“He’s nice,” I said. “He’s one of the red-blooded.”
“Fuck’s wrong with your voice? And your eyes? What the fuck? Ma, what’s going on here? He sleep last night? He looks…drunk.”
“He’s not feeling well,” she said. “He should go to his room and get some rest.”
I sat on the floor. My mom helped me up, walked me to the couch, and turned on The Smurfs. In the kitchen, my dad said, “So Sally the Balls—how’d the kid hear of him?” to which Grandma Magnet responded at a volume too low for me to make out her words. Not two minutes later, I heard the word Cicero pronounced a few times in a few different tones, all of which were loud, but didn’t interest me so much as did Brainy Smurf’s imminent abasement. As usual, Brainy was, in this episode, aggravating everyone else in the tribe, especially Handy Smurf, who was trying to fix some broken instrument I couldn’t keep track of while Brainy stood by, nagging him about the superior ways he might fix the thing if he were the one in charge of fixing it. I hated that Brainy—that fun-killing, know-it-all, bespectacled stiff. I looked forward to when the others Smurfs would have enough. I hoped they’d beat him with the hammer this time—it had been too long—but worried they might only exile him again.
I fell asleep before finding out.
When I woke, my parents grounded me over the weights—my Grandmother Magnet had ratted in the end, maybe to ease their worries that I might be really ill, or maybe out of resentment for my unknowingly blowing some intricate plan she’d developed for more softly breaking the news of her love for the Balls—but while I was grounded, my dad taught me how to use his own weights safely, and I worked out religiously for three days straight.
* * *
A couple answers back, when you mentioned you recorded “every new song and gag [Blank] learned,” what exactly did you mean by “gag”?
Given the revelatory moment I had (or felt I had) with Mouth, and the views I’ve already expressed about Curios, I trust that it isn’t too hard to imagine how the idea of training Blank—or any Curio (or, for that matter, any animal)—to perform tricks intended only to entertain humans might strike me as distasteful, even repellent. In the vast majority of cases it does. In those cases where it doesn’t, the motivation “to entertain humans” belongs to the trainee at least as much as to the trainer; it is in those rare cases that the tricks engendered by the training are what I call “gags.”
Blank’s tricks are gags because Blank performs them in order to entertain me, or, at the very least (i.e. for those who won’t allow that Curios possess a theory of mind), it performs its gags in order to hear the sounds and/or see the movements I tend to make when I’m feeling entertained.
But how can I claim to know what Blank’s motivation is when Blank performs a trick? To answer that, I’ll have to first explain how I know what Blank’s motivation isn’t. Toward that end, here’s an excerpt from Chapter 1 (“Early Training”) of Abed Patel’s (truly stellar) 1991 New York Times bestseller, How to Shape Your Cure:
Suppose you find it entertaining when your two-legged Curio stands on one leg, and thus you’d prefer that it do so more often. Here is the most efficient way to make that happen:
Don’t touch your Curio for a number of hours.
Once your Curio begins to exhibit early-stage grieving behavior, coax it into a standing position on a flat surface without touching it. If you cannot coax your Curio into standing on a flat surface without touching it, get someone else to set your Curio standing upon the flat surface.
Use a pen or pencil to bend one of the Curio’s legs back at the knee and, very briefly, with the hand not holding the pen, scratch it on the head. Set the pen down.
Repeat step 3.
Repeat step 3 again.
Bend back the leg with the pen again, but rather than scratching the Curio’s head while you’re bending the leg, set the pen down. If the Curio continues to keep its leg bent after you have set the pen down, scratch it on the head. If it doesn’t keep its leg bent, don’t scratch its head: bend its leg back with the pen again, set the pen down, and repeat this step until it keeps its leg bent without aid of the pen, at which point you should scratch it on the head.
Repeat step 6 until the Curio has kept its leg bent without aid of the pen three times in a row.
Hold the pen near the Curio’s leg, but do not touch the leg with the pen. If the Curio bends its leg back on its own, let it climb into your hand. Then set it down. If the Curio does not bend its leg back on its own, repeat step 7.
Repeat step 8 until the Curio, three times in a row, has bent its leg when the pen is held near its leg.
Hide the pen.
Wait two minutes. If in those two minutes, the Curio bends its leg, let it climb into your hand. If the Curio does not bend its leg within two minutes, repeat steps 9 and 10.
Set the Curio down. Repeat step 11 until the Curio, three times in a row, has bent its leg within two minutes of being set down, but after the third time you’ve let it climb into your hand, don’t set it down; let it stay on your person for at least an hour. The next time the Curio seeks your body heat, it will stand on one leg to get some.
Although Patel’s readers are vastly fewer and farther between than they were in the nineties (I’d assume a rather large proportion of you younger readers haven’t even heard his name), I doubt many people reading this memoir would fail to recognize in the excerpt quoted above a method fundamentally similar to (though, perhaps, a tad more systematic than) that which they use to train their own Curios. In turn, I trust most wouldn’t hesitate to agree that one’s Curio, in the course of being so trained, is motivated to participate successfully in its training (i.e. to learn whatever trick it’s being taught) by its need/desire for direct exposure to its owner’s body heat (I prefer the terms “affection” and “human warmth” to “body heat,” but I see no need, beyond mentioning my preference, to stir that pot here); that just as Mouth, when deprived of food, did what he had to do to get food, so does a Curio, when deprived of its owner’s body heat, do what it must to gain exposure to that body heat.