Finally found out why Maurice Clart-Biggons’ cat is always getting caught in the rose bramble that separates his house from mine. There is an entrance to a creature’s den in the middle of the bush. The hole isn’t very big, and it’s covered partially by the rocks in the bramble, but the interest that feline has is insatiable. Like a city yuppie that plays camp-out in an RV with a king bed, and its own electric supply so he won’t have to give up his Wii, his Bose, his laptop, or miss an episode of Law and Order, the cat thinks it’s a jungle predator.
Early last evening, I once again played the knight rescuing that dumb mammal. It rewards me every time by trying to scratch me with its clawless paws. The black and gray gib, who lacks those nutty necessities that all males need to procreate, must also lack the brains to realize a four-inch thick body can’t squeeze through a two-inch wide hole, framed by thirty-year-old branches. The boughs are stronger than the gelded kitty, and hold him like a boa constrictor. They don’t squeeze him firm enough to stop that damned keening that announces his recidivistic idiocy, and capture.
Is there a mute switch on animals? That would solve all my problems, unless Tink discovered him trapped. She’d always command me to rescue his furry ass.
I am certainly not a cat person. Cats are as egocentric as my ex-wife, but twice as smart. My lawyer, our daughter Pam, has advised to guesstimate my ex’s intelligence that high, so as not to create a libelous situation. Therefore, I have used a gross over estimation. I reference as proof of her lack of intelligence: she married me.
Please take note that when I say cats as a plural it is distinguished from the Katz family who live in Lakewood. They are lovely. We’ve been to their house for Pesach once. Chicken soup with Matzo balls you could die for.
Anyone who has not been through a divorce, as an active participant, can’t know the emotions involved. So if I sound a little harsh, and come on strong, well, just get over yourself.
People, who have never lived in a glass house, probably don’t completely understand the use of curtains. For all you writers out there, show don’t tell takes on a new meaning when you live in a glass house or dance in a grass skirt, especially when like the Mad Mutt, you are twenty pounds overweight.
I am using the same restraint that I did with Shark-face Nienstine. Like my Colt at that time, I’m loaded. No haven’t touched the Murphy’s yet today. I’m loaded with emotions, but I’m not confined in my locked desk drawer. No, no, no; I’m out there.
At least I didn’t need the Colt to get my ex to sign the divorce papers. Using it was probably the only way to stop her from signing. I don’t think the toner from the Xerox was dry, before she gave it an autograph.
But I digress.
Yes, the divorce was not friendly, that conclusion is obvious. For over ten years Pam’s mother held an illegally gained restraining order against me, so that, I had no contact with her, Pam or Jayson, my grandchild.
Hell, I didn’t even know Jayson existed until the Fatal Blow, Lew P’s novel about my life. Some day I should thank my bearded colleague for re-uniting us. Maybe I could give him another story or two to write, and then we’d call it even. Especially, if his royalties beat his advance, and he shared.
Lew P keeps mumbling something about firing me, because I’m an iconoclastic curmudgeon who won’t cooperate. A freestanding character as the protagonist? Humbug. God I hate when writers talk writerese and stop communicating like humans. They become aliens from the planet Random House or something.
Tink and I have made up for lost time with Jayson and Pam, now that things are straightened out. During our most recent lap in the karmic soup that stews everyone until they are done, my daughter feels significant enmity towards her mother for depriving her, vindictively, of a father from age 16 to 26. My ex lied about my character, although no one would deny that I am one, only my most gross enemy would say I have none.
Getting back to that keening kitty that got stuck in my bramble – repeating that phrase reminds me of the song we sing to Jayson to get him laughing “the little ole lady who swallowed a fly” – Tink holds Bubs in the house, because the dog hates the cat more than I hate the ex-Mrs., Lorraine.
While Bubs is under house arrest, but barking and scratching the wood floors to get free. I crawl on all fours head first into the bramble to the hissing cat that raises her back hairs as if I were my dog. Maybe I carry Bubs’ scent, or maybe she’s just a misanthrope like the rest of her breed.
While I lift its body – gelded the pronoun his seems inappropriate. Wouldn’t use it for a capon either – up and out of the vee that has snared it, the stupid feline pummels my hands with her clawless paws. It’s like being hit with tiny pillows or getting a shiatsu massage with padded thumbs.
I’d laugh but my bouncing belly would be pierced by the rose thorns and deflate like a red balloon. The scratches from the thorns would make the cat think he had been successful warding off my attack, boosting its gelding ego. I won’t give that feline the satisfaction, same as I wouldn’t give my wife the shore house.
I’ll rescue that animal because that’s what I do best, but I would not sacrifice myself like it’s a human. I do that enough in the stories Lew P writes about me.
Damn authors always thinking they can control their characters, when it’s the characters that are required for the success of their writing. I mean, who do you think develops the plot. We live it. I know, he may have a theme, but who does all that dirty work, me. They should show us some respect and treat us as equals.
I guess Lew P does, because we are sharing this blog.
Getting back to that hole in the middle of my bramble. It looks like a snake hole. I thought from a far it could be a small mammals, like a shrew or a field mouse, but I think now it’s a snake hole.
My landscape person, Lance, they are no longer called gardeners, or the lawn guys, but a landscape person, collects snakes for his snake farm. He milks the venomous ones, and sells the collected milkings to companies that make anti-venom. He has five or six snake skins crazy glued to the dash of his car. He had to use crazy glue because the whole idea is crazy, and really spooky. Sort of like, some anonymous cowboy’s boots shed their skin on his dash. He is waiting for enough skins to cover the whole of the inside of the car. Scary huh?
The skins go along with his straw cowboy hat, and the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. When he speaks the picture fades, because there is no drawl, just pure Jersey Lawn-boy.
He says he bought his personal car with the earnings from the farm. Can’t be that much, because he owns a 1968 Ford Mustang. He calls it a classic. I call it rusted junk. It has potential to greatness, as we all do, but when it’s colors are red lace, and brown trim, and the brown trim refers to the shade around the lace holes, then the car is no longer a classic, but a doily junkyard reject.
He drove me to the Shop-rite in Wall once, and at any speed over twenty miles per hour, it sounded like a chorus of whistlers. “Strangers in the Night,” but it was daylight and no vocal, just the whistling part.
Maybe Frankie’s spirit is in the car, like that terrible NBC sit-com from 1966 with Gerry Van Dyke, the tag-along brother of Dick, My Mother the Car. Frankie was a Jersey boy, so who knows.
Anyway, tomorrow is Monday, and Lance mows the lawn for the last time this fall, at least till he comes back to bag the leaves, so I’ll have him climb in the bramble and see what he thinks.
I had a hard enough time dealing with that snake Shark-face in the Fatal Blow, and since my stroke, Fish, my internist says “take it easy, but take it.” LOL. No he just says, “take it easy,” so I do.
Till I sneak up on you next time, because I know a classy person like yourself wouldn’t be caught hanging around with an ole Mad Mutt like me, I say Shalom.
The always incredulous, but today, the not so Mad Mutt.
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