Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [70]
We’d finally calmed Bentley down with a rawhide chew, but every once in a while he would glance in the direction of the glass and growl.
I went back to my computer and saw that the Undertaker was online. The Undertaker is a friend of mine, an actual former undertaker who now works in website development.
I sent him an instant message. “Hey. There’s a opossum loose in the yard. How do I kill it?”
He replied instantly. “Tylenol.”
I wrote, “U sure?”
“Yup.”
“How do u no?”
“Cause. Killed neighbor girl’s kitten with it.”
I said to Dennis, “I have to call the Undertaker, can you hand me the phone.”
After rummaging though my sixteen-year-old Filofax, I found the Undertaker’s phone number scrawled on an old, yellow Post-It note. I phoned him, and he answered on the first ring, as though expecting my call. “Yup?”
“Hey, it’s me,” I said.
“Yeah? So?” he said.
“So wait. You killed the neighbor girl’s kitten?”
He chuckled. “The fucking thing would come to my basement window, and it would make all these little yowling sounds all night long. So I went online and found out that Tylenol is fatal to cats. So I gave it some crushed up and mixed into a can of tuna.”
“That’s horrible,” I said. “You live in a basement?”
He said, “Yeah, well. The house has two floors, but I like the basement best.”
“Oh, you would. You really would. You are such an undertaker.”
Again, he laughed, pleased.
“And I can’t believe you killed a little girl’s kitten. That’s something serial killers do. That’s how it starts, with pets.”
“Oh, stop,” he said. “Cats are a dime a fucking dozen.”
I couldn’t argue with him. As much as I’m a dog person, I’m not a cat person. Still, I would never kill one. Shave it and paint it blue with food coloring? Okay, twist my arm. But I certainly wouldn’t kill one. I killed a mouse that crawled in my tub once, and I still feel guilty about it, ten years later.
“I think you’re a bad person,” I told him. “But do you think the Tylenol trick would work on this creature?”
He said, “It’s worth a try.”
After I hung up, I thought about this some more. Did normal Americans kill everything that caused them trouble? Was this what normal people did? Dennis and I were not only new to the country, but I am not normal in any way. So it’s very hard for me to know.
It was pretty clear that more mothers than you’d think routinely killed their kids with bathtubs and heavy rocks. My own mother was of this same strain. But that was appalling and certainly not representative.
But then I considered the statistics: each year four million dogs are “put down” in animal shelters. And twice as many cats. And even at our local supermarket, there is a glue trap designed especially for snakes.
There isn’t a house in all of Connecticut that doesn’t have a twelve-hundred-dollar “bug zapper” from Brookstone in the backyard. And these are often designed to emit a pleasing glow yet destroy everything that flies into them.
And, of course, in New York City there are entire committees of suit-wearing professionals devoted to the destruction of rats in Central Park.
So it did seem that the American way of dealing with a pest was to make a kill.
I was hoping for a less nefarious solution, so I called my friend Suzanne, who lives in California. Suzanne is one of these people who is always smiling and you can see her smile, even over the phone. She is quintessentially Californian in this way. “Set a trap,” she said. “And then you can take it into a field and let it go.”
But this required a bit more of a relationship with the opossum than I was willing to have. I just wanted it to go away from wherever it came from and leave me and my dog’s shit alone. The idea of trapping the scavenger in some sort of contraption and then going on a little nature hike with it just so I could then let it go seemed like more than an act of kindness than I was capable. That, to me, was approaching an act of God.
Wasn