My friends were away for the weekend, and they put me in charge of checking in on and feeding their two cats.  I did this twice a day.  I had watched them in the past, without incident…

Sunday night, I drove to my friends’ house.  The two cats, a female named Charlie and a male named Vinny, greeted me at the door as usual, both meowing in anticipation of being fed.  The male cat, Vinny, was especially vocal that evening, which I assumed meant that he was extra hungry.

Now, Vinny is extra enthusiastic toward feeding, so much so that he has taken to bullying the other cat  to steal her food.  Because of this, I had to separate the two felines for feeding time.  I gave Charlie her food in the extra bedroom and shut the doors.  Vinny meanwhile had already devoured his food and was meowing and following me around, looking for more.

“Quiet, you little piglet!” I said.

While waiting for Charlie to finish her food—she’s a slow eater—I decided to use the bathroom.  Now, the bathroom at my friends’ place has two doors.  One was already closed, as to allow Charlie to eat her food in peace.  I entered the bathroom through the other door, but when I went to close the door, I looked down and saw that Vinny, still hot on my heels for food, had joined me in the bathroom.

No big deal, I thought.  I stood by the toilet, unzipped, and started my business (Number 1).

Suddenly, Vinny darted between my legs and popped his head up to look into the toilet.

“Vinny! No!” I exclaimed.

Too late.  The cat had stuck its head directly into my stream of urine.  I stopped urinating as quickly as possible, but the cat still got sprayed.  As quickly as Vinny had appeared, he darted away and ran out of the bathroom.

I continued my business, laughing the entire time, waiting to finish so I could call my friends and tell them that I had just peed on their cat’s head.

The final installment of my Philadelphia Story.  To start at part I, click here.

At the police station, I called my parents on a pay phone and told them what had happened and that I needed the credit card information in order to cancel the cards I had just lost.  Ryan, Hank, and I then waited to give our statements to the detective.  The detective called me in first.

I sat in a chair in a cubicle next to a desk.  The detective introduced himself and then we got down to business.  He sat in front of his computer, took down my information, and then asked what had happened.

The detective was a brown-haired, not-quite-middle-aged man, who was smoking a tiny cigar.  You know, one of those brown cigars with the plastic end that goes in your mouth.  He started typing at his computer, but ashes from his cigar kept falling in his lap.

“God damn it,” he would say each time this happened.

Just put the damn thing in an ashtray!

So, I started my story: “We were walking towards Walnut Street…” but I paused because the detective stepped away from his computer.

“Keep going,” he said.

So I kept going.  But when I finished my story, the detective sat at his computer once again and said:

“Ok, so you were walking towards Walnut Street.”

Good grief.  I had to tell the story again so he could enter it into the computer.  This was taking forever, I thought.  Meanwhile, I heard Hank and Ryan laughing hysterically in the waiting room as they talked to another crime victim.  This guy must have told them a hell of a funny story and, of course, I was missing out on all the fun.

After the detective got my story, he put me in front of a computer to look at mug shots.  I entered different criteria (e.g. approximate age, height, weight, complexion, etc.).  But while I was looking at pictures of men, I saw a few pictures of women.  The detective looked over my shoulder and said:

“Those aren’t women.”

Yikes.  Dudes dressed as girls.  And in mug shots no less.

I couldn’t pick out anyone that looked familiar in the mug shots, so I went back into the waiting area while Ryan and Hank took their respective turns telling their versions of the story.  At one point, while Hank was telling his story and taking a particularly long time to do so, Ryan and I wondered aloud: How can a blind guy tell such a long story about what happened?  Mean perhaps, but it’s what we were thinking then, impatient to go back to Ryan’s apartment and finally call it a night.

After all was said and done, the three of us got a ride back to Ryan’s apartment with another cop in a normal cop car.  One item of particular interest: the back seat was one piece of plastic.  The cop explained that this made it easy to wipe blood and other bodily fluids off the seat.  Also, there was a drain in the bottom of the car, so you could hose the back seat down.  Yikes again.

We drove through Chinatown—don’t ever eat there, the cop warned us, they have rats so big they could steal a baby—chatted with the cop, laughed, and finally ended our mugging ordeal.  A fitting end for Ryan’s last night in Philadelphia.