Dead Man Below Deck

Chapter 15. Loose Ends

This next part is difficult to write about, so I will try to keep it short. The good part or what at first seemed like the good part was that my new bike motor arrived that day. I had never intended to stop with a little electric bike motor. A 40cc gasoline motor was being offered on the web for $250 on sale, so I jumped at it. It was illegal, of course, but if you rode it on the sidewalk you didn’t break the laws about having licensed motorized vehicles on the street. Go figure.

The motor arrived, and I spent the day trying to put it on a new Schwinn I had picked up at Kmart. After several hours, it looked about right, but I could not get it to start. In frustration, I ran it over to a motorcycle shop where the manager treated me like an i***t. He agreed to work on it for a few hours, after which it still did not run. The purchase price for the motor and new bike plus the charge for the labor made my new motorbike a thousand-dollar waste of money. So much for doing things the cheap way.

While I was wasting time and energy on the motor bike, Elric the cat was dwindling away. He had begun to lose bowel and bladder control a bit at a time a few days before. The vet gave him some medicine and told Betty that she could not allow the cat to turn the condo into a toilet. By midday, it was clear what had to be done.

Betty could not do it, so I took Elric over to the vet’s office to be put to sleep. I stroked him while the vet injected him, then held his paw while he went to sleep. They gave me his collar to take home. That evening, Betty and I sat out on the deck and had a good cry. It was not a good day. Elric had been with Betty a long time.