Ole Tom Fogerty
By: Josh Embry
May 9, —
Ms. Charlotte Wettleson,
I admire your clothes hanging skills as well! You are a good clothes hanger — not too fast, not too many on the line at one time — just the perfect amount of hanging for Mr. Kosch’s liking! And speaking of Mr. Kosch, he hasn’t mentioned these five friends of his to you before? If not, that wouldn’t surprise me because Mr. Kosch can be quite a character, alright! Oh, and I have to tell you this queer thing he does frequently. Did you know that he thinks about placentas when he is eating polenta? It does make you wonder though; what word came first: placenta or polenta? Oh Charlotte, I’m starting to sound like him now!
I apologize for the digression; back to these friends of his. Mr. Kosch’s friends are cats, and when I mean cats, I mean felines. I know Mr. Kosch sometimes refers to other humans as cats but not with these five. Do you know why he does that? I have never asked him why before. Anyhow, their names are Crawdad, Shim-Shack, Blood, Fogerty, and Cat. While all five are worthy of a retelling of their life and background, no one’s background is as interesting as that of Fogerty’s. If I had enough time, I would certainly give you details of Mr. Kosch’s other four friends, but for the sake of time and of ink, I shall sadly have to abstain until our future correspondences.
Now, I shall go into great detail of the ancestry of Fogerty and shall try to leave nothing out for the sake of clarity.
Fogerty’s ancestors arrived in modern day Brazil while hiding in the hull of the great ship Six Flags (the theme park that which you might know is named after this ship), which was headed by the conquistador Francisco Juliente de Suarez (1476–1513). Upon docking at the port of Orielles, a wily young ship hand came across two cats that were hiding out under a loose floorboard. The third cat, who was of relation to one of the two previously mentioned, was out hunting a deranged cat-bear abomination who had snuck upon the ship just prior to it leaving Europe.
The ship hand snatched up the two cats, stuffed them in a sack and brought them off the ship. The third cat came back from his unsuccessful hunt and found his relative to be gone. Panic ensued, and the cat raced up the steps and jumped out onto the dock, scanning the area for any sign of cat activity. He could hear a loud hissing and clawing coming from the northeast, and looked to see the ship hand carrying the cat bag over his shoulder. The bag moved with such ferocity and herky-jerkiness that one would think a lion, a tiger, and a bear must have occupied it. The ship hand smashed the bag on the ground, but it only intensified the savagery within. Loud, sharp howling and hissing escaped from the bag as the ship hand was able to pull out the free cat’s relative.
The ship hand managed to get the other cat out while holding the tail of the first cat in his other hand. The two cats were going bezerk as they tried to claw and scratch and bite the boy holding them. He held them out from his body, arms locked, and laughed a maniacal, twisted laugh that would make even the devil shudder. The third cat was watching all this from behind the safety of a drunken old goat (and this was an actual goat, mind you) and was mortified at what he was witnessing. The ship hand then proceeded to tie the tail of the two cats together and held their tails as if he was holding the handle of an Easter basket.
The boy walked over to a clothesline hanging between two trees and tossed the cats over the clothesline. The two cats swayed and bobbed into one another and before long, the cat of no relation went at the viewing cat’s relative, thereby starting a vicious cat fight. The free cat ran to the clothesline and tried to help his relative, but the young ship hand saw the cat out the corner of his eye and punted it like a football. With this, the cat went sailing through the air and into a bucket of slop. The boy returned to his show, laughing and cheering with delight at the evil he initiated.
Some time passed before the punted cat awoke. He dragged himself out of the slop and saw the ship hand was nowhere to be found. However, upon seeing the clothesline, the cat sunk to the ground. For there, on the clothesline, swinging in the wind were the two cats. Their lifeless, ravaged bodies were torn to shreds and each of their skins were half ripped off. Blood dripped from the torn throat of his relative and onto the grass below: pat… pat… pat… pat.
The feline who came across this ghastly scene went by the name Tom Fogerty. All this that I have written above was paraphrased myself from what was once thought to be the lost diary entries of Mr. Fogerty (if you would like the exact excerpts from his entries, I can get them for you; however, I thought it would be better to paraphrase his writing for you because his writing was known throughout for its expansive articulacy and attention to detail). Luckily not only for you and I, but for the rest of the world, his diary entries were found in a rusted-out wagon deep in the Sonoran Desert and have been recopied many times over since.
Back to the story. After slowly regaining his wit and sanity after witnessing such a horrible scene, Ole Tom Fogerty vowed to never see something so sinister happen again under his watch, and in thinking this, he made it his mission to cut down every clothesline in South America, and by God he did just that. Unsurprisingly, cat deaths resulting from being thrown over clotheslines dropped to near record lows. While Tom Fogerty was known as the Clothesline Cutter throughout, he was undoubtedly more famous for his lascivious promiscuity that traveled with him from village to village. What aided in this promiscuity was the gargantuan size of his genitals.
Do you remember when I wrote that the ship hand punted Tom into that slop? Well, the ship hand didn’t just kick him anywhere. The boy kicked Mr. Fogerty with such force in the extremities that they swelled to such a size that they never went back to their original state. No medical professional (cat or human) during that time knew why they had not reverted back to their original size. Some said it was the work of the natives’ gods, some said it was God Himself pitying Tom for the loss of his relative, and some even said the ship hand must have had magic running through his leg.
Ole Tom Fogerty’s notoriously large genitals were written about extensively throughout the continent and if you go back and look through the records of sixteenth century cat literature (unfortunately, very few human records remain on the subject), you’ll see thousands of feline scholarly journals, diary entries, newspaper stories, medical papers, etc., about the size of his naughty bits. Some of the natives even thought of him as a god and his penis as a weapon used to strike down those who refused to mate or were infertile. He was the talk of every village and not a person you came across didn’t know the name Tom Fogerty.
When Mr. Fogerty had had all the fun he could in South America, he still longed for more. And so, Tom ventured on up through Central America and into present day Mexico, impregnating every cat he came across (not to mention other species, but that’ll have to be discussed in person because it is too graphic to be written down, for if it came into the wrong hands, you and I would certainly be arrested) and with it, his ego started to match the size of his genitals.
Even while getting into his older years, Ole Tom still considered himself to be the prototypical philanderer in all of the New World, but there was severe competition springing up all around him. Ironically, his competitors were mostly his children or grandchildren who were endowed with the same ravenous sex drive and close to the same physical attributes as he had. His gonads just weren’t cutting it for the younger generation and this troubled his heart and his mind greatly.
The end of Ole Tom Fogerty began on the day of August 3rd, 1517. At the age of seven (which was ancient for cats during the sixteenth century, for if the medical practices today were around back then, they would consider it all witchcraft, no doubt) and with one of his back legs practically blown out from years of impregnating hundreds of felines day after day, year after year, Tom tried for one more glory ride. In a village yet to be explored and conquered by the Europeans, there was a beautiful feline named Agatha. Agatha was young and full of life, and the younger males were obviously on her like white on rice.
On the morning of August 3rd, Agatha was out hanging clothes when she saw a frail, old cat limping into town. He was poor and decrepit, and was favoring one leg over the other. She saw behind him a wagon and on that wagon lay what presumed to her to be the feline’s massive gonads. Agatha felt pity on the old geezer and offered to pull his genitals along with him to the inn. Ole Tom, upon seeing the beauty and voluptuousness that Agatha possessed, took the pity she gave him and used it to his advantage, like he had with thousands of females years before.
Tom got to talking with the feline and after retelling her his recent sad state of affairs, the beautiful, young Agatha showed him up the stairs to the one room inn, carrying his genitals up the steps and into the dusty, sun filled room that had only a thin straw-filled mattress in it. For the next three hours, the windows of all the buildings in the village and in the surrounding villages had to be closed and the bottom of the doors stuffed with anything that could be found, for the howling and yelling coming from that one room inn reverberated for miles and miles.
The incessant bellowing and wailing reached its climax and stopped as quickly as it began. The surrounding inhabitants opened their windows and went back outside, for they knew what had happened wasn’t going to happen again anytime soon. The young studs of the town, who still resented their grandfather’s sexual god-like powers of old, ran out of their hiding places and hissed at the door of the inn, tearing and scratching at the walls. They were furious that the old cat was able to get with the ever so longed-for Agatha. They wanted their revenge. After hearing and seeing nothing from the two new lovers for some time, the head stud cat told some of the others to go to the nut house across the street.
What they returned with could almost be described as a wolverine rather than a cat. It was a wild looking thing for sure, for legends have been passed down describing its monstrous appearance. The creature had a long, thick body and was covered in coarse brown fur. Its feet were the size of potato cakes, and from those potato cake feet sprouted razor sharp claws that glistened in the sunlight. With four stud cats holding it, it was still almost able to break free before three more cats rushed over to keep it from getting loose. It had a rusted copper muzzle over its face and between the bars covering the lower half of its face, one could see the yellow, blood-stained teeth hiding behind the saliva that spewed from its mouth. The locals referred to the creature as Mr. Renfield (they say this is where Bram Stoker got the inspiration for his character of the same name in his novel, Dracula, produced some 380 years later) but it was unclear as to why it was called that originally.
The cats dragged the deranged Renfield over to the entrance of the inn and waited. In a few minutes, the doors of the inn swung open and out stumbled Ole Tom Fogerty in a drunken stupor. He landed on the dry dirt like a stone. Apparently, there had been an old goat in the inn and when Tom and Agatha were going up the stairs, the goat offered him a bottle and Tom took it. Tom thought the goat looked familiar but after he had some liquor in him, he forgot all about the encounter. Ms. Wettleson, do you believe this to be the same goat that the young Tom Fogerty hid behind upon arriving in the New World? While records do not say whether this be the case or not, I find it to not be merely a coincidence, but perhaps a sign of what was to come for poor Tom.
Behind the drunken cat, the graceful and beautiful Agatha stood, smiling and licking her paw. Tom managed to get on his knees, albeit slowly, and looked up at Agatha and smiled. She returned a smile and went back to the pile of clothes she was hanging up before he had limped into town. The old cat looked up at her clothes and cocked his head to the side. He squinted his eyes, for all he could see was what appeared to be clothes hanging in midair. After regaining himself some more, he shrieked in horror and started crawling backwards. Ole Tom’s eyes grew as big as matzo balls and his chest heaved. He leaned back against a wood post to regain himself and said to Agatha:
“Agatha, my darling, please cut that clothesline down at once! You have no idea what pain those have caused me throughout my years.”
Agatha furrowed her brow and looked at him in confusion. Mr. Fogerty tried to tell her again but while doing so, he heard a growling accompanying dust kicking up from the northeast. He rose to his feet, and there in front him was the ugly Mr. Renfield, in all its awesome terror. Its eyes were like openings to hell and saliva poured down its body before settling into large splotches on the ground.
Now, as I have mentioned many times before, Mr. Fogerty was certainly no spring chicken, but it was written that he could conjure up past memories if he thought long and hard enough about them. He turned his eyes back towards the clothesline and then back to the devil before him. His eyes flamed with terror and all he could see was his relative fighting for dear life against the other feline — like a bunch of wild cats — as they were strung over that clothesline some six years prior. Tom met eyes with the head stud cat and a malicious, evil smile told Tom his unfortunate future.
The old geezer tried to run, but after exerting so much effort with his recent adventure with Agatha, he had no strength left and fell like a newborn kitten onto the ground. The head cat nodded to some of his cronies and they went and seized the old cat. He pleaded and begged for them to leave him be but the young studs only laughed at him. Mr. Renfield was brought over to Tom and their tails were tied together.
While I have plenty of details regarding what happened next, it would be unethical of me to share the ghastly scene that would come into your mind upon reading it. If I have so inclined you to look into the matter yourself, then by all means do so, but we shall never speak of it if this be the case. To make this brief and reader-friendly, it was not long before Renfield managed to tear out the old cat’s throat and ravaged his frail, wrinkled body. Mr. Renfield went on to drink Tom’s blood and a few days later, Renfield died of what many presumed to be a combination of insanity and wickedness, but because of science that we are fortunate to have in today’s day and age, we can now assume it was probably hemochromatosis that killed the cat (not curiosity this time!).
Agatha did what any lover of a dead feline would do and ran away from the village that she grew up in so that no male would ever do to her what Tom so graciously did. She traveled northwards and made her way to present-day Oklahoma. There, she died at the hands of a Himalayan platypus whose deadly desire for revenge stemmed from not being blessed with the beauty that Agatha carried with her.
The news of the death of Ole Tom Fogerty traveled swiftly and with great chatter throughout the New World. It was decided that a grand funeral was to take place to honor “The Great Impregnator,” as this is what he was famously referred to after his death by a Spanish priest. All in all, some three million living descendants attended Mr. Fogerty’s funeral, including his somewhat-less-endowed-but-still-fairly-well-endowed grandsons who ended his life just a few days earlier. Writers during the time wrote about the occasion extensively and in great detail, much to the delight of myself and Mr. Kosch.
Human and animal sacrifices were made by natives so as to not upset the spirit of the great cat who they revered as a god. There was also a story circulating at the time that a tribe of natives wiped themselves out of fear for Tom’s great penis coming up from the earth and striking them all down for their infertile ways. However, this could be neither proved nor denied so to this day, it remains one of history’s greatest mysteries.
There were also accounts written that a pack of cats looking to make a quick buck tried to dig up Tom’s body and cut off his genitals so that they could be sold back in Europe for a hefty sum. Authorities caught wind of the act beforehand and impaled the what-would-have-been grave robbers high in the sky so as to show what would happen if anyone tried to pull the same stunt. Despite the grim warning, more and more scallywags tried their hand with this attempted thievery but none were successful.
It was eventually decided by King Charles V of Spain that the appropriate thing to do was to cut off Tom’s genitals, place them in a jar and let them be admired throughout history. While some believe Mr. Fogerty’s genitals have been lost to the hands of time, I say otherwise! There has not been documentation of them since they went on world tour in 1697 but I believe they are big enough that they will be found someday, no doubt!
There were many long-lasting effects that resulted from the illustrious seven-year life of Ole Tom Fogerty. The most wide-ranging and long-lasting effect is the large endowments in the nether regions of Tom Fogerty’s millions of offspring. Since roughly 76% of all cats from South America (as recorded from a study conducted by the College of Wooster Liberal Arts Program in 2010) trace back to the lineage of Mr. Fogerty, if you, Ms. Wettleson, decided to venture down south into the likes of Peru or Brazil, you would most certainly come across at least one living descendent of The Great Impregnator!
Oh, how I have dreamed of the day that I could perhaps shake the paw of one of his descendants! Perhaps you and I already have and just don’t know? Reverting back to course, this inclusion of so much of Mr. Fogerty’s DNA into the cat population has helped South America lead the rest of the world in feline penis size every year since 1621!
Another lasting effect that has been able to withstand the hundreds of years since its inception is the universal identification of a promiscuous male cat being appropriately called a “tom cat.” Feline records indicate that the saying began shortly after Mr. Fogerty’s death and has proven to hold true to even this day.
The last effect, and most important one, revolves around the beautiful Agatha. Weeks before Agatha had her throat torn out by the Himalayan platypus, she gave birth to a son, who she named Fogerty, after her only love. Little Fogerty was found by local Apache Indians and later went on to raise a family in Mississippi. The Fogerty mentioned became the great (multiple times over) grandfather of Mr. Kosch’s warm and loving friend of the same name. His mere existence had been such a blessing to Mr. Kosch and myself that we could not imagine our lives without him.
Now, Ms. Wettleson, I can see how you could wonder how such a retelling as I have told you could be considered tomfoolery, and I have to be honest that not many people believe this account nor would even entertain it. However, seeing that you asked about Mr. Kosch’s friends in your last message, I thought it to be such a tantalizing story that I had to share, no matter if you believed it or not. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed reading it anyways.
Mr. Kosch wished me to extend his offering again that you are always welcome to come by the store some time and catch up. Perhaps if you are lucky, you may be able to meet our good friend Fogerty if he is not busy selling himself out on the street. Mr. Kosch and I offer our warmth to your family and hope all is well in Massapequa.
All our best,
Mr. Ross Hamden
Kosch’s Cat Emporium, Inc.®
