How the Ferguson Family Cat Learned to Fake a Hangover

Our cat Biscuit got sick on a Tuesday in October, the kind of gray afternoon when the radiator in our St. Paul duplex clanks like it's got something to say. He stretched out on the kitchen tile, paws folded, tail draped like a shawl, eyes half-shut in an expression that said "it's been an honor knowing you all." My daughter Callie, thirteen and dramatic even on a good day, planted herself on the couch with the phone and started dialing every vet clinic within twenty miles.

By six o'clock she'd tracked down a pill from the neighbor's stash — something the size of a baby aspirin, left over from her own cat's dental surgery. We figured it couldn't hurt. We figured wrong about how it would go.

Getting that pill into Biscuit's mouth turned into a full production. My husband Dave held him. I tried to pry his jaw open. Biscuit twisted his head, spat the thing clear across the linoleum, and let out a yowl that could've drowned out the Amtrak line two blocks over. Dave suggested we try the other end — a suggestion nobody took seriously. It was my mother-in-law Rosalie, visiting from Duluth for the week, who had the idea that actually worked.

"Soak it," she said. "In something he likes."

She dug through her purse and came back with a little brown bottle of valerian tincture she carried for her own nerves — the stuff smells like a gym sock left in a locker for a decade, but cats go wild for it. She dropped the pill in, let it sit, then held it out to him on a spoon.

Biscuit sat up like he'd been electrocuted. Sniffed it once. Then he lunged and swallowed the whole thing without so much as a fight — first real bite of anything since sunrise, since he hadn't touched his food bowl all day claiming to be too sick to eat.

That was the mistake. Empty stomach, full dose of valerian. Within twenty minutes our dying cat was strolling the hallway with his tail up like a flagpole, rubbing against the baseboards, humming — actually humming, this low warbling sound I'd never heard him make — like he owned the building. Callie declared him cured. Rosalie looked pleased with herself. I should have known better.

An hour later, the bill came due. Biscuit flopped sideways in the middle of the living room rug, paws tucked, eyes rolling back, doing his best impression of a cat on his deathbed all over again. Rosalie, convinced the relapse meant he needed more medicine, poured him a second dose straight from the bottle onto his paw for him to lick off.

By nine that night we had, officially, a drunk cat losing his mind in a two-bedroom duplex. He yowled nonstop — long, warbling, downright obscene-sounding cries that had our upstairs neighbor Mr. Petrosky banging his broom handle on the ceiling. Dave tried to reason with him. Callie filmed it for her friends. I sat on the arm of the couch with a mug of chamomile tea going cold, watching my cat lose every shred of dignity he'd ever had.

The finale came around ten. Biscuit apparently decided he was some kind of wild mustang, took off sprinting down the hallway, and slammed headfirst into the door frame outside the bathroom. He staggered back, gave the frame a loopy, lopsided grin like it had insulted his mother, and dropped flat where he stood, out cold.

We figured that was the end of it. It wasn't.

Come morning, still not fully sober, Biscuit shuffled to the sliding door and gave us the same paws-folded, tail-draped routine from the day before — this time angling for the balcony, like fresh air might cure whatever was left of his hangover. We let him out without thinking twice. Then Dave and I loaded the car and drove out to his sister's place near Stillwater for the afternoon, completely forgetting our cat was still parked out there.

We got back around four. Slid the door open expecting the worst and found Biscuit sitting primly next to Callie's science-fair carrot planter, half the carrots gone, looking stone-cold sober and thoroughly ashamed of himself — like a man waking up in a stranger's yard with no memory of how he got there.

The valerian bottle lives on the top shelf of the hall closet now, behind the winter coats, where no soft-hearted grandmother can reach it without a step stool.