Taxidermy

I WANTED TO BE A TAXIDERMIST FROM AN EARLY AGE. People who know me say it’s because I experienced a succession of traumatic and premature pet deaths when I was a child: Mauritz, my hamster, was sucked up by the vacuum cleaner after only a week; Katzluxsky, a Prussian Blue-looking tomcat, lasted six months before being decapitated by my father’s unattended chainsaw and Po-na-nehenza, the terrapin my aunt bought for my birthday, drowned after becoming jammed in the U-bend of the downstairs toilet overnight.

I felt most sorry for Po-na-nehenza: he might have survived if we’d found him sooner, but no-one used the downstairs bathroom overnight because it was where the Ghost of Gordon hid, Gordon being our allegedly pedophilic neighbor who died after breaking his neck following a fall from a stepladder in his bedroom whilst trying to change a light bulb. My brother said the Ghost of Gordon hid in the downstairs bathroom so he could look at our penii: my brother went through a phase of pluralizing things by appending a 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, because my brother actually had a glass eye on account of him poking his left one out with a pen when he was about three, although I don’t really remember that because I was only a few months old at the time and had probably just learned that poking at 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 supersedes intelligence when you’re a kid, which was why my brother scotched any theories of mine that Gordon really was trying to replace a light bulb, and that maybe he wasn’t a pedophile but just a lonely person who smelled because he didn’t ever clean his house since his wife died, and this was also why it was an undisputed fact that Gordon once tried to put the moves on my brother, only he (my brother) used his near-lethal martial-arts-type skills on him (Gordon) which was why Gordon started walking with a limp that time and talked as though one side of his face was melting, but I wasn’t to tell our parents because they’d only send him off somewhere so the government could use his incredible powers to fight bad people, and if that happened then he wouldn’t ever be around ever again to stop the kids at school from taking my lunch money and tying my shoes together so tight I had to crawl home after school.

I’ll admit, my brother was pretty handy when things like that happened, so I didn’t say anything, but even after all that I still felt 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 rather than use the upstairs bathroom, a part of the house I didn’t like at all because of the carpeted floor, which was a pretty disgusting feature when you considered that both my brother and my father went in there too, and urine on a tiled floor, like the downstairs bathroom had, was one thing because you could mop it up, but urine on a carpeted floor was just the worst, only at least the upstairs bathroom didn’t have a pedophilic poltergeist lurking in it, 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 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 erection from seeing Po-na-nehenza’s terrapinny ass poking out of the water 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 is the reason why, very early on in my career, I took great care in stuffing a hamster, a cat and a terrapin, each of which I named Mauritz mk. II, Katzluxsky the Second and The Return of Po-na-nehenza respectively and which 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 know me who don’t know me. You know? What I’m saying is it’s pretty hard to meet people who don’t know you when you’re a taxidermist, because outside of your existing circle of friends, many of whom think you’re a bit odd because you’re a taxidermist, the only people you really spend time with are other taxidermists who, in turn, tend not to know anyone not associated in some tangible way with their work. You get excluded from the more everyday dialogues too: let’s say I was at a party, a party thrown by existing friends that is, because taxidermists hardly ever throw parties; they’re more likely to host a conference where someone from another taxidermists’ association come in and talks about a new technique they’ve discovered, which is unlikely because the only really interesting development that has occurred 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’m at a party and someone introduces themselves to me, they’ll say, “So what do you do?” and I’ll say, “I’m a taxidermist,” and they’ll say, “Get out!” and I’ll say, “No, seriously,” after which they’ll either make their excuses and leave, or else they’ll start asking forward and/or inappropriate questions, like what sort of things do I taxiderm, and what do I fill those things with, and—in one instance—have I ever thought about stuffing a human male and giving him an enhanced dick to use as a sex toy, which I thought was pretty fucked up on three counts:

1. the obvious
2. he assumed I was into men, which I am but he didn’t know that, and
3. he also made his excuses and I heard back from friends 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 just want to know exactly why I became a taxidermist, which is I think where we came in.

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you were younger? Like, my brother wanted to be a spy, my cousin wanted to be a show-jumper, and my best friend from school wanted to be the Queen. Yet how many people do you know who actually became those things? Not many I’ll bet. My brother is a bailiff, my cousin works in a bank and my best friend from school is a hooker. I know this latter fact because when I was taking a short-cut back home one night, after the aforementioned party, I cut through a back alley and disturbed some girl giving head to a guy in faded denim jeans and matching jacket, which is never a good look, particularly when the jeans are around your ankles and you’re not in the habit of wearing underwear, so I mumbled an apology and hurried away, but the girl turned around and there was this popping noise – kind of like when you open a tube of Pringles – and she said “Oh my god, J___!”, which is my name, and it turned out she was my friend from school and had recognized me, although I would not have recognized her because it had been maybe ten years since we’d last seen each other and I’d never seen her with someone’s penis in her mouth, but she told me to meet her at a bar around the corner in five minutes and we had a drink together, which is how I know she became a hooker.

The point is, hardly anyone becomes the things they wanted to be. After graduating, I went through a series of painfully dehumanizing jobs, ones which left me miserable and defeated to the extent that one day I found myself staring down a toilet bowl, water fizzing with a recently deposited chemical effervescence, wondering if Po-na-nehenza’s fate had really been so bad, on a cold tiled floor; cold, but dry and thankfully not stained with urine, since I lived alone and sat down when using the toilet because, as previously established, I didn’t possess 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 stop, like when I was a kid and would run down a really steep hill 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 impossible, 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 a dick, and I learned that my best friend from school was pretty happy being a hooker, although she still wished she could be the Queen only 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 the Queen in the first place, but if I think back over the last few 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 people who don’t like stuffing dead animals, that everybody still wishes 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 taking things apart and putting them back together.