A couple of weeks back, I went over to Peaches' place to watch the season premiere of Lost with her new neighbors and some of our shared friends. As I hit the fridge for a beer, she asked me if I happened to be getting any mail addressed to her at my new place. It really wasn't the best time to fabricate something about hatching a complicated mail-fraud scheme as revenge for some imagined offense — we're getting on very well these days — so I settled for trying to explain to her exactly how a change-of-address form works.
She didn't think that was very funny.
We had a few beverages and watched an hours' worth of suspenseful ambiguity, and then I went home.
At the end of the week, I had to fly out of town on extremely short notice. I asked Peaches to take in Milo the White Trash Terrordog while I was gone, and she assented.
When I went to retrieve Milo the White Trash Terrordog the following Tuesday morning, I asked if she'd called the post office and gotten her mail problem/Entertainment Weekly withdrawal syndrome taken care of. A certain, extremely familiar amused expression crossed her features. She gestured toward the front door, where she'd put an old cardboard box on a chair behind the mail slot, forming a sort of goal, like the mailman had to shoot the letters past a defender and needed a backstop. Taped to the inside of the door above this makeshift mail isolation booth was a note, written on colorful construction paper, that had obviously been originally taped to the outside of the door, a cheerful missive for the mailman.
There was a cute, sad cat's face drawn on the note.
Here's what happened:
Peaches went down to the central branch of the Postal Service, just off of 34th Street N. in St. Pete. The woman there asked Peaches' address, went into the back, returned a minute later, and asked her if she owned a cat. Peaches allowed that she did, in fact, own a cat, and the woman at the post office explained to her that the mail was no longer being delivered to the address in question.
Because a letter carrier had been attacked by a cat there.
When a letter carrier is menaced or attacked by a canine at a certain residence, he or she goes back to the post office and fills out what's called a "Dog Incident Report" — apparently, it says that right at the top of the form — and understandably stops delivering mail to that address. Well, one of the letter carriers that handle the route including Peaches' house had gone into the office one day, scratched the word "Dog" out of the top of one of these forms, replaced it with the word "Cat," and written up a report on Peaches' residence. Her mail was no longer being delivered, because on more than one occasion, when a letter carrier slid the mail through the slot in the front door, the cat reached back through the slot and, in an effort at play, scratched the letter carrier.
Now, Peaches' cat — whose given name is Meg Ryan, though everyone calls her KiKi for some reason, and it doesn't matter anyway, because the cat doesn't give a damn what her name is, or who's calling her — is about the size of one and a half cantaloupes. She might weigh eight pounds, if you sprayed her thoroughly with water before affixing tiny, cute cement shoes to each of her four paws. The paws in question are slightly larger than quarters.
This is the beast (and, technically speaking, it was really only about 1/16th of the beast) that frightened/irritated a United States Postal Service employee to the point that he or she refused to approach its lair. Peaches had to fence off the mail slot from the inside, and assure the Postal Service that no tiny cat-arm would ever threaten another letter carrier, in order to resume finding out what psychotic thing Tom Cruise does every week.
Maybe the letter carrier is allergic — like really, really allergic — to cats. Maybe he or she was orphaned when, during a sightseeing trip to India, both of his or her parents were eaten alive by a voracious litter of juvenile tigers. (Such an occurence would be exceedingly ironic, seeing as the tiger kittens would have to be orphans themselves; otherwise, the mother tiger would've fed them.) I don't know.
Last week, I called up the central branch, and asked the extremely polite woman who answered the phone if I could talk to the manager. Seconds later, a different extremely polite woman came on the line; I identified myself, and related the story of a friend whose mail service had been suspended because a letter carrier had been attacked by a cat.
There was a very long silence, and then the woman told me that no, they hadn't had an incident like that.
I told Peaches. She assured me that she'd been down to the post office in question, and had seen the report with her own eyes — scratched-out "Dog," written-in "Cat," and all.
What happened, I imagine, is that after Peaches went down there and straightened everything out, the incident report was thrown away instead of being kicked on up the bureaucratic food chain, and everything went back to normal.
Since hearing the cat-attack story, I've told every one of my friends who would listen. Many, many plans for retaliation via tormenting the letter carriers that deliver to Peaches' house have been considered in conspiracy: angry feline sounds coming from speakers hidden in the bushes around the porch, BEWARE OF CAT signs, a fake paw on a stick shoved through the mail slot at the perfect moment.
But we've discarded them all. I understand that delivering the mail can be a thankless, stressful slog of a job sometimes. We don't get much snow or sleet, but we get a buttload of rain in the summertime, and Milo's not the only White Trash Terrordog in Pinellas County by a long shot; on the wrong day, having somebody's cat take a swipe at your wristwatch can be the last straw, I guess.
But it's still kind of ludicrous to think that the mail-delivery process shut down because of such a thing. Why not leave a note?
I mean, what if it hadn't been Entertainment Weekly that Peaches so desperately needed?
What if it had been black-market insulin, coming in from Toronto?
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.