Taxidermy

I always wanted to be a taxidermist from a very early age. People who know me always say that it’s because I had a succession of traumatic premature pet deaths when I was a child; Mauritz, my hamster, fell into the waste disposal after only a week, Katzluxsky, my cat, lasted six months before being decapitated by my father’s unattended chainsaw and Po-na-nehenza, the terrapin my aunt got me for my birthday drowned after getting jammed in the u-bend of the downstairs toilet overnight. I felt most sorry for Po-na-nehenza; terrapins can stay underwater for hours before they need air, but no-one in my house used the downstairs bathroom overnight because we all knew that that was where the Ghost of Gordon hid, Gordon being the child molesting neighbor who died when he broke his neck after a fall from a stepladder in his bedroom whilst trying to change a light bulb.

My brother said that his ghost hid out in our downstairs bathroom at night so he could look at our penii; my brother went through a phase of pluralizing everything by appending an pair of ‘i’s’, so that sheep would become sheepii, cooties would become cootii and glasses would become glassii although glass eyes never became glass eyesii strangely enough which was interesting because my brother actually did have a glass eye on account of him poking his left eyeball out with a fountain pen when he was about three although I don’t really remember that ‘cause I was only a few months old at the time and had probably just learned that poking one’s eyeball with anything was not a great idea, my brother not being as fast a learner as I turned out to be which gives you some idea as to why, at the age of nine, he thought we both had penii when, in fact, he, as the single male child in our family, possessed the only one, although such disparity in knowledge was irrelevant at the time because age beats intelligence when you’re a kid which was why my brother scotched any theories of mine that maybe Gordon was simply trying to replace a burnt out light bulb instead of trying to get a glimpse of our penii and maybe he wasn’t a child molester but just a lonely kind of guy who smelled a bit funny because he didn’t ever clean his house and this was also why it was an undisputed fact that Gordon once tried to put his hand down my brother’s pants only my brother like, totally kicked his ass after perfecting the moves he’d been learning from his kung fu movies and that was why Gordon walked with that limp all of a sudden and talked like one side of his face was melting and how I wasn’t to tell our parents because they’d only send him off to the army so they could use his incredible powers to fight bad guys and if that happened then he wouldn’t ever be around ever again to stop the kids from three blocks down from taking my lunch money and tying my shoes together so tight I had to crawl home after school and I’ll admit, my brother was pretty handy when things like that happened, so I didn’t say anything and even after all that I still felt pretty bad for Po-na-nehenza because I always needed the bathroom overnight and if I hadn’t been so scared of the Ghost of Gordon then I might have crept downstairs to take a pee rather than use the upstairs bathroom, a part of the house that I didn’t like at all because of the carpeted floor which I thought was pretty gross when you consider both my brother and my father peed in there too and pee on a tiled floor, like the downstairs bathroom had was one thing ‘cause you could mop it up but pee on a carpeted floor was just about the worst thing ever but at least the upstairs bathroom didn’t have a ghost lurking somewhere and that kind of swung it for me and so poor Po-na-nehenza had to spend the last few hours of his life face down in pissy water - probably, seeing as how my dad and my brother hardly ever thought to flush - in a cold bathroom with no-one for company but a dead pervert who, if my brother was to be believed, probably got a ghostly boner from seeing Po-na-nehenza’s terrapinny ass poking out of the water for all that time and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone or anything.

Anyway, despite what people who know me say, that isn’t the reason I became a taxidermist, although it sort of is the reason why, very early on in my chosen career, I took great care in stuffing a hamster, a cat and then a terrapin, all of which of I named Mauritz mk II, Catluxsky the Second and The Return of Po-na-nehenza respectively and are not for sale to anyone under any circumstances. I say despite what people who know me say; there aren’t actually that many people who don’t know me. That is, there aren’t that many people who actually know me who don’t know me. You know what I mean? Maybe not. What I’m saying is that it’s actually pretty hard to meet people who don’t know you - new people, that is - when you’re a taxidermist, because outside of your existing circle of friends, many of whom think you’re a bit weird anyway, because you’re a taxidermist, the only people you really hang out with are other taxidermists and they in turn, tend to not know anyone not in some tangible way, associated with their work. You kind of get excluded from the more common conversations too. Like, if I were at a party, a party thrown by existing friends that is, because taxidermists hardly ever throw a party; they’re more likely to host a gathering where someone from another taxidermists’ association come in and talks about some new technique they’ve discovered which is unlikely anyway because the only really interesting development (interesting to taxidermists that is) that has happened of late has been the increase in the use of polyurethane shells for animals’ bodies although I’ll admit, the more recent freeze-drying techniques are pretty cool too if slightly out of the budget of your average self-employed taxidermist. But if I were at a party and someone introduces themselves to me they’ll say something like “So what do you do?” and I’ll have to say - because I’m a terrible liar and why would I want to lie anyway? - “I’m a taxidermist” and they’ll say something like “Get out!” and I’ll say “No, seriously” and after that they either make their excuses and ditch me or they’ll start asking questions like what sort of things do I do and what do I fill those things with and (in one instance) have I ever thought about stuffing a whole human and giving him like a huge dick and keeping him as my own private sex toy which I thought was pretty fucked up on two counts: i) the guy assumed that I was interested in men, which as it happens I am but he didn’t know that and ii) he also ditched me later on and I heard back from other friends at the party that he thought I was really weird which was pretty rich coming from someone who thought I might want to fuck a corpse but most people also just want to know exactly why I became a taxidermist which is where I think is where I started off from.

Can you remember what you wanted to be when you were little? Like, my brother wanted to be a kung fu master and my best friend from school wanted to be a pony groomer and my best friend from camp wanted to be the Queen of England. How many people do you know actually became those things? Not many I’ll bet. My brother is a loan shark in Santa Fe, my best friend from school is a bank teller and my best friend from camp is a hooker. I know this last fact because I accidentally got off the bus one stop too early when I was on my way to pick up some supplies for work and ended up having to cut across a huge parking lot to get to where I needed to be because apparently walking to places you need to get to isn’t possible or even encouraged any more thanks to cars and roads and, y’know, progress and all that crap and so I walked forever across this empty lot and had to squeeze through a chain link fence that ran alongside the back of the supplies depot I was looking for and just as I squeezed out through the fence I disturbed some girl giving head to a guy in faded denim jeans with matching jacket which is never a good look, especially when the faded denim jeans are around your ankles and you’re clearly not in the habit of wearing underpants but I just muttered an apology and let them continue, because the guy certainly didn’t seem bothered, in fact he seemed positively thrilled about my sudden appearance from the fence so much so that he called after me asking if I wanted to make out with the girl or something, all this, remember, while she’s giving him head and I turned around thinking this time ‘Why is he assuming that I’m into women?’ which is maybe a bit unfair of me considering that I took offence when the corpse-fucker guy at the party assumed that I wasn’t but is still way sleazy regardless of my own prejudices and just as he said that the girl turned around too and there was this popping noise as the guy’s dick fell out of her mouth, kind of like when you open a tube of Pringles and she said “Oh my god! Jenni!” and it turns out that she was my friend from summer camp and she had recognized me although I would never have recognized her had she not said anything because I’d never ever seen her with someone’s dick in her mouth and also it had been maybe ten years since we’d last seen each other and she told me to go meet her in the diner across the road in five minutes which the guy with the matching denim and increasingly floppy dick didn’t like at all but I guess he got over it because she sat down in the diner with a wad of notes a little over five minutes later and, after carefully washing her mouth out in the bathroom with liquor and Listerine (she told me) she bought me a coffee. And that’s how I know she became a hooker.

The point is, no-one hardly ever becomes the things they wanted to be. My brother didn’t want to become a loan shark, my best friend from school didn’t want to become a bank teller and I’m guessing my best friend from camp didn’t want to become a hooker although I think it’s fair to say that at the age of twelve while she might not have known what a hooker was she probably grasped the underlying principles involved since I remember her going into the boys’ dorm one night after we were all meant to be in bed and returning with a bag full of candy and a genuine Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle which were kind of hard to get hold of at the time but apparently seemed like a fair trade for a five second public viewing of her pre-teen chest, but the point being that I went through a series of soul-destroying jobs after college that left me so miserable and defeated to the extent that one day I found myself staring down a toilet bowl, water fizzing with recently deposited chemical effervescence wondering if Po-na-nehenza’s fate was really so bad, sitting on the cold, tiled floor; cold, but dry and thankfully not stained with urine since I lived alone and sat down to pee because, as previously established, I didn’t own a penis and decided to make myself happy by becoming the first thing I remembered ever really wanting to be.

One thing about me that people who know me say, that is actually true, is that I talk too much. I can’t help it. I like talking. Not in an obnoxious, Hey!-Look-at-me! sort of way, it’s just that once I get going, I find it hard to slow down, like when I was a kid and I would start running down a really steep hill and would be unable to stop until I ended up at the bottom, breathless and hysterical. Have you ever tried running like that as an adult? You can’t do it, it’s physically impossible, believe me, I’ve tried. But another thing about me that is true, although not many people who know me also know this, is that that I like to think about all the things I’ve learned about myself and other people after I’ve finished talking. Like I learned that the corpse-fucker guy was an asshole and I learned that my best friend from camp was pretty happy being a hooker although she sometimes still wished she could have been Queen of England but without the crappy family, because she always thought queens didn’t have to put up with that sort of shit and that was precisely the reason she wanted to be Queen of England in the first place but if I think back over the last ten minutes or so, I can say that I’ve learned that I was way more with it than my brother ever was, even as a child; that I probably need to make an effort to meet more new people who don’t like stuffing dead animals; that all guys are dicks who make assumptions; that sometimes girls make assumptions too and can be just as much as a dick as the next guy although they probably shouldn’t have the adjective dick attached to them simply for the sake of good form; that everybody still wishes that they were the things they wanted to be when they were little and that I probably wanted to be a taxidermist simply because I liked putting stuff back together.