Photographic proof of Rambo in his Jams. Also pictured: Teen Beat magazine with Kirk Cameron on the cover, records, and VHS tapes. It’s like the eighties threw up all over this raccoon. I couldn’t even make this shit up, people.
When the raccoons were old enough, we returned them all to the woods, except for one raccoon that we kept as a pet. His name was Rambo, and he’d learned how to turn on the bathroom sink and would wash random things in it all the time, like it was his own private river. If I’d have been thinking I would have left some Woolite and my delicates by the sink for him to rinse out, but you never think to turn your pet raccoon into a tiny butler until it’s too late. Once, we came home to find Rambo in the sink, washing a tiny sliver of soap that had been a new bath-size bar that morning. He looked exhausted, and like he wanted someone to stop him and put him to bed, but when we tried to take away the last bit of soap he growled at us, and so we let him finish, because at that point I guess it was like a vendetta, if raccoons had vendettas. Sometimes when I’m working on an impossible project that I know I should just give up on and someone tries to take it away, I growl and scream, “THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!” (which is both weird and inappropriate) but I think that that’s probably exactly how Rambo was feeling, with his soap sliver and puckered little fingers covered in radon water, and it makes me sad. But then I laugh, because it reminds me that right after the soap incident my mom insisted that Rambo needed to live outside in a chicken cage “to protect him from himself.” I had placed him on top of the cage to pet him when my little sister, Lisa, who was about seven then, whacked him in the nose (because she was kind of a dick at the time), and then Rambo flipped the fuck out, stood up on his hind legs, grimaced, and jumped directly onto my sister’s face. He grabbed on to her ears like he was some kinda horrible raccoon mask, and he was hissing and looking right into her eyes like, “I WILL BRING YOU DOWN, BITCH,” and my sister was screaming and flailing her arms and it was totally awesome.
The next day my dad took Rambo to the farm, which I’d thought meant that he actually took him to my grandfather’s farm to live, but now that I think about it, it probably had less to do with going to a farm than buying one. And now I’m sad again. But then I think about the fact that my dad was probably pointing the gun at Rambo, and Rambo was probably wearing his little Jams and was all, “Hi there, mister!” and my dad probably sighed defeatedly,1 saying something like “Aw, fuck. Just go on, then. Here’s ten dollars and some soap.” Because deep down my father is a total softy. Unless he’s inadvertently killing the mother of a bunch of baby raccoons. Then you’d better stand the fuck back, because you’re totally going to get blood on you.
#6. Most people don’t go out into the woods to catch armadillos so that their father can race them professionally. Also, when you find one and pull it out by its tail, most girls’ fathers won’t scream out, “Mind the teeth! That one looks like a biter!” Probably because most fathers don’t love their daughters as much as my father loves me. Or maybe because they didn’t make their daughters pull live armadillos out of tree stumps. Hard to tell. Honestly, though, those girls are missing out, because there is nothing like seeing your father down on his hands and knees with five other grown men, screaming and slapping at the ground to scare their respective armadillos into crossing the finish line first. And when I say, “There’s nothing like it,” what I mean is, “Holy shit, these people are fucking insane.”
Usually when I tell people my dad was a Texas armadillo racing champion, they assume I’m exaggerating, but then I pull out his silver armadillo championship ring (which is, of course, shaped like an armadillo), and then they’re all, “Crap on a crap cracker, you’re actually serious.” And then they usually leave quickly. The gold armadillo championship ring would be more impressive to show off, but we don’t have it anymore because my father traded it for a Victorian funeral carriage. And no, I’m not joking, because why the fuck would I joke about that? But I do have photographic proof:
Why, yes, that is the shining winner’s ring of the Armadillo Glitterati. Also pictured: My father during an unfortunate Magnum P.I. phase, confused spectators, unnamed armadillo.