| Based on a True Story… Sort Of.
The air is getting scarce in the burlap sack. I’m cramped, too, as I hadn’t purchased the human-sized sack from Burlap Sacks Is Us on Venice Boulevard, next to the Rally’s. Of course, things hadn’t gone as planned. Not by a damn sight.
Suddenly I feel the car jerk to a stop. All I know at this point is that we’ve been driving for over an hour, meaning I’d wet myself thrice already (tiny bladder). Where has she taken me? And is it even a “she”? I thought this plan was fool proof, but it seems, alas, that I am the fool.
Maybe I should catch you, dear readers, up to speed on my current shocking situation…
In my 42-odd years or so on this turd called Earth, I’ve had one dog and a few cats. The dog was a big lab / collie / mutt thing named "Tigger." I don’t remember much, but he was a good ol’ dog. Even let me stay in his dog house a few times when it was raining or I needed a hiding place or whatever. After a few years we moved, and I guess Tigger was too big to take with us or something, so we gave him away. Sucked.
Later, our family cat phase started, and we never looked back. First was Smokey, a dude cat with a black fur spot soul patch. Cool in my book. Then we got a cute retard cat named Murray who did shit like get a fishhook stuck in his lip. Smokey split not soon after Murray busted in on his turf. Too cool for school. Murray took off a little while after that. Probably just got lost or something. Doofus. Not long after came the cat I’d known the longest, Skeeter. For fourteen years this fat cat hung out in my family’s home and ate and slept and allowed us to pet her. No running away or anything. She died of kitty cancer a year ago, which was some shit.
So, anyway, I like cats. So does my live-in lady friend (Beth) who’d given her kitty (Beans) to her mom (Betty). That put us in the market. She found an ad on for a cute little kitty that’d been found in a garage. Just a little apple-sized thing way too young to be without her mom. She was looking for owners. We answered the ad and took home the little kitty we’d fabulously christened Nabisco Jerome. She was so damn teensy and cute. Kinda smelled, though. … That’s when we noticed her swollen shit-bubble of an anus, which resulted in a trip to the vet ($$$) and some ointment we got to rub on her asshole (fun!).
 So, yeah, Nabisco initially seemed to be a cute lil’ kitty who loved to be held and pet, and I, being the big ol’ softie that I am, really liked that she was such an easy purr. But one of the best aspects of having a pet cat is that they kind of take care of themselves. Dogs are just a step below children in the care department, and ain’t no way I wanna try to handle that at this drunken point in my life. Cats are comparatively low maintenance pets... so what the hell was I doing wiping Nabisco’s ass? This isn’t my child. This is a freaking varmint when you get right down to it. Isn’t the self-cleaning aspect of cats part of the appeal?
We bought the classy food, only gave her water, etc. Yet, in addition to the kitty version of skid marks, the little beast also took the biggest and most frequent dumps this side of… well… me, I guess. But I have 300-plus pounds on her, easy! Something wasn’t adding up.
And it wasn’t long before she learned to hiss. Now, my previous cats used hissing as a last resort. Nabisco would hiss two seconds into seemingly enjoying a good belly rub. What the fuck? Then we started seeing her personality come out, and, lemme tell you, this cat is a stinker. Just a rotten punk kid. Say she’s in the kitchen sink, licking dishes I, admittedly, should’ve washed already. We’d say, “Nabisco, no. Get down!” She’d look at us, and then go about her business. It wasn’t until one of us actually stood up (and who wants to do that on a night of TV veggery?) that the beast got down. … Only to hop back up there as soon as we were engrossed in whatever Food Network program we were watching. And sometimes, we couldn’t even do that, as the cable’d mysteriously go out. How? NABISCO LIKED TO PULL THE CHORD OUT OF THE WALL! Sure I should fix it, but, seriously, it was all simply mean-spirited.
So, aside from messes, knocked over shit, chewed up blinds we constantly told her to stay out of, TV interruption, the stench of shit everywhere no matter how many times we clean her hellish litter box, the viscous bites and scratches, etc. nothing could’ve prepared us for the event that was the last straw. I was at work, you know, working. Or whatever. I was sober at least. Then Beth phoned with distressing news. One of our neighbors, through some serious detective work emailing other neighbors, calling rent control to get our landlord’s number, and then convincing our landlord to give her Beth’s cell number, had called her at work.
“Apparently Nabisco got caught in the blinds and there’s blood and shit everywhere,” Beth explained over the phone. “I’m getting a ride home, but can you meet me there? We might have to take her to the vet.”
I arrived home to find a pissed off girlfriend taking the shat-upon cover off the new couch she had just bought a week ago. The cat was limping. The neighbor was feeling bad for the cat. The blinds were torn all to hell with traces of blood on them. It was a gory crime scene.
Basically, the way I see it, at that point our neighbor had saved Nabisco’s life. If my g-friend and I had come home to find shit and blood on our couch with no explanation, well, I don’t think kitty homicide would have been out of the question. But it seems the concerned neighbor had heard crying from our house (and not my usual drunken weeknight sobbing). She investigated to find Nabisco tangled in the blinds, trying to gnaw her way out until her gums bled. It wasn’t until the lady of the house had gotten there that the rogue poop was discovered. Apparently, Nabisco, like me, shits when she gets scared.
Luckily for my wallet, her limp seemed to go away not long after she was freed. To save face in front of our neighbor, I picked the cat up to pet and comfort, hiding my rage more effectively than Beth, who wisely suggested I not pet her too much as, “Her back’s covered in shit.”
 All in all, it wasn’t the best lunch break. We were all rattled. Me, Beth, Nabisco, our neighbor… but what to do? Sure we weren’t going to kill her as I’d suggested time and time again (jokingly, c’mon… I was just… just joking…), but cats can live a long time. Did we really want to be stuck with this feral beast who reeks of shit, destroys our stuff, and hisses for no reason at various unpredictable times after biting us for potentially over a decade?
I decided that a burlap sack drop off on a country road was in order. That’s how I’d heard things were done back home. Beth wanted no part of it, but she didn’t try to stop me either, only went out shoe shopping, leaving me to hit Burlap Sacks Is Us and do the dirty work. I didn’t mind. Nabisco had had this coming since I first wiped her ass...
I thought it’d be easy to get her into the sack trap, but, just as it seemed like her dumb shit ass was going to walk in willingly, she jumped at my face with a mighty hiss, propelled by what can only be described as wild animal rage and poop.
Everything went black…
Now I’m here. In this sack. Waiting to see where the cat takes me. She can’t be driving… right? She must have an accomplice. But whom? Beth? The neighbor? Old man Witherbuy on Meadows Lane? I may never know. When the car door opens, I’ll get my just desserts, not long for this world…
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