MY CAT SMASHING MOJO

I have a mortal enemy. His name is Jabar.

Jabar is a cat.

Is that lame—to have a cat as a mortal enemy? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. If I were you though, I wouldn’t rush to judgment. You don't know this cat. This cat is evil. He's cunning, he's focused and nasty and vile and just plain mean.

He’s smart too.

He’s real smart.

He’s so smart he’ll write your midterm, and he’ll get a better grade than you ever would have.

He's my Lex Luthor.

Of course, if he's Lex Luthor, that would make me Superman, and I can’t be Superman. I hate that goody two-shoes jerk. Plus, I look terrible in red speedos.

Okay, this cat is my Joker. Which makes me Batman.

Yeah, I can deal with being Batman. Not the corny seventies Batman, but cool, pissed-off Frank-Miller-Dark-Knight-Returns Batman. I’ll be the Batman who chews steel, spits iron, and calls Robin a fruitcake.

That Batman’s awesome.

You see, not long after purchasing and moving into our first home, the wife and I had a cat door installed in the door leading into our garage. We then had another installed in the side door leading from the garage to the back yard. This was so our two cats could come and go as they pleased. It was simple. It was cheap, and at the time, it seemed to make perfect sense.

The thing we never counted on was that, while the doors gave our cats the ability to get out, they also presented other cats in the neighborhood with a way to get in.

It really should have been obvious from the start, but it wasn’t.

Okay, so maybe I'm not exactly Batman.

I mean, besides being a hell of a hand-to-hand fighter, a billionaire playboy, and a heck of a detective, Batman was also a scientist. A scientist would have figured out the intricacies of the cat door situation long before installation began.

I first spotted him on a Tuesday morning. I was late to work. I hustled down the stairs and into the kitchen where I planned to snag my keys and head for the door.

He was right there, waiting for me.

There was a very fat cat with a big black spot over his right eye sitting on my kitchen counter. The chubby, eye-patched little bastard was squatting on my tiled countertops without a care in the world—like he owned the place.

Our eyes met and I swear to you, I saw him grin.

Before I could react, he leapt from the counter, shot through the cat door leading into the garage, zoomed through the one leading into the yard, and was gone.

Not only was he smart, he was fast—especially for a dude carrying a couple extra pounds.

Lets jump ahead to Wednesday night. I was awoken by the sound of two cats fighting downstairs. I figured it's just our two cats—because they’re jerks and they fight all the time—so I tried to go back to sleep. Plus, I was in the middle of  a fairly fantastic dream involving me, the Enterprise, and an invading horde of hypersexual Orion slave girls.

The fighting didn’t stop.

It wouldn’t stop, and it sounded a heck of a lot more vicious than usual.

I dragged myself from bed, wobbled downstairs half-awake, and clicked on the lights. It was Jabar. He was in my house, and he was beating the snot out of my cats. The black-eyed devil spotted me and escaped in a blink.

The next night, the exact same thing happened.

The night after that, he did it again.

He was toying with me.

The wife and I decided to temporarily close up the cat doors and bring a litter box into the equation. After a few weeks, we tried the cat doors again.

The very next night, Jabar was back.

Damn it!

I’d had enough. If Jabar’s intention was to start something, he should considered it started. It was on! I was done fooling around. I was done playing the straight man, and I was through playing nice. No more games. No more second chances. No more lollygagging, no more pigeonholing, and no more lollypigeons!

If he wanted some of me, he was going to get some of me. He was going to get all of me he could handle, and them some!

I coiled my hands into fists and slammed my knuckles together. I lifted my head to the stars and proclaimed to the heavens above, "Bring it on, bitch!”

The wife heard me from the other room. "Bring what on? Who are you talking to?"

"Nothing...no one."

It was a Monday night—around 11 p.m. I was in the garage, and I was standing to the side of the door leading into the backyard. My eyes were trained on the flapping plastic covering the cat door just below my knees. Hoisted above my head was a brick.

My plan was simple: Cat comes into garage. Cat gets smashed.

Almost elegant in its simplicity, no?

Sort of like a Peanuts comic strip—with bricks and squashed cats.

"Steven, are you in he—" The wife stepped into the garage and immediately spotted me with a brick over my head, a wild expression on my face, and sweat pouring from my brow.

She stared at me for a moment, an indescribable look of confusion on her face. "Steven, what are you doing?"

"Nothing."

Her eyes moved from me, to my smashing brick, and back to me. She wasn’t buying my nothing excuse. "No, seriously, what are you doing?"

"I'm going to crush Jabar with this brick."

"Who's Jabar?"

The cat that keeps coming in here at night."

"How do you know his name is Jabar?"

"I heard the little girls across the street calling him that when they were playing with him in their yard."

Her expression changed. Suddenly, she was looking at me like I’d just taken a dump on the floor—like I dropped my pants and started humping the punch bowl at her company Christmas party.

"So, wait. You're going to stand here in the garage all night so you can smash the cat of the little girls across the street with a brick when he tries to come in our house?"

When she said it aloud like that, I have to admit, it sounded just a little idiotic.

So what?

I couldn’t let that deter me. The plan was the plan, and the plan was set in motion. There was no coming back and no backing down. I had no intention of allowing her to steal my need for vengeance! Under no circumstances whatsoever was I going to let her ruin my cat-smashing mojo. Not today! Not ever again!

"Yep. That's exactly what I'm going to do."

"No, you're not."

"I'm not?"

"No, you're not."

"But I want to."

"You're not smashing that cat."

"Oh."

"Put the brick down and come upstairs."

You've won this round Jabar.