I started out as a cat dentist quite by accident….you see, one day I was at the bank and made a joke about how a Vet was going to charge me over six hundred bucks to get this rotten tooth pulled out of my cat’s head. The exact wording of the conversation escapes me, but the general gist of the banter was that although it wouldn’t put me in the poorhouse, I felt the fee to be excessive so I created a hypothetical situation in which I would get the cat really drunk on Lemon Gin and pull out the offending fang with needle nose pliers. We all had a good laugh and that was the end of that.
Or so I thought….
Later that evening, as I was right in the middle of my nightly ritual of getting drunk and wallowing in self pity, I heard a loud commotion outside. I peered through the drapes to ensure that it wasn’t some escaped mental patient with a history of violence, then ascertained it was one of the girls that worked at the bank. She was playing a set of bagpipes right beneath my window. Then I realized that it was not a set of bagpipes at all, but a fighting and screaming cat confined in a ratty old pillowcase. I hastily donned my purple polyester pantsuit with the big white vinyl belt and slid down the banister like a jaunty pirate and unlatched the door.
She wanted to know if she could pay me two hundred bucks cash to pull out the animal’s tooth, no questions asked.
So I looked around and said,”Yeah, okay, c’mon in”.
And that’s how I met my first wife.
