Ham (7 page)

Boy, is he a boy. And Danny loves it. At heart, Danny is a boy too. They have their own language. They wrestle, smash toys against walls, smash themselves against walls, belch, fart, and hike. They are magical together, and it relieves my concerns around Cooper being an only child.

More than once, they have entered the front door after one of their “adventures” with the singsong announcement “Da-ad! Don't worry, we're oka-ay!” so that I am not shocked when I find them muddied and bloodied from that slip down the hill that was “a little steeper than we thought.”

But with me, the apple seems so far from the tree. From a different orchard, even.

As my criteria for things in common widens with desperate necessity, I realize we do share an unnatural love for chocolate, but I don't think it's something we will look back on as a bond. If he didn't like chocolate, I would consider it an aberration much greater than his fascination with blood and gore, and I would send him to a psychologist. I don't trust people who don't like chocolate or people with very thin lips, which often go hand in hand.

And books—we both love books. He's a bit of a research freak, like me, and wants to know about everything, but with a particular interest in knights and volcanoes and dead skin cells.

And we do love playing out wild, ridiculous stories and characters in imaginative situations, although Cooper has most of them end up with casualties. Cooper “Tarantino” Harris-Jacobsen directs with meticulous, seemingly scripted detail and many retakes. “No, not that way, Daddy. Go out the door and come back in and die. Slower.”

It's not that we don't have a good time. We laugh a lot. And I am astonished by his infinite mind and freaky memory and extensive vocabulary. He uses words like “exasperating,” “transformation,” “paleontologist,” and “cinematographer.” The word “awesome” was used only once, as it is strictly forbidden in our household. I explained, “The aurora borealis is awesome. The Grand Canyon is awesome. A gummy bear is not awesome. Getting a parking space near the entrance of Toys“R”Us is not awesome.”

After a series of stinky-butt and amputation references, I am mollified by phrases like “It's spring so the jacarandas will be blooming” or, to our talking GPS, which we named Shirley, “Shirley, we're almost home so we are no longer in need of your assistance.” And when he says “Please turn off your cell phones and unwrap any hard candies before the performance,” I wipe a prideful tear from my eye.

Still, I look for any potential pea-to-pod-ness, and one night I thought I'd hit upon something.

In addition to an obsession with dinosaurs, Cooper loves animals of the current, Cenozoic period. He has lots of stuffed bears and tigers and alligators, which he animates with distinct personalities. And he loves dogs. He
loves
dogs. It occurred to me that if I shared my history with animals, it would give us another common passion.

At bedtime, after reading
The Courageous Captain America
for the seven thousandth time, after which I wanted to stab out my eyes with an ice pick, I said, “Cooper, you know Daddy loves animals like you do. I've had so many different pets. Would you like to hear about them?”

“Yes, Daddy. What kind of pets?”

I had him! I started at the beginning:

“When I was a baby, Nanaw and Bubba got a little white poodle for our family named Jimmy-John.”

Cooper thought that name was very funny.

“Jimmy-John liked to have his tummy scratched.”

“What happened to Jimmy-John?” Cooper asked.

I hadn't thought this part would come up. Jimmy-John was only with us for a year when he got a rare cancer and died.

“Jimmy-John had to leave us . . .” I stuttered, “but we got another dog right away. His name was Duke.”

“Where did Jimmy-John go?” He wouldn't let up.

“I think to another family that needed him more. But then we got Duke! Duke was a mutt. A crazy brown big dog that”—
jumped the fence and never came back. Shit!
—

“. . . visited us for a while and then went on an adventure.”

I remembered we got two more dogs that we also named Duke, both of whom escaped and were never seen again. We just kept replacing the dogs but maintained the name so as to live in denial and not have to fix the fence. I skipped the extra Dukes. I didn't want him to think we might replace him with another Cooper.

There was also a psychotic beagle we named Columbo because he had a slightly wandering eye like Peter Falk. He yelped and yapped fourteen hours a day while constantly racing the length of the backyard fence. He couldn't jump over it, but his OCD pattern soon created a balding runway that became a dusty trench deep enough for him to crawl
under
it. My father fumed and steamed. “That goddamn fleabag's days are numbered.” One day, Columbo was just gone. No explanation.

Next came a scroungy mutt called Furfy, whose name I really wanted to share with Cooper because it was so funny, but I didn't know how to explain that she bit the mailman and my father drove her to a wooded area twenty miles away and abandoned her there. Or that she somehow miraculously returned to us months later, exhausted and mangy and pregnant, and bore a litter of equally scroungy puppies, all of whom were suspiciously given away in one day, along with Furfy. I suspect my father actually crossed the Oklahoma border this time.

“Then we got Noni,” I said, skipping to a dog I could talk about. Once again, Cooper laughed at the name.

Even though we'd had Jimmy-John and Duke and Duke and Duke and Columbo and Furfy, Noni was the first dog around long enough for me to develop a real relationship. She didn't jump fences or yelp or bite mailmen. Hers was the name I used when asked to create a stripper name, which is based on your favorite pet and the street you grew up on. I would be Noni Washington. Great stripper name. Or it could be a prostitute name, but it sounded more to me like a heroin-addicted lounge singer with sleepy eyes, who wore dulled lamé tunics with sporadic wiry threads popping up here and there, and seams stretched beneath armholes and at the hips. Noni Washington would kick off her shoes and sing songs of unrequited love and pain and torture and misery and despair. I could actually picture myself as some version of Noni Washington in the future. And it wasn't bad.

“Noni was a sweet dog,” I said to Cooper, snuggling close to him. “And she loved to chase cars and she slept in the garage . . .”
Damn it!

Once again, this wasn't going well. What decent person would let his dog chase cars? Noni had, indeed, been run over several times, suffering broken bones and hemorrhages and everything but death. As a result, she had a noticeable limp and always veered to the left. She had to aim right to go straight. I didn't want to portray myself or Cooper's grandparents as irresponsible, or as people who kept their dog in the freezing garage in the winter with a metal pan of ice-capped water. If Noni was thirsty, she had to lick her water like a Popsicle from November to March.

I changed gears.

“One time I found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest and broken its wing. And Nanaw and I mended the wing and made a nest in a shoe box and fed it oatmeal and worms until it was big and strong enough to fly away. When living things can't help themselves, we help them.”

“What was the baby bird's name?” Cooper wanted to know, hoping it was also funny.

“Um, Harold. The bird's name was Harold.” I paused for a giggle. “And every year Harold returned to our house and sang on our windowsill.”

Now I was just making shit up.

I flashed on the number of creatures who hadn't made it. And the animal cemetery across from our house under a streetlight at the top of the woods. Dozens were buried there. Not only family pets—any creatures, critters, varmints, or strays that we found—birds, squirrels, rats, snakes, an opossum, an armadillo. Anything dead. If the area were ever excavated, one would think the Pol Pot of the animal kingdom had stormed Sand Springs.

I held a funeral for each animal and was obsessed with ceremony. There were songs and eulogies and robes draped from bedsheets. Tears were shed. Memories of beloved pets were shared and unfulfilled lives of strangers were mourned.

“We never knew his name. But this snail brought happiness to our neighborhood.” I'd gathered other snails and placed them at graveside, and when they drew themselves into their shells, I imagined them weeping.

Flowers were laid and crosses were planted. I decided the armadillo was Jewish so I built a crude pine box, chanted the Mourners' Kaddish, tore my shirt, and sat shiva.

I fast-forwarded.

“When I was fifteen and I moved to my own apartment, I couldn't have a pet and I was so sad.”

But I did have a sort-of animal mascot. I lived in a nondescript suburb of St. Louis off I-44 that had no road signs or any indication that it existed. You had to live there to know it was there. Driving home from work, I often missed the unmarked turnoff and had to backtrack, slower, to find the narrow gravel road that led to my tiny apartment. A couple of weeks into the summer, as luck would have it, a dog was run over on the shoulder of the highway at that exact intersection, and the carcass became my landmark: Dead dog—Turn right. The dog was never removed, and as it rotted in the equatorial heat, the corpse finally decayed into a discolored oily spot, which I still relied upon as my marker: Dead dog oily spot—Turn right. If not for the poor animal, I might have gotten lost, run out of gas, and wandered on foot along I-44, only to be hit by a car and become a discolored oily spot landmark for some other geographically challenged traveler. I was glad the dog was dead.

I skipped that story.

I also skipped the one about the winter I returned to Sand Springs and, late one night, skidded on a sheet of ice in front of our house, unsuccessfully avoiding a cute little cottontail bunny. I sprang from my car, slipping and sliding, and found the poor thing panting its last pants, the steam of its body heat rolling up like a funeral pyre, all eerily lit by the glare of my headlights. I lifted the limp ball of sticky fur and placed it gently in the snow as if that would help. It sank into the drift and its crimson blood seeped into the ice like a carnival snow cone. The rabbit died almost instantly, probably hastened by the shock of freezing snow after being plowed over by my beat-up Gran Torino, which I knew only as “my red car.”

The next day I made the mistake of sharing the saga with friends in journalism class, and Sheilah Nobles, standing stiffly in her calf-high, turd-colored leather boots and cowl-neck macramé sweater, leered at me through gigantic plastic-framed glasses that looked more like ski goggles than prescription eyewear. Then she murmured, “Rabbit Killer!” with a wicked, depraved snigger that grew into a howl and was soon joined by everyone in class, their mouths wide with laughter. Then the chanting began:

“Rabbit Killer!”

“Rabbit Killer!

“Rabbit Killer!”

Most of these kids were from families who regularly shot and ate rabbits, wore their pelts, and carried their sawed-off feet on key chains, but because it was sweet little sensitive me, I was now known as “Rabbit Killer” until I left home again, months later and for good, confident my work as a professional performer would supersede my reputation as a murderer. Still, when I received the token senior yearbook a year later, signed by all my classmates as a surprise, most of the personal notes started with “Dear Rabbit Killer . . .”

Cooper was losing patience for my silent, agonizing trip down animal lane and I knew I had to get to a good story quickly.

“And the
next
place I lived wouldn't let me have a dog or a cat and I
really
wanted a pet, so . . . I got a snake!”

“A snake?” Cooper asked with wonder. “Was it poisonous?”

“No. It was a baby boa constrictor and his name was Joey.”

“Joey the snake! That's funny.”

“All my pets' names are funny. That's part of why we have them. Because they make us laugh.”

“Did he eat snake food?”

Joey ate little white mice. I bought two and put them in a cage right next to the snake aquarium. In retrospect, it was a horrible thing to do—giving the furry little creatures a 24/7, up-close-and-personal, wide-screen view of their ultimate nightmare. I might as well have placed a giant stuffed hawk on the other side. In the blink of an eye, the mice population rose to fourteen, probably nature's instinct to build an army in defense. Oddly, fourteen was the exact same number as was in the cast of the show I was doing. I named each mouse for a member of the troupe and every week, when I fed Joey, I would report, “Nancy is dead” or “Jeff was swallowed whole.”

I obviously couldn't share this either.

“Yes, Cooper, I fed him snake food,” I said instead.

I recalled when Joey seemed to slow down, which is hard to detect in a snake, and soon after died of pneumonia. Boa pneumonia. I'm sure it was my fault and that his aquarium must have been left in a draft or something. I thought creatures of the wild would surely be made of sturdier stuff. Like there aren't drafts in Nicaragua or Peru or tropical rain forests?

Desperate for a happy, uniting pet story to share with my son, suddenly I was questioning my love for, or at least my care of, all my pets. By the time I was sixteen years old, every creature I'd been associated with had fled or died or been abandoned or fed to someone else. Noni still lived with my folks but she was getting old, and at any moment could be walking seemingly straight but veer left into the street and get hit by a pickup truck. My parents would probably just get another dog and name it Noni, hoping I wouldn't notice.

“Let's see, what other
great
pets did Daddy have? Hmmm . . . When I was in college and I shared a house with Uncle Bruce, we got a kitty,” I said to Cooper with a cheerful cadence.