When people ask me about the best gift that I’ve ever received, I almost always give the same answer. On the occasion of my fourth birthday, my mother presented me with a Barbie Dream House (with working elevator). It was my little girl alpha and omega. The response usually elicits a laugh and a head shake. That was so long ago. Something, anything, must have pushed it from its pedestal by now.
But at that age I was still easily dazzled by gifts. At age 20, my interest in presents began to decline. Of course I still received them, and still loved many of those that were given to me, but when asked what I wanted I often responded with silence. Last Christmas my mother had to ask me three times what I wanted before I told her that I might like my very own copy of Americanah and a horse-printed shift dress I had seen at Club Monaco.
Even though I love things, I’ve come to value experiences over them.
But on my 24th birthday, my first on my own in Brooklyn, my best friend decided to surprise me.
“The people at the pet store said you can keep them in the same cage.”
Inside that cage were to live two hamsters. I had never had a pet of my own. There had been a class hamster named Peto in the fifth grade but that was the limit of my experience with pets. Raised in an apartment that never allowed such things and mostly uninterested in the concept, I found myself once again dazzled by a gift.
My best friend was in the midst of a classic film phase, and I was unsure what to call them, so we named them Cary Grant and Marlon Brando. Cary Grant was the more streamlined of the two while Marlon Brando resembled the actor in his later years although he was less The Island of Dr. Moreau Brando and more The Godfather Brando.
I made sure they had water and food and got them a little wheel and ball and spent a lot of time in awe of the fact that they were mine. I lived in a very large, sparsely decorated studio back then, so their cage lived on the floor next to an ever-growing pile of fashion magazines. I would take them out of their cage, sit on the floor, and play with them gingerly, afraid that I might hurt them. At night I could hear them as they moved around. Sometimes there was fighting. I was worried at first, would wake up and check on them, but everything was always fine. I eventually stopped checking in.
I was commuting to and from Greenwich, CT for work in the spring of 2007 and often spent my weekends sleeping as late as humanly possible. But on a Saturday morning a few weeks after my birthday, I had a charity walk that I needed to attend. I willed myself out of bed at an early hour and checked in on the hamsters.
Something was terribly, terribly wrong. I reached for my phone.
“Why are you calling me so early?”
“Cary Grant ate Marlon Brando!”
There had been fighting that night, but they eventually quieted down. Or at least I thought it was a they settling down. But all that was left of poor Marlon Brando was his head. Cary Grant sauntered around the cage as if nothing had changed. He put his paws on of one the bars and pulled himself up onto his hind legs. In search of some affection perhaps, he pushed his little nose through a gap. I looked at his blood-covered paws and mouth, his belly swelling with his former roommate, and thought “I will never love you.” I managed to dispose of the last remaining piece of Marlon Brando somehow and left Cary Grant to consider his crime.
We lived an uneasy life after that, Cary Grant and I. We acknowledged one another in passing but never played in the same way again. For how can one love a cannibal? In that stereotypical New York City fashion, we had broken up emotionally but were unable to do so physically.
On Thanksgiving Day 2008 I was once again willing myself out of bed at an early hour. I had to hop on the train to the bus to my home for turkey and stuffing and didn’t want to be late. I walked over to the cage so that I could make sure he had enough food and water to last the couple of days that I would be gone. He would often lazily greet me as I approached. For a time after The Incident there had been excitement but he had long ago resigned himself to our wary relationship. But on this morning there was no greeting at all. I opened the cage and gave him an apprehensive poke. Nothing. As is usually the case with hamsters, he had lived a very short life. I dealt with the remains and continued to prepare for my trip to Boston.
I was surprised at how much I missed his presence, and I decided not to focus on the bad. Instead I remembered the wide-eyed wonder with which I had greeted his arrival and smiled.
Tags: birthday gifts, cannibalism, cary grant, hamsters, marlon brando, peto, pets, that still is from notorious which you should watch immediately
HAMSTERS ARE TRULY EVIL CREATURES.
(my hamster had 12 little pink babies on my 8th birthday, and ate 9 of them)
I had a friend when I was in elementary school who found her hamster mid-eating one of her babies.
I mean, there are just so many better small animal species:
RATS: affable! dextrous! jaunty!
GUINEA PIGS: humorous! confident! hungry!
MICE: don’t know much about them, but I insist they must be better than hamsters….
I did really enjoy them though. They were so cute! Also I had another friend who experienced a guinea pig baby eating incident, so I think it’s just the way of rodents.
A friend of mine got a few guinea pigs on assureances from the pet store that the pigs were A) quiet and B) all female. Neither of these statements was true, so I’d add “loud” and “fecund” to that list.
Some West African frogs have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single sex environment.
Just sayin’.
Guinea pigs are great but as a child part of the thrill of owning them was never knowing whether we’d come back from school to find four, eight, or three guinea pigs.
Rats are the greatest! As long as you get them properly acclimated to people, they love to just sorta chill in your pockets while you’re watching tv or browsing the internets 🙂
mice are HORRIFIC and will do all the horrible things hamsters do and smell worse
Once had to cope with a mouse who had a litter of babies and then two days later ATE THEIR FACES OFF. Just the face parts.
Ugh, mice.
My parents thought they were being nice by getting me three mice for my 9th (?) birthday. They never ate one another (thank goodness!), but they did smell terrible and were never trained to be comfortable being handled/put in your pocket/etc., but I still loved them.
Unfortunately, my dad had gotten them somehow through the medical lab he worked for, and so as time went on, they all eventually grew enormous cancerous tumors and died (as was their genetic potential, I assume.)
In addition to this trauma, I found out years later that my mom had tried to drug the last surviving mouse with painkillers to put it out of its misery, but it still didn’t die. I was appalled by this revelation at the time (Mom is an attempted pet murderer!), but I now think I would have done something similar in her shoes.
I had three pet mice. Now I have two. They are cannibals. All three used to be nicely hand trained, but after the cannibal incident, the survivors started biting me as well. It is fortunate for the tiny furry jerks that I have firm opinions about not feeding pets to snakes even if they turn out to be assholes.
I had a variety of hamsters, several of which had babies, and there was no eating of anybody! I’m now feeling VERY grateful for my noncannibalistic pets.
Me too! I actually had two male hamsters, kept them in a cage together, and nothing untoward happened. They were pretty chill roommates. They lived to a ripe old hamster-age. I used to feed them baby carrots and sunflower seeds as special treats. One died not long after the other–from loneliness, we said, but more likely from old age. I was out of town with my grandma when they died, and my parents buried them in the backyard under the linden tree.
We had a pygmy hedgehog and gerbil that shared a cage…until we noticed that the gerbil was chewing a bald spot on the little spiky guy. So gross. And uncomfortable I imagine.
Oh gosh. This story is tragic in a variety of ways.
do you remember why we named him peto??
my brother had two hamsters, hazel and mazel, and one bit the other in the chest, producing a huge bubble of internal bleeding that eventually burst gruesomely. they were AWFUL to each other. but at least no EATING occurred, cripes.
(in contrast, i had two rats, sugar and spice, who absolutely adored each other and when spice died, sugar mourned for her sister in a way that was genuinely heartbreaking.)
Something similar happened to me when I was 9 – one of my hamsters attacked the other one, which died of its wounds. As I cradled it in my hand. I had wrapped it in a hand towel and was holding it under a desk lamp because for some reason I thought that if I kept it warm, it would get better, but it DIED in my hand as my tears fell over his fur and his beady little eyes in which the light of life was slowly but inexorably dimming, and did I mention I was NINE? I’m 25 now and I haven’t fully gotten over it.
I ended up giving the other hamster away to a classmate of mine because I just could not stand to look at him anymore. I couldn’t bring myself to take care of a murderer.
Despite the murderous actions of his namesake, everyone should really watch Grant in Notorious. Ingrid Bergman acts the hell out of a hangover and wears fabulous headwear in it.
Recommendation seconded! Also, the name makes that Duran Duran song play on a loop in my head.
NO-NO…. NOTORIOUS!
DOGS. That is all.
HARDLY EVER EAT EACH OTHER WITHOUT GOOD REASON
It is a scientific fact that hamsters are the devil’s cotton balls.
I laughed so hard at “devil’s cotton balls.” Thank you for this.
This makes me feel much better about the eventual fate of various snake farm donations.
Agreed. As a snake owner, it is my (not so) humble opinion that small rodents are fit only to be food for my Pythagoras*. This post only confirms it.
(*I am blissfully and deliberately ignoring the fact that we know full well if we put another, smaller ball python in there, Pyth would probably eat the newcomer. Animals, man….animals.)
For how can one love a cannibal?
The age-old question…
My sister’s rat once had 17 babies. As it happens when a mammal has SEVENTEEN FREAKING BABIES a lot of the died in infancy. We’d wake up in the morning to find that the other rats had feasted on the bodies of the deceased rat-babies during the night. It was terrifying.
Now I have a (male) hedgehog who lives by himself and will never get pregnant or have a companion he could eat. Small animals are terrifying.
I have a pet lizard and wanted to try a new food for him, so one day I dumped a tiny hissing cockroach into his cage. The roach immediately hid itself by burying in the sand. Out he pops a month later and he’s about 2 inches long. He’s gloriously gross and also fascinating. I named him Steve-o. Lizard never ate him. Once, Steve-o escaped, my dog found him, and brought him to bed YES MY BED. I put him back with Lizard.
I would hear them fighting sometimes, Lizard fussing around and stepping all over Steve-o, ignoring him while he hissed furiously. *hiss! hiss! hiss!* *scrape-thump*
Then Steve-o died and I was actually truly sad. He was Lizard’s roommate and my little pet. He mainly ate apples, and probably lizard poop.
The perfidy of the pet store!
Most hamster breeds are solitary once they’re out of infancy. The only exception is dwarf hamsters–but they are tiny, evil monsters that eat their owners instead of their cage-mates.
Hell, I’m feeling very good about owning a pit bull now. I guess with rodents the rule is the cuter the animal, the more horrific its acts.