Pandas, Bro

"Well, Ming Ming, did everything work out the way you wanted?" I asked the panda, who just kept on doing what pandas everywhere do: ate pounds of bamboo and had a really hard (ha ha ha) time popping a boner. "In the end, I mean," I persisted, hoping against hope for an answer. "Was it good for you here? Was it bad for you?"

But that son of a bitch wouldn’t stop gnawing on his bamboo stalk to answer my question. He wasn’t going to give me the time of day. His schedule, which consisted of moving as little as possible to conserve the nutrient-poor calories provided by the bamboo, was exceptionally tight and would admit no distractions.

Ming Ming, so the story goes, came to our city’s zoo from a private reserve in the Republic of Suriname. He and a dozen other pandas were part of a top-secret breeding project undertaken by some Dr. Moreau manqué. The good doctor was attempting to splice panda DNA with gorilla DNA because, as he screamed to the INTERPOL agents who arrested him, “the time had come.”

Ming Ming was the sole survivor of this utopian panda-gorilla fusion farm, and he seemed none the worse for wear. Sure, he had a bunch of nasty scars all over him and nightmare-inducing PTSD, but is that any worse than what you or I go through on a daily basis? I think not, mon frère. I was in a fender bender about six years ago on I-95 while driving through Richmond during rush hour and, man, my neck still hurts. Whiplash. Wish I’d gone to the doctor and had it checked out, but I was so darn busy what with everything I was and wasn’t doing. I was busier than this good-for-nothing abused panda, anyway. Yet here he’s front page news and I’m yesterday’s papers.

It wasn’t always like this. You may not remember me, but I was the backup point guard for the 1994-1995 Virginia Commonwealth Rams. We went 19-11 (8-8 in the Colonial Athletic Association), qualified for the NIT, and lost in the first round to the University of Rhode Island Rams (the irony, huh?). I say backup, but it wasn’t like I was a benchwarmer who sat around all game in a sweatless, non-bloodstained shooting jacket. No, I was more like an eighth man who averaged ten minutes, one point, and two assists per game. I wasn’t exactly Isaiah “J.R.” Rider—I’m 5’11” and I’ve never dunked a basketball, for one thing—but my contributions were more than de minimis and I think I was in a good position to make even greater contributions as a seventh man during my senior season.

Then there was that accident, the one I oh-so-casually referenced earlier when I was talking about Ming Ming’s PTSD. I can be calm and collected now, but the whiplash it caused would forever alter the trajectory not just of my three-point shot (23% from “downtown” before the injury, 0% afterwards) but of my entire life (2.5 GPA with a communications major before, college dropout one year later). Before you could say “Isaiah ‘J.R.’ Rider,” I found myself living in an abandoned schoolbus parked somewhere along the Henrico County line, miles from the opulent studio apartment I once occupied in downtown Richmond.

But I guess I can’t blame it all on the accident, no more than Ming Ming can blame his inability to impregnate Song Song on his former owner’s decision to circumcise him. The way the papers reported it, the guy was a devotee of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and believed that circumcising the panda would cause him to finish faster, derive less joy from the sex act, and focus exclusively on procreation instead of the pleasure that accompanies busting a nut. So what I’m saying, then, is that Ming Ming’s owner had his reasons and I had mine.

Reasons for what, you ask? That’s so kind of you to ask. Nobody just asks nowadays; instead, they launch right into the interrogation under the klieg lights and you’re too nervous to ask to stop so that you can call your attorney. The reasons I’m talking about are my reasons for getting entrapped on To Nab a Pervert. There are several of them, actually. All of them begin with true love and end there, too. Can you chat with somebody, even a fake somebody or a team of somebodies, for five hours in an AOL chatroom and not feel something? Something besides a desire to drink a couple 40s and “push rope” for as long as your weakened constitution allows it, I mean. Because, yeah, I felt that, but I also felt something greater, something deeper.

Is this the same something that Ming Ming feels when he gazes up into the gloomy gray heavens, bamboo stalking dangling from his mouth the way a circa-1989 Ring Pop™ used to dangle from mine? The challenge in talking about the past—my past, Ming Ming’s past, your past—is that the words are always coming from the present. The crazy things that happen to us, and there are so many of those, can’t be quantified or qualified like my performance on the 1994-1995 VCU Rams basketball team.

"Where did it all go wrong?" is a question Ming Ming would probably ask me if he could talk and if the mouth he used for talking wasn’t stuffed full of bamboo. "Where did it all go wrong?" is a question I’d ask Ming Ming if I, like the rest of the panda-loving public, didn’t already know the answer to that.

But let’s pretend for a minute that Ming Ming’s life didn’t go south after he was drugged and smuggled into South America. Let’s suppose that it started much earlier, that Ming’s Ming father, a panda like himself and most assuredly not a gorilla (because as we now know, that’s just not possible given our current level of DNA-splicing technology), just didn’t love him enough and that was what did him in. We’d be wrong, wouldn’t we, for making asses of ourselves and assuming that life was so bad with those other gorillas and pandas, that the torture was indeed torture. Maybe Ming Ming developed Stockholm syndrome; maybe he met the love of his life and it was a gorilla.

Ming Ming and his hypothetical gorilla princess together in the gloaming of a Surinamese fall day: is that so hard to believe? Is it so hard to believe that the one that we love, the one who completes us, isn’t someone we could ever have? Or isn’t even someone who is real, someone who is possible? No, it’s not hard to believe, though it’s certainly hard to talk about. I can’t reckon with the words, and Ming Ming, for his part, will remain forever silent but for the perpetual crunching of his bamboo.

Out of all which we may define (that is to say determine) what that is which is meant by this word reason when we reckon it amongst the faculties of the mind. For reason, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts; I say marking them, when we reckon by ourselves; and signifying, when we demonstrate or approve our reckonings to other men.

—OLB