Mandatory Parker: Understanding the Substance Behind the Metaphor
Exactly HOW did Parker get the nickname "the Lint-Covered Breast Implant?
As with many other things concerning cats and the Interwebs, my cat has several names. His given name, as is now well-known, came from his habit of haranguing me as soon as I wake up to discuss the bonus situation. This can be pronounced and emphasized in different ways to get across distinct messages, everything from “you’re the cutest thing I’ve seen this week” to “tromp on my testicles one more time to wake me up, and I’ll have a Davy Crockett cap and five kilos of chili meat by noon.” (The latter happens when he gets frustrated about waking me up to discuss the bonus situation and attempts to expedite affairs.) Unlike some cats, Parker neither took my surname when I adopted him nor took a new middle name, as if yelling “PARKER NUMBER SIX RIDDELL!” would make the slightest difference with getting him out of the closet or off the bookcase. No, he only has one name, as much as veterinarian assistants want to change that situation.
Nicknames, though, he has a few. Much like the esteemed writer Jeff Somers, I sing to my cats, and Parker’s most-used nickname allows me to annoy him and make a famed Prodigy song 100 percent less misogynistic by my greeting him at the garage door after a long morning bike ride with “How’s the FUZZ BUTT?” When I’m concerned about him but not too concerned, I might call him “little man,” and there’s “Babou” when I really want to call him something else. However, he has one nickname that brings on more questions than it answers, and the story of how he got it is a tale all on its own.
Those who have heard me or read me referring to Parker as “the lint-covered breast implant,” and some are concerned. Not about Parker: the beast weighs about eight kilos, so they understand that when I pick him up, he sags and sloshes a bit like a jellyfish pulled out of the ocean, if jellyfish purred like a V8-powered frozen margarita machine when held upside down. No, their questions are for ME. Dear friend Alex Jay Berman summed it up for just about everyone when he asked “Is there something about your dating history that you care to tell us about?”, and I could hear him recoiling and hissing when I responded “Oh, it’s much worse than that.” (That’s the state of most of my stories: I’m saving many for when the other participants are dead and preferably cremated.) Alex has been hearing my stories for over 25 years now, so he knows that when I say “there’s a story behind the metaphor,” he’s going to spend the next two weeks shoving sharpened pencils up his nose until the pain goes away. This is because there’s a story behind my accursed knowledge on breast implants, and it’s much worse than he knows.
To begin, for those whose lives aren’t both blessed and cursed by cats, cats shed hair. They shed a LOT of hair. Parker in particular sheds such massive quantities that I have to sweep my house three times a week to keep the floor reasonably clear. (I’m very glad that with the exception of one small strip of carpet in my bedroom closet, my house has nothing but tile and faux wood flooring, making that sweeping relatively painless compared to having to vacuum.) Besides the floor, he leaves prodigious piles of cat fur everywhere he sleeps, to the point where visitors can tell which side of the bed he sleeps just based on the simulated powder burns he leaves on my sheets after a few minutes. Leave a blanket on his favorite chair for an hour, and it’s the foundation for cat felt. The couch gets its cover washed every month, with a fitted sheet over it changed every two weeks, and between that and the cat fur he rubs all over my clothes, the lint trap in my clothes dryer looks like a litter of kittens. With my late cat Leiber, he and I played a game every Saturday morning of seeing how much fur I could brush off him and pull out of the vacuum dust trap before I screamed “WHY IS THIS CAT NOT BALD?” I can’t play this with Parker, because I’d go hoarse on a typical Monday and mute by Wednesday. If I could do something economically viable with all of this fur, I’d be rich beyond wildest dreams, but since it’s a never-ending supply, it goes into my garden as a source of slow-release nitrogen so it doesn’t clog up my shower drain, my air conditioner filter, and my nostrils. Let the plants deal with it.
The “lint” and the “breast implant” aspects now covered, now the horror comes from explaining why these terms go together in such a Lovecraftian fashion. For that, we have to go back forty years, to when your humble chronicler was living in a different area of North Texas than today. Specifically, the town of Flower Mound, back when it still bragged about its old motto: “Come For the Cow-Tipping, Stay For the Meth.” At that time, I was still in high school, and my mother was working as a nurse, with her quitting her old position as a Labor & Delivery nurse at the old hospital in Lewisville and taking a new position as a nurse and receptionist for a gynecologist in the nearby town of Carrollton. (I learned a lot about the horrors of contemporary women’s medicine at that time, including the slow revelation upon delivering a bag of specula to the office that only a few doctors would preheat them before use.) This meant she signed for and inspected an awful lot of medical freebies.
Those outside of the medical profession in the United States, or those without a close relation in the medical profession in the United States, simply have no idea how many samples, models, and promos go out to doctors, nurses, therapists, and random bystanders every day to sell a new drug, new surgical technique, or new bit of medical hardware or software. Sit in a typical examination room, and the walls at which you stare while waiting for the doctor to arrive are covered in anatomical diagrams and posters helpfully provided by any number of suppliers, and the counter of said examination room cabinet just isn’t complete without at least one plastic model of a dissected organ, joint, or pathology. Go to enough estate sales, and regulars respond to finding steel hip or knee replacement samples given to the deceased with a yell of “BINGO!”, and a typical annual physical usually sends the patient back with enough medication samples that they should come inside Halloween gift bags. At the time, my father worked as a packaging engineer for Frito-Lay, so there was no telling what was going to be dropped on the kitchen table for inspection on any given day: do my siblings and I get to be the first humans to taste Cool Ranch Doritos outside of product testing, or do we get two dozen single-dose sample bottles of Benadryl cough syrup? Or do we get both?
Now, there’s something to be said about growing up in the greater Dallas area in the 1980s, before the great oil bust of 1986 that ended the wild days of the preceding boom, that led to my being unsurprised by most human folly. This was still a time when cocaine flowed across the land in great rivers, and the phrase “more money than brains” wasn’t an insult in real estate and corporate law circles. Body augmentation options were still relatively limited: piercings and tattooings were still great ways to limit career growth, especially in an area where management-enforced conformity was still an asset instead of a vice. These days, those getting their sexual awakening from watching Hellraiser on late-night streaming have all sorts of options, and getting enough non-factory options while on the grease rack for other medical issues to justify spending summers in an ice tomb on Telos can do so without judgment. Back then, the possibilities with rejection-resistant petrochemicals were few, and into that gap wandered the most Dallas thing ever to Dallas: the silicone breast implant.
Now, the various issues with those early mammary boosters are well-known today, from immune system rejection issues to quality issues with the outer membrane to the societal pressure (one famed airline had quite the scandal at the time involving the CEO, who “encouraged” flight attendants into getting implants if they wanted to advance their careers and “encouraging” doctors installing them to find creative ways to defraud insurance companies into paying for them), but let’s just focus on the immediate issue. One day, I was home after school with my siblings, sitting on the couch watching television, and my mother walks in, pulls something out of her purse, and tosses it toward me while yelling “CATCH!” What came at me was the tactile version of the Uncanny Valley, but I was curious enough to hang onto it instead of pegging it out the window before reaching for a weapon if it tried to crawl back. I had a globe of…SOMEthing, the color and general consistency of corn syrup, with some advertising material on is surface in white ink. I dropped it while trying to read it and picked it up off the floor, where it was promptly covered with fur from two cats and a poodle/beagle/English sheepdog mutt in addition to the dust and lint in my mother’s purse. Brushing it off did nothing, so I took it into the kitchen to wash it off in the sink, where I was then able to brush the fiber off it just enough to read the words “Breast Implant” on the side. However, and with italic emphasis, the lint wasn’t washing off. It just moved across the surface, and if I stared at it long enough, I’d almost swear that the surface was absorbing and digesting the cat fur.
In the following four decades of life, I’ve come across a lot of things that stretched the limits of human sanity to the shattering point. Workday and Jira, among others. That day, though, was one of the times where I simply knew too much of forbidden things to pretend that I could be a normal teenager and settle into a normal life as an insurance adjustor or a mechanical engineer. Every day, whenever feeding Parker, I watch him jiggle ever so slightly while he’s at the food bowl. Worst of all, I fear the day I have to give him a bath, only to see his coat part to reveal white lettering over clear yellow filling. His nickname isn’t just to be disparaging. It’s preparation for that day when it happens, my grasp of conventionally understood reality slips away like soap in the shower, and the Lint of the Brown Cat falls over all.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.