Inappropriate but Funny

The above title is how my wife, who knows me very well, sums up my existence. This is the story of how she came to that conclusion.

We live in an apartment building. And like most apartment buildings, it has an alarm system in case of a fire. One weekday morning, I heard this blaring sound and lo and behold, it was the fire alarm.

So my wife gets out of bed and starts heading to her vanity.

I say 'what the hell are you doing?'

"Brushing my hair."

I was dumbfounded. Now you may take from the above that my wife is a vain woman, but this is not the case at all. Well, not any more vain than an average woman. Which in man terms is unbelievably, but somewhat tolerable occasionally, vain. But what was baffling is that she is an extremely logical person. Well, as far as estrogen and logic can co-exist.

You need to understand, I am probably one of the most clear headed people in an emergency situation. In non-emergency situations, I worry about everything. Everything. Hell, I make shit up to worry about just so I can have something to do. But an emergency? Nothing clears away all the mental noise in my head like an emergency.

Immediately, my mind covered the three steps necessary to getting out and avoid burning to death.

One, figure out how to get the wife moving in a productive direction. In this case, productive meaning 'not worry about how you look first thing in the morning so that you may have other mornings to worry about how you look because you didn't burn to death in a fucking fire because you were doing your hair.'

Two, corral Ben and Seymour. Immediately, I realized this was going to be problematic. I don't have a cat carrier. I'll probably get into more about Ben and Seymour, or the 'tards' as I refer to them at a later date, but for now all you need to know is Seymour is feral. He lets me pet him maybe twice a year, and I've had him since he was a kitten. He's just terrified of everything and hides all day. So I run into the closet and get a duffel bag and throw it on the bed.

Now the hard part. I had to corner Seymour. He's one of those cats that will run and run until he's out of options. So you need to 'funnel' him into a spot that he can't get out of. In this case, he made his last stand in the bathroom. Meanwhile, the alarm is blaring away. In reality, probably 40 seconds have passed, but I could swear I smelled smoke and felt the temperature rising, harbingers of my certain impending doom. At that moment, I resolved that if I died because of this retarded cat and my wife's hair, I was going to haunt the shit out of them if they made it out alive.

Anyway, once you get Seymour cornered, he freezes, and he resorts to his last ditch attempt at avoiding capture. The wily Seymour stares at you, as if to say 'look at me, I'm scared and really cute, are you sure you want to continue on this course of action? Maybe it'd be best if you just let me be...' So that's when I grab him. He's got back claws, but none in the front. I grab him by the back to nullify the claws, rush out of the bathroom and head into the bedroom and start the process of trying to shove him into the duffel bag.

What happened next? Well, it was a new one on me. Between me yelling 'Shove his goddamn head in the bag' and her yelling back 'I'm trying you asshole, he doesn't want to go in there,' a strange thing happened.

For some reason, Seymour was suddenly attached by his mouth to my wife's wrist. It took a second before I realized the ramifications of this. Then my wife let out a howl of pain and I thought 'huh, guess he really didn't want to go into the duffel bag.' It took a second to extract Seymour from my wife's wrist and we got him in the bag. Which he peed in just to annoy me further. Oh, and my wife was bleeding out of four holes in her arm. Quite a bit actually.

And Ben? Yeah, he was sitting on the floor, just watching all of this transpire.

Step Three, I throw the duffel bag on my shoulder, scoop up Ben and we start heading for the front door and the stairs.

Just as the alarm goes off.

Well, that sucks. So to recap, I have one 25 lb cat in one arm, a terrified cat in a peed in duffel bag in the other, and a wife with four new holes and mussed up hair.

It was one of those moments where you just think 'God fucking damnit. Was this really necessary today?'

My wife was now really irritated. She's in pain, and knows she now has to make a doctor's appointment. She ends up going to the doctor that day, and gets bandaged. Apparently, if it hadn't been a cat bite, it was deep enough to require stitches. I was shocked the little fucker had it in him to do that. He certainly never bit me in the eight years I had him.

There would also be scarring, and potentially an infection. So not exactly fun for my wife.

I try to be empathetic, I really do. But sometimes I fail on a monumental level. The next day, we were chatting back and forth. I guess maybe I was busy at work, but for whatever reason, I felt like she was going on an inordinate amount about the 'attack.' So I sent the following:

"Hey, we just got a get well card and it's signed by Siegfried and Roy*."

Maybe it was too soon. Maybe it was the bandages. Maybe the puss. Maybe the pain. Maybe the threat of infection. Maybe the knowledge that we now had a man (or wife)-eater living among us. Maybe it was all of the above.

My wife was not amused. Yet, she still managed to laugh. She showed the message to a co-worker who said 'Funny. Inappropriate, but funny.'

And it stuck.

My wife has threatened to put that on my headstone. So excuse me if I get a bit frightened by the delivery guy with a big headstone under his arm and my wife grabbing a stone chisel.

*For those of you who don't know, Siegfried and Roy were an act that decided playing with 300 lb tigers was a good way to make a living. Right up until the point where one of the tigers decided Roy (or was it Siegfried - I can't tell them apart) would make an excellent face-jerky treat.