Trespassing In Desperation

FRIENDOS, as many of you know I am a man of many cats. The sheer number of cats living in my house are due to two basic reasons: One, I refused to get a dog with my wife, The Duchess, one of the few moments in my life when I have defied her, and thus she has punished me for my temerity. And two, because cats are adorable, I thought that was obvious. And so here I am enslaved to these furry demons. I swear if I startle awake tomorrow and find that my cat Harry is nestled in close to my ear and whispering subliminal instructions (I imagine he’d have the voice of James Spader, for some reason), I would not be surprised.

Cats are a pain in the ass, however. Not only do they absorb almost all of the money and other resources in any given home like a gang of furry, plump parasites, they’re also very dumb creatures who need constant supervision. I mean, cats make poor decisions every day of their lives, which is why they’ve evolved to resemble furry babies and to parasitically attach themselves to us. Left to their own devices they would perish in increasingly ridiculous ways.

To illustrate this, stare in awe at the story of the time my cat Guenther went on a suicidal jaunt and forced me to trespass on my neighbor’s property.

I Believe I Can Fly

One day way back in some previous era — I think I was carrying around a rotary phone and the only way to take photos of things was via Etch-a-Sketch — a loud noise sent our cats scurrying to their safe places. Apparently for our one gray cat, Guenther (RIP, buddy) the term “safe space” referred to our next door neighbor’s roof.

Our house has a second-floor deck in the back, and when we first moved in we had zero cat-retention methods. For years our cats were yeeting themselves over the low wall of our deck and scampering about on the neighbors’ roofs, having adventures, and then returning home for meals and cuddles as if nothing had happened. The Guenther Incident was our first clue this was happening, I think. Once things had calmed down in the house, I went counting snouts to make sure we had all the critters, and came up one snout short. Upon investigation, I located Guenther … on the roof diagonally across from our deck.

It wasn’t far. So I got a step ladder and climbed up to peer over our railing, and Guenther recognized me and got excited. He padded over to the edge of the roof, meowed at me, and before I could tell him it was a terrible idea, he launched himself at me … and fell one foot short, dropping like a bag of rocks into our neighbor’s yard.

I stood there for a moment planning a cat funeral. Also, my explanatory speech when I knocked on my neighbor’s door and asked politely to retrieve my dead cat. I figured by this point of my tenancy in the neighborhood I was well known as “the drunk White Man who also sometimes writes books” so that would work … well, ‘in my favor’ doesn’t seem like the right phrase, but something like that.

Incredibly, though, Guenther bounced once, looked up at me with what appeared to be resentment, and scurried under the neighbor’s ground-level deck. Fucking cats. They can swallow uranium, get hit by cars, and drop two stories into gravel-filled yards and just shrug.

It started to snow, and had gotten very cold. The Duchess became extremely concerned that our not terribly bright but very gentle gray boy would freeze to death and/or become the property of our neighbors, but our neighbors weren’t home.

I went back to the deck and peered down to the cold, snowy yard below. I looked at The Duchess. “I think I could climb down there,” I said.

“Do it,” she responded. “I can always marry someone else.”

Parkour!

I am not a graceful or particularly athletic person. When I played Little League baseball as a tyke, I played a rarefied position known to insiders as Left Out, which means I stood in Left Fied and the Center Fielder, a kid named Jon, ran over to catch every fly ball hit towards me. I have never forgiven him.

But! Despite my lack of physical skill, I am largely impervious to humiliation, and that is a huge asset when it comes to physical exertion. So I looked at the yard down below, and quickly figured I could make my way down there as long as I didn’t think too hard about it. I climbed up over out deck railing, jumped over to the roof where Guenther had been hanging out, then climbed gingerly down to a stockade fence and from there leaped into our neighbor’s yard, officially trespassing.

The house next door was, at the time, a rental occupied by several college students. They were nice enough guys — a bit loud now and then, but generally cromulent neighbors. So I figured that if someone were to walk out into the yard while I was creeping around back there, all would be well. Besides, all I had to do was coax my little moron out from under the deck and we’d be golden. The Duchess grabbed a long extension cord and lowered a cat carrier down to me, so the plan was simple: I would use some cat treats to lure Guenther out, stuff him into the carrier, and then figure out how to climb out of the yard.

It is always the Somers Way to leave details like an exfiltration plan to the end. That’s why so many of us are in jail.

Of course, Guenther refused to come out. He huddled under the deck like it was his new home. Of course, the kids came home and were startled to discover me in their back yard. I explained the situation, and they were nice enough about it. Still, Guenther would not come. The Duchess arrived and suggested we had no choice but to cut open the decking and retrieve Guenther that way, but the kids balked at that — they were renting, after all, and had security deposits to worry about. The Duchess turned on the Power of The Duchess’s Angry Tears (which, dear reader, are in fact the most powerful force in the universe) and they eventually relented.

When we moved their grill off the deck in preparation for some demolition, however, we discovered an access panel built into the deck. We lifted up a 4×4 section of the deck and Guenther’s head popped out. He looked at us in some confusion, I grabbed him, and all was well.

Epilogue

The ripple effect of my invasion of private property should have been obvious: The kids, having been informed that it was possible to climb down from my deck into their yard, began using this newfound ability as a defense against losing or forgetting their keys, which they did often. Since I had once locked myself out of my apartment while in college and been forced to break in via a window in an alleyway, I sympathized, but the rest of the year saw a parade of twenty-somethings leaping from our deck to the roof next door.

Was there liability there if one of those kids fell and killed themselves? Sure, but I planned to just drag them under the deck if that happened and pretend to have no knowledge.