Hamsters.

There is a part of me that thinks “fuck hamsters.”  They’re frail, they don’t give a shit about you and you can’t really pet them.  They’re hair balls with lungs.  And their death permutations are more intricate than a museum of Medieval torture dungeons.

Hamsters teach us about loving, but, more importantly, they teach us about loss.  With each fateful trip to the mall pet shop, it begins with a fluttering heart and promises of grown-up responsibility;  and it ends, inevitably, with a furry bite-size tragedy on your hands.  In the case of Mary, that was quite literally the case.

Mary was my favorite hamster.  She was a shock of white and butterscotch, with a little detail of dark brown by her haunches.  To me, she was fluffier than the rest.  But, even better, she was a total bad-ass.  She was the alpha hamster, snapping her teeth into the necks of any other hamster, male or female, that dare get in her fuckin’ way in the Habi-trail.  I remember being mesmerized watching other hamsters flee in the other direction when they met her beady little eyes on the other end of the tube.

The only other hamster that was cuter was Ted, who was a puffy gray thing with little white ringlets around his eyes.  Ted was more docile and you could actually pick him up and he would sit there in the nook of your hand, like “What’s up?  Check out my nose wiggle!” without moving.  That was my brother Jim’s hamster.  I pretended, as well as I could, not to be jealous about how super cute Ted was.

One day, Jim took Ted outside to show a friend and, on the way back, he dropped the gray poofball on the red brick walkway leading to our front door.  Oops.  He quickly scooped Ted back up, escorted him back inside, plopped him onto the cedar chips inside the aquarium, and Ted feebly knocked about for a few minutes in the rodent turds and alfalfa pellets.  Then Ted went to stare into the corner like the Blair Witch Project, his nose went still, and he never moved again.

I wanted to be sad, but my jealousy gene has always been in a battle with my compassionate nature for dominion of my soul. So I cycled from feeling sad to “hahaha” to feeling guilty about the perverted triumph I felt to reveling in the triumph to double sadness of my feeling of ironic triumph.

Luckily, guilt has mostly been a prison bitch to my to ego, so after about 5 hours I landed safely and squarely on “Fuck you, Jim, Mary is alive!  She will never die! HAHAHAHAHA!”

In my head, Mary WAS immortal.  Other shitty hamsters and guinea pigs would run around like cracked-out dipshits and keel over in a coupla months, but Mary was a solider.  She was already over a year old and she would bite the furry fuck out of anything in her way.  I was convinced that I could release her into the wild and she would find a way to forage for her own food, rats be damned!

One time, I was playing with Mary in my deluxe Fisher Price duplex housing unit with Roger Daniero, the neighborhood douchenozzle.

For some reason, I wanted to pretend that Mary lived inside the house and I wanted to look in through the window on the second floor and see her doing seemingly human things.  Yes, in my 6 year old head, that struck me as inordinately cool and YES, it IS remarkable I didn’t turn out to be gay.

Roger wanted to keep the Fisher Price house wide open at the hinge and just have Mary chill out in the kitchen on the ground floor.  Fuck no, Mary ain’t no typical woman!  She’s already barefoot, she doesn’t have to be in the kitchen, Roger, you sexist prick!

An argument ensued about where and how Mary should be located, but she was my fuckin’ hamster, so I picked up her fluffy lil gangster torso and placed her on the second floor, right on top of the cartoon illustrated rug.

I began to close the unit, so I could peep Mary through the window looking eerily human.  “Look, she’s standing by a dresser, just like a person!” I imagined myself saying.  My mind was brimming with the voyeuristic possibilities.

As I was shutting the house, Roger made a last ditch effort to thwart my awesome plan.  He thrust his arm between the two halves so they wouldn’t come together.  Mary skidded into the corner with the jolt.

“Cut it out, Roger!”  I said.

“That’s stupid to have her upstairs like that!”  Roger contended.

“No, it’s not!  It’s stupid to have her just sitting there with the house open on the bottom floor.  We can look at her through the window!”

“It’s just a window.”

“You’re the window!”

(I was 6, fuckfaces, that was cutting-edge insult technology at the time).

I pushed Roger away and shut the house with a crisp plastic snap.  I won.  Finally.

“Now the cool part, Roger, we can look through the window and see what she does.”  I guess at 6 I was just in the inchoate stages of discovering my inner peeping Tom.  I peered in and saw Mary on the rug — just like I had expected!  How cool is that!  People can ALSO be found on rugs, I thought triumphantly!

I looked closer and noticed that Mary’s shock of white fluff didn’t appear to have the same markings I was used to….

I looked through the kitchen window on the first floor…. No….

Calmly, I stood up, briskly walked up the stairs from the basement to the bathroom on the upper floor, rolled a swath of toilet paper around my fist and slowly marched back down.

With the calm precision of a military surgeon, I unclasped the house and spread its halves back to its original open position.  With one the hand swaddled in Charmin, I picked up Mary’s head, which had left a red stamp on the cartoon illustrated brown ceramic kitchen tile on the bottom floor.  With the other hand, I rolled Mary’s torso from the second floor onto the mass of white tissue.

Somehow, the Fisher Price property had managed to fully decapitate Mary.  It was like some perverse magic trick.

Tada.

Using the full extent of my medical expertise, I again picked up her little head and tried to mash it up against the body, hoping that her very existence might snap back into place like a jigsaw puzzle.  Maybe the blood would stick her parts back together somehow, I thought.  It was logical to my 1st grade brain.

Roger stared at me slack-jawed as I expeditiously took  the reconstituted hamster up two flights of stairs to my father, who was in the process of running a bridge tourney with a large group of friends.

“Dad… Dad…” I said quietly.

I wasn’t crying or screaming.  I had a sense of purpose and, like all medical dramas on TV, time was of the essence, man!

My dad turned to me with a beer in his hand, looking askance at the bloody, white, and tan rodent composite in my open palms.

“Dad…”

At this point, my composure melted and I shuddered out what I wanted to say through a soggy burst of anime-style cartoon tears.  My shoulders violently heaved in a way that only a 6 year old’s can, the rhythm of my soft bones shaking the snot out of my glistening nostrils.

“Dad… can you fix her?”

I don’t remember how my dad looked or what he said.  I was hyperventilating and 6 and my dad was Superman and gave me food whenever my stomach growled and I never saw him swear or fall down or get mad.  He was tall and had thick oily brown hair that always smelled like Brut and leather goods.  He was a freakin’ superhero… as dads mostly are when you’re 6, I guess.

It never occurred to me, for a second, that my dad wouldn’t be able to fix Mary.

Playing along (in retrospect), he took the makeshift operating table from my supinated palms, and said “Everything is going to be okay.”

He was, as he has always been in my life, calm and gentle, as put his hand on my shoulder and walked away, presumably to find more space to “fix” Mary.

Later, he told me that there was nothing he could do, but that we should give her a proper burial to honor her.  In other words, for once we weren’t gonna flush a hamster down the toilet.  We had a proper burial, with a little shovel and a flower and everything.  I think my dad, never the talker, even said a prayer.  I remember looking at him with a mixture of thankfulness for such a beautiful service, and suspicion, for not being cool enough to save Mary.

Recently, I had to make the decision to move back to NYC from LA.  It was a daunting task that was stressing the shit out of me, and my dad — at almost 70 years old — drove up to the Hollywood hills to help me move.

His hair is near-white now.  He has a bad back and is still hunched.  Instead of cologne and cowhide, my dad now smells mostly like museum dust and fart.  He is clearly many years removed from my childhood image of him as some sort of Superman.

But again, in a moment of crisis, he was there for me, calm and gentle as he has always been in my life, cleaning up after my shit, telling me in my panic that “Everything is going to be okay.”

So, thanks dad, I know you read this.  And I want you to know that despite your inability to fix my fuckin’ hamster almost 3 decades ago, I actually do think that you’re a superhero.

I love you.

Happy Father’s Day.