Vinyl Cafe Unplugged Read Online Free

“She looks like a monkey,” he said. “I’ve always wanted a monkey.”
    Galway thought otherwise and disappeared. She was somewhere in the house—she emptied her food dish during the night. You could sense her shadowy presence, but no one saw her.
    “It makes you wonder,” said Dave, “if there are other animals moving around the house you never see.”
    Galway reappeared abruptly after a week. One evening while Dave was watching television he looked up, and there was Galway smouldering hatred from the top of the bookshelves. She was still wearing the jammies, though the legs were frayed at the bottom and chewed through at the knees. She had been rubbing at the only fur available—the fur on her ears and the back of her head. She had gone completely bald. In the ripped and threadbare pajamas and with her rat-like head she had the threatening menace of a skinhead.
    She was still around the next morning, but she didn’t acknowledge anyone. And she began grooming again. She started with the little balls on Stephanie’s chenille bedspread. In two days Galway licked Stephanie’s bedspread flat. One night Morley got up, went to the bathroom and caught Galway grooming her toothbrush. It took Morley two seconds to teach the cat not to do that again.
    She moved on to Arthur. One afternoon Dave came home and found the dog splayed out on the floor with Galway perched on his back, grooming his ear. Arthur, who habitually rushed to greet anyone who walked through the door, looked at Dave self-consciously, then sighed contentedly and dropped his head back to the floor.
    “I don’t think she’s necessarily crazy ,” said Dave. “Maybe not even neurotic. I think she’s bored. I think she needs a challenge.”
    And that is when Dave decided to toilet train the cat.
    “If I’m going to take the time to teach her things, they might as well be useful things. Anyway, it’s a skill that seems to dovetail with her interests.”
    Dave had seen something on television about a cat who could use a toilet. He figured it wouldn’t be difficult to train her. Like teaching any animal a new trick, the most important part would be to move slowly. The most important part would be patience.
    He decided the first step would be to move Galway’s litter box out of the basement. He would do it in stages, so he wouldn’t upset her.
    He set the box in a corner by the back door. Galway spotted it at dinnertime. She stared at it for a full minute. Then she walked slowly across the kitchen, down the stairs and dumped on the floor where the litter box used to be. She stared deliberately up at Dave while she did it.
    “I was moving too fast,” said Dave. “I tried to take her too far too fast.”
    He took the litter box back downstairs, but not to its original position. He set it a couple of feet closer to the stairs.
    It took him two months to coax the box, and Galway, out of the basement, through the kitchen, up the stairs and into the upstairs bathroom. By April, Galway was doing her business in the cardboard litter box in the bathroom right outside Dave and Morley’s bedroom.
    The next step was to lift the box from the floor to the top of the toilet. If he could get Galway to use the box while it was perched on the toilet, Dave figured it would be nothing to cut a hole in the bottom and eventually get rid of it altogether.
    “No more kitty litter,” he said one night ebulliently. “This is actually going to work out.”
    He believed that.
    Not wanting to repeat his earlier mistake, Dave decided to move the box up to the level of the toilet seat by imperceptible degrees. Once he got it to the right level he could slide it over and onto the toilet. He chose May 1 as the day for the beginning of the ascent. On May 1 he balanced the litter box on a couple of books and waited to see what would happen.
    What happened was Galway looked at her litter box and then dumped in the bathtub.
    “You have to expect setbacks,” said Dave, the