Hamsta Gone Gangsta

It’s absurd that I found myself babysitting a hamster last month, but even more absurd that I lost her. Nina was born in a pet store only a block away from the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens. She had the lucky fortune of being scooped up by two of my closest friends, Chris and Lydia, who three years before, had met and fallen in love in an East Village bar. It was love at first sight.

Chris and Lydia say the same was true of their feelings for the hamster; that when they saw her deep, dark eyes and white fluffy exterior they just had to make her theirs. My guess is that it had less to do with love and more to do with an alcohol-induced whim, or at the very least, a parenthood test-drive. Regardless, they genuinely cared for Nina and bought her all the accoutrements a hamster could want. Nina’s new home was a hamster dream palace – colorful tubes snaking across Chris and Lydia’s Brooklyn apartment. Chris took photographs of Nina while Lydia routinely fluffed up her sleeping quarters.

So when they told me that they were leaving the city for a couple of weeks in mid-December and asked if Nina could stay with me in my East Harlem apartment, I naturally obliged.

“Of course,” I said with only slight trepidation.

Nina and I didn’t have much of a relationship. When I visited Brooklyn (which wasn’t often) she would often bite me when I picked her up.

“That’s just what she does,” my friends said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Nina’s mood was subdued on the night that Chris and Lydia packed up her party palace and brought her and her kibble to my apartment. She had never been to Harlem before, so perhaps she sensed that things were different uptown.

I had only been living here six months, so I understood any uncertainty that she might be feeling. I came to Harlem in the summer of ’05, lured by 1000 square feet, a dishwasher and a rent-stabilized lease. The close proximity to the East side and West side express trains sealed the deal.

“How often do I change her cage? What about feeding her?” I asked, putting pen to paper as Chris and Lydia began instructing me on the dos and don’ts of hamster care.

They told me that I should clean her cage only once over the two weeks she was here, check her water supply every day and not feed her any meat products. Oh, and she liked carrots.

They said their goodbyes to Nina and with that, Chris and Lydia walked out of my apartment. The door shut. It was just Nina and me.

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“You’re what!” my friend Purnima exclaimed the next day over lunch at Serafina. “Are you kidding me? That’s so random.”

I couldn’t agree with her more. But there it was. While I was diving into mozzarella, prosciutto and sangria, Nina was spinning around in her wheel uptown, her wood chips stinking up my pristine abode.

“Who has hamsters?!” she asked, baffled.

The two of us racked our brains, thinking back on our grade school friends and if any of them had hamsters. Purnima and I had been close for years. We grew up together in Indiana and she had come to New York directly out of college. She and her (now) husband had given Murphy and me a place to stay until I found my first apartment.

We came to the conclusion that we didn’t know anyone who had a hamster. Besides me.

“Fascinating,” she said. “Well, good luck with that.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

On my way uptown from lunch, I stopped at a bodega and picked up some carrots. When I returned home I gently took Nina out of her cage and placed her in my hand.

“You’re not in Brooklyn anymore, baby,” I said to her sweetly before she dug her tooth into my index finger.

“Dammit,” I muttered under my breath. “What the hell joy comes from a biting hamster? I just don’t understand.”

Back in the cage she went.

I had been dating someone about a week at that time, and it was high time that he and I had some private time together. He lived in Brooklyn and we were in Manhattan, so it seemed the obvious choice to come back to my place.

As I opened my apartment door, I realized that I had some explaining to do. He had never been to my place before, and a single woman with a small rodent isn’t sexy. I began babbling about the hamster and why I had her in my place.

“It’s my friends’,” I stammered, pointing at Nina. “They went overseas. Lydia is from Slovakia and they went home for the holidays. They asked me to watch her while they’re gone,” I said meekly.

“It’s okay if it’s yours,” he said smiling.

“No, it’s not mine,” I said defiantly. “Really. It’s not mine.”

“Okay. But, again, it’s okay if it’s yours,” he said, his grin widening.

I figured my best course of action on this was to walk away from the hamster and get out of this conversation. It was a lose-lose. Hamster isn’t sexy. We went into another room.

For the next couple of weeks, Nina and I settled into a routine. I woke up, gave her water, took her out of cage to play, she bit me, she went back in cage, I fed her a carrot.

We went on like this for two weeks. On New Year’s Eve, Chris and Lydia returned from their trip and called me.

“Welcome home,” I said excitedly. “She’s doing great and looking forward to getting back to Brooklyn.”

“We’re pretty beat,” Chris said. “Would it be okay if we picked her up on the 2nd?”

“No problem,” I replied. “Happy New Year.”

In the very early morning hours of January 2nd, 2006 I returned home from a late night out and checked in on Nina. I picked her up, told her that I had enjoyed having her here, but that her time in East Harlem was up. I put her back in the cage and I went to bed. That was the last time I saw her.

When I woke up at noon, she was gone. It’s unclear exactly how she got out; whether I didn’t lock the clasp properly on her cage or if she simply didn’t want to be a prisoner any longer and squeezed through the wires. If it’s the latter, more power to her. I can understand wanting to make a run for it, to seize an opportunity and giddy up out of the confines of ones environs.

One hears a lot these days about the gentrification of Harlem. Maybe Nina, in all her fuzzball glory, is part of that wave. She certainly looks every bit the part, the white snowball that she is. Sometimes when I walk down the street, men warmly refer to me as ‘snowbunny.’

“Hey snowbunny, you lost?” they say sheepishly.

“Nope,” I respond confidently. “I know exactly where I am.”

Being a minority in East Harlem hasn’t been a problem for me; perhaps because I always felt like a bit of an outsider growing up in Indiana, so home doesn’t feel like ‘home’ unless I’ve got one toe out the door. But for Nina, a move to East Harlem might not be the smoothest of transitions. She’s got the whole ‘rodent’ stigma working against her, and even if someone rescues her, I know that Nina is going to piss the person off with that nasty biting habit. Nina’s future is bleak, that I know. But I felt it important to mention her here; to alleviate some of my guilt and to dedicate this entry to Chris, Lydia and the Hamsta Gone Gangsta.