A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (19 page)

“Y
ou stop it!” I shouted. “You stop it right now!”

I braced myself. Koko, the alpha female of the barn, again lowered her head and charged straight into my hip. She wasn't listening to my pleading commands. Signing up for joke classes wasn't turning out to be as funny as I thought it'd be.

A lot of college seniors will take an easy joke class to help them cruise by during their last semester. For its part, Rutgers was happy to oblige them with a course catalogue that offered a number of highly coveted options. Wine Tasting always filled up instantly. Acting 101 was a go-to because it was open to the general student body and amazingly easy; real actors went to the Mason Gross School of the Arts, a sub-school of Rutgers. Most infamous was Theater Appreciation, an English department offering where you simply saw a bunch of Broadway shows.

Of course, I'm me and I always have to be one baby step crazier than anyone else I know. So every time one of my friends bragged about how he'd just found an easy course, I took it as a challenge to find one even more ludicrous. I spent hours scouring
the Rutgers course listings until I found a course so weird that I knew I'd come out on top.

This is how I came to register for Animal Grooming, Husbandry, and Exhibition. Section: Goat.

Rutgers is split into a number of campuses. The College Avenue campus is what people think of when they think of a college. Douglass Campus is female housing only. Busch Campus is an engineering school, so it's only for Asians. Mason Gross is where you go if you like both smoking pot and overachieving. Livingston Campus is where they stick the weirdos, like people with misdemeanor convictions or Asperger's.

Cook Campus is the most mysterious of all. It's dedicated to the study of agriculture. The only people I ever met who attended Cook were exercise science majors. They were like the emissaries from a strange land who occasionally visited the normal world, but otherwise stuck to their own. Most of the Cook kids hung out in weird barns set far back in fields. Rumors swirled of a “cow with a window in its stomach” that lived there. For all the normal people who didn't attend Cook, there was no reason to go there.

That's why most Rutgers students didn't know there was a class on goats.

For the class, I had to wake up extremely early. I didn't like that at all. I had to take a bus to the end of its line. I didn't like that either. I had to hang out in a barn. Also not my thing.

But I got to do something incredibly weird, and that made it all worthwhile.

Before my first class, before I even saw my goat, I decided to name it “Jeffrey Timmons, World's Foremost Goat.” I don't know why. I don't know anyone named Timmons, and have no particular affinity for the name Jeffrey. It just felt right at the time.

Entering the barn for the first time, I was instantly overwhelmed. I'd never set foot on a real farm in my life, and there were a lot of things I wasn't expecting. For example, I always thought pigs made a sound that goes something like “oink oink.” What I found was that pigs actually make a sound that resembles a woman being brutally murdered. They weren't even in the same building as I was; I could hear them screaming from the next barn over.

Inside the barn where my class was held, the goats charged chaotically around a large pen. There were roughly twenty of them, along with their kids. I arrived with no idea of what I was supposed to do, so I approached a young woman who was hurling piles of hay into the goat pen while the goats ran in circles and shrieked.

“I think I'm taking a class here,” I screamed over the goat screeches.

“Oh, right,” she sighed. She stopped hurling hay. “Here's how it works. You walk around with your goat. Get to know your goat. Feed the goat from your hand. Keep your goat clean. Then at the end of the semester, you'll compete in the goat show.”

“The goat show?” I asked.

“Yes, the goat show,” she said. “Each year Cook holds Ag Field Day. The goat show takes place there.”

“Ag Field?” I asked.

“Yeah, Ag Field Day,” she said, getting frustrated. “The agricultural celebration Cook holds every year.”

She apparently didn't know that to me, the customs of Cook Campus were as foreign and mysterious as the customs of gypsies or Freemasons. Fearing I would irritate her more, I backed off my line of questioning.

“That goat's yours,” she said.

She pointed to a tan-colored goat eating by herself in the corner. While most of the goats were social and jockeying for position, my goat seemed shy and removed. Two tiny goats played underneath her.

“Those are her kids, 5226 and 5227,” the girl said. “Your goat's name is Sugar.”

“No, it's not,” I said. “My goat's name is Jeffrey Timmons, World's Foremost Goat. I already named him.”

“Her,” the girl said. “No male goats. If we brought a male goat in here, it would just try to fuck everyone.”

Her reasoning was sound, but her attitude made it clear that she couldn't care less about my presence in her barn.

“Well, I'm sticking with my name anyway,” I said.

I wasn't sure if she was my teacher, so I stood around waiting for her to approve or disapprove of my clinging to the name I'd arbitrarily given my goat. She was far more interested in the affairs of the goats she was feeding than she was in the ways of men. She didn't even turn back toward me before mumbling the words “I don't care.”

I walked toward Jeffrey Timmons, World's Foremost Goat. She backed away, looking at me suspiciously. She neighed at me, but weakly. She was tired.

I'm not completely sure why, but for some reason I immediately identified with this goat. I don't know if I've ever fallen harder for an animal on first sight. I've never been a pet guy. I didn't grow up with dogs and have honestly never understood the appeal. From visiting friends with dogs, it seemed to me that their main effect on the lives of their owners is that they disrupt meals and also you have to pick up their shit with your hands. My family had cats when I was growing up, which I liked better because at least cats know how to do their own thing and stay out of your way.

Yet somehow, the girl running the barn had managed to ally me with a goat version of me. This goat seemed worn out, tired, and confused. I empathized deeply. I looked into her creepy goat eyes and what I saw was a kindred spirit looking back at me.

At that moment another goat sprinted across the barn and slammed as hard as she could into the side of my goat.

This was Koko.

Here's my opinion of Koko to this day: fuck Koko. She was the alpha female of the barn. Some of the other goats actually tried to stand up to her as she went out of her way to jump and spit on them. Others ran away or, even worse, just took it. I was flabbergasted. The world of goats, I found out, revolves completely around bullying. The worst bully gets her food first, gets pampered the most, and disrupts any situation that doesn't directly benefit her.

Immediately, I despised Koko. After all, I was the human version of Jeffrey Timmons, and I'd known far too many human versions of Koko.

In order to get credit for the class I was required to put in three hours a week with Jeffrey Timmons. There were no set times for this, so I could show up any time the barn was open. Some days, I'd be the only person in the yard practicing with my goat. Practicing entailed walking around in circles, training Jeffrey to stay by my side at all times. I was told that there were three primary ways to make this happen: give Jeffrey Timmons treats, pet Jeffrey Timmons, and talk to Jeffrey Timmons.

Petting a goat is weird, but you get used to it fast. They don't react with happiness like dogs or cats do. Mostly, they just stand still and stare off into the distance. Really, the only aspect of petting Jeffrey Timmons that I never got completely used to was seeing her shit. When goats shit they basically stop midstride and eject hundreds of little shit pebbles onto the ground. So
while petting Jeffrey Timmons was all good, I quickly found that petting Jeffrey Timmons while her ass spit weird droplets of shit everywhere was disconcerting.

Feeding Jeffrey turned out to be a breeze. Especially since I cheated. I was supposed to feed Jeffrey feed from the barn. But in my first few days with Jeffrey Timmons, I noticed that goats get distracted really fast. Even with feed, I couldn't hold her attention span for as long as I needed to. So one day, as a potential solution, I brought in a pocketful of Cap'n Crunch cereal. That changed everything. As soon as she got a taste of it, she was obsessed with me. I'd show up at the barn and she'd immediately focus in and make a beeline toward me. Not even Koko's ramming could halt her in her tracks. I had randomly discovered that Cap'n Crunch is essentially goat crack. It did wonders for our bonding.

While I managed to get petting and feeding down pat, the only bonding exercise that did get weird was talking to Jeffrey Timmons. When we were in the yard alone together, I noticed a strange pattern developing. Away from the chaos of the barn, the aggressiveness of Koko, the constant neediness of 5226 and 5227, Jeffrey would immediately relax. She wouldn't neigh as much, she was less twitchy, and she'd move at a more relaxed pace.

“I know, Jeffrey Timmons, World's Foremost Goat,” I once found myself saying. “It's nice to get away from all that stuff for a little while. Believe me, I know that things can get hard. I sometimes feel like I'm in over my head, too.”

This was a period of my life when I didn't talk to anyone about my problems. I routinely told my mother I was using my school's mental health services to get therapy. I wasn't. I regularly told my ex-girlfriend that I was going to start seeing someone. I never did. It wasn't just that I wasn't getting help, I was
lying to people I cared about in order to avoid it. Not only could I not talk to those people about my problems, I couldn't even talk to them about maybe finding other people who I
could
talk to about my problems. And yet, here I found myself able to open up to a goat. And as the semester went on, this habit snowballed.

“This girl really liked me, Jeffrey, and I didn't kiss her,” I told my goat. “
She
asked
me
out. And she was awesome. Beautiful, smart, nice. And the date went great. You know why I didn't do it?”

Jeffrey stared at me as she devoured a low-hanging branch of evergreen tree.

“I like her too much to stick her with me,” I continued. “I'm such a fucking mess that I didn't want to ruin her with my fucking bullshit.”

Jeffrey looked me in the eye as she continued chewing. Then promptly shit a tidal wave of pebbles all over the ground.

As the semester passed by and the day of our competition grew close, I began getting nervous. Most of the other participants were agriculture majors who actually knew what they were doing (because why would you take a class on goat grooming, husbandry, and exhibition if you weren't in that field?). I, meanwhile, was clueless as to what the competition even entailed.

The only chance I stood lay in the fact that Jeffrey Timmons was a former show goat. A lot of the goats in the barn were born and raised there, but a handful were old pros from the competitive goat circuit who had been donated by their owners when they aged past their prime. Jeffrey was one of these rare goats. She was used to being put through the motions of goat competition. I just had to trust that her instincts remained intact and that when the moment of truth came she would step up to the plate.

Late in the afternoon the day before our competition, I visited Jeffrey Timmons one last time at the barn.

“I've told you a lot of stuff this semester,” I said to her out loud. “You've really been there for me. You're a good friend. Tomorrow, do your best. Even if we come in last place, I'll still be your friend.”

Jeffrey ate Cap'n Crunch out of my hand. She didn't react to my speech. I assume she was playing it cool because even she found it humiliating that I was pouring my heart out to a goat.

When I let her back into the pen she headed straight for 5226 and 5227, but before she could get to them, Koko sprinted from the far corner and slammed head-first into Jeffrey Timmons's side. Jeffrey let out a yelp of pain.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Stop!”

Without thinking, I leapt forward, landing in front of Koko just as she crouched low and got ready to ram Jeffrey Timmons again.

“You stop it!” I shouted. “You stop it right now!”

I backed into the corner of the barn as she huffed and prepared to charge at me. She wasn't listening. She charged full force and rammed into my hip at full speed.

“Koko!” I bellowed. “You stop!”

She snorted and ran at me again. She hit me, and I reached down and grabbed her by the head. She bucked wildly, trying to get away from me.

“Stop with your nonsense,” I said, maintaining my grip. “Stop being mean, you asshole bully.”

She tore loose from my hands and glared angrily at me. I stared back at her. Finally, she turned and trotted away. I turned back and saw Jeffrey Timmons standing meekly against the wall, her two children wrestling with each other below her.

“You're welcome,” I said. It was the least I could do.

With that I climbed over the wall of the pen. As I left the barn, the girl in charge gave me the exact look that the type of weirdo who fights goats and also talks to them deserves.

The next morning, I woke up at six and headed back to Cook. I had to prepare Jeffrey Timmons, World's Foremost Goat, for our big competition. This involved a three-step process that I had been dreading: I had to shave her, clip her toenails, and shampoo her.