Los Angeles, CA
A circle of puke. Dark orange. Oatmeal texture. I couldn't tell. Human puke? Or cat puke?
I had not seen alley cats in weeks, maybe months. Something happened to them. My mind wandered. Maybe it was a deranged homeless person living in the alley behind Jack in the Box who cooked up the cats one night. There's a couple of restaurants in the area and times are tough. Hate to think that the soup special is really boiled alley cat.
Crickets invade our apartment every autumn. The cycle of nature. Very vexing. A few sneak through and I have an minor internal crisis because I'm convinced that killing crickets is bad luck and it's 100% my fault that the teams I bet on miss field goals because I mutilated a cricket while running to the defense of my hysterical girlfriend.
The entire concept of insects freak out Nicky and she screams like a little girl and it's during those moments I'm reminded that she used to be trained in the theatrical arts and she can belt it out. And those grasshoppers are jumping ones too. The bigger they leap, the louder the scream.
The insect-induced screams are almost blood curdling. I jump up and fall right into assassin mode. I'm a cold-blooded insect killer. Doesn't matter if it's a spider or roach or silverfish. I'm the iceman and dispose of the critter and that's that. However, I freeze up whenever I see a cricket. It's bad luck in most Asian cultures to kill crickets. Disney brainwashed us as kids and made our generation think of crickets as these sage-like creatures that guide us out of peril. All I want is to cover the point spread man, and if scooping up crickets and taking them outside is going to help the cause, then dammit, that's what I have to do.
Crickets turned me into a compassionate bug squasher. So am I getting karmic retribution for all those killed spiders? Do all of those missed free throws have anything to do with all the cockroaches I stomped on in my day?
Protecting crickets is bad superstition. Once you give into a superstition, then you become a slave to obsessive-compulsive behavior. If I had a cat, then I wouldn't have to worry about this. If the alley cats were still around... the crickets wouldn't be an issue.
The alley is infested with crickets and more are getting through the cracks than ever before. I suspect it's because of the lack of alley cats. The cats fed and feasted off the crickets. Those crickets only flourish because their main predator, a group of feral cats, was living in the crawlspace underneath the apartment building next door. But those cats have disappeared. We have no idea where they went.
I saw one cat scurrying across the street late one night but aside from that, no cats. Where the hell did they go? I assume they found a better spot to live, maybe a block or two over where a crazy cat lady goes out and feeds them regularly. Or maybe someone found the cat(s) and adopted them and gave them a great home. Or maybe they were picked up and fixed? I doubt that scenario because something of that nature costs money and the City of Angels is too broke to send out people trapping feral cats. In all probability, they were picked up and euthanized.
The orange puke was not a cat. It was human puke. Someone booted. It was Friday night. Totally probable. But who did it belong to?
I went out to sushi in Beverly Hills. Something I never do. But Showcase was in town and he wanted to take Nicky and myself to a relaxing dinner. It was fun to catch up and hear stories and tell some more. But the last thing I wanted to see when I got home was the circle of puke.
I totally forgot about it until I woke up early the next morning and went for a walk. On my way back home, I noticed the orange circle, which was sort of dried out. That's when my neighbor (BMW douche) opened his front door and out stumbled a "bro" in a disheveled suit (minus the tie). I can only suspect those wanna-be execs drank heavily after a shitty week of work and the bro puked in the alley and then passed out on my neighbor's couch, only to get kicked out at day break. Well either that, or my neighbor is secretly gay and was sending someone home a booty call and I totally busted him.
But where the fuck did the cats go? My alley smells like puke and grasshoppers are everywhere.
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