The Beloved Mrs. TenNapel and I put off having kids for ten years after we got married and that means one thing… get some cats! We went to a rescue shelter and they were holding a black cat from being adopted out because it was around Halloween. But when we asked specifically for a black cat they asked why we wanted that specific color. I explained that the cat I got for Christmas in the 4th grade was black, and that I thought (and still think) that they were the most beautiful of cats. We were introduced to a black cat that I think they had named “Sidney” and we fell in love the little fur ball.
I named him Mr. Black, after the one name in Reservoir Dogs that the gangsters weren’t allowed to take. Mr. Black became the star of our home! He just wanted to love on us, he’d look into our eyes and wink. We kept him as an “inside cat” because all of your Southern California neighborhoods we occupied were full of coyotes. Then one day, we let him roam the front lawn and he fell in love with being outside. For weeks we didn’t let him out, but he would sit at the front door and howl at 2am. We resisted, then the sleeplessness drove us mad so we let him run outside one evening and he didn’t come home. The next day I went on a Mr. Black hunt. I found tufts of his fur on the corner behind our house and trail of blood that careened into the Glendale hills.
That’s the heartbreaking end to Mr. Black, but he did live on to infamy in my Nickelodeon show Catscratch, where he was renamed Mr. Blick.