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Adam’s Family
When his parents argued, twelve year old Adam would sneak out of the back door of the house
and walk the two blocks to the Hickson Memorial Library. There, where for the last six months
he couldn’t extricate himself from the ‘A’s, he would leaf through and read all that he could
about the subject of Africa. At his age, in the nineteen fifties, he read the Snows of Kilimanjaro
, Serengeti Shall not Die, The Lions of Tsavo, the works of Albert Schweitzer.
He was a funny little kid, a loner. Adam also liked the outdoors. Every month when the
magazines with titles like Rod & Gun, Outdoor Life and Sports Afield were published,
he would take his allowance and purchase them during the third week of the preceding month.
At home, Adam slept in a tiny bedroom. It was large enough for a child’s bed, a chest of drawers,
a desk and chair. The walls of the bedroom were plastered with cutouts from the outdoor magazines.
There were photos of every significant animal living in Africa. Adam also collected photos of the
big game animals of North America. Each time a new issue might provide a photograph of a cheetah
running in full flight, or, a wapiti standing majestically in the Rocky Mountains, he would carefully
cut it out and paste it to his walls. The walls were completely covered. His grandmother, who lived
with the family, couldn’t stand the destruction of their walls. “Why are you doing that?” she nagged.
Of course, the inevitable day arrived when he came home from school, walked into his room and saw that
the entire collection of animal photos had been removed. The walls were painted a somber battleship gray.
Undaunted, Adam began his collection once again. He metamorphosed and found pictures of insects that he pasted
on his walls. He had pictures of insects fighting, of oozing colorful South American fluids, of insect eyes,
claws and antennae. His grandmother became more agitated. Now the arguments emanating from the living room,
down the hallway, included all of the grownups. “We should take him to a doctor”, said his mother.
“The boy is just a boy”, said his father. “He should see a psychiatrist, not a doctor,” said his grandmother.
Adam was listening, but what he was really focusing on was a picture he found in a National Geographic magazine
of a leopard, allegedly located in the Ngorongoro Crater, pulling down a wildebeest, with all the acoutrements
of a savannah kill. He cut it out and pasted it on his bed side wall right next to the photo of the dung beetle.
The following week his photos were gone and the walls were painted a Chinese industrial green.
Being the resilient individual that he was, Adam cut the taxidermy advertisement out of one of his magazines.
He filled the appropriate boxes and sent two dollars with his application for lesson #1. It arrived within
two weeks. It was a detailed booklet with drawings and very didactic explanations of the initial process.
With the fifties being not so politically correct, Lesson #1 explained in detail how to place a live hamster
into an empty, large mayonnaise jar, how to throw in a swab of cotton soaked in ether, and then tightly
replace the lid. Young Adam followed the instructions and was profoundly and visibly shaken when he saw the
little animal die. Nevertheless, he wanted to continue his lessons, and he did so in a careful and
methodical manner. At the end of Lesson #1, working away in a small corner of the house basement,
Adam produced a stuffed brown hamster. When he brought it upstairs after a few days, his grandmother
opened the door to his bedroom, saw the Christ-on-the-cross pose of the rodent, and said “Oy”.
That evening Adam listened to grand sobs and arguments. He left the house for his beloved library.
By that time he managed to get out of Africa and over to the Arachnids. Not too soon after, his
room took on a familiar décor. This time, spider pictures started off in the inside corner of
the wall and worked their way up into view.
Over time, Adam sent for and received Lessons #2 through to #10. The hamster was
accompanied by a pigeon, then a sparrow hawk that fell from the sky and into the street,
a squirrel he happened to pick up in the park. One day Adam brought home a deer head in
a black, plastic bag. It wasn’t freshly killed. He followed the instructions for a large
mammal and used wire and excelsior and borax with skill and experience. The basement corner
became a menagerie. The deer head was a thing of beauty. It would have been perfect except
that the only glass eyes Adam had in stock were the ones with vertical, oval pupils meant for
the sheep family. Adam became skilled with scalpel and tweezers. His thirteenth birthday was coming soon.
The arguments continued upstairs. If it wasn’t about Adam, it was about money, drinking,
sleeping too much, not big enough of a television or car. No one ventured downstairs to
see how Adam was doing. The spider pictures stopped where they started. He lost interest
in the B’s and C’s of the library aisles. In his little hideaway Adam made shelves for
his tools of the trade. He had bottles of ether, cans of salt and borax, glass eyes
from miniscule to huge, plastic teeth of all kinds. One evening, his grandmother quietly
opened the makeshift, plywood door that Adam had constructed to keep his privacy. She entered
without knocking, saw the Guernica collection of skins, heads and bodies and said “Oy”.
A few evenings later, the arguments continued. Every night was the same. The mother yelled
at the father and the father yelled back. Adam was listening to it all. Suddenly, the house went
quiet. Adam sat up straight.
“Where’s grandma?” he heard his mother ask his father.
Mike Florian is an active business owner located in North Vancouver, British Columbia.
He writes in the middle of the night when things are calm and quiet.
His work has been published previously in The Oddville Press and Word Riot.
Email: Mike Florian
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