Gianmarco Soresi learns more about cats than he ever wanted to when his girlfriend adopts five.

Gianmarco Soresi is a New York based stand up comic, storyteller and actor. He’s headlined Carolines on Broadway, Stand Up NY, EastVille Comedy Club, DC Comedy Loft, and his work has been featured on Funny or Die, Fast Company, The Atlantic, York, SeeSo’s New York’s Funniest, George Takei Presents, and Netflix’s upcoming global series Bonding. He recently acted opposite Tracy Morgan on TBS’ The Last O.G., Tom Selleck on CBS’ Blue Bloods, ABC’s Deception, TruTV, and Comedy Central. More at www.gianmarcosoresi.com

This story originally aired on April 26, 2019 in an episode titled “The Joy of Cats.”

Story Transcript

Hello.  I think I saw some of you recognize me from my college production of Cats.  I was one of the cats. I was wearing makeup. Maybe that’s it.

But that’s not important.  What’s important is that in the orchestra pit, which I like to call the litter box, there was this woman.  I don't know if it was in spite of her tuba or because of it but I fell in love. Her name was Laura and she's an Audrey Hepburn with the mind of an Annie Hall with these big, thick glasses that magnified her slight hazel eyes that nearly disappeared whenever she smiled.  And she smiled every time I walked in a room.

Then she would recreate an entire episode of This American Life or let me be a little spoon for three months in a row.  We dated and our relationship lasted all four years of college up to graduation.  Then we had that big decision to make. We had other couple friends, some breaking up, some getting married.  We weren’t going to do that because one thing we had in common is both our parents were divorced. Her parents got divorced when she was seven.  My parents got divorced when I was seven. Days old. Yes. So like most kids my first word was ‘Mama’ but my next five were ‘told me to tell you’.

So we kind of met in between.  We moved in together in New York City to join an acting company just so I could waste a little more of my parents’ money.  Things were going well. She was the first girlfriend I ever lived with, but I had lived with plenty of my dad’s girlfriends so I had experience.  And whenever we felt frustrated, fortunately, we had a weekly pay-what-you-can yoga class, or I call it our ‘weekly free yoga class’ to get out all our tension.

Until one day we were walking home from a very relaxing vinyasa when we passed this older man on the corner.  Older guy. He had a big beard. He was in kind of a crumpled suit the color of a tombstone and he was holding in his outstretched arms a cardboard box.  In the box were five of the tiniest kittens I had ever seen.

He launches into the story that he's actually a funeral director.  He was leaving a service that morning when he found the box with the kittens.  No note. And he thought they were adorable but his wife was deathly allergic so he couldn’t keep them.  

And as he's telling the story I see Laura start to pet the kittens.  And I see her start to hold the kittens. Then I see her start to name the kittens.  

I’m like, “We got to go.  Now! We got to go! We got to get out of here.”  

So I give her a quick pat down to make sure that she didn’t hide any in her pockets and we turned to leave when this guy says to no one in particular, but very clearly for us, he says, “Well, if no one adopts them by the end of the day, I’m going to have to drown them in my pool.”  Because those are the only two options in that situation.

I try holding on to Laura but it’s like that thing when a mom lifts a car to save her child.  She breaks through my grasp, she grabs the box, and she just gallops into the sunset like a lioness with her cubs.  When I found her somewhere in the Heights, she swore to me. She swore she would have them in a shelter or adopted by the end of the week.  And long story short, I had to drown them.

But that’s a joke.  Long story short, I was living in an Upper West Side litter box.  Real quick. I think you maybe have gathered I’m not a cat person because my earliest memory, like I've done a lot of therapy and hypnosis and sensory deprivation, and my earliest memory is my mom and I moving into her new boyfriend’s house.  This boyfriend was actually my dad’s former divorce lawyer. Yes, it’s very complicated. He went from representing my father to filling in for him. Yeah, I know. It’s the plot of Hamlet.

And we’re moving in and he had this cat named Smoky, a black cat with a little white at the end of his tail.  I went to pet Smoky and, as cats are apt to doing when you show any kind of affection, Smoky scratched my face, and there was blood.  And I asked if I could live with my dad forever.

I was doing okay, though, with this box of kittens because they were too small to get out of the box.  But a week passes and we still have five kittens, but they're a little bit bigger. Another week passes and still five kittens, a little bit bigger.  Another week passes we now have three kittens, because two of them got out of the box with their claws. Now there are cats everywhere.

Their stray tails it’s like a booby trap.  When I step on one, a claw comes out of nowhere.  I feel like Indiana Jones going to the bathroom every morning.  

I tried so hard to get along with these cats because I love Laura.  I loved Laura more than I hated these kittens. And I even love that that was her impulse to adopt them, because I think it’s that same impulse that made her date me.  In a lot of ways, I think maybe I don't like cats because, in a certain sense, I’m a cat. In the sense that I’m also an asshole.

And well, you know, this is not just my opinion, okay, Story Collider?  This is science. Because you see, here’s the thing. The reason that dogs are so nice is because of un-natural selection.  We domesticated dogs over 15,000 years ago and we bred them to help us hunt and snuggle and make YouTube videos.

And I know there's cat YouTube videos but they're very different, because I've tried to make cat YouTube videos.  In dogs, the dog is your scene partner. Cats, it’s like wildlife. There's a lot of waiting and like baiting and someone can get hurt and that’s because cats, that’s why we have Toto and Beethoven and Air Bud and the dog from Frasier and Garfield.  There's a reason. It’s because cats have only been domesticated for about 9,500 years. And, unlike dogs, cats chose us. They came to us because we had food, the food attracted rats, and the rats attracted cats.

And who did the cats attract?  They attracted this parasite that lives in their poop.  It’s called Toxoplasma gondii. And this parasite causes a disease called toxoplasmosis.  This disease, if a mouse or a rat gets it, it changes their brain chemistry that makes these rats and mice attracted to the smell of cat urine.  

Humans can get toxoplasmosis.  It’s inconclusive if it changes our brain chemistry but, if it gets into a growing baby, it can be utterly lethal.  Again, this isn’t the cat’s fault, I guess. It’s not like Laura and I were in a place that we were going to have a baby anytime soon.  I’m just saying, between the rats and the mice and the Toxoplasma gondii, you are the company that you keep.

And cats are very arrogant.  I used to try to talk to them and call their name and Laura would defend them.  She said maybe their feline brains can’t understand our vocal patterns. But, no.  There was a study. I did a lot or research on this.

There was a study called vocal recognition of owners by domestic cats that showed cats do recognize their owner’s voice.  They can tell because their ears twitch and their heads move. But that’s it. Other than that they do nothing but just like, “Oh, it’s you.”  

And we get fooled.  We get fooled because the cat, whenever we get home, the cats will rub against our legs.  And we’re like, “Oh, that’s love.” That’s not love. They are just rubbing their endorphins and pheromones all over you because they're claiming you as property.  It’s like if I went up to you and rubbed my armpits on your face. That’s not love, that’s gross.

All this is real.  When the show is done just Google ‘Why cats are evil’ and all of this will come up.  

The only thing that got me through this time was there was one cat of the five named Baby.  Laura named him Baby because Baby was the runt of the litter. Baby, actually, still had not left the box because he was so small.  He was so small I could pick him up with two fingers. And I would just lie down and I would… I realize this is like the state I could enjoy cats in.  It’s like when they're borderline comatose, really, or catatonic, if you will.

I would lie down and I would put Baby on my chest and I would just try to synchronize my breath with his for hours.  But Baby, as babies do, got bigger and bigger. And one day I went to pick him up, with three fingers this time, and I put him on my chest.  When I went to take him off, Baby scratched me, on my face, and there was blood.

That’s when I said to Laura, I said, “Look, this was not the plan at all.  I can barely take care of myself, let alone five cats. We don’t have the money.  We’re both artists. the cat litter and the food and the veterinarian bills are going to be coming up surely.  And this is not what we’re doing. This is not the phase of life that we’re in. I love you but, baby, it’s either me or the cats.”  

And I really miss Laura.  She ended up finding a home for three of those cats.  She kept two, Baby and another one named Posy. She moved to LA.  She met a nurse, met a guy and they got married and they live together now.  It’s them, the two cats and two beautiful children.

Me, on the other hand, I’m single, I have no cats, I have no children.  I have two roommates that no one will adopt.

I've been working on this story, actually, and a good friend of mine named Alice who I run my stories by sometimes.  She actually had a cat that somehow got pregnant and had five kittens. She knows how much I miss Laura and how I can be lonely sometimes, and she came.  She knocked on my door. She surprised me. She came to my door.

And in her hand she was holding the runt of the litter then said, “Hey, how will you feel about adopting just one cat?”  

I looked at that cat and I was like, “No!  I hate cats. Have you been listening to anything I’m saying?  What are you talking about? No way.”

But I do know now that I would live with a million cats if it meant Laura coming back.  Thank you.