Mike Bridavsky could not stop crying. Over the course of two spring weeks in 2012, the foundation of his life had crumbled completely. The Bloomington, Indiana recording studio he’d secured a $60,000 bank loan to build, quit his full-time university job to run, and then dumped his entire savings into finishing was on the verge of bankruptcy. He also owed six, maybe seven, months in back rent for the space — a debt totaling more than $10,000 — and then a promising string of booked studio sessions were abruptly canceled. Personally, too, he was a mess: a woman recently broke his heart; his band hadn’t played a show in seven months and seemed on the edge of dissolution. Then his car’s radiator blew up, the vehicle’s exhaust fell off, and someone with impeccably cruel timing slashed his tires.
“I had no job, I was $110,000 in the hole, and I had no way to get money. I started crying hysterically,” recalls Bridavsky, now 34. “I was looking into bankruptcy, I was looking into moving. I had a nervous breakdown, my friends had to take care of me. I was in horrible shape.”
A week later, when Bridavsky could finally walk around without bursting into tears, one of his friends posted a curious development to his Facebook wall. Mike’s cat was on the front page of Reddit. “I didn’t even know what that was.’”
What that was: The beginning to a series of serendipitous occurrences that would soon have Bridavsky and the tiny, toothless kitten he’d rescued from a tool shed in rural Indiana featured on Good Morning America and then, gradually, turn the animal into one of the most famous cats on the planet.
Bridavsky, a bearded musician with wise eyes and tattoo sleeves, wasn’t always a cat guy. In high school, the Cleveland teenager thought cats were total assholes, thanks to his girlfriend’s jerky kitty. But then in 2002, while studying to be a recording engineer at the Indiana University Bloomington, Bridavsky interned at Steve Albini’s Chicago studio complex Electrical Audio, a feline-friendly business whose online staff page lists distinguished cat alumni (Kitty Pants, Mandela, Pip). Fluss, the fluffy grey cat famously credited with producing Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, sat on Mike’s shoulders in the control room. “I didn’t get into cats because Steve had cats,” Bridavsky clarifies, “but I like the whole idea of cats in the studio.”
Nearly a decade later, in the summer of 2011, Bridavsky already had four rescue cats living at Russian Recording, the studio he’d invested everything in constructing, when his friend texted him a picture of an unusually walleyed six-ounce kitten, the bottle-fed runt of a feral healthy litter who was found in another friend’s backyard shed. (His other four cats — Oskar, Josie, Vivian, and Special Agent Dale Cooper — were already tattooed on his right arm.) When Bridavsky drove out to see the newborn, he was drawn to her immediately. “She looked very weird, like a little alien,” Bridavsky remembers. The story he tells is that he picked her up and randomly said, “Hey, Bub!” and that’s how she got her name. (Bridavsky and a close female friend called each other BUB, so the nickname was a term of endearment reapplied.) “She was a really phenomenal creature.”
As it would turn out, Lil BUB is extraordinary — “one of nature’s happiest accidents,” as Bridavsky likes to say. Her green eyes bulge. Her pink tongue almost always sticks out. She doesn’t meow, but dictates her own onomatopoeia of squonks and squirggels. She has a pronounced case of dwarfism, which makes her legs disproportionately stubby, and osteopetrosis, a rare disease that causes a typically debilitating bone density. She has four extra toes, one on each foot, and an underdeveloped lower jaw, which causes her tongue to droop perpetually. She’s also a “perma-kitten,” meaning she’ll remain her current size of four pounds for the rest of her life. She looks, awesomely, like a Japanese anime character come to life.
