The shower-monkey prophecies.

As many of you may recall, a suction-cup-bearing rubbery Chinese monkey holds court in my shower, blankly gazing with his beady eyes at a sight most of you (fortunately) shall not behold: my rank, naked carcass. Morning after morning, I, in the darkness of a pre-dawn “wake me the eff up” wash-up, find myself arranging his limbs in unusual, and, might I add, anatomically improbable, positions for my own amusement.

This morning came like any other. My alarm went off and I turned it off (Sheryl Crow’s “Steve McQueen”) and I laid in my bed like a dead thing for about ten minutes before I loped into the darkened bathroom for my shower. In the semidarkness I groped for my shampoo and my body-wash and mechanically cleansed myself into presentability, and, just as I was about to turn those warm, life-giving jets of heated water off, a small voice hissed softly from the vicinity of my left nipple.

“Hey, you. You over there. Come… a little closer.”

I paused and tried to recall the Five Warning Signs of strokes. I was reaching for the handle to turn the water off when it spoke again.

“Hey. Don’t turn that off. I don’t want the other one to hear us talking. I’m down here. The rubber monkey.”

I evacuated my bladder onto myself and toyed with the idea of letting my bowels go, too. After an eternity of silence, I spoke to the rubber shower monkey, which clearly is a sign of stark insanity.

“What do you wish of me, o rubbery Chinese-made shower monkey?”

A pause.

“Today you’ll have a nosebleed.”

Silence.

“How do you know that, o rubbery Chinese-made shower monkey?”

He never spoke again, and I, hoping against hope that I’d imagined the whole thing, went on with my day. The forty mile drive to Bloomington, the elevator ride to the belfry of Franklin Hall, waving mutely at the ‘borgs shuffling off to their servitude in Eethray-Entay, the naked horror beholding my awaiting workload. My nose began to run a little from the sinus medication I’d taken and I got a tissue to expel the offending gunk. I looked down at the tissue, as I always do (I have to see if there are some real gems in there) and the tissue was covered in my own crimson gore. As my lifeblood formed a 98 degree rivulet down my beard, I thought to the Chinese-made rubbery shower monkey and wondered if his latent clairvoyant powers could be harnessed for ‘good’ – I would love to prove to the Lord that winning a spectacularly ass-filling lottery wouldn’t turn me into a blow-addicted penthouse-living monstrosity. Mostly, though, I began to wonder if I had suddenly become a hemophiliac, because damn.

***

I would like to take a moment to now pause and reflect on the loss of my cat, Balthazar’s, testes. Friday before last I dragged him, howling and spitting like a crack-whore, to Bloomington’s spay and neuter clinic, wherein he was unceremoniously castrated, inoculated and provided with flea-poison. Our fervent hope was this: once Balthazar was sterilized and kitty testosterone wasn’t coursing through his body by the gallon, he’d stop being a nasty little mothertouching douchebag. Oh, of course he’s still precious, and yes, I love him dearly, but having your hand rendered into something resembling ground chuck held together by sinew isn’t high on my “yay, let’s do it!” list. I tell people about how one moment he’s cuddly and sweet and loving on you and the next he’s digesting one of your fingers and they sigh.

“He’s just a baby”, they say. “Kittens do that.”

I want to show these people my eight-pound, seven-month-old “kitten” drinking my rapidly congealing blood after he’s managed to slash my arm down to the pearly-white bone. I want them to watch him as he tries to hide so that he is better able to leap on your exposed leg, torn shreds of which he will carry to his lair to prepare some cracked black pepper jerky. And that poor UPS guy – watching my cat burst forth from his abdomen like one of those critters in “Alien” with one of his kidneys in his maw gave me at least six gray hairs. I just pray that Balthazar at least had the decency to dispatch him humanely. That’ll teach people to send overnight mail to my house for “Tanya McRimmerman.”

Balthazar has his moments, though. Two afternoons ago, a curious Balthazar entered the shower as I was bathing and began to weave between my legs. Since he was already pretty wet and since he’d not had a bath since his special trip to get the snip-snip – which was followed by five days in a kennel while I was in Pennsylvania – I decided I’d do something seemingly foolhardy considering a) Balthazar’s track record and b) the fact that I was completely butt-naked. I picked him up and nestled him in the crook of my arm and moved the water over him, and worked some of my shampoo into his coat, and rinsed – and repeated.

He purred in ecstasy the whole damn time.

Three words come to mind.

What. The. @&$#.

I’ve never had a cat that loved, absolutely loved, water. I have no doubt that he’d swim if he got a chance. I mean, in something other than other creature’s slaughtered offal.

***

It’s amazing – the other day I converted my ‘blog into a Word document. It was FOUR HUNDRED THIRTEEN PAGES. Apparently, I am a novelist and didn’t even realize it.

So enjoy. Send the link to a friend. Pop the top off that fo’ty in your fridge and suck the rank foam off the top and light up that pineapple flavored White Owl cigarillo and reflect on how normal your lives and psyches are. After all, I am here to serve.

Until Friday, I remain,

Dom