The Cat Lady and the Munsons

1.) The Cat Lady

You might not have grown up in the same neighborhood as a Cat Lady, but in all likelihood, one of the neighborhoods next to yours had a Cat Lady. That was the case with me. I had to bike five blocks to my friend Willy's house to get a load of the Cat Lady on Adderley Street. Neighborhoods, like thermostats, so often change one degree at a time. And that single degree that separated Willy's neighborhood from mine permitted a habitat for an old woman whose ramshackle house was swarming with cats.


The Cat Lady (I never got her real name) lived across the street from Willy. One day we asked Willy's mom if there was a Cat Man in the picture for this Cat Lady, and she replied that, to her knowledge, the Cat Lady had never married. She had been willed a large sum of money, so the story went, but she spent it sparingly.

Willy's mom was one to adorn ceramic plates and coffee cups with phrases such as “Blessed are the meek.” She was an artist who made enough to get by and co-provide, along with her husband. She never begrudged the Cat Lady. Some of her neighbors felt otherwise; they instilled some anti-Cat Lady sentiments in their children. Rex Munson from across the street used to complain about her. Like all the Munsons, he was incensed by the Cat Lady's indifference to the fortune she supposedly had.

We'd put a game of catch on hold and gape at the lonesome Cat Lady as she lurched and labored toward the bus stop. On one such occasion, Rex slugged the football with his fist.

“That lucky old bag...” he griped, shaking his head and coveting.

I was too young to appreciate the humor.

We watched her shamble around the corner, out of view. Then something strange and magnetic happened: The six of us were compelled to gather in a huddle. Those among us were either summoned or summoning. The effect was the same. To children on the brink of puberty, there is no human-noise more compelling than: “Psssssssstt.”

It was agreed upon that we should take a look inside the Cat Lady's home while she was away. We reasoned we'd be exploring rather than breaking and entering.

To add some intrigue and suspense to the mission, we slunk past her house and followed the gravel driveway to her garage. It was a small structure composed of worn and peeled siding. The door was chained shut by a Master-lock. We crept around to a window that was bug-ridden and sheeted in dust. One by one we peered in. When it was my turn, I strained my eyes and made out the shadowy form of a bed.

“She lives in there now,” Willy explained. “The cats took over her house.”

I reeled, shook my head, and cupped my hands against the glass again. Sure enough, there was a kerosene heater inside. I considered the nights of bitter cold that would eventually come, shivered at the thought of how she must survive the winter: surrounded by that worn and peeled siding, beside a smelly fire, hidden beneath a mound of blankets, for five months. Alone.

It was too much. I jerked my head away, toward daylight and friends. Despite the pleasant weather, I was still shivering. When it came time to ascend the rickety steps into the Cat Lady's back entryway, I felt conflicted. Rex turned the knob and cracked a Grinch-like smile, for the door was unlocked. My guts sunk heavily. I kept my mouth shut and considered aborting the mission.

“Last one in's a chicken-shit,” Rex declared.

The matter was settled for me, but two others expressed their misgivings and opted out. Tyler feared his father's wrath should we get caught; he seemed to have horrid visions every time he blinked. Lucas cited religious reasons that still remain unclear. Willy's little brother Calvin fussed with his jean shorts and tangled with trepidation. Our gazes met for a second and I gave him a quick, understanding nod.

Rex shoved against the door until a barrier of trash yielded enough room for passage. He slithered inside, followed by Willy. I was next, dreading all the germs but pushing forward, anyway—and that made Calvin the De facto “chicken-shit.”

“Hey! At least I'm doin' this,” he called out.

Tyler and Lucas fled to the latter's home for lemonade and Super Nintendo. The rest of us were determined to snoop around. We sought answers from this spinster who'd left civilization without so much as murmuring goodbye. How did she succumb to this cat uprising? We searched for clues left behind by this ghost who somehow lived among us.

The closest I ever got to walking on the moon was walking atop the rubbish in the Cat Lady's house. The stench notwithstanding, the sheer elevation of the garbage made me queasy—and Neil Armstrong had no equivalent to the surreal feeling I had as I climbed the trashy summit into the kitchen. During our tour, we leaped from one flimsy plank of cardboard to another—landing-spots that must have been strategically placed by the Cat Lady herself. (Years later this strikes me as a pretty ambitious move for a shut-in: to even bother laying down a big piece of cardboard here and there to plateau the heap of squalor you've amassed in your own home.) Feral cats with coats like defiled carpet-samples hissed at us as they backpedaled. Countless trash bags spewed their contents: shards of Coke bottles and light-bulbs, mold-consumed bread, soiled rags and tissues once coated in fluids that had long-since hardened, coffee-filters splattered and laden like neglected diapers, newspapers from decades ago and yellowed mail that had decidedly become the junk kind. Clothing that would never be worn again was strewn everywhere, and so were impotent cans of Pledge and Lysol.

In the living room we gaped at grime-encrusted knickknacks of fishermen and sad clowns. I spotted crushed games of Life and Sorry and an antique vacuum lying kaput in the corner. Its rubbery bag was bloated. Its chrome had been reduced to tiny dots amidst all the rust. We surveyed the end of the world and its dearth of redemption. We breathed fitfully through our mouths and gagged our noses as we pointed and hooted at the cat droppings littered throughout.

We marveled at all the crap until we got bored.

“Let's get the shit out of here.”

That was Rex again. He cussed more than the rest of combined, and though he may very well never amount to much, to this day I give him credit for that suggestion.

As I've mentioned, he belonged to the Munson clan. They were not exactly known for breakthrough moments in wisdom.

2.) The Munsons

White Kids Dunking...

^Spud Webb, a black man dunking.^

Rex was a participant in the Slam Dunk Contests we had during those summers in the mid-'90s. The events were held on a modest slab of concrete in Willy/ Calvin's backyard. The hoop was adjustable, and so we lowered it to a height of about 8 feet, for slam-dunking purposes. To that same end, we procured two mini-basketballs that were easily palmed.

Our slam dunk excitement was brought on by ideal circumstances. The best player at the time, Michael Jordan, was also a sensational dunker. Ho-hum dunkers like Bird and Magic had retired from the NBA. They gave way to a new breed of high-flying freaks whose M.O.'s were posterizing chumps and then losing to MJ's Bulls in the playoffs. Finally, the sprites in NBA Jam paired superhuman leaps with a tempo that catered to our Mountain Dew dependencies.

In retrospect, few things are sillier than prepubescent white kids charging a hoop and exclaiming in the high-pitch of Mickey Mouse. “Clyde Drexler!” “Shawn Kemp!” “Spud Webb!”

More Stories, and Additional Stories is the name of that eBook.

A Translation of Zooey's Meows

A few years ago I wrote a column for my college newspaper entitled “Professor Radington.” That was the name I christened a plastic robot I found discarded beside a heap of curbside trash in Wrigleyville, following hours of PBR-chugging with my friends in Chicago. Moments after lugging the Professor into my friend's apartment, I was grasping hold of his plastic claws, spinning in a circle, his stumpy frame in rotation around mine in the way that a planet orbits its Sun. P-Rad's novelty did not wear off when I sobered-up in the morning. He made the trip with us back to Oshkosh and I decided that, in addition to serving as a bizarre decoration and apartment mascot, I was going to pay him tribute with a humor column.

The idea for the piece was that I was eagerly awaiting fatherhood (which wasn't the truth), but I wanted to be sure I could meet the daunting challenge before undertaking such a major responsibility. And so I tired my hand at dog ownership, with poor results, and consequently lowered my standards down to comatosed dogs, houseplants, and finally, after all these endeavors had failed in one way or another, plastic robots. Dogs, coma dogs, houseplants, and plastic robots—that was the chain of ownership in Bullshitland. In the column, I did prove to be a worthy father for P-Rad. Inanimate objects are safe in my care. As for creatures with a heartbeat, I am less adept at meeting their needs.

Oddly enough, for several years I really did own a pet, a (semi-) legitimate stepping stone on the path to fatherhood. It never occurred to me to apply this life experience to an absurd column that proposed a hierarchy of care-taking that ranged from plastic robots to children. On this scale, aquatic frogs rank somewhere between houseplants and coma-dogs.

My frog, named Kermit, with little creativity, survived for about eight years, provided ten minutes of entertainment in that time, received virtually no affection (mainly because human touch could be damaging to this breed of frogs), and required sporadic maintenance. I came to acquire Kermit when I was eleven years old. For Christmas in 1994, besides Chicago Cubs attire and Super Nintendo games, with brash ambition, I asked for a dog. Deep down, I knew it was a forlorn wish since my dad has a disdain for pets. As kids, we were allowed to keep goldfish, because they were quiet, cheap, and dispensable, but any creature with four legs was simply out of the question. My dad reasoned that six life forms under one roof was sufficient. The Olig household was kept in a state of sterility—all walls were painted white, as if vibrant colors would incite neuroses and thuggery, the Oldies station played at a barely audible volume, providing familiar background noise while my dad filled out his crossword puzzle, and my parents generally believed it was foolish and impractical to feed yet another irresponsible stain-creator.

The reason why Kermit was excluded in my column about Professor Radington is that I hardly considered him a pet; he was more of a living, breathing afterthought. Once a day I had to scoop two crusty food pellets into his tank. Once a month I had to provide him fresh water to swim around in, dumping him into a smaller container temporarily until the change was made. In his twilight years, Kermit croaked in loud repetition throughout the night and became a real nuisance. Apparently, the lesson my parents were trying to teach me by giving me Kermit for Christmas was this: Pets are a pain the ass, son, and they're not worth the trouble.

For the month of July in 2009 I sublet an apartment in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. I shared a two-bedroom place with Anna, a thoughtful and cute earthy girl without pretensions who had recently graduated from the Roosevelt Acting Academy. She was becoming a strong-willed, independent adult, which is a very serious business, and so she liked to keep a box of crayons, a sheet of drawing paper, and a hash-pipe nearby whenever possible, as sort of a reward to the struggle. She owned unicorn's head attached to stick that the make-believe rider could straddle, which she kept on the back porch, leaning against the glass table where we placed our ashtrays and drinks. I named the unicorn Rhonda, a name Anna loathed and rejected, though she never offered an acceptable alternative. Rhonda was to Anna what Professor Radington was to me. Anna's kitten, whom she had owned for eight months, had ran away not long before I moved into the apartment, and perhaps Rhonda the unicorn filled the void in some capacity—in that hollow, unsatisfying way unique to inanimate objects.

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The rest of "Zooey's Meows" is available for your reading pleasure within my book. In case you'd like to order a copy...

www.xlibris.com/NickOlig.html