Here kitty kitty kitty.....

So last night I was hanging out with some peeps packing shit up, friends of mine from college that were making the great leap foward to the East Coast, and A and I were hanging out in the living room watching them throw shit into boxes....we had been drinking champaigne and smoking when I heard the distressed "Meeooowww...." howling of a cat. I called back as I'm wont to do and the cat answered back. We did this for a while, calling out to each other and I told the others "that cat is in trouble, it needs help. I could tell that it was outside, probably stuck somewhere because the sounds were coming from the corridor between my friends building and mine.

I tracked outside, stumbling over my drunk self (I also had previously been drinking at an office mixer earlier in the evening) and kept calling out to the cat, trying to figure out where in the hell it was. Bueno, when I realized that approaching from the front, whereby the way was blocked by a gate, was not going to work I trooped around back, increasingly concerned for the obviously frightened kitty.

Entering the corridor from the backyard of my building I began calling out again to the cat, attempting to divine where it was when I noticed a door in their building, from under which a diry white paw was swiping out in a desperate bid to make contact with a human being. I poked my head down, trying to catch a glimsp of the cat, I saw a dirty gray-white face peering back at me, crying piteously. I shrieked at the top of my lungs right then:

"A***, A*** I found the white cat!...I found him! I found him!"

Okay sees, our neighbors across the way from us (but technically in the same complex) have a fat white cat that would love nothing more than to cuddle up to Rosita (my cat) if she weren't so prickly (perhaps its more monogamy than anything, as she does have a lovah) and he's been missing.....FOR THE PAST THREE WEEKS! Knowing how long he had been missing, and how drunk I was, I became frantic to get him out. What occured next was a rapid series of events as we ascertained where in the hell in my peeps basement he was, tried to contact his owners, tried to contact the landlord and called 311 to talk to animal control...

The Results? 1) Animal control, apparently, wont do shit for cats unless there's an assload of them living in unsanitary conditions with so-called cat collectors; 2) the landlords werent home --and indeed we didnt hear from them the rest of the night; 3) while we did have access to the basement, unfortunately it's divvied up into portions, with a door leading between all of them but all those doors locked. We did eventually locate a door that lead to the part of the basement where the cat was but it had a Masterlock on it.

While A and I were drunkenly/stupidly gazing at the locked door, one of the cat's owner's roommates came by after being informed by another neighbor of what was going on. All three of us, joined later by another person who did nothing but stand around and look stupid, spent the next hour trying to break into the basement. When the outside door didnt open, we tried the one that was between our friend's part of the basement and the one where the cat was. We tried again and again to break just the lock. At then end of it, staring in frustration at the lock that would not give, A turned to the chick and said to her "Do you just want to break down the door, landlords be damned?" (okay perhaps not in those exact words, but you gotta admit sure sounds cool...)

The chick nodded her head, as we all agreed that a cat gone missing, starving and dehydrated, for three weeks warrented the destruction of private property. A handed our hammer to the chick and she wacked, realized she wasnt gonna make much headway, flipped the hammer around and attacked the door with the claw side. Several good whackings later we had a hole big enough for the cat to come through and sure enough it did, very thin and dirty.

After making sure the cat was properly recieved by his sobbing owner, A and I returned to our friends and the champaigne.

Eve