Harvey, Private Hamster
Revelation
It was the hamster litter that woke me, on that hazy winter day, rough and grinding on my fur, like an insistent tic looking to stick somebody else for the drinks.
From my office, the world looked the same as it did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Although the day before that, it was a little different, but the day before THAT, it was still the same. The wheel, the dish, the bottle of zero proof hanging from the wall...I was feeling overclocked and under fed.
There was a knock at the door...
I twitched back from my reverie and looked to see the usual huge blob of protoplasm, five enormous appendages with protruding claws, reaching through my doorway. This always stood my fur on end. I never knew whether this would mean extinction or food.
In this case, it meant food.
The sky cracked with the rumble of the noises the Mother ship of the enormous appendage made. It retreated with my empty food dish and, moments later returned with the same dish, full of the same drivel and gruel that made today like any other day. Well, mostly.
But this time, there was something different. The monstrous blob of protoplasm also deposited a bit of paper in my cage. It was folded neatly.
I resisted my urge to gnaw it into tiny shreds and....
From where I could see, there was a nice pair of high heels. In them were a nice pair of ankles, and a nice pair of legs, and a nice pair of knees, and from there on up, past a mini skirt that was at least as big as the wrapper on a 6-oz. bag of Ralston Purina Party mix, she'd been dealt a lot of nice pairs, right up to the nice pair of blue eyes she was watching me add up her nice pairs with...
"Hello, Harvey" she said..."You gonna stare me out, or would you like a little...nibble..." as she set the food dish down.
Her nails were lacquered like my tongue after a night out with the rest of the boys.
"On the other hand, her nails didn't smell like cigarettes and beer. And maybe that's for the best, 'cause I was attracted in a purely animalistic way, one that is driven as much by pheromones as by the vision of her glorious gams. I needed something bad in a really good way, and I needed it now. Coolly, I turned to her and said...
"So...what brings ya to this neck of the forest, doll?"
At once, my words sounded foolish...especially the way I misspelled 'what'. The sun outside continued to do its lazy arc, bringing that gorgeous ambient light that played on her lush brown hair. For fifteen minutes a day, that kinda light is worth dyin' for, especially when it plays with a Broad like this one. That leaves 1,425 minutes when it ain't. You takes it when it comes.
WHAM!!
The sound of the cage door slamming in my face woke me from my dream.
I looked about the room, confused by my utter display of sexual wants.....
I felt so embarrassed, I felt like I was blushing.
I then remembered the paper.
Yes, what was so special about the paper?
I glanced down and noticed that this was a cutout of the personals!
I glance through the listing....
Wart.....hog......ISO........yellow.......beast type......
No, NO. next one.
Radar.......always ISO single........airplane?
What the?
Ok, here we go!!!
surreal.....Utah........Las Vegas vacations?!
ISO simple, respectful COW????
Could this be?
The one I have been searching for?
All these years, running around, and around, looking for that special someone that really appreciates me?
Could this be the one?
I tried to gather my wits about me...when that didn't work, I gathered what was left of my wits, and tried to mash 'em together like a ball of pizza dough...it didn't work. So I gathered what was left of the remainder, and took a long pull at the bottle of zero proof on the wall...Surreal...
There HAD to be a connection.... my tiny furry paws scrabbled at the paper...if I concentrated any further, my browser would have grabbed my eye balls and I'd soon have a unibrow...
...but I had to think...SUDDENLY...
...YES!
I grab the paper again, and like for the first time, my little blinky rodent eyes notice the Hi-liter markings, like a floozie's phone number scrawled on the wall of a cheap gin joint...
S urreal...
D r. Vette...
Radar....
W A rthog...
Megalos...
I assembled the letters, faster than a 3-card monte player in Times Square...and blinked like a...well, like a hamster...the letters clearly spelled out....
...SDRAM ...
Obviously a code...but WHAT??
I took another pull from the zero proof...and thought about it...
The memory of my brother Hortense came back to me like my exercise wheel when I step off of it wrong. In the back of my molecule size brain, there was a nagging memory of that code...
SDRAM...SDRAM..... rattling around my head like a BB in a tuna fish can. Hey, when you're a hamster, you can get away with that kind of analogy.
I idly fingered my .01 caliber Hamster Special, and tried to connect the two...Hortense...SDRAM....
And then, a blinding realization...
...I was looking straight into the sun.
But back to my story. . .
What is it that SDRAM means? And how does it connect with my brother?
I suddenly recalled those experiments that they had performed on Hortense and his ferret pal, Bob... something about a clock, but what was it...?
I was wrapped up in my thoughts like a cheap computer tie cord around a K-mart Skuzzy line, when the Dixie Cup vibrated.
"Harvey, P.H.," I said.
"What's the gag, Hamster?"
His voice was wrapped in a handkerchief three sheets thick, making him sound like the latest drop-kick test on those crummy little speakers at the bottom of last year's CPU case.
"Could you speak a little more clearly?" I intoned, noticing a really nice peanut on top of my feed bowl, "There's people listening in on the other side of the line, and unless I miss my guess, you're gonna post on the world wide sucker board!"
Not so good, but not so bad, for improvisation.
What I heard next made my fur rise.
And the man on the phone talkin' to his hankey began a story,, That well, if it hadn't been for that peanut I spotted earlier I might have starved listening to it.
He began with the tail of a man, er hamster that was the longest I'd ever heard of...
We're talking longer than a big rig carrying the circus tent that brought my cousins to town last fall. And brother that was "big" real big.
He began to weave a tale with more turns in it than a habitrail purchased and maintained by a childless yuppie couple.
And it all began with her.. that babe that could knock the socks off a rat wearing army boots..
You see one night, I think it was in October.
Yeah, that's it, October, when the people come out all dressed funny,, yeah that's the night.
The night they come out and make trails of candy to their houses for the good little rodents to follow...
The voice, which carried more than a passing resemblance to James Earl Jones after gargling Drano, continued...
And as the voice buzzed on, it was starting to come back to me, like a long-ago indescretion, fueled by an overdose of the Old Zero Proof, that you had hoped would be lost in the mists of time. And yet it loomed back through the fog, like the Last Blast of the Andrea Doria.
That night, Hortense had taken the opportunity made available by the large bipeds and their trails of sucrose bait to do a little house shopping. The large feeder biped he had been living with had been showing him a bit too much attention and it was making him nervous, kind of like Vincent Price saying "Here, Kitty, Kitty". Or maybe not like that at all.
It made sense, as Hortense had moved shortly thereafter, he said he was fascinated by the blinking lights in the new large biped's hutch.
But what could this possibly have to do with the SDRAM Anagram?
My mind raced like my tail does when I've almost caught it on the exercise wheel as the voice frazzed on.......
"And that's about it, Hamster. I hadda get it out to ya, because..."
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
"What?" I barked. "What about my brother, Hortense!" It was tough, since we hamsters weren't given much in the way of vocal cords...not that we weren't blessed in other ways...yeah, that's right, sister...but that wasn't important now.
Because there was nothing at the other end. Sounded to this hamster like it was the end of the line... for Mr. Hanky.
I cradled the Dixie cup, and fired up a Llama. (A little brother to a Camel. ) I drew the rich smoke into my tiny lungs and came to a decision. I wasn't gonna get the answers sittin' on my hard drive...
It was time for this hamster to hit the streets.
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