Atomic Nerds

Michele blogs about expectations of Christmas as being perfect and Rockwellian, versus the reality of something more resembling a wacky Christmas movie.

I never really had any expectations of a Rockwellian Christmas. The few memories I do have of Christmases before my parents’ divorce (I was seven) are of imperfect holidays- Grandma was over and she was riding Mom for something, the Christmas tree went over after cats chased each other up it (or I pulled it over), always something. After the divorce, Christmas day was divided between Dad’s house- always fraught, since my stepmother made no bones about hating my guts, and liked to use holidays to underline her contempt- and Mom’s. The bits that weren’t spent under my stepmother’s just-drop-dead glare were imperfect, but nice; presents were opened Christmas morning, then there was hot chocolate, tea, pajamas all day (until I had to go over to Dad’s), and reading whatever looked the most promising out of the books given that year.

Some years are more imperfect than others.

First, a little background: When I was maybe eleven or twelve, for reasons that seem unfathomable to me now, my mother and I thought it would be a fun idea to get a pet pot-bellied pig. They were exotic, they were all the rage, and being the precocious little animal-lover I was, I had read all about how intelligent and social they were. Which indeed they are- the great pig saga was my first introduction to the lesson every pet keeper needs, which is that high intelligence is often a drawback rather than a plus in a pet, and social means a lot of things.

At the time, we were fairly naive when it comes to obtaining animals; we still thought newspaper classifieds were a great way to find a breeder. We used the classifieds and found a breeder in a nearby county, who traveled into town to sell us a piglet. At the time, we had no idea that during the height of the pot-bellied pig craze, it was a common scam tactic for unscrupulous breeders to pass a cross of the small, docile, expensive potbelly and a big, mean, cheap farm pig off as a purebred potbelly to prospective suckers who wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. As the cute little black piglet we brought home that day wound up growing to more than 200 pounds of ornery pork, it is very likely we were the suckers in this scenario.

We named him Chitlin, short for the chitterlings (stewed, boiled, and then maybe fried bits of pig intestine) common in the region of Lousiana my mother grew up in. That we found this hliarious tells you something about my mother and me, and also perhaps explains why Chitlin grew up with a grudge against humanity. As a piglet, like many young animals that undergo a radical personality shift as adults, he was every bit the charming pet we had been led to expect he would be. He was a litterbox-trained housepet who liked to sleep next to the bed, and LOVED to snuggle in a beanbag. He was easily trained, as he’d do anything for food. For about two years, Chitlin was an adored, if unusual, companion.

We neutered him on schedule, but the lack of testicles didn’t stop him from developing a boarlike personality rather than remaining docile and piglet-like, much as neutering usually won’t stop a dog from lifting its leg. He grew a mane of intimidating bristles. He grew tusks, which had to be trimmed by a brave vet wielding bolt-cutters once a year. And, like any bored, intelligent, hormonal, incredibly strong young animal (I used to feed him walnuts for fun- he easily cracked them with his jaws), he began to get destructive. He stripped the varnish off most of the cabinets in the kitchen. He learned to open the refrigerator, and we had several items walk off before we installed a lock on it. When left outside, he rooted up most of the brick patio as a hobby. When he had been a baby, we had left him in the mostly pig-proofed (NOTHING is ever really pig-proofed unless you put them in a steel room with a drain in the floor) kitchen behind a baby gate. One December, Chitlin decided he had had enough of staying in the boring old kitchen when there were so many interesting things in the rest of the house to destroy, and demonstrated that his strength was now far too great to be contained.

A few days before Christmas during the middle of his second year, we arrived home to find the house looking like a trailer park after a tornado hit. Everything under three feet tall was wrecked and strewn over the house, and a few things that weren’t but were on top of something fragile enough to be pig-slammed were as well. Fortunately, we hadn’t put the presents under the tree yet (which was mysteriously still standing- Christmas miracle?), but the house was comprehensively wrecked. My mother, who was apoplectic at the destruction, booted the porcine offender into the backyard and went off to fume and assess the damage.

Around this time, I noticed that the mistletoe was missing. God alone knows why we had mistletoe; we had never bought it as a Christmas decoration before and never would again, and it’s not as though either of us had any male callers that it could be used with. Regardless, for some stupid reason, we had mistletoe that year. And Chitlin, apparently figuring that anything green with berries was bound to be good even if it tasted like burning, had eaten it all. Pigs are like tiger sharks that way- they eat anything on the off chance that it’s edible. Their stomachs can break down nearly anything.

“Uh, Mom? The mistletoe’s missing. I, uh, think Chitlin got it. Isn’t it poisonous?”

“FINE. He can drop dead for all I care.”

“…Okay, Mom…”

About an hour later, mid-cleanup, I stuck my head out the back door and noticed a pile of vomit, that looked like it had originally mostly been green leaves of some kind. Chitlin was lying half in and half out of his doghouse, not moving, but breathing heavily. Oh, shit. I had never seen him vomit ANYTHING before- I was half-convinced that, like horses, it was physiologically impossible for pigs, or perhaps that there was simply nothing too vile for him to digest.

“Mom? I think he’s really sick. He threw up. And he LOOKS sick.”

She wasn’t too happy about it, but at the end of the day, my mother can no more not feel compassion for a sick or hurt animal, no matter how awful the animal, than she can go without food and water. She marched out to the backyard to metaphorically poke him with a stick. He didn’t want to get up. When poked, he moved his head and made a horrible noise between a grunt, a moan, and a wail, that I will try my best to represent:

“GROOOOOOAAAAAAAAAOOOOOINNNGGGHKKK”

“Oh, shit.”

That was it: we had to take him to the emergency vet if we didn’t want to let him die, which neither of us really did. His display of pathos had knocked his recent acts of pointless carnage right out of our heads. The only problem with this was that he now weighed about eighty pounds and barely fit into the plastic crate that was our biggest pet-transportation unit. Oh well- there was nothing for it but to woman up and make a collective effort at muscling him into the crate and from there, into the van and to the vet. I got out the crate, and Mom prodded the sick, reluctant animal on his feet, and gently led the suffering pig- who was doing a great impression of being on his very last legs- into the house. Where he saw the crate. Which he had only ever seen in the context of car rides, which he hated with a screaming passion, and which always ended at the vet’s, which he felt even moreso about.

At that point, he let out a horrified scream and bolted away from us at the crate at top speed, wailing like a portable klaxon.

I had not been anticipating that.

My mother and I threw each other disbelieving glances and took off in hot pursuit. Chitlin, never any fool, immediately dove for the first cover he could see- the Christmas tree. He threw himself behind it, sending ornaments and needles flying in all directions, and stood in the corner, panting and snorting and muttering to himself about the horrible day he was having. Naturally, we had put it in a corner- we always did, it was the only way to keep from having it knocked down by dog or cat. Or pig. I looked at my mother. My mother looked at me.

“You’re young and short and flexible- GET HIM!”

“But I… fine… just get the crate, I’ll try and herd him into it.”

She put the open crate near Chitlin’s head, and I dropped to my hands and knees and shuffled in after him. He leaped away from me, nimbly avoiding the crate and coming around the tree, at speed, up behind me.

“OH SHIT!!”

My memory becomes somewhat muddled with adrenaline and general chaos at this point. I remember moving on my hands and knees at a rate normally reserved for quadrupeds like the demon pig I was both chasing and being chased by, and Chitlin screaming. I think I might have been screaming, too; my mother certainly was, perhaps not realizing that a person shuffling for their life and the life of the threat is generally not open to receiving constructive criticism about their technique. I remember having my eyes mostly shut against the punishment of needles and ornaments (who knew we had so many pointy ornaments?). Chitlin must have been sick indeed- he would normally be much faster than me- because eventually I came up around on his rear again and was able to catch him in a flying tackle. I frantically stuffed him in the crate, catching a few trotters to the face in the process, and locked him in.

We now had a very noisy box of great density. Instead of having some strong drink and lying down in a very quiet room, which is how I would probably handle a similar experience now, we had to somehow wrestle our Box of Horrors into the car and to the vet. Somehow, we did- two short women, one only twelve or thirteen and one drastically out of shape- probably running on the pure adrenaline. (My mother has back pain to this day, can throw it out on a fifteen-pound bag of cat food, though I don’t know for sure that this was the original cause.) We went to the vet amid screams and wails and unnameable substances, Animal Farm on wheels.

At the vet’s, they told us that he would most certainly have died if we hadn’t brought him in when we did, pumped him full of liquid charcoal, and kept him for a few hours while we slumped at various angles in the waiting room. Eventually, they gave him back (which I may never forgive them for), and gave us the bill to go with him. Eight hundred dollars.

Joy to the world.

That wasn’t the last time Chitlin poisoned himself, though the incident was the final straw in relocating him permanently to outdoor-only status when we weren’t there, and eventually outdoor-only period. He still lives there, now too old and fat and arthritic to cause damage to anything other than his dinner. This will probably be his last Christmas; my mother tells me he hardly ever does anything other than eat or sleep anymore, and that he’s showing increasingly less interest in the first activity. When a pig no longer wants to eat, you know it’s close to the end for him. I’ve encouraged her to have him euthanized- it doesn’t sound like he has any quality of life anymore- but so far, she won’t do it.

I’m holding out for bacon when he finally goes, but for some reason I’m having a hard time getting her to come around.

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