His name was Cosmo.
He was a small, ornery, highly-territorial, frequently fierce and yet (often) deeply cowardly orange-cheeked amazon parrot. Cosmo had been acquired several years previously by my girlfriend Denise, with whom I’d just established an apartment together in San Rafael, Marin County. This was in the early 1980s.
The first time I met Cosmo, one thing was immediately, unmistakably clear.
He hated me.
Parrots are notoriously faithful animals. They tend to bond with one person to the exclusion of all others. In the case of Denise and me, I was clearly the interloper, the intruder, the unwelcome “other guy.” For the next two years or so, Cosmo made it his job to impress upon me exactly how unwanted I was.
For one thing, he’d bite me.
He’d bite me a lot.
His favorite attack was a stealthy one, waiting until I had removed my shoes and sat down at the table to read, write or eat. Once the flesh of my feet was deliciously exposed, Cosmo would gently flutter from his cage to the floor, then quietly click across the hardwood floor to my feet, where he’d wait for the perfect moment to crunch down hard on some carefully selected tetrapodal digit.
He also liked biting ears.
I remember the day I got my ear pierced. The piercing was a birthday present from Denise, who thought I’d look good with a gold hoop. About three hours after the procedure, a basic little stud filling the new hole in my left ear until it could heal enough for the piratical jewelry, Cosmo unexpectedly flew to my shoulder and began sweetly cooing at me. This was something he’d never done before.
“Oh look, he’s starting to like you,” Denise said. The words had barely escaped her voice box when Cosmo suddenly lunged at my ear, grasping the stud in his beak and attempting to fly off with it, and a portion of my ear, apparently.
Yes. That hurt.
Another way Cosmo enjoyed plaguing me was to identify favorite clothing items or paintings or furniture pieces and then setting out to destroy them. When that was not possible, he settled for flying over them and defecating spectacularly across whatever the treasured item was. If you’ve never seen parrot feces before, all I can say is it tends to be bright – almost glowingly bright – green, with swirls of yellow and white. It instantly hardens to the consistency of dried toothpaste. Its smell, while not as bad as that of some animals’ excrement, was softly penetrating, like pureed carrots in the first pungent stages of fermentation.
For all of his aggression, however, the little guy – only about nine inches tall at full height – was terrified of socks. That’s right … socks. He’d been captured in the wild, Denise believed, and probably carried memories of the jungle. Our best guess was that to Cosmo, socks resembled snakes. Short, fat snakes. If I dropped a sock anywhere near Cosmo, he’d fly to his cage, duck inside, and cower as far from the sock as he could. Eventually, after determining that the sock had not moved in any way, he’d drop to the floor, and slowly, over the course of 10 to 15 minutes, would carefully edge closer and closer to the sock, frequently check to make sure his escape route back to the cage was still clear. Once he’d reached the thing, he’d wait several long moments, studying it from end to end before taking a quick bite then leaping away, just in case. The sock, of course, never bit back or attempted to flee, so after another nibble or two, having assured himself the sock was no threat, Cosmo would pounce. He’d bit it, lift it into the air, shake it from side to side, throw it to the ground and pounce again.
Then he’d stand on top of it and screech his might victory screech.
“Rhaaaw! Rhaaaw! Rhaaaw!” he’d scream.
To Denise and I, that screech was his way of saying, “Look at me! Look what I did! Look how colossal and terrifying I am! Nothing and no one can confront the mighty Cosmo and escape unscathed. There is no creature on earth that can harm me! Rhaaaw! Rhaaaw! Rhaaaw!”
His false bravado genuinely amused me.
No, that’s not true.
It irritated me.
He was terrified of socks, but in his mind, it was socks that were terrified of him.
Had he not also been the source of countless beak-related injuries and flying green parrot poop splatters, I might have let him have his little delusions. I might have been content with allowing the pint-sized parrot his belief that he was some a massively imposing specimen of fearsome power.
Then the circus came to town.
This was in the days when travelling circuses still had elephants.
The particular circus had set up for a week at the Marin Civic Center, and during the day, the elephants were placed outside to be viewed by visitors, a short wall of hay-bales erected around the creatures, just outside the eastern side of the massive circus tent. Recognizing an opportunity to teach Cosmo a lesson in size, power and his actual physical puniness, I decide to take the parrot to see the elephants.
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