The moment my relationship with Emily hit rock bottom, she wasn’t even there. I was standing on my porch, blood-soaked paper towels pressed to my right arm, telling six cops that everything was fine, just fine, the cats got into a little fight but it was all over.

"I’m sorry, ma’am, but we have to come inside." I don’t think I looked entirely credible with all that blood. Cops -- they’re always big in person -- poured into the house. They looked in all the rooms. They separated the housekeeper and me so we couldn’t concoct a story. A big Irish cop took me into the living room, and a big Latino cop spoke to her in Spanish in the kitchen.  But it was all true, there had been a terrible cat fight, there was blood on the walls and my thumb was swelling alarmingly.

When they realized there was no crime, the cops laughed and left, one of them joking to a final pair of cops arriving at the scene, "The cats had a fight and one of them pulled a knife, but it’s all over." Just as the last cop car pulled away, my husband skidded up to the house, bounded up the stairs and shouted, "Are you ok?" When he saw that I was bleeding, he said angrily, "Get the carrier. That cat goes to the pound today!"

"No!" I cried in horror. "It’s not his fault! It was human error!"

Milagrito, my male cat, was supposed to stay in the garden while Six, the six-toed monster, was in the kitchen. The male cats not only had to be in different places, they had to have two doors between them, like an airlock.

Like guards at California’s Pelican Bay super-max, who try to prevent accidental contact between members of the Aryan Nation and the Mexican Mafia, we planned the cats’ movements around the house to avoid bloodshed. We closed one door and double-checked it before opening the next. We escorted the cats from room to room, calling out "Milagrito in the kitchen!" and "Six walking!" Such was Six’s hatred that if he smelled Milagrito under a door, he flung himself against it in a hissing, growling fury, rattling the door on its hinges. The furry little kitties were not becoming friends as I had hoped.

The day of the police invasion was cleaning day. The housekeeper’s niece, who helped her aunt, arrived early and wanted to get to work. The women needed to go in and out of the back door to the basement. The basement leads to the garden, where my other two cats spent their days. Usually, I locked Six down in the living room on cleaning day, as far from the garden as possible, but on that day, before I could put Six in his room, the phone rang. I asked the girl to wait before going downstairs and turned my back to answer the phone. It was my husband, Mark, wanting to know what to pick up at the store for dinner.

While I was on the phone, distracted, the housekeeper opened the back door, thinking that she could slip through quickly and I would never notice. Milagrito, who was on the stairs, surprised her with his through-the-legs maneuver. Once in the house, he trotted up to Six, no doubt expecting submission and flight. Milagrito is a top cat, but when he met Six -- nervous, stressed, had-it-up-to-here, what-the-fuck-now Six -- it was the under-cat who attacked in a homicidal rage. Milagrito, who never in his five years had encountered a cat who did not run from him, who had just had his manicure and had no tips to his claws, and who in any case is a lover, not a fighter, was losing from the start.

Forgetting Mark, I screamed "No!" and flung the phone to the ground. I ran to rescue my cat. The phone continued to transmit to my appalled husband a barrage of horrible yowls, growls, shrieks, thuds, and crashes as the fight tumbled through the house with me in pursuit. Assuming it to be a home invasion or possibly a terrorist attack, Mark dialed 911. Then he hopped in his car and floored it for home.

While the police were converging and my husband was racing home to save me, the cat fight heated up. The cats tore down the hall, dodged into the dining room, rolled in a ball of claws and tails into the living room, then leapt up to and ran along the back of the sofa. I caught up and attempted to grab Six. He turned on me so fast I didn’t have time to react. One moment he was chasing Milagrito, the next he was attached to my arm, his upper and lower canines meeting deep in my right thumb, from which he hung as he raked my arm with his hind claws. That bought Milagrito a few seconds.

Milagrito reached the end of the sofa, bounced off the wall in a U-turn, and flew back past us, distracting Six, who let go of me to pursue the hated enemy back into the dining room. There they clinched for one last bout. I was finally able to get them apart by a combination of kick-boxing, a pan of water, and screaming louder than them. I drove Six hissing into a bedroom and slammed the door.

This was the cat I was pleading to keep. Realizing that I needed to go to the doctor and was not giving up on Six, my husband relented, "Ok, but if he had hurt Milagrito, he would be on his way to the pound!"

Why was I so determined to hang on to a cat who would kill my cats if he could, who wasn’t trained like mine, who had a tendency to nip when startled, who was easily startled, and whom nobody else could possibly want to adopt? Perhaps if he had been just another homeless cat, I would have done the sensible thing and taken him to a shelter or put up flyers or ads seeking a home. But I was committed to him because he was my rescue. Not a rescue in the usual sense, like my other cats -- a stray cat that you bring in from the street. I took this cat off a psycho -- my friend, Emily.

I met Emily at work at a software firm. At the time, I had a reputation for being independent, abrasive and outspoken. This was a surprise to me, as I considered myself tentative and polite. I phrased my criticisms as questions --"Do you think the customer might have a problem if we don’t give them a way to install this?" and got credit for biting sarcasm. I was also bathed in the reflected notoriety of my husband’s sex zine, Frighten the Horses, which I co-edited. Maybe I was right enough of the time, or maybe I just got a lot of sex. People treated me with a great deal of deference.

Emily, too, was at her peak, a software genius, popular and respected. She was an interesting person and we were close. She was a man when I first met her and was briefly a lover. She spoke to me about her feelings of being a woman but also liking woman, and I said, fine, so you’re a lesbian. She was grateful for my support, which can be elusive for a transsexual who transitions into the "wrong" sexual orientation. I later accompanied her to get her sex reassignment surgery and sat by her bedside in the hospital. She began living as a lesbian. I rode on the back of her motorcycle in the Dykes on Bikes contingent of San Francisco’s Gay Pride parade. I was devoted to her, and she seemed to love me back.

I don’t know when she changed. I suspect she’d never been a very stable person and I just hadn’t seen it. She spoke about broken friendships over the years, and I thought she was naive and picked the wrong friends. It was only later that I learned that she didn’t act out with me the way she did with other people. For whatever reason, respect or gratitude or fear of my temper, she kept the craziness away from me for a long time.

As she got older, she got stranger and more out of control. She began abusing prescription drugs, doctor shopping to get pain meds. She lost a well-paid job as a director of engineering with a software company. She no longer seemed to know how to function in a corporate environment. She retrained in another field, then lost that job, too. She began borrowing money from me. Always messy, she lived in increasingly squalid apartments.

One day she called me, "I’m so depressed, I’m seriously thinking of killing myself." I rushed to her house and was appalled at the mess. I’d known she was a poor housekeeper, which is why we hung out at my place rather than hers, but I now realized that she was a deranged clutterer. In her studio apartment, there was no furniture beyond a card table, a couple of folding chairs, and an immense TV. Yet there was not an inch of floor space visible. There were old newspapers in drifts. CDs skittered across the floor. There were unfinished packages of chips and cookies that she had dropped, their contents spilling out, dust and dirt mixing with crumbs. There were styrofoam containers of half-eaten food.

There were boxes that she had never unpacked, but whose contents were spilling out. Shopping bags full of new stuff -- kitchen stuff, phones, work gear, electronic gizmos--duplicated the stuff in the boxes. On the floor were clothes, some disgustingly dirty, that she took off as she came in the door. Everything she owned, whether recently bought or virtually discarded, was on the floor.

I said, "I’m cleaning this place up, ok?"

"Oh," she groaned weakly, "you don’t have to."

"Yes," I said firmly, "I do."

I began filling bag after bag with trash from the floor. I only meant to throw out the garbage, but I quickly saw that she threw all kinds of things on the floor that she might want to keep. I began sorting more carefully, putting stuff aside. I found a dozen medication bottles. Receipts from her shopping. The actual purchases, still with price tags. Forms from hospitals and doctors. Contracts from check cashing places, where it appeared she was kiting checks. IOUs to another friend for such large sums that she could never have paid us both back. I read her life for the last two months. The money I had lent her for school, for her dentist, for housing, was spent on compulsive shopping and drugs. She had so much debt by the time she borrowed from me that it was unlikely she had ever intended to pay me back. Emily’s floor was an indictment.

But I didn’t hate her -- yet. I was both pissed and concerned. I began talking to Emily’s other friends, and we soon realized that not only had she told us unflattering stories about each other, representing herself as a victim, she had royally fucked us all. She had loaded up one woman’s garage with her crap; she used another’s name to get the phone turned on, then didn’t pay the bill. She acted out. She got high and stayed up all night. She raged. She threw stuff. She manipulated. She name-called. She stole their meds. And always, she demanded assurances that they loved her.

Emily began showing up at emergency rooms and mental hospitals. She told me that she was trying to get a diagnosis of major mental illness to qualify for disability. She doctor-shopped and brought home a new diagnosis each week. One week she had ADD, then she was depressed, then she was bipolar, then she had depression with schizoid affect. One day, she mentioned that she had a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, and the pieces fell into place.

This condition primarily affects women, who prey on friends and family in an attempt to fill a bottomless hole of need. I found out it was typical for borderlines to become less successful as they get older. Perhaps it is because they don’t mature, perhaps it is because the strain of appearing normal gets to be too much. Emily had fooled me for years, but the mask was slipping.

I realized that I was not going to change her. I also saw fairly quickly that she was not going to kill herself. The threat of suicide was a handy tool to manipulate her friends as her own life spiraled out of control, but her displays of suicidality were carefully staged so that she never hurt herself. What she wanted from me -- more money, more time, more devotion -- I was not willing to give, and I had no power to avert the train wreck that was her life.

But if she was beyond help, someone else wasn’t. Picking his way around the overflowing boxes and piles of stuff was a scrawny cat.

Six was a polydactyl. That’s a cat with extra toes. He was a cool, unusual-looking cat, shiny black with a triangular face and big feet that from the right angle looked like cloven hoofs. He was long-legged, thin, tense and jumpy. He was the most impoverished pet I’d ever seen. He had one old, broken toy that someone, not Emily, had given him long ago. There was no scratching post. He never went outside. Because of the lack of furniture, he could not sit on a table by  a window and watch the street.

His physical needs were neglected. The cat box was so hard from clumped urine that he couldn’t dig in it. His diet never varied. His ribs were covered by a thin layer of skin and his backbone stuck out. His water dish was dry. To my horror, I saw the cat root around in the sink for greasy water to drink. Now I hated Emily.

Continued

Bonus: for a look at the cop action from the other end of the phone, go to http://open.salon.com/blog/mark_pritchard/2009/04/01/200_mph