Thoughtless for the Day

Darwin tells us, of course, that left to his own devices Coop would freeze to death thus failing to pass on his bad-timing genes. In an evolutionary sense, it would be a very good thing if Special Agent Dale Cooper never bred. For starters, Coop is missing a foot and several toes. Since these appendages were already lost when Coop and I first met, over twenty years ago, I have no idea exactly how he came to lose them. Since Coop and I are roughly the same age and since I'm not missing any body party parts, I've always chalked it up to Coop not being smart enough to avoid hungry dogs. If I see a dog hungrily eyeing my digits I get on the nearest bus and leave the area.

Coop's string of questionable judgments resulted in his capture and his landing his shell in the Black Hole of Calcutta of pet stores. It was located in the Gallery, populated with half-dead animals and rumor has it, eventually closed down by the Board of Animal Welfare. I had gone there in order to pick up some meal worms for a friend's lizard when I noticed Coop franticly attempting to climb the sides of an aquarium that was barely bigger than him. "You should move that turtle in to a bigger aquarium," I helpfully offered to the guy behind the counter who was a dead ringer for Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo character from Midnight Cowboy.

"If you're so fuckin' concerned about it," Ratso Rizzo shot back, "the why don't you fuckin' buy it and get it out of here?" In Philadelphia, this approach is know a "the soft sell". "The hard sell" involves a baseball bat and your grandmother's kneecaps.

"How much do you want for him?"

"What have you got?"

Using all of my bargaining skills, combined with my intense knowledge of psychology, I managed to talk Ratso Rizzo down to everything I had in my wallet along with all the change in my pocket: a little over fifty bucks. The average box turtle usually sells for anywhere from "free" to "we'll pay you to get it off our property".
And that, pueri et puellae is how Special Agent Dale Cooper went from being the world's most unlucky box turtle to eventually living in a colonial townhouse and having is own private garden. Although, I admit, at times it's been a bumpy road. Because of his mistreatment at the unwashed hands of the workers at the pet store, Coop had health problems for a few years. For a while, I even had to give him vitamin injections (nothing in your past, and I've opened for Johnny Thunders, can adequately prepare you for shooting up a turtle) on a daily basis. Of course, there's still one more thing I need to do for Coop: I need to get him laid.

Once a year, Coop's eyes develop a reddish tint and he starts humping anything he can climb onto (if you visit my home during the early summer, don't take off your shoes or leave your pocketbook unattended on the floor; trust me) and I make a promise to look into arranging some female companionship (Coming this fall to Animal Planet: Rodney Anonymous, Reptile Pimp) for him. I've even gone so far as to contact the Philadelphia Zoo, who (understandably) hung up on me.

I'm not worried. Cooper is, like me, only his early forties. Unlike me, he could easily live to be well over one hundred and twenty years old. I've got plenty of time to get him some action. Someday, thanks to my tampering with process of natural selections, you might just find yourself strolling by a frozen pond on a snowy day and catching a glimpse of several confused turtles that had awoken early expecting spring.

Darwin, as you might know, brought several tortoises and turtles back to England with him following his adventures on the Beagle. One of them, Harriet, a giant tortoise now living at the Queensland Zoo, turned 175 last year. As for Darwin's pet turtle, the last I heard was that he was alive and well and living on a country estate in the UK.

Special Agent Dale Cooper (seen here in his private garden)