Mandatory Parker: “Equal And Opposite”

The Dinner Theater Adaptation of War of the Gargantuas Continues

It’s dawn. Two four-legged tumors settle in and find their favorite sleeping spots: one in my office, waiting for the sound of clacking keys and random curses under my breath. The other stumbles to his favorite windowsill, allowing him plenty of time to lounge while reporting on the perfidies of the local crows. For most of the day, all they do is snore and shift in their sleep, but when they awaken in the evening? Nonstop mayhem, with occasional breaks, with stompings, jumps, pivots, madcap chases, and occasional running into walls. When the sun rises again, all that’s left is a truly heroic layer of discarded and occasionally plucked cat fur in the carpet and on every surface they can find. This is a venue hostile to Roombas, to standard vacuum cleaners, to dustmops. This is Cat World, and the monkeys who think they sit atop the local food chain tremble at the sounds of lumbering and galumphing once the sun goes down.

We are now on Week 6 since Parker the Lint-Covered Breast Implant and Winston the Flame-Point Doorstop first made contact, and amazingly the house still stands. My fiance Sarah, Doreen Green to my Irwin Schwab, saves her sanity by not knowing much about cat behavior, leaving me to look upon the two’s exploits with increasing horror. If they hated each other, we could deal. If they merely liked hanging together but otherwise went about their lives, we could deal. No, instead, we have two cats who didn’t know they needed each other in their lives: they hiss and grumble and growl while beating the crap out of each other, but take one away, as I had to do a couple of weeks earlier because of a potential bladder stone emergency, and they both just HOWL.

Maybe it’s time to get a better look at Winston to understand the dynamic. Pictures don’t do justice to get across exactly how small his head is compared to his body: he walks and runs as if some enterprising psychopath chainsawed a mature cat and a kitten and stapled the kitten’s front to the cat’s rear. Hence, he has monstrous haunches able to propel him anywhere he wants, but relatively tiny forelimbs, causing him to use them only for steering and never for propulsion and thereby leaving him looking more like a freshly thawed Christmas turkey than anything feline. The head, though. Winston has parallels elsewhere in the history of life on Earth. Brontosaurs, Moas. Combined with his natural grace, which includes an incredible proclivity to lie in places where he immediately slides off, though, his closest analogy in deep time is the caseid Cotylorhynchus, which he confirms every time he stands up. Look into those pale blue eyes, and you immediately hear the sound of an empty can of spray paint: a loud rattle inside, but no other contents to speak of. Unlike Parker’s wide vocabulary of Cat and English, Winston manages two words full of meanings, “Murph” and “Bev,” and really doesn’t need much of anything else. Spend any time with this cat, and you find yourself paraphrasing David Warner by way of Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin: “Oh Winston, dear Winston, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence.” He’d agree with you and then fall off the couch.

And then there’s the earwax addiction. Winston, like many cats of limited brain cells, has an absolute obsession with licking everything in sight. Try to scratch the top of his head, and he falls off the couch attempting to grab and lick the hand doing so. Leave insufficient food in his bowl, and his modus operandi for awakening the resident hominins is to lick eyeballs and slide his face across ours in a big sloppy French kiss that, combined with cat food breath, is the absolute opposite of stimulating. The ears, though, are targets. Human ears are far too small for his determination to flense out every last scrap of earwax, and often settles for just licking the outside before giving it up as a bad call. Kala the Kenyan sand boa has no ears at all. Therefore, Winston’s target and assignment to leave bereft of fresh earwax is Parker, and that’s where things get weird even for them.

Parker never had an earwax problem per se, but what deposits he has draw Winston like the Sirens called to Odysseus. It doesn’t matter the placement of Parker’s head: on the floor, on the bed, in the bathtub, hanging from a ladder or shoved inside a box to protect his generational wealth, if Parker’s ears are accessible, here comes Winston. In he goes with a tongue more suited for a woodpecker or pangolin (much like a pangolin’s, I suspect Winston’s tongue is anchored on his pelvis), happy to pull out brain tissue along with his beloved wax. Parker tolerates it for a few moments, and then ticklishness kicks in, and he promptly kicks out to break Winston’s hold on his skull. Winston retaliates by hopping up and bug-stomping Parker in the ribs before going back for those tasty tasty ears, and it Is On.

Mind you, if Parker had serious issues with this, he could do any number of things to convince Winston that his ears are sacrosanct and untouchable. Instead, he encourages this. For the first time in his life, Parker has a sparring partner as appreciative of rough trade as he is, and he returns the sentiment. All night long, it’s face-kicking and flipping and scrabbling, running into doors and random items. Occasionally Parker decides to take a break by throwing himself like a cannonball at my ribs while I’m sleeping, but then Winston hops onto the bed and starts his shenanigans, and now I have two cats dancing the tarantella on my ribcage. They eventually leave, usually when Winston slips off the bed onto his face, with one noticing the other leaving the room and taking chase. It finally ends when the first light of dawn creeps into the house, so they finish with one last Hop on Pop (very occasionally missing sensitive components of the human male anatomy) and head back to their alcoves to recharge for the next night.

Sarah sleeps through all of this, every night. She has no idea how much I envy her.

However, once the monkeys wake up, I get my revenge. Parker is easy: I just open the front door and go outside and watch him lament his lack of freedom. Winston, though, earns his punishment. Parker is svelte and flexible, as he demonstrates when he twists his spine 180 degrees, but Winston lumbers through life as if he paid for college by volunteering for scientific experiments involving a Heinecken mini keg and a drunken proctologist (as confirmed when I clean his litter box), and “flexible” is not one of his chosen synonyms. Alas for him, his favorite morning perch is just narrow enough to hold his bulk, so he wedges himself like a chuckwalla in the windowsill (yet another animal that shares his proportions), flips himself just enough to get comfortable, and immediately starts snoring. For a cat who uses an innocent belly rub as an excuse to instigate severe and terrible violence, he sure has problems trying to right himself when I come in on the windowsill for a scritch. Do that often enough during the day, and he actually sleeps at night.

As for Parker, he’s in heaven. His random screams in the middle of the night and his insistence upon getting me up at 2 in the morning to witness his knowing where his food bowl are located are over. Those were signs of his boredom in the early hours. Now, if he’s bored, Winston hears, and the yellow goop fairy tells him “There may be some in his left ear you missed.” A quick shake of the pea in his skull, and the rampage begins anew. By morning, Parker may be sore, creaky, and bald in patches, the former chunks of pelt making a thick layer of felt on my side of the bed and subsequently clogging the dryer’s lint trap, but he’s not bored.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. 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. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

ear wax Mandatory Parker Winston