When I was a junior in high school, I got a job working as a receptionist for a retirement community in Cedar Rapids. I loved it. I’d work from 4-8 in the evenings, and when the Members would come downstairs for dinner, they’d stop by my desk and harass me, or ask me how many boyfriends I had. (Don’t worry, I never had more than one at a time. I’m not that kind of girl.)
It made a perfect summer job, too, because I gave me the mornings to do slave work around the house for my parents. Usually it was just mowing, but every now and then Pops would want me to do something else because I was the only child that had a driver’s license.
One morning, he asked me to drive up to the John Deere dealership in Waterloo and pick up a part for one of his old-timey tractors. I said sure, fine, no problem because no matter how you slice it, driving to Waterloo is a sight better than spending another morning mowing the lawn.
At 1:00, I was dressed in my favorite outfit. (It’s sad that I even remember what I was wearing.) In true 1999 fashion, I had on a white button down shirt under a brown sleeveless sweater, a khaki colored skirt, brown stockings, and light brown chunky suede shoes.
Y’all. I was looking good.
And that outfit may seem kind of ridiculous for the middle of the summer, but let’s bear in mind that I worked at a retirement community. Almost everyone inside was complaining how hot it was outside, so the air conditioner was blasting. If I didn’t layer up I’d freeze to death.
Because I had to drive so far, Mom let me take her van instead of my truck, which was affectionately named the J2K. Why was it named that, you ask? WELL. Considering that it was 1999, everyone was all freaking out about Y2K, and I’d paid about $2k for my truck. Also, my name starts with J. Hence, the J2K.
Wow, that was a useless tangent.
The trip up to Waterloo was pretty uneventful. On the way back, I realized I had plenty of time to spare before getting to work because it was only 2:00 by this time. I still had about two hours, and my best friend’s house was just a few miles off where I currently was on the freeway.
I decided to stop by, so I pulled off 380 at the Urbana exit.
And that’s where everything went wrong.
When I got to my friend’s farm, I was disappointed to find no one at home. But the house was unlocked and as I glanced around at the barns and outbuildings, I could tell that the boys were probably in the fields. It didn’t make any sense to come all this way and not leave a note saying I’d stopped by, so I hopped back in the van and dug up some paper and a pen.
DK (short for Donkey Kong), who my friend’s favorite cat, was climbing around my ankles, purring and shedding his fur all over my brown stockings. As I wrote, he jumped up on the hood of the van and started batting at the antenna. It didn’t take me long to finish the note, and when I was done I jumped out of the car and slammed the door.
The sound that came from DK’s feline mouth was not unlike what you would hear if you trapped five screaming banshees in a room with Ernest Hemmingway for an hour. Horrific. The stuff of terror movies.
I was halfway to the house when I realized this strange and horrible sound was not stopping, neither was it moving anywhere. I turned around, looked at my mom’s van, and screamed.
DK had somehow gotten his right paw stuck in the van door, in the small joint between the radio antenna and the sideview mirror, and he was howling in pain. I tripped my way down the stairs, down the sidewalk, around the retaining wall, and threw myself into opening the van door.
But it was locked.
And there sat my keys, in the middle of the driver’s seat.
DK howled.
“OH MY GOSH!” I screamed. DK was sliding off the hood of the car as he struggled to free his paw. I hesitantly tried to push him back on so he wouldn’t be hanging from his trapped paw, but it didn’t work. He slid all the way off and was now hanging from the door.
Howling, howling, howling.
The other cats, five or six of them, came sniffing around to see what the problem was. A few of them took pot shots at DK, swiping at him with their paws.
“THIS IS NOT HAPPENING!” I screamed again, to the empty yard, empty house, empty barns.
Oh, and this was before I had a cell phone, too. So I just stood there, whipping my head around frantically, trying to decide What To Do. I was clearly not thinking straight, because I thought the best idea would be to run down to the nearest neighbors’ house, probably ¼ of a mile down a gravel road. In suede heels, stockings, and a skirt, mind you.
And off I ran.
I soon learned that it is ill advised to run in suede heels, stockings, and a skirt. But DK was hanging from my van door, darn it, and it was my fault.
Well, I got to the neighbors’ house and realized why we never came this way when we rode horse. The neighbors had two very wicked, ferocious dogs that growled and bared their teeth at me as though they wanted to eat and/or kill me for disturbing their peace. And since I wouldn’t be able to save poor DK if I was dead, I turned around and ran back up the gravel road the way I’d come.
My brown stockings were a bit on the gray side now, from all the gravel dust, and I was panting hard. It was a hot day and I was wearing a lot of clothes to be running around like an idiot.
I checked the outbuildings once more when I got back to the farm. I yelled and yelled, hoping someone had run out of gas and was back to fill up, or needed to refill their spray tanks. Really I didn’t care what brought them back to the house, I just wanted SOMEONE.
Nobody. Anywhere.
I remembered the house was unlocked and perhaps I could get ahold of someone on the phone, so I barreled inside and yelled, once more, “IS ANYONE HOME?”
No answer.
I called Mom. No answer.
I called Dad. He was at work. He answered his phone. And, after a very long pause, he said, “Wait a second, you did WHAT?”
And I was all, I know, I know, I know. I’m not even sure how it happened, but DK is hanging from the side of the van right now, there are claw scratches all over the paint finish, and the keys are locked in there, and no one is home here.
Poor Dad.
He told me he was on his way with some keys.
By this time, I had started crying like a girl. DK was still dangling, the other cats were still batting at him with their claws, and I was going to be SO late for work.
Just then, my friend’s brother drove up the lane with his tractor. I burst out of the house like my skirt was on fire and started screaming and waving. He looked extremely shocked to see me, stopped his tractor, and jumped out. As I explained to him what I had done, his eyes got larger, larger, larger and larger until I finally thought they might explode out of his head.
He held in a snicker or two. Then we went over to examine the cat. “Wow,” he said. “That is…well, what I mean to say is…I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“I think I’ve killed him,” I wailed. DK had stopped flailing and was just hanging there, a foot from the ground.
“No, no, you haven’t killed him. Let’s see if we can take one of these windows off,” he said.
Fortunately, I had cracked the back windows for some reason, and they were open an inch. It was just about enough room to reach the screws and remove them, and the plan was once they were taken off, I’d get shoved through the window and unlock the door.
Not a fun plan, but if anyone deserved to get shoved through a window right then, it was probably me.
The window was nearly off when I saw dust kicking up on the gravel road. It was my dad, come to save me and hopefully the cat as well.
“Quick, put the window back together,” I told my friend’s brother. “I don’t want my poor dad to have come out here for nothing.”
My friend’s brother looked at me like I fully insane, but he obliged and screwed the few pieces he had managed to remove back on.
Dad drove up and jumped out of his truck. He walked over to inspect my destruction and all he could say was, “Wow. How did you do this again?”
I sighed. I felt like a terrible person, and I pretty much was.
Dad unlocked the van and we opened the driver’s side door. Poor DK fell to the ground, and then took off running across the yard as far away from me as he could get, despite his smashed paw.
“At least he’s still alive,” I said.
My friend’s brother laughed. My dad shook his head at me. Poor guy, he had just driven 30 minutes one way to unlock a van and release a trapped and now-damaged cat.
“I’m late for work,” I moaned.
“I told them you were on your way,” Dad said.
I jumped in the van, dusted off my brown stockings and suede shoes, and carefully drove out of the driveway, so as not to accidentally run over one of the other cats or something equally catastrophic.
HA. Catastrophic. GET IT?
Somehow, DK managed to live many more years after I smashed him. His paw swelled to the size of a golf ball that evening and the next day, but soon the swelling went down and he went about his life just as though nothing ever happened.
He never seemed to have much time for me anymore, though.
