So, once I had a job at a pet shop. I can't say it's name, because the subject is  too rich with material and I mention it a lot and they could still be alive. It was in an old, large building really close to my home and it paid $2.00 an hour, which in those days could buy you half a carton of cigarettes and I must say that smoking is bad for you and don't do it. It was run by a large family and by that I mean there were only 4 of them but were really big and quite unusual to the point of being very very very weird but it was so close to home.... plus that $2.00 per hour and I didn't have a car to work somewhere else because I was only 15. Plus I got a discount when I bought pet supplies.

So I decided one day I really really wanted a mouse. I had an empty aquarium to put it in and I remembered one I had when I was eight or nine which was really cute and fun and cuddly and I used to keep it in my coat pocket (kind of like Lenny in "Of Mice and Men" only his was dead) and it used to crawl back and forth all over my arms until I made the mistake of putting it in a cardboard box which it immediately chewed through and became one with the mysterious environment of the old house we lived in and may have even been snapped in a trap eventually.

I waited until the end of the day when I would be leaving and picked a mouse out of an aquarium with twenty mice in it and put it in a little sack with a drawstring which I put in my pocket and said good bye to everybody and walked right out with it. Yes, I stole it. I walked around the side of the shop and took it out to look at it. When I took it out of the bag it immediately sank it's long sharp teeth into my index finger and did not let go. The pain was unbeleivable, like getting a shot in your finger only a shot that took a full minute and blood and blood and more blood came out and I shook my hand around and still it would not let go! I stuck it back in the bag and it let go and I had to suck the bitten finger and I think I actually saw stars and I also was not as sure about my mouse idea anymore.

I took it home (because I couldn't put it back in the aquarium) and got my aquarium ready but the little mouse was very agitated and I could see that it was going to bolt into the depths of our basement and it was too late to get it outside so all I could do was to turn the aquarium upside down over the sack. The little mouse immediately began to do this jumping thing, where he would jump up, bang against the aquarium bottom and land again on the cement floor. He wouldn't even rest before he would jump again and THUMP and then land. He did it over and over and over. I tried to slide some cardboard underneath the aquarium but this would infuriate him and he would bite the cardboard and I would either kill him or he would escape. I decided to leave him alone for awhile and then maybe he would calm down. From another room I could hear a steady THUMP-plop, THUMP-plop, THUMP-plop. It never stopped. He was insane. It finally stopped and I went back to check him out. He was dead. He had died of a stroke or a heart attack or had just bashed his own brains in. I was relieved because it was clear he and I hadn't made that "connection" I was shootin' for. What I can't remember is how I got rid of him.

I found out later why my lil' mouse pal was so wild acting. A nephew of the owner, Danny, was a frequent visitor. He often stumbled across baby mice in the sea of antiques back in their warehouse. He would scoop up the little pink fetus looking things and put them in with the for-sale mice, where they would grow up and breed. They were always selling mice to little kids and their moms. In a good pet shop the mice are lab bred or farm bred and are really tame and don't bite. Danny would also reach into the for-sale tank of mice and give one to their awful monkey. The monkey would gobble them up greedily. The monkey would also whiz thru the cage bars or try to grab stuff out of your pockets if you got too close.

The lessons learned here are don't steal. Wild mice are not nice. Monkeys are usually bad and they belong in some other country, far away. Baby mice look like shrimp with little tiny legs. Teenagers under 16 will do just about anything for quite awhile to have some money in their pockets.

This is a real and true historical account from a real town in America.