"I hope you're happy, now," I shouted at Citizen Jim as he crawled up the stairs to my apartment.

"Stimpy, I can't get my eyes focused. I think that fat Irish cop did some brain damage to me when he whacked me with his billy club," he said, pausing long to first find, and then to grip, the edge of each step.

"Focus? What good is focus when you never watch where you're going, anyway? If you'd been paying attention, you would have known you'd passed my apartment, but you kept going and caused this horrible thing to happen!"

Half an hour before this, I'd been talking on the telephone with Citizen Jim when I heard a loud, metal-based crash outside. Then the line went dead.

With the phone still in my hand, I ran down the stairs and opened the front door, craning my neck to see if the sound had come from anywhere within fifty yards of my apartment. When I saw nothing, I walked outside; at the same time, the guy who lives across the street was walking out of his house with a phone pressed against his ear.

Looking in the direction my neighbor was also looking, I saw that two cars had collided a block away. At the spot where Sheridan Street meets Whiting Avenue, a crowd was gathered around a maroon Cutlass Sierra and a forest green Jeep Wrangler with a tan top.

When I got closer, I noticed that the Jeep had Alabama license plates. A moment later, Jim staggered toward me holding his forehead with one hand and his lower back with the other.

"Call 911!" he shouted. "Make sure they send a woman! Or three women! In tight paramedic outfits!"

After I made a mental note that Jim was bleeding from a few cuts on his face, as well as a gash in the side of his neck, I glanced around in all directions. "Have you seen Jay?" I asked Jim, then asked the others standing around the two crashed vehicles, "Has any of you seen my cat? The big yellow one?"

"I am standing here needing a goddamn tow truck and an ambulance and a scantily clad nurse firmly but lovingly pressing gauze and sterile bandages all over my bleeding parts and all you're worried about is your CAT?!" Citizen Jim screamed.

I hadn't seen hide nor hair of my cat Jay for many days. This usually meant he would either find his way home after spending the night in jail, or that Farmer C. would knock on my door after finding Jay passed out in the alley between the Laundromat and the Western Auto. This is where Jay often wandered after a night of heavy drinking at the Main Event on West Main Street.

All the college kids think it's so cute that this cat wanders into bars on a regular basis and accepts their offers of beer and hard liquor. They don't know the problems we've had, the broken promises, the swearing he could quit any time he wanted, the nights and days of waiting by the door for him to show his face after a bender.

So when I heard the crash outside my living room window while talking on the phone to Jim, I was afraid it would have something to do with Jay's not coming home for days. I was not only worried that I would find out that Jay had something to do with the crash, but that it would somehow end up in the very paper for which I write, perhaps with a photo.

I have enough problems without being stared at when I leave the house every day because of an errant house pet.

My worst fears were realized when Sgt. O'Hooligan began walking from the Cutlass Sierra holding Jay by the scruff of his neck. "Would this be the cat herself is lookin' for, then?" he asked in his thick brogue.

Jay's eyes were glassy and veering off in opposite directions, while his mouth hung open.

"Yes, sir," I said, holding out my arms for Jay.

Sgt. O'Hooligan pulled back. "Not so fast. You'll be needin' to hear what we're writing his ticket for, so, and which includes driving under the influence of alcohol, driving with an expired license, driving with expired registration, driving with expired inspection, reckless endangerment, driving without corrective lenses, wanton—"

"WON TONS?! What the hell do WON TONS have to do with this? And besides that, cats don't need corrective lenses!" Citizen Jim yelled. "I never heard of such a thing!"

Still holding Jay aloft, the police officer clocked Jim on the side of the head with his night stick.

"And now we'll be movin' from the path of the tow trucks," Sgt. O'Hooligan said. "You'll need to be gettin' your friend off the road way, like."

I ordered Jay to march straight to the apartment to wait for me. He staggered and weaved his way up the street, his back legs moving as if attached to his torso by loose hinges.

"I was only trying to love you in my own way," Citizen Jim said from the spot at the top of the stairs where he finally collapsed after crawling in from the street. "What about me?"

But I had other things to think about. Like how this was going to look.

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