I Was Once Bitten on the Face by a Woodchuck

The offending rodent belonged to my friend Alex. We were in college at the time and Alex thought it would be fun to keep a pet; specifically, a claret-tinged groundhog his brother Todd claimed to have liberated from the farm where Punxsutawney Phil lives. In reality, Todd had nicked the poor critter with his pick-up truck and, being in the Buddhist phase of his Protestant-college-kid-kicking-the-tires-on-the-rainbow-of-world-religions tour, understood that he was spiritually obliged to nurse the thing back to health and make it his constant companion until such time as the woodchuck could save his life, thereby settling its cosmic debt (Todd’s knowledge of the Buddhist faith was entirely contained in a pamphlet handed to him during a Beastie Boys performance at a Free Tibet concert). In any event, Todd quickly tired of the critter when he realized that it could not be trained to fetch his sandals, pee outdoors or generally refrain from biting anything unfortunate enough to wander within three feet of its quivering snout. So he offered it to Alex.

When Alex raised the idea of accepting Gretchen (Todd named it Gretchen – Gretchen wasn’t impressed) I initially suggested that we consider purchasing a couple of rats instead. Alex, however, believed that rats would scare the girls away. I wasn’t sure who these girls were and why they would have so thoroughly avoided our quarters in the aptly named Crummy Hall until we happened to acquire a pet rat, but Alex was very much a cup-half-full kind of guy.

While I generally shared Alex’s desire for fuzzy companionship, I was given pause by my assumption that a woodchuck would likely require, you know, attention and stuff. Unfortunately, Alex was not to be depended on. Some extol God, country and family, in some order, as principles of paramount worth. Alex revered couch, ganja, and Hot Pockets in exactly that order.

In the end, however, Alex was just so adorably smitten with the notion of sparing Gretchen a trip to the woodchuck-pound or wherever, that I eventually relented, accepting that it would be unwise to come between a man and his Readily Attainable Destiny. RAD, you see, is the destiny that finds you – not the other way around. It’s easy.

Not to be confused with that whole The Alchemist type destiny requiring great patience and persistence to discover, RAD is the Waffle House of the cosmos – its right there. And not merely a spiritualizing of simple stereotypes, RAD is very specific. For example, one who marries in a church, sires toe-headed offspring and purchases a single family home on or near a cul-de-sac, will undoubtedly one day find oneself driving off the lot in a brand new minivan, wondering if the seat-back entertainment system is covered under the 10 year/100,000 mile power-train warranty. It just happens. That’s RAD.

One who plays high school lacrosse, drives mom’s old Jeep Cherokee, breaks-up with Taylor the summer before enrolling at a private liberal arts college and then spends the entire subsequent September wondering what the hell makes Coors “the banquet beer,” will assuredly attend at least seven Dave Matthews Band concerts. That’s RAD.

The wildly narcissistic homosexual fitness enthusiast will eventually cut off a pair of blue jeans above the pocket linings, purchase a snake and cruise around the arts festival on a pair of roller blades, wearing only said cut-offs and snake. That’s totally RAD.

And so it was that Alex – young, lazy, marijuana smoking, microwavable snack craving Alex - was destined to own an imprudently domesticated twenty pound rodent. RAD.

To say that life with Gretchen was at all pleasant would be like claiming that the Pittsburgh Pirates are a Major League Baseball team – a dirty, bald-faced lie. Alex and I, of course, loved the attention that came with being “the dudes who keep a freaking groundhog chained to the bike rack out behind Crummy Hall.” And we surely didn’t mind when the hippie chicks from the outdoors club brought over some of their compost for Gretchen to snack on. But, in spite of our most half-assed efforts, we just couldn’t change the fact that Gretchen naturally loathed human beings.

So it was hardly surprising that one morning while tying my shoes outside the ground-floor window Alex and I used as our principle means of ingress and egress, Gretchen waddled over and bit me on the face. I wasn’t even mad. Sure, it hurt like hell, but I clearly understood the message Gretchen was attempting to convey: “look asshole, you know better than to keep a goddamned woodchuck leashed-up outside this hell hole of a dorm. Oh, and don’t go and do something really stupid like attend law school.” Without even pausing to dress my wound, I retrieved my dullest pocket knife and cut Gretchen’s leash, hoping that Alex would believe that she had finally managed to gnaw her way to freedom (Alex had discovered extacy by that time, so he was hardly troubled).

I still think about Gretchen from time to time and I know that Alex does too. In fact, he and Todd decided to name their newest bar in Fort Lauderdale (RAD) The Drunken Woodchuck. Yes, Gretchen was a fine woodchuck. In fact, I consider her to be the finest rodent I’ve ever known. A shit-ton better than that weasel Ron Martino, anyway.

Writing is Hard

I don't know why so many people try it, frankly. It’s solitary, tedious and sweaty. Worst of all, it's not particularly rewarding. Oh, I suppose if you're really important or famous or sleeping with some really important famous person you could make a tidy sum by churning out a well-timed biography. But writing, for the most part, is like voting - pointless.

Sure, people will argue that there's more to the literary arts than big advances and book tour groupies, but people are assholes. And so are the authors we celebrate most. Shakespeare? Had gonorrhea (I have no idea). Hemmingway? Six-toed cat fetish (close, right?). Wordsworth? I'll tell you what a word is worth - squat. Yesir, anyway you slice it, writing is a dead end.

That's why I'm going to quit. Right now. No more reaching for the old thesaurus, pondering phrases or even cutting and pasting from the internet. Nope. No more having to listen to all those half-hearted “I really enjoyed that, um, thingy you wrote” from friends and family. I'm retiring.

Of course I’ll have to keep up my correspondence. I owe Leonard that much. Leonard is my pen-nemesis, with whom I became acquainted via an ad in the January 1996 issue of Mid-Atlantic Woodcarver. It read, “Seeking thick-skinned, erudite chap with whom to trade trenchant invectives by mail – no Irish.” How could I resist?

Now, I don’t know the first thing about Leonard (other than his address, of course), but over the last 14 years he and I have bluntly affronted every conveniently imagined personality trait we find most despicable in the other. For my part, I’ve decided Leonard to be a Limbaugh Republican who drives in the left lane, chews with his mouth open and sings in the band Nickelback. From what I can gather, Leonard imagines me to be an undocumented alien who enjoys making conversation at urinals and undressing people’s daughters with his eyes.

Frankly, I don’t think I could rise each morning absent the sweet anticipation of Leonard’s vitriolic missives. And I surely couldn’t suffer the indignities of a typical workday unless I was sure that I could pin them all on that dick-face Leonard. So I’ll limit my writing to cathartically berating Leonard and that’s it. Done and done.

Not that I’m prone to sentimentality, but before I hang up my pen I think it might be appropriate to briefly appraise the highlights of my writing career. Won’t you join me?

I first distinguished myself at the age of six, when, completely unprompted, I composed a most thoughtful letter to President Reagan upon his having been shot by that Brady guy (Bill, I think. He was dating Jody Foster). "Git well son" it read, next to a drawing of The Gipper in a Superman outfit. A handwritten response on official White House letterhead soon arrived. "Thank you for your kind letter," the President wrote. Actually, I’ll bet that he wrote something like "monkey dike harpsichord" but Nancy or James Baker or somebody cleaned it up in the final draft.

Two years later, in the midst of a multiplication-table induced rage, I passionately carved the phrase "fart attack” into my desk top. Our teacher, Ms. Jennings, was understandably upset, but I knew even then that it was only because she was sleeping with the janitor whose task it would be to delete my etching.

My final splash in the literary pool came in the fifth-grade (I'm 34 now), when I wrote my Uncle Bernard in Florida as part of a letter-writing exercise. I nailed the greeting ("Deer Uncle Bernard") and the salutation ("Your's...Stan"). Sure, the body of the letter was merely a line-by-line transcription of the first page of the index to our science text, but my Uncle and I had always related in a very cold, literal way.

So that's it, really. The intervening years have been filled with equal amounts hard work and rejection. Rejection of manuscripts, plays, screenplays, poems and pick-up lines. Not that I'm bitter. After all, it’s better to have tried and failed than to have been bitten on the face by a goddamned woodchuck.