Guess who’s coming to dinner?

ONLY GOD could create a snowflake. But a gopher, that’s the devil’s work.

First, there are the teeth. Fangs, really. An orthodontist’s dream. As with a Kennedy, the teeth are the first things you notice on a gopher. His pearly whites are actually a sickly yellow, sharp as a lover’s rebuke.

Then there is the way they just move into a neighborhood, beneath the finest carpeting, under the choicest birch.

There’s a sense of entitlement about a gopher’s arrival. Like those too-young wives in their 7-series BMWs, a quart of Starbucks balanced on their bony knees. That’s what a gopher brings to mind -- privileges not yet earned.

“New sprinklers?” I ask my friend Hank.

“Gophers,” Hank hisses.

Hank’s torn up his yard. Long trenches line the walkway. At first glance, Hank has done more damage to his yard than a thousand gophers.

You’d think there’d been a gold rush here. Or a glacial scraping. Grant left fewer marks on Atlanta than Hank is leaving on this lawn. But that’s Hank for you. He doesn’t do things a little bit.

“I lined my flowerbeds with bricks,” Hank explains.

“Why?”

“To protect my petunias. Gophers love petunias.”

In an American neighborhood, nothing happens just once. If the guy next door paints his house, it’s a pretty sure bet some other neighbor will paint his house as well. If one mother gets her fanny done, you can expect another mother will soon have a fancy new fanny too.

So if Hank gets gophers?

“We’ve got gophers,” I announce three days later.

“In front or back?” my wife asks.

“Yes,” I say.

Any direction you look, we’ve got gophers, the offspring of Hank’s gophers, probably, though the DNA tests are pending.

They have burrowed the half-mile from Hank’s house to our little cul-de-sac, the one where nothing ever happens. Along the way, they paused only to get pregnant.

Gophers have summered at our place before, and now they are back, arriving with the April tomatoes and, most probably, leaving with the last pumpkins of fall.

One year, they sucked down 20 bucks’ worth of Brandywine and St. Pierres overnight, stopping only to lick their lips and belch a Bloody Mary belch, then breed some more.

We love our gophers. We treat them very well.

“You’d better plant the tomatoes in the pots,” my wife says.

“Then what will the gophers eat?” I ask.

“Everything else?”

Exactly. I’ll wake up one morning and the yard will look like Nevada. A place that welcomes casinos. A place where they ensconce nuclear waste.

“I just read this university study on gophers,” Hank says. “You get ‘em with poison, or you don’t get ‘em at all.”

Of course, that’s a moral choice. I am willing to shove tubes of smoky poison down their tunnels, where it will filter up into the grass where my kids and pets nap. Like hemlock under the family bed.

I could easily do that. My wife would leave me. My kids and pets would follow, leaving me an empty couch and 40 years of deli fare to look forward to. It’s a moral choice.

“If you listen to Wammack, he swears by the traps,” Hank urges.

If I listen to Wammack? He’s the guy each December who hangs over the edge of his second-story roof installing Christmas lights. All the wives drive by shaking their heads and going, “Oooo, look at J.P., he’s going to get hurt,” but you can tell they’re turned on a little by the danger of it all. The wives, not the lights. With the lights, he gets mixed results.

“I’d rather not listen to Wammack,” I tell Hank.

“One year, he trapped 20,” Hank reminds me.

“I’d rather not have to see the little guys,” I say.

“You see the Dodgers last night?” Hank asks, changing the subject only slightly. “You see the way Ashby pitched to that banjo picker?”

“I’d rather not see their little faces,” I say.

“The gophers or the Dodgers?”

“Both.”

Unlike Hank, I try to stay on task. I have gophers to worry about. The Dodgers are digging their own holes. Later, we’ll worry about those.

*

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.