Mandatory Parker: "The Villainies of BlackCat and The Fake Shemp"
Parker Meets His Nemeses, and the Nemeses Stare Back
Two months after finishing the big move, and life has stabilized for the Lint-Covered Breast Implant. It’s been a long haul consolidating two households, with more work still, but at least we’re no longer tripping on boxes in random places and wondering where the hell we’re going to put dishes and clothes. For the most part, Parker has adjusted remarkably well, even within the general philosophy of “Cat,” and his days are spent either flumping on my feet while I’m at the computer writing, flumping on his Stepmonster’s desk while she’s trying to work, or flumping on the living room couch and yelling until I turn on the TV for him. (A future installment is in order about his movie and TV viewing habits: I never thought I’d have a cat who actively enjoyed watching The Monolith Monsters as much as Parker does.)
As much as he enjoys the benefits of indoor life, the great outdoors still call, which means that at least once per day, we go through the Ritual. On weekend mornings, it’s getting a French press full of coffee and several pieces of sourdough bread, dressing Parker in his obligatory harness and retractible lead, Parker yowling about the indignity of not being trusted not to run down the street, and then stepping outside. On weekday evenings, it’s the same situation except for a big tumbler of water in place of the coffee, but the end result is the same: setting up operations on folding chairs where I read and Parker surveys his goofball domain, occasionally tangling up his lead with the expressed intention of my getting out of the chair so he can steal the chair for himself. Eventually, either we run out of daylight or I have to go inside for something important, so the end the ritual usually involving our walking back to the back door, where I let him in, unbuckle the harness and put it aside, and give him a treat for coming in of his own volition. Sometimes that doesn’t happen and he decides that coming back inside is only for suckers, so I get my workout hefting ten kilos of squirming cat as he grumbles and occasionally hisses over the sheer injustice of it all.
For the most part, those trips are uneventful. He has issues with the squirrels in the yard, but these aren’t the feckless twerps from the old neighborhood. Here, they’ve learned to cohabitate with dogs, multiple cats, hawks, owls, and the occasional fox, so Parker’s chances of finding one unobservant of such a klutzy cat are right up there with my getting an operational Green Lantern ring. The crows here give him a wide berth, and he has finches and wrens instead of bluejays. He sees the occasional mockingbird, but they only come near to live up to their common name, and even the local lizards get evident pleasure off setting up perches just out of his range. As opposed to six months ago, he takes this as his lot in life. Even the occasional rabbit only sets off a few moments of “kekekekeke” clicking before he realizes that they aren’t his true menace.
The neighborhood has dogs. So long as they remain on their side of the fence, parker doesn’t care. The neighborhood has garbage trucks. After his first encounter, where he seemed fairly certain it would take out the fence, Parker no longer cares. Oh, but he has nemeses, ones that keep him up on patrol all night and keep him vigilant all day. Parker has competition for cuteness, and it drives him mad.
BlackCat has no other name: he (I presume male, based on a clipped ear and an inability to get close enough to check for sure) is a feral in the neighborhood known for his stealth tactics. He was already known for sneaking around to torment dogs both indoor and outdoor, including the Stepmonster’s late dog, and Parker was just a new test subject to see how close he could get before getting a reaction. He regularly uses the alley behind the house as a highway, making a point to rile up every dog along the route before strolling to the next, but he also used the house’s driveway as a shortcut to said alley. Parker, like other strong-willed cats I’ve known, doesn’t really care about other cats passing by, but the yard is HIS territory, and he plans to defend it with his life. Because of that, BlackCat pushes that instinct to its absolute limit. He skedaddles through the back yard right in front of Parker, day and night, when Parker is safely ensconced inside. When Parker is out on goof patrol, though, BlackCat often circles back from his alley perambulations and balances on top of available fences, just staring Parker down. In the last couple of days, he has taken to a tightwire act across the top of the back fence: he knows Parker can’t get up there, and carefully picks his way across while Parker impersonates a hungry alligator and just dares him to slip.
It’s night, though, where things get weird. The first couple of weeks here, Parker truly and rightly lost his mind whenever BlackCat passed by, rushing to get into any available window and dislodging everything, including blinds and artwork, that might get in his way. That came with a large repertoire of screams guaranteed to wake even me from a dead slumber, and I’d occasionally find him at a window, puffed up to twice his size, demanding a redress of his grievances by parading in front of the back door so he could deal with the interloper in person. Meanwhile, BlackCat would sit in the driveway and just watch the feline fireworks: I didn’t actually hear him laughing, but the body language told me everything I needed to know.
Lately, it’s a detente at night. Parker no longer wakes up the neighborhood at three in the morning with strangled screeches, and BlackCat only occasionally slinks to the back door to see if Parker is watching through the window. This also applies during the day, so long as Parker is inside. Should he be outdoors and BlackCat on the ground, well, I find myself yanked off my feet when Parker reaches the end of his lead and speed times mass threatens to remove my arm.
Parker’s other nemesis, though, rarely gets into the back yard. Parker’s attitude is more akin to finding an alternate-reality twin, or at least a close cousin, living the wild and free life Parker can’t experience. The first time this cat came by, I noted the bright blue eyes and roughly similar face and paw markings and started calling him “Fake Parker,” but realized that a couple of fellow Michiganites came up with the perfect term and started calling him “Fake Shemp.” Right after Joe Palma’s 120th birthday, too.
Unlike BlackCat, The Fake Shemp has no interest in sideswipes and driveby freakouts. Instead, he comes sauntering down the alley as if it owes him rent, stops on the other side of the fence from Parker, and just stares. Fake Shemp honestly wants to be friendly, both with me and with Parker, but takes off at any sign we might get closer. Considering that Parker is usually twice his normal volume and grumbling like Mount St. Helens before its big eruption when Fake Shemp comes by, he finally gives up on any presumption of Parker’s friendliness and heads on out to continue whatever Fake Shemp business he has planned for the day. After these encounters, Parker eventually calms down and shrinks to normal size, but he’s aware, and he’s watching.
Because of this, although the Stepmonster talks about vague ideas on getting another cat to keep Parker company, we realize we may not be able to change the situation. Parker is not only very happy being an only cat, but if we decided to adopt a new companion, it would have to be a cat adamantly opposed to going outside. Otherwise, the only thing worse than two cats yelling at a door at a feral with the obvious response to their threats of violence is being dragged around the yard and getting both shoulders pulled out of their sockets by maniac cats. I already know my obituary will have some variation of “death by cat” in it, but do I really need to give the coroners more reason to laugh than usual?
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.