1. contradiction

The cats love to go outside the apartment — love it. The hallway is their favorite place, their one true love. Hobey likes to sit at the front door and stare at the crack where light from the beloved hallway comes in. Sometimes, he jams a paw under the door to pat the hallway carpet. Little Joe will hear my key in the deadbolt and clamber up onto the table beside the door, the better to launch himself through the crack and into the heavenly hallway the instant the door opens. The rustle of a garbage bag is their cue to stampede over to the door and wait impatiently for me to go out to the garbage room, so that they can bonk into my legs and step on each other’s heads and scramble out into the hallway.

Why? Ah, ’tis a mystery. Because they ask to go out. And they demand to go out. And they sit in front of the door and fluff themselves up and curl their tails around their feet as adorably as possible so that I will see them and say, “Aw. Would the beee-yooooo-tiful little pussycats like to go out?” And they cock their heads and stare at me in an increasingly unsettling “foolish human — you thought we would never perfect the Feline Death Ray. Muah ha ha ha haaaaa!” fashion so that I will clomp zombie-style over to the door, droning, “yeeeeeees maaaaasters,” and let them out. And they get up on the table and touch the chain lock, trying to figure out how to get out. And then their big moment arrives when they see me putting my coat on, and they get all hectic around the door, jostling each other like cattle about to enter the chute, so very excited to go out out out! Into the hallway! Woo hoo! And when I open the door, the cats burst out into the hallway and, in a paroxysm of joy…do nothing.

Okay, not “nothing.” There’s…sitting. And…stretching. And perhaps a bit of clawing. Occasionally, an ear is washed nonchalantly. Eventually, one of the cats flops down and heaves a beleaguered sigh; the other one gazes resentfully at me, blaming me for the hallway’s tedium. I hold the door of the apartment open for them, and they file sullenly back inside, ears flattened in disappointment. But five minutes later, they want to go out again. Five minutes later, I look over, and there’s a cat by the door, leaning against it, communing with the hallway on the other side.

2. preparation

The cats hate to go out of the building. The same cats who can’t wait to dash out into the hallway and institute a reign of sloth over the loud carpeting would rather mate repeatedly with the vacuum cleaner than go outdoors.

So, on the morning of the day that Little Joe has to go to the V-E-T for a S-H-O-T, I get the C-A-R-R-I-E-R down from its shelf in the closet and place it in the middle of the floor, to the accompaniment of farrump farrump frmp frmp frmp ffffsssshhh as both felines vanish under the bed. After a few minutes, the felines emerge, ringed in a halo of static charge, and crackle suspiciously over to the carrier. Hobey hisses at it. Then the felines get on with their day, and I get on with mine.

An hour before it’s time to leave, I get everything ready to go so that only the actual insertion of cat into C-A-R-R-I-E-R remains at the last minute. Hobey, a veteran of such psych-outs, knows what’s up, and he slinks behind the toilet. Little Joe…well, Little Joe once ate a jalapeno pepper, squalled, mewled, complained, dragged his tongue along the carpet to get rid of the taste, barfed the pepper up nearly whole, sniffed the barfed-up pepper, and then ate it again. Little Joe is the Ralph Wiggum of cats — cute and amusing, but denser than the air on Venus and eminently easy to fool. So I bustle around, packing my bag with extra Band-Aids, putting on my coat and hat. Hobey skulks ultra-casually into the bathroom with a tail the size of a Louisville Slugger. Little Joe watches and grooms his whiskers as though none of this has anything to do with him.

3. altercation

I approach Little Joe, who blinks stupidly at me. I pick him up. Perhaps it’s the apologetic grip with which I lift him, or maybe it’s the obsequious “thaaaaat’s a nice cat” which accompanies it, but suddenly, he knows. His ears flatten and disappear along his head, and he pedals with his back feet and attempts to meow threateningly. I should mention here that Little Joe isn’t just the Ralph Wiggum of cats. He’s also the Mike Tyson: short, crazy, built like a brick shithouse, and possessed of a voice on loan from one of the Gabor sisters. As a result, The “Meeee!” Of Doom sounds more like a dyspeptic gurgle, but it works — I think he’s about to barf, so I drop him like a hot potato. Said potato hits the ground, feints left, then takes off for parts closet. A merry chase ensues, but ends abruptly when the potato tries to hide behind the refrigerator, only to get stuck between the fridge and a stepladder. Now the cat is humiliated as well as angry and stupid, and has absolutely no sense of humor when I inform him that next time, he might think about ordering the salad.

More pedaling and irate gurgling on the way to the carrier. Now it’s time for the Plastic Man imitation, in which all of his little limbs shoot out to three times their normal length and grip the sides of the carrier. The Plastic Man imitation is backed up with shedded wads of fur and psychotic Betty Boop growling, but after a few moments, the grip weakens, and I stuff him into the carrier and slam the top closed. Little Joe chooses that moment to jump up into Halloween Cat Attack Pose: back arched, tail puffed out and held to the side, teeth bared with much hissing. Usually, it’s quite effective, but when he whacks his head on the top of the carrier in the process, it weakens the terror I feel. Or would feel, if he didn’t already look like a schizophrenic bowling pin.

Out into the hallway we go to wait for the elevator. At one end of the hall, a baby is screaming its head off, and the unmistakable strains of Ozzy Ozbourne waft down from the other end. Little Joe is confused by the baby, which sounds like a cat, and disgusted by the Ozzy, which also sounds sort of like a cat, and has retracted his head completely into his body. Another attempt to look fearsome, aaaand another failure, as he now resembles the fur-coat-wearing spawn of Jabba the Hutt and a fire hydrant. “Wuuuwwwurrgh.” “Uh huh. Tell it to the judge.”

4. confrontation

Outside. I walk quickly. Little Joe begs passersby to intercede on his behalf. The passersby look at Little Joe, then turn to one another and wonder aloud how I managed fit an epileptic pony into a cat carrier, because Little Joe is now careering around inside the carrier so violently that I have to cling to the handle with both hands. Jumping. Bucking. Rolling. Somersaulting. Trying to squeeze out through the holes in the carrier. Rolling up like a porcupine and shooting nonexistent quills. Also, howling, whining, wailing, baying, squeaking, ululating, and gurgling.

At the office, dogs in residence Chili and Rusty check out Little Joe’s scene. Little Joe presses his head against the top of the carrier and glares at them menacingly, but Chili and Rusty see dozens of sock puppets on meth every day, and they just shrug and flop down at my feet. Little Joe hisses and farts and imitates a sea anemone recently hit by lightning. We wait.

Enter Sergei, the vet tech. “Oh, hello, ‘Little’ Joe,” he says, making the air-quotes with his voice. “Mee,” croons Little Joe, his eyes as big as plates, because Little Joe is in love with Sergei. If Little Joe had a loose-leaf notebook, he would write “Mr. Little Sergei” all over it in bubble script. “Mee?” Trying to curl up and look as cute as possible in front of Sergei, Little Joe trips over his own leg and falls over, then adopts a “pfft — I can have any blond Soviet-bloc émigré I want” mien and tries to seem bored by the entire affair. Sergei observes dryly that the movement classes really paid off, and goes to fetch Dr. Grossman. “Mee,” Little Joe sighs dejectedly at Sergei’s retreating form. “Well, then you shouldn’t have sunk your fang into his thumb.” “Mee!?” “Uh huh. ‘Love bite.’ Pull the other one. Besides, he has a girlfriend.” “M-mee?” “No, I will not buy you a fairy princess outfit.”

The actual visit goes smoothly. Little Joe is too busy head-butting Sergei’s belt buckle to notice the shots he’s getting, or the liposuction jokes made at his expense.

5. resolution

Little Joe sits like a stone the whole way home — a disheveled, lovesick stone.

At home, he sulks in the carrier for a minute before hopping out. Hobey walks up to Little Joe, smells vet, hisses at him, walks up to me, smells dog, hisses at my shoe, and stomps off. I fix lunch for the cats, and they both sit in the doorway of the kitchen, tails lashing the rug, and wait for me to leave the kitchen before deigning to so much as look into their bowls. “Suit yourselves.” Baleful chewing is the response.

Later, I work as hard and as quickly as I can, knowing that Little Joe will only stay angry with me for so long before giving in and jumping up on my lap to “help” with the payroll and push pencils into the garbage. I hear a scritchy noise. Little Joe is licking, and purring at, my umbrella. When I get up a short time later to retrieve my mail, he bounds out into the hallway, all trace of vaccinations and unrequited love erased from the walnut of his brain, and arranges himself like a museum-quality vase in front of my door. “Back inside. You clash with the carpet.” “Mee.”

February 11, 2002

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