On a small road just outside the city limits, we stopped and got online. It worked like a charm, and even though Tom pecked the wrong key occasionally, we got it done and had three tickets waiting to be picked up at the airport—one to Mumbai, one to Tel Aviv, and one to Istanbul. (Nonstop! :)) It was gonna work! I couldn’t believe it, it was gonna work. We sipped some water from a nearby stream and headed to the concrete jungle.
Tickets were one thing, we could do that without talking. But now we had to figure out a way to get to the airport without being stopped along the way.
Wandering through the actual city, with the asphalt starting to irritate my feet, we spied a man in an apron exit the back of a bar toward a dumpster in the dirty alleyway, dumping what looked like a lot of good food into it, just throwing it away. Like a week’s worth of food.
We approached the dumpster warily. A few rats were already in there fighting over the food. They looked at us with murder in their eyes. I said, “Don’t worry, good rats, it looks like there’s plenty for everyone.”
“Plenty for everyone—ha! What are you doing here, country folk? This is rat turf. You won’t survive three days here. Welcome to the jungle, baby, you’re gonna die!” (See Rose, Axl.) And then the little bastard shot at me and bit me right above the hoof and drew blood. I couldn’t believe it. He laughed. “You get high?” he asked. This kid was nuts. “I got sense, blow, ecstasy—whatevs you want. You just left the farm for the pharmacy.”
My mouth dropped open, nothing to say. He laughed again. “You’ll come looking for me. Remember, first one’s free.” And off he went. He turned back when he was almost gone. “Oh, and piggy,” he sneered, “I left you a special little somethin’ in there. Buon appetito, hicks.”
Now I don’t like to judge any animal, and I knew some rats back at the farm who were good people, smart, industrious, enterprising—family very important to them, solid species. So these rats were weird, and the only conclusion I could draw is that’s what living in a crowded city stripped of nature does to you, can drive you a little crazy. ’Cause these city rats were real a-holes. Real rat finks.
The three of us went dumpster diving. I was shocked at what people throw away. You could feed dozens of animals with this so-called garbage, half-eaten rolls, rice, good greens. None of it made sense, people didn’t make sense, but we were starving so we all just dug in. I was munching on some romaine lettuce when I heard a feeble squeal behind me. It was Shalom. He was frozen, his eyes wide in fear, his lips quivering like a baby’s. What? I asked him. What what? But the cat had his tongue, he could only point. There, on a piece of a poppy-seed roll, was a creamy white substance, kind of gross-looking, throwing off some greasy oily color as it went bad. I’d never seen it before. I sniffed it. It smelled pretty good. I licked it. It tasted pretty good.
SHALOM (aka Jerry)
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I stopped in mid-lick like somebody was taking my picture. SHALOM was trying to get a word out but he was stuttering terribly.
SHALOM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMM …
ELSIE
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmwhat?
SHALOM
MMMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAAAA
ELSIE
Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam?
SHALOM
MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE!
ELSIE
Okay, it’s mayonnaise, what’s the big whoop?
SHALOM
MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE!
ELSIE
Stop screaming!
TOM came fluttering over, and nodding like the coroner on a bad TV show, said under his breath—
TOM
Ah yes, mayonnaise …
SHALOM
MAYONNAISE!
ELSIE
What on earth is going on?
TOM
There is a very popular sandwich among humans, one that’s been popular for decades, one that incorporates mayonnaise as its customary dressing. It’s called a [whispering] BLT. [He pronounced it “blit.”]
ELSIE
A blit?
SHALOM
BLT!
TOM
Well, how to be delicate here?… The L and T stand for lettuce and tomato.
ELSIE
Fine.
SHALOM
NOT FINE!
TOM
And the B stands for …
SHALOM
Don’t say it! Do not say the word that shall not be spoken!
TOM
Bacon?
SHALOM
No, not the B word!
And he started spazzing out, banging his head against the inside of the dumpster, trying to get away from the sandwich. I understood. His B word was my V word. I guess we all have our words. It wasn’t pleasant. Tom had now taken Shalom under his big useless wing and was comforting him, stroking his snout.
TOM
There, there. It’s all very psychological, probably goes back to his mother, that sow, but … um … acon-bay.
SHALOM
What? What did you say?
TOM
Acon-bay, what? Nothing … anyway, acon-bay is like kryptonite to a pig, that and ork-pay.
SHALOM
What? You think I don’t know pig Latin? Pigs created pig Latin! That’s why it’s called PIG LATIN!
ELSIE
That’s what those nasty rats were talking about.
TOM
Relax, I said ork-pay. Anyway, these are certain things that strike to the heart— CRANBERRY SAUCE! CRANBERRY SAUCE! CRANBERRY SAUCE!
Out of nowhere now, TOM was completely losing it, jumping up and down, fluttering madly, his wings kicking up food and gunk everywhere. Especially this gelatinous crimson substance that was so inorganic it still had grooves from sitting in a metal can.
ELSIE
So? Cranberry sauce … so what?
SHALOM
Don’t you mean an-cray erry-bay auce-say?
TOM
So what, you ask me. So what, she asks. So what. I will tell you so what. Every Thanksgiving next to the dead bird, next to the murdered turkey—they set the cranberry sauce. Cranberry sauce is a traitor. Cranberry sauce is the enabler of Thanksgiving. Cranberry sauce is the Benedict Arnold of condiments. Cranberries grow in a bog and they should stay in a bog. What’s a bog?
SHALOM
APPLESAUCE!
ELSIE
Oh shit, here we go again.
Now I had a turkey jumping up and down yelling “Cranberry sauce!” and a pig still fixated on bacon and newly worried that ork-pay ops-chay might be lurking near the apple auce-say—all he needed was a slice of omato-tay to send him squealing over the edge. And I was wondering if I was the last animal on earth to realize that humans eat us all and not only that, they throw most of us out without even eating us, throw us away like worthless garbage. I mean, if I’m gonna be killed for food, at least eat me and poop me out and let me rejoin the circle of nature. Don’t kill me for no reason at all. And that’s when I saw it—a half-eaten hamburger. And that’s when I lost it too. I started mooing like a banshee. The entire country was mad and it was making me mad. I thought, This is what it’s like to be a mad cow.
27
KOSHER KORNER
Shalom was in bad shape. Pigs don’t bounce back so fast, not known for their resiliency are pigs. They tend to roll in the deep mud. We had a few hours to kill before we had to be at the airport and we needed to pick up a few things, so I decided we should find Little Israel, the part of town that was heavily Jewish. I thought Shalom might be happy to get a taste of the world he was about to enter.
We found the neighborhood and popped into a clothing store to buy a couple of raincoats and some glasses and hats as disguises. I say “buy,” but we actually stole. It was easy, no one expects a cow or a pig or a turkey to steal a pair of Ray-Bans (product placement) and velvet shorts like the guy from AC/DC, so they look right through you and do not see you. People see what they think they�
��ll see and unless you do something really stupid, you can be invisible. Then we went into a bookstore and lifted some books on Judaism for Shalom and a Star of David for him to wear around his neck and a yarmulke for his head.
Shalom was perking up, smiling at the men walking by in the big fur hats and the women in the drab, colorless clothes. He started nodding at folks, and saying “My people!” and “Shalom, brother, Shabbat shalom” and a bunch of words I didn’t understand. People took a wide berth around him. The pig was right, these people did not want to touch him. They looked at him like he was crazy, and I’m not sure they were wrong.
A couple of wiseass kids flew by on their bikes, almost clipping us, and Shalom yelled, “You little schmucks!” He started using those foreign words, he called it Yiddish, but it sounded a lot like pig German, and I think he made it up like pig Latin. He spoke this Yiddish at passersby and a strange new accent subtly and then not so subtly took over his voice, like he was from Poland by way of Brooklyn. He said the kids were “meshuga.” At one point he yelled out: “Remember the six million!” He started complaining about the “goyim,” and that he was going to find himself a “shiksa.” I thought, Isn’t that a type of razor to shave with? A Schick? (Product placement.) What did I know, there aren’t a lot of Jewish animals in upstate New York outside the Catskills.
Shalom started dancing the hora and singing “If I were a rich pig, hamma deedy dada deedy dada dum…” from Fiddler on the Hoof. When he finished with that, he started in on any Barbra Streisand song he knew, and then it was on to the Neil Diamond songbook. No one seemed to care, though, not even the chair. Then, suddenly, Shalom stopped mid-Diamond.
Cliffhanger!!!
28
THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST
(see Stevens, Cat)
“I have to find a mohel!” he announced. “Who?” I asked. We were in high spirits to match his high spirits.
“Not who, what. A mohel is a man skilled in the art of removing the foreskin from a Jewish man’s penis.”
“Like a penis tailor?” offered Tom helpfully.
(My editor loves that joke. I’m on the fence.)
“Oy gevalt. You are foul. If you must be pedestrian, yes, like a ‘penis tailor.’ I am a Jew, but I have a goyische schmeckel, and my petzl would like to convert. It is a seal on the covenant between man and God, and I don’t feel comfortable going to Israel with a fully intacto schlong, if you know what I’m saying.”
(Let me add a note here that my editor says that “the double entendre is the lingua franca of kids’ movies.” Whatever that means.)
I was uncomfortable with everything he was saying, with this whole line of thinking, but it was clear Shalom was passionate about trimming a certain part of his anatomy and donating it to the glory of his god, so Tom googled a mohel in the neighborhood and there were like five in the vicinity. Who says you can never find a mohel when you need one?
We found the mohel’s address. Shalom seemed to lose his nerve momentarily, but then he produced a bottle of Manischewitz (product placement) he must have lifted and swilled three healthy gulps. He invited Tom to accompany him, saying he was sure he could get two snips for the price of one, but Tom said thanks but no thanks. “How long will this take?” I asked. Shalom said, “A good while. See, it takes an hour to mow a small lawn and a couple of hours to mow a big lawn, if you catch my drift.” Then he turned on his hoof with bravado and went inside.
“So we’ll be back in ten minutes,” Tom called out after him.
As we waited for Shalom to finish with the mohel, or rather for the mohel to finish with Shalom, Tom and I strolled the quiet neighborhood. It didn’t feel quite as safe without our pig muscle as I looked at some sausages in butcher’s windows and then—oh, my mind reels at the thought—tongue, sliced thinly on rye. I got a little light-headed, I could have barfed. Tom was nervous too, ’cause he heard a lot of turkey sandwiches get ordered. Luckily, we had put on our raincoats, hats, and glasses so no one seemed to know who, or rather what, we were.
29
JUST A LITTLE OFF THE TOP
After about fifteen minutes, we made our way back to the mohel. The door opened, and there stood Shalom, a makeshift diaper around his waist and a lollipop in his mouth. If it’s possible for a pig to be paler and whiter and pinker than usual, he was paler and whiter and pinker than usual.
“That was quick,” Tom said, trying to make light.
Shalom’s face was ashen. “My poor schvantz. We shall never speak of what happened in there. Is that clear?”
Tom and I both nodded, stifling laughter.
“Ever,” Shalom said, “never ever ever. That man, that man is a butcher! I’ve seen things. I tell you I’ve seen things a pig should not see. Things that cannot be unseen. What just happened never happened.”
We started away. “Let me get this straight,” Tom said, tongue firmly in beak. “Not a word ever about the mohel and the shtupper?”
Shalom, limping slightly, hissed, “Don’t say that word.”
“C’mon, forget it. It’s already such a schlong schlong time ago.” Tom was convulsing.
“Schmuck.”
“What word? Mohel?” I asked.
“Oh, everybody’s a comedian!” grunted Shalom.
Tom couldn’t help himself. “Never Say Mohel … wasn’t that a James Bond movie—Never Say Mohel Again?”
“Enough with the pupik jokes, you putz.”
A few moments of silence, then: “Moo-yl,” I lowed.
“Zip it!”
“What? I was mooing,” I said. “You can’t ask a cow not to moo-yl.”
“Not funny, guys, my diaper is chafing. You goyim are all alike.”
30
FLY LIKE AN EAGLE, OR A SQUIRREL
We knew we were getting close to the airport because the planes overhead started getting louder and louder and lower and lower. I noticed Tom was studying them intently, and flapping his wings a little. “What are you doing?” I asked. “It doesn’t look so hard,” he said, “to fly.”
And with that, he took a running start, flapping madly, trying to get airborne. Maybe he got a couple of inches off the ground. Maybe. “You see that?” he said. “I flew!”
“Yeah, yeah…” I lied.
“Check this out,” and he took off running again toward the edge of a little hill we were on, belting out the old Steve Miller classic, “I want to fly like an eagle…”
With that he jumped as high as he could off the cliff, seemed to hover for a moment, and then sank straight down like a stone. Shalom and I ran to the edge and looked down just in time to see Tom hit the ground with a grunt and a thud and roll a few times beak over tailfeather. It was funny the way a cartoon is funny.
Tom rolled to a stop, stood up, and exhaled. “That is another thing that never happened.”
“What never happened, you succumbing to the harsh law of gravity?” asked Shalom, tongue in snout. “I see you can dish but you can’t take, what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.”
“Yeah, never happened,” shouted Tom as he scampered back up the hill. “Like the mohel never happened, like your circum—”
Shalom cut Tom off. “I get it. No need to elaborate,” he said as he adjusted his diaper.
“Saw what?” I asked.
We walked on in silence for a while. I could see Shalom stealing glances at Tom, sensing Tom’s dream had died a little, and it seemed to soften the pig. Finally, Shalom said, “That thing that didn’t happen?”
“Yeah,” answered Tom, wary of an attack.
“Dude, I swear, maybe you didn’t fly, but you were gliding like a badass,” Shalom offered.
“Really?” asked Tom, cheering up just a bit. “Gliding is a lot like flying, isn’t it?” he said.
And now Shalom grinned. “Gliding like a goddamn flying squirrel, my avian friend, like a goddamn flying squirrel.”
31
A TERMINAL CASE
The airport terminal was
very big and confusing, but we knew we had to make it to one of those automated ticket machines. Tom was still in denial. “Maybe I’ll just glide myself to Turkey. Who needs a plane?”
I protested. “No, Tom, we need your beak, neither Shalom nor I have prehensile fingers, your beak is the nearest thing we have to a finger, please don’t glide away.”
“Okay, friend, for you I will temporarily ground Air Turkey.”
“I appreciate that,” I said as we entered the terminal.
I was so happy our disguises were working.
I’m sure we made for an interesting sight—big ol’ me, well over six feet on my hind legs (Oy, as Shalom would say, was my back killing me), in a beige raincoat and sunglasses, and Shalom dressed in the velvet pants of a little schoolboy, holding our pet turkey by the leash.
We had had the foresight to register Tom as a comfort turkey, an emotional-support fowl. There was a program where you could get your dog permitted to travel in the cabin with you rather than in storage to comfort you if you were a nervous flyer, and we were able to get Tom the same accreditation online. He had taken the course on the phone, and had learned some rudimentary therapeutic insights. Which made him very annoying. He kept lapsing into a German accent and saying things like “Zat pig has ein ‘edible complex’” or “Tell me about your mother.” He told me the pain in my hooves was all in my head, and I told him the pain in my hooves was gonna be all in his ass if he didn’t quit it.
“Apparently, you are having some transference resistance. I should get a pipe. Would you respect me more if I smoked a pipe?” he asked me.
Tom’s other problem was that the leash made him very nervous and sweaty. Anything around his neck made him nervous, and I understood—his greatest primal fear, one that was in his DNA, passed down from centuries of turkeys that had endured the peculiar American custom of Thanksgiving, was of the chopping block. His neck stretched out long and the blade glinting through the air coming down at light speed, his truncated life flashing before his eyes.
“Shut up!” Tom barked. I hadn’t realized I’d been saying that last bit out loud.
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