 monkey times blog Curiosity and the Cat
It was around midnight on May 24th, and I was pottering around my Harlem apartment getting ready for bed when I heard the noise. You get used to levels of street noise in Harlem — revving engines; people using their car horns as doorbells; people yelling at each other in the street; construction by everyone from ConEdison, New York's power company, to the latest yuppie gut rennovation next door. But some noises catch your attention. This sounded like a child being murdered across the street. I ran to the window and looked outside, to see if the sound was coming from an apartment or the street itself. It didn't take more than a few seconds to identify the source of the noise, considering that it was reaching the jet plane decibel level, and because the source was white and it was dark. A cat was perched on top of the corner of some wrought iron railings outside the apartment complex opposite the brownstone where I live. It was thrashing about, trying to move one way and then the other. After a few initial happy thoughts about it having its leg stuck between a couple of the bars, it suddenly became sickeningly obvious — by looking at the way the cat was moving and where it was — exactly what was going on. The cat had fallen out of a window and was impaled on the fence spikes. As the Roo Dog went to ground in his crate at the hellish noise, I headed downstairs to deal with the spectacle, grabbing a towel on the way down as I didn't want to get scratched by the frantic creature. Initially, I ran for the bathroom, but only the room mate's towels were there. Thinking ahead to tracking down the owner, I didn't really want to hand them a cat wrapped in a blood-soaked white towel, so I stopped by the bedroom and grabbed the darkest blue towel I could find. Outside, a car was double parked near the cat and someone inside was staring at the painful scene. Another man, an older black guy giving off a semi-homeless vibe, with grey dreads, was hovering around, saying "Did you see what happened? Did you see what happened?"
The cat eyed me with desperate but benign eyes as I laid the towel over it and performed the unenviable duty of pulling it off the spike, something that went down pretty smoothly — apart, of course, from the mental picture that later kept me up until 4AM — wrapped it, and laid it down in front of the apartment door. There was no gushing blood, which meant no arteries or major veins, so there was a little hope at least. I turned round to the guy in the car and old dreadlock guy to ask if they knew which window the cat fell from. It wasn't that hard for us to work out, with one light on in the windows above. It was a fifth floor living room. What was that I said about hope? The apartments were numbered with West and East letters after the floor number, so I chose 5W and buzzed up. It took about half a minute, and when I got the guy up there, told them to come down because their cat had fallen out the window. At this point, old, dreadlocked guy began talking to me: How's it doing man? You know, something like that happened to me this week... And he starts lifting up his sleeve to show a bandage around his hand, while launching into an all too familiar story about why I should give him some money. My head exploded. First of all, hurting your hand is not like falling out a window and getting your bowels impaled on 7-inch-high wrought iron fence spikes. Secondly, all white people don't necessarily have free money magically pouring out of every sun-kissed Caucasion pore, or even the magic money tree that every white person has installed in their ass at birth. Thirdly, I'm kind of busy right now, de-impaling a cat.
He went away pretty soon after that. A female vet who lived next door came and looked at the cat, telling us to make sure the owners got it to a vet immediately. As time ticked by, waiting for the neighbor, she observed that, "People in Harlem don't take good care of their pets." The neighbor came down, and I explained to him that the cat had fallen out of the window and had been impaled. Damn! he exclaimed and took the cat upstairs. Half an hour later, I saw him and the woman that lives there, whose cat it was, get into a cab they had ordered with the cat in a crate, as if it was really likely to escape anywhere. Half an hour had passed since I rang the doorbell. This, living on a street where cabs are flying by the bottom of our street a few hundred yards away, under 20 blocks away from the 24-hour animal emergency hospital. I didn't get that at all. I also didn't hold out much hope for the cat in general. Serious animal injuries are killer expensive to treat in 24-hour emergency animal hospitals. You can expect a grand for the first night's stay. Most people around here don't have that kind of money to throw down on a pet. The following day, I saw the guy in the fifth floor window of the cat apartment from down in the street below. I gave him a thumbs up/thumbs down with a querying look. He gave me the thumbs down. Curiosity impaled the cat. In telling the story to friends later, several said, I don't know how you did it. It was a simple matter of focus. After having lived for four years in the Palestinian West Bank, I was just glad it wasn't human. 
more from this section  • A letter to Washington Mutual and their debt collecting agency, IC System (Thursday, May 15th, 2008)  • Contact from Suha Arafat (Friday, March 21st, 2008) • Open Letter to Women Considering Using Internet Dating Sites (Sunday, July 9th, 2006) • Little Shop of Horrors (Wednesday, June 7th, 2006) • Return of the Monkey King (Thursday, June 1st, 2006) • Curiosity and the Cat (Friday, May 26th, 2006) • The Children of the Shoemaker have Sandals (Thursday, April 6th, 2006) • Finding an Apartment in New York City (Sunday, August 7th, 2005) • A Letter from the Editor (Saturday, July 23rd, 2005) |
  ...the nigelparry.net
recommended web hosting    
 FROZEN MINNESOTA gifts designed by yours truly
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[ top of page | monkey times blog | home ] Content & design ©1995-2010 Nigel Parry and nigelparry.net.  |