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Sometimes I wonder if there is some sort of rule requiring those hunky blond guys in the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs to own creamy-colored Labrador Retrievers. Do these pretty boys all have labs for pets? Do they all give their dogs clever names like Winston Jefferson or Jeevers? Is this lab-as-pet thing mandatory as the plaid boxers they wear or the Ivory soap smell that rises from their perfectly tanned skin? Do their girlfriends always have to go to Vassar, Smith, or Radcliff? 

 

Sure, it's cliché, but in my experience, little old ladies have tiny poodle-up dogs, and little boys have painted turtles - even though those little shelled critters are almost always vectors for salmonella. The Audrey Hepburns of the world have Siamese cats - or something like them. Oh, and dark adolescents? They have no social skills except for an occasional bong-sharing party. And their pets are inevitably rodent-eating reptiles. 

 

Yes, pets are our loving companions and indicators of our personality types. Consider your pet as a calling card. So, OK, my social card for a while was Fred, a $2,400 (not including the cost of the cage and fit-up) umbrella crested cockatoo. This is not your granny'sgranny's canary. This avian beast was more than a foot tall and had a wingspan of five feet and a beak that packed a whopping 3400 pounds of pressure per square inch. While he was brilliantly white, his whiteness (I learned this only after he had arrived in my pad) was due to the copious amounts of fine white talc that he produced. The piles of powder Fred generated could have kept a whole city of babies in talc until they went to college.

 

Day after day, I would come home to my apartment and find it looking as if every school child in town had come over to my living room to clap the classroom erasers. 

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Unfortunately, like I said, I wasn't warned about this little talc detail until after I purchased Fred.

 

Where do I begin? Let's start with why I went out and got a parrot. It was a slow time for me emotionally. I had convinced myself that I was one of those people who would always be single, as in lonely. Suffice it to say I was feeling a tad pathetic. And scared, too: I had just picked up some magazine that said people who have no affection die young or have debilitating strokes.

 

I decided that getting a pet was the only way to save myself. I was keenly aware that I was about to pay for my primary companion, and in so doing, I would be engaging in a kind of prostitution – i.e., paying for affection. But hey, at least I could comfort myself in the knowledge that I was selecting a whore outside of my species. It seemed kind of exotic.

 

The idea solidified that a pet might provide as much emotional benefit as a daily dose of Paxil. A pet would not carry the social stigma of being unbalanced or needing medication. I always made fun of unstable people and was not prepared to accept the notion that I was one of them. 

 

Instead, I was about to become a respected pet owner. I did my research and learned that parrots are brilliant. One book suggested that these birds can be as bright as a four-year-old. It went on to say that parrots are also very precocious and affectionate. 

 

Armed with this knowledge, I headed from one pet store to another, looking for the bird — and the love — of my life.

 

After looking at the talkative African Grays, the moody Green Amazons, and the giant and gaudy-as-a-French whore Macaws, I set my mind on a Cockatoo. It must have been all those Wednesday nights of my youth watching scary Robert Blake with his cockatoo. Now that particular cockatoo, known to millions of viewers as Fred, was a Sulfur Crested Cockatoo, the smaller and more colorful cousin of the Umbrella Crested Cockatoo. Naturally, as a person who always likes bigger, more expensive models of anything, I wanted the Umbrella. By coincidence, the bird I would eventually purchase was also named Fred.

 

Fred was docile and sweet-natured when I first met him cooing on his perch. After a couple of visits, I decided that he would fit in nicely with the décor of my apartment and temperament. I did not know then that this simple purchase would automatically turn me into a bird person. There are no official rules governing entrée into this club; it is a little like when you come to accept Jesus Christ as the only Lord and your personal Savior after, let's say, a murder: you are kind of a self-made Born Again.

 

I was about to become a bird person. Bird people are a strange sect of society; they get very little attention from the population at large. They are a harmless lot who fly under the radar, occasionally congregating en masse at caged bird club events at two-and-a-half-star hotels near airports. Here, people buy silk-screened T-shirts with parrots on the front. The tagline usually says, ""I Love My Bird More Than My Grandchildren."" It may be that some oddballs find this funny in a David Letterman way, but the reality is that many of these people prefer their birds to their grandchildren. I did not know about these people when I bought Fred, nor did I know that I would have to endure them every time I went to buy Cockatoo food, which is not sold at Price Chopper. You have to go to the bird store, which is much like church. This is fine; who am I to judge? But remember, I was expecting something like a waterless fish tank, an ""animals as art"" kind of pet that people would admire when visiting my crib for a few cocktails. Unlike the ""bird people,"" having a bird was not a passion for me. Not at all.

 

Well, I finally committed to taking Fred home after talking with my neighbor, a bird person herself; she said there was no better pet than a cockatoo. Again, I was new to all of this. I did not know that she was a bird person when we spoke, and I was not well informed about these particular people because, as I said, they fly below the radar - like the millionaire next door..only odder. However, I can attest that bird people differ from dog owners who take their pooches to the park for doggie play group. No, the bird people are the Moonies among pet owners.

 

When my neighbor began going on and on about Max, her bird (referring to him as her ""baby""), I still was not wholly clued into how different we were. I just thought that she was trying to support me. Growing up, my family had had pets – so this parrot thing would be fine, or so I told her. She agreed that I was, indeed, ready to ""adopt."" I neglected to tell her that our dogs were terrified of a rolled-up newspaper when I was a child. Humans in our house ruled supreme.

 

I delivered Fred's new home to the apartment a day before I picked him up. While the cage seemed appropriate for my house in the catalog, in real life, the prison cell that arrived looked as if it could be home to various animals ranging from a family of bobcats (anything smaller could fit between the bars) to a lesser ape. My once tasteful living room now looked like a scene from Silence of the Lambs.

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Now, the trauma, and it was trauma, occurred when Fred actually made his arrival. He had been shoved into a box and was not OK with it. Meanwhile, I feared the great white beast in the box. Something about the slashing sound that his beak made on the cardboard could contain a refrigerator but not my Moulocian pet triggered the initial seeds of fear in me. Within minutes of his arrival, he made serious headway toward his escape. It was a sobering experience, a ""take stock of your life"" kind of moment for me. Within minutes of the first sighting of the beak piercing through the box, dear Fred could push his head through the hole. The tight squeeze made him appear as if he was part of the box. It was as if he'd somehow been ""beamed"" down to Earth with a box on the same "" beaming platform;"" clearly, upon the recording down here on Earth, some of the particles got mixed up. Bird and box had gotten inextricably scrambled. It - he -was simply a box-a-too.

 

I knew I had to assist him with his escape. That is until I saw the beak coming towards my thumb. During this part of the escape, Fred broke a large feather, which had a vascular center that, when broken, acted like a shunt. This poor bird was terrified by his having been kidnapped and boxed. Given that any creature with the sensibilities of a three-year-old child would freak, I really should not have been surprised that Fred would've attempted to take flight as soon as possible.

 

I am unsure what particular element of this event was the most horrific. The sheer gust of wind as he took flight. Or my surprise at how wide his wingspan was. I was cowed as this great bird of prey took off in the house. But most horrific of all was the blood being splattered across the walls as Fred's feather-turned shunt moved up and down in powerful gusts.

 

The blood, mixed with Fred's white powder, splashed onto the walls and dried into a pink the color of steamed shrimp. Ah, I had a new and strangely smelling adobe textured wall covering. Had I been able to look past the fact that this organic mixture would more than likely be able to transmit the Avian Flu - I would have been forced to admit that it was not wholly unattractive. If the stuff had been applied evenly, it might pass as a very upscale wall appliqué.

 

I was finally able to get the parrot into the cage. But the most horrific part of his move was yet to come. He was no longer snow white but looked like a Santeria survivor. Furthermore, his wing was still leaking. I called the vet, who told me that I needed to take hold of the bird's feather with a pair of pliers and pull it out, or else he would bleed to death. 

 

Well, I was not about to watch the bird lose close to four gs of blood on my watch. I grabbed some pliers and went to get Fred, who, upon seeing the pliers, went nuts- applying another blood splatter across the china-white wall. He waved that beak around, and that's all it took for me to back down. I figured I would wait until he grew weak from blood loss and attempt the feather amputation at that point. As luck would have it, Fred's blood-letting feather dried up, and Fred and I could move on to the next crisis. This came almost an hour after the hemorrhage incident. I went to lie down because I was completely overwhelmed with what I had gotten myself into. 

 

Clearly, this was not the pet I wanted. I was on the bed reading about parrots, thinking that my ignorance about the bird was not helping our "" adjustment."" That's when I learned that these parrots typically live to be over 50 years old. Oh no, I thought. I want out. Now! Suddenly, I felt drained and emotionally exhausted and soon fell asleep.

 

A little while later, I woke to the sound of a door opening. Obviously, the opener of the door wanted to do so covertly to take me by surprise and end my life brutally and violently. Well, just as I was about to strike a ready-for-action pose, the assault on the lady in my living room occurred. I was not at all sure what I was more terrified of. The fact that there was a lady who I did not know in my living room or that she was clearly being murdered there. I was at my wit'swit's end. As it turned out, it was only Fred mimicking a door opening and a woman being killed. 

 

Everything else the bird said was either a mumble that sounded like something coming from the spiritually possessed or the nagging screams of an abusive parent. I tell you, it was awful.

 

I went to bed that night near tears, terrified of my new pet. The following day, I woke up to someone cooking eggs. I realized someone was in my kitchen when a pot sailed through the air, landing near my room. It was Fred; he had gotten out of this kennel cage and was swinging from the pot rack. I called the pet store, and they told me that they used to call Fred ""Moses"" because he would not only be able to open his cage but also those of the other birds in the store. That's when I decided I had to start locking Fred's cage. I was becoming his warden, and this, too, I tell you, was not a good feeling.

 

It was about a year later when Fred came into his sexual maturity; I would say it was at that point that our relationship really went on the skids. Fred fell in love with me. How ironic, considering I had sought the pet for emotional comfort.

 

Comfort yes. Coitus, no.

 

Fred's love for me was an obsessive, violent love often dramatized in same-species couple dramas and shown on Lifetime Television for Women starring Meredith Baxter-Birney. I was now the proud owner of a gay, scary albino bird of prey with a beak that could tear apart a VW and the impulse control of a toddler. I was fucked. Every day, he would scream so loud that people would comment in the lobby of the apartment building about the man who owned the baboon. I would join in on their complaints about the nightly loud hoots and hollers that the simian made. Oh me? I was the guy who owned a gentle little parrot. I would smile and lie through my teeth.

 

The complaints kept up. Usually, they followed an outburst from Fred when he was feeling particularly randy. I would hurry him outside on the leash I'd bought from a bird store for large parrots. At dusk, I would take him for a walk, and people would stare at me. I was suddenly one of the most famous people in the neighborhood. I was the guy with the bird. No one did not want to talk to me, no one at all. The beggars would come up to me, as would children, asking if they could pet Fred. I would say ""sure"" to the children, and I told the bums that he was mean. And just as a child would reach out to touch Fred, the mother would lunge forward, separating Fred from their precious little one, always citing some past experience in their family where a parrot had taken off someone's ear or finger. No one wanted a nine-fingered kid on the Little League team. That's when it hit me: I was not popular; I was some kind of hometown Siegfried and Roy act. 

 

It was a horror. So, in the end, I gave Fred away. Packed his little ass into a box. He left much in the same way he had come in.

 

People ask me if I miss Fred. And I always reply, "Fred who?"

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