for the fans and friends of my pet rat

It seems to be a theme for 2007: I open up a blog post with an idea for a story that didn't work out. Perhaps it will change in 2008. I'll write and complete a great number of stories, and each one will have a shelved weblog serving as epigraph.

I was writing a story about ghosts again. I was writing the story of a punk, in the mold of the anarchist train jumpers that roll in and out of my life, who wear drab clothes and colorful tattoos and so much of my envy they practically glow with it. In the story he's all growned up, matured with business and PTA meetings to go to. He goes on with his life, and all throughout, the ghost of his old pet rat rides on his shoulder. It has elements of all the cheese we enjoyed together, meaning both the junk food and the late night television we chased it with. It has tints of Hook, the eternal-child-becoming-a-sellout-grownup-finding-his-eternal-child again, the schizophrenic codependency of Drop Dead Fred, the superpowered friend angle of Jesus and the man walking together through the sand, and hopefully something good and serious and artful to temper the ridiculous shittiness of all those other sources. It might never get made, but that's how I wanted to eulogize my friend.

Bukowski died last Thursday

I'm usually pretty cavalier about death
and I am here, too

I don't know if it's a strength or a weakness
My favorite aunt died recently, and so have a couple of people I used to smoke pot with

I know I should feel more for them, but I don't
They're gone. It sucks.
People go, and it's never the right time.
And it almost always sucks.

I feel the same way about Bukowski.

Maybe a little bit more.

This was the first time I ever lost a pet I cared about
It wasn't the first pet I've had die
I had a frog get cooked, a tarantula break his feeder legs
A runaway lizard
A suicidal hermit crab
And two cats that just weren't worth the money it would've taken to keep them alive

but I really gave a shit about Bukowski
I shared experiences with him
he went to gigs
he rode my bike with me, and we went to parties and barbecues together all summer

I came home from work and he was lying on his side
one of his eyes was open
it had been open for days

I don't know what happened but one day I came home and he was bleeding from his eye
the next day, I came home and it was scabbed over, black and stuck open

the last day he was on his side
wrapped around one of the ladders in his cage

There's really nothing shittier than having a pet die, and then having to untangle his atrophied limbs from the wiring of his cage. I guess there's a lot I can think of shittier than that, but nothing I've had to deal with in a while and nothing I'd witsh on anyone else. In the end, he didn't look like my friend anymore.

His lip rolled under to show his bottom teeth, at least an inch longer than I'd ever imagined, and black from the part where they met his lip down. He looked like any other dead rat on the street, and a little bit like that first dead girl in The Ring, the one you see for a just a second right when the closet door opens.

Still, it was a relief
It was a relief because he wasn't suffering anymore
As much as death doesn't seem to faze me, I really can't handle the suffering
Or the waiting

I lit Hanukkah candles with him last Tuesday
It was his first, because I think I missed the whole eight days last year
It was his last, and that goes without saying
I held him in a towel, because he stunk
I think he had taken to shitting himself, or maybe it was the black stuff coming from his eyes
I rubbed his head as I said the bruchas

I like ceremonies but there won't be any this time.

Bukowski's in an old shoebox on the porch. My mother wrote an epitaph on it, in the hopes that I would finally toss it out, and that's what I'm going to do.





[currently watching THE CAVEMAN'S VALENTINE]