TBT #55: My Pet Monster

I’m dangling my feet off the balcony and watching big things look small. I’m trying to see the ocean and the ocean is invisible at night. I can play a song with my wine glass — it’s flat and hollow and round.

He’s scratching against the door again. His nails must have grown back. It’s a rhythmic sound, barely audible unless you listen for it. My friends all missed it, when they were here earlier, but to me it’s overwhelming. Scratch Scratch Scratch. It tears through my skin. And then muffled groaning — gruff, anguished screeching against the closet door — and I’m the only one that can hear him. He knows that. He does. Of course he does. You have to understand, he’s my best friend.

I’m not a bad kid. I just get lonely sometimes. And it never started out like this. Walking through a mall, looking at toys — I’m little, as happy with a gumball as I am with a model spaceship — but there he was. Purple and orange and ugly and friendly. My sister Jill thought he was disgusting, but as soon as I saw it, I knew it was the toy I wanted.

He came alive soon after I got him. I can’t explain that part. He came shackled with handcuffs, which I hated, because it didn’t seem all that befitting of a friend. So I found a key in the garage that seemed to fit the lock. And then it happened. He was alive. He stood in front of me, no longer stuffed but made of bones and skin and blue fur. And he looked scary, but I knew — somehow I knew absolutely — that he wasn’t going to hurt me. He was a friend.

We had some hard times, the monster and me. He was always playing tricks on people, and I had to go to great lengths to make sure nobody else found out about him. I was afraid they’d take him, if they knew. It wasn’t right, probably, for a 12-year-old’s best friend to be a reanimated monster. But I couldn’t imagine having anyone else. He wasn’t hard to take care of. Though he never spoke, he was smart, and the only thing he ate was garbage (even the cans!). I could even turn him back to his original stuffed form by putting the handcuffs back on, something I did a lot in the beginning as a means of hiding him.

But I stopped doing that a few years ago. I even threw the key away. I couldn’t stand to be apart from him, to let him go back to where he came from, wherever that might be. He’s all I have.

My best friend Chuckie moved away shortly after my thirteenth birthday. I watched from the treehouse as Monster ate alphagetti cans. The moving van groaned and rambled down the road and I slumped down against the plywood wall and buried myself in my knees. The monster looked up and came over, his little purple legs making a soft padding sound as he came to me. And held me. He was a monster of a friend. You have to understand that.

And then my sister left. And I needed to leave too. To go to school, to get a job, to start a life! There was no getting around it, but I was so alone. The monster changed. He looked older, withered. He didn’t run around playing tricks with the kind of youthful abandon we had when we started. He coughed and spat gross pink goop against the floor. He ate seldomly, slept often and groaned where he used to roar.

“The key’s gone, dammit,” I had to explain to him once in my university dorm room. “It’s gone. You can’t go back.” He whiimpered sadly and returned to the underside of my bed where I kept him, hiding him from my roommate. “I’ll play with you later,” I sighed. “I have to finish this paper.”

I’m an adult now, living on my own. I work as a temp at a big office building downtown. And still he scratches against the door of my apartment. Even as I sit, surrounded by friends, drinking wine, singing songs, laughing at nothings, he scratches against the door. “Look at you,” people say, “you’re an adult now!” And I can only smile and nod because, hell, all the signs are there. Except for the scratching; the groaning; the monster in my closet.

The ocean is invisible at night. The city breathes a gross auburn air. My wine glass song is answered by a honking car, a siren, a scream, the scratching. I have an Ikea coffee table. I’m an adult now. The monster groans and grasps and throws his body against the door. I don’t have it, goddammit. I don’t have the key anymore.

And I still need you.