Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned

by Alan Alda

  My father felt, I guess, that getting me involved would help me deal with the loss. He said, “Let’s bury him together, okay, Butch?” I was choking back my tears as we each picked up a corner of the blanket and lifted Rhapsody off the porch. With shovels over our shoulders, we started walking, carrying my dead dog between us. My father had one end of the blanket, I had the other, and we walked and we walked—through the olive grove, across the field, beyond the line of eucalyptus trees, to the scruffy patch of land by the dry riverbed. We put the dog down and put our shovels into the dirt. With the first shovelful I burst into tears. And with every shovelful I cried louder and harder. We finally had an open pit in the ground, and I was uncontrollable. My father didn’t know what to do. He looked away helplessly. I let the shovel drop and stood with my hands at my sides, sobbing.

  After a moment, he turned to me and said, “Maybe we should have the dog stuffed.”

  I looked up at him. I wondered what he was talking about.

  “Stuff the dog?”

  “We could take him to a taxidermist and have him stuffed. You want to do that? That way you could always keep him.”

  If it didn’t involve putting the dog in the ground and starting in with the shovels again, it sounded good to me. “Okay,” I said, “let’s stuff him.”

  So we took the dog to a taxidermist.

  We entered a dark store on Hollywood Boulevard, and I walked through an eerie menagerie. There were dozens of birds—black birds, blue birds, somebody’s parakeet—all dead, standing on branches. A squirrel stood on a velvet-covered board, tail at high alert, a quizzical look on his face.

  The taxidermist put a studious and professional look on his own face. He wanted to know what our dog looked like. Did we have any snapshots? What kind of expression did he usually have?

  I tried to think about this, but I couldn’t remember any expression he was particularly known for. I’d never really paid attention to my dog’s emotional life. I thought all dogs had pretty much the same expression—a kind of dogginess common to all of them.

  My father and I launched haltingly into an effort to describe our dog’s expression. We came up with vague abstractions. He was a nice dog. He had a nice expression on his face.

  After a discreet pause, the taxidermist said he’d call us when the job was finished.

  It took six weeks to stuff the dog. By the time he came back from the taxidermist’s shop, I hadn’t forgotten him completely, but he was certainly not something I thought about every day.

  We pulled off the brown butcher’s paper he was wrapped in and looked at him. The dog had a totally unrecognizable expression on his face. He looked as if he’d seen something loathsome that needed to be shredded. Nobody in our family knew who this was. He sat on his blue velvet board, looking up at us like something with rabies. We were kind of afraid of him.

  My parents made excuses for the taxidermist. He didn’t really know the dog; he did the best he could. We’ll get used to the look on his face.

  We put what now passed for our dog in the living room near the fireplace. But after a couple of days, it became difficult to walk into the room without feeling that a wild animal was going to spring at you. You were aware, out of the corner of your eye, that there was something alive but perfectly still in the room, and then you would see those glass eyes staring at you and the vicious mouth, hungry for your flesh. When guests visited, if we didn’t warn them that the dog wasn’t real, they’d walk into the room and stand dead still. Sometimes they would back slowly out of the room, trying to escape before it leapt at their throat.

  We realized we couldn’t keep him in the living room, so we put him outside on the front porch—not far, in fact, from where he’d died. The trouble now was that deliverymen were afraid to make deliveries. They would leave packages on the grass.

  Losing the dog wasn’t as bad as getting him back. Now that he was stuffed, he was just a hollow parody of himself. Like a bad nose job or a pair of eyes set surgically in eternal surprise, he was a reminder that things would never again be the way they were. And the longer you looked at his dead skin stretched inaccurately over a wire frame, the less well you could remember him as he was. As time went on, my memory of the real Rhapsody was replaced by the image of him sitting lifeless on the blue velvet board with a hideous look on his face. And anyway, it wasn’t memories I wanted; I wanted the dog. I wanted him sitting at the end of our first day in the new house, patiently watching my face while I pulled foxtail burrs from the fur on his long ears.

  Yet the effort to keep him had seemed to make him disappear even more. I couldn’t understand why. As I did about most things in my life, starting with my mother, I kept asking the same questions: “Why is it like this? What’s happening here?” But I couldn’t figure it out.

  I understand it a little better now, and I see now that stuffing your dog is more than what happens when you take a dead body and turn it into a souvenir. It’s also what happens when you hold on to any living moment longer than it wants you to.

  Memory can be a kind of mental taxidermy, trying to hold on to the present after it’s become the past. I didn’t know this then. Change was coming, and I was going to have to come out of my cocoon soon. But I wasn’t ready for the next stage in my life, and I hung on to the early times as long as I could.

  Hold off the outside, I thought. Don’t go to the edge of our world near the Land of the Civilians. Stay in Eden, where it’s safe.

  But I wouldn’t be able to hold off change any more than the Hollywood taxidermist could. I was headed out.

  chapter 4

  THE SAGE OF LA TUNA CANYON

  I grew wild, like the brush in the canyon.

  I spent most of my time alone. I didn’t go to school because my parents thought we’d be able to go on the road when we had to if they had me tutored; our house was so isolated that I seldom saw a friend; my father worked until late at the studio, and my mother put in a long day reading nutrition pamphlets and True Crime detective magazines. I was free to explore. My curiosity took me on long hikes where, sweaty and smelling of sage, I climbed the mountain trails, poking into things, trying to figure out how they got that way. If I found coyote droppings on the trail, I would poke at them with a stick to see what the animal had been eating.

  One morning I went up the dirt road to the henhouse to feed the chickens, and on the ground I saw the most amazing thing. A rattlesnake had tried to swallow a mouse whole and had apparently choked and died trying to get it down. What a stupid thing for a snake to do, I thought. What made it think it could swallow a mouse? Since the snake was dead and couldn’t hurt me, I picked up a stick and started poking at it. And then I froze. The snake wasn’t dead. He slowly backed off from the mouse’s body and let his jaws locate themselves again. I was thirty inches from a rattlesnake that could jump much faster than I could. I just stood still, and for some reason he continued to back off from me and then turned and slithered away. I learned a good lesson that day: If a rattlesnake thinks he can swallow a mouse, he probably can. Don’t assume you think like a snake unless you are one.

  The snake didn’t stop me from poking around, though. I couldn’t resist. On our first Christmas Eve in the new house, I managed to poke my finger into an emotional light socket. Around midnight, I was in bed, excited that Santa Claus might be coming at any minute and listening for sounds on the roof. What I heard, instead, were sounds of my mother and father downstairs. I sneaked down the staircase and saw them decorating the tree and wrapping presents. Was it possible they had been lying to me for eight years about Santa? I decided to catch them in the act. When they weren’t looking, I got closer and hid behind a stuffed chair. After a while, my mother, who was a terrible actress when she was trying to get away with a lie, started speaking in a strange voice. “Oh, listen, dear,” she said to my father, “I think I hear Santa coming.” God, I thought, she’s awful. Why is she so fake? There was a knock at the door. “Oh. Here he is now,” she said as she open
ed it. And standing in the doorway was a man in a red suit and a white beard.

  “Just passing by,” he said. The suit was pretty convincing, but as soon as he talked I knew it was Beetlepuss Lewis, one of my father’s burlesque partners.

  “Oh, come in, Santa,” my mother said in an even phonier voice. “Can we get you something to drink?”

  “No thanks,” Santa said. “I have a bottle of wine in the sleigh.”

  This was what I loved about Beetlepuss and all the other comics. They couldn’t let a straight line just lie there like an orphan. It was obvious that at this performance, the role of Santa was being played by George Beetlepuss Lewis, and I jumped out from behind the chair and said so in a triumphant, piping voice. This was putting my finger in the emotional light socket.

  My mother’s face fell. She was instantly miserable, almost in tears. “You mean you don’t believe in Santa anymore?” she said. She seemed despondent, as if up until now she had believed in him, too. “Can’t you still believe in him?”

  I explained that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t believe that Beetlepuss Lewis was Santa Claus. “But you were so innocent when you believed. It was so sweet. Can’t you try? Just a little longer?”

  She was getting a good deal more mileage out of this innocence stuff than I thought it was worth. A year earlier, when I was seven, she thought I looked so cute and innocent in the bathtub, she wanted to take me into the living room and show me naked to her friends. I had to dig in my heels and pull back all the way to the bathroom door until she gave up. Now she seemed so depressed about Santa Claus that I had the feeling I had killed something in her.

  There was a tug-of-war developing between her reality and mine, and she was pulling as hard as she could.

  But I did love George for being funny at a critical moment in our lives. It’s what made me love all the comics. There wasn’t anything you couldn’t be funny about. This was the group I identified with and wanted to be like, not the civilians. Civilians are lesser creatures, I thought. They’re not completely alive. It’s true they can laugh, and that’s why they make good audiences, but they don’t know how to make one another laugh. Instead, they tell jokes. They recite these formulas and you go ha, ha, but they really don’t know how to be funny. They’re not like us. We have a secret power. We’re a sacred, secret brotherhood.

  These are the crazy things I grew up thinking. The adults around me never expressed these arrogant thoughts. I worked them out for myself by watching the people who came in from the outside world.

  There were my tutors, for instance. There was Miss Brown. She had a brown personality, a brown outlook. She taught me brown things in a brown way. Her brain was dry and knotted and twisted up in the bun of hair on her head. Finally, one day she just dried up completely and blew away. She was replaced by another tutor: Loraine.

  Loraine was okay. She was buxom, and I liked that. And she liked to tell me stories about her boyfriends and the crazy parties they went to. She was only about ten years older than me, and she hadn’t lost her playfulness, so I had a pretty good time sitting next to her, trying to figure her out. She tried to teach me about Greek myths, but we spent most of our time looking at pictures of half-naked gods and exploring my questions about whether she thought they were attractive or not. She was fun, but I was curious about a lot of things, and her answers tended to be short on facts and long on anecdotes about parties.

  “What’s a flame?” I wanted to know.

  “It’s oxidation,” she said.

  “No, I mean when you look at the flame, what are you actually looking at?”

  “Oxidation.”

  This is not an answer, I thought. This is just a word. I was nine years old, and I wanted answers. If she had said, “You’re looking at photons coming out of the atoms when they get excited,” it might have sounded like something to look at and shut me up. But I kept asking her the same question, and to relieve the monotony, she launched into a supposedly hilarious story about a guy who got mad at her boyfriend and said he hoped he’d die in childbirth. This didn’t seem funny to me, because since her boyfriend had been born years ago, he had already gone through childbirth. She decided not to go into detail, and I was left with the impression that sometimes civilians could have a certain kind of boisterous fun, but they really didn’t know funny.

  Before long, word of her stories made their way to my mother, and Loraine went off to the tutor burial ground and in came Mr. Phillips.

  Mr. Phillips was in his early forties. He tutored me in the evenings. Fit and muscular, he did some kind of work during the day for the phone company. I imagined him climbing poles and coming down out of the sky at dusk, when he would sit across from me with his muscular legs crossed and a smirk on his face when I asked questions that he considered off the point. He was disciplined and expected me to be, too. He saw me doodling during one session and wanted to see what I had drawn. I wasn’t inclined to show him because it was a naked woman, which I felt he would think was way off the point. When I refused to hand it over, he very calmly wrestled me to my knees and took it from my clutched hand. We didn’t discuss the picture. He just balled it up and smirked. We went back to long division.

  But after our sessions, I noticed he hung around with my mother and her friend Gail in the living room. I had seen men flirt in the burlesque company, so I knew what it was, and he was clearly doing it with Gail. Gail seemed odd to me. She was quiet and had hair that had been bleached so much it didn’t have any color left. She wore too much powder and had a nose that looked as if it had been broken several times. I had long since determined from my study of the Greek gods who was attractive and who was not, and she was not someone I would have flirted with. But Mr. Phillips looked at her and wagged his tail. I wondered where all his discipline had gone. Gail was married to one of the burlesque comics who came over to our house on Sundays. She was somebody’s wife. It seemed to me Mr. Phillips was definitely off the point with her.

  When April Fools’ Day came around, I prepared a nice little joke for Mr. Phillips. I made up a tray with a sandwich and a cup of tea and presented it to him at the start of our session. Luckily, my goldfish had just died, and I’d put him in the sandwich. The sugar bowl, of course, was filled with salt, which Mr. Phillips figured out and didn’t even taste. For some reason, though, he didn’t open the sandwich, so he never saw the dead goldfish. He picked it up and took a bite out of it. I was appalled. I thought seeing the goldfish was the joke, not eating it.

  “Stop,” I said. “Don’t!”

  He stopped midbite. “What?” he asked. The tail of the goldfish was hanging out of his mouth.

  Now here, I had a decision to make. Should I tell him he had a goldfish in his mouth or let him eat it? I thought about being wrestled to the floor a couple of weeks earlier; I thought about his flirting with Gail. Finally, I thought about the smirk. There was the goldfish, right where the smirk used to be. And I thought, Let him eat it.

  He ate it. Or at least he ate half of it, and then I wished him a Happy April Fools’ Day. He took it pretty well, and he didn’t get sick, but I think it wasn’t long before Mr. Phillips decided to join the others in the great march of tutors heading south.

  I was glad. I was more comfortable with our happy band of brothers. Every Sunday, thirty or forty of my father’s old friends from burlesque would come by and my father would put dozens of ribs on the barbecue. He would stand over the fire painting the ribs with a sauce he had invented as the smoke from the charring meat swirled around his head. His pals would swim and eat and drink, and when night fell they would take turns performing their old routines. One of them was expert at the spit take. Several times during the sketch, he would be surprised by something just as he was drinking a glass of water and he would shpritz the front row. Everyone erupted in laughter and applause, not because it took them by surprise—they had seen it a hundred times. They applauded the artistry, the delicacy, of it; the ineffable meaning and utter stupidity
of it.

  We were arranged in rows in the living room, and the performers would be two steps up, as though onstage, on the landing of the entrance to the rumpus room. A rumpus room was a forties invention: a room where you could raise a rumpus. It had a bar decorated with decals portraying muchachos sleeping under their giant sombreros. Everyone drank Moscow mules, and the women wore peasant blouses or dresses with peplums and had pompadours made of two giant rolls of hair, as if they were carrying a pair of mice on their heads.

  I was allowed to perform with the comics in some sketches. My father had a large stack of black notebooks filled with old burlesque bits. These books had been compiled and passed around like a first folio from one comic to another for decades. I read and reread them during the week, looking for sketches I could work in on Sunday. They contained the great ones: “Floogle Street,” “the Crazy House,” “Handful of Nickels,” “Slowly I Turn.” And there were dozens of short blackouts—each one a quick exchange and a punch line—like “You Will/I Won’t” . . .

  (Two men onstage.)

  FIRST MAN: You will.

  SECOND MAN: I won’t.

  FIRST MAN: You will!

  SECOND MAN: I won’t!

  FIRST MAN: You will!!

  SECOND MAN: I won’t!!

  (First Man takes out a gun and shoots Second Man, who falls dead.)

  FIRST MAN: You will!

  (Blackout)

  . . . a brief and bizarre sketch that captured all of modern history and anticipated existentialism and theater of the absurd by forty years.

  Some of the dialogue in these sketches could be tailored for whatever town you were in. While describing a despicable place or person, you would be prompted to “insert here name of local park” or “insert here name of mayor.” All of it was nonsensical and impudent, and some of it was risqué enough to be completely unintelligible to me.