A Sucker Born Every Minute

I wasn’t sure how to start this post, so I think I’ll just start with the backstory.

It was the early 90s and I was homeless for the umpteenth time. My mother wanted me to come here, but Charles wouldn’t let me. He had made no secret since I was a child that he “hated my guts” (his words). I wasn’t his biological daughter and he made sure I didn’t forget that.

Then someone gave my mother an old travel trailer. It was about 60 or 70 years old and had seen better days. It was parked way in the back, near the barnyard. My mother talked Charles into letting me move in there.

Now that I had a roof over my head, I needed to find a way to make some money. That’s not easy with rheumatoid arthritis and no driver’s license, but I found a way.

Years before, I had raised fancy rodents for a couple of pet stores. You know- rats, mice, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs. When I learned of a pet wholesaler in Oklahoma who was looking for new suppliers, I contacted them and confirmed the details.

I managed to track down several breeders within a few counties surrounding me and met up with them. I was able to get breeding stock, and as luck would have it, some of them had extra old cages and equipment that they gave me.

There was an unused room in the barn, so I cleaned that out, and in no time I had a nice setup and I was in business. I had accumulated beautiful varieties: long hair, short hair and curly haired rodents in a myriad of colors.

Rodents multiply fast, so very soon I had plenty. About once a month, I would load the weanlings into the van, and my mother would take me to the wholesaler. She enjoyed the outings because, except for routine trips to the grocery store, she seldom went anywhere.

After leaving the wholesaler, we passed by a wholesale pet food mill, where I would get bulk bags of animal food for a fraction of pet store prices. If I was low on shavings, it was a short detour to a lumber mill. They had huge plastic bags of shavings for about 75¢ a bag. They were several dollars a bag at the farm stores, so that was a big savings. After all expenses, if I was $100 ahead, I was doing good.

Then Charles died of a heart attack, and mine was the only income that my mother and I had to live on for the better part of a year, until she turned 60 and could get Social Security. It wasn’t just utilities to worry about. She had prescription medicine that she couldn’t do without. She’d had rheumatic heart disease since she was 12 years old, and she took meds that kept her alive.

Her doctor was an old fashioned country doctor who was much more concerned about his patients’ welfare than making money. He immediately stopped charging for her necessary office visits, and he contacted the drug companies. He managed to get some of her medications for free, but couldn’t get enough of it. She kept having to take 1/2 doses of her meds, and sometimes 1/4 doses. As a result, she ended up in the emergency room several times when her heart would get inflamed with an erratic beat. The hospital would refer her to charities that provided prescription meds, but they all had a waiting list due to insufficient donations.

When my mother finally started getting Social Security, she started out getting only $427 a month. That’s how much she got for…. I don’t remember, maybe 1 to 2 years, then it was raised to $560-something. At any rate, you can see how the financial situation was pretty desperate.

One of the rodent breeders had given me a copy of a small, cheaply made magazine about animal-keeping. It covered everything from small exotics like chinchillas and hedgehogs, to fancy livestock like mini horses, to a bit more conventional animals like Bengal cats. Anything unusual that people keep in captivity. It was a black-and-white magazine printed on flimsy newsprint, with a rather small circulation. The name escapes me and I doubt it’s still being published. Inside the magazine was a request for articles. They could not pay for them, but if they accepted your submission, they would send you a couple free copies of the issue it appeared in. That sounded fun, so every couple of months, I would send in an article and they would publish it.

Small circulation it may have had, but it just happened that a Mr. Roberts some 50 miles from me, across the state line in Oklahoma, either subscribed to it, or had come across a copy with one of my articles in it. He managed to track me down and made an offer I couldn’t refuse.

He was in the small exotic animal business, he said, and he couldn’t raise enough by himself to meet his demand. Would I be interested in taking on some of his animals to help him out? He would be supplying all the food, and any offspring I sold, I could keep half the money. This sounded like a wonderful opportunity. We needed the money so badly, and I had the cages and equipment and plenty of room. I said yes! (Missed red flag: If he really needed help because his demand was so high, why was he counting on me to make the sales?)

If my situation hadn’t been dire, I would have asked a lot of questions, and maybe I would have picked up some funny vibes. But desperate people don’t always think straight.

A few days later, he showed up with a truckload of animals. I don’t remember everything, but they included Hedgehogs, Sugar Gliders, Degus, Jerboas and African Pygmy Mice, among others. Oh, those adorable tiny Pygmy Mice! Two adults together would make about the size of a house mouse’s head!

The small animals weren’t all. Mr. Roberts also had a Potbelly pig and a Dwarf goat, both males. Fortunately, there was a goat pen with a shed at the end of the pasture, so I put those two in there. (Missed red flag: If he wanted babies, why weren’t they at least in pairs?).

He also had bags of feed, some open and some unopened, with promises to bring more in a few days.

Days went by, then a month. Babies were appearing and I ran out of their food. I heard nothing from Mr. Roberts. I called his number several times, and the phone would just ring and ring with no answer.

I had been getting discarded produce from a small mom-and-pop grocery store for my own animals, but it wasn’t enough to stretch out for the additional animals. Plus, hedgehogs have to have animal protein in their diets. So I started getting butcher scraps from that first store, and found a second store for more produce scraps. I really needed to sell some of those babies!

Wichita Falls had one of those free weekly papers. You know the kind: 98% ads and 2% articles. They’re placed in dispenser racks all over town and people can pick one up for free. Anyway, it ran a special, or maybe it was a regular deal, where you could get a discount if you paid in advance for a classified ad to run in several consecutive issues. So I did that. I got a few calls, but no real interest. I was beginning to get a little frantic. I was having an extremely difficult time keeping these animals fed.

I had Mr. Roberts address, so finally, my mother and I made that long drive, using gas we couldn’t afford, and found his house. It was on one of those country dirt roads that had a house every few hundred yards. I could see no sign of life at all. I knocked on the door and no answer. There was a building on the property that looked like a closed in rabbit barn, but it was shut up tight. Did I have the right address?

We stopped at several of the neighbors’ houses and I asked about Mr. Roberts. Yes, I had the right address, but nobody had seen hide nor hair of him. They hadn’t even seen his pickup parked there. They didn’t know where he was, but he apparently hadn’t been home for a long while. What could we do? We went back home. I made more phone calls that never got answered.

While all this was going on, I was getting a pretty bad RA flareup, no doubt due to stress. This county is too poor for a free clinic, but they had a program to pay for doctor visits. I applied and got accepted, and they arranged a doctor visit for me. The doctor gave me a prescription, but I didn’t know the county didn’t pay for that. If I had known that in advance, I wouldn’t have bothered applying to see the doctor. So I had a prescription that I was unable to do anything about.

I still had no problems at all selling my own “common” rodents, but the wholesaler didn’t deal in the exotics, and he didn’t know anyone who did. Then I got an idea.

I called the newspaper, told them I had a bunch of exotic animals, and wondered if they might be interested in doing a human interest story or something. They asked enough questions to determine if it might be worth their while, and made an appointment to come out. Good, I thought, that might be some great free advertising, of sorts.

A few days later a reporter and photographer showed up. They took lots of photos and asked me lots of questions, then left. A couple of Sundays later, the article appeared.

HOLY MOLY I wasn’t expecting that! I can’t remember if it was lifestyle or local, but the front page of that section was completely covered with color photos of my animals. Turn the page to see more! Accompanying the photos was a long article. Surely that was enough to bring in some business!

Over the next few days I got many phone calls and crowds of people came out to look, but no sales! People seemed to think I was running a zoo, and nobody had any interest in buying. They just wanted to see the animals.

When it became apparent that I was never going to be able to fill that prescription, I called the county to tell them I was going to withdraw from the medical program. I did manage to get out the words that I didn’t have the money to fill prescriptions, therefore it was pointless for me to see the doctor, but I didn’t get to say much else. The people in the county office had seen that feature in the newspaper and passed it around. The lady lit into me with fury! It was obvious that she thought I was pulling some kind of scam, and there was no way I could have all those animals and be broke. I tried to explain they weren’t my animals, but she wouldn’t listen.

A few days later, I sold a couple of baby sugar gliders. Finally! But a couple days after that, the electric company showed up. If I didn’t pay the bill right then, they were turning the electric off. I had enough to add to the sugar glider money to keep it on. If I had not made that sale, the electric would have been turned off. What wonderful timing!

But I made no more sales. At all. I continued to struggle to keep those animals fed, and my phone calls continued to go unanswered.

Then one day, with no warning, Mr. Roberts showed up and wanted his animals back. He wanted to know if I had any money for him. I said no, and that made him mad. I was so flustered over his sudden appearance, I found myself stammering and getting apologetic. Since the animals had been multiplying, he took away far more than he had brought. (Missed opportunity: Instead of apologizing, I should have reamed him!)

I have a hypothesis. He was going to be out of town for an extended period, and it would have cost a fortune to hire someone to go to his place every day to take care of his animals. So he found a way to find a pet sitter for free.

That popular phrase often attributed to P.T. Barnum has a lot of truth in it. That time, I was the sucker.