How a Pet Shop Changed My Life
A quick read about time, place, looking thrice, and changing your mind.
Over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain named Boston one of the “four unique cities in America.” But, it’s 2020 and I think Boston is particularly uninteresting: there are no juxtapositions, no surprises, nothing that makes you stop. The skyline could be [insert city here’s] skyline, and Newbury Street — I swear — has the same restaurant on every block. The water in the harbor is a flacid green-navy, the North End is exactly what you expected it to be, and the lawns in Chestnut Hill are too pristine. Everybody is the same touch-of-gruff: the graying men wear sweatshirts and beanies with jeans and eat donuts made from wood shavings (which they call “Dunkin”?); the women hide under puffers and shake their necks when they talk. The weather doesn’t even care enough about Boston to scream at it. There are no thunderstorms no earthquakes no tornados — all you get is apathetic snow that falls in hushed sweeps. Mark Twain has been wrong before, I thought. And then I went to Allston. It’s the little piece of no-mans-land between Brighton and Fenway.
The first time I saw Allston it was dark, which was one of two reasons my recollection of it is a little hazy. I was in line at a bar, assuming the identity of O***ia B**h from New Jersey. I shivered as one of the graying gruff men in a sweatshirt and beanie checked the ID. We had made fun of a drunk guy together minutes earlier which was just the sort of bond that would precipitate him letting me in without looking at the photograph on my ID. So, in I went. And in I went for the next few doldrum weekends — following the shadows of robotic college students before me. I focused on the same neon yellow sign, the same sidewalk, the same velvet rope every saturday.
The first time I saw Allston in the light, I was blinded in a way that made me see — like Saul turning into Paul right in the middle of “rat city.” Everything was full of texture — the kind of unfiltered texture that made you really look. A sign peeled off of a building, old toys were abandoned on the curb — and turns out — there’s a late night ESL tutoring center above the bar I had been going to every weekend. This juxtaposition of strobe lights vs. desk lamps and after hours grinding vs. after hours of underage grinding happening in the same building is worth 1,000 words of its own. But, moving on — I must tell you — Allston restored my faith in a higher power, and Boston. All the oddities contained within its few blocks couldn’t just have appeared there, there had to be a larger force at play. A “bookstore” the size of a closet that sells only action figures with missing fingers, tin boxes, and old Yellow Pages doesn’t just pop up next to a three-table sushi shop that only exists in daylight and serves rolls on fire — on actual fire. And both of those entities don’t just coerce you into walking down to the pet shop nudged between a tattoo parlor and the cutesy “Fro-yo World (-;” without something greater directing the whole scene.
The pet shop, aptly named “The Pet Shop” is lawlessness materialized in the grungy neighborhood: a place no one who would refer to Boston as the “Athens of America” has ever been. It’s the reason I decided to stay in this city, because I started to see the layers of puritan northeasternism start to unravel. You walk into the store (at around 8:45 pm usually) and are greeted — or rather not greeted — by a Newfoundland dog that splays in a puddle on the linoleum. Toys jump out from one side of the wall and tanks paint the other side. There are no goldfish. After passing through the surprising, but soon-to-seem dull exotic fish, python, lizard, scorpion, and salamander section you come to a door with a sign over the window so that you can’t see through it. The door, without giving any indication of what’s behind it, asks you to leave your bag outside of the room. After dropping your bag reflexively, intrigue beckons you in. You’re greeted by two free-running-loud-squaking macaws. An audience of parakeets, chinchillas, degus-es, and other unidentifiable fauna assure you are safe to walk around, promising their eyewitness testimony if the slinking macaws go Hyde, Bundy, or Borden on you.
The Pet Shop is otherworldly, and I haven’t figured out if it’s otherworldly in a heavenly or hellish way yet. It was my first solid experience of weirdness in a city I largely saw as marked by homogeneity, but it’s also too slippery a place for me to wholeheartedly endorse. One time I went in there and swear I saw a crocodile floating in a tank. I believe there’s a fairly large chance this actually happened because I remember remarking to the friend I went with that I’ve always wanted a crocodile. The next time I went into The Pet Shop, I was talking to the unfriendly owner’s son.
“Where’s the crocodile?” I asked.
“We don’t have a crocadile. We have never had a crocodile. That is illegal,” he replied without blinking.
As time has passed, I’ve grown to love Boston more, but it all goes back to Allston and that crusty little Pet Shop. It’s a place of friction in a city where I saw little resistance. Since my eyes stuttered over the landscape of the little pet shop in the pass-over neighborhood, they’ve been more apt to stutter, instead of gliding over, the rest of the city.
After doing some research, I realized the pet shop is probably not a place I should find inspiration in, or back wholeheartedly. In the middle of writing this, I looked up the The Pet Shop on Yelp, and there were almost no good reviews. All cite perceptions of immoral, unhomely living spaces for the animals, the greasiness of the graying, complacent owner, and the immediate death of animals bought from there. The reviews that are good and bump the place up to two stars instead of one seem too good to be true.
So, I must not be that good an observer of place, maybe I just see what I want to see; maybe my powers of critique can fail; maybe I should go back and look at it again.
