My name is Bruce.

I feel like it's time you knew the story of Bruce Campbell. 

I'm sorry if you're hearing this for the 8 millionth time, I tell it to everyone, but it's a funny story. And I want to tell it.

This is the story of:

A true story.

Bruce Campbell came into my life when I was a junior in college. 

Of course, back then, we didn't realize he was who he was. We just thought he was a cat.

It was mid-October when my roommates first met Mr. Campbell. We were sitting in our college apartment in the middle of the night when we heard it: A soft scratching sound at the back door.

The scratching came from a stray cat looking for someplace warm to sleep. She was wet and covered in scratches and scars from who knows where.

When she meowed it sounded like she had never experienced joy in her life. 

We didn't have any way of taking care of her, but my roommates couldn't turn her away. They poured her a bowl of 2 percent milk and named her Tina.

That's her, on the left.

Now I know you're wondering "hey, what happened to Bruce Campbell? Whose this?"

Hold your horses. I'm getting there. 


I'm on record as never having been a fan of the name Tina. It didn't match the personality of a cat who bit and scratched if you pet her in the wrong place. She scratched up all the furniture out of spite (I'm sure of it) and would scream if you didn't let her outside at least once a night for her to kill small mammals and get in fights with other cats. 

But none of those reasons were why her name changed. 

That meow she gave? The one that sounded like she suffered from a broken heart and had never known a loving touch? She did it constantly, all day, every day. Without stopping.

And what started as heartbreaking soon became annoying.

It didn't take long for everyone in the house to call her by a different name: "Kitty," we would yell, "shut the f*ck up!

Kitty Shut the F*ck Up! lived with us for a few months and there were attempts to find a better name for the angry feline, but none of them had stuck.

The name Preggars, for example, only lasted about a day and she was back to KSTFU.

Come Christmas-time the campus housing authority had discovered that we had the cat in our apartment, a no-no according to our pet policy. Facing a several hundred dollar fine we had little choice but to get rid of her. 

With few places for her to go, I found her a home with my grandmother, who happily agreed to take her in, if she got the proper shots at the vet.

The vet visit changed KSTFU's life. And her gender. 

The vet learned very quickly that "No Name" (the vet secretary told me that she just didn't feel comfortable writing down KSTFU's full and correct title) was not a girl at all, but a male. A male with a small identification chip implanted in his elbow, which meant that the cat had a real name and an owner somewhere, who was looking for her/him.

The vet's hands were tied. She couldn't legally give the cat back to me since it didn't belong to me, and called the county animal shelter, who had placed the computer chip in her/him. 

The cat's registered name, as it turned out, was "Bruce Campbell."

As in:

 

You know, Bruce Campbell.

There was no address or phone number for the owner, so with a new name, a new gender and no owner out searching the streets for him, Bruce Campbell was sent to live with my grandmother. 

But like all of his names, "Bruce Campbell" didn't stick long.  My grandmother is an old fashioned woman. Cats, she believed, should never have the same names as people. Cats have fun names like "Mittens" or "Mr. Whiskers" and there was no way she would let a "Bruce" come anywhere near her home. 

She exclaimed --- rather matter-of-factly --- that Bruce was the worst possible name a cat could ever have, and announced that, instead, she would refer to him only by the name "You're such a Good Boy."

Of course his wildly inappropriate new title did nothing to change his personality. He still scratched and screamed and ate everything, but of all the names he's had, Good Boy is by far the longest lasting. He lived with her for years until my grandmother's declining health necessitated he come back to me. 

By then I was older. I'd graduated college. Gotten a job. I had a wife and a dog. 

I wasn't the same fool who would name my cat Kitty, Shut the F*ck Up! and think that was funny. 

Not that his old name didn't still apply. If anything he had gotten worse. 

Bruce meows, and screams, and barks at all hours of the day and night. He even meows while sleeping in this strange snore/meow that sounds not unlike a lawnmower.

Oh, his name is back to Bruce Campbell now, and I think that's how it's going to stay. It's by far the classiest, and it lets me write stories like this.

Don't tell my grandmother, though, she honestly believes that Bruce gets depressed when he's called anything other than "You're such a good boy" and that's what he is so destructive. 

Maybe there's something to be said for that. He's lived with me for a little more than a year now, and he still gets into everything. He attacks the blinds, falls behind dressers, jumps onto television sets, ruins cashmere sweaters, scratches up furniture, attacks the dog, eats 900 pounds of food a day and keeps us up all night long. Every night. 

Personally I think that maybe it's because he's a cat that's had more names (and genders) than you can count on one hand that's made him so grumpy, but that's just me. 

Or maybe we just haven't found the right name.

But I don't want to push it...