"Why do you keep peeing on my beanbag chair?" I asked my cat, Spongebob Stinkypants, as I held up my beanbag chair and shook it at him. He sat looking up at me, flicking his tail on the hardwood floor excitedly, as he tried to figure out if we were were playing or if he was in trouble. I stuck the section of the chair with evaporated cat pee in his face and made sure his nose was right up in it.
"Here, right here, smell familiar?" I asked him. He backed up a few steps. "Yeah, I thought you might recognize this." And then I carried the chair past him to the hall bathroom, throwing open the door and tossing it into the shower, where I began washing it off for the second time in as many weeks. Spongebob pranced into the bathroom behind me. He plopped down into the cool tile floor behind the now half-open door and spread out.
He loves to follow people into the bathroom. It's his favorite room. If you flush the toilet, he'll jump up onto the rim of the bowl and stick his head in, watching the water go down like it's some great event. More than once I've been standing up peeing, only to see a fuzzy head and paws appear between my legs and lean way out into the toilet, watching the yellow stream spash down into the clear water.
I rinsed the dried cat pee off the vinyl beanbag chair and threw it down into the shower to drip dry. Then I walked out, closing the bathroom door behind me and forgetting about Spongebob.
I plopped down on the couch in the living room and resumed watching "Mission Impossible" with My Wife.
After a long time had passed, I began to hear noises coming from the hall bathroom.
"Did you lock Stinky in the bathroom?" My Wife asked me.
"Yeah, apparently I did," I responded. Neither of us offered to get up and go let him out.
Before long, I heard the sound of cabinet doors being opened and then springing shut again. "Ah, he's learning the fine art of opening cabinets. Great," I commented.
And then we heard another noise, a different noise, the sound of something sort of rumbling. "What the hell was that?" I asked My Wife.
"I don't know. Go check," she replied, still not making any attempt to get up off the couch.
Curious, but dreading the answer, I got up and walked over to the hall bathroom. I turned the doorknob and pushed on the door.
BUMP!
"What the hell?!"
"What?" My Wife yelled to me from the living room. "What'd he do?"
"The door won't open," I yelled back. And then I pressed on it hard enough to bend it just a little so I could peek inside the bathroom. I could just barely see a long strip of wood directly behind the door.
"Oh hell!" I cursed. "He's pulled open the vanity drawer and now the door won't open. Stinky, you dumbass, now you're stuck in there!"
He had pulled the drawer all the way open, so that it was fully extended and completely barricading the door.
Stinky was meowing pitifully now, tired of being in the bathroom and beginning to realize from the tone of my voice that bad things were happening, or about to.
"You opened it," I said uselessly to the cat, "now close it back."
He meowed in response, but didn't touch the drawer again.
I could only just open the door a tiny crack, just enough to see in, but not enough to get anything substantial through, like my hand or even a thick screwdriver. The more I looked at the situation, the more I began to think I was going to have to break the drawer just to get inside.
"Where is the long, thin screwdriver?" I asked My Wife, the woman who constantly steals my tools and then scatters them all about the house rather than putting them back in my toolbox.
"I don't know!" she yelled, apparently insulted that I had asked her. Then she began yelling questions to me about the situation, why I couldn't open the door, and couldn't I just poke my hand in and close the drawer and other thoughts a person might have from a comfortable seat on the couch.
"No, there's no room. There's barely any room to even see in, let alone poke a screwdriver or something in there." I reponded. "I think I may have to trying using a knife blade. It's about the only thing thin enough to fit that would allow me to push on the drawer."
I left to get my longest knife.
When I arrived back, My Wife was just opening the door.
"What did you do?" I asked her.
She held up a long, perfectly flat kitchen utensil. "Spaghetti fork!" she announced proudly. "Good thing I'm Italian!"
Spongebob came running out of the bathroom and went straight up to me. I took his furry face in my hands and said in a playful voice masking my irritation, "So, if you could open the damn thing, why couldn't you close it?"
He meowed happily and then wrapped his paws around my wrists and bit the shit out of my hand. Life in the Memphis Household was back to normal again.
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