Apartment Adventures

I got back from New York on Sunday with a U-haul truck full of stuff from my storage unit. Tym Cornell and C.E. Nelson kindly dropped by to help me unload it (C.E. just happened to be passing through town on his way from Arkansas to Florida), and I took them both over to Rojo for a beer afterward.

When I came back upstairs, a couple across the hall was fighting loudly, and their door was open. A black cat was wandering the hallway. I shrugged and figured one of them would soon notice the cat was missing and take it back in. I spent a couple of hours catching up on email and work, and then I went out again for a little while.

The cat was still in the hallway. I knocked on the door where I’d seen the people fighting earlier, and there was no answer. So I put the cat in my apartment and gave it a bowl of water. And then I wrote a note for the owners, which I stuck under their door. “Black cat is in apartment #[redacted]. I’m not home, but the door is unlocked if you want to come get him.”

I came home, and to my surprise, the cat was still in my apartment. Even more surprising, the cat had not trashed my apartment or peed all over the carpet.

The cat seemed hungry, and I didn’t have anything at all to give him because I’d been out of town for a week. So I called a friend and asked her to bring over a can of cat food.  She brought two. Then I wrote another note for the cat’s owners, giving them my phone number to call when they are ready to get the cat. The cat seemed malnourished and blazed through an entire large can of food in no time. I had nothing for the cat to poop or pee in, but I was just hoping he’d use the tub if necessary. But he never did either while he was there.

All night, he kept talking to me, jumping up on the bed and asking to be pet. I sort of hoped they wouldn’t call me. The cat reminded me a lot of Frankie, my cat in New York. My ex got custody of Frankie, which is in his best interest, but I miss that cat. By the time I went to sleep, I was thinking of names and figuring I’d go to Target in the morning to get a litter box.

But at about 6:45 the next morning, my phone rang. “Is this David? You have a black cat?” The guy came over. He claimed that he didn’t know how the cat got out because he was “declawed and not an outdoor cat,” which made no sense of course. The cat was wandering around in the hallway on the tenth floor of an apartment building, not running around the woods. I didn’t tell him that it happened because they were fighting with the door wide open, and the cat just walked right out. I just gave the cat back. But that guy is an idiot, and that cat would be better off with me.