When I was about 6 years old we had these two turtles.
You couldn't name them because they looked exactly alike.
What was the point?
They lived in this round plastic thing that looked like a see-through ashtray with
water in it. In the middle of the ashtray was an island with a ramp and a little
plastic palm tree.
The two little turtles had stripes on their necks and stripes on their arms that
reminded me of referees.
These two turtles were lazy and boring as hell.
Movement was against their religion. They just sat under that plastic palm tree
like two drunken NFL officials sleeping it off.
You could walk by and poke them, and they'd look at you with those stoned
half-closed eyes, as if to say, "What the fuck are you bothering ME for?"
...but they still wouldn't move.
If you poked 'em off of the island they'd swim about 2 inches, climb their lazy
drunken referee asses back up the ramp to the island, and get pissed off. Then
they'd go on strike, and pull their little striped necks and arms into their shells,
"Leave us alone. We're tired, so fuck off."
One day My brother Bobby discovered that when you changed the water, if you
used WARM water, they swam a lot more when you kicked them off the island.
This was very amusing and interesting to us!
So we tried some warmer water.
Those little drunken bastards were swimming their asses off now!
Those tiny striped arms and legs were pumping their way back up the ramp to
Referee Island.
They moved double-time to make it to the safety of the plastic palm tree, so they
could hide in their little welfare shells and sleep it off again.
We were overjoyed to see them getting so much exercise.
"Look! They LIKE IT!" my brother cried. "Let's give 'em some MORE!"
... My mother had just made tea.
"Their gonna REALLY like this!" my brother said, pouring the hot water from the
tea kettle into the plastic ashtray.
The little refs were in their shells "resting."
We poked them off the island, "Get movin' boys!" and BOY DID THEY SWIM!
They were flying around like Mark Spitz on speed!
As soon as they got back up the ramp, POKE!
...Back into the steaming water they went, pumping those little striped arms,
sticking those little drunken referee heads out of the water, looking for that frigging
palm tree again!
POKE! Back in again, look at 'em GO! This was great!
Then suddenly, they stopped.
They just lay there in the water like skydivers, with their striped arms and legs
sticking straight out. They weren't moving at all. We poked them over and over,
which burned our fingers a bit, but they just floated like skydivers.
"Maybe they're just tired" I suggested.
"No," my brother said sadly,"I think they had heart attacks.
Too much exercise."
We spent the next hour with napkins and magic markers.
We each made a small American flag with them.
We had just seen a John Wayne movie.
John Wayne played a sailor who got killed in action and was buried at sea.
We wrapped our turtles in the flags, and brought them to the toilet with tears in
our eyes.
Bobby imitated a bugle, and sang taps.
I flushed.
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I remember we had a parakeet when I was a kid. He talked and flew around the
house all the time. We found him dead on the kitchen table next to a bowl of sugar
one day. There was sugar all over the place. Looked like he sugared himself to
death.
Many years later, at Thanksgiving, my brother Frank told us the truth;
He said he came home on his lunch break, and went into the bathroom with the
Herald, to take a dump...
"That fuckin' bird flew in, and tried to land on me, and I sez Get the fuck outta
here! ...and I swatted the bastard with the Herald and killed him. Then I threw him
onto the kitchen table and sprinkled the sugar all over him to make it look like an
accident, and then I went back to work. I hated that fuckin' bird!"
