You, good sir, are the Prime Minister of Douchebagistan.

~offhand comment I made today

Balthazar, the Savage, Developmentally-Delayed Asthmatic Cat: The Miniseries, Part II

Picture it: Three-thirty in the morning, not a soul in sight. City's looking like a ghost town on a moonlit summer night.

OH MY GOD NO NOT GARTH BROOKS LYRICS SAVE ME SWEET ANGEL GABRIEL NOOOOO

One of the night vets - a lithe young thing, fresh out of vet school no doubt - staggered into the sterile room panting, her eyes lolling about in her head like two vast, unripe martini olives. I looked up from my circa-2001 People Magazine ("Is Britney really a virgin?") and saw that she was completely covered with crimson gore, which had begun to clot and clump untidily. It was two in the morning three Fridays ago, and to say that I wasn't in the mood for surprises at that ghastly hour would be like saying that Kim Jung Il thinks he's one fancy dude. As she collected herself enough to speak, I expected her to tell me the tragic story of how Balthazar, God love his sainted, wee soul-ling, had not survived the tests and the blood-drawing they'd administered and how he was scampering about under the watchful gaze of the Baby Jesus now. Then I thought: uh, wait a tic. They were going to be a) testing him for heartworm and b) taking about three drops of blood. Why was this night vet looking like she'd managed to survive a Rwandan death squad by feigning death in a pit-grave? Had the shrieks - both feline and human - that had caromed off the stainless steel fixtures for the past hour have anything to do with it? And why was she writing "Evil Kitty" on Balthazar's manila file with a hand that resembled three pounds of pulled pork?

Four hours earlier

That night, and the four nights previous to it, Balthazar had been acting a fool. He'd stop dead in his tracks and, pressing himself to the floor in a strangely contrived posture, would hack wetly for a minute or two and then, as if nothing untoward had happened, would get up, remember that he had something to feck up somewhere else in the house, and would disappear. But he'd been doing it too much that night, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to rip his chest out. So, we did what two cat daddys would naturally do when faced with that crisis: we crammed fish-flavored petroleum products down his gullet like it was going out of style. This is because - and laugh if you will, you heartless assholes - we firmly believed that he was trying to bring up a furball.

It became so pitiful that Keith and I rushed him to the emergency vet (read: ka-CHING for them), where a vet and a technician trundled him off for a series of tests. The primary vet was a strange Scandinavian chap who gave off a "don't leave him alone with little girls" vibe, but since Balthazar was a simple beast I decided that, since he had a DVM and I had, oh, a Bachelors, I would defer to him just this once.

An hour passed, during which sounds like "OH MY GOD GET IT OFF MY BACK IT'S GOING FOR MY JUGU-GAAAAAAAAACK" and "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU" and "I CAN'T FIND MY OTHER CHEEK" were to be discerned rising over the omnipresent, feral shrieking of a cat who, judging by the intensity of his protest, was being vivisected with a kitchen knife sans anesthesia while being raped by a honey badger. Enter young night vet, who appears to be trying to cauterize a flesh wound with a Bic lighter. She writes on Balthazar's file and turns to leave.

"So, your 'cat' doesn't have heartworms, he's got asthma. We gave him a steroid injection in the, like, two seconds we could hold him down. We'd appreciate it if you would come around and collect him yourself, please and thank you. Have a good goddamn night."

As I tried to thank her I couldn't help but notice that she was limping; limping, and missing a piece of her ring finger.

Balthazar was waiting for me, crouched in the back of the oxygen tent with eyes the size of Pamela Anderson's ta-tas and his ears cemented to the back of his head. His tail flicked incessantly, and as I got closer I saw strands of what appeared to be bloody, blonde human hair in his maw. I'd never feared the cat until that moment: somewhere in the dark of that clinic a Swedish pedophile was lying, clutching the jagged hole in his scalp and praying that the Hair Club for Men was an international organization. What was he going to do to me?

I cooed and scooped him into my arms and, to express his gratitude, he didn't maul me to death as I'd anticipated. Instead, he

expressed his anal glands on my brand-new white UMaine shirt

It was then - as I stared in mute horror at the extruded effluent on my beloved, worn-once shirt - that I briefly toyed with the idea of driving the beast to a largish field somewhere in Nineveh township and leaving him for dead. As soon as the thought was entertained, the stink of cooking sherry and stored-away linens briefly alit in my nostrils and I heard that old Romany hag whisper over the nine years since I'd met her.

"Eef you keel this cat, the door to Hell itselv vill open."

I shuddered and packed him away in his cat carrier (aka Kedi Hapishanesi) and took him home. As I wrote myself a note to send flowers for the service of the teenage intern who perished as Balthazar, by several eyewitness accounts, leapt up his ass and burrowed out his chest cavity like one of the critters in Alien, I thought that for the smallest moment that I smelled brimstone. Balthazar, quietly cleaning his junk in a patch of sunlight, paused for a moment and leaned over to burp. A small object lay on the sea-grass rug and, after a moment of regarding it, he left to go lay cable in the litterbox.

As I drew closer, I knew what it would be, and the part of me that hopes was crushed like a mouse under a jackboot.

It was a piece of that vet-lady's finger.

***

Dom

PS. OK, only some of that was true - but I swear by all I hold dear that that cat expressed his anal glands on my shirt, so help me God.