When I was in high school (way back in the olden days) there was this science teacher that had a very unusual hall pass. You couldn't get anywhere in the school while classes were in session without a handy dandy hall pass. Most of the teachers just had a big metal ring that you could hook on your arm as you wandered the halls looking for the bathroom. Let's just say that when I took the hall pass to use the facilities I always wandered around trying to waste time. But not in this class. You see the hall pass was a cat. A cat on wheels. More specifically a stuffed cat with a collar and leash on wheels. Not a stuffed cat as in plush toy. Stuffed as in taxidermy stuffed. Yep. A taxidermy stuffed cat on wheels with a red rhinestone collar and matching leash.

Cat on wheels wasn't exactly the freshest looking thing. And I swear it had fleas. It sat in the corner of the room with it's leash on a hook. If you needed to "go" you had to hook the leash to the collar and take it for a walk. Nobody wanted to touch it because........it was just nasty. Hardly anyone ever went to the bathroom in that class unless your bladder was about to explode. Well unfortunately the time had come for me to make the all important decision, take cat on wheels for a walk or rupture my bladder. I took cat on wheels for a walk. Until then I had never been really close to it but when I went to hook the leash onto the collar I came face to face with it. It's marble eyes were in crooked, the whiskers on the right side of it's face were missing, there was a faint Pine-sol scent about it and the fur.......it was just nasty! I took the cat for a walk, we were humming down the hall at a quick pace, had to pee bad, the little plastic wheels scraping against the floor behind me. Hey, this isn't so bad and I picked up the pace, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, [clunk]. Uh oh. I turned around and there was cat on wheels, laying on it's side. Horror of horrors, I would have to touch the horrid thing to upright it. Between the tips of my fingers I grabbed a few nasty, stiff, flea ridden furs and pulled it back up onto it's wheels. I then moved very s-l-o-w-l-y toward the bathroom looking over my shoulder the whole time to make sure cat on wheels wasn't wobbling. I made it to the bathroom before I peed my pants and the trip back was slow going and pretty uneventful. The teacher didn't even ask me why I was gone so long. I think he knew because, perhaps it was the look on my face but when I put cat on wheels back into it's corner and hung up the leash the teacher just smiled at me. I never went to the bathroom again while I was in that class.

Copyright © Tambra Jo Gwozdz
March 14, 2001