Thursday, June 29, 2006

Why I don't house sit anymore (Part 1)

I was originally planning to write another Vomit Girl adventure, one that would involve a family wedding and general disgrace all 'round, but then I thought better of it. Next week, perhaps. So instead, I'm going to tell you all about the time we accidently set fire to a house, a BBQ, a TV and Fandango Jones all in one fell swoop. Quite the night, really.

It all started with the house. A fucking excellent house, at that. It was one of those above-shop dealies, with a bottle shop below, and a tram running past every ten minutes. The house itself was a pretty good layout - a study, a second bedroom, the master bedroom out the back away from any noise, and a fucking huge balcony, overlooking the tramlines & shopping strip. So, I was asked to housesit this particular house, while its usual occupants were galavanting around Europe for the next three months. Sounds like a good deal, right? Yes... until you consider the contents of the house... it was entirely furnished by items from roadside collections and scrapheaps over the last ten years, and nothing worked. You'd touch something, it would break. They didn't believe in paying bills, so the only device that could be used to heat ones self over winter was a shitty little bar heater with a frayed cord. Well, that, or a fuckload of beer. I often chose the latter. But the worst possible contents of said house, were the two items with four legs and a tail apiece; The devils spawn... The kamikaze vegan cats.

I'm not joking, either. These little fuckers were shocking. Their owners had raised them as vegans from birth... they had never consumed meat, dairy or anything else derived from an animal their entire lives. Now... I've heard that you can actually do this with dogs, because they just eat all sorts of junk anyway. But there's a real problem with doing this with cats... they've fucking carnivores - not omnivores. They eat meat. In the wild, in the home, in a boat on a fucking moat; Cats eat meat. There is no escaping this fact... unless you're a delusional vegan yourself, that is.

So, there I was... a great house filled with crap, and even crappier cats. They were in a constant state of frenzy. Picture every cat you've ever seen at that very minute they realise you're opening a can of their dinner... they go a bit bezerk, they'll run about your feet, and they might even miaow a lot - but it's all calm once you get the food into their bowls, right? Not the vegan cats. They're always like that. The little fuckers were total menaces. They learnt how to open the freezer door. They learnt how to open the cupboard doors. They learnt how to trip me up the stairs when I came home drunk. They were not so much 'crafty' as 'obnoxious little fuckers with no 'off' switch'. By the time the owners returned, I'd taken to eating my dinner out on the balcony, in the cold, with the cats locked inside, just so I could eat in some sort of relative peace.

So. The whole three months turned out to be one disaster(oft fur created) atop another. As time wore on, things were broken. Usually by the cats, but sometimes just because everything they owned was a decomposing pile of garbage. Breakable garbage. I mean, yes, within 24 hours of being in the place, I'd managed to burn a wall, but I was hoping that was a one off. Anyway, it was cats who knocked the candle into the dried flowers, not me. So - I'd pretty much given up on trying to peacefully coexist with the house by the end of the first month, and instead started working on surviving the remainding time without letting the cats further injure, or in fact, kill me.

My first step on the path to self-preservation, was of course to invite people around for my entertainment and companionship. They say, afterall, that you shouldn't drink alone. Sooner or later as you can probably imagine, there came a time to crack out the BBQ. So we did. Fandango & I declared the following Saturday to be a BBQ at the cat house, and it was. Come nightfall, there's only three of us there... Mooky, Fandango & my good self. Fandango is making a series of abusive phonecalls, while myself and Mooky were probably well on our way to being drunk. Fandango gets off the phone, and decides that it's time to fire up the BBQ. So we do. It's a 4-burner beast, on a trolley, and backed up against the house-side of the balcony. The gas bottle is attached, the grill is clean, and we turn it on and fire it up - it all works a treat. Fandango gets his cooking-implements, we get the sausages and other assorted tasty, and start to cook. Time passes uneventfully.

Now, there was actually one good thing about this house, and that was the stereo. Nice meaty speakers, and all in all, a pretty good setup which meant we could crank it up inside for outdoor events. The other good thing about the stereo was that it was located in the living room, in a spot where you can see out the window to the BBQ. So, as Mooky and I raced inside to change a CD after the previous one had ended, if we were to have turned our heads 90 degrees to our left, we would have seen Fandango standing at the BBQ, doing his thing. But we didn't. we were too busy fighting over which CD to play next. We fought over covers, and hid the ones we respectively didn't want to listen to. Mooky probably said something wank about playing jazz or something. And then we heard Fandango yelling. I told Fandango to fuck off, as he had played the last CD. He yelled some more. I told him to fuck off, some more, under the assumption he was yelling CD demands. This continued back and forth awhile, and Mooky & I compromised and found a CD to play. Crank up stereo, press play, and why the fuck is Fandango still yelling?! When we finally looked out the window, there's Fandango, sort of jumping from one foot to another & waving his arms about, tongs in one hand, BBQ fork in the other (in what could only be described as a 'help me, I'm a little bit pissed, and I'm on fire' dance)... with a foot or so of flames between him and the window.

I ran outside and observed the scene... the BBQ was on fire, Fandango was unhurt, but a little singed around the edges, and Mooky was running around in circles. The first order of business was to pull the BBQ out from the wall, and put it out. This plan was working well, until we realised that the BBQ, the BBQ trolley, and the TV underneath the BBQ were all on fire.

What TV?! You might rightly ask, as did we.

The vegans had a big old wood-panelled TV, wrapped in black plastic bin bags sitting on the bottom of the BBQ trolley, beneath the grill. We hadn't seen this beforehand, because the front of the trolley was decorated with a set of venetian blinds. Yes, venetian blinds. We didn't question this at the time, because the whole house was filled with similar oddities. Anyhow - back to the fire at hand.

Each side of the TV's wooden cabinet was on fire, and the top part of it had completely melted and malformed. On further inspection, I found that the TV was in fact, plugged in to a live outlet. After a good deal of obscenities escaped my person, Mooky came charging over, armed with a bucket of water, clearly confused as to which particular bit of flaming balcony he should aim it at...

NO! I yelled, The TV's plugged in!! No water yet!
Mooky put the bucket down. Fandango and I looked quizzically at the scene.

I think out loud... Turn the electricity off
Mooky vanishes back into the house.

I crawl under the flaming BBQ, and quickly yank out the power cord to the TV, when suddenly, the music stops and all the lights go out. We can't see a thing, bar the flames. This leaves Fandango and I in a minor state of confusion. Mooky comes out, and we realise that he's run about the house turning all the electrical appliances off, possibly in case they self combust in solidarity with the still flaming TV. We set about extinguishing the fires, carting water about with the pissy little 2 litre buckets we find in the laundry. During this process, we find a flaming chunk of chipboard... in the BBQ's drip tray. I was under the impression that most people filled those with that kitty litter stuff, or other assorted oil catchy things. Not chipboard. Idiots. I guess this is why everything comes with bleeding obvious safety labels now. I felt like putting one on the cats tails 'Warning: Do not keep on a vegan diet'.

So, we stood back and surveyed the damage... a burnt roof, a totally fucked BBQ & trolley... an even more fucked TV, some burnt window panes and bricks, and a pair of freaked out cats. We cursed the vegans, we laughed, and after attempting to consume a sausage that had survived the disaster, we made a decision to fry our dinner instead. Just as we're about to put some music on and sit down to a relaxing beverage to calm our somewhat on-edge nerves before people show up, we hear the sirens. At first, we joke, thinking that it's a funny coincidence... but then they get closer... and closer... and then we decide it's in our best interests to fan away as much smoke as possible before we end up footing a large fire department bill. We sit on the balcony and watch the fire engines drive back and forth, looking for the fire they somehow keep missing, and eventually they bugger off.

Our guests call, asking where the door is. We head down to meet them, as they joke about how the fire trucks might have something to do with us. We open the door, and usher them in before more tell-tale smoke escapes out the stairwell... their laughter turns to stunned looks as they stand in a smoke-filled staircase, and then changes back to a somewhat more nervous laughter as we tell them what happened.

So, a fun night really. We had a fire, Mooky and I danced, and Fandango enjoyed pretending the sausages he later cooked in the frying pan were actually cocks, accompanying them with meat-patty balls. We spent a good portion of the night cursing the damned vegans for turning the house into what Fandango most accurately described as a meat eaters trap. Fire here, attack cats there, absolutely fucking nothing was safe. Bastards.

Needless to say, the vegans don't really talk to me anymore. I think I'm the winner there.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

All those nights at the house have run together for me. Blavod, extreme toasting, people running back and foward to the bathroom to be ill, people running to the balcony to be ill. Cats throwing up on people. Good times with fire and alcohol.. lots of alcohol.

The Rantolotl said...

hahahahaha!

tramfish!

I think I'll be writing more about that house...

Anonymous said...

The keg of DAB... the keg of dab that sat there for months. Setting a fire in the middle of the balcony... so many stories to go with that place. So little i can actually remember properly.

Fandango Jones said...

Tramfish? What about Toiletcarrot?
"Why the fuck is there carrot in the toilet?!"

Then there's the non-vegan vomit...

And who could forget the classic "I'm gonna go piss on things! ... *falls over*" ?

We should craft a make-shit sausage catapult and lob flaming meat into their balconay area.

Fandango Jones said...

Uhh... make-shift is what I meant... although flaming shit could be launched too I guess.

Anonymous said...

I had forgotten about the toilet carrot. I do however remember passing out near the catbox. The cat box visited by vegan-cats with non-stop explosive diarrhea. The sights and sounds of waking up to that still haunt me. I also remember waking up to a smell of vomit that fandango poisoned an entire room with even though at least a week had passed. God's that house smelt evil after we were done with it.

Kipper said...

I wonder if there's any sort of cosmic symmetry out there in relation to vegan cats. I wonder if anyone keeps pet cows and forces them to be carnivores and eat meat.

no hang on that's the entire US agricultural industry isn't it

Fandango Jones said...

I wonder if that website sells degrees in Vegan-Cattery that will make me an extra $900 a month? Let us hope!

And that vomit was entirely in protest that such cunts could live in such a cool place. Well... two parts protest, three parts DAB.

Anonymous said...

I was gonna get out the barbecue next time you're in London, but now fuck that...


I say barbecue, it's half an oil drum wrapped in chicken mesh that you have to scavenge bricks for it to stand on.

The Rantolotl said...

Wait until I write part two... you'll hear about the fireplace/bbq/deck lamp I created after the fire... It might be the long lost cousin of you bbq =)