I Was A Teenage Crayfish Owner
I Was A Teenage Crayfish Owner
I found myself wondering the other day in English class how my professor could question my relationship with a crayfish, then five minutes later unhesitatingly accept another student's relationship with cheese. Actually, when I phrase it like that, it sounds as though I mean crayfish-as-food, so let me start over.
I was working at Petsmart, during one of the most dismal years of my life. I was going to a small college, which I hated, I never went to class, and I was nearly failing everything. My manager hated me, and I hated her in return. Work was miserable, as I had no authority to do anything but sell stuff and repeat whatever semi-factual information was on the official Petsmart caresheet. I missed my old job at Petco, where I'd quit in protest of the new managers and their "profits > animals" policies. I'd already run away once that year, taking three rats to Denver overnight (see Donahoe, I Didn't Drive All This Way for Nothing, 2005) and hadn't intended to return. My home life was in shambles, as I got farther into debt daily caring for my underemployed significant other and our cadre of rescued animals. I was having my first dermatological autoimmune response, and I was inhumanly miserable and itchy.
So it doesn't surprise me, in retrospect, that I ended up with another pet. The more awful I'm feeling, the more easily I can empathize with some wretched, sickly creature. And the crayfish was a textbook case of "wretched creature".
The crayfish arrived in a shipment of "feeder" goldfish, that emblem of Petsmart hypocrisy. Although it was in an enviable position for a predatory scavenger, surrounded by dead or trapped fish, it was too cold and sick to take advantage of it.
The mud-brown invertebrate barely wiggled as I reached my hand into the bag of dead-fish soup it sat in.
"Ohmigod, that's disgusting," my vapid teenage coworker said. "At least use a net." I shrugged her off and she went to handle cuter things, like hamsters. I was alone with a half-dead crayfish and needed to think of a way to make it better. Why? Well, I couldn't fix myself, so I needed to fix everyone else. Plus, it was my philosophical responsibility to alleviate suffering for those in my care.
This is probably as good at time as any to explain that I am rather terrified of crayfish. Slimy, chitinous things make me a little panicky, and I get nauseated by the way that crustaceans feel as they move. Parasites strike fear into my heart, and I could see some kind of freshwater lobster worm wiggling between the crayfish's carapace panels. Part of me longed to drop her and run screaming for the bathroom, to douse my arms in soap and scalding water and wash till the imagined parasites left my body. All that was summarily ignored, though--this was my responsibility, dammit, and if I got grossed out now, I would be no better than my shallow coworker.
"Here," I said to the crayfish, gently placing it in a container of clean water a few degrees warmer than the goldfish-shipping bag. The crayfish wiggled briefly and was still while I got up to bag fish for some customers (my actual job).
"Better?" I asked, when I returned to the aquatics desk. "Because I have to switch you again." This time it was into slightly warmer water, within a few degrees of our display tanks. I was holding the crayfish to transfer it to the next container when my hateful manager Sara came by, her piggish eyes gleaming as she saw that I wasn't working.
"What are you up to, Jessica?" she said in her repulsive, oily way, puffing slightly from the exertion of getting out of her office chair and walking twenty feet.
"I'm saving this crawdad. It's cold," I explained, using small words so Sara wouldn't make fun of me for using "jargon" (which, as she pronounced it, rhymed with "organ"). Her piggy eyes gleamed again as she huffed, "Before cleaning the algae off the tanks!?" (This is a major function of the "aquatics specialist" position.)
"No, after," I replied, very calmly. "I'm done with the next shift's tanks, too." Sara's face fell like some big, puffy souffle. She knew I was no liar. "Well, good, then," she half-stammered. She brightened as she said "Crawdads sell for $9.99, ha ha."
Sara waddled away as I gave the crayfish a despairing look. Perhaps I should euthanize her (the crayfish, not my manager, for whom painless death would be too kind) before Sara could make any money off my labor and the crayfish's suffering. The little brown crayfish waved a claw at me, which I took as an expression of desire to live and spite Sara, and I moved it to a display tank with the admonition "Not For Sale" on the glass. I put my hand in the container to move the crayfish, and before the bristly feel of little, wiggling crayfish legs could make me vomit, I was rudely pinched by a serrated claw.
"Ow, goddamit," I exclaimed, unceremoniously dumping the crayfish into the tank. My shift wasn't going to be over for another four hours, and I was tired of working already.
About a half-hour later, I was lifting a specimen container to put tetras in for a customer, when I noticed my pinched hand was red and swollen. I had washed and disinfected it well post-pinch, so I resolved just to watch it carefully.
Ten minutes after that, my hand appeared to have had a baseball inserted in it. "Sara," I said, approaching her as she ate her second lunch of the day, while on the clock. "My hand is swollen. I think I'm allergic to something. Can I go home?" Sara always jumped at the chance to cut my hours, and happily agreed to let me go.
I went home and slept well that night, getting up on time for class the next morning, for once, and with a perfectly healthy hand.
My evening shift started at 3:30, but I came in at 3 to see the crayfish. I waved at her, and she waggled a claw back.
"Salt bath time!" I said, having researched crayfish parasitology on my lunch break at school. She attacked the net as I got her out of her tank, which I felt was a sign of improved health.
The crayfish got a thirty-second concentrated salt bath. At ten seconds, the one visible parasite stopped wiggling. At fifteen seconds, it made a break for open water and promptly died. At twenty seconds, masses of fish lice fell out of her segmented abdomen, dead. It was nice to know that I was helping, even though I wanted to crawl under the desk and lie in the fetal position, hiding from all the parasites I was now paranoiacally sure were on me. I stuck it out and put the crayfish back in her tank, where she scuttled under a rock and stared at me with her little eyes-on-stalks. I went back to the desk and fed the dead parasites to the killifish, then finished my scut work for the day before my shift even started.
Later, I pithed and deparasitized a feeder minnow for the crayfish. She ate it in ten seconds, and I told her what a good crayfish she was.
For the record, I am not insane now, nor was I when I worked at Petsmart. I had no one to talk to besides the animals, but I've never operated under the delusion that they can understand or respond (some can't even hear me). The crayfish did not tell me she was female, as my annoying coworker and Sara had joked; I just looked up sexual dimorphism in Procambarids and made an educated guess. As to why I felt it helpful to praise a crayfish, I can only surmise that I was actually expressing self-praise for getting her to eat.
"The crayfish eats," said Sara on another workday, two weeks later. "It's for sale."
"I don't think she's healthy enough," I lied.
"It is," she said, glaring before she stomped off to the office. The crayfish really was much better. She'd gained about 20% more mass and had molted the night before. It appeared as though we had two crayfish now, but one was just a shell, which she was eating for calcium and protein replenishment. This was described to me as "gross" by another teen coworker. But seeing that "second crayfish" in the tank gave me an idea of how to save my chitinous little patient from being sold to some random child who would probably squish her or kill her with poor care.
At closing, I put the actual crayfish in a bag with wet paper towels, which I then put in my coat pocket. The shell went in a dead-fish bag, and in the Fish Log Book I wrote "Losses: 42 feeder goldfish, 17 feeder minnows, 9 neon tetras, one dwarf gourami, one crayfish."
We went to my parents' house, where I set up a spare tank over the kitchen sink, put the crayfish in, and went home to my apartment to sleep.
I was awakened at 7:20 a.m. by a phone call.
Me: (groggy) "Hello?"
Mom: (nearly shrieking) "What is this THING over the sink!?"
Me: "A crayfish. She's friendly. Don't feed her, please." (My mother has a habit of feeding aquatic carnivores things like bread crumbs.)
Mom: "Oh. A crayfish. Why?"
Me: "...It is a very, very long story."
Mom: "Well, it is kind of cute. He's wiggling his little claws at me."
Me: "She does that."
Mom: "Can I feed her?"
Me: "Give her some carrot or something. She doesn't eat bread, by the way."
Mom: "What about some ham?"
Me: "Only after she eats some carrot. I haven't been able to feed her anything but fish and occasional zucchini. She probably has some sort of horrible deficiency."
Mom: (having stopped listening) "Aww! She picked it up! She's eating it with her little... hand-things."
Me: (knowing the answer) "The carrot?"
Mom: "No, the ham." (baby-talk voice) "What's her naaaame?"
Me: "I dunno. Name her. I'm going to school."
I visited my parents' house after class, where I swear the crayfish already looked fatter. "What'd you name her?" I asked my mom. With the air of someone unveiling a work of art, she replied "Obby."
"What? Obby?" I said.
"Yeah," said my mom, a little defensively. "It's short for 'obsessive'. She wiggles her little hands all the time like that. She looks like she has obsessive-compulsive handwashing."
The idea of an OCD crayfish struck me as hilarious, so the name stuck. Of course, from then on, Obby was really more my mom's pet than mine, and I really only ever cleaned the tank and checked on her health.
Over the rest of the year, Obby grew disturbingly large on frozen/thawed seafood, vegetables, leafy greens, and probably bread. Her mud-brown shell became a rich mahogany with deep red tones, and her claws darkened, indicating that they were very hard and would hurt like hell if one pinched you. Mid-summer, she needed a larger tank, so I went to buy one at Petsmart, where I'd recently quit working.
"Did you get some more fish?" asked Sara, still smug that she'd driven me from my job. "No," I said flatly. "Just my pet crayfish."
This essay is dedicated to Obby, who died last year in a tragic accident involving the kitchen garbage disposal and her ninja-like ability to remain unnoticed.