Oscar the Grouch

Here's one of my life's contradictions: Salmon is my favorite food, but I get sick with anxiety when I enter the aquarium section of the pet store.

Fish scare the hell out of me. Has everyone heard about the new pedicures where fish nibble your feet? Disgusting. Dis-GUS-ting. While cruising along in a pontoon at Elephant Butte, my family heard a loud THUD. After circling back around to the site of impact, we found a dead fish. Not just any dead fish--a fish with rigor mortis. This fish had been dead for centuries. It stunk to high heaven, and I thought I would die from the yuckiness of the whole thing. And then there was my stepdad's Oscar.

Otherwise known as a Cichlid, the Oscar starts out about the size of a silver dollar. Sometime around my elementary school days, my stepdad bought one of those little octagonal cutesy fishtanks, and filled it with a small community of fish. The two I remember well were an Oscar, and a plecostomus (a crap sucker). We named them Oscar (obviously) and Felix (because the sucker cleaned up after the slovenly Cichlid). We took such good care of the fish that they soon outgrew their surroundings. A larger tank was in order. We upgraded to a 10-gallon tank, and outfitted the pair with some new plants and rocks. About a year went by, and we had to get yet another tank, because the beastly Oscar outgrew his home again. This time, per the suggestion of the pet store guy, we got the 55-gallon tank, and hoped Oscar would stop growing.

Not only was Oscar getting monstrously large, but Felix was getting big, too. Oscar had some serious crap to clean up, and Felix worked day and night. For years. I thought those sucker fish were cute at first, but when he grew to the size of a sweet potato, and I could see the gory detail in his sucker mouth and googly eyes, he went from funny to just plain freaky. Oscar mostly ate fish sticks that resembled Chinese crunchy noodles. He often ate to excess, and after a few too many, he would throw them up. It was funny the first few times, but after seeing his repeated bulimia, it just got gross. The pet store guy spoke up again. He suggested live goldfish for Oscar's diet. I should tell you now that I have a certain respect for Oscars. I think they're totally icky, but I feel that they are one of the most emotionally readable animals out there. When we dumped those poor live goldfish in the tank, he went for it. I was okay when he ate the first one. Then the second. The tough part was watching the third goldfish, only half-eaten, still gasping for water, his little mouth hanging out of Oscar's. I know. Horror story. And it was like a train wreck. I was in high school at this point, and had developed a horrible fear of fish. Oscar was more than hungry. He was a murderer. But so was I.

When Oscar and Felix got the deluxe condo upgrade, my stepdad thought he would do the nice thing and set up the small tank in my bedroom. He bought fish, food, aquarium plants, the whole nine yards. All I had to do was feed them. I couldn't bring myself to do it. I hated those fish. I wouldn't feed them. Their starvation became so advanced that they became cannibals. There were little fish carcasses, skeletons, lying on the pebble floor. And this became a vicious cycle, because I just got more freaked out. And then he'd buy me more fish, because the old ones were disappearing. I couldn't win.

Meanwhile, Oscar got to be so big and strong, that he could splash water out of his tank. I'm not talking about a spritz here and there. I'm saying he would rear back, do this quaky-shaky thing with his tail, and SPLASH! Eight, ten ounces of water, all over the living room floor. If you got too close to his glass barrier, he would turn from a lustrous shade of orange, into a smoky, black and brown, dull pallor. If you didn't relent, he would look you dead in the eye, open his mouth wide, and do what I can only imagine was screaming in fish-ese. You're probably wondering why I egged him on, but I stayed the hell away from him. I know he did the chameleon screaming thing because little kids would come to our house and run right up to the glass. And those little kids are probably scared of fish, now, too.

This fish got to be nine years old by the time I went to college. There were many reasons I was glad to leave for college, and one of the biggies was not worrying every morning that I might be the one to find Oscar floating belly up after his extraordinarily long life. He lived to see 11, if memory serves. Mom called me one day and told me that Oscar was gone. I didn't want details. She told me that my stepdad had a private ceremony for his fish, and I'm glad it was special for them. If he is in the ground somewhere, I know there is a tree nearby that is thankful for all that fertilizer.