Authors: Zack Love
By 1:45, Heeb’s thoughts had gently faded into a garbled mumbling. By 2 a.m., there was total silence and Heeb was sound asleep.
Jackpot, and the other two cats that had been on the bed earlier, saw that the commotion there had stopped and that it was now safe to go back to their domain.
Jackpot lightly leaped onto the edge of the bed, and wandered about the thin strip of vacant bed to Heeb’s immediate right, in search of an ideal place to sit. The other two cats, grey colored and somewhat smaller in size, jumped onto the bed next to Melody and began to approach the end of the bed where her head was resting. But after a few steps, they noticed that both pillows were occupied, and decided to turn around and head for the other end of the bed where there was more room.
The grey cats circled about the two pairs of feet positioned in contradictory ways at the end of the bed. After a few moments, at approximately 2:16 a.m., they began to take considerable interest in Heeb’s feet – perhaps because his size nines were new to the area and carried with them a peculiar scent that intrigued them.
At 2:17 a.m., both grey cats began licking the big toe and index toe of Heeb’s left foot. Their small, warm, pink tongues, rhythmically lapping up the sides and tops of Heeb’s two toes were quickly and delightfully incorporated into Heeb’s deep sleep. His dreaming mind easily transformed the cat tongues into those of Melody and Yumi simultaneously sucking on his left foot. After a while, Melody and Yumi moved to the next set of toes on his left foot, and worked on them with the same rhythm and indulgent patience as they had employed with the first set of toes, so that it felt as if this pedal pleasure might never end.
While Heeb had exerted himself rather intensely with Melody before collapsing in exhaustion, the titillation produced by the sensations at the base of his body and the dreamy fantasies they invoked aroused Heeb in a rather noticeable way. In fact, Jackpot, who had comfortably settled down immediately to the right of Heeb’s hips, noticed something moving in that area. And at the height of Heeb’s Yumi-Melody fantasy, when the two grey cats had moved over to the first two toes on his right foot, and began licking away with even greater gusto, Heeb abruptly became completely erect.
Now, at precisely that moment of Heeb’s greatest arousal, Jackpot was sure that the object that had suddenly sprang up in the dark was a little mouse. Given how heavily fortified Melody’s apartment was against rodents, it was with no small surprise or delight that Jackpot spied the first mouse ever to make it onto Melody’s bed. In fact, Jackpot felt a certain amount of respect for the courageous little creature who could so brazenly wander into Jackpot’s midst, with two of his formidable colleagues located just a few feet away, at the end of the bed.
Jackpot’s evolutionary instincts were well honed and he knew not to underestimate the mouse’s ability to escape. So, in a flash of hunter-like speed and precision, he pounced onto the object that had moved in the dark, so that the claws from both of his paws trapped the target for the second that it took Jackpot to get the prey between his sharp teeth.
But seconds after that moment of feline glory, when Jackpot caught between his teeth and claws that thing that had moved in the dark, the cat realized that a grave case of mistaken identity had occurred. Jackpot’s realization happened just as Heeb’s powerful blow sent the black fur ball sailing off the bed. Heeb’s hysterical howl of pain had actually begun as a frantic yelp, and by the time he had sat up and swatted Jackpot off his Hebrew National, he was screaming at the top of his lungs – both from the psychological trauma and from the actual pain of the incident.
Some of Melody’s neighbors were awakened, wondering what sort of domestic spat was underway next door. The matter was somewhat clarified when they heard Heeb scream “Call an ambulance!”
“Are – are you OK?” Melody stammered, equally shocked to discover what had happened.
“No, I’m not OK! Your cat just bit my dick! Do you think I’d be OK after that?! Now call a fucking ambulance!”
“OK. Right. An ambulance. 911,” Melody said, scurrying about for the telephone.
The female emergency operator answered after the first ring: “This is 911. What is your location?” Melody was able enough to answer that question, but the query that followed left her stumped for a moment: “What is your emergency?”
Heeb’s frantic cries could be heard in the background.
“Well, um…It’s uh…an animal accident.”
“What kind of animal accident?”
“You know, one involving animals.”
“Miss, we need additional details, so that we can dispatch the proper emergency team to your area. Right now I don’t know if you need an animal vet or a staff member with rabies expertise.”
“Well…My cat bit my boyfriend.”
“Where?”
“On his penis.”
Chapter 19
Misery Likes Company
To add insult to injury on that mortifying night, Sammy had to explain what had happened to him to six different people: the two ambulance personnel in the back of the vehicle, then the hospital insurance administrator, then the nurse, then his hospital roommate, and then the doctor. And because the story seemed so implausible on its face, none of the six people would accept the simple and brief explanation that Heeb initially offered: “A cat attacked my penis.” Each of them interrogated Heeb about the circumstances preceding the bite, and had to be told exactly how a cat had managed to attack his penis.
Thus, Sammy had to repeat the following account six times: “My girlfriend keeps twelve cats in her studio apartment. Three of them were on her bed when I arrived. I asked her to shoo them away so that we could have the bed to ourselves. She did that, and then we got under the covers. We then had quite a bit of sex, and as far as I know, no cats were involved or on the bed at the time. But as I drifted asleep afterwards, some of the cats must have returned because I felt something licking my toes, which reinforced an erotic dream that I was having. That dream and the toe-licking sensation caused me to have an erection. And apparently, there was a third cat partnering with the toe-licking cats, and watching my waist area closely. And when he saw my penis move into an erection, he must have thought that it was a mouse because he pounced on it with his claws before taking a bite. Moral of the story? Wear steel underwear, if you’re sleeping in a studio with twelve cats.”
The worst follow up question came from one of the ambulance personnel, an Italian-American named Vinny, who was preparing various gauzes, disinfectants, syringes, and some antibiotics while his colleague read through some medical reference manual in the back of the speeding ambulance. “Adon’ ahnderstand sumpin’,” Vinny began in his thick, Italian-Brooklyn accent, “Why didn’t you put ya undies back on after? I mean, just to be safe, you knows? With so many animals runnin’ around and all?”
“Who the fuck thinks of these things?” Heeb replied in exasperation, his groin area still excruciatingly sore from the fresh wounds. “We had just finished having sex for the second time, for Christ’s sake. You drift off to sleep at that point. You don’t start thinking about the anti-cat penis armor that you need to put on.”
“I dunno, man…F’it was me, I’da put da’ undies back on. Just to be safe. You don’t wanna mess around wit’ ’dat stuff.”
Heeb knew that there was still some serious pain ahead of him, so he didn’t want to argue with or in any way excite the people charged with his care. “You’re right. I should have put the undies back on. I wasn’t thinking,” he said.
Heeb was glad that he had refused to let Melody accompany him. The fewer people who saw what he would have to go through, the better. And he had decided that a relationship with Melody was never going to work, that she was indirectly responsible for the catastrophe at hand, and that he never wanted to see her again. So he didn’t want to give her any opportunity to gain back his affection by going with him to the hospital.
“Now this is gonna hurt a little, but we gotta clean out ya wound, or there could be complicashuns,” Vinny said, as he approached Heeb with some disinfectant solution. Heeb knew that Vinny meant well, but the Mafioso accent was less than comforting under the circumstances.
Heeb’s clenched knuckles turned white from the intensity of the pain, and he began hyperventilating between yelps, as Vinny washed away the blood, cleaned out the area, and bandaged the wound with fine mesh gauze soaked in saline solution. The needle prick of the tetanus shot that followed felt like a tickle by comparison.
The ambulance arrived at the hospital. Vinny and his co-worker helped Heeb out of the vehicle, put him in a wheelchair, and wheeled him towards the hospital’s emergency admissions area. Along the way, Vinny couldn’t help cracking a joke about how this had been revenge of the cats.
“It was like a conspiracy, you know?” said Vinny.
“I was just joking about the three cats partnering up,” replied Heeb.
“No, but they did. It was just too puhfect. Like the J.F.K. assassination. Look at how co-owdinated they was. I mean, two ‘adem cats licked to get you hard, and then the third went in for da kill. Just like ’dat. I tell you, ’dem cats decided to make an example of you. They said, you people betta stop neuterin’ us, o we’s gonna show you what it means ta get fixed.”
Vinny and his co-worker burst into laughs, which they managed to stop just in time to hand off their patient to the hospital staff.
By the time Heeb had been wheeled out of the emergency waiting room packed with at least a dozen traumatic injury cases and into a more private hospital room, he had been through a lot, he had explained a lot, and he wasn’t exactly feeling social. He just wanted the doctor to arrive already so that he could get himself on a very private road to recovery. Thus, Heeb was rather chagrined to discover that he had to share the small, beige-colored hospital room with another patient – the fifth person to whom he would have to recount his traumas of the evening.
As the nurse wheeled Heeb into the room and helped him climb into his bed, he tried to avoid any direct eye contact with the man sitting up in the adjacent bed. But through his brief glance, upon entering, Heeb noticed that the patient was a handsome-looking man in his late twenties, with a full head of thick, jet hair, blue eyes, manly eyebrows, and well-sculpted cheekbones. He was reading
Entertainment Weekly
. And, like Sammy, he was covered by only a thin, grey hospital gown. He looked up for a moment just after Heeb passed his bed but he couldn’t really see him because the nurse was obstructing his view. He looked back down at his magazine.
“The doctor should be here shortly,” the nurse said before leaving.
Heeb adjusted his position on the bed a little, and then looked for a magazine to read. He settled on
Scientific American
.
Heeb’s hospital roommate looked up from his
Entertainment Weekly
again. He saw Heeb’s nearly bald head, chubby figure, and
Scientific American
, and decided to go back to his magazine.
But while moving his head back to his magazine he caught enough detail to notice that his new roommate had some kind of groin injury. He did a double take just to make sure, and then exclaimed, in amazement: “I can’t believe it!” He looked directly at Heeb, who was still reading.
“What the hell’s going on this city?” he asked.
Heeb looked up from his magazine just enough to acknowledge that he had heard his neighbor express the same irksome curiosity as everyone else before him. Sammy muttered in response: “Look, I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Believe me, I know how you feel…I’ll leave you alone,” he said, returning to his
Entertainment Weekly
.
The reply sounded so sincere that Heeb looked up from his
Scientific American
for a moment. He glanced over at his roommate, who was reading again, and realized that he too had a groin injury.
“Oh my God!” Heeb was now genuinely curious about the calamity that had befallen his neighbor. “What happened to you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it…I mean the embarrassment is almost worse than the pain.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
They both tried to resume their magazine reading.
A few moments later, Heeb’s roommate looked up and said, “Come on, man, it’s obvious what happened to you, because the same thing happened to me…And if it happened to both of us, there’s really no need to pussyfoot around…No pun intended…”
Heeb looked up, shocked at the precise and specific pun. He stared at their identically bandaged members. The eerie similarity of their circumstances suddenly overshadowed any differences. The distress, fatigue, and painkillers – combined with the uncanny coincidence – made Heeb conclude that his roommate was Melody’s mailman, who had apparently suffered a similar fate – perhaps from the night before.
“Was it the black one with you, too?” Heeb asked, wishing he could swing the cat by its tail and hurl it off a skyscraper.
“And don’t forget her accomplice.”
“Yeah, I would have never thought that they’d do that sort of thing.”
“They certainly caught me by surprise.”
“I just can’t believe she went postal on me,” Heeb remarked bitterly.
“Oh, she’s definitely a bit loco.”
“Believe me, I know…But how could she do it with the mailman, for God’s sake?!” Heeb exclaimed, suddenly feeling jealous.
“Why not? She’s not exactly discriminating in her line of work.”
“Yeah, but having odd jobs doesn’t mean you have to do it with any loser who comes your way,” Heeb insisted.
“Hey, easy there. You're not getting jealous, are you?”
“What do you expect, after she told me all about you and your mail exploits?”
“Male exploits? What are you talking about? That’s definitely not my style.”
“So you met her after work?”
“Of course. I couldn’t do that in the middle of the day.”
“But I’m sure there’s a mail exploit somewhere, or she wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“A good friend of mine had a male exploit…It was so bad that he had to leave his job afterwards.”