Adam Selbst competes with tigers for the attention of his mother.
Adam Selbst is a writer and graphic designer from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He hosts the monthly Big Irv’s Storytelling Roadshow and has been performing around NYC for the last 8 years. Adam lives in a bodega art collective with 64 other people and in his spare time he enjoys being slowly poisoned by an ancient, weird mold in his shower and throwing elaborate dinner parties.
This story originally aired on November 15, 2019 in an episode titled “Wild: Stories about humans and animals coexisting”.
Story Transcript
So my parents have just retired and they moved down to North Carolina. They’ve been there about a week before I got the phone call from my mom.
“Adam,” she said, “You're not going to believe this but in North Carolina it’s legal for us to own a tiger.” It had been one of my mother’s lifelong dreams to own a tiger.
So my family was well known for collecting strays. We always had a couple in the house. My mother loved strays. The first one to attack me was when I was learning how to crawl. It was our cat Patience and I had blundered into her. I’m 45 now. I still have a faint scar on my face from this attack.
A lot of parents, upon having a pet hurt their first son so badly, would have sided with the child. That isn’t how things worked in my house. To quote my mother, “I think Adam probably learned his lesson. Besides, what are we going to do? Get rid of the cat? That wouldn’t be fair. The cat was here first.”
In the end, they decided not to get a tiger, not for any of the reasons that you would think but it’s because they already had two cats and they didn’t know if those cats were going to get along with the tiger, and that wouldn’t be fair because those cats had been there first.
It’s fine now. My mother made up for it by working for the local tiger rescue organization. What is a local tiger rescue organization? A lot of people ask me. That’s fine. I’m prepared for this question. I'll answer it.
You see, since it’s not illegal in North Carolina to own a tiger, a lot of people think this is a really cool idea and they go out and do it. Here’s the thing. It’s actually quite expensive to own a tiger, first of all. Second of all, I don't know if you guys know this, tigers are actually quite dangerous. Third, and most importantly, once you own a tiger, they're actually pretty hard to get rid of.
But it’s okay because in North Carolina they’ve got a system. If you have a tiger that you don’t want, what you do is you get it into your car and you drive out to a rural section of North Carolina and you just let it out. I know, but the system works. You can’t argue with it. If they had a tiger they didn’t want then they don’t.
So my mother started volunteering for this organization that would go around and pick up all the tigers that had been let out and would bring them back to their compound that’s like several acres and care for these tigers for the rest of their lives. The name of this organization, by the way, is called Carolina Tiger. They are truly doing God’s work. You should give them money. I do.
I spent a lot of time at Carolina Tiger over the past few years and I had a favorite tiger. My tiger’s name was Jellybean. Jellybean was a white tiger. I don't know if you know much about white tigers. They're pretty rare in nature. It’s a recessive gene. You need two recessive genes to come together and make a… I don't really understand that biology but it happens about once in every 10,000 tigers in the wild.
But white tigers are in demand at circuses and magicians and stuff like that so what they do is breed them. And the only way that you can breed white tigers in captivity is by breeding two white tigers together and, in reality, that means breeding siblings together and that means breeding a parent with their offspring. As a result of this, most white tigers are severely inbred. They are cross-eyed, they're blind, they have epilepsy, they have club feet, but not Jellybean. Jellybean was perfect and he loved me.
So a couple of years ago, I went down. I had just bought a new camera and I wanted to take some pictures of jellybean. As I approached the enclosure, he came running up to greet me. I love Jellybean. There was only one problem with visiting him, which was his enclosure-mate Tex.
Tex was one of the more difficult tigers at Carolina Tiger. The rumor I heard was that Tex was taken off of the main tour after charging an entire class, a kindergarten class of five-year-olds creating a mass panic. Twenty kindergarteners wet their pants at the same time. It was chaos. Tex is, what we say in tiger parlance, an asshole.
And this particular time I went down to take pictures of Jellybean and Tex, thankfully, was nowhere to be found. So I just stepped over the rope that keeps you away from the enclosure. It’s fine. My mother works there. I walked up to the face of the cage and the way these enclosures work it’s a chain link fence but it’s real floppy, and they keep it really floppy because there's no top. If they're stiff the tigers could crawl over and they would get out. So they keep it floppy and the tigers can’t get out.
So I leaned against the fence, really lean in and Jellybean was so happy to see me. He was chuffling and making noises. Chuffling is sort of like what tigers do. It’s like a tiger version of purring.
So I’m taking pictures and he's posing and everything is going great. Then, out of the corner of my eye, my peripheral vision, I see some flashes of movement. So I look up but I don't see anything. There's nothing. So I turn my attention back to Jellybean and now he's rolled over and his paws are going and he's making all these noises. We’re having a great time but again I start seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. I look up and, again, there's nothing.
And I peer really hard into the distance and it takes a moment but finally I see it. There in the green undergrowth all the way back in the enclosure, a little patch of orange. It’s completely motionless except for every once in a while I see the flicker of a tail, like when you see a housecat stalking a bird and he can’t quite contain himself. That was Tex. Tex was hunting me. What an asshole.
So I turned around to say to my father, “Hey, Dad, look. Tex is stalking me.”
And this is when I learned two really important things about tigers. One, about Tex individually and another thing about tigers in general. What I learned about Tex was how he got his name. Tex is from Texas. Tex’s previous owner kept him chained 24 hours a day by a short five-foot chain to a tree and he made his money by charging people to come over and take pictures of Tex. Tex only hated one thing more than cameras and that was photographers.
The other thing that I learned about tigers in general is that they're really smart. They will never attack you if you're looking right at them. They'll wait until you turn your gaze away to say something like, “Hey, Dad, look. Tex is stalking me.”
Now, I know that tigers are fast. I knew that beforehand. David Attenborough taught me that when I was like ten years old. But believe me, you have no idea.
I turned back and Tex had closed the distance and was already in the air. It was like being hit by the world’s softest locomotive. I flew backwards several feet and landed in the dust and my whole family came running over to see if I was okay and help me up and dust me off. Everybody, except my mother who blamed me.
She stalked over to me with anger flashing in her eyes and she said, “This wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t acting so much like prey.”
And everybody burst out laughing. They thought it was the funniest thing. Everybody called me prey for the whole rest of the weekend. I forgot my glasses in a restaurant and I went to go run to get them and my father called out, “Look out, it’s a tiger!”
And they all laughed when I spun around and tripped over my feet. And it would have been funny had I not just been attacked by an actual tiger in a state that has a very legitimate tiger problem. I didn’t think it was funny at all.
I got really angry and I said, “What are you talking about, Mom? No, no. How are you taking his side? This is unfair. Listen. In this family we have rules, goddammit. I was here first this time. Tex? He's some asshole you just met. I was here first. How dare you!”
But it didn’t work at all. Everyone thought it was hysterical and all weekend I was furious and they were having the time of their lives.
A few years passed and going on the website of Carolina Tiger I saw that Tex had passed away. Naturally, I called up my mother to gloat.
And while we were talking, I took the opportunity to tell her, “You know, that really hurt my feelings because it’s not just Tex. It’s every animal we've ever had. You never defended me. You always took their side.”
And I heard her sigh really deeply and she said to me, “You know what, Adam? I’m not always going to be here to fight your battles for you. At a certain point, you're just going to have to learn to stop acting so much like prey.”
Thank you.