The scratching and the biting and the blood all over

Christ, what a day.

I went to Morning Prayer and to work as usual. At work I began my usual day, and about 10:00 a.m. I called a prescription in to the pharmacy. Then I phoned Cris to see if she wanted me to pick anything up there on my way home from work.

Barely had we started our conversation when Cris started screaming bloody murder: “No! No! Noooooooooo!!! Noooooooo!!” Then she dropped the phone.

Not sure what was happening, I hung up and dialed 911 and told them what I had heard. It could have been murder, it could have been Al Qeada for all I knew, but it sounded really bad. After I got off the phone from them, I knocked on my boss’s door -- she had just started meeting with a couple of people -- blurted that I had an emergency at home, and dashed off.

I drove home as fast as I could, breaking a great many traffic laws and possibly damaging the engine of the car. I know I looked at the speedometer once and it said 105. I think I was in 4th gear at the time, so that might not have been good for the car (which has 5). I didn’t notice what the tach said, but I do remember the engine revving pretty high.

I pulled up to the house as two police cars were pulling away. So then I knew that Cris hadn’t been murdered but that she undoubtedly had had to break up a fight between the cats Milagrito and Six.

This whole thing has been building for weeks. We’ve been keeping them apart because Six freaks out so badly when he sees Milagrito. (Six freaks out because he is new and was raised by a friend of ours who has gone nuts; we took the cat when this person went into the nuthouse.) The cats had never actually been face to face; we keep them separated by at least a closed door, and usually two closed doors with a room between them. What happened is that the housekeeper ignored what Cris had just said to her and opened the basement door, and Milagrito charged in, as he often does. Cris had let Six explore the house because she feels sorry for him. Six saw Milagrito bolt in and instantly attacked him. Cris had to break up the fight and got seriously bitten and scratched.

She phoned the doctor’s office to see what she should do, and the stupid receptionist, who is always brusque and dismissive, immediately misunderstood the problem. She gave Cris the runaround until Cris asked to speak to the other woman who works in the office. This incident, more than anything else -- the housekeeper’s error, my dangerous crosstown trip -- made me furious. I took Cris to the doctor’s office and while she was in the examining room, gave the woman a talking to. For her part, Cris complained directly to the doctor about her. It’s not the first time she’s been a problem.

I was on an adrenaline high from breaking the receptionist’s balls if from nothing else. And there was still the question of whether or not Milagrito was all right, since he had run out the back door when Cris broke the fight up, and he hadn’t shown up by the time we left for the doctor’s office. We stopped in at the pharmacy on the way home and I got Cris an ice cream cone. I also made her laugh by recalling the last time something like this had happened. “Psycho plus Gutierrez equals cat biting incident,” I said. I was referring to the incident several years ago with Cris’s sister and the cats of another sociopathic woman we know, in which Shirley ended up being bitten.

We got home and Milagrito showed up, looking a little frightened but not wounded, thank God. Cris had several bad bite wounds and some bad scratches but she came out the worst. She has to take antibiotics, and if it gets infected, she has to go into the hospital. Six, of course, was completely copasetic.

Since we didn’t have to take M. to the vet, I went back to work. The boss had left for the day so I didn’t have to explain things to her. But I left early because I had to go back to Parnassus Ave. to the dermatologist to see about the various poxy skin conditions I have. He removed a mole that had started growing on the side of my face, and told me the rash I had on my chin might be a fungus or even ringworm (I wonder if I once touched my face right after cleaning one of the cat boxes. We have three of them.)

So I walked out of 350 Parnassus for the second time that day, this time with a bandage on my left temple. By this time I felt calm, the surgery notwithstanding; or perhaps the ordinary excited reaction my body might have had to the surgery merely used up the rest of the adrenaline I had, but in any case I felt calmer than I had all day.

As for the housekeeper, Cris said she had yelled at the woman, and then flung at her: "Clean up the blood!" Reflecting later in the day, Cris mused, "Any conversation you have with your boss that ends with the words 'Clean up the blood' is not a good day."