Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

by David Sedaris

  What struck me with him, and with many of the conservatives I’d heard since the election, was his overblown, almost egocentric take on political outrage, his certainty that no one else had quite experienced it before. What, then, had I felt during the Bush-Cheney years? Was that somehow secondary? “Don’t tell me I don’t know how to hate,” I wanted to say. Then I stopped and asked myself, Do you really want that to be your message? Think you can out-hate me, asshole? I was fucking hating people before you were even born!

  We’re forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it’s the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast-food restaurants. But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport’s just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?

  Would Adolf Hitler please meet his party at Baggage Claim Four? Repeat. Adolf Hitler can meet his party at Baggage Claim Four.

  It’s a depressing thought, and one that proved hard to shake. It was with me when I boarded my flight to Portland and was still on my mind several hours later, when we were told to put our tray tables away and prepare for landing. Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, “Your trash. You’re trash. Your family’s trash.”

  I Break for Traditional Marriage

  When a referendum was passed making it legal for gay men and lesbians to marry each other in nearby New York State, the first thing my wife and I thought was What now?

  We’d been Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Denny for going on thirty-nine years, and suddenly, on the whim of some high-and-mighty fat cats, it was all meaningless: our wedding, our anniversaries, even our love. “Who are we?” Brenda cried.

  And I looked at her thinking, What do you mean, “we”?

  Then I walked into the kitchen and yelled for my daughter, Bonita, who was watching TV in the basement rec room. You’d think that at thirty-seven she’d be married with a home and a family of her own, but when she was a teenager she fell in with a custodian at her high school. Next came the news that she was pregnant. The fetus got lodged in her tubes somehow, and to make a long story short they had to yank everything out, leaving her infertile, which is what she deserved, if you ask her mother and me—a custodian, for God’s sake! Oh, she married him all right, we saw to that, but two years later their relationship ended in divorce. Her next marriage ended the same way, as did the one after that. So now here she is, practically middle-aged and living with her parents.

  “Bonita,” I yelled, “get up here.”

  She’s lazy as sin, my daughter, and in the time it took her to get off the sofa and climb the seven steps to the kitchen, I was more than ready for her.

  “Damn it, Daddy, I was just in the middle of—” and before she could finish I shot her through the head. The high jinks in New York made a sham of my marriage, so it logically made the fruits of that marriage meaningless as well. That was one good thing that came of it.

  The noise of the gun brought Brenda down from the bedroom. “What in God’s name have you done to our daughter?” she asked. And I shot her in the head as well, just like I’d been wanting to every day for the past thirty-nine years.

  This might sound inexcusable, but if homosexuality is no longer a sin, then who’s to say that murder is? If it feels good, do it—that’s what the state legislators seem to be saying. Who cares what all the decent people think?

  After shooting my wife and daughter, I grabbed an ice pick and headed out to the garage. A few years back my mother-in-law—Nancy Anne, she likes me to call her—fell out of a tree. She’d been climbing up after her iguana when a branch snapped off, and the next thing she knew she was laid up in the hospital with a dozen pins in her hip. Brenda insisted she come live with us, but what with the stairs, the house was too much of a hassle. So we moved the cars out onto the lawn and turned the garage into an apartment. She’s got a kitchenette, a shower stall, the whole nine yards. You’d think it would make her happy, living there for free the way she does, but all I ever hear is that it’s not insulated and hasn’t got any windows. “You hung my doggone pictures on the retractable door, and every time someone opens it they fall off,” she says.

  I say, “Secure them with tape, why don’t you?”

  And she says, “I’m not spending my hard-earned money on tape.” As if she ever worked a day in her life. She lives off alimony.

  “Oh, Nancy Anne,” I called, and I pointed the remote in the direction of her retractable door. She was in her nightgown but had tights on underneath it—in this heat! Her glasses were on top of the TV set, and she reached for them, saying, “Randolph? Randolph, is that you?”

  Boy, it felt good to reclaim that garage. After dragging Nancy Anne’s bed into the backyard, I returned for her sofa, then her potty-chair. I got her clothes, her cushions, all of her wooden bracelets and hairpieces, and built a raging bonfire. Then I threw her body into the flames and returned my cars to their rightful place. Or what I thought of as their rightful place. For all I knew, in the time it took to kill my mother-in-law with an ice pick and throw her onto a bonfire, some activist judge or group of state assemblymen had decided that cars don’t belong in garages anymore, that they should live in houses and eat chicken dinners, just like people do. Up was down and down was up, as far as the world was concerned, so why not make like the homosexuals and follow my dreams?

  Back in the house, I made a list. Everything I’d always wanted to do but didn’t because society frowned on it:

  1. Shoot my wife.

  That I could cross off, along with:

  2. Solve the Bonita problem, and

  3. Stab Nancy Anne through the eye with an ice pick.

  Next I needed to:

  4. Grow a mustache like Yosemite Sam’s.

  5. Make a piñata but use precious documents instead of torn newspaper.

  6. Eat at the Old Spaghetti Factory and walk out without paying.

  There are other things I’d like to do, but this, I figured, was more than enough to start with. Seeing as the Old Spaghetti Factory wouldn’t be open until lunchtime and there was nothing I could do to rush the mustache, I decided to start by going to the bank and withdrawing some precious documents. The marriage license in my safe-deposit box was no longer worth the paper it was printed on, but that still left my birth certificate, my life insurance policy, and my social security card.

  While driving to First Federal, I listened to the radio, an all-talk program I’m partial to where the callers were just as riled up as I was.

  When I tuned in, Sherry was on the line. “If the gays can stand in a church of God and exchange vows, who’s to say my husband can’t divorce me and marry a five-year-old?” she said. “Or a newborn baby, heaven forbid! I’m not saying he’s into that, but I guess if he was, there’d be nothing stopping him now!”

  The next caller identified himself as Steverino. “I remember as a boy we had this joke,” he said. “Your buddy might say, ‘I love this pepperoni pizza,’ and you’d say, ‘Why don’t you marry it, then?’

  “At the time it was just a saying, but I guess now you really could tie the knot with a pizza, couldn’t you? I mean, if the guy who cuts my mother’s hair is free to wed his little gay boyfriend, why can’t I marry a slab of flattened-out dough with cheese and dried sausage on it?”

  The host of the show is a guy named Jimbo Barnes, and on pretty much everything we see eye-to-eye. “There’s no reason I can think of why you couldn’t marry a pizza,” he said. “Hell, you could probably even marry a mini-pizza, one of those ones made from an English muffin, if you felt like it.”

  Steverino said that he didn’t really like English muffins, and Jimbo said that was just an example. “Bite-size pizza or sixteen-incher, whatever floats your boat is what the activist state legislatures are saying.”

  This was something I’d never thought of—marrying an obje
ct: my refrigerator, say, or maybe the riding mower I sometimes borrowed from my neighbor Pete Spaker. It’s a John Deere X304—top-of-the-line, with automatic transmission, cruise control, and four-wheel steering. Maybe I could just borrow it again, and when he asked me to return it, I’d tell him we’d eloped, that the mower was my new wife and until such time as we divorced, it was living with me!

  Of course, by then they’d have probably closed the loopholes. Taking away anything that might benefit traditional heterosexuals, especially white ones and especially especially white males. This is something Jimbo Barnes addresses quite often—“an endangered species,” he calls us. No matter that we made this country what it is today. Thinking about this got me so mad that I missed my turnoff for the bank. This meant taking a side street, where I fell in behind a school bus, of all things.

  I know you’re not supposed to pass them, but normal classes were out for the summer, so the only students on board were ones who had failed and had to go to summer school—dummies, basically, like my daughter, Bonita, had been. The bus stopped on the corner, and just as I was pulling around it, this kid—most likely a gay one—threw himself in front of my car. Someone got my license plate number as I was taking off, and the next thing I know, I’m in jail with one charge of second-degree manslaughter and three charges of first-degree murder! Plus the hit-and-run bit. And all because some high-and-mighty legislators in New York State thought they knew better than the rest of us! Of course, if I was gay they’d probably let me off, so I tried kissing my cell mate, an illegal immigrant named Diego Rodríguez, if you can believe it.

  And I’m here to tell you that, as long as you keep your eyes shut, it’s really not that bad.

  Understanding

  Understanding Owls

  Does there come a day in every man’s life when he looks around and says to himself, I’ve got to weed out some of these owls? I can’t be alone in this, can I? And, of course, you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Therefore you keep the crocheted owl given to you by your second-youngest sister and accidentally on purpose drop the mug that reads “Owl Love You Always” and was sent by someone who clearly never knew you to begin with. I mean, mugs with words on them! Owl cocktail napkins stay, because everyone needs napkins. Ditto owl candle. Owl trivet: take to the charity shop along with the spool-size Japanese owl that blinks his eyes and softly hoots when you plug him into your computer.

  Just when you think you’re making progress, you remember the owl tobacco tin and the owl tea cozy. Then there are the plates, the coasters, the Christmas ornaments. This is what happens when you tell people you like something. For my sister Amy, that thing was rabbits. When she was in her late thirties, she got one as a pet, and before it had chewed through its first phone cord, she’d been given rabbit slippers, cushions, bowls, refrigerator magnets, you name it. “Really,” she kept insisting, “the live one is enough.” But nothing could stem the tide of crap.

  Amy’s invasion started with a live rabbit, while Hugh’s and mine began, in the late 1990s, with decorative art. We were living in New York then, and he had his own painting business. One of his clients had bought a new apartment, and on the high, domed ceiling of her entryway she wanted a skyful of birds. Hugh began with warblers and meadowlarks. He sketched some cardinals and blue tits for color and was just wondering if it wasn’t too busy when she asked if he could add some owls. It made no sense naturewise—owls and songbirds work different shifts, and even if they didn’t they would still never be friends. No matter, though. This was her ceiling, and if she wanted turkey vultures—or, as was later decided, bats—that’s what she would get. All Hugh needed was a reference, so he went to the Museum of Natural History and returned with Understanding Owls. The book came into our lives almost fifteen years ago, and I’ve yet to go more than a month without mentioning it. “You know,” I’ll say. “There’s something about nocturnal birds of prey that I just don’t get. If only there was somewhere I could turn for answers.”

  “I wish I could help you,” Hugh will say, adding, a second or two later, “Hold on a minute…what about…Understanding Owls?”

  We’ve performed this little routine more times than I can count, but back then, when the book was still fresh-smelling and its pages had not yet yellowed, I decided that because Hugh actually did get a kick out of owls, I would try to find him a stuffed one. My search turned up plenty of ravens. I found pheasants and ducks, and foot-tall baby ostriches. I found a freeze-dried turkey’s head attached to its own foot, but owls, no luck. That’s when I learned that it’s illegal to own them in the United States. Even if one dies naturally of a stroke or old age. If it chokes on a mouse or gets kicked by a horse. Should one fly against your house, break its neck, and land like magic on your front stoop, you’re still not allowed to stuff it or even to store its body in your freezer. Technically, you’re not even allowed to keep one of its feathers—that’s how protected they are. I learned this at a now-defunct taxidermy shop in midtown Manhattan. “But if you’re really interested,” the clerk I spoke to said, “I’ve got a little something you might want to see.” He stepped into the back room and returned with what I could only identify as a creature. “What we’ve done,” he boasted, “is stretch a chicken over an owl form.”

  “That’s really…something,” I said, groping for a compliment. The truth was that even a child would have seen this for what it was. The beak made from what looked to be a bear claw, the feet with their worn-down, pedestrian talons: I mean, please! This was what a chicken might wear to a Halloween party if she had ten minutes to throw a costume together. “Let me think about it,” I said.

  Years later we moved to Paris, where, within my first week, I found an albino peacock. I found swans and storks and all manner of seabirds but, again, no owls, because stuffing them is forbidden in France. In the U.K., though, it’s a slightly different story. You can’t go out and shoot one, certainly. They’re protected in life just as they are in the U.S., but afterward, in death, things loosen up a bit. Most of the owls I saw in Great Britain had been stuffed during the Victorian era. I’d see them at English flea markets and in Scottish antique shops, but, as is always the case, the moment you decide to buy one they’re nowhere to be had. I needed one—or decided I did—in February 2008. Hugh and I were moving from our apartment to a house in Kensington, and, after going through our owl objects and deciding we could do without nine-tenths of them, I thought I’d get him the real thing for Valentine’s Day. I should have started looking a month or two in advance, but with Christmas and packing and helping to ready our new place, it had slipped my mind. Thus I wound up on February 13 calling a London taxidermy shop and asking if they had any owls. The person who answered the phone told me he had two of them, both recent specimens, and freestanding, not behind glass as most of the old ones are. The store was open only by appointment, and after arranging to come by the following afternoon, I went to where Hugh was packing books in the next room and said, “I am giving you the best Valentine’s Day gift ever.”

  This is one of those things I do and immediately hate myself for. How is the other person supposed to respond? What’s the point? For the first sixteen years we were together, I’d give Hugh chocolates for Valentine’s Day, and he’d give me a carton of cigarettes. Both of us got exactly what we wanted, and it couldn’t have been easier. Then I quit smoking and decided that in place of cigarettes I needed, say, an eighteenth-century scientific model of the human throat. It was life-size, about four inches long, and, because it was old, handmade, and designed to be taken apart for study, it cost quite a bit of money. “When did Valentine’s Day turn into this?” Hugh asked when I told him that he had to buy it for me.

  What could I say? Like everything else, holiday gifts escalate. The presents get better and better until one year you decide you don’t need anything else and start making donations to animal shelters. Even if you hate dogs and cats, they’re somehow always the ones who benefit. “Eventually we’ll celebrat
e by spaying a few dozen kittens,” I said, “but until that day comes, I want that throat.”

  On Valentine’s Day, I carried a few boxes from our apartment to the house we’d bought. It looked like the sort of place where Scrooge might have lived—a narrow brick building, miserly in terms of space, and joined to identical, equally grim houses on either side of it. From there I walked around the corner and got on the Underground. The taxidermy shop was on a quiet street in North London, and as I approached I saw a man and his two sons with their faces pressed against the barred front windows. “A polar bear!” one of the boys shouted. The other tugged on his father’s coat. “And a penguin! Look at the baby penguin!”

  My heart raced.

  The man who owned the shop was so much taller than me that, in order to look him in the eye, I had to throw my head all the way back, like I do at the dentist’s office. He had enviably thick hair, and as he opened the door to let me in I noticed an orange kitten positioned on the floor beside a dalmatian puppy. Casting a shadow upon them was a rabbit standing upright on its hind legs, and above him, on a shelf, sat two tawny owls, each mounted to a stump and standing around twenty inches high. Both were females, and in great shape, but what I’d really wanted was a barn owl. Those are the ones with spooky white faces, like satellite dishes with eyes.

  “We do get those from time to time, but they’re rare,” the taxidermist said. Above his head hung a massive seagull with its beak open, and next to him, on a tabletop, lounged a pair of hedgehogs.

  I’ve seen better variety, but there was no denying that the man did beautiful work. Nothing had crooked eyes or bits of exposed plaster at the corners of its mouth. If seen in a photo, you’d think that these animals were alive and had gathered peacefully to boast about their excellent health. The taxidermist and I discussed the owls, and when my eyes cut to a glass-doored cabinet with several weather-beaten skulls inside it, he asked if I was a doctor.