Biggie was a cat who my ex and I found at a party. She'd been ill treated and ran away from home. This was not some magic thinking on the part of my ex and my friend and myself. This was a fact.
A woman in San Francisco got this beautiful cat from the SFPCA. Her landlord made her get rid of it. She gave the cat to a co-worker, who lived in the suburbs. The co-worker never combed the cat, and apparently did not feed it. The cat showed up at a household I used to live with and one of the people there fed the cat several cans of cat food. The cat ate uninterrupted. She was clearly starving.
The cat had a tag indicating a San Francisco address. They called the number and got the original owner and explained the situation. She explained hers. She came to their house and talked to them. The coworker never bothered to get a new tag and never told her that the cat had gone walkabout. The original owner and my friends decided to just not return the cat or even talk to the "new" owners about it. The original owner tried to find a new home for the cat, but could not, and gave my friends all rights over the cat and asked them to re-home her.
My ex and I met the cat at a party at that house and took her in. I drove her over the mountains, crooning to her in Spanish, surmising that it was her first language (her original owner has a Hispanic surname.)
The cat was so intractable ("a ball of razor blades" was the description), that we tried just letting her live outside. That lasted 5 months, until she got sick and I was eagle eyed enough to catch it and get her treated. (She probably ate some stale mouse.) Then, after a few attacks on me (painful and bloody, I might add), my ex wanted her put down. I realized that it was either death or declaw. The cat was hopeless. I normally loathe the idea of declawing, and no other cat of mine has had that procedure. But, in this case, it was the only choice. When we stopped reacting to her attacks (yelling, water bottles, running around the house), she stopped attacking. Pity they did not have "Soft Claws" back then.
It wasn't all bloodshed and mayhem. Although she did not like to be touched as a rule, she did occasionally allow it and truly enjoyed a gently petting session. She was also content with what I call "air petting". She's sit on the arm of the sofa and I would talk gently to her about what a beautiful cat she was and how nice she was. She'd close her eyes and purr in a strange, whirling purr, while kneading the sofa arm. She also had a very cute meow that sounded like "Me-eh. Mep. Eh."
She mellowed in her last years. I don't know how old she was. She suddenly got very thin and the vet palpated her and said her liver was shot. Since she really was a high strung and intractable cat, I opted for humane euthanasia. I'd like to think that she had a better life with me than living with some insane people in the suburbs and hope that she's been reincarnated as someone who will have a more loving and consistent life history.
A few years later, I found out from a friend that she was probably a Maine Coon cat, which is funny, because my ex really wanted a Maine Coon. Its just as well, because we wound up taking in Fred and Ginger at a cat show when we realized that we did not like the Maine Coon breeders at the show. (Fred and Ginger were San Francisco SPCA cats.) If we had known that Biggie was a Maine Coon, we would not have given those two cats a nice home.