exploiting my youth – Pathetic Fallacy

Roque & roll

In the summer of 1981 my family took a cross-country trip from our tiny college town of Eureka, Illinois to spend the summer Claremont, California, where we would live in a loaner house that was part of an affluent retirement community. My father was on sabbatical from his professorship and planned to spend a few months writing. I have many memories of this trip, but the three big ones were: 1) going to Disneyland, where I was able to experience Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and the 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea: Submarine Ride, both of which are now but memories; 2) the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is now a classic but at the time arrived seemingly out of nowhere with almost no promotion (Superman II was supposed to be the biggest movie that year); and 3) afternoons playing roque.

I remember the day my father first described the sport of roque to my mom, my brother Rob, and me over the dinner table. He said that a group of the retirees at the village were all hooked on a game that was sort of like pool, except instead of a table, it was played on a big hard court, and the players used mallets and hoops like croquet, but you hit your ball using a cueball, and also there was also a sort of a curb around the entire court, so that players could make bank shots, like the rails of a billiards table. I was confused but intrigued, and then my dad said that if we were interested, we were allowed to use the roque court when no one else was there—as long as we took part in its cleaning and upkeep.

The next day, Rob and I watched a game and it was fascinating. The court was only a short walk away in a central shared area of the community, surrounded by short palm trees. It was recessed into the ground and dog-eared at each corner, resembling an emerald gem cut. The surface was warm red clay, much like that of a clay tennis court, and it was dusty and got on the soles of the shoes of the elderly gentlemen who carefully and precisely lined up their shots. The mallets were short, compared to croquet mallets, and they had a soft rubber head on one side, for better control and possible spin on the cueball. The wickets were thick metal and were permanently anchored in place by cement below the clay. And boy howdy were the players serious. There was absolutely no talking when someone was taking his turn, and usually none after as well, unless to murmur approval for a good shot or to sympathetically click their tongues for a bad one.

My father had apparently petitioned the locals on Rob’s and my behalf—perhaps he realized we had little to do that summer on a daily basis—because a couple of the aged fellows took us aside and took us through the rules, which were mostly the same as croquet’s except when they weren’t. They showed us the proper way of holding the mallet straight up between the legs and making contact with the cueball. But most importantly, they showed us how to maintain the court. It had to be swept clean of debris (the California foliage produced stray leaves year-round). It had to be lightly sprinkled with water, to prevent cracking in the sun. When it inevitably did crack, there was a reserve of clay powder that was sifted into the fissure by hand and wetted. Finally there was a large metal roller, pushed like a lawn mower, that was used to keep everything level.

If the sport of roque is remembered at all today, it’s as a plot point in Steven King’s 1977 novel The Shining (but not in the Kubrick film adaptation of 1980). In the novel, the haunted Overlook Hotel features a roque court, and towards the start of the book the hotel’s owner, Stuart Ullman, describes the structure to Jack Torrance, the troubled author who has taken on a position as winter caretaker:

“It was Derwent who added the roque court I saw you admiring when you arrived.”

“Roque?”

“A British forebear of our croquet, Mr. Torrance. Croquet is bastardized roque. According to legend, Derwent learned the game from his social secretary and fell completely in love with it. Ours may be the finest roque court in America.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Jack said gravely. A roque court, a topiary full of hedge animals out front, what next? A life-sized Uncle Wiggily game behind the equipment shed?

Late in the novel, after he has been possessed by the malevolent spirit of the hotel, Jack uses a roque mallet to terrorize his wife and child, as well as to mutilate his own face (early King novels, am I right?). It’s remarkable that King went so out of his way to feature a forgotten sport and then get absolutely nothing right about its history. Roque is an American invention, developed in New York and named by Samuel Crosby in 1899; the name was derived by removing the first and last letters of “croquet.” Croquet itself was not a particularly old sport at the time. The earliest description of that game comes from 1856 in London, although it seems likely to have derived from previous vernacular sources. When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, the Queen of Heart’s croquet game, played with flamingo mallets and hedgehog balls, was a reflection of a recent craze for the invention.

Roque was something of an overnight sensation at the turn of the century. The innovations it brought to croquet greatly increased opportunities for skillful play, and the permanent courts, which required a significant investment of resources, made it into a serious sport for serious players. Competitive roque was played by two teams of two players and high-level play included the technique of hitting your ball into your partner’s ball, thus pushing the two balls along in tandem.

How big did roque get? It was a sport in the 1904 Olympics, replacing croquet, which was an event in 1900. The United States won all the medals, largely because roque wasn’t played outside of the country. In his 1954 novel Sweet Thursday, a sequel to Cannery Row, John Steinbeck spends a chapter describing how the town of Pacific Grove, California became torn apart by a rivalry between retiree players and fans of two opposing roque teams:

Once, during its history, Pacific Grove was in trouble, deep trouble. You see, when the town was founded many old people moved to the retreat, people you’d think didn’t have anything to retreat from. These old people became grumpy after a while and got to interfering in everything and causing trouble, until a philanthropist named Deems presented the town with two roque courts.

Roque is a complicated kind of croquet, with narrow wickets and short-handled mallets. You play off the sidelines, like billiards. Very complicated, it is. They say it develops character.

In the novel, Deems, the benefactor who paid for the courts regretted the rift they were causing and had them bulldozed in the dead of night right before a big tournament.

While I was researching the history of roque for this essay, I discovered that in its basic form it did not use a cueball, and that the version I had been taught was called “two-ball” roque. There was also, apparently, a version called “royal” roque, but what that entailed I can only imagine. In any case, roque’s popularity faded quickly after World War II. The American Roque League last published official rules in 1959 and the National Two Ball Roque Association las published its rules in 1961. In 2004 the American Roque and Croquet Association suspended its national roque tournaments.

A 2011 article in Croquet World Online Magazine details the construction of a contemporary court in Stuart, Florida. Its builder, Chris Bullock, remembered the game from having played it at Cape Cod in the 1950’s. The article say that Mr. Bullock and his friends play a new variant, “golf” roque, designed to be faster-playing. This article, now more than a decade old, is the most recent mention of play I could find, and I wonder if Bullock’s court sparked new interest or if it was the last of the dodos.

Whether or not there’s anyone left playing the game today, roque left a lasting impression in my mind, mostly for the memory of one ill-fated evening. It was late in my family’s stay in Claremont and Rob and I were a bit squirrelly with the realization that we were heading home soon after two and a half months. And we were going to miss roque. Generally we played in the late mornings because those were the only times that the courts were free. But that evening Rob and I decided we wanted to play late.

It had been raining that day, which of course is rare in southern California, and the court was a bit tacky, but we were determined to go through the upkeep routine, because that was in its own way as fun as playing. There was a sizable crack and I thought we should really fill that in as much as we could so we heaped on a few handfuls of the clay dust, but it wasn’t really settling in place, so we pulled out the hose and soaked the pile through. The court around the crack was already saturated and excess water from our repair attempt was puddling.

Now we had a sticky mound of clay that was noticeably higher than the rest of the court. So we did what seemed obvious—we pulled out the roller and set to work, running it back and forth as if we were making a pie crust. The mound was not getting smaller, so we took running starts; and then disaster struck: a layer of the court peeled off entirely, stuck to the roller, leaving a gash about two feet long, six inches wide, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. The tacky clay had crumbled unevenly and the exposed surface was pockmarked and cratered.

We were horrified. We had been entrusted with the use and care of these men’s most prized possession, their passion in life, and we had ruined it. I was absolutely losing it while Rob was trying to figure out how we might fix things. The answer seemed to be more clay, and more rolling, but now nothing stuck at all. Any powder we put down just added the smear stuck to the roller, which would not scrape off. Darkness was falling, and we were supposed to return to the house. Eventually, we simply gave up. We replaced the roller and the hose and walked back in shame. We didn’t tell our parents, but we knew that the next day there would be a reckoning. I didn’t sleep well that night.

Late the next morning, Rob and I walked slowly out the back door and onto the path that lead to the scene of our crime. I played through scenarios in my head, mostly involving us having to somehow pay for the damage with a lien on any future wages, which were more than a decade off. I also imagined the sad retirees returning home to their wives and trying to hold back the tears. But instead, what greeted us was nothing of the sort. There were four old guys, lost deep in play at a forgotten sport. The court was immaculate. Nothing was ever said.

Safe & non-toxic

Back in the days when Halloween was primarily a night for kids to knock on doors to get stray change and popcorn balls; back before the holiday morphed into an excuse for young adults to dress as sexy versions of 90’s cartoons and get their slutty drink on; that is, back in the 70s, store-bought costumes were crap. They consisted of thin vacuum-formed plastic masks and silkscreened bodysuits which were made of a mystery fabric that was not quite muslin, not quite plastic, but 100% flammable. Eventually even this material was deemed too costly to produce and the suits were made entirely from vinyl, lending them all the drape of a deflated beach ball. These were the ubiquitous licensed character costumes made by Ben Cooper, inc., which, defying all reason, are highly collectable today. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

Ben Cooper brand costumes: bring them up the next time a Gen-Xer complains about how everything was better back when.

Of course, there were kids and parents who wished to avoid paying a whopping three bucks for commercially-produced outfits that were only marginally recognizable (owing to the fact that they had the characters’ names emblazoned on their chests). For the non-conformists, costumes of hoboes, pirates, ghosts, and mummies were good options because you could make them out of last year’s ratty clothes and sheets and felt and other bits of stuff lying around (toilet paper was often involved). But for the true weirdos, those who aspired to be something scary or gross for Halloween, there was only one game in town, and that was the Imagineering line of makeup and prosthetics. They were cheep, funky, grungy, and surprisingly effective, especially when it came to making gaping wounds and the like, and I loved them so much.

Instead of selling full costumes of specific characters, the Imagineering line consisted of theatrical building blocks you could mix and match. There were evil teeth and fake fingers. There was fake blood and tooth blackout. And there were small pallets of ingenious stage makeup, such as Scar Stuf™, a mixture of beeswax and cotton fibers that seemed like it couldn’t possibly work but which did in fact produce startlingly realistic scars, wounds, and other abrasions.

For much of my childhood I was limited to the pointy teeth and fake blood. I was not particularly flush as a kid, and while most items in the Imagineering line ran 50-75 cents, that was still a lot for me. Until one October—maybe ’78 or ’79—when I finally had some income of my own from delivering The Peoria Journal Star (afternoon edition). That year I finally splurged on a pair of Evil Eyes, the prosthetic eyes that GLOWED IN THE DARK. In light they were just a couple of ovals of plastic but in complete darkness, they were Fire from the Very Depths of Hhell. To maximize the glow effect, I would hold the plastic eyes under my reading lamp—a gooseneck 75 watt lamp clipped to the headboard of my top-level bunk bed—for about five minutes. Then I would run to the darkest place in the house (mostly under a blanket in my closet) and stare in horror at the glowing orbs until they faded into blackness. Of course, like all glow-in-the-dark toys, the magic was over far too soon, and the best effect could only be achieved by holding the eyes a long time as close as I could to the incandescent bulb, which was blisteringly hot. To save my fingertips, I took to placing the eyes on my bed and bending the lamp down as close as I could. One day I decided I would get the best glow ever by bringing the lamp down so that the hood touched my quilt and the bulb pressed against the eyes, shutting the precious lumens in entirely. Pleased with this set-up, I went off to get a snack before I would take the eyes into the dark.

Two hours later, my mother came into the living room where I was sitting reading and asked if I smelled something funny. My father also was alarmed. We walked down the hall and it became apparent that thin black smoke was coming out of my bedroom door. When we entered there was a cloudy, oily plume coming from under my lamp, which was still directly on my quilt. My father grabbed a sock to push away the lamp, which had deformed from the heat. We were greeted with a massive billow of inky miasma; and underneath, a soupy, sticky mess of plastic making tendrils from the bulb to the quilt, which now had a smoldering hole in one block. My shocked parents asked me what on Earth I had been doing and I was at a loss to explain myself. Secretly, all I could think of was if there were a way to block out the windows because holy hell, those goopy, melted eyes would’ve glowed like the sun.

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale

When, as a kid, I learned the word raconteur, I thought that the role wasn’t simply a matter of one being good with stories; I thought it was a career one could have, and even be paid for. I’m not sure why I came to this conclusion, or who I thought would be writing the checks, but it seemed to me like would be a good job to have.

It may have been this early misconception of what the life of the raconteur entails that has inspired me to tell and re-tell so many dumb, over-sharing stories about myself. I think I have gotten quite good at it. This is a collection of my go-to yarns I employ at parties and other events. If you’ve met me in person, you may have heard some of these anecdotes before.

These anecdotes are guaranteed¹ to be 95% True. The other 5% is poetic license².

One of my earliest memories is the time I nearly cut my own finger off. I was around the age of four or five and I was attending another kid’s birthday party. The event was happening in a large apartment in Manhattan and it was early 70’s mod in design, full of funky furniture and ficus plants. There were several dozen kids on hand, and looking back on it, this family must’ve been fairly well-to-do; they had two televisions—unheard of at the time.

We kids were pretty rambunctious, running through all the rooms and jumping on beds. In the master bedroom there was an exercise bicycle. To understand what happened you need to know that in the 70’s exercise bikes looked like half of a regular bike, jacked off the ground; they had a normal bike wheel in front, with a rubber tire and spokes. So some of the kids were hopping up on the device (which was a novelty at the time) and pedaling as furiously as their five-year-old legs could go. I was waiting my turn, but their were a lot of kids in front of me, so I stuck out my right hand and let the whirring spokes brush against my fingers, and—

When I pulled my hand back it was gushing blood. There was a tear that extended across the width of my index finger, which felt a bit wobbly like it might come off entirely. All around me kids were shrieking and running in circles. Eventually the grownups in the other room discovered what had happened and my mom wrapped my hand and swept me up in her arms. As I was taken away to the hospital, all I could think was, I’ve ruined the party. I’ll never be invited again.

When I think about it, I’m amazed that I still even have hands. The bike incident was just the start of a long line of dumb injuries. I have slammed my fingers in doors; I have been bit by dogs; I got a staph infection in my wrist when I I’ll-advisedly caught a frog in a stagnant puddle. Aside from the massive scar under my index finger, I have one about as large on the ball of my right thumb. Here’s its story:

The house we were living in when I was seven was a strange building whose basement had storage spaces that were cut out of the ground and left unfinished; a landscape mural that was screen-printed on the living room wall and had a scalloped wood trim glued around it by way of a frame; and a couple of built-on additions. One of these was a weird narrow hallway with stairs leading to the back yard, and it was pretty unusable as a living space. My parents stuck old newspapers in a pile back there to await recycling, and I remember that when I was bored I would sift through these to find old comics pages, and particularly look for old Jumble puzzles. These were the old skool ones drawn by Henri Arnold and Bob Lee, and they were drawn weird in a way that fascinated me. Also by the Jumble was the bridge column, and that made no sense at all, but the printed ♠♥♣♦’s were pretty neat.

One day I was looking at a Jumble and trying to figure out what GNATFREM might be rearranged to. As was my habit while in thought, I was hopping up and down (a stim I’ve grown out of) and paying no attention to my surroundings. I landed wrong, on the edge of the top stair, and I fell down backwards, trying to remain upright. Reaching the bottom, I held out my right hand to stop the fall, and it went straight through a diamond-shaped pane of glass in the door. And as my long-suffering mom gathered me up for another trip to the hospital, all I could think was, oh no, not this again.

The dot.com I worked in as a web designer back from 1999 to 2002 was never going to succeed, but not for lack of confidence. It was full of a bunch of cocky twenty-somethings burning through VC like it was an ATM and was led by a fast-talking hirsute ex-hippie who could convince you that we were all headed straight to the moon and would be retiring on our stock options any day now. It was a silly time, not just for my company, but for the entire new economy™ generation. How silly? There was a service at the time, kosmo.com, that would purchase and deliver anything you asked for without a fee. In my office there was a competition to see how badly we could abuse this by ordering, say, a single pen or a container of Tic Tacs.

At the office I would get a whole different mess of junk mail than what I got at home. For the most part this consisted of endless AOL free trial CDs, which I eventually made into an elaborate mobile with the use of dowels, string, and duct tape. (I hung this over our conference room table because it was the new economy! Japes and waggery were right there in the job description.) But my single favorite solicitation was an invitation to join yet another subscription-based classics book club. Printed across the back flap of the offer’s envelope was the motto “Because your taste in literature soars above the quotidian.” This struck me as so comically pompous that I immediately cut the flap off and pinned it to my workspace’s cork board. My coworkers also found the phrase ridiculous, and eventually “soars above the quotidian” became a catchphrase amongst us all, as in “this pizza really soars above the quotidian.”

When I was young my parents never had alcohol of any sort around the house³. Drinking felt like something forbidden and I was actively embarrassed by beer commercials on television. But my paternal grandparents always had two liqueurs squirreled away on their crowded basement shelves: crème de menthe and crème de cocoa; as their drinking years began in 1933 with the end of prohibition, their drink of choice was grasshoppers. But I had no context for this when I discovered the cache, which both scandalized and intrigued me. This was my first exposure to spirits, and I thought this candy-flavored cocktail must be the height of sophistication, still imbibed by alcoholics everywhere. Years later, when I was a young adult I tried ordering a grasshopper at a tavern; all I got was an exasperated look from the bartender.

During my undergraduate years I did work-study at the college’s science library, which was far less busy than the main library, so I got to spend time checking out the various academic science journals and their esoteric titles, of which my favorite was The Journal of Sedimentary Petrology. When eventually I took an introductory Geology class I understood the periodical’s name, and that took away some of the fun. However, my familiarity with Geologic terms did eventually come in handy.

One slow afternoon I sat at the circulation desk reading comics (this was ’87? I was probably reading Love and Rockets, let’s say I was, that makes me seem hip). All was silent, even for a library, and that’s why I had a jump-scare when I glanced up from my book and saw a smiling, balding man standing before me. He could have been there several minutes. He said nothing, but nodded and widened his grin.

“Can I help you?” I asked. “Yes, mm-hmm,” he said, and nodded and grinned more.

Since it was apparent he was not going to offer more, I inquired, “Are you… are you looking for a book?”

“Yes, a book, that’s right. I’m looking for a book on eras.”

I blinked. “Eras? um… do you mean like geologic eras?”

“Yes, geologic eras, a book on that.”

“Any, uh, era in particular?” I had just covered these in class. “Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic?”

“Oh, Mesozoic, yes. A Mesozoic book.”

I paused, confounded. “Are you… are you looking for a book about dinosaurs?”

He nodded and smiled. “Yes, that’s it, dinosaurs. I would like a book about dinosaurs.”

When my oldest child was a toddler, my wife and I were still enrolled in graduate programs at Boston University, and our schedules necessitated child care hand-offs, often on campus. I spent many afternoons carrying our kid through the halls of the twin buildings that make up the College of Arts and Sciences. One afternoon I was walking down a hallway with my child on my shoulders. They had only recently started to talk in semi-complete sentences. So I was surprise to hear them say, “Daddy, this floor looks waxed.”

I looked at the floor, which was some sort of worn but glossy mid-century rolled linoleum. I couldn’t understand why my kid would care about the floor or how they would know what waxing was. I said, “Well, it does look pretty shiny, I guess.”

“Yes,” they said. “Shiny.” Then, after a pause, they asked, “Daddy, what am I talking about?”

I regularly donate platelets at my local Red Cross blood center, which requires being hooked up by needles and tubes to an apheresis machine for about two and a half hours, at which point you are rewarded with a seat at a table full of terrible snacks. I like giving platelets because it forces me to be still. It’s moving to think that out there in the world are people whose lives were saved by being given a literal part of you. Also I get to watch dumb shows on Netflix. Last time it was a couple of episodes of Wednesday.

Once when I was done with a donation two of the phlebotomists were clucking over me as they removed the medical tape that held the plastic tubing in place. This tape is tenacious and requires a sharp pull to detach, and they were both amused and alarmed by how much of my arm hair was being lost. This was the conversation they had:

Phleb. # 1: Oh lord, this takes so much of you with it! It’s like a waxing!

Phleb. # 2: (holding up tape covered in hair) Yes, just like a waxing ain’t it!

Phleb. # 1: (laughing) Yeah that’s just like when I get my— (long pause) …my eyebrows done.

When my son was about five he became curious about the relative power of animals, machines, and anything else. He expressed this interest by asking his parents who would win in a fight by saying, for instance, “shark against bear who wins?” His queries were always in the form of X against Y who wins? “car against truck who wins?” “dragon against giant who wins?”

Eventually his questions became very weird, like “house against lightning who wins?” or “cake against fork who wins?” and even “plane against television who wins?”

To this day I still think about pairs of things in this manner.

In 1985, my senior year in high school, I was an AFS exchange student to Israel. Most of the other kids in the program were Jewish and were using the exchange as sort of a Birthright Tour (this was before Birthright Israel was an organization), but I was a goy and I had never studied Hebrew before and I found it very difficult.

One evening in my host family’s home I was trying to use what little Hebrew I knew, and so I asked for a glass, which is pronounced in Hebrew as “cōhs,” but instead I and said “coos.” My host sister’s face drained of color. My host brother said, “you mustn’t say that, it’s a very dirty word, you must say cōhs.” “Oh,” I said, and then I asked, “but you say couscous, don’t you?” And he said, “Yes, of course, but—” and then he snorted and said, “oh yes, very funny!” And from then on whenever my host mother, who was from Morocco, served couscous, my brother and sister would laugh uncontrollably.

When I first met my wife Marina, I apparently blew her off at an orientation party thrown by the college’s theater group. As she tells it, she approached me while I was standing at the snack table and said, “oh, we’ve met before, you’re on the same dorm floor as me”; to which I said, “uh-huh,” loaded up on cheese and crackers, and wandered off. I, of course, have no memory of this, although I did remember passing her on the dorm floor we shared and thinking that there was no earth on which I would have a chance with a woman like her.

Eventually we did start to date. One afternoon early on I suggested we take a walk around Earlham’s campus. I mentioned that I knew where there was a grave on the wrong side of the fence. By this I mean Earlham College borders a cemetery on its western side, and there is indeed a grave which, strangely enough, is on the wrong side of the fence, on college property.

She agreed to go on the walk. When we came across the headstone, Marina was very surprised and said “oh, I thought this was like the glass tomb.” I asked her what she meant and she said that during new student week she was told that a common pickup move was for older students to tell new students there was a glass tomb somewhere in the cemetery and then take them out looking in the middle of the night, to eventually put the moves on them. I was taken aback by this and asked if she really thought I was just using a line on her, to which she replied, “Yes, but I went along anyway.”

In our early 20s, my wife and I were living month to month in grad-school poverty. We rented a car to drive back to the midwest for the holidays, and lacking the money for a hotel, we asked to stay at the home of a distant relative on the way. This person’s relationship to us was never (and still isn’t) quite clear to me; I believe he was my step-father-in-law’s cousin. Maybe second cousin. I think he was some sort of medical doctor?

In any case, he and his wife (they didn’t have kids) were in their mid-30s. Their house was a huge McMansion and we were fed more food in one evening than we could get in a week. Our host was also extremely enthusiastic about red zinfandel wine and he poured us both many large glasses and insisted we drink more. Then he said there was one thing we must do to repay his hospitality, and for one horrifying moment I thought that he was going to request that we swing with him and his wife. But instead, he showed us to a sort of rec room which had an enormous television (by 90s standards) and there he had us watch along three VHS recordings of Gallagher concerts. And honestly? That was worse.

One winter I slipped on the cement and brick stairs outside our house. This could have been a serious accident if I had hit my head; as it was, I was bruised all up and down my torso and it was painful to draw a deep breath. So I went to a doctor to see if I might have cracked a rib.

Dr.: It could be a cracked rib or maybe not; we could get you an x-ray, it’s up to you.

Me: Up to me? Aren’t you the doctor? Isn’t this something you need for your diagnosis?

Dr.: Not really. We don’t actually do anything for a cracked rib.

Me: Then why get an x-ray?

Dr.: Then you’d know if you had a cracked rib.

At the turn of the millennium my wife and I had just had our second kid and we were all living stuffed together in a small condominium, two kids, two grownups, and one fat black cat. His name was Prospero and he was constantly sneezing up massive boogers. He always wanted to run away from home, and if the door were open even a few seconds he would dart out. Looking back on him now, I realize he was a bit of a jerk, but we couldn’t have a dog in any of the four rentals we’d had during the 90s, and so we were happy with what we could get.

The condo didn’t have much going for it, but it did have a shared pool, and my older kid wanted to have their birthday party as a swim party, so the day of the party Marina drove around getting food and decorations and such. As we returned back from our last errand, with about a half-hour to go to the party, Marina pointed and said, “It’s Prospero! He must have escaped while we were running in and out!” I looked and saw the fat black cat crouched under a bush. It was so close to the party and we still had to set up so Marina asked me to catch Prospero while she got everything ready. She went into our condominium’s building and I crouched down. It was evident that the cat was not going to cooperate; as I reached out, he swatted my hand, first with the pads of his paw, then with extended claws.

I was already tired from our activities and feeling grumpy so I snatched up the protesting feline, holding him at arms length as he squirmed. I was heading for the door when Marina came down the stairs and yelled, “John, that’s not Prospero! Prospero’s inside!”

I looked at the hissing creature to see if I were holding some other fat, pure black cat. And then it sunk its fangs deep into the web between thumb and index. It curled its body up and began raking its back claws against my hand, shredding large gashes into my palm and fingers. I was dumbfounded and it didn’t quite register that I was holding the wrong cat. “Let it go! Let it go!” Marina shouted. So I released the cat, who hung on a few seconds longer by its teeth, and then tore off across the parking lot and into a neighboring yard.

My hands were an absolute mess and I was bleeding everywhere. Marina got me some gauze. We decided that it was too late to call off the party, so she would drive me to our HMO clinic, drop me off, and hurry back to greet our guests. As I wrapped my dressing, I could see my kid looking at me with sad eyes. And all I could think was, I’ve done it again, I’ve ruined another party.

This statement does not constitute an actual guarantee. ↩︎
This does not imply an actual license. ↩︎
Or at least they hid it well? ↩︎

header image: Lucia Mathilde von Gelder (1865-1899), Der Märchenerzähler