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Throughout high school, I was afflicted with an especially nasty strain of a common ailment called puberty. That, thankfully, is over with.

Envision the most uncontrollable, unaccountable kid you’ve met and I was his best friend. After this incident the Dean “felt” (it’s truly a wonder how prone these practical people are to feel rather than to think) it best that the two of us never again sit in the same class. And let’s admit it’s never just one incident but a semester’s-long piling up that broke the camels back. Last period on Friday—to a sixteen year old what a full moon is to a werewolf—is when I killed Ms Wentworth’s chest high saguaro cactus with the 3rd–or was if 4th?–edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. But I didn’t heave this hefty and overgrazed pastureland of American thought; I merely redirected its trajectory. That’s a heavy book, after all, to get brained with. I merely antagonized and poked fun at my best friend’s excitable disposition and he swung the tomb in a whirling dervish of frustration. Ahhh yes, the days before special-ed segregation. I parried, the five pound bomb flew from the aggressor’s hands and went crashing into the cactus, snapping off the top quarter of its height.

Death by literature!

Ms. Wentworth’s halo of frizzy hair, which had something topiary about it, shuddered violently at the celery snap of impact. What we all learned about the saguaro that day is that it’s little more than a hollow shell save for an inner spongy material, like a sanguinated watermelon with stickers.

But it was also her child. She read to it when we lost complete interest in the conceits of dead white guys. Watered it fortnightly. Picked lint and erasureheads from its fierce quills. Extending one didactic finger, she corrugated her forehead and warned us that it would surely maim if we bumbled into it (for guys, these so-called warnings are always interpreted as open invitations to inflict suffering on one another). If you subscribe to Freud you might say that on some subconscious level we were all, including Ms Wentworth, aware of the threatening phallic presence the cactus commanded over the class. My friend, a high-powered mutant operating on minimal self-reflection, never paid mind to consequences and repercussions, and so, swung away knowing full-well that I would smack the text from his hands and possibly send it sailing toward her kitschy-cluttered desk, or, more fantastically, the swollen succulent posing stiffly nearby.

From behind her imposing wooden altar, Ms Wentworth, in one giant gasp, sucked all air from the room, looked at me like the murdering bastard I was, and in a single blousy flush, upended her chair, swooped up her circumcised baby, burst into tears and made for the teachers lounge; that furtive Shangri-la, that war room of the gerontocracy, that coven of hidden secrets, of huddled small talk where teachers murmur, plot, rumor-make and eventually regroup. Unaccountably, all blame was placed on me: a freshman suspended and then transferred to a different class full of “behavers,” and away from my best friend. For every other bad thing I got away with, I could hardly argue this unjust.

It was her first year teaching high school, and may have been her last for all I know, because she didn’t return second semester. Too busy maintaining a constant aura of aloofness (I was sixteen after all) to lose any sleep over the prospect, that coy Ms in her title forever shrouds any vengeful husband who may or may not exist.

Things worked out, for me at least. I ended up with a cantankerous English teacher cum painter-poet-singer-songwriter-playwright-thespian who warned me—and here I must paraphrase—that in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, you’ll find passion driving you to almost compulsively reach for perfection in writing, often—in fact, mostly—at the expense of everything else in your life. I’m now learning that the very hard way.

As usual, someone more entrepreneurial, more decisive, more certain of themselves, grabbed hold of that kernel of an idea, that nugget of insight and made a bit of cash.

Six years ago, while working in a pet store, I was busy cleaning tanks when a delicate crustacean, a decopod, flitted through the murk of dirty tank water and grasped my submerged hand. Tiny pinchers at the end of long, delicate foot-stalks nimbly maneuvered Lysmata amboinensis toward my fingers. Its thorace, yellow with two red racing stripes, swayed gently in the turbulent water like a commuter on the metro. Slowly, with a set of antennae twice the length of its body, the cleaner shrimp walked to the tip of my fingers and set its tiny claws upon a hangnail. The feeling was like a slight static shock, not uncommon in a room full of salt water and outlets. Then it moved to my cuticles, and finally, with a pair of chelipedic tweezers, grabbed at the grime from under my nails. And it was satisfying. I sat motionless, reveling in my first symbiotic relationship–with an invertebrate, no less!–and mentally arranged ways to have my fingers manicured every time I came to work, and then, how strange it would look when a customers saw an employee standing there with one arm in an tank and a blissful look on his face.

But then pet shops attract strange people. It is a refuge for the pony-tailed or tattooed and goateed male unable or unwilling to work at the Gap–preferring as it were to feed rats to snakes over folding jeans. The customers, mostly other guys, can be generalized as well. There are the shitheads in search of a frat house mascot that eats things. Then the forty-year old virgins who graduated from Dungeons & Dragons to a Bearded Dragon. In an opposing corner are the mulleted, sleeveless, toothless hilljacks who walk in with eight squaking kids, and a wife who remains in the Ford heap idling out front, to complain about the price of rats and then ask if their ten foot Burmese would eat a thawed chicken. Next, the fanatics who smell like the animals they keep, the bird lovers. Lastly, the no-nothing dentists and lawyers who want to recreate that time they went diving in Fiji right in their living room and want it to scale and would like it done this afternoon. This is the price one pays for running a pet shop that is against selling puppies and kittens.  There is no further need to encourage a stereotype by engaging in socially awkward behavior with a crustacean.

Of course if I wasn’t the only one doing it…

What saved me from the next logical step all those years ago, the money-making step, was, perhaps, a lack of a  business degree. I regret to say that John Ho, who runs the Yvonne Hair and Nails salon has started a trend in the US that’s likely to spread or at least earn him some revenue. The only difference between Ho and I is the difference between a Chordata and a Crustacean. Customers at Ho’s pay to have their feet soak in a tank full of flesh-eating fish. Ho admitted insecurity in regards to the idea , but was recently quoted in an AP article as saying “let’s give it a shot.” In the pat words of the reporter, “customers were quickly hooked.” Why? Because Garra rufa , the “Doctor Fish” as it’s known in Japan, apparently only consume dead or infected skin–like maggots in a gangrenous wound–such as calluses, corns, bunions and hang-nails.

One question: What’s this toe-sucker’s natural dinner time habits, certainly not primate epidermis? The ecology and phylogeny of this Middle-East freshwater fish would make a good follow-up post. Perhaps someone with an eye on evolution and phylogenetics could address it.