
Zoo Animals
A gopher sits beside the ticket turnstile in a sundress, straw hat, and tiny heart-shaped shades. He placidly sniffs the air as we stroll, Perry Smith and I, past him into City Green Zoo.
The Zoo isn’t much of a zoo. It mainly houses animals from the local wilds who have been hurt or maimed by hunting rifles, car accidents, ne’er-do-well teens, poisonous garbage spills, melting polar ice caps and other minor disasters. Most of the animals you could see for free just by looking out your window or else sitting in a park for ten minutes. But you don’t go to the Zoo for those animals. You go to visit the Gibbon Sanctuary, which is only open on Thursdays and Sundays after 1:00 p.m., when the gibbons are open to receiving guests. And until that time comes, you walk around looking at disfigured deer, avoiding angry geese, and eating dolphin-shaped gummies from a plastic bag.
A gopher scurries in front of Perry Smith and I. Looking down, I can see he has a “Kick Me” sign stuck to his back with green painter’s tape, but I don’t take him up on the offer. Neither does Perry Smith.
You walk around looking at disfigured deer, avoiding angry geese and eating dolphin-shaped gummies from a plastic bag.
Perry Smith is tall in an unobtrusive way; you don’t notice until you walk toward him and he starts to loom. He has a sunken chest, owl eyes and shiny brown hair, always gelled into a curl at the front. We met at a mutual friend’s house party, found we enjoyed one another in a convenient sort of way. We’re both gay, but not for each other.
The two of us stop in front of the Great Horned Owl cage. It’s 12:17 p.m. on a gorgeous Thursday in September, so we’re two of maybe nine people here. I am wearing a sweater patterned with Christmas trees and a toque that hides my eyebrows. Perry Smith is wearing jeans that are impossibly too long for his impossibly long legs. He’s rolled them up at the ankles and safety-pinned them in place. The owl is wearing nothing but her feathers and an eyepatch. She hoots at us contemptuously. I read the sign explaining her situation out loud:
Bettina: Born in captivity here at the Zoo. Orphan.
Great Horned Owls are dying throughout North America. They have large ear tufts and faces like cinnamon discs. They cannot move their eyes, but can turn their heads 180 degrees. Bettina lost her eye in a bar fight in 2016.
Perry Smith stares into Bettina’s one yellow eye, arms folded across his chest.
“Ha,” I say. “The sign makes it sound like she was the one fighting. Can you imagine an owl slashing at someone with a tiny broken beer bottle?”
“No.” Perry Smith’s voice is a deep and unforgiving baritone. “That’s stupid.”
“Yeah, I’m just joking.”
“Sad,” says Perry Smith. I’m not sure if he means my joke or the owl.
Bettina hoots and flops off of her branch, landing ungracefully on the foliage-strewn floor of her cage and tucking herself out of sight behind a rotting log.
We move on to find something else.
“Do you have a favourite owl?” I ask as we plod along the cracked concrete path, taking in the animal face cut-out boards, the signs reading PLEASE DO NOT FEED, the advertisements for an event from last spring called Zoozoopalooza, which is too much for me to wrap my mouth around, let alone my brain.
Perry Smith ogles me. “A favourite owl? What?”
“Yeah, like barn, snowy, great horned, burrowing.”
“What kind of person has a favourite owl? Do you have a favourite owl?”
“No. But if I had to pick, probably tawny.”
“I don’t even know what those look like.”
“They’re tawny.”
“No shit.”
We arrive at the kite cage. The kites at our zoo were born without beaks, so they’re really just feathered bowling pins. “You’d think they could at least attach a ribbon to them or something,” mutters Perry Smith. “Tie them to a string. Make them live up to their namesake.”
“Are kites named after kites?” I ask. Perry Smith shrugs. I turn to the information sign. YES, it reads in bold red letters.
“Do you have a favourite kind of kite?” Perry Smith asks.
“What kinds are there?”
“How the hell should I know? I was being sarcastic.”
“Oh. Okay. I was just trying to start a conversation before, you know.”
“Who cares about owls?”
“That’s almost a pun.”
“You’re being insufferable.”
“Fine, let’s talk about something else.” We sidle over to a pen of balding badgers. “Are you excited to see the gibbons?”
“Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“Right. And how’s work going?”
“Work is crap. It’s always crap. Every time I sit down at my desk, I might as well be slitting my own throat with rusty nail clippers.”
“Just curious.”
“You’re always curious. Never about anything good.”
“Work might sometimes be good.”
The badgers bump languidly into one another, hissing ferociously every time their bald bodies rub up. Pink skin shows raw and spongy through the scarce patches of brown and grey hairs. Badgers are members of the mustelidae family, reads the sign. All our badgers are American-born and bred, except James, who is European.
Perry stretches his too-long fingers. “Work’s awful. My boss hates me because I keep arranging the pushpins into penises.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t do that then.”
“Neither of you understand artistic vision.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“And she made a pass at me the other day.”
“What? Why? She doesn’t know you’re gay?”
Perry Smith rolls his eyes. “Why would I advertise that I’m gay at work? So my yogurt can get hate-crimed before lunch?”
“You think your coworkers are that bad?”
“No, people are bad. I’m just being a realist about it.”
“Sometimes people are nice, Perry Smith. Give them a chance.”
“I’ll give them a chance when I quit.”
A gopher scurries up beside us, plopping his fat rear down on the pavement. He wears a fake Uncle Sam beard and hat as he stares through the glass into the hissing badger pit. I’m almost certain badgers eat gophers, but maybe this exhibit holds a morbid curiosity for him.
“So, what was the pass then?”
“The what?”
“The pass your boss made?”
“Oh. She grabbed my ass.”
“Like grab-grabbed? Or accidental-oops-I-tripped grab?”
Perry Smith scowls. “No, definitely not a trip or a squeeze between friends. A power squeeze. We were alone in the copy room. I dropped my papers. She laughed.”
“I’m sorry to hear.”
“Yeah, well. I thought about reporting her to HR, but they never do anything. So, I tried messing with her instead.”
The Uncle Sam gopher scurries away around the side of the enclosure. I catch a glimpse of his furry butt racing across the lawn and into a bush where another gopher, this one sporting leather chaps and a ball gag, is waiting for him. The two sniff one another in greeting and slip into the shade of the trees.
“Hello?” Perry Smith waves a hand in front of my face. “Pay attention to me!”
“Sorry, what were you saying?”
“I said, I messed with my boss.”
“Yeah, I heard that.”
“Is it gibbon time?”
“No. What did you do to her?”
“Ugh, let’s go see the alpacas.”
Our alpacas are all sick with the flu, a sign informs us. Each of them wears an N-95 mask over their elongated snouts, which they press down into their troughs of oats, thick lips flapping against fabric.
“Perry Smith, what did you do?”
Perry Smith shrugs, picks at the flaking paint on the alpaca’s fenced enclosure. “What she wanted. Stuck my ass out whenever she walked by. Bent down to pick up paperclips and moaned when I stood up.”
“So, asking for a harassment claim against you now.”
“Please. She clearly wanted me to start something. But then she had the audacity to ignore me, didn’t even seem annoyed let alone aroused. Probably because she hates me.”
“Because of the moaning?”
“Because of the pushpin penises. Jesus, keep up.”
An alpaca coughs and spits. I see a bloom of phlegm appear against the blue of its mask.
“I mean, she can’t hate you entirely. Unless the ass-grab is a weird power play.”
Perry Smith shrugs and chucks his last few dolphin gummies into the alpaca pen. They bend to get a whiff or a taste, masks rubbing against one another, snorting and pawing at the ground. “I don’t know,” says Perry. “Women are weird. Hardly matters though. I started to feel sick after a couple hours, went into her office and told her I was gay.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. I thought she looked a little sad, like maybe she’d wanted me to be angry at her or something. But then she went right back to her computer like I wasn’t in the room at all. Didn’t tell me off. Didn’t say a word.”
“What did you want her to say?”
Perry Smith doesn’t respond, just rolls his eyes and moves on to the pen beside the alpacas, which houses nothing as far as I can tell, save for a patchy green field bookended by clots of trees and a number of gophers in all manner of dress: English beefeaters, flapper girls, a dandy, a drag queen, a daffodil, two Bo Peeps, and a Marie Antoinette. Every single one of the menagerie stands facing a different direction, stock still, mouth open as if in a silent shout of excitement or terror or hunger or all three. The sign beside the enclosure is blank except for a small made you look in the bottom right-hand corner.
“Messing with her didn’t work then.”
“Whose idea was it to dress all these gophers up in little clothes?”
“Or it did? I’m confused.”
“Like, don’t they get dirty when they hide down their holes?”
The alpacas snork at one another. One munches its mask from its face, the elastic strings growing tighter and tighter as it chews.
“So, what are you going to do now?”
Perry Smith turns to me. “Probably start making vulvas out of the pushpins. See if I get a stronger reaction. See if anything happens.”
“Not sure if that’s a good idea.”
The alpacas snork at one another. One munches its mask from its face, the elastic strings growing tighter and tighter as it chews.
“Oh good, a buffalo. Finally, something different.”
“I think it’s a bison, actually.”
“Whatever.”
The bison is white, an albino. There’s a story about a White Bison Woman zip-tied to the chain-link, but the sign is made of weather-beaten wood, so split apart with cracks that it’s impossible to read any of the words beyond the title.
“Do you have a favourite even-toed ungulate?” I ask. Perry Smith shakes his head. “Mine’s probably a porpoise,” I say. “Because they don’t even have toes.”
“Sad.”
The clock at the heart of the Zoo chimes, signalling that it’s now 1:00 p.m. and the gibbons will receive visitors. Perry Smith is awfully quiet as we make our way toward their hut. I wonder what he’s thinking about, but I’m not sure if I should ask. He’s a prickly sort, Perry Smith, a human hedgehog. If something’s bothering him, he won’t tell me; he’ll only bristle and stab needles into my fingers. Not literal needles. That would be insane.
“We picked a good day to come here,” I say.
Perry Smith hums in agreement. “As good as we could hope for," he says.
We reach the Gibbon Hut, the last of the seven other visitors to push our way through the swinging doors. The gibbons are visible through a gigantic Plexiglas window set into one wall. This is what we paid $28.00 for. This is the only exotic part of the City Green Zoo, the only part that’s whole. The other guests and Perry Smith and I stare into the confines of the gibbons’ artificial jungle home upon the monkeys, all clustered around one another in a rough semicircle, furry legs folded criss-cross apple-sauce, gazing up at their matriarch, a balding grey gibbon in the ragged grey remains of a floral nightgown. Her palms are upturned to the mossy wooden beams and the ivy and the heat lamps above as if in meditation, as if asking for her daily bread, as if praying for something different, something exciting, something strange.