I've been going to the zoo with my kids every year for the past decade, and I haven't been seeing anything new -- just whistling Dixie and daydreaming -- since the second zoo trip. I don't know if I am just projecting myself onto the animals, but I find more and more that they seem bored and listless. It is the people -- usually the loud mothers with young children -- who make the loudest squawking and howling noises. At the Monkey House, I was near a family in which the kids leaped around, climbed the fence and make that "ooh-ooh, ahh-ahh" monkey noise that is part real, part Tarzan-movie. One little rat-tailed kid screeched louder than any monkey I've ever heard. Even the monkeys grimaced. The monkeys sat still, as if they were senior citizen trying to watch C-Span Booknotes while their small grandchildren ran amuck. "Looks, that monkey`s picking his butt!" said one kid, picking his nose. I could have saved the zoo admission and saw the same thing at Wal-Mart. The monkey looked at me. I gestured, "I'm sorry." The monkey nodded. I think for the sake of us parents whose annual patronage of zoos keep them going, the zoo should expand its exhibits of animals in their new, postmodern new natural habitats. Imagine an exhibit called The Cat Lady in The Old Neighborhood. It would be a full cutaway view of a cramped, unpainted colonial built in 1930 with the same carpeting since the Beatles last took a bow on Ed Sullivan's stage. Cats everywhere are perched on tables, chairs and couches. Challenge the kids to count the cats -- no two kids will come up with the same number. Finally, on the hour, the lady of the house (who moved in shortly after her 1946 honeymoon) appears. She is wearing the same housecoat she had on the night she watched the first episode of "Love American Style" and wanders the rooms in curlers, chain-smoking Larks, sloppily filling the fifteen bowls that feed the cats. She calls every cat King Farouk. The smell will make the kids retch -- but at least they'll feel like they've experienced travel to a new land beyond the suburbs. Imagine the next exhibit, The Tattooed Biker Mutha with a Boa Constrictor Strung Like A Christmas Light Between His Armored Shoulder and the Sissy Bar. Mothers will clutch their children's wrists in white-knuckled fear. They won't like the snake much, either. Next exhibit: The Anal Childless Yuppie Who Feeds Prosciutto to Her Labradoodle. Warning: Be prepared for revulsion when the grown woman let's the dog lick her on the lips while she says in an eerie sing-songy, quasi-drunky, "Whoosshha a good girl??!!! Izzooooo a good girl???!!!" Be sure to read the exhibit signs for fascinating background information such "In the owner's will, Caleb [the dog`s registered name] will inherit half a million dollars and assume ownership of three rental duplexes in the vicinity of the Cat Lady in the Old Neighborhood." In frosty weather, this mix of Labrador and poodle that set the owners back four grand will sport a J. Peterman sweater and a special diamond paw ring. The nanny will be instructed to forbid children with runny noses to pet the dog. Why not also just throw up signs around certain parts of the zoo where patrons behave like beasts anyway? The difference between just letting any middle-aged mulleted bulbous carnivore ravenously sink his teeth in the $3.50 hot dogs and putting up a sign over his head that says Cholesterol Colonies is the difference Or show some of the swinging and swaying flesh that escapes the inappropriately short belly shirts like rabid tunas in weak netting and name this walking exhibit: Captain Ahab's Adventures. (I can just see the flyers: "Cliff's Notes Don't Jiggle!") All I know is that after ninety minutes at the zoo everybody is hot, crabby and barking at each other. That's when I hear all the animals squawking and chirping and yipping in their own languages to their own babies, "Stay away from them -- they'll bite." Of course, if you want to see the Human Animal at its most irritable and vicious, just visit K-Mart on any Saturday night, where I have actually seen a woman bite off her own child's head. For a second I was comforted in knowing she got arrested, but that turned out not to be a cop car but a blue light special. The zoo is a fascinating place, I am told, and if I am bored with it, then I must be a boring person. There's something to that. Have I become the moronic metalhead who smirks at classical musicians, a numb nut with such a leaden ear that he equates a Mozart flute concerto with Muzak? Or is it perfectly normal to visit the zoo and feel like you've got more in common with the gorillas picking gnats out of each other's fur than with the sugar-and-TV-fed families marauding from exhibit to exhibit, making dorky faces at the animals? "I always feel sad at the zoo," my wife. "The animals all seem so bored and sad." Yeah, well, they seem to be living the life I long for. Sitting around naked, not worrying about their next meal. I'd change places in a second if I could bring my magazines.
