I had a sock puppet as a kid. His name was Claude. We didn't have a lot in common. He was charming, personable, and spoke fluent French. The only French I knew came from Pepe Le Pew cartoons.
While he didn't ever say so (in English where I could hear him), I knew that he resented dragging me around wherever he went. It was obvious that I was holding him back.
One day, when my mother was doing the laundry, I lost my grip on Claude in the dryer. I tumbled around in there for about 45 minutes with the towels. I must have gotten turned around, because I got lost. How I ended up in an alternate universe filled with socks remains a mystery to me (and to the socks). I'm not sure how long I was stuck there, swimming through an endless sea of socks. I thought at one point that I had grown a beard, but it turned out to be just dryer lint. Still, it looked pretty good.
Anyway, the socks decided they had suffered enough. An elite cadre of athletic socks bravely volunteered to escort me out of their universe. The send off party was great. All of the celebrity socks were there, doing impressions of people no one knew. Somehow, that seemed fitting. There were a number of jokes about photos vs. five toes that I didn't get at first. With the traditional parting cry of, "You'll always smell like feet to me," my escorts pulled me into the wormhole back to my universe. The worm was not happy about that.
When I first rolled out of the dryer, no one was home. I walked through the house and discovered that Claude had made himself at home in my room. All of my stuff was gone and the wall was lined with pictures of Claude being adored by my family. I had to admit it. He was a great sock puppet. As I stared at the picture of Claude addressing the UN, I heard a rustle and turned towards the door. Claude stood there with his mouth hanging open. That was somewhat normal for him.
"Zo," he said in a thick French accent. "Eet seemz you 'ave return'd. Eef you zink zhat Ah vill toleerate yer prayzhanz, yew 'r' mistaken!" He had to repeat it a few times before I got all of that. Pepe Le Pew was much easier to understand. Once it was clear that talking about our feelings and reaching a mature solution was not an option, a fight broke out. More accurately, he tried to choke me. We thoroughly trashed the room. Stuff flew everywhere. A stack of Sock Puppets Quarterly magazines scattered across the floor. At one point, I'm pretty sure I hit my head on the ceiling. We knocked over a chair and Claude used it to pin me down. "Huh Hahww!" he laughed. Even his French laugh was better than mine. In desperation, I stuffed his head down into his neck. He tried to bite me, but I grabbed his skull from the inside and yanked hard, pulling him inside out.
I threw him in the dryer along with the athletic socks and set the timer for an hour. I looked in on them later, but they were gone. I think his sudden absence and my return were hardest on my family. They missed him terribly. In the years that followed, I've only seen Claude a few times. We keep our distance and pretend to ignore one another. Sure, I've followed his career. I mean, who wouldn't? In spite of my personal feelings, he's still a great sock puppet. I just know, deep down, that someday he'll return, pause in the doorway, same something in French that I won't understand, and then attack. I'm ready for him. Pepe Le Pew is available online.