Julie Roth   

My upstairs neighbor has cats.

The first I heard them was the night after I saw Interview with the Vampire, and I thought they were large rats. Large, sprightly rats, bounding, full of blood, across the floor. I was in bed as I thought this, so it made sense to me at the time.

Well, last night I think she got a new one. This one would have to be some eight feet long (plus tail), I think, because I heard it purring like a rhythmical chain saw through the floor. I consider myself lucky this feline is not sprightly, or the ceiling might have come down on me — the ceiling and all my neighbor's furniture and cats.

Again, I was in bed and had no desire to be swarmed over by their furry, shedding, larger-than-rat selves. After all, I am allergic.

Oh, you think these just the delusions of someone drifting off to sleep. Well that's nonsense. This column is set in New York. Anything can happen in it.

Why, a couple of weeks ago, my friend Karen and I were chatting on a street corner, when a gypsy-looking man in polyester and a hat came up and said, "Ladies, if I were a woman, I would fall in love with you." Well, since there was no chance of his turning into a woman on the spot (his mustache and penis clanging on the sidewalk at his feet), we were safe. So we thanked him.

You would too.

I was telling my dad the other day that one of the great things about this city is that wherever you walk you pass people singing or talking to themselves — many of them better dressed than yourself. What I didn't tell Dad is the scary flip side of that: that the people talking to themselves sound frighteningly like the voices in your own head, with their, "What I really meant to say..." and their "Sonuvabitch — How dare you treat me like..." and their "I can't believe he said that!" (What's worse, so do the songs. I once caught "Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree" like a cold from a barefooted guy with black fingernails.)

Anyway, assuming I've made my point that anything can happen in this city, you will now believe me when I say there is an eight-foot happy pussycat living in the apartment above my own.

And so I hope you will understand that I had no choice when I tell you that I gave him your phone number.

~Julie