Pet People

My grandparents had a dog named Beebe. Beebe smelled like rotting flesh, a smell my mom said came from deep inside his ears. He was an old dog that would stand up slowly and often skitter into door jams and walls. He would also hump my grandmother’s embroidered throw pillows on the couch with a vitality only negated by the wheezing breaths that shot through his nose, leaving a spattering of snot that dampened the top of the pillow as well. People often say you become your parents when you get old. Following this logic my parents, who are middle-aged, will eventually become like their parents, and that by the time I’m old I’ll be like my grandparents also. And that means I too might have a strange attachment to a wheezy old stinker of a dog.

As a child I never had a pet bigger than my fist. I’m not sure if that was a rule or simply coincidence but either way it’s very lucky. Fishy, Bernard, and Acorn’s horrific deaths would have been exponentially worse had they been larger. My goldfish froze mid stroke during the winter, my “boy” mouse had 26 babies, ate them all, and consequently died, and my hamster came to an untimely end when my three year-old sister speared him with a pencil.

As an adult I generally hate pets. This is not because I am a cold person. It’s not because I don’t like big-eyed fluffy creatures. On the contrary, I love to cuddle puppies, hold toads, brush gerbils, chase ferrets, feed fish, and talk to parrots. But experience has tempered my affections. So when on a summer Sunday morning my friend Frank asked if I could take his bush baby for a week, it was odd that I agreed. As I walked away from his house holding the rustling carrier I went through the checklist list of potential problems: Bubbles didn’t smell like death, he didn’t appear to be pregnant, it was too warm for him to freeze, and I had put sharp objects away in a drawer (my little sister was also now living in a different city and 15 years old).

Bubbles was cute enough for a seven year-old bush baby. Sure his eyes no longer seemed disproportionately large, and his fur was more tufty than it had been, but he had a sweet disposition, by which I mean he didn’t make any noise and when you held him, he didn’t pee in your hand. At Frank’s, Bubbles had a free run of all three rooms, though he preferred to huddle in the dustiest corners where the wall to wall carpeting had collected a fuzz indistinguishable from Bubbles’ own fur. So when we got back to my place I let him out of his cage and watched him wander back and forth looking for a nest-like corner—something made difficult by the lack of lint and the hardwood floors. Bored with watching his pacing I went out on an errand and left him in the apartment to finish his search. When I came back hours later, he was gone.

As a jaded pet owner who had seen much more gore than most, I wasn’t worried. It was likely that he had burrowed somewhere unexpected and would emerge in an hour or so hungry for his canned mushed meat. By nightfall there was still no sign of Bubbles but squeaking sounds had begun to punctuate the stillness of my disregard. I followed the sound across the apartment and ended up next to the radiator, where the water pipe enters the floor through a hole much larger than it’s silver circumference. Using the light from my cell phone I peered down the hole. Although I couldn’t see much, the light was accompanied by much louder squeaking and I concluded Bubbles was most like lodged in the radiator pipe shaft. Luckily it was summer and the heating was off. To be safe though, I turned the dial on the radiator to zero.

My first instinct was to lower a string down the hole. I imagined that Bubbles, in his old age, might be wise enough to cling on to it with his small five toed hands. However after lowering much more string than there was distance between me and Bubbles down the hole, I realized the string was likely piling on top of Bubbles’ head just causing extra irritation. My next idea was chewing gum. I had a large pack of Wrigley’s spearmint gum in the kitchen so I chewed six pieces as quickly as I could and waded them onto the bottom of the string. Jaw still sore I lowered the sticky gum ball down the hole. After attempting some fishing-like motions of dangle-and-pull-back dangle-and-pull-back I gave up on this. I needed something to make the gum stick to Bubbles’ fur.

The string and gum retracted (with a few Bubble hairs attached) I pulled on my sneakers and ran to the hardware store. Tools, which mostly I didn’t know how to use, took on their own creative utility in this problem. Wood glue that didn’t dry right away, but did get very sticky very quickly (said the shop owner), could be smeared on the gum ball for extra strength stickiness. A long metal curtain rod could be used for poking. I bought both and rushed back to Bubbles. The squealing had subsided in my absence. I stuck the gum to the end of the curtain rod and coated it with wood glue, blowing it to the sticky dry stage. Then I stuck the contraption through the hole slowly until I felt resistance and heard squeals. I didn’t want to push to hard, for fear of losing Bubbles to the depths of the building, so applied a little more pressure and decided to wait until the glue had time to adhere. Minutes passed and the frantic squealing continued. Giving a slight pull upward I felt Bubble’s body dislodge and the new weight on the end of the curtain rod. I moved him up slowly. After forty or fifty long seconds, Bubbles tufty fur appeared at the hole. I grabbed onto some of it and pulled.

Perhaps it was the excitement and anxiety of being stuck in a radiator shaft that made Bubbles puff up, but somehow he was larger now than he was when he went in, and he couldn’t fit back through the hole. I taped the pole to the wall with duct tape and stacked some books on either side of it so it wouldn’t slide. Maybe I could wait for Bubbles to shrink? But then maybe the glue/gum wouldn’t hold forever. I decided that sometimes things shrink when they’re cold and that pouring a pitcher of ice water over Bubbles would make him return to his normal smaller size. I filled the pitcher and slowly poured it over Bubbles. Then I gave his fur, of which there wasn’t much to grab on to -- most still below the hole and the rest covered in gum -- a yank. Bubbles screeched out of the hole wet but saved. The tumor of gum stuck to his back was now my biggest concern. Most of it cut off with hair scissors and I decided to put him back in his carrier before attempting to cut the remaining bits off. He was terrified and scrabbley. Back in his cage he enjoyed water and mushed meat and them went to sleep.

When I returned Bubbles a few days later he was doing much better. Besides his patchy coat he was fine. The shaking which had gripped him the day after the radiator incident had stopped for the most part and now just appeared to be an occasional shiver. Frank held him in his hand,

“What happened?” Frank asked, rubbing his finger on Bubble’s new bald patch.

“Nothing serious,” I said. “He got stuck to some gum.”

“Cool,” said Frank. He paused. “Do you wanna keep him?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m not really a pet person.”