GenePool Humor

The Black Cat Revisited

We have had no shower for three days now, and it's thanks to the water bill. I have never seen the water bill myself, so I don't really care what it says, but Joe the landlord is very particular about it, and about a month ago it jumped up drastically. This probably had a lot more to do with our tendency to store all the dirty clothes in the house until we're down to our very last strip of clothing before we do the laundry-- resulting in a two week stretch when the washing machine is always in use-- than it has to do with any loose pipes. In hindsight, maybe we should have shared this information with Joe.

Without warning, we were visited by a plumber, which is exceedingly unfortunate given the condition we typically leave our home in before we leave for work every day. Evidently Joe and the plumber were able to avert their gaze from the piles of dirty dishes, tell-tale stacks of laundry, and dried hairballs on the rug long enough to adjust the faucets and install a new toilet. (Does anyone else have a low flush toilet? I don't see how they can possibly help the water bill when it takes two flushes to completely remove what has been deposited into the toilet.) For a couple of weeks all was well, and we thought we had nothing else to expect from the plumber, up until this last Friday, when Joe pulled me aside and informed me that we would not have a shower for a couple of days. The plumber had apparently concluded that the high water bill had nothing to do with our laundry habits, the sinks, or the toilet. No, a leaky pipe was the culprit. I don't know how he figured this out, but I'm fairly sure he can't see through walls. But maybe he can give us our old toilet back now that it's been exonerated.

So that's how we ended up with no shower. We came home from work on Monday evening to find all of the walls surrounding the tub were entirely absent. Discovered during the day was A: there was no insulation whatsoever in these walls (Joe asked "didn't it get cold in there in the winter?") and B: the pipe had probably been leaking since the day it was installed, since all they had to do to bring the wall down was apply a little pressure. I was very glad, when I heard this, that Deb and I had never done anything in that particular shower that involved leaning hard against the wall.

On returning home Tuesday, we found substantial progress had been made, although not enough to allow us to bathe. Large, rock-like slabs (they were cement-like, but not solid cement; I don't know WHAT they were made of.) had been screwed into the wall, and the wall under the shower head had been tiled halfway. Our joy at the prospect of having a shower of our own again soon (we'd been using Joe's) made up for the rather noxious odor wafting from the bathroom.

Our story really begins at around 1:45 Wednesday morning. That was when my wife finally finished the work she was doing on her computer and visited the bathroom one last time before retiring for bed.

It was then that she realized the wall was meowing.

A little something you need to know about our cats. Biologists have a very specific method for measuring the intelligence of different species-- it's figured as a ratio of average brain size to average body size. On a chart, then-- and yes, humans are at the top, just above republicans-- cats fit on the same I.Q. line as hamsters. One of our cats, Zeke, actually takes this comparison one step further, insofar as he has the actual brain of a hamster.

There are many things I like to hear when I'm being woken up at two in the morning. "Gene, they sealed Zeke in the wall" is most assuredly not one of them. It took Deb a while to even convince me she wasn't just hearing things, as I went down to the bathroom and didn't hear a sound coming from the wall, but that's because like Constantine, our intelligent cat, Zeke doesn't particularly like me. I had to pretend I wasn't there for a while before he made any more noise.

For our plumber's sake, I want to mention that we started out with the best of intentions. We did not want to completely destroy all the work he'd done, but since he'd gone and tiled the very wall we needed to get through to fetch the cat, we ultimately didn't have much of a choice.

But first we started with the side wall. I thought if I could remove the cement-like panel from that wall I'd be able to reach around the corner and grab the cat. So with Deb's help I took that panel down and found the somewhat cartoonish irony of another cement panel. Then we took THAT one down and discovered insulation. It was only after we ripped the insulation out that we saw the large support beam (for the outside wall of the house) that completely blocked any access we might have potentially had to the spot where Zeke was stuck.

Then I noticed that there was a small cementine panel at the top of the wall we wanted that had not been tiled yet. So I took that down too. (By the way, if you ever have to do this? Be prepared to cope with several hundred screws.) The good news was that there was no other panel beneath it. The other good news was that when I looked down through the opening I could see Zeke's eyes looking back at me. (That's all I could see; Zeke is a black cat.) The bad news was that he was about six feet away and my arms are simply not that long.

In the vain hope that our cat had developed a brain while being trapped in the wall all day, we hung a blanket down through the opening and tried our best to encourage him to climb the blanket. When this didn't work I grabbed a broom, stuck it through the opening, and tried to scoop Zeke. This also didn't work, but I did get the satisfaction of whacking the damn fool cat on the head a couple of times. Then we tried tying string to a basket, putting catnip in the basket, and lowering it down. If he didn't get the "climb up on the blanket" thing, he certainly wasn't going to comprehend the notion of an elevator,so of course this didn't work either.

It was about this time I started entertaining the notion of just bringing the tiled part of the wall down. Being a guy, my first thought was to take a sledgehammer to it. But while this might be fun, I did have to consider:

A: a cementish wall with ceramic tiles and no water damage can probably take a lot of punishment,

B: I could inadvertently hit a support beam hidden on the other side and bring down the ceiling,

C: I could inadvertently hit the water pipe, which mayvery well have water in it (this is what would happen if this were a sitcom,)

D: I could hit the cat, although I was willing to take this chance,

E: I really didn't want to be showered in rapidly moving ceramic shards while wearing nothing but a bathrobe,

F: I don't own a sledgehammer.

I thought back to the Edgar Allen Poe short story, the Black Cat, where the narrator walls up his wife's body and accidentally seals her cat in as well, so that when the police come to ask about his wife the meowing on the other side of the wall tips them off to look there. How did the police take the wall down? I couldn't remember. Sledgehammers, probably. I wondered if there were any hardware stores open.

About the biggest thing I had was a screwdriver, but rather than whack the tiles with it, I applied it to the edge of one of the tiles. It popped right off into my hand. Had I known anything whatsoever about laying tile (and you know I don't) I would have known how long it takes for the glue, plaster, whatever they use, to dry.

Before Deb could say anything, I started popping tiles loose. It's funny what one finds important in this sort of situation. My main concern was not for the cat-- although I would have never heard the end of it had I just left him there-- but for my deep and profound wish to get my ass back in bed. Deb, who was probably a lot more worried about the cat, nevertheless became extremely concerned about how much this would cost Joe. Since she didn't know whether tiles could be reused, she left the room to call her mother. As for how her mother could possibly know the answer to the question "can bathroom tiles be reused" I have no idea. But I didn't mind. While Deb was with me I was caaarefullly popping the tiles ever-so-gently and plaaacing them on the floor of the tub so as not to damage the poor things. But with her out of the way-- and goodness knows she could talk to her mother for hours-- I was free to get down to business.

Deb returned a short while later to find chaos. I had removed half the tiles from the cementian panel and had started to attack the wall itself, first by locating the screws and removing them, but when this proved difficult (the plaster hid them well, and there were a lot of them) I just stuck the heaviest screwdriver I could find into the corner of the panel and applied pressure. So there were little chunks of cementile everywhere, the slab I was working on had split, and I was pulling on the panel as hard as I could. This caused a fair number of tiles to jump off of it like Titanic passengers in the final scene (shut up, I don't do metaphors) until finally, it gave way.

After working for over an hour, I think it would have been only fair to have been rewarded in some small way, by, say, actually being able to bend over and pick up the goddamned hamster-brained cat. But when we got the panel out of the way, we looked down at where Zeke had been only a little earlier to find a nice big empty space, with no evident feline in occupancy. (Also, fortunately, no dead bodies.) By now it we had been at this for over an hour, we were covered in dust and sweat and in great need of a shower we couldn't take, and in dire need of sleep we couldn't have until we found the cat. So it took us a few seconds to think of the obvious and lift the small square of insulation at the bottom of the opening in the wall. Beneath it was a hole.

I don't know how houses are built, but if I were to guess, I'd say this hole led to the space between floors. Specifically, the space between the floors of Virginia's bedroom and the first floor. (Virginia is Joe's sister. Her bedroom is the only room in their apartment on the second floor.) I imagine Ginny had been going nuts all day-- not to mention how her dog must have reacted-- because of the meowing coming from somewhere within her room. This discovery answered the question "how does a plumber who might be capable of seeing through walls not NOTICE the CAT sitting next to the water pipe?" Zeke, using all three brain cells, must have discovered this hole some time Monday night, and had still been somewhere under Ginny's floor when the plumber started work on Tuesday morning.

It took us another half an hour to get the damn cat to come out. I left the bathroom altogether, in part because he might not show if I'm there and in part because I would not be responsible for my actions while in a room with both the cat and a heavy screwdriver. Deb got him out by dropping bits of food in the hole, and quietly promising to protect the cat from me.

I don't know what the plumber thought when he first saw the devastation awaiting him the next morning. I know Joe didn't look happy when I showed him. But I bet both of them were glad the first thing we did before we went to bed was lock up both the cats on the enclosed porch. We haven't decided yet if we're going to let them out again.

© 2000, Gene Doucette