by Jenny Lawson
Best. Fifteenth anniversary. Ever.
Hairless Rats: Free for Kids Only
This morning Victor and I followed our usual routine. We got up, drove Hailey to kindergarten, and stopped into the local gas station for coffee and local gossip. On the way out we stopped in front of the public bulletin board that serves as our small town’s newspaper. It’s always filled with invitations to neighborhood barbecues, and ads selling broken tractor parts or requesting clean dirt (which seems like an oxymoron), but today we found that the same person who had fascinated us with bizarre ads last year was back. They were the kind of ads that made you question exactly what was going on in his home, and also your own sanity. They were ads like:
“FLYING SQUIRRELS: CHEAP. FREE DELIVERY.”
A month later that ad was replaced by another:
“REGULAR SQUIRRELS—FREE TO GOOD HOME. NOT FOR EATING.”
I tipped my hat to his ethical disclaimer, but it was puzzling. Had the flying squirrels been “regular” the whole time? Had it taken the seller a month to realize they didn’t have wings? How many squirrels had been dropped from the roof before he finally gave up and realized they weren’t faking it? Were these regular squirrels free only because they all now suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and vertigo?
I imagined a horde of squirrels, all hunkered close to the ground as they stared in horror at their former friends who easily jumped from branch to branch. “YOU’RE GOING TO GET KILLED!” the squirrel would yell, and his former buddies would shake their tiny heads in pity, wondering what horrors their friend had seen to change him so. In my head, it was as if the squirrels were damaged Vietnam vets, shell-shocked and unable to cope with real life after the terrible things they’d had to witness.
Victor said I was being ridiculous, but I pointed out that it was also pretty ridiculous to give away squirrels that you could just set free, and he admitted he had no real answer to that.
The ads kept coming over the summer, and then very abruptly stopped. Most likely (Victor and I speculated) it was because the (probably very well-intentioned) man was eventually murdered by his own squirrels. But this morning, almost a year from the time since we’d seen his first ad, a new sign was up with the same distinctive handwriting. He was alive and the world was a better place for it:
I censored the phone number to protect them from prank calls. And because I want to keep all the sugar gliders for myself. Sugar gliders who, I half suspect, might actually just be mice with flabby underarms, and who have survived being thrown off the roof.
VICTOR: Wow. I don’t think I want to know of the situation you have to be in where you need a rat delivered so desperately that it can’t wait until morning.
ME: Ooh, I would.
VICTOR: Well, of course you would.
ME: Who wouldn’t want to know about an emergency rat situation where the emergency is that you NEED a rat. It’s like the exact opposite of every regular emergency rat situation ever. It sounds fascinating. We should call this guy just to see what his deal is. I bet he has great stories. I mean, who gives hairless rats to children? He’s like the bizarro-world Candy Man.
VICTOR: So call him. Pretend to apply for a free squirrel and see what his story is.
ME: I wonder what the application process is on that? It would be really depressing to get turned down for free squirrels.
VICTOR: True. “I’m sorry. We’re going to have to decline you. Your home isn’t even fit for squirrels.”
ME: Our home is pretty messy, but I think it’s at least fit for squirrels. I’d be like, “But our squirrels seem quite happy.” I’d totally appeal that ruling.
VICTOR: “I’m sorry, but your references didn’t check out.”
ME: “But our references were squirrels.”
VICTOR: “Right. And they’re not happy. Plus, there have been some reports of hate speech.”
ME: “What?”
VICTOR: “Last week you dropped a fork and yelled, ‘Rats.’ Then in January you complained that your computer wasn’t working properly and was acting ‘all squirrelly.’ We have people on the inside, you know.”
ME: “Hang on. Are those people the squirrels who live in my attic? Because they’re all high and they don’t know what they’re saying. Those squirrels are junkies and they are not to be trusted.”
VICTOR: “Ma’am, that was slander. You’ll be contacted by the squirrel civil liberties union for a statement. Plus, you need to stop referring to squirrels as ‘those people.’ Please get your shit together.”
ME: Wow. We sound . . . totally unfit to have squirrels. Now I don’t even want to call the guy, because I’m all nervous about being judged. I don’t even think I could pass the interview.
VICTOR: We probably shouldn’t apply for more squirrels if we can’t even manage to keep ours off the horse.
ME: ?
VICTOR: It’s another word for heroin.
ME: Yeah, I know what “off the horse” means. I just can’t remember how we got to the point where I’m defending myself against the imaginary accusations of a man who gives hairless rats to neighborhood children, and who apparently trusts the nonexistent squirrel junkies in the attic.
VICTOR: True. I don’t remember ever having these conversations before we moved to the country.
ME: Me either. Also, I just realized that I just went to a gas station in my pajamas to buy coffee. I just became a giant warning sign to others. I can’t decide whether this is a problem, or I’m just more comfortable here than I was in the city. Can it be both?
VICTOR: I dunno. What the hell happened to us?
ME: [after a few seconds of silence] Growth?
VICTOR: [nodding slowly] Growth.
And Then I Snuck a Dead Cuban Alligator on an Airplane
November 2009:
He was my first. He was big, with a wide neck like an NFL player and a smile that said, “There you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” Victor stared at me as if I had lost my mind, and pointed out that he was losing his hair and was missing several important teeth, but it didn’t matter. I was in love.
“Pay whatever it takes,” I said to Victor. “James Garfield WILL BE MINE.”
It was frightening, both for Victor and myself, this sudden lust I had to possess the dusty, taxidermied wild boar’s head hanging from the cracked wall of the estate sale we’d wandered into.
Victor refused to pay money for something he saw as hideous, but there was something in that toothy smile that screamed, “I AM SO DAMN HAPPY TO SEE YOU,” and when we left without him I was positively bereft. I spent the next week looking at the blank spot on the wall where James Garfield would have smiled at me. Whenever Victor would try to cheer me up with a joke or with videos of people hurting themselves, I would force myself to smile and then sigh, saying, “James Garfield would have loved that.”
Eventually the melancholy got too strong and Victor angrily gave up and drove me back to the estate sale, where he was totally unsurprised to find that James Garfield had not been sold. He’d made me stay in the car, because he said my look of intense longing would affect his ability to negotiate, and offered the guy in charge of the sale twenty-five dollars for him. The man sneered and said that he could just rip out the tusks and sell them on eBay for that, and Victor came back to the car to tell me how negotiations had broken down. “THEY’RE GOING TO DISMEMBER JAMES GARFIELD?” I screamed. “STOP THEM. PAY ANYTHING. HE IS A MEMBER OF OUR FAMILY.” Victor stared at me in bafflement. “I’d do it for you,” I explained. “I’d pay the terrorists anything to get you back.” Victor sighed and laid his head on the steering wheel.
A tense twenty minutes later he came back to the car, lugging the beautiful head of James Garfield like some kinda goddamn American hero. I cried a little, and Hailey clapped her tiny hands in delight. “You will be my best friend,” she said to him as she petted his snout.
Victor looked at both of us like we were mad, and then stared straight ahead as he made me sw
ear this would not be the start of some sort of wild-boar-head collection. “You’re being ridiculous,” I said. “James Garfield is one of a kind.”
When my parents came to visit a few weeks later, my mother shook her head in bewilderment. I’d expected my father to feel at least slightly vindicated that his love of taxidermy hadn’t skipped a generation after all, but he seemed just as baffled as Victor. He peered quizzically at the mangy fur shedding from James Garfield, and told me he could make me a much nicer boar head, if that was what I was into. “No,” I said. “This is it.” I was not a fan of taxidermy and never would be. Having one dead animal in the house is eclectic and artistic. More than one reeks of serial killer. There really is a fine line there.
APRIL 2010:
Half of a squirrel arrived in the mail today. It was the front part, almost down to the belly button, and it was mounted on a tiny wooden plaque.
It was odd. Both because I was not expecting any squirrel parts, and because the squirrel was dressed in full cowboy regalia. He was holding a tiny pistol out, threateningly trained at the viewer (presumably to defend the miniature marked cards in his other tiny hand), and his eyes followed you from room to room, like one of those 3-D pictures of Jesus from the seventies.
“Hey, Victor?” I yelled from the living room. “Did you buy me a half of a squirrel?”
Victor walked out of his office and stopped short as he stared at the tiny bandito pointing a gun at him. “What have you done?” he asked.
“Ruined Christmas?” I guessed. I found it hard to feel guilty about ruining his surprise, though, since the box was addressed to me, but then I saw the note on the package and realized it was actually from a girl who read my blog, and who had agreed that Victor was totally in the wrong last month when he’d refused to buy me the taxidermied squirrel paddling a canoe1 that I’d found in an antique shop.
“Oh, never mind,” I said. “Apparently this half squirrel is a present from someone who understands fine art.”
“You can’t possibly be serious.”
“It would be rude NOT to hang it up,” I explained to Victor. “I will name him Grover Cleveland.” Victor stared at me, wondering how his life choices had taken him here.
“Didn’t you once tell me that more than one dead animal in the house borders on serial-killer territory?” he asked.
“Yes, but this one is wearing a hat,” I explained drily. He couldn’t argue with that kind of logic. No one could.
JANUARY 2011:
“I am a moderately successful writer, and if I want to buy an ethically taxidermied mouse I should not have to justify it to anyone.”
This was what I was screaming as Victor glared at me, dripping rain water all over our foyer. In truth, we weren’t really arguing about whether I was allowed to spend money. We were arguing about the fact that the taxidermied mouse I’d bought had been lost. The delivery website said it was left on the porch, but it was nowhere to be seen. I suspected burglars, but even imagining the small compensation of their mystified faces as they opened the box containing a dead mouse wasn’t enough to make me feel less upset. Then I’d noticed that the tracking page had transposed my street number, and so I sent Victor out into the dark and rainy night to go find the neighbor who was probably very confused about who had mailed him a dead mouse. Victor had been a bit flabbergasted at my request, but after yelling for a bit about . . . I don’t know; I wasn’t really paying attention. Budgets, maybe? . . . he finally threw on a coat and went out in search of the mouse. He returned twenty minutes later and told me that the address didn’t even exist, and that he’d asked the people at the houses near where the address would have been and none of them had seen any packages. He was wet and frustrated, and I assumed that accounted for how irrational he was being as I pushed him back out the door to check with all the neighbors on the block.
“You didn’t even tell me you’d bought a taxidermied mouse,” Victor yelled, and I said, “Because you were asleep when I found it online, and it was so cheap I knew it would be gone if I didn’t buy it immediately. I didn’t want to tiptoe into our bedroom at three a.m. to whisper, ‘Hey, honey? I got a great deal on a stuffed mouse that died of natural causes. Can I have your credit card number?’ because that would be CRAZY. And that’s why I used my credit card. Because I respect your sleep patterns. But then I forgot to tell you about it, because I bought it at three a.m., when I was drunk and vulnerable. Just like you with all those choppers you keep buying on infomercials. Except that this is better, because I’ll actually use a taxidermied mouse. That is, I would have . . . until—crap—until he went missing,” I ended in a whisper.
“Are you . . . are you crying?” Victor asked, stunned.
I wiped at my eyes. “A little. I just hate to think of him out there in the rain. All alone.” My voice trembled, and Victor closed his eyes. And rubbed his temples. And sighed deeply before staring at me and walking back out into the rain. Forty minutes later he walked in with a tiny wet box and a look that said, “I will disable your computer when I go to bed from now on.” But I rushed up and gave him a dozen kisses, which he gruffly accepted as he dried off with the towel I handed him.
“It was at the abandoned house at the end of the block,” he said. “Apparently someone just dumped everything that didn’t have a proper address there. There must’ve been twenty-five packages lying on that porch.”
But I wasn’t paying attention, as I was too busy pulling Hamlet von Schnitzel from his watertight baggie.
“What. The fuck. Is that?” Victor asked.
It was pretty obvious what it was. It was a mouse dressed as Hamlet. His Shakespearean ruff collar held up his wee velvet cape, and he seemed to be addressing the bleached mouse skull held nobly in his tiny paw. I held it up to Victor, squeaking, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well.”
Victor looked at me worriedly. “You have a problem.”
“I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM.”
“That’s exactly what people with problems say. Denial is the first sign of having a problem.”
“It’s also the first sign of not having a problem,” I countered.
“I’m pretty sure defensiveness is the second sign.”
I placed Hamlet von Schnitzel in a glass bell jar to protect his little ears from Victor’s hurtful accusations. But I had to admit that I didn’t completely understand my recent obsession with odd taxidermy either. It worried me. I still didn’t understand my father’s fascination with dead animals, and I refused to buy any that weren’t terribly old or didn’t die of natural causes. I still shooed spiders and geckos out of the house with a magazine and a helpful suggestion of “Perhaps you’d like some fresh air.” I considered myself an animal lover, donated to shelters, and never wore real fur, but it clashed with the other side of my personality, which was continually browsing through shops, always on the lookout for beavers in prairie dresses, or a diorama of the Last Supper made entirely with otters. Victor was right: I needed to stop. I told myself that I was finished and I vowed that I would not end up like my father, surrounded by the soulless, unblinking eyes of dead things. And with a little willpower I vowed to conquer my curious and terrible obsession.
APRIL 2011:
I just bought a fifty-year-old Cuban alligator dressed as a pirate.
This is so not my fault. Victor broke his arm by falling down some stairs in Mexico, so I went with him on a business trip to North Carolina so I could help him. The trip was uneventful, until we stopped at a little shop on the way to the airport. While Victor went to use the restroom, I stumbled upon the small, badly aged baby alligator, which was fully dressed and standing on his hind legs. He was wearing a moth-eaten felt outfit, a beret and a belt. He was missing one hand, and he was nineteen dollars. His tiny belt hung sadly, and I appreciated the irony of an alligator wearing a belt that was not made of alligator. His mouth was open in a wide grin, as if he’d been waiting for me for a very long time. I remembered my vow to not buy any more taxidermied animal
s and feverishly searched for loopholes while Victor looked through the aisles for me. I contemplated stapling a strap to the alligator’s shoulders, putting my lipstick in his mouth, and calling him an alligator purse, but it was too late. He had me at the beret.
I could hear Victor shuffling around on the other side of the aisle, and I sheepishly poked the tiny alligator over the top. “Hello, mon ami! I am Jean Louise,” I said in a daring French accent. “I have never been on zee plane before and would love an adventure!”
“Oh,” said the confused elderly woman on the other side of the aisle. “Well, good luck to you?”
Victor tapped me on the shoulder and I screamed in surprise, and he looked at me and Jean Louise with disgust. “Don’t judge us,” I said meekly, as I hugged the alligator protectively. “We’re all we have.”
Victor shook his head but said nothing as he silently walked up to the cash register to pay. Jean Louise leaned forward and whispered, “Enabler,” but Victor still held out his credit card to the baffled cashier. Luckily Victor doesn’t speak French.
“I’ll need to make him a tiny hook for his missing hand,” I said as we walked out. He was far too brittle to go in my suitcase, so I put him in my purse, and Victor insisted there was no way they were going to let me get on the plane with a dead alligator. I disagreed, pointing out that he was quite literally “unarmed,” but his tiny gleaming teeth said otherwise, as I remembered the fingernail clippers we’d been forced to throw out at security once before. I turned to the experts (everyone following me on Twitter).
To make a long story short, if you ask people on Twitter whether it’s legal to carry a smallish sort of taxidermied alligator onto a plane with you, most of them will say, “Um, no. You can’t even bring breast milk on a plane.” Then you’ll point out that the alligator is at least fifty years old, is wearing clothes, and is missing a hand, and some of them will change their mind, but most will still say he’ll be considered a weapon. Then you’ll write, “I can’t imagine anyone seriously thinking I’d try to take over a plane using only a tiny clothed alligator as a weapon,” and everyone on Twitter will be like, “Really? Have you met you? Because that totally sounds like something you’d do.” And they had a point.
