The Petting Zoo

There’s this God-damned ostrich. He’s looking at me sideways, like birds do, through that pitiless orb. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain, the books tell us. The ostrich cannot fly.

Peck.

I am six and screaming in a brown wide-wale corduroy jacket with a hood and Stride-Rite corrective shoes, holding the top of my head. I’ve neither the sense nor inclination to run, as I am bound by fear. The ostrich is moving slowly, each foot gliding to meet each new step, keeping that big rolling eye on his flightless prey. Again, I am pecked.

The dentist will give you awfully interesting drugs to make things easier during surgery. With an Ativan in your belly, your sinuses full of laughing gas, and your veins full of drip drip drip Demerol, you’re just as happy to have your legs sawn off, rob a liquor store, or walk through a shopping mall on Christmas Eve as have teeth pulled out. Same thing is true with a petting zoo.

Most of these animals don’t want to be touched, at least not in the way a dog wants a deep-tissue massage at the base of her tail. But we want to touch all the animals; the goats, the sheep, the pigs, the Godforsaken ostrich. All a person has to do is get the animals loaded on dentist drugs to have a petting zoo. The lion under the influence of opiates will gladly lie down with the lamb. A boy in Stride-Rides can, hypothetically, pet an ostrich.

On Thursdays, my Mom and Dad had their evening out while I was left in the care of my grandmother Dee. I called her Dee out of a lack of respect. Respect for elders is a big thing where I come from, yes sir. No ma’am. Even at six, though, I had this unconscious notion that respect was earned.

My grandmother’s days revolved around trips to Woolworth’s or Miller & Rhodes downtown and finding things for Gladys, her hired black woman, to do. Bourbon kept Dee pretty focused. It was 1968, and Gladys’ people were only just able to sit at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, though they were never there. Sit-ins make digestion of hamburger boats rather difficult.

The Woolworth’s smelled like popcorn and plastic toy trucks. The petting zoo was nearby. My grandmother bought a plastic rain bonnet and we had sodas at the lunch counter.

Outside, a big white Ford Fairlane with red vinyl roll-and-pleat seats waited. My mother drove a black 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air that she later sold to hippies for $50. Dad drove a Pontiac Chieftain with an amber light-up Indian chief’s head as a hood ornament. Later, he got an old Mercedes Benz that Mom said Hitler might step out of any moment.

Ottawa Chief Pontiac formed alliances with two other Great Lakes tribes to drive the British out of the region, and was, for years, a feared and respected leader. When the French abandoned the Three Tribes and sided with the British, things fell apart for Chief Pontiac. Later, he was honored by descendants of the settlers by having his head cast in plastic and placed on the hood of a motorcar to catch moth guts on hot summer Virginia nights. Hitler was a feared and respected leader who tried to drive the British out of London with little unmanned airplanes, but never had his head placed atop anyone’s chromium grillwork.

Later, Mom got a Ford Falcon and Dad got a Country Squire station wagon. One summer, we took the wagon to the mountains and rented a cabin in the middle of nowhere. The air was cool and smelled like trees and soil, while Richmond baked in the drone of cicadas and bus exhaust.

By the time the petting zoo guy got around to swatting off the ostrich, I was crying and running for the gate while Dee howled whiskey-stinky oaths to no one in particular. The zookeeper was damn lucky the ostrich didn’t kill him.

A pet ostrich damn near killed Johnny Cash by gouging him with its giant toe. That’s how the big foolish birds get you and it’s what you’d never expect from something evolution seems to have left behind. The bird leaps into the air and thrusts a sharp toenail into your gut. I keep thinking how the finest voice in American music may have died along a hedgerow as an ostrich played jump rope with his small intestine.