Last week I had zero kitties. Yesterday I had one. This morning I have two. It’s as if they keep dropping from the sky, and I don’t just mean that figuratively.
A few days ago I was hanging out with my roommate in the living room when we heard a meow from what we thought was the kitchen. She called out for her two cats, “Mikey? Sammy? Come here.” When neither of them came, she went to take a look, but neither were there. So she walked through the house until she found them both. Our ears must’ve deceived us. It didn’t come from the kitchen. We just thought it did. So, case closed, that’s what we thought.
Maybe ten minutes later the little meows started up again. It didn’t much interest me at first. However, when I saw my roommate, who I thought was just tripping out, I helped her look. She swore it was coming from the kitchen and I replied, “No, it was coming from the front porch.” Mind you, the two share a wall. After much debate and going back and forth on where it was coming from, the meowing stopped.
Until it started again. And now it was driving us crazy because we couldn’t find it’s source. The only thing I could possibly think of was that a kitten had somehow gotten into stuck in the house’s frame. So I go outside and look up onto the roof, and sure enough there was the cat. It came crawling from a crevice where the eves meet and walked away. So again, we thought, case closed, right? Wrong.
Around ten that night we hear it one last time before we go to bed. Usually I would’ve slept in because I’m lazy, but at about 5:45 in the morning I hear that dang cat again. By this time, my roommate is already freaking out again in the kitchen. She’s on her hands and knees with her head poking into one of the cupboards where we keep the tupperware. “It’s coming from right here. Listen. It’s a baby kitten, and he’s stuck. What should we do? Matty, what should we do? We gotta set this little thing free.”
So set him free we did, but we had to fuck some shit up first. “Go get me the hammer,” I told my roomie. “I gotta bust this wall out.” That was easy for me to say. It is her house and those are her walls, I’m just living here.
“What? We’re just gonna put a big hole in the wall?” she asked.
“Well we can’’t just leave it there to die, can we,” I said.
“No, you’re right. We can’t. We sure can’t,” she said and grabbed the hammer.
We had to slide the oven out because it was the only good place for me to break into the wall. And as a bonus, we could just slide the oven back in and cover the hole until we got it fixed. I started banging the hole extra high on the wall because I didn’t want to bash out the little kitty’s brains, all while trying to save it. As the drywall gave way, the meows became unmuffled and more intense. So I went a little deeper, this time ripping out the wall with my hands, and that’s when I see him. My heart just about melted when I looked at his little scared face, eyes full of drywall.
As we pulled the little orange dude from its prison, he shook in fear and wouldn’t stop meowing. The thing hadn’t eaten in a very minimum 14 hours, probably much longer, and looked starvingly undernourished. At most, he was the size of an under-garnished six inch sandwich from Subway. If you are a cat person, this little thing would’ve warmed your heart as you held it close to your chest. If you’re not a cat person, and you didn’t feel the same, well, that’s just evil. That’s how precious the little dude was.
Usually such a duty as to take care of this whole situation wouldn’t just fall on my roommate, she would run with it. But she couldn’t miss another day of work, and she was already late, so she put a little cat bed in a pink laundry basket, and I drove it to the vet.
If there was ever a chick magnet, this kitty was it. All the girls at the vet wanted to hear Wallee’s story and hold him him for themselves. “Wait! So, what? He was in a wall?” Courtney with the glasses asked. “How’d he get there?”
As I explained that there was only one way, they could barely stand to listen. Earlier I mentioned that there was a crevice where the eves meet on the roof. Well, that crevice led to a one way route, a shoot rather, and that was a ten foot drop onto the concrete where we found little Wallee stuck behind the wall. “Well, I sure hope he’s ok,” Courtney said snuggling the little thing. “The doctor will be with you in a moment.”
I was happy to hear the doc say that Wallee was healthy. A little malnourished but otherwise o.k. For comparison, he weighed exactly two more ounces than your iPhone. Wallee, he guessed was 3-4 weeks. Cat’s aren’t even supposed to leave their mother until about 6, but obviously he had a bad mother, who I guessed wasn’t ready to have a kid yet, so she dropped him down the shoot for someone else to take care of. The doctor gave me strict instructions to do a whole bunch of shit, and usually such a life-depending responsibility wouldn’t be my preference, but I had long since fallen for my little dry-wall baby. I took little Wallee home, and for the rest of the day we hung out on the couch, and as I watched Game of Thrones for the fourth time, Wallee took a nap on my shoulder and even started to purr.
Earlier that morning, as my roommate left for work, she put on this real serious face and made sure that I knew “that we weren’t keeping it.” “Good joke,” I laughed at her in my head. She would hate me calling her this on a public forum, but she is that lady. The cat lady. And she has the biggest heart of anyone I know. There was no way in hell that after one night of bonding with little Wallee she was going to give that thing away. I don’t think anyone could. If only you got to hang out with Wallee, you’d understand. He’s the best little kitty. I know that’s what everyone says, and I even agree with it, but Wallee is truly something else.
If I could only use one word to sum him up, I would say “special.” If cats knew how to skateboard, he’d be the one whose mother made him wear his helmet to the skatepark and she’d tell him to not pay any mind to what the meany-head bullies said. He’s definitely a little slow, if you know what I mean. My guess is that he landed on his head when his mother dropped him from the sky.
You should see the little dude drink. For the first few days I had to feed him with this syringe thing, but then he graduated to a mini-bowl. That shit’s the best. He doesn’t just sip from his bowl, he jumps in with his front paws and shoves his face all the way in like a little piggy. With that milk mustache he should be “Got Milk’s” next cover boy.
He hasn’t quite grasped the concept of cleaning himself, and when I don’t do it for him, the milk dries up all over his fur, making it look like he is going for that dreadlock look. And to be honest, that’s cool by me. I’m a very hands off parent, so if he wants to play in his milk and rock those dreads, all power to him. I think he knows what he’s doing though because his dreads are a statement to his vagabond, adventurous lifestyle. Wallee’s definitely an explorer. He roams through the house, pouncing around on his weak little baby-sized Forrest Gump legs.
So, in a nutshell, that’s the story of Wallee, our fallen angel, our new little kitty that my roommate “promised we couldn’t keep.” However that’s not the end of the story. Like I said in the beginning, “cats (that’s plural) kept falling from the sky.”
A few days later as I’m cleaning up my room I hear another meow. Then behind me I see Wallee coming around the corner and I think to myself, Thank God, this can’t happen again. But then it did happen again, and Wallee was in the living room, licking the wheels of my skateboard. So I scoot close to the wall to get a better listen and it stops. Maybe I’m tripping out, I think. I wasn’t though, because it started again.
Alright, what do I do? I need to save this next kitten, but I can’t just go busting another wall in, especially because it wouldn’t be so easy to hide. The last one came from behind the stove, this one was in a bedroom. So I call my roommate and just like always, she doesn’t answer her phone. When she finally calls me back, I tell her the story and she starts freaking out. “Another one? No way! Really?” “Yeah,” I tell her, but it’s not coming from the same wall, it’s coming from my bedroom.” She told me to sit tight and we’d take care of it as soon as she got home. Well, we took care of it alright.
Take my man card if you will, but I am by no means the guy you call when you need something fixed. Handy-man is something I’ve never been accused of being. I can try to roll up my sleeves and get down, but more likely than not, I’ll probably just fuck it up even more. Knowing this about myself, I put on my thinking cap. The cat sounded like he was coming from just next to the window, but I thought it would best to make a hole in the closet, so you could at least shut the door and hide the hole until the real repair man came around to patch up both holes.
Since I called out my roomie earlier, I feel it would only be fair if I did the same to myself. My roomie at the moment is also my mother. You should see the way my oldest brother clowns on me for this. “What did you and your roomie do last night? What’s your roomie up to today?” He asks these kinds of things in front of people, especially the girl I had a crush on, and he always thinks it’s such a knee slapper. Personally I find it a little dickish, but what else should I expect being the baby?
Once my “roomy” finds me the hammer, she is still very reluctant to put another hole in her wall. I tell her we have to and she says, “I know. I know. But my walls. My beautiful walls. This is going to cost a fortune to have repaired.” “It’s ok,” I told her. “It’s in the closet and you’re having your house fixed anyway. Just get the guy to take care of this one too. And like I said, it’s in the closet. No one will ever see it.”
“Ok. ok. Just be careful,” she tells me
I start in at the wall, making another hole with my hammer but then quickly stop. “Fuck, there’s insulation here. Hold on; let me see if I can tear it out.” All the while, my mother is looking on with horrified eyes as I rip everything out. Then I go back to my hammer. In the hole big enough for my arm to fit through, and in the direction of where I think the cat is coming from, I reach in and find a 2×4 blocking my way. “Oh shit.” I know this news isn’t going to go over well with her. “I have to do another one. There’s a 2×4”
Again very reluctantly, she tells me to be careful. So I try, again going at it with my hammer, and then with my hands, ripping out the insulation. As I reach towards the cat’s direction, I hit something else. “Uh-oh. Another 2×4,” I say. “Maybe I should try to get a little closer to where we think we hear it.”
“Three holes in my wall!” By this point she’s boiling, and taking her frustration out on whoever owned the mother cat. “I should find these people and they should pay for this. You should always neuter your pets. I’ve got three holes in my wall now.”
But she was wrong. She forgot about the one in the kitchen. So there were actually four, but I didn’t feel the need to correct her, and in the end that number wasn’t right at all. There were actually five holes in the wall, because I found one more 2×4 before I struck gold. And this hole was the biggest of them all.
In retrospect, I’m so bummed that we didn’t film either of these rescues. It would’ve made for a great video, especially with this second little kitty. It took two hours to get this thing free. Unlike Wallee he wasn’t just behind the wall, stuck, and waiting to be scooped up. This cat had way too much wiggle room; he had space to crawl around and was too scared to come close to the hole. It didn’t much help either that I had just enough room to where I couldn’t go any deeper than my elbow because there were 2 2×4’s barring the only entrance.
My friend Aaron, who was over at the time, and I sat there for an hour and a half going back and forth. One of us would hold the flashlight and then the other would try to beckon him over. My mother had the bright idea of putting in a little saucer of Wallee’s milk, so we did that, and it would come close, but the second it saw my hand, the little white thing would run and hide again. He looked ten times more scared then Wallee was.
So the next thing we did was put some food one a long, skinny, yellow Wiffle Ball bat, and reached it out to him. He took a couple nibbles, but wouldn’t come. Then, when I almost had him— he was like an inch away, come here little baby— my mom swings the door open and barges in like a wrecking ball, sending the thing hiding again. By this point I was rather annoyed. Number one, I wanted to get this little thing free, and number two, my arm was getting tired. Finally when he got close enough one more time, I saw my chance and I took my shot. I grabbed the little thing by his skull. Once I had him secured, I contorted my arm like Tetris and pulled him free.
After another trip to the vet the following morning, my mommy promised me that “we were not keeping it.” That was five days ago, and the little cat, who doesn’t have a name yet, is sleeping on my shoulder. It doesn’t have a name because my mom doesn’t want to get to attached to it. I want to call it Twoee, my seven-year-old-niece wants to call it Frank Frank, my five-year-old nephew wants to call it Whitey, and my mom is going back and forth, trying to get me to call my friend who might want it. To be honest, I have a sneaky suspicion that we’ll be keeping the little dude, whether he’s called Twoee, Whitey, Frank Frank (which has really grown on me), or something else.
You just can’t separate these two. They bonded since the second they met. You should see the way the sleep together and the way they fight. Wallee seems to be the aggressor, but Frank Frank, because he was with his mom longer, is a little bigger. He’s not as adventuresome either. He’s more of a chiller. A chiller who needs to learn how to use a litter box, because not only does he shit all over the house, he shit on my blanket the other day, walked in it, and then walked across my chest. I almost threw up, and I did throw away that shirt.
Today I have to go close up those two holes on the roof, because although I love these two little dudes, kitties can’t keep falling from the sky.
