Hamsters I Have Loved

I was in second grade when Santa brought my little brother and I the best present any kids could wish for: living creatures.

Up until then, the pet roster had been limited to Marie, the stray cat I convinced my parents to let us keep, and Shere Khan, a tiger salamander. Marie spent half her time outdoors and the other half spurning any human contact, and we only had Shere Khan for nine months before we set him free in the Camp Jefferson lake. (Was it because we genuinely believed he’d be happier in that moss-infested pond, or did my parents just get sick of feeding him raw meat and a cleaning a tank that “stunk to high heaven”? Take a guess.)

Needless to say, the pets I kept during my first eight years of life weren’t exactly top-tier, but all that was about to change, because Coleman and I were now in possession of highest caliber animals $20 can buy: dwarf hamsters.

The Petco people assured my par—er, Santa, the hamsters were the same sex. They knew this, somehow, without actually knowing what that sex was. (As we would learn later, they actually knew neither of these things.) This mystery led us to choose gender-neutral names for our hamsters. Mine, tan and slightly red-eyed, was Sammy. Coleman’s, gray and white, was Charlie.

Sammy was quite the escape artist. One of my most vivid childhood memories is coming to the hamster cage, lowering the hamster elevator, and combing through the litter—only to find no trace of Sammy. (The hamster elevator was a soup ladle we used to scoop the up hamsters from the cage without being bitten.) A day-long search party commenced. I despaired of the potential loss of my beloved pet; my parents despaired of said pet’s eventual stench as it died and decomposed within our the walls of our home.

I had this old skeleton key that was one of many treasures from my great-grandmother’s house. She’d told me that it was magic—that if I held it tight enough and believed hard enough, it could answer a wish. I was very careful not to abuse the key’s power and didn’t wish for anything until Sammy went missing and I wished for his/her safe return. I also prayed to god, but in what was perhaps a harbinger of my future faithless-ness, I gave all thanks to the magic skeleton key when we found Sammy hiding in the dollhouse in my closet. (If you think that sounds cute as hell, you’re right.)

Years later I’d learn the Sammy that went missing that day was actually Sammy II. Sammy I’s escape had a much grimmer ending—death at the paws of Marie. Rather than use this a teaching moment about the food chain and the ruthlessness of life, my parents pulled a classic switcheroo on me.

Hamster mania had swept the Bauer household, so Sammy and Charlie got a roommate. At some point we’d become convinced they were boys and selected their new companion, Harvey, accordingly. It’s important to note that the Petco people told us he was male. It’s also important to note that Petco employees are no better suited than you or I to determine a tiny rodent’s gender based on its invisible-to-the-human-eye genitalia.

Charlie and Harvey kept fighting. Specifically, Charlie kept fighting with Harvey—he was always the instigator of the violence that led to the crazed squeaking as Harvey writhed beneath him.

Some keen readers may have picked up on my very subtle foreshadowing and realized what pre-pubescent me did not: Charlie was not fighting Harvey. Charlie was either raping or making sweet-but-kinky love to Harvey, and I think we all know it was probably the first one.

Did my parents know? They gave no indication they thought it was anything other than fighting, but then again, how do you tell your 10 and six-year-old kids one of their pets is sexually assaulting the other? We placed little plastic dividers in the tunnels of their palatial cage to block off sections and give Harvey the chance to go unmolested, but the single water bottle necessitated shared living space. It was so mystifying to us that it was always just Charlie and Harvey “fighting,” never Sammy. (#NotAllHamsters.)

The truth came out one day when I peeked in on the cage before school. Harvey was up in the tower, and beside him was what appeared to be his own entrails. As my mom and brother came running, I took a closer look and realized that the fleshy pink thing next to Harvey wasn’t his guts, but his progeny. Harvey was a girl hamster, and she’d given birth.

Even though we couldn’t tell the difference between hamster fighting and hamster fucking, we all knew they usually had litters. Were more babies on the way? No, but we were about to get that much-delayed lesson about the brutality of animals. Upon inspection, we saw that the bars of the bottom of the cage were bloody.

We (read: my mom) immediately assumed Charlie ate the other babies. Dark, right? But guess what! It gets darker, because thanks to 10 minutes of research (read: Googling it), I know now that the father hamster doesn’t eat its young—the mother hamster does. Because she’s stressed or sick or because the father, her rapist, is still in the cage.

Dark! So! Fucking! Dark!

So why did Harvey spare the lone baby in the tower? Because she was dead. I realized with distress that she wasn’t breathing, and I asked my mom just how we were going to take care of this little baby, which we named Pinky for its defining characteristic.

The answer, she said with regret, was that we weren’t. Coleman and I were shuffled off to school and my dad came home over lunch to euthanize Pinky by putting him/her in our garage freezer. (Seriously, this is some sack-of-King’s-Landing-level darkness. George R. R. Martin, feel free to use this as inspo as you consider the possibility of maaaybe writing Winds of Winter.)

Sammy (in his second incarnation) went on to die a death so uneventful I can’t remember it. Charlie lived an absurdly long life for a hamster, though in his later years he developed many large, visible tumors.

At first the tumors didn’t seem to bother him, but there came a day that he seemed to be in a lot of pain. My 80-something-year-old great-grandfather, a vet (both in the war and the animal sense), was actually on his way over to euthanize the little guy when Charlie peacefully passed away in Coleman’s hands. It was pretty sad, because even though Charlie was a violent rapist where his own species was concerned, he was remarkably cuddly when it came to people.

There were more hamsters after that, but they just didn’t make much of an impression after I’d awakened to some of life’s harshest realities with Charlie, Harvey and Sammy. I think the takeaway here is that, yes, a hamster is absolutely a safer bet for Baby’s First Pet than a dog or cat, but there really are infinite ways to scar a child for life.