Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Or Perhaps a Tin of Fancy Feast Gourmet Cat Food?

Once upon a time, in a faraway land known as Central New Jersey, there lived a handsome, young, aspiring writer with a head full of ideas and a pocket full of dreams covered with little bits of lint because they were kept in a pocket, after all. The young writer toiled away as a part-time waiter/restaurant manager, struggling to eke out a decent existence on nothing more than charm, chutzpah, and cash tips so that he could go on indulging his passion and his artistry, and go on writing his as-yet-unfinished first novel.

Then one day, along came a beguiling sorceress, fair of face, sweet of voice, and not short on cleavage either. In short order, the sorceress had used her wiles to convince the young writer to cohabitate with her in her magical lair. First, he gave up his weekends to paint the walls of the lair the color of cinnamon, then he gave up his free time to pick up extra shifts at work so that they could afford to decorate the lair with expensive and flimsy furniture from Pier 1 and Ikea, then he spent all his writing time cooking and cleaning for her because the sorceress was, in addition to beguiling, kind of a slob.

Unbeknownst to our hero, the sorceress had a little black cat to which our young and overburdened writer was deathly allergic. The sorceress kept the black cat hidden and secret until one day when, with the help of her suburbanite parents, the cat was imported to the second-floor lair with its cinnamon-painted walls and very poor heat retention. The gallant writer accepted the cat because he was, at heart, a generous person and a really nice guy.

The writer and the cat were bitter enemies at first, constantly hissing and spitting, attempting to claw the skin off of each other's hands and shoulders, and deliberately peeing in each other's litter boxes. But eventually, the dashing writer grew to care for the cat, despite the sneezing and the perpetual sinus infection that went along with it, and despite the fact that the cat was slightly neurotic about being handled for more than a few seconds at a time. They grew to develop a mutual trust and even affection, the kind characterized by curling up on laps during cold weather and gentle purring while the tops of noses get scratched. It was love, just like in the storybooks, if the storybooks had been written about man-cat love that definitely never involved sex, I swear to God.

But time proved treacherous to our poor protagonist, and within the space of just two years, the sorceress had grown weary of her cinnamon-walled enclosure. She wanted to branch out, explore the world, and bestow her wealth of cleavage on other unsuspecting and unfortunate souls in the Route 1-Route 130 corridor. She abandoned the young writer, the enchanting black cat, and the second-floor lair at $1195 a month to move on to a life where she would never again know love, and her breasts would be free to sag all the way to her belly button.

The still-handsome-but-not-so-young-anymore writer spent the better part of the last year reassembling his life and his self-esteem, and pulling his now severely lint-covered dreams out of the pockets of the pants he used to wear back when he was a carefree scamp with a 30-inch waist. But the real loser has been the cat, who now finds herself removed from her home and unwelcome almost everywhere she goes. The sorceress and her suburbanite parents refuse to return phone calls, and our poor writer is now faced with the impossible task of giving up an animal that was more than an animal for a while; she was a friend.

Would you like to give that friend a home?