If you’ve spent any time with my partner and me inside of our quaint, condemnable home, you have likely heard him command me to kiss Elvis.  Mostly, he makes these demands with a cute voice as if cooing a baby.  “Kees Ebis,” or “Gib Ebis keeses.”  As he expects, I just respond by sneering, rolling my eyes, and walking away.  He knows I will not kiss Elvis.  He only does this to antagonize me after a ghastly incident I experienced last year in our bedroom.

Elvis has a nightly routine.  After I climb into my side of the bed, he immediately follows, leaping onto the bed and curling into a ball upon the corner of the mattress beside my head.  This becomes problematic since I face the outside of the bed while sleeping.  I’ve tried discouraging his bedding preference by positioning myself as close to the edge of the bed as possible, but my partner fusses and threatens me if I don’t give the damn cat room to lie down.  I begrudgingly yield to his demands (mumbling under my breath how much I hate the cat) and thus, with Elvis balled up mere inches from my breathing holes, I spend another night inhaling loose cat hair.

After climbing into bed on the night of “the incident,” Elvis is absent for his nightly ritual.  For a moment, the thought of having my side of the bed to myself brings me with joy; however, once I was comfortably resting on my side, the tardy cat trampled my happiness, seemingly flustered to have missed his bedtime appointment.  I groan as I make room, but Elvis seemed uninterested in my complaints as he marched in small circles at the usual corner with his bushy tail standing straight in the air.  As I observed this routine with impatience, Elvis suddenly lost his footing and stumbled ass-first onto my mouth.

Let’s be real here.  The anus is the most disgusting part of the body.  Just beyond its puckered gate runs a lengthy track of tubing that incubates a cornucopia of plague batter such as dangerous bacteria, protozoa, and fungi.  Also, it smells.  Really bad.  My reaction upon learning that gay men put their mouths on those things for pleasure was akin to that time my 6-month-old niece vomit-punching me in the mouth after burping up her apple juice: there was a lot of spitting, dry-heaving, hysterical crying, and commotion (not to mentioned that I lost my appetite for apples and apple-flavored anything for 10 years – but that’s another story).

After a familiar frenzy of spitting, dry-heaving, hysterical crying, and commotion, I charged into the bathroom where I scrubbed my lips and mouth with a mixture of toothpaste, peroxide, and bathroom scrubbing cleanser. The bad taste has left my mouth, but my partner still doesn’t let me forget “the incident” by taunting me with a “Gib Ebis Keeses” every once in a while.  I may roll my eyes and walk away, but after I turn away, I try to stifle a smile as I wonder what Elvis looked like in that one brief moment when he thought I was blowing a raspberry in his asshole.