I BOUGHT NINETY HAMSTERS

You would think this would be a good thing.... but like so much of my life, things have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

This sad tale began when M. had to go to Indiana for a week to spend time with what I can't help imagining is an ailing, snively, elephant with an elaborately moussed display of gray hair between her ears. . . . and indeed she is visitng what has to be the closest human equivalent, M.'s porked out, whiny mother. Now, normally she keeps all the cash from me, because . . . well, just never you mind why... well, might as well be honest now... okay, truth be told, she keeps the cash away from exactly because of episodes like this.Regardless . . . this time, she left me the rent.

810 dollars cash in the hand. Green and hot. Now, M., she will just spend money without even thinking about investing, but me? I'm all about the occasional investment opportunity (someday I will make money off one of them, too, M.). So I started thinking immediately about ways to take the rent and make more money out of it, then spend that money and still have money for the rent... I figured the best bet way was to have a marauding army that I can send out on a crusade to gather gold and cash with their usual ruthless, blood splattered methods...

Then it came to me, the most logical thing that one can do with 815.00 bucks -- so I went out and bought ninety hamsters, a veritable living field from which I can grow a profitable and yet cuddly army (though knowing M., with her known tendency to second guess me, will probably find some tiny, meaningless reason to nit-pick this decision, too . . . I expect she will keep up the bitching right up until she is made queen). The guy at the pet store said that these horny little, fuzzy faced killers would wham bam at such a prodigious pace that within a month my troop strength would be up to over a thousand... and from that thousand, the tens, and then hundreds of thousands I need just to take over this neighborhood.

First thing I did when I got home was go to the bedroom and remove everything, put up a Bruce Lee poster and a series of little sayings that I think will help them be better soldiers, stuff like -- HUMANS LOVE CATS, and KILL ALL OF THE HUMANS OR THEY WILL LET CATS EAT YOU, DESERTERS WILL BE EATEN BY A CATS, etc.. Painted the walls dark green, and wrote KILL, KILL, KILL all over the place--ceiling, walls, floor... I set up these little cots that I made out of toothpicks and some green jean jacket of M.'s that she almost never wears. I even cut up some junior mints and put them on each of their pillows... since I myself always find 'welcome mints' the perfect touch for a guest room.. That bedroom really shaped up into a nice barracks, if I do say so myself. And I'm sure that M. will adjust to sleeping in the dining room, as long as I can convince her that this is temporary, and that within a couple years she will have the entire wing of a palace? I can only hope her intellect is up to the task of taking in my sweeping, Napoleonic vision...

Once the troops were bedded down for the night, I got to thinking about how I had said too much to that geeky dude at the pet store who smelled, ever so vaguely, of dog feces. . . This underpaid tool of the puppy mills more than likely called some terrorist hotline and reported a dark shadow is about to fall on america... So, I kind of got all paranoid, you know, with the weed and all, and then just. . Well, I got completely carried away; there is no real way to deny that... I mean, you can barely move through the apartment because of all the barbed wire -- I kept open only little passages for cooking and bathing purposes... not to mention all the booby traps on all the doors and windows. I may even be responsible for the squirrels that have been exploding all morning out on the balcony... Regardless, the next day I turned my often adequate mind to the task of breeding killers. I started by moving a cd player into the barracks and putting on a tape I made of Foghat playing Slow Ride over and over, then I lit some spicy, scented candles -- for both their wonderful, fresh scent and that warm, comforting glow. When I checked back a few minutes later, only three of the hamsters were humping. They get off fast, their little furry pelvises a blur for less than a minute... Then they were going right to the next lass, and the next... with only occasional breaks for laying about gasping for air and twitching. I figured the rest of them were still adjusting to the hell of war, and that in a few hours they would get their mojo back.The next day I went in to bring them breakfast and found those three same hamsters were still going away at it. They were skinnier, and humping significantly slower, but none were showing any signs of quitting their marathon boffing.


The next day I went in to bring them breakfast and found those three same hamsters were still going away at it. They were skinnier, and humping significantly slower, but none were showing any signs of quitting their marathon boffing. This went on all day, and all night...


On their third day, during a nine-hour indoctrination lecture, the three were still mounting one after another of the females. . . They were moving very, very slowly by then and wobbling from side to side as they walked... their ribs showing. They looked like they were not long for this world, which they weren't... one after another, first one during my lecture and then the other two in the night that followed, fell off their host hamsters and gasped and twitched again, but instead of kind of catching their breath and recovering enough to slowly crawl over to the next female, they keeled over dead and grew stiff one last time...

After the three fuckers were gone, the hamsters ceased having any kind of sex. The other hamster armies had always been so sexed up that when I put my hand in their cage to feed them one of them was always hopping on and trying to get off a hump.... Two days passed like this... then the mystery of why they were all suddenly acting like up tight, fundamentalist wombats was solved.... when I came walking in after taking Ruby down to the beach to find that they had taken down my 'kill-kill-kill slogans' and put up instead a poster of K. D. Lang. They were singing along with a Melissa Etheridge tape, one of those late, stupid ones... which they turned off a few minutes later, just long enough to watch Ellen.

I stood there looking at them and then it hit me...I had bought three males, and eighty seven females, and the shock of going without sex, and having no foreseeable sex in the future, had turned all the females into lap happy lesbos . . . that was kind of disturbing, because my breeding plans were just fucked by that shit... I thought it couldn't get much worse, but I'm no fortuneteller, that's for damn sure.

Next, they read me a list of demands, in these high pitched, superior sounding voices, that said they were becoming Lesbian Separatists and as such were banning me, and all males and cats of any sex, from the barracks.

Then, believe it or not, it got even worse....How could this get worse, you wonder? Well, they decided that as part of their discussion with what they called a 'mystical mother' during their 'Wicca sessions' that they had become . . . PACIFISTS!!!! . . And further, they were leaving the army to, 'find the spirit of the great mother within.' They claimed that they could never be forced to fight, but you can bet that they changed their fuzzy little minds when I got so pissed that I let Ruby-dog and the kitty bums into the barracks for an all day hamster feast.