The Jaycee Diaries

As we walked into his house, my jaw damn near dropped in horror. I had always wondered where he was and what he had been doing in the months since he went MIA, and now I knew. It was the most horrific thing I had ever seen! Utterly speechless, we proceeded inside of the house.
You can’t even make something like this up; they had seventy-eight cats, four dogs, six birds, and a tiny chipmunk. I truly could not believe my eyes. There were animals crawling on the walls of that house, and I thought I was going to be sick. Even worse than the animals was the scowling woman standing in the doorway. She was so unwelcoming that she made me trip over my feet as she hurried us in and warned us about leaving the door open because of the cats. I looked behind me to check, but I really wanted to run out of the door instead of closing it. We got a very short tour of the house, which was pretty much just rooms filled to the brim with cats. Sick ones, stray ones, feral ones; they all had a story and a place to live. Her sick mother lived in the back of the house, and there was no proper introduction. We had been directed by my father to sit on two stools in the kitchen, because all of their chairs were being occupied by cats. A bit confused, I sat down. I just sat there, watching in horror. Speechless, my eyes watched her. Pauletta opened a cabinet and I was hoping that she was going to have snacks for us, but boy, again I was baffled. In the cabinet where the snacks should have been were rows and rows of canned cat food. Orange, blue, pink, yellow- I never knew there were so many options! They had them all. On the counter in front of me there were rows of dishes holding hard cat food in any flavor that they wanted to choose. I went to pet a couple of the cats, because I actually did like animals; just not this many. She used a cracked, shaky tone with me and told me to leave them alone. Now I was getting angry. That was just wrong! How dare her. It was like a petting zoo, and I couldn’t even touch? Since I had nothing else to do, I stared and started to analyze her. She was the ugliest creature I had ever seen in my life. I never wanted to be mean, but she was mean to me, so I already knew that liking her was out of my hands. As she sifted through the colorful array of cans, I noticed that at the very top of her short, frail, orange-reddish, faded out hair was a balding spot. It looked as though she had dyed it one too many times. Short and round was her figure, and there was nothing feminine about that way that she stood at all. It was awkward and plump. She has two kids of her own, (boys), so I didn’t expect her to be slim, but gosh they were late teenagers by now! I met them in passing a few times. One was older with dark hair and glasses- Tommy. The other, Mitch, was thin and had the same shortness as his mother. Their father had died a few years back in some freak accident before she met my father, which explained why she already had a house. Well, I guess when he died she spent all of her time becoming a depressed cat hoarder. The widow card was what she had played with my father, and it all made sense now. She had money, the one thing that my father loved most in the world.

My father stood in front of me, holding two kinds of Chef Boyardee and since I knew that there were onions in the raviolis I opted for the beeferoni. I hated onions and everyone knew it, but no one ever fully accepted it, since they liked them. Onions turned my stomach and instantaneously made me want to puke. I would always get a whirl of nausea and my mouth would swell up with sickness. I didn’t like it one bit. Mushrooms were also on my list. They reminded me of slippery slugs that you had to choke down your throat, so I would have the same reaction. I hated two of the worlds most commonly used ingredients. They were loved by almost everyone in the America and put in just about everything, so pretty much I was screwed from the get go on that one. My mother knew how I felt, but she never really knew how to honor my requests. I’m pretty sure that she would have lied, stolen and cheated to get her way. Giving her arm may have even been an option at one point. I would go on strike and refuse her food and because I was so thin she would give in and give me Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and salads for years. I would eat hamburgers and things like that, as long as they had no onions, but other than that I stood my ground. My father knew that I would choose the beeferoni because it was safe, so my brother, who loved onions, gladly took the ravioli. He directed us to the living room and sat us on the floor. I was hoping we could sit in chairs and talk to him like we used to, but he had other ideas.