It was the damn cat who started it all......

Some chumps in need of rescuing - a treatment for a 15 minute film by J Rowan Ramirez. 

It was the damn cat who started it all. My mother always told me you shouldn't trust a broad who lay down in an instant of you meeting her and let you stroke her belly, but I never had listened to a word my mother said. I'd been happy not leaving the house - other people called it a funk in a bad way but I saw it more as the James Brown kind of funk. And who needed to leave the house anyway? We live in an internet age - I can get sushi delivered in the morning and the fat sucked out in the PM, and the people who go to work say I'm the chump?

But the damn cat wouldn't leave it alone, so while I'm instant messaging some guy in Albuquerque who says he can fulfil my wildest fantasies with just the click of a mouse she's jumping across my keyboard like there's ants in her pants. I told her she could have him, he'd sent a picture of a catalogue model which meant he'd be some thirty stone sweat ball who couldn't use Photoshop whacking one out in his mother's utility room, but she never stopped to ask. Hell, she was a cat.

"Please help me" types the cat. Man alive, who'd have thought the cat could talk? Or at least type. I stopped for a minute. This was quite unusual. Then she did it again: "Laura, I need your help. Marvin."

Maybe some background will help. You see, two years ago I wasn't the wreck you saw before you - I'd been like the regular shmos, you know - house, job, loving and supporting relationship. I'd been one of those chicks who smiled and showed their teeth as if she meant it, and I think I did.

But I'd messed it up one night  - you see I'd always had this weird thing for this no one from the seventies. I had always told myself that it was ironic but somehow it managed to hit my brain on the way out and stick around, my original first love had been a Dungeons and Dragons freak who'd run off to join a suicide cult so he seemed like a much simpler daydream - so when he came to my city I had to go and find out what was what.

The concert was strange - a crowd made up of middle aged straight men and their confused looking wives, a bartender too young to give a fuck and a floor that looked like on of my dead grandfather's lungs. My Albuquerque friend would have felt right at home, but I can safely say it freaked me out. So I went outside, the thing was - it had freaked him out too so there I am, face to face with the man who used to be my idol. A drunk, swollen, bitter and I can pretty safely say facelifted version of the man I'd imagined my first kiss with.

Maybe we were kindred spirits or maybe our kindred spirit was bourbon, either way I found myself slapping aside all of those husband and house thoughts as we hit the seedy hotel bar next door, followed by the seedy hotel.

I would have got away with it too, but I'd left something behind. I was always told that a good writer takes their notebook with them everywhere they went - an album worth of songs, beautiful songs, the pouring out of my soul from my perfect life. I guess I left it with the wrong guy. Six months later, as I was planning a June wedding, his new album broke new ground. Some Rick Rubin produced comeback to rival Johnny Cash, with a host of stolen songs- and just who was he kissing on the front cover?

So it's been two days and the cat won't stop. I tried putting her outside but she has these voodoo qualities these days, I keep expecting my head to shrink. All the time it pops up - "Please help me. I'm being held against my will. Find my ex wife - she'll know where I am." All from the man who ruined me for the sake of a few goddamn pop songs. Why should I help him? Why should I leave the house? Why should I do anything but sit here and rot?

The cat looks at me with pleading eyes, her kind know how to make you squirm, they must have been taught that shit at kitten school. "I don't even know who his frickin' ex wife is!" I plead with the moggy, as I sit down and google his name.

They have everything on the internet. Food, sex, everything but slee. One day people will never have to go outside again. I reassure myself of this as I print out a map and dust off my coat.

That goddamn cat. She really owes me one this time.