Mar. 10, 2004 - 12:46 p.m.

Do you remember the cat I fucked? Well, the poor kitty has suffered yet another indignity at the, well, not the hands, of her Daddy.

For some reason, cats have always been attracted to me. NewWifey(tm) says it's because I smell like a litter box. But I believe that cats are just remarkably perceptive creatures with impeccable taste in humans. Either way, the little furball factories have been rubbing up against my legs since my early childhood. My parents used to call me St. Tommy of Assisi.

My current kitty, "Gloria", is particularly enamored of my feline charms. She follows me around from room to room, chases after my motorcycle in the woods, and brings me dazed and bleeding chipmunks. Lots and lots of chipmunks.

She also rides around on my shoulders. Every cat I've ever had I've raised from kittenhood, including Gloria. And ALL of them for some reason have eventually migrated up to my shoulders and used them for transportation. They splay across the left side, behind my neck, and over to the right side. Gloria constantly rubs the side of her face against my stubbly Sicilian chin, purring like mad and content to go wherever I may lead. And she'll hang on through anything. In the Winter months I workout down in my basement, where I have a weight set, punching bag, Suzanne Sommers Bunmaster, and a set of rollers. For those of you who never raced bicycles, rollers allow you to ride your actual bike indoors, without those annoying lesions you get from crashing though plate glass patio doors. They're NOT exercise bikes - you can fall, or even ride off the side.

One day last winter I was setting up the rollers, and as usual the cat was on my shoulders. Bend down, straighten up, lift the bike off the rack; Gloria didn't stir. Finally it was all set up. I use a small stool to mount the bike when it's on the rollers, since my 'nads compress alarmingly if I try to swing a leg over a bar elevated that high. Well, this time I got my right leg over, sat and clicked into the pedal binding. All I had to do was start the pedal moving to get a gyrascope effect going so I could lift my left leg and quickly get it in its binding also. I pushed down hard with my right leg...and my left foor slipped off the stool.

The sound was louder than you might think, and that's even without my girly scream. The stool shot out sideways into my bookshelf, the bike's wheels skidded out to the right, and I was simultaneously tossed out and down to the left. The rollers stood on end briefly from the sudden weight shift, then crashed down on top of the bicycle, which was still attached to me by my foot binding. We looked like one of those anaconda mating balls, but in steel.

I say "we", because Gloria never budged. She never even really dug in, just kept shifting her balance and riding it out as if this was just another excursion. Ho hum. I disentangled, set everything back up, and this time we rode without incident. She only disembarked the SS Dangerspouse when poured out the Kibbles two hours later.

So this morning - last night, really - my alarm went off at 1:30am as usual. And as usual, I staggered around in my bathrobe for half an hour trying to figure out why I was up in the middle of the night. After nine years of this schedule I still wake up just as stunned and confused as my first week.

And just like she has every morning for the past two and a half years, Gloria leaped off the dresser onto my shoulders to watch while I made breakfast. She hops off when I get in the shower, staying between the liner and the outter curtain until I'm done. I still find it vaguely unsettling to be scrutenized by her while I'm showering, though. Not that I'm prudish about such thing. It's just that I've just seen how she's mangled some of the other dangly toys we have set up around the house for her.

Oh - another thing about Gloria is that she LOVES to drink from the toilet. I don't know what taste advantage this water has over the fresh Brita-filtered quaff we keep in her monogrammed bowl, but she'll sit in front of that dingy, rust stained blue bowl and yowl her lungs out until one of us comes and lifts the lids. She splays her front paws wide to either side of the water, holds rump and tail high, and bends over to lap daintily at that Petri dish. There's no accounting for taste. At least she usually waits til I flush.

Usually.

I'm a man, and all men MUST pee within the first 3 minutes of waking or...well, I don't know what will happen. Nobody's ever made it that long. Just know that "Thou Shall Peemediately" is the unwritten 11th Commandment, and none of us men sin.

So there I go, stumbling out of the bedroom in my British Racing Green terry robe with a little orange striped tabby across my shoulders, down the hall to the bathroom at 1:30 on a Wednesday morning. Just like Tuesday morning. And Monday and Thursday and Friday mornings.

Into the bathroom, where I turn on the shower's hot water tap. It usually takes exactly the same ammount of time for the water to heat as it does for me to pee, barring a binge the night before. Works out perfectly. Stepping back from the shower I lifted the lid on the DangerThrone, and parted the front of my robe to give both inches of Little Elvis an unobstructed view. Then, relaxing the ol' PC muscles, that familiar, blessed feeling of bladder evacuation began.

Ahhhhhhhhhh...........

All of a sudden I felt the weight on my shoulders shift. Gloria, for the first time in her two and a half years, decided she wanted a drink immediately. Either that, or the site of a a wriggling, golden rope stirred some feral hunting instinct in her. Or maybe it finally dawned on her, after all these years, what exactly I was doing to her water dish every morning.

Whatever was going through her mind, the conclusion that she came to was 'I need to get down there RIGHT NOW.

I didn't have time to so much as reach up an arm to block her. In one swift motion she stood up and pushed off with her back legs. Straight down. Into the toilet. Which I was still filling.

Guys, have you ever tried to stopper the stream, mid-gusher? Especially during a groggy, 1am, full kidney expulsion? Squeeze all you want, it's like trying to damn the Snake River Canyon with graham crackers. A lot is gonna leak through.

Gloria plunged in paws first, like a furry (but straight) Greg Louganis. In one horrifying instant I saw her arms, then head, disappear into the hole at the bottom of the bowl. And she wasn't backing out! Her back legs and tail were sticking out of the water as she was doing this hideous handstand, but I couldn't stop the urine and she was getting it full strength on that end also.

I couldn't stop peeing!

I didn't have any choice.

I turned.

Bending sideways I quickly reached down and grabbed Gloria by the tail, yanking her free with a squishy "Sploosh! sound. She wasn't happy.

Meanwhile, I was still letting fly all over the towels...the vanity...the curtains...NewWifey(tm)'s hair goop...the rug...especially the rug. It probably was a good 45 seconds before I petered out my Peter, but that was 45 disgusting seconds too long. I was gonna have a lot of explaining to do.

Cats do not like to be washed. Especially cats who have just had a near death experience in a cesspool. They just. Want. To. Get. Away. As far away as possible, as fast as possible. All my attempts to cajole her into the sink for a quick rinse were met with failure. She just ran around like a lunatic, splashing yellow drops around the baseboard.

I had to get to work. I had a duck pond of pee standing on my bathroom floor, and I still hadn't showered or had breakfast. I didn't have time to fight a wet pussy! I didn't have a choice. I opened the bathroom door.

Gloria bolted out, ran back down the hall and into the bedroom, where she curled up on the pillow beside NewWifey(tm)'s head. I watched for a minute wondering if I should throw a towel over her and toss her outside (the cat, I mean). I decided the potential for bloodshed wasn't worth it. I just had to hope that Gloria would lick herself clean before NewWifey(tm) woke and smelled something amiss.

Back in the bathroom, I did a cursory cleanup job. Which meant I shifted the throw rug around to hide the biggest puddles. Then I hopped in the shower, got myself clean, and leaving the shower running I unhooked the shower massage unit and sprayed it all around the bathroom. The walls, the floor, even the ceiling. All of it, doused in the hottest water I could stand. Hopefully it will kill the smell. I left a note for NewWifey(tm) hinting at some unexplainable plumbing problem, and suggested she shower in our guest bathroom until I can fix it.

I don't think I fooled her.

At 2:15am, midway through my drive to work, my cellphone rang.

"Honey? Did you...did you pee on the cat?"

"WHAT?! Pee on the cat? What on earth are you talking about??"

"...Now listen to me, Honey. I'm going to ask you this one more time. Did. You. Pee. On. Th-"

"ALRIGHT! Yes, I peed on the cat. What about it?"

*click*

NewWifey(tm) is due home from work in about an hour. Although I'm interested to hear her thoughts on the matter, I think a night spent at my sister's might be in order. I figure she'll be so busy scrubbing bathroom walls, floors, curtains, vanities, etc., as well as bedding, that she won't even notice I'm gone anyway.

Well, gotta run. Really. If I'm allowed back, I'll see y'all later.........

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Bonus Newsroom Banter:

Overheard comments regarding Spaulding Gray's death:

"I guess we're gonna have to start calling him Spaulding Blue now."

"Freakin' guy can swim to Cambodia, but not Staten Island? C'mon...."

"Poser in a Box."

There were others, but I'll spare you. Because I'm sensitive, you know.

Also, I have to pee.

Stand back......