one can get to an eleven-pound rescue cat. I think it’s because both fur babies and owners reciprocally provide 100 percent pure, uncut love, straight from our hearts. No wonder it hurts so bad when we go into sudden withdrawal.

The herd is thinning for us. This week we lost two members of the team.

My wife lost a long-ago, back in the nabe, friend, Bo. A great guy and talented musician from a neighborhood brimming with artistic achievement.

And just last night, we lost Uncle Petey. He wasn’t really our uncle. And he wasn’t really that old. But he was in bad shape for many years and, finally, he succumbed as the walls of poor health closed in.

He was a gentle Panda of a man who was like comfort food on two legs. In that sense, he was our “uncle.”

When I met the young woman who would become my wife, I was introduced to a world of energetic, creative men and women VERY unlike the meat-and-potatoes crew I grew up with, for I came of age in one of the bronxier sections of the Bronx. It was a place where you went to school, you joined the military, you got a steady job (Post Office, Board of Ed, Metro North — those would do just fine), got married, had kids, and retired at sixty-five. The “lives of quiet desperation” (thank you, Thoreau).

Not this crew. Nope. This new group was full of theater majors. At first, my opinion of theater majors was even lower than that of education majors. That is, “lazy, not-too-bright kids intent on securing their 2-S deferment and coasting for four years.”

I soon learned that these folks had energy, brains, ambition and talent up the wazoo. They pushed and pushed and became musicians, film directors, producers, and cinematographers, book publishers, disc jockeys, award-winning comedy writers, and actors, as was the case with Uncle Petey.

So many people give you the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” BS about their stillborn artistic endeavors. Here’s a typical one: “Yeah, I coulda written a book, but who has the time?”

Uncle Petey worked his butt off honing his craft, making connections, and pounding away on doors. It sounds corny but he was a “people person”, the kind of guy who methodically weaved webs of like-minded folks.

When I first met him and that post-collegiate crew, he held low stakes, nickel-and-dime, poker nights in his fan-conditioned, top floor walkup dump in the far East 90s, across from Knickerbocker Towers. It was Petey, me and my wife, and a rotating cast of their fellow theater majors.

I smile at the memory of those raucous nights. Lots of laughs in his cramped kitchen, back when we were in our twenties and giddy with good health. We barely had two nickels to rub together but our futures were before us. Through the adventures and achievements of Uncle Petey and that crowd, I found my own path out of my maze of mediocrity.

Uncle Petey was relentless in the pursuit of an acting career. No surprise, then, that over the years he got plenty of work. Work that took him to California where he became a beloved character actor who paired with bold-faced names. He got regular radio work. He came East and started a theater troupe. He earned his keep giving improv lessons to new generations of aspiring talent. From NYC, to London, to Indianapolis, a lot of people absorbed Uncle Petey’s passion and love of the craft.

Now he is gone but he’ll never be forgotten. He’s in my personal Hall of Fame, a pantheon of one-of-a-kind nut-balls, with others of blessed memory such as Uncle Kenny and Uncle Richie.

When I was a little kid, my sister and I would roll our eyes when my grandma would talk about life experiences and intone, in her heavy Yiddish accent, “…vell….as long as you have your health….” We’d snicker and laugh our bloody heads off.

Yeah, well who’s laughing now?

Alev hasholem, Uncle Petey. One of the good ones.

“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today.” Wimpy! That’s the first thing I thought of when I read that a local bar, actually THE BEST local bar — An Beal Bocht — was using “cheeseburger” as a prompt in a Moth-adjacent Wednesday night event.

The second thing I thought of was my Uncle Arthur. Artie! My dad’s brother in law and the bane of my father’s existence. Arthur was a gratuitously cruel, uncultured arriviste.
Arthur sold home appliances. He was a commissioned clerk in a Fairfield County strip mall store. He and his family lived in my grandfather’s big old Victorian house in Bridgeport.

The kid that was me marveled at how Dad, uncharacteristically, would hold his temper as Uncle Arthur bloviated. Artie berated his wife, Dad’s sister, sponged off his wife’s family, and trolled my father in issues related to World War II (they were both in the Army, European Theater, but my Dad saw combat and Arthur toiled in Graves Registration), politics and business. “So Mort!” he’d taunt, raising a glass of Wild Turkey, as my father’s blood pressure rose. “You make it? You make it yet? I made it! You?”

“Why don’t you punch him in the nose?” I’d ask my Dad as he drove our ten-year old Pontiac home from Connecticut to our Bronx dump, back when I was a little boy.

“Ahhh. Empty barrels make the most noise.” That’s all my Dad would say.

But, back to cheeseburgers! The Connecticut contingency invited us poor relations up for a BBQ once in awhile. One time, Uncle Arthur popped some pre-formed patties on his charcoal grill in his — or, rather, my grandfather’s — backyard. He split open a bag’s worth of Wonder Bread buns and unwrapped a package of Kraft Singles.

And then, he began to bloviate, oblivious to his culinary duties. And, as he talked smack, trying so hard to “engage” my father, he absently flipped the burgers.

One by one, our meal slipped through the grill to die a Viking death in the fiery ashes below. Uncle Arthur began to curse. It was somehow his wife’s fault. It was somehow Weber’s — the grill’s maker — fault. Then, the haymaker:

It was my father’s fault!!! Yes, he flipped the switch; my Dad distracted him and thus the protein perished. And as he screamed, the buns ignited in Wonder-ous fury and burned to black.

Everyone laughed at the sight of this obnoxious heathen, this…this…EMPTY BARREL of a man, flail about after cluelessly setting the burgers ablaze.

Everyone but my father. And I’ll tell you straight up: never in my life was Dad one to give advice. In fact, one time, my sixth-grade self asked him to help me solve a weighty life-strategy question and he said, simply: “I don’t give advice.”

But in not laughing at Uncle Arthur, I learned something. There’s a popular old Kenny Rogers song, “Coward of the County” and the payoff line is: “Sometimes you gotta fight when you’re a man.” But Dad held it in, because he knew the full extent of Arthur’s backstory. Hardscrabble upbringing on the Lower East Side. A brother who was, well, today we’d say he was “troubled.” Select your own descriptor. He took a razor sharp shears from his mother’s sewing basket and stabbed the kid that was Artie in the neck.

And it was downhill from there. So the amateur shrinks among us can think of defense mechanisms such as compensation and displacement. Whatever it was, Uncle Arthur had a lot of psychic scar tissue. Enough that even my Dad, the six-four dreadnaught with the hair-trigger temper, knew who and what he was dealing with.

Very damaged goods.

Inadvertently, my father gave me sage advice after all.

That’s my “cheeseburger” story, and I’m sticking to it.