I do not play the part of the bad guy very well. You know how some people are able to stick to their guns regardless of whether it ruffles people’s feathers? Yeah, that’s not me. As a result, I have forever been highly susceptible to peer pressure. It explains why I once threw my own sofa over a balcony. It explains why I once ate about a dozen live guppies. It explains why I got caught stealing a Spider-Man action figure at the mall when I was 8.

I’m a little better about peer pressure than I once was. I haven’t eaten any live creatures in well over 18 years, w00t! But it still can be a challenge for me to say no. Especially when the people who want me to say yes are being very persistent. And are girls. Which explains why I’m sweating so much lately.

You see, my sister-in-law, whom I’ll call Michelle since that’s her name, took in a stray cat a few months ago and subsequently learned that the cat was pregnant. (Seems like every time I hear about someone taking in a stray cat, the cat is knocked up. Cats, apparently, are creatures of highly questionable morals. I think this is why I’ve grown to like them. I bet Governor South American Booty Call will get a cat when he moves into his sweet bachelor pad in a few months.) The cat has since had her kittens – two males and a female – and now Michelle is trying to find homes for them.

You can see where this is all going, right? Sure you can. I knew it was coming the moment I heard the words “the stray is pregnant.” I was hoping that somehow things would work out in my favor. In hindsight, it was a laughable to think this. It would be like falling out of an airplane with no parachute and hoping that I land on a giant cloud of soft, delicious marshmallow crème.

For those of you who don’t read this column regularly, let me fill you in on the cat situation in my house. We have two of them. Dexter is the black, hairy alpha male. I wouldn’t say he’s fat, but he’s a bruiser. I call him fat and stupid mostly because he doesn’t understand English. Charlie is mostly white and has the temperament of a young Don Knotts locked in a closet with a hundred brain-thirsty zombies. He is terrified of everything. He’s lived with us since he was a kitten and after two years he still cowers when any of us enter the room. If there were ever a poster child for Kitty Zoloft, he’s it.

We used to have a big, old, fat cat named Frisco, but a couple months ago he stormed the gates of Kitty Heaven, where he presumably spends his days feasting on roast turkey and lying in a warm, sunny spot in Saint Peter’s breakfast nook. While I was very sad to see Frisco go to the Great Kitty Beyond, I must admit that it’s been nice having just two cats in the house.

For one thing, Charlie seems to have calmed significantly in Frisco’s absence. We’d had problems with Charlie using the entire house as his litter box, but it hasn’t happened a single time since Frisco’s departure. My guess is that Charlie didn’t like sharing litter boxes with Frisco. I can’t blame him, really. In his old age, Frisco became, shall we say, very intestinally unkind. Charlie, delicate flower that he is, apparently found this to be not at all to his liking. So, when things got a little too sketchy for him, Charlie would simply make do with, say, Colette’s coat. Or my stepdaughter’s overnight bag. You get the picture.

So it’s been nice these past couple months. As the unofficial cleaner of the litter boxes, and the official cleaner of anything gross that does not land in a litter box, I have less work to do. This makes me happy, as I have all the flippin’ work I need. Plus, there’s a balance with two cats. They each have someone to hang with when we’re gone, but there’s not so many cats running around that I feel like The Cat Guy.

Well, into my delicately balanced world came this stray cat with her three adorable, tiny, fuzzy, screaming nightmares. And of course it wasn’t long before Colette and our three girls saw the kittens. And of course they all immediately, immediately, wanted to bring one home.

I did not. No sir. Not only would I go right back to being The Cat Guy, but I worried that a new cat would freak Charlie out all over again. I most certainly did not want a return to the almost-daily messes that only I had the stomach to clean up. I said no.

“But look at how cute they are,” one of the girls would say. The cuteness is a disguise, I said in return. They are filthy, smelly digestive tracts disguised as adorable mammals. Be not deceived. The answer is no.

“But if we took the girl kitty, Charlie would be OK,” they would say. “He wouldn’t be threatened by a girl.” Right, I said in return. Boys are never freaked out by girls. In other news, Newt Gingrich made out with Marilyn Manson at a death-metal concert last night. The answer is still no.

“But if we got the girl, we could name it Rose, and we’d have cats named Rose and Charlie, just like my grandparents,” Colette would say. See, that’s dirty pool. Colette has missed her grandparents terribly since they passed, and she has longed to have a pair of cats named after them, as sort of a feline tribute. A low blow, but the answer is still no.

Unfortunately, none of the girls seems to think that my “no” is permanent. Colette keeps trying to get me to go look at the cats, in the hope that I will somehow be overcome by their cuteness. She also pointed out that her sister offered to take the new cat back if Charlie started freaking out. Yeah, and everyone would just love it if we took in a cat for a week, then I ordered it back out. I mean, come on. There’s being the bad guy, and then there’s channeling Stalin.

So far I’m standing firm. I’m being the bad guy. I don’t see myself changing my mind. And yet, I can’t shake this feeling that I’m standing under a piano suspended in the air by a large rope, and I’m wearing a Wile E. Coyote costume, and the Road Runner, harbinger of destruction and carnage that he is, lurks close by. And he’s carrying scissors.

Bob Rybarczyk (brybarczyk@sbcglobal.net) writes stuff. He is the harbinger of pizza and nachos. Look for his first novel, “Acoustic Kitty,” in area Borders stores and online at Amazon.com.