You took us into your hipster confidence with a gleam in your eye and a shake of your dreads. All we needed was Internet, but for forty dollars, a one-time fee, you would hook up the cable. It was a special offer, because you could tell already that you liked us.

We contemplated misdemeanor theft and you begged permission to use our bathroom. Highly irregular, admittedly, but your sense of urgency to get us our Internet service kept you from stopping. Of course, we allowed you, our new friend, Zach the cable installer.

We agreed that cable would be too much of a distraction and the Internet was all we needed from you. Then we waited to break the news for much longer than we expected as you double flushed and came out of the bathroom without washing your hands.

We got off the London train in a quaint little market area with cobblestone streets and iron lampposts. Shop keepers were rolling up the garage style doors that kept their store fronts safe from what may lurk in the night, to reveal windows full of freshly baked breads and hanging clusters of cured meats. A florist was setting buckets of brightly colored daisies and tulips on the sidewalk under her shop window and a grocer rolled out carts heaped with fresh fruits and veggies.

We kept walking past the shops and followed the cobblestone road as it veered to the left. There was a tall hedge on our right and more shops to our left.

“I think it should be right past these bushes,” Charles said.

As soon as he finished his sentence we came upon a large courtyard with cobblestone trails weaving around green grassy patches spotted with budding trees. All of the trails lead to a small cathedral, it’s towering spire and intricate stonework was like something out of a fairytale. There was a small, gray haired man in glasses with darkly stained fingers closest to us. He was setting up an easel and laying out charcoal sketches of the cathedral on a blanket in front of him. There seemed to be a vendor with a wheeled cart to match every shop down the road. Men and women were pushing around loads of flowers, fruit, and even baguettes with a variety of sandwich makings on them. I saw a mime dressed in a black leotard with a wool skullcap and white face. He was moving at normal human pace, unstacking several wooden crates he had with him.

I looked at Charles. He had on jeans that were torn at the knee, a Blind Melon t-shirt under his grey zip-up hoodie and a baseball cap on backwards. Then I looked down at myself, bell-bottom jeans, pastel tie-dyed tank-top dress with a blue sweater and paisley scarf that hung down past my knees. Even though we looked exactly like we did an hour earlier I felt like a Cinderella-esque tornado of glitter and magic had overtaken both of us and transformed us into the people who stood there taking in this new and magical place.

There was a longhaired man with a guitar strumming near the cathedral, but neither of us could hear him from our distance. We picked a grassy area within a stones throw of the sketch artist. Charles laid his guitar case parallel with the sidewalk, took his guitar out of it and left it sitting there open. I unwrapped my Guild from its flannel shirts and touched my face to ensure that I was still myself.

“Do you really think anyone will give us money for this?” I asked.
Charles shrugged. “I don’t really care if they do or not, but it makes us look more legit.”
He sat down cross-legged and began to strum his guitar.
“So what do you know?” He said.
“Umm…well, I don’t really play with other people.”
“Yeah, so you’ve said. Just play something you like to play.”
“Why do I have to start?”
“Okay. You’re right. I’ll start. All Along the Watch Tower, you take the Hendricks’s solo. Go.”
“Fine. I’ll go.” I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath.

I started strumming Sweet Jane, the Cowboy Junkies version, not the Velvet Underground version. I was about half way through when Charles said, “Aren’t you going to sing?”

I stopped playing.
“No one said anything about singing.”

Charles gave me a look of exasperation. The old artist across the way chuckled.
“You better stop whining. You’re miles from anyone you know. You’ve come this far, so why don’t you just give in already and be the person you obviously want to be or you would be hanging with the Queen Mother right now instead of sitting here with me.”

I hated him for being right. He was very apparently in his element. My face burned with embarrassed excitement. I started strumming again and let a weak little tune come out of my mouth. My voice cracked and strained through the first two versus. When I noticed Charles wasn’t laughing and the artist was paying more attention to his canvas than me, I gained a little courage and sang out the last verse. As my fingers stumbled over the chords I inserted little swear words into the lyrics. When I finished Charles smiled.

“Again,”
“But I…”

Charles raised his eyebrow and I started the song over. My playing improved as I warmed up and Charles started adding harmonizing chords. I moved into Wish You Were Here and even stopped singing in the middle of the verses and strummed a little softer for Charles to riff a short solo. He glanced up at me when he was finished and I moved into the last verse. He started singing and our voices meshed well together. They weren’t stellar, but we could carry a tune and neither of us out sang the other.

We were almost at the end of the song when I noticed a flash out of the corner of my eye. It was a coin hitting Charles’ guitar case. I looked up and the courtyard was filled with people, tourists I imagined to be German with their tall backpacks and shorts with hiking boots, families with kids in strollers and groups of teenagers walked along the paths. A balloon vendor with enough colorful helium balloons to carry a small child away had popped up, along with a man pushing an ice cream cart, and a gypsy looking woman draped in scarves sat in front of a cardboard box with a stack of tarot cards in front of her.

Charles and I smiled at each other and began to play some more. We stayed in that spot for much of the day. His repertoire was more vast than mine, so I let him play many of the songs solo, singing if I knew the words. At around 3:00 I remembered that we hadn’t eaten anything all day and I instantly became weak with hunger.

Charles stretched and began to count our money. Twenty-one pounds, all in change.
“That’s fantastic,” I said. I put my guitar back in its case.
“Not bad.” Charles nodded and gave me a full-toothed smile, they were straight and white.

We started up the path to the shops. Charles stopped in front of our friend the sketch artist. He pointed at a charcoal drawing of the cathedral rising out of the tops of the trees in the courtyard and asked how much.

“Three pounds mate.”

Charles shoved his hand into his pocket, weighted with change and counted out four pounds. The artist slipped the drawing into a plastic baggie, handed it to Charles and nodded in thanks.

“So how about that little deli with the wrought iron tables and chairs for some sandwiches?” I asked as we moved past the hedgerow.
“Umm…here. Do you want this?” Charles held the drawing he just bought out to me. “To like, commemorate the occasion. Or whatever.”
“Are you sure you don’t want it? It’s pretty cool.”
“No. Yeah. I got it for you.”
“Oh wow. Thanks, Chuck. That’s really sweet.”

After my three-year-old orange tabby dragged himself into my lap and collapsed with a painful sigh, I wrapped him in a blanket to protect him from the freezing Chicago night and jumped in the first cab I could find.

Muffled cries came from inside the blanket. The cabbie eyed me through the rearview mirror.
“Is your baby crying?”

I hadn’t thought of it, but Tres was a rather large cat, about 17 pounds and swathed in a blanket, I’m sure it did look like I was carrying a baby.

“Oh, it’s not my baby. It’s my cat.”

The cab driver looked alarmed. “Oh! No animals in my cab without cage!” He started to brake and swerve towards the curb.
“Please, sir, don’t kick us out. He’s sick. He’ll die if you don’t get us to the emergency vet.”

The panic must have been apparent in my voice or he noticed the tears that were filling my eyes because he pulled back into traffic.
“Thank you.”
“What’s his illness?”
“I don’t know. He can’t, um…go to the bathroom and he’s breathing really heavily.”
“Good thing he can’t use bathroom. He won’t go in my cab,” he chuckled. I gave him an unappreciative smirk in the rearview mirror.

The cab pulled into a parking lot. There was no sign on the outside of the building but through the windows I could see the white walls and florescent lighting of a clinic. I paid the driver and walked towards the front door. There were a large bundle of blankets and tarps next to a torn up wheelie-suitcase about three feet from the entrance. One dirty shoe peeked out from under the fortress. I tried not to wake the bum as I pulled on the door handle. The door didn’t budge. I pulled again. Nothing. I tried to make eye contact with the woman standing behind the counter in the clinic, but she didn’t look up from her paper work.

I looked behind me, but my taxi had already left. On the corner, two men were leaning in the passenger side window of a car that had pulled up. The driver leaned over and handed one of them something. I quickly turned away and tugged on the door handle again. Then I noticed a glowing button. I pressed it. The woman from behind the counter looked up at me.

My typical winter garb was a seventies, brown wool-lined corduroy jacket, a grey wool snowcap and matching grey fingerless gloves. The woman behind the counter looked up and then, immediately back down at her paper work, apparently mistaking me for a bum.

The homeless guy stirred under his pile of blankets. I pounded on the door and began to plead with the woman, although I sure she couldn’t hear me. I felt the thugs on the corner looming closer like zombies.

I held up my baby in a blanket but the person at the front desk still glared at me as if I were trying to scam my way in to steal horse tranquilizers or something else with some street value. I pressed the button again, a quick triplicate of buzzes. The woman behind the desk was staring at me. There had been no noise from inside the blanket for a good 10 minutes, but as my frustration grew, so did my grip on my little bundle, producing a pathetic groan that reminded me of the reason I was standing, freezing, in the ghetto in the middle of the night in the first place.

Finally the door latch clicked and I rushed in the door to get my cat some help, only to be halted with a pile of paperwork.

“Please sign in here and fill these out,” the small woman behind the desk said to me pointing to an empty sign in sheet on the counter and handing me a clip board full of papers. She had a scar on left side of her face that stretched all the way from her chin to her ear.
“Can I fill this out while you are examining him?”
“No ma’am. Please fill out the symptoms page first.”
“Well, I can tell you that he’s been breathing really harsh and…”
“Just put it on the paper please,” she gestured with a stumpy little finger.

I unwrapped Tres and laid him on the plastic chair next to mine so I could fill out the paperwork.
“Do you have insurance for Tress?”
“It’s Tres, like and an ice cube tray.” I began to reach for my wallet and then realized that nowhere in my PPO rules and regulations had they mentioned I could add my pets as a dependant. I looked at the woman behind the counter in confusion.
“You don’t have pet insurance?”
“Umm…no.”

Tres decided he’d had enough of the bureaucracy and in one heave that made all of the fur on his body gather forward in rolls around his neck, he projectile vomited all over me and the paperwork. I looked from the green goo up to the grimacing Scar-face behind the desk with a pitiful plea for help. At that point a young woman, with a pierced nose and purple hair, came out of the back room with a clipboard.

“Tress Jones?” she asked cheerily and scanned the room.
I was the only person at the emergency vet at 10:00 on a Saturday night, and Tres the only patient. I looked around at the empty chairs in bewilderment. Tres’s obvious cry for help had sucked the last bit of energy from him and he lay limp with his two front paws hanging off the end of the chair, his chin resting in between them. The girl sized up our situation and seemed to grasp the gravity of it better than Scar-face.

“Oh my. Linda, please get another set of forms and some paper towels for mommy here.”
She scooped up Tres and started to speak in a baby voice, “I will take baby Tress, here and see what’s the matter with him.”
“It’s Tres. Like a tray of food. It’s French.”
She stopped and stared at me for a moment with an it’s-just-a-cat face. “Oh. Okay, mommy.” Then she carried Tres through swinging double doors.

Hours later I awoke to the perky young neo-punk vet nudging me on the shoulder.
“Mommy? Mommy, you dozed off.”
I opened my eyes and expected to see the vet holding my Tres, but she held nothing, but the clipboard.
“Where’s Tres?”
“Well it’s good that you brought baby in tonight,” the tone of her voice slowly changed from baby talk to doctor talk. “And that’s because his bladder was forming crystals that were clogging his urethra, which kept the urine from being expelled. This was causing all of the toxins to back up into his blood stream and he was very close to being poisoned to death.”
“Oh my god. Well, where is he? Did you fix him?”
“This is a severe case and I’d like to perform a common procedure on him, called a perineal urethrostomy.”

She pulled out what appeared to be the textbook for sixth grade veterinarians. It was filled with very large text and colorful pictures. She opened it to a pre-marked page.
“Basically, what we do is amputate the penis.”
She made a slicing motion with her fingernail across the illustration of the halved cat’s penis.
“Then, we enlarge the first portion of the internal urethra to make a female size opening. That way there is a bigger hole for the crystal’s to be excreted through.”

I stared at her for a few moments.
“So, you’re giving my cat a sex change? I’m going to have a transsexual cat?”
She smiled, it seemed in relief that I understood her, “Essentially, yes.”
“Well, I mean, will it effect him, you know, mentally or socially?” I nervously giggled at my own question.
“No, no, Ms. Jones. I assure you that Tres won’t know the difference.”