Hissy Cat

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September 26, 2005

Drinking In A Hotel Bar

Last night I became exactly the kind of grown-up I always hoped I would grow up to be.

The kind that gets drunk in a hotel bar on a Sunday night and dances to synthesized renditions of Burt Bacharach songs in a skirt that is short enough to make me look like a hotel bar hooker.

Yesterday, after the Folsom Street Fair (which taught me that there are not enough public spankings or bound people accepting large dildos up their asses in the world to make large, organized events not boring), the Tess, the Luke, the Brett, the Ameeth, and I took a cab to the Fairmont hotel where we were meeting Molly and her Dad at the Tonga room in the Fairmont Hotel. We were promised a Korean woman in a boat playing Missy Elliot on a keyboard while the boat motored around the bar. We were not dissappointed.

We should have perhaps taken it as an omen for the rest of the night that the cab we unknowingly climbed into was-- in the driver's words-- "an awesome disco cab." On the dash were half a dozen Chinese dragon bobble-heads angrily bobbing their heads to the blaring 50-cent. There was speculation that the entire trunk of the cab had been turned into a sub-woofer. I believe it. Among the bobble-headed dragons on the dash were, inexplicably, three or four cat miniatures made of animal fur and glass eyes and little rattan baskets. In the space between the back seat headrests and the rear window pane were a cabaret line of colored spotlights. A star made of blinking Christmas-tree lights adorned the ceiling and there was a multi-colored discoball in the center of the cab. Oh, and a TV screen showing Lord of the Rings.

Wedged as I was soundly between lovely, warm bodies in the backseat (four of us were smooshed it), I was largely sheilded from the aggressive rattling and jostling of the car, though those sitting next to doors testified to being slammed around quite a lot, and I believe it. At one point, shooting down a side street the tires shrilled as we came to a sudden halt. A German Shepard was passing by.

The car once again came to a dead halt (this time in the middle of traffic). A cab going in the opposite direction had stopped and running out of that cab, a hunchback waddlyran over to the driver's window, waving a fat stack of bills. "I have three hundred! I have three hundred!" the hunchback said, "but I can only give you ten."

"I'm going to break your fucking legs," said the disco cab driver. And after the hunchback had peeled away in his cab, "I'm going to fucking kick his ass. I'll break his legs. Next time I see him at the airport, I will get out and break his legs."

And then, the Tonga room. Although it was never explained exactly what circumstances had led to Molly paying a visit to the Tonga at age fourteen, she had been so thoroughly impressed that she was able to convince even cheap, lazy motherfuckers like myself to make the visit. The place was Tiki-ed out, and, indeed, the boat rumor was true. There was, in fact, not only a keyboardist but a drummer and girl singer on the boat in the pool as well, playing "Top 40 hits of the 70s, 80s, and 90s." So overwhelmed were we by the magic of the Tonga room, we felt it would be wrong not to share the magic with our friends. At our peak, we numbered thirteen.

Did I mention that every half hour there was a "rainstorm" where the lights would dim, monkey and parrot noises would interrupt, and water would fall from the sky over the artificial, indoor lake? And the dancing? There was dancing.

We started drinking when the bar was just opened and empty, around five o'clock, and stayed through the eight and nine o'clock onslaught of what I can only assume were tour groups freshly arrived from Boca Raton. The best part of drinking so damned much so damned early, that we were done by ten and too saturated to not be in bed by eleven.

In other news, Gerty, my three-legged cat, caught a rat on Saturday evening. Though she has been known to chase Orange Leo from Adobe-- a Tom about twice her size and in possession of a full set of limbs-- out of the courtyard, and while she is cat ninja with her cat toys, I didn't think she would actually snag a rat. For one thing, the rats in my courtyard are huge. For another, Gerty only has three legs. Jumping is not really her strong point. Nevertheless, she managed to spring at the wall where the rats congregates under the window of my neighbor Swan, who feeds them (and talks to them, and hears them talk to him), and return to the ground with a fat, wiggling rat in her mouth. I was sitting in the yard having a smoke. The cat took one look at me and came trotting proudly up to me with her prize. I ran inside and shut the door and called Brett on the phone in a state of stupid panic. Brett promised to come clean up the rat remains in the morning, so I could let Gerty have her fun. For maybe ten minutes I heard her playing with her prey. I heard her batting it around in the crunchy fallen leaves and then silence when she picked it up, then more crunching along with awful death wheezing. Then came the most pitiful cat wail I have ever heard. Gerty, who I don't think knows how to kill, had let her rat get away up a tree. With only three legs, she really can't climb and she was pacing back and forth, and looking up to the branches, crying like kid who just watched the sccop of ice cream go falling of the cone. I picked up Gerty and brought her inside for praise and scratching and a can of wet food.

In my heart of hearts, I am proud of my cat.

Posted by hissycat at September 26, 2005 09:51 AM

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