Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  Finally a very large black security officer approached B.D. and asked him if he needed anything and B.D. whispered, “A beer, sir.” Off to the side, but fairly near, two wardrobe girls were skipping rope and smiling at him as they went through intricate, hyper-athletic moves. They must be more accessible than a famous actress he thought, recalling the intimidating beauty of the woman as she glugged her whiskey tea and, after the shot, wagged her butt at Bob and the director.

  The security man returned with a beer enclosed in his big paw. B.D. stared at the label. St. Pauli Girl all the way from the land of Germany. He wondered if they could come up with a Goebbels’ or a Stroh’s from Detroit. Probably. He thanked the security officer who followed B.D.’s line of vision to the wardrobe girls skipping rope.

  “Watch out for those two ladies. They’re not twins but they’re known in the business as the Terrible Twins. There are no snakes in the world as dangerous as those two, not even the dreaded fer-de-lance of my home country.”

  On further conversation it turned out that the security man, Harold, came from Belize, and his crisp elocution was explicable because he was not a victim of our educational system. Harold gave B.D. his card in case he needed any after-hours “protection,” then withdrew with a slight bow when Bob reappeared mopping his face with a handkerchief. When they had shaken hands it had occurred to B.D. that Harold was as large as the federal officer that had arrived in Grand Marais to arrest three men for shipping illegal otter skins across state lines. When the officer, who was also black, got out of his car “he just kept on getting out” an old Finn had said. He was at least six and a half feet and about three hundred pounds, wore a cowboy hat and a silver-plated long-barrel .44 on a hip holster. The trappers had offered no resistance.

  Bob waved a hand in B.D.’s face to catch his attention at the same time the wardrobe girls, the Terrible Twins, approached wondering if they wanted any after-work company? Bob said that he and B.D., who was given yet another card, were booked solid for the rest of their lives. The girls gave him the finger and strutted away.

  “Gee whiz, Bob, they’re cute.” In addition to being real hungry the twins had given B.D. a nut buzz just by standing there. One of them wore soft cloth trousers that pulled right up in the fold of her genuine article.

  “A grief too deep for words,” Bob said. “There’s a lot wrong with me possibly but I’m not some sort of toe-freak masochist.”

  On the way to the club on Santa Monica Boulevard Bob’s dialogue was rather manic and B.D. turned him off, his hunger pangs now so severe that his mind flitted to and fro between other great hunger situations in his life, say the time he was lost from dawn to dark on a cloudy day while deer hunting and when he reached his battered old van there was a precious can of emergency Spam in the toolbox. His cold hands shook and he struggled to open the can, dropping the contents when he cut his finger. He had hastily and unsuccessfully tried to scrape pine needles, leaf fragments, and his own blood off the meat before cramming it in his mouth. It lasted three bites and there was nothing to wash it down with except a few ounces of banana-flavored schnapps in a dusty bottle, given him because it was too repellent for the purchaser. In the ensuing indigestion he felt the inventor of banana schnapps ought to have his ass kicked. Spam alone, however, was a reliable staple for the weary white trash of the northern forests, or that was what Shelley called them.

  “Did you ever notice how often you look at the clock and it reads eleven-eleven,” Bob asked loudly to get his attention.

  In truth B.D. had never noticed this but quickly figured it only happened twice a day and said so.

  “It’s not reality but our perception of reality that counts,” Bob said, finishing off one of those little two-ounce bottles of airliner booze. “When you ride first-class for thousands of extra dollars they give you these free. Maybe it’s because eleven-eleven is when I get up, and when I eat dinner.”

  It had just turned eleven and B.D. was wondering why there was so much traffic. In most places night and day aren’t so different in emotional content and rather rigid patterns are followed. There were long lines and youngish people outside of clubs, and a movie theater playing something on the order of Fungoid Fat Guys Must Die. He didn’t realize it was Friday night since what day it was never had any importance in his life. His mind wavered back to his hunger and Grandpa’s contention that even saltines were a feast for a hungry man. It didn’t take all that many years for him to figure out that Grandpa was frequently full of shit, sitting there before the woodstove eating stinking Liederkranz cheese and pickled bologna with his saltines, talking grandly about how much hemp they had smoked at the government-sponsored CCC camps during the Depression in order to save their pathetic pay for beery weekends. Now this same hemp, B.D. thought, could get you locked up real tight for a long time.

  When B.D. pulled up in front of the club he asked if Bob might send him out a sandwich, say liver sausage, sharp cheddar, with a thick slice of raw onion, plus a Budweiser if possible.

  “I’m a liberal Democrat with populist roots. You’re coming in. I’ve already figured out your meal. I just hope you love spinach.”

  “I can handle it with pork products,” B.D. quipped, handing the keys to the dirty car to the reluctant valet, who then grinned when Bob got out and handed him a twenty.

  Inside the club the air was thick with smoke what with smoking being the main reason the private club existed. On the way to their table Bob explained quickly, if loudly, that since the politically correct fascists in California had banned smoking even in bars, certain intelligent radicals had joined together to form clubs in honor of freedom. B.D. thought that the swank club wasn’t exactly reminiscent of the Chicago radical explosion but then he wasn’t in a critical frame of mind over such matters. He only smoked when drunk but that was because cigarettes had become too expensive. Throughout the club folks were puffing away with panache. They were the nattiest group B.D. had ever seen in one place, all gathered in rebellious smoking friendship.

  When they reached their booth blood rushed to B.D.’s face. Bob’s date, Sharon, whom he had mentioned earlier in the day, turned out to be a junior high girl, or so he thought. Sharon sprawled in the red leather booth in a short pink dress, white anklets, and black patent leather shoes known as Mary Janes, looking thirteen at the outside. She batted Bob with the Sherman Alexie novel she was reading when Bob slid into the booth beside her and cupped her ass. B.D.’s mind spun, thinking it was odd that California banned smoking and then allowed this sort of thing. He sat down hesitantly at the scene of yet another crime and on a closer look figured she might push eighteen but was dressing real young for private reasons. Bob chuckled at his discomfort and said that Sharon was a recent graduate of Radcliffe on the East Coast, which raised in B.D.’s mind the image of a building on a cliff above the stormy Atlantic.

  “You’re real lucky to go from one ocean to the other,” B.D. said, shaking her small soft hand which made him quiver.

  “I’ve never thought of it that way.” Sharon was wondering if this asshole was for real or putting her on. “Bob talked about you on the phone. I have great sympathy for you and the plight of your people.”

  “The road is both long and short. I have my hopes in my heart.” B.D. was a little confused by a woman in the booth behind Bob and Sharon whose monster tits were literally falling out of her blouse. She flashed him a dizzying smile.

  “Well put,” Bob said. “The struggle is both in the moment and in the long term.” He grabbed the arm of a passing waiter. “Why don’t you miserable fucks bring us some drinks?”

  “Do many Natives wear such wonderful hats?” Sharon ignored Bob’s impatient anger, not being an alcoholic herself though she was mildly wired on Zoloft.

  “A few of us in the brotherhood,” B.D. said, wondering at the same time why he was spilling bullshit. Sharon was like Shelley who seemed to demand it. If he had had a pencil or pen he could have used the old trick of dropping it on the floor to l
ook up her legs but then, however pretty, she was a tad scrawny. Bob, who had just gotten up to track down drinks, must be trying to recapture his youth or something like that, but then again he might just be trying to help Sharon out.

  “Bob’s a swell guy,” Sharon said, glancing across the room at Bob at the bar demanding service. “I just worry he’s going to blow his tubes with booze like my dad did. Sure, he’s a good writer but ninety-nine point nine percent of all writers are forgotten within a month after their last book.”

  “Why would anyone want to be remembered?” B.D. asked. “We’re all worm chow.” He felt cozier watching Bob approach followed by a waiter with a tray containing two bottles of wine and a martini, the other hand holding an ice bucket with three Buds.

  It wasn’t really a swell evening except to B.D. Sharon only picked at a plate of two oysters, two shrimp, and two cherrystone clams on a bed of radicchio while Bob had a double order of veal chops and pasta. Lucky for B.D. Bob’s spinach joke was only a side order that accompanied a prime New York strip that weighed nearly two pounds. He had noted it on the menu but then it cost thirty-eight dollars so he had settled on spaghetti and meatballs which only cost the astounding price of eighteen dollars. There was a restaurant in Iron Mountain where the same dish was only four dollars and a single meatball was the size of a baby’s head and a side order of half of a roasted chicken was only two bucks. Bob stepped in and insisted B.D. have the steak saying that in L.A. a man requires power food. Sharon’s pathetic dish irritated Bob so much that he began choking. B.D. agreed on the idea of power food, describing the sense of well-being he felt after eating five deer hearts. Sharon impolitely pointed out that they were both full of shit.

  “Only partially full, darling. But then so are you. From birth to death the primate colon is never completely empty.” Bob’s voice carried strongly and two couples at a table across the aisle from their booth didn’t seem happy.

  Sharon giggled and playfully lifted a leg and kneaded Bob’s ample tummy with a shiny, patent leather shoe. As B.D. worked methodically on his steak, eating the delicious fat first, he noted Sharon was a pretty smart gal. She and Bob had a high-minded argument about whether the media, in toto, was in reality the main weapon of mass destruction in the world since it irretrievably warped the minds of the collective citizenry. According to Sharon TV, the movies, newspapers, and nearly all books were actually a nerve gas dumbing down the world. Bob countered by asking, “Then why do you want to enter the movie business?” Naturally, she said, “To improve it.”

  “You lame fucks from New York and your itty-bitty art films,” Bob said. “You xenophobic dweebs think that New York is the world. Everything is cold and sooty and everyone shivers in leather jackets at dawn. You see a bridge, buildings, and pigeons. Then more bridges, buildings, and pigeons. Throw in a dog or two and a Chinese restaurant and a bum picking his nose.” Bob was carried away but not so far that he neglected his meal.

  “You liberal romantic novelists come out here thinking you’re going to do good work and what do you come up with?” Sharon talked so softly you had to stop chewing so your mandibles didn’t drown out her voice. “You think you can apply your lame sensitivities across the board to every situation and what do we get? Shooting. Everyone shoots everyone. You think that the paradigm of life is crime. You fall back on your limp penises which take the form of guns. Bang. Come. Bang. Come.” Sharon wiped her spotless lips with her napkin, a prim gesture. She pouted at B.D. who had finished his steak and was loving the spinach which swam in olive oil and garlic. “What do you think, Mister Noble Savage?”

  “I was thinking that this was the best steak of my life and that I want to get my bearskin back.” He eyed her uneaten cherrystone clams and she pushed them over. This was another adventure in the making because he had never eaten a raw clam. “I know I’m missing out a lot where I live but I don’t have a TV, the movie houses are far away, and I don’t care for newspapers because the pictures are in black and white and the world is in color.” He felt weak in the face of her onslaught.

  “But sweetheart, you get the nerve gas in the discourse of everyone you know.” She stuck her tiny foot out under the table and gave his pecker a polite nudge.

  Just then Bob’s cellular buzzed and he portentously lifted it from the belt holster. He said, “Yes. No. Yes. No. Great,” writing down an address from his jacket-pocket notebook and clicking off the phone. He eyed B.D. and affected the voice of Joe Friday. “I’ve got Lone Marten’s address. We should move in now.” He was clearly in his cups and smirked with a sense of mission, picking up a veal-chop bone and gnawing at a difficult piece of gristle.

  “It would be better to move out at dawn,” B.D. said, sensing that caution might be a better tack.

  “Tomorrow is Saturday which makes dawn around noon, at least in L.A. Bob always sets his alarm for eleven-eleven sharp.” Sharon turned to Bob who was staring blearily at the bar then waved at a couple.

  “It’s Sandrine and her big-shot NBC stiff. He saddle-soaps her boots with his tongue. I can imagine what that might do to your taste buds. Take it from me, your palate is a big part of your future. Once your palate goes the rest of your sensory apparatus dries up like a cow pie in the noonday sun, under which only grubs and maggots can thrive—”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Bob, shut up.” Sharon nudged him so hard that only superior balance in such matters saved his glass of wine.

  “Sandrine de la Redondo, this is your neighbor Brown Dog at the Siam,” Bob said, ignoring the TV executive in his English bespoke suit and amber steamed glasses, and very clean ears, when they approached.

  “Êtes-vous célibataire?” Sandrine asked, placing her hand cheekily on his neck. B.D. stared deeply into the bare midriff of her outfit, smelling the pleasure of lilac bushes on a May morning.

  “That means, Are you a celebrity?” Bob translated.

  “It means, Are you single?” Sharon corrected.

  “Pouvez-vous venir prendre un verre chez moi ce soir?” Sandrine asked, running her little finger behind his ear which made him shudder.

  “She wants to know if you’d like a drink later.” Sharon yawned.

  “Yup. Don’t mind if I do.” He figured if this woman were immediately interested in him there must be something seriously wrong with her. Just what it might be was the intriguing question. If she wanted a green card he’d promise her one by dawn. He waved a bit limply as Sandrine and her limp boyfriend departed.

  “She wants a part. Everyone wants a part of some sort. Including me. I’ll take him home. We’re stopping by a very important party where he’s going to introduce me to people who might give me a job.” Sharon shoved Bob out of the booth with her heels, straightening her legs made strong by tennis and whatever. Bob merely signed the bill and tossed a C note on the softening pats of butter on which a single fly was mired.

  Nothing, for the time being, could be other than it was, B.D. thought, stretched on his bed at two AM back in his room at the Siam. He thunked his drum-tight tummy. Perhaps late in the evening was too late for a two-pound steak? On the way home he had bought a six-pack of Grolsch for ten bucks with a devil-may-care attitude to tamp the steak down while he listened to Mexican music. There were apparently only so many parts and jobs in the movie business and a lot of people wanted them, but then he recalled that when United Parcel Service had had an opening in Escanaba over two hundred men had applied. There were a lot of benefits, everyone said. If you stayed on the menial level you could avoid this mad struggle. If you needed some dough you showed up with your chain saw, a can of gas, and a few quarts of oil and you could always cut pulp. If you needed a place to stay there were hundreds of deer cabins in the Upper Peninsula you could stay in for doing some fix-it work. Through his friend Frank at the tavern he was always in demand. He’d live-trap the porcupines and red squirrels that were damaging a cabin and let them loose near another, say at the cabin of the yoga couple to see if the critters liked expensive dwellings.
The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future. He had noticed that it arrived in daily increments without any effort. The more central struggle in life was between water and beer. Too much beer, he knew from many years of experience, tended to be hard on the system. The yoga couple had told him that Elvis Presley need not have died had he consumed enough water. All of Presley’s pain and drug taking were due to constipation caused by bad diet (cheeseburgers and grilled peanut-butter-with-banana sandwiches) but mostly by a failure to drink a lot of water. B.D. had been concerned about his love for Frank’s cheeseburgers and the yoga couple had given him a ballpark of four twelve-ounce glasses of water per cheeseburger. You had to get up and pee a lot in a cold cabin but luckily there was a window near his cot. He ultimately did not scorn these wood yuppies because, at this moment, they would obviously better know how to deal with Los Angeles than he did. He found it hard to counsel himself against impatience though he had only been there two days. And the third day looked like it would bear fruit, as the Bible people say.

  Sandrine knocked at his door at three AM adding a muffled French greeting. B.D. was ready with a rule that she had to talk in American. He had also dispersed his four hundred and seventy dollars in a half dozen places, including a fifty in each sock. Someone said that you had to give a little to take a little, the kind of confusing homily life is built on. Sandrine’s room was very pleasant indeed, papered with French posters that included a sublime river gorge in the Midi that might hold lunker trout. I should be back home fishing at this very moment, he thought, because timewise it was six AM in Michigan and he could imagine dawn mist curling on the surface of this favorite beaver pond that had yielded a three-pound brook trout on a No. 16 female Adams with a soft yellow belly. Sandrine had decided B.D. was at least a minor rock musician, though never on the cover of Rolling Stone, from his absurd outfit and because she knew that Bob wouldn’t be hanging out with nullities. When they smoked a joint as an alternative to a drink B.D. saw problems coming, in that it was by far the strongest pot he had ever experienced. It miffed him when she turned on the television but she said, “The walls have ears” and that the immigration people were hot on her trail. In France she had lived in a château but in “Amerique” it must be the Siam for concealment from the neofascist government. She was incapable of dropping her entire disguise, and her central motive, rather than the green card, was getting the thousand bucks Bob owed her for a sexual favor. Perhaps B.D. was gentleman enough to cover his friend’s debt for a poor girl? “Let me think it over,” he said, speaking into a clenched fist as if it were a microphone. The pot smoke had begun to swirl around his brain pan and the yoga couple’s advice to “listen to your body” was at the moment not very attractive. Right in front of him Sandrine had changed into something more comfortable, a soft cotton shift leaving her legs bare to the midthigh. His tummy beef became restless and began to moo. She took off his fedora and leapt back as if hit by a cattle prod, proclaiming his hair to be the ugliest in the cosmos. Luckily for him she was an experienced cosmetologist. She led him to the bathroom, had him bend over the bowl, and sheared off close to the scalp his bristly skullcap, a matter of no importance to him though when he saw the lid of water covered with his hair he thought of biblical Samson being shorn by Delilah. When she flushed the toilet the swirling vortex of hair looked like a cow’s ass. She finished his head off with a bluish rinse at which point he recalled Delmore’s portentous dream that he would return home with a weird haircut! My God, but life was mysterious. They embraced in front of a large bathroom mirror with Sandrine releasing his weenie from captivity. It seemed far away as it prodded her warm cotton outfit seeking out the bull’s-eye. “Non, non, non,” she whispered, heading for the bed. They flopped into the age-old upsy-downsy position, a practice Bob had advised she preferred. In his pot haze anything was fine by him and this delightful lass had obviously been there before. Without the stealthy effects of beer, steak, and marijuana it would have been over in a trice. The world seemed dark so he opened his eyes and there between the two orbs of her bottom he could see Vincent Price on the television. It was the very old horror movie about parachutes that didn’t open, an apt metaphor for his life. Delmore had complained that modern airliners weren’t equipped with parachutes. She thwacked away at his chin and he felt her hands run up his calves and shins to the only thing he was wearing, socks. Her hands played over his insteps as Vincent’s airplane cradled through the clouds between her butt cheeks and she gargled, “A present for Sandrine, merci.” At his moment of release she shrieked, “You fucking cheapskate,” having peeled off the socks and found the two fifties. She leapt up with tears in her eyes, shaking the paltry bills that he hadn’t exactly given to her. While he quickly dressed she threatened to call the Mafia which he had only dimly heard of, though post-dope paranoia had set in and any harm was possible. Up until this point, and he was well into his forties, he did not believe that the aftermath of sex could depress him. When he pulled on his trousers she grabbed for his wallet which he had wisely left in his room and they tumbled backwards onto the bed. While she kicked and emitted fake sobs on her belly he stood and decided hers was actually the top fanny of his life which did a lot to lift his momentary depression. When he reached the door and took one last look she held out a hand imploringly for more cash, every bit as winsome as the divine actress earlier in the evening. Back in his room he drank a quart and a half of his valuable stash of water and went to bed without a single thought.