by Lorene Farnsworth
I could hear the squeaking of hamster wheels before I even got all the way through the backyard. If I was a stranger and didn’t know they were in cages, I probably wouldn’t have ventured any further than the back door of our house. The cages were multi-colored and Frank had affixed them to the two longer walls of the garage. There were ten across, five vertical, fifty on each wall; which made one hundred blue, green and red hamster cages in all. There were slides and tunnels and little doors, water bottles and feeders hung in every wing and hamster wheels abounded, complete with every one of Mom’s little round compact mirrors, which Frank had mounted on the wall next to every wheel, just in case the jogging hamster needed to check out how tight his buns were getting after a day at the gym. Every cage was connected, so that the hamsters had free run to visit their friends and families.
Frank told us the drugs were to help his back and our mother told us that the drugs were to cure Dad’s chronic ‘hiatal hernias.’ I recently looked up the spelling for hiatal and an online article informed me the condition involves: ‘heartburn, nausea, and regurgitation.’ Smelling a rat, I typed in my father’s physical symptoms at that time and found a far different condition; it looks to me that my father was suffering from what they call, ‘chronic pilonidal abscesses.’ I thought heartburn, nausea and regurgitation didn’t sound at all like something that would require the use of a thick, rubber donut to sit down on in the car. The only thing I can think is that my mother must’ve been uncomfortable with the word ‘abscess.’ I can’t say as I blame her, for it does conjure up some nasty images. Simply put, Dad needed to keep his weight down and every time he didn’t the dread pilonidal abscess would emerge, inevitably followed by the dull, red,
rubber donut and an escalated dose of Frank’s nasty attitude, caused in part by the pharmaceutical amphetamines he was able to obtain from the hospital dispensary where he worked.
Since our father was not one to keep his unhappiness to himself, whenever we saw the rubber donut my sister and I would try to make ourselves scarce, which is not an easy task, living in a military base house. At first, we were glad to see Frank find a drug that helped, but we quickly realized that, although he was losing a lot of weight, and apparently was canker free; amphetamines didn’t seem to have much of a calming effect on him. In fact, he was worse than we had ever seen him. Always in motion, grinding his teeth, sniffing constantly, Frank became more nervous and volatile than ever and we longed for the days when all he had was a butt canker and a foul mood that might go away when the canker did. Ironically the drugs had turned our father’s whole being into one giant, unstable, butt canker.
Edwards Air Force Base is a place so dismal that it is only surpassed by the Azores and certain parts of Georgia. And that’s where we went to live, after being lulled into a false sense of security by the four, comparatively strife free, years outside of London, England. Edwards is not one of those bases that people are falling all over themselves to live in, not like Germany or England. Everybody wants to live in Germany and England because they speak English and they obligingly sell you cool shit like beer steins and figurines of the Royal Family.
Diane and I tried to stay outside as much as possible when Frank was raving, but that was hard, because outside sucked. Outside was a desert, with snakes and spiders, all of whom were vying to kill us from minute to minute; outside was 110 degrees, with no shade trees and kids
who hated you because you were new and you talked funny. Outside were Air Force lifers who hurled their infants into the deep end of the pool to toughen them up, outside was country music and guys who greased their hair back with so much goop that it you could smell it cooking in the sun when they walked by. Once, Diane and I watched our 16 year old next door neighbor run out of her house screaming and waving her arms. The front of her ruffled midriff blouse was on fire. I was three years younger than that girl, but I knew as soon as I saw her that she must have leaned over the gas stove when she was cooking. We stood and watched the guy from across the street put her out, taking her down and embracing her from behind, rolling her face first, back and forth into the brittle, yellow lawn. He finally smothered the flames, but she was burned enough for the ambulance to come, so I tried not to laugh at how stupid she was.
There is always a water shortage in the desert and for the four years we lived on base, no one was allowed to water their lawn, and we were even asked to conserve on toilet flushing. The military police patrolled the base, shining their silver, metal flashlights into people’s yards at night, looking for any signs of a suspiciously green lawn. However, my father’s racing metabolism was dead set on procuring an English style country garden in the Mojave Desert. Possessing the boundless energy pharmaceuticals lent him, he went ahead and threw up an eight foot high wood fence around our entire backyard, and Diane and I handed him the nails and tried not to look like we were thinking anything about how fucking crazy he was. The whole project took him only two days since he didn’t have to sleep, or pay attention to any pesky child labor laws, and when it was completed Frank watered his back yard triumphantly, free of any prying eyes- and that’s when the madness started. We began driving up weekly into the mountains to
visit the state parks, where Frank wrenched up small forests worth of conifers and ferns to transplant to our barren backyard, and every morning at three am, he went out back and watered his lawn till dawn. No big deal, he was awake.
Soon our backyard was an English bower, with bushy foliage and climbing vines and little benches. Our dog, Bobby, named after the Scottish terrier who spent the rest of its life lying
on top of its master’s grave, (dream on, Frank) lived in a state of the art doghouse, complete with a canopied veranda. The canopy went up after Dad noticed one afternoon that Bobby was getting sun in his eyes as he sat in front of his new doghouse. I suggested sunglasses, but Dad didn’t
have much of a sense of humor in those days, so I was back to holding nails, helping him build a doghouse veranda canopy. This idyllic life could have continued along indefinitely, barring war or transfers, but for the hamsters.
The hamsters had seemed like a great idea at the time, but I’m sure that’s what the assassin thought when he shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and began World War I. Frank got it into his head that Diane and I needed more responsibility, maybe we had dropped a nail or something, I don’t remember. The gist of it was that he thought the ownership of a couple of small pets might teach us how to take care of something outside our small, slovenly, self-involved little persons. So, sometime in July of 1963, we piled into the car and drove the thirty miles into Bakersfield because we desperately needed two hamsters. The hamsters were cute, we liked them and they liked us, as far as we could tell, and Diane and I actually got to play with them for a few days. We fed them and cleaned their cages and proved all around that we weren’t the little sociopaths that Frank thought we were. Everything was going along well until Dad decided he needed to make the hamsters a built-in cage in the garage. It was done by morning,
we heard him hammering and cursing long into the night, and the next day when we went out to look at the cage, it was a thing of beauty.
Frank had outdone himself, it was a rodent theme park, we wished we were small enough to go inside and play with them and as it turned out, shrinking to their size would be the only way we ever would. For the hamsters were in the domain of Frank now. He had enjoyed building the cage for them, he had loved playing with them, and he decided that we could wait a few years to learn responsibility after all. Just like that, our father had repossessed our hamsters.
Since the cages allowed the hamsters a rich social life, it didn’t take long before there were twelve hamsters, then twenty-five, then sixty-five, and so on, and infinitum was only a matter of time. For each new batch of hamsters we couldn’t play with, Frank built another set of cages, still all connecting, complete with all the cunning little doors, slides and tunnels. Frank seemed not to be getting the connection between the open access hamster thoroughfare and the exploding hamster population, and he was behaving as if a garage full of hamsters in the Mojave Desert would go unnoticed by the local authorities indefinitely. Near the end of the summer, there were exactly 100 cages in the garage, fifty on each of the long walls, covering every inch of wall from ceiling to floor, ten cages wide, five cages vertically. The hamster count hovered somewhere around 300, depending upon on how many births there were that week. And that’s when the rattlers started coming to call.
Frank’s high fence kept most of the marauding snakes out and he managed to beat to death those hamster-crazed enough to-somehow- jump over an eight foot fence. By then, even Frank had realized the hamsters were getting to be a problem, so he started giving them away to the local kids, who of course began losing them and letting them escape into the desert, doing their part to attract the drooling rattlers to the base faster than greedy old bachelors to a pancake breakfast.
Soon, everyone in the neighborhood had serious snake problems and everyone knew just who was responsible for it; since ‘their little bastards’ had promptly turned Frank in, and it wasn’t long before the military police came to our door. The one thing I miss about living in the military is that you’re not allowed to be crazy. Well, you can be a little crazy, but not to the point where your craziness starts spurting out stuff like hamsters and rattlesnakes. The military will shut your crazy ass down, which is what happened to Frank that day. The MPs gave him two choices, which I thought was nice of them, considering. Choice number one was to put his herd of hamsters into the car the next morning, drive them back to the pet store in Bakersfield and drop them off. Or, choice number two was: ‘We will come in and shoot them, one by one, tomorrow evening.’ The next morning, as we were driving into Bakersfield, I was relieved to see that Frank was using his red rubber donut again, so maybe that back medication hadn’t worked out so well for him after all.
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