My wife found me in the morning, lying across the threshold of our open front door. I was asleep in a pool of my own drool. In my hand was a half-eaten raw potato.
For weeks a foul stench had come through the wall separating our half of the duplex from that of our neighbour. The smell was so bad it made our eyes water. The only way to keep it at bay was to open all our windows, even though this was Canada in early spring. Brrrrrrrr.
The source of the smell was our neighbour’s cats. Or more precisely, their “leavings”. Multiple cats had been using the neighbour’s half of the duplex as a litter box for years. Their apartment was saturated with cat urine and faeces, of which we were now the olfactory beneficiaries.
We spoke about it with our neighbours on several occasions. They responded by putting bleach on their basement floor. This merely changed the nature of the stench from “cat pee” to “World War I trench cat pee”.
My dad came to visit. He had bad allergies. The stench was so overpowering he had to go stay in a hotel. That night, in addition to the windows, we opened the front door to get maximum ventilation. We lived in a sketchy neighbourhood (see this post). So for security reasons I rolled out my sleeping bag and slept in the threshold of the open front door.
I woke in the night to the sound of a small tinkling bell. I roused myself. There, on our kitchen table, was one of the offending cats grooming themselves in a most unseemly manner. I snapped.
In sleep-deprived derangement I stumbled into our kitchen, seeking a projectile to drive the cat from our home. My eyes landed on a raw potato. I went back into our dining area and reared back to drill this cat with a potato. But even in my fuzzy state, something in my brain told me that at this close range I might actually kill the cat. Besides, the cat was innocent: by rights I should be throwing the potato at my neighbour. So I bit the raw potato into pieces and hurled a tiny fragment at the cat.
Of course I missed, splattering potato on the wall. But the cat got the message and ran. I stumbled back to my sleeping bag, clutching the remainder of the potato lest I need it later. That’s how my wife found me in the morning.
After all diplomacy was exhausted we called social services, because our neighbours actually had a new baby living in that cesspool. We broke our lease. Later the health department condemned the entire building.
Months afterwards I was cycling home from work. My route led past the old apartment. I was stopped in my tracks by a familiar stench. There, on the front lawn of the duplex, was a dumpster full of sodden floorboards. Apparently they had been so saturated with cat urine the building owner was forced to strip the neighbour’s apartment back to the studs.
[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]
[Image credit to imgflip]
