Read Online Ham by Sam Harris - Free Book Online

alligators, which he animates with distinct personalities. And he loves dogs. He loves dogs. It occurred to me that if I shared my history with animals, it would give us another common passion.
    At bedtime, after reading The Courageous Captain America for the seven thousandth time, after which I wanted to stab out my eyes with an ice pick, I said, “Cooper, you know Daddy loves animals like you do. I’ve had so many different pets. Would you like to hear about them?”
    â€œYes, Daddy. What kind of pets?”
    I had him! I started at the beginning:
    â€œWhen I was a baby, Nanaw and Bubba got a little white poodle for our family named Jimmy-John.”
    Cooper thought that name was very funny.
    â€œJimmy-John liked to have his tummy scratched.”
    â€œWhat happened to Jimmy-John?” Cooper asked.
    I hadn’t thought this part would come up. Jimmy-John was only with us for a year when he got a rare cancer and died.
    â€œJimmy-John had to leave us . . .” I stuttered, “but we got another dog right away. His name was Duke.”
    â€œWhere did Jimmy-John go?” He wouldn’t let up.
    â€œI think to another family that needed him more. But then we got Duke! Duke was a mutt. A crazy brown big dog that”— jumped the fence and never came back. Shit! —
    â€œ. . . visited us for a while and then went on an adventure.”
    I remembered we got two more dogs that we also named Duke, both of whom escaped and were never seen again. We just kept replacing the dogs but maintained the name so as to live in denial and not have to fix the fence. I skipped the extra Dukes. I didn’t want him to think we might replace him with another Cooper.
    There was also a psychotic beagle we named Columbo because he had a slightly wandering eye like Peter Falk. He yelped and yapped fourteen hours a day while constantly racing the length of the backyard fence. He couldn’t jump over it, but his OCD pattern soon created a balding runway that became a dusty trench deep enough for him to crawl under it. My father fumed and steamed. “That goddamn fleabag’s days are numbered.” One day, Columbo was just gone. No explanation.
    Next came a scroungy mutt called Furfy, whose name I really wanted to share with Cooper because it was so funny, but I didn’t know how to explain that she bit the mailman and my father drove her to a wooded area twenty miles away and abandoned her there. Or that she somehow miraculously returned to us months later, exhausted and mangy and pregnant, and bore a litter of equally scroungy puppies, all of whom were suspiciously given away in one day, along with Furfy. I suspect my father actually crossed the Oklahoma border this time.
    â€œThen we got Noni,” I said, skipping to a dog I could talk about. Once again, Cooper laughed at the name.
    Even though we’d had Jimmy-John and Duke and Duke and Duke and Columbo and Furfy, Noni was the first dog around long enough for me to develop a real relationship. She didn’t jump fences or yelp or bite mailmen. Hers was the name I used when asked to create a stripper name, which is based on your favorite pet and the street you grew up on. I would be Noni Washington. Great stripper name. Or it could be a prostitute name, but it sounded more to me like a heroin-addicted lounge singer with sleepy eyes, who wore dulled lamé tunics with sporadic wiry threads popping up here and there, and seams stretched beneath armholes and at the hips. Noni Washington would kick off her shoes and sing songs of unrequited love and pain and torture and misery and despair. I could actually picture myself as some version of Noni Washington in the future. And it wasn’t bad.
    â€œNoni was a sweet dog,” I said to Cooper, snuggling close to him. “And she loved to chase cars and she slept in the garage . . .” Damn it!
    Once again, this wasn’t going well. What decent person