A Childhood Memory and My Favorite Movie

Dear Readers,

This is a short story I wrote in a creative writing class at Eastern Arizona College in the fall of 2004.

A Childhood Memory and My Favorite Movie

I think you can figure out about a person by the way they treat animals.

One of the things I remember pretty clearly is something that happened to me in second grade. Our class had a pet hamster. Harry the hamster. I think the teacher named him. Students would take turns feeding him, playing with him, and other stuff like that. The teacher said we could learn from the hamster and he would be sort of our class mascot.

Most everybody liked Harry, but I remember there was this one kid that shook Harry’s cage. We were all busy taking a test or doing some kind of work where we were supposed to be quiet. Then that kid gets up, doesn’t say anything, walks over there, grabs the cage, and shakes it. It didn’t make any sense. Maybe he was trying to get attention, but it didn’t make any sense. I mean, what could motivate a person to do a thing like that? That’s just a horrible, horrible thing if you ask me. But besides that kid, most everyone was nice to Harry. Yeah, everybody besides that one kid liked him, but they liked him at different levels. I loved him. Maybe that’s cheesy, I don’t know, but there’s nobody else here; so, I feel comfortable telling you that. Yeah, I feel comfortable saying that I loved Harry. I loved Harry. I loved Harry.

This might seem strange to you. But, I’m telling you, if I have any idea what love really is, I would have to say that I know what it is because of Harry.

I still love him, in a way. Every chance I got I was over there watching him run on his wheel or drink his water. I loved the way he moved around his cage and crawled around his tubes and scooted his bedding around. Mostly he just slept, but I would even watch him sleep, with his stomach slowly going up and down. And I even stayed inside during recess sometimes so I could be with the hamster more. The teacher said it was OK if I stayed in as long as I cleaned his cage and behaved myself.

It must seem strange to you that I’m going on like this. Maybe you think I’m exaggerating just to get attention or to make everything seem cooler than it really is or maybe you think I’m saying all this just so I sound like an interesting person. Or a person that needs help and needs people around him to listen to him and help him.

Well I don’t care what you’re thinking. I know what my real feelings are. I know how I felt at the time. I don’t care if you think I’m lying.

I loved Harry.

So one day I got to class and the hamster was gone. His cage was gone, too. I asked the teacher where Harry was. The teacher said Harry died. I asked her of what. She said old age. I asked why he died and she just said because he was old. I remember I wanted a better answer so I asked her why again and she said something like, “that’s just what animals do when they’re old. They die.”

Of course the teacher didn’t tell me anything new. Of course I already knew that everything dies when it gets old. My father’s gonna die. My mother’s gonna die. Everyone I know is going to die. I’m gonna die. You’re gonna die. I understand all that. Well that’s the end of the story. That’s all there is to it. It’s simple, really. I loved Harry. He died. End of story.

So maybe that’s an important part of my life. I don’t know. I’ll tell you another thing about me.

There’s this movie called Taxi Driver I like. I’ve watched it more than a hundred times. It’s about this guy named Travis who was in the Vietnam War and he lives by himself in New York City. He gets a job as a taxi cab driver and he mostly drives around places where there’s drunks, prostitutes, homeless people, and that kind of thing. And he works the night shift.

Then one day Travis meets this girl he falls in love with. He obsesses over her and asks her out to lunch and they go on a few dates but Travis is kind of crazy and some other stuff happens and she dumps him.

Well, a lot of stuff happens in the movie, it would take too long to tell you the whole thing, but the important part and one of the coolest parts is Travis starts buying guns. Yeah, he gets a bunch of guns from this guy who sells them illegally. One of the guns he straps to his forearm and hides it under his sleeve and he rigs up this mechanism where he flicks his arm out and the gun comes out really fast and there’s a bunch of scenes where he’s standing in front of the mirror, practicing pulling his guns out. Maybe you’ve heard the line, “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? I don’t see anybody else here; you must be talkin’ to me.” Well he says that while he’s standing in front of that mirror in his apartment, getting his guns out.

He goes through this thing, too, this mental state, where he starts exercising a bunch and he gives himself a Mohawk, and he plans to kill this one guy running for mayor.

But anyway, the movie goes on and Travis meets up with this young prostitute and they become friends in a weird sort of way. He wants to get her out of the prostitute life and he gets mixed up with her pimp and some of the other gangster-type guys around her. Near the end of the movie Travis just kills a bunch of them. Shoots them. Stabs them some. It’s a pretty violent part. You should watch it.

I love that movie. It’s like the whole time he never gets out of the city. It’s around him all the time, the darkness, the crime, the tall buildings, the city noises, and he can’t get away from it. It’s around him all the time and he can’t get away from it. I don’t know exactly what the movie means, but I understand the feeling I get when I watch that movie. It’s such a cool feeling, and that’s why I watch it so much. I’m gonna watch it again tonight.

Maybe someday I’ll stop watching that movie. I think that would help me clean up my life and I think it would help me be a gentler person. But, I just have to watch it. I don’t feel right if I go too long without watching it.

What do you think? Do you think I should stop watching the movie?