The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Yeck!’

  ‘Am sorry, li’l pup. That was jest me bein’ clumsy now, wasnit? Beg your pard’n.’

  We drove south and came to a town called DeSoto, not at all large, the sound of distant cowbells competing with the car engine, and they put me on a leash and came out to see what there was to steal. Waiting for them, I looked up and saw a pair of sneakers dangling from the wire between two telegraph poles. From Judah’s Jot-em-Down Store, a grinning Raymond made off with a fishing reel and a packet of household candles, and at Mrs Gallagher’s Grocery across the street, Arlene nabbed two fan magazines and a bottle of purple nail varnish. The trunk of the car was full of stolen items, but they also had a sack of Scamp and they poured the biscuits into a bowl for me out in the parking lot. Arlene had the cheek to go back into Mrs Gallagher’s asking for some water for the dog. ‘Yam yam,’ I said. ‘All property is theft and hallelujah for the young.’

  I will never forget that night in Texas. First they met up with all these teenagers: Joyce, who was shameless, Margie, who was brainless, Scott, who was brainless and horny, Hintze, who was horny and scientific, and Eddie Kimble, who was more or less psychotic. When Raymond stopped the car they all came tripping out of Kimble’s house, some in Bermuda shorts and others in brand new jeans, the boys carrying fourpacks of beer and pitchers of some grape-juice concoction. Kimble was antsy about his share. ‘Hot damn, this here’s a whole nuther thing,’ said Hintze. He was swigging from the pitcher as he sat on the back seat.

  ‘Nu-uh.’

  ‘Ah pipe down, Kimble. You gettin’ your turn. Here’s the stuff am gone be looking after.’

  ‘You talkin’ ’bout that li’l dawg?’ said Margie.

  ‘Nu-uh, I aint, Miss Plug Ugly. I’m braggin’ ’bout this here jungle juice. Kimble made it.’

  ‘Give it here, Hintze!’

  The Margie girl rubbed me around the ears and put me on her lap. ‘Hey, Arlene. Look at this li’l feller. You had him all day?’

  ‘All day. All night,’ said Raymond. He liked to think he was the daddy of the group.

  ‘No way, man.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pass the juice.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Arlene, the li’l dawg here’s like a gnat in a rainstorm. Can’t we drop him off somewhere?’

  ‘He’s bin dropped off somewhere. With us,’ said Raymond looking in the rearview mirror.

  ‘He’s fixin’ ta bite your hand off,’ said Kimble. He lit a cigarette and looked sideways with his puffy eyes, looking all crazy towards Margie and me. ‘He’s one agger-vated dawg I’m tellin’ ya, and you, girl, are one sorry-ass babysitter tonight. You better keep this li’l chicken far ’way from them flying saucers! This pony gone be shit-scared.’

  ‘Am more worried about you,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, pass that here, you maniac,’ said Arlene. She twisted the radio dial and everybody laughed at nothing while taking large, acrid swigs, the vapour in the car becoming so dense you could lick it off the windows. It was dark outside and the cicadas were veep-veeping. Their wild conversational gambits rolled around the car from window to leatherette seats, the young people saying things then unsaying them, clicking their fingers against the beat, spewing cigarette smoke and feeling embarrassed about nothing in particular, while Raymond wound down the window and countless small essences escaped into the trees and the lighted houses, the voice of Eddie Cochran falling behind us on the road to Cedar Hill.

  Over the town, the TV antennas blinked like fireflies. The Texas sky seemed placid enough but grave, too. People were talking and the sound they made was burnished by yet more of the insect noises. Together they made a happy sound in the grassy amphitheatre of the hill. This was, they said, the highest point in the state between Red River and the Gulf of Mexico, and the height, the fireflies, the cicadas, the flash of cigarette lighters and the sudden gleam of tilted beer bottles and of moisture in the eyes of maybe a hundred or so young people, brought the evening into line with some great Aztec evening of yore. That’s what I thought as I watched them peering and necking up there at the edge of Cedar Hill State Park: they were watching the sky in the full flow of their youth and in the face of the changes that their youth would bring about, but the gesture was old, the instinct to look up was old and the hope of awe was older still. They all sat on the grass and I liked them and ambled among the sneakers looking for something to eat.

  Joyce was telling Hintze that she once saw one from the top of the rollercoaster at the Schaeffer Carnival. It was long like a cigar and definitely wasn’t a weather observation balloon or any old thing like that. Hintze tried to feed me a piece of beef jerky from his pocket but I left it on the grass and he frowned. ‘My dogs’d cross the county to git some of this larrupin’ stuff,’ he said. ‘Hey, Raymo. What kinda uppercrust hound dog you got here? The ole cuss won’t even eat his jerky.’

  ‘He’s a good ’un,’ said Raymond. ‘He’s one of them dawgs from New York.’

  ‘Some business-lady’s rascal,’ said Arlene. ‘And what a cute little fella all the same with his dirty old collar.’

  ‘We think his owner is somebody. Ain’t that right, Arlene?’

  ‘Sure. A lady from New York. Some kinda person from New York with shades on.’

  ‘Well, it’s the easiest ten bucks you ever made, brother,’ said Kimble, now chugging the last of the pitcher and looking up.

  ‘We won’t be gettin’ no ten,’ said Arlene. ‘Uncle Arnold will hit us with five if we’re lucky.’ I walked over their knees and ducked beneath the plumes of smoke. ‘Ole rascal,’ said Arlene, kissing my nose while the smell of a dozen campfires rose on the breeze.

  ‘Feline,’ I said.

  There was something in Arlene that smarted for rhythm and rhyme, her brown eyes perhaps, the sense that dwelled in her nervous smile that life could never be easy. She wanted the heights of everything. She stroked my back and I felt a small yearning in her hands, the need for poetic glories in love and belonging. She looked at Raymond and he blew four perfect smoke-rings in the air before turning to wink at her, able to wink without doubts in his mind. I felt there was a story here, a story about these girls never leaving Cedar Hill. They were my opposite. They would never leave and this stone cold fact felt like one of the lessons of the evening breeze.

  ‘My daddy saw a heap of ’em,’ said Margie. ‘Flyin’ saucers flyin’ like ducks in formation. He saw ’em above Carswell Air Force Base. That’s the truth. The honest-Gawd truth.’

  ‘Darn right,’ said Hintze. ‘Elmo Dillon saw one of them land in the middle of his mamma’s lawn. I’m talking some crazy-lookin’ gizmo.’ He sat up. ‘It lands right there in the yard. Elmo says his mother passed away. Not that night but a hundred days later and she was babblin’ in a hundred languages an’ deluded and shit.’

  The UFO hunt had all the kids on the hill looking the same way. They looked upwards and they pointed at stars and shooting debris. Many of them were tangled in one another’s arms, others sat alone, with Christmas telescopes trained on an infinity of eyes they imagined to be looking back at them from the blue-black sky.

  ‘Deluded is right,’ said Eddie Kimble. ‘It’s all hoaxes my friend. You know what I’m thinkin’? I’m thinkin’ we should git from here and find ourselves a whole new basket of beers.’

  ‘We’re staying,’ said Raymond.

  ‘Do you think we’re being watched?’ asked Arlene. After a second Raymond turned and his expression told her she’d asked one of the great questions. He nodded. Yes indeed. He nodded like one who was forced to carry the wisdom of ages.

  ‘Definitely, man,’ he said. Raymond was wondering whether he might get work as a grocery clerk before the summer. It seemed the night to ask. Maybe they should stop by on the way back into town. Maybe he could run more errands for Arnold or look for a bar job in Fort Worth. Tips were good for bartending. Come the summer, it should be the Marine Corps: the air base at Corpus Christi. He’d never been anywhere.
Maybe he would see places and tell them all about it. Far-away places.*

  The sky was a bastard for secrets. I remember my keeper at the Griffith Park quarantine saying there were over five thousand pieces of astro-junk floating up there, broken engine parts and jettisoned fuel cylinders, the shiny detritus of our battle to master the cosmos. The kids felt planted and watched, but out there the space chimps of the United States were running out of oxygen and the astro-dogs of the USSR were passing through the solar system in a state of ample loneliness. Alien races would meet those thirsty dogs and take them in for questioning – tell us what you can, they’d say, about the strange beings who paint the walls of caves and send their fellow creatures into the boundless dark of space. I wonder if the Russian dogs care for Plutarch as much as I do. I can see the lost Laika opening her maw and planting the flag of comedy on the terra firma of Mars. ‘Consider a monkey,’ she might say. ‘Because it cannot guard property like a dog, or endure weight like a horse, or plough land like cattle, abuse and sarcasm and jokes are heaped upon it.’ Posidonius, in The Fragments, has exactly the same notion about monkeys. The choice of monkeys over dogs for use in the national space programme might begin to describe what Billy Wilder called the comic nature of American reality.

  Hintze came up the hill with hotdogs. ‘The top two’s mine so keep your mitts off,’ he said.

  ‘Gawd, Hintze. Insane amount of mustard.’

  ‘We say moutarde in France, dear Raymond.’

  ‘Yeah. Blow me, Hintze.’

  ‘Come on, guys. Let’s get outta here,’ said Kimble, flicking a cigarette butt down the hill. ‘There ain’t nothin’ gonna show up there. No saucers. No damn UFOs. Let’s go into town. This is a bust.’ As Kimble was speaking, I kept my eyes up and believed that something would show. They all liked rockets but none of them understood how rockets had turned them into an endangered species. I wanted to see one, just for the adventure.

  ‘No, it ain’t a bust,’ said Raymond. ‘This is how you get to see them. You keep watchin’.’

  ‘That’s right. You keep watchin’,’ said Arlene. ‘There’s only nothin’ there if you don’t keep lookin’.’ She lay back on the grass. Her eyes were fixed on the sky and her hands were crossed in front of her. I put my head on her lap and watched as the fireflies blinked above us, the Texan sky wide open and nothing happening.

  * Years after Marilyn was gone, I saw a picture of Raymond’s face on TV. It was a late-night special about soldiers lost in action in Vietnam.

  10

  V

  ita Sackville-West once spoke of her admiration for a French tapestry showing Ulysses being met on the doorstep by his dog, Argos. I can see the brown colour of the wanderer’s tunic and the expression in his eyes when the dog recognises him. I felt I was playing both parts. It was the year of a song called ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’: we heard it one night as we walked past a joint in Greenwich Village and the music summoned our sadness and our hopes at the same time. Marilyn wasn’t well that season: to be precise, she had been in the doldrums and a danger to herself, sick with depression. I can’t pretend that I ever truly understand what ailed my owner; it was the human thing, that burden of self-consciousness that weighs down the day. Since finishing with Arthur, I think she felt she might always be alone. She felt she was bound to fail at everything and end up mad like her mother. There were periods of weeks when Marilyn just sat in her bedroom staring at the wall, never washing and never getting dressed. She told her maid one day that the most reliable items in her life were her dressing gown and her socks. It was hard for me to feel I was making a difference: worries just went round in her mind like those records she played after it got dark.

  At Dr Kris’s suggestion, she was admitted to the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic, a total disaster – it looked like her mother’s institution – but I took up sentry duty when she was moved to a private room at the Columbia University Presbyterian Medical Center. I loved being her guardian, but I wasn’t much good. She had been in her bedroom on East 57th Street with the curtains drawn for many weeks previously. She just wept. And during those long days and nights I absorbed her dark mood. It’s not always easy to keep one’s whimsical composure. So when I sat down by the bed at Columbia I was not so much like Argos as Garryowen, that mangy dog in Joyce’s novel who waits for what the sky would drop in the way of drink. I wasn’t exactly sitting there quoting the ranns and ballads of ancient Celtic bards, but I was gloomy, no mistake about it; I was like the old towser growling at the nurses.

  Marilyn lay dreaming of her father. She lay in the wellmade bed and she couldn’t help passing her sadness on to me. ‘Give us the paw! Give the paw, doggy! Good old doggy! Give the paw here! Give us the paw!’ That was the Irish nurses all right and non-stop. The sad talk circled in my head for weeks. ‘All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the famous old Irish red setter wolf dog formerly known by the SOBRIQUET of Garryowen.’ That was James Joyce in his book, loved, admired, and not quite read by my owner, and, to the same degree, unloved and mostly unread by my former owner’s sister, Virginia Woolf, who said the author went on like an undergraduate scratching his spots. Bitter, Virginia, like that, or so it was implied in the kitchen at Charleston, a house where her memory lay as heavy as the stones in her pockets, Grace always said.

  Marilyn sat up in the bed, her skin stressed, her eyes clear, and she looked over at the window to see the snow was melting down on the streets. People need people, and they came and went, publicists, actor friends, and Dr Kris one day in a beautiful grey cardigan. She brought roses. ‘I’m sorry Marilyn. I did a terrible thing. That place was wrong for you and I know it now.’ The winter freeze appeared to linger in Marilyn just then, because the eyes she turned from the window were unforgiving.

  ‘Dr Kris,’ she said. ‘I guess you miss your husband very much, don’t you?’

  ‘Why this question?’

  ‘Yes. You must miss him very much. And your father, too, I guess. Do you miss your father?’

  ‘Marilyn.’

  ‘Goodbye, Marianne.’ The therapist stood at the side of the bed for a second, frostbitten, lost for words. Yet already Dr Kris was arranging the favourable terms of her self-pity. She pursed her lips and made a note to herself about individuals who think terminally. Her sister’s face fluttered through her mind, but she banished it, feeling stronger by the time she reached the door and closed it behind her.

  By degrees I could get onto the bed, first hopping on a chair, then paddling among the blankets and scampering onto her, Marilyn’s fingers welcoming me. For long weeks she was propped up in bed reading Freud’s Collected Letters. Everything she thought and touched, including me, was infected by the old boy’s way of going on, as if the book was offering a signal of comfort about unhappiness and the battle we endure with ourselves. It makes us feel better to know that suffering is both common and routine: not only common but intellectually respectable, something that fails, for all the pain, to reduce a creature’s appeal. In that way the book comforted Marilyn through several weeks and I picked up some language and a few bad tropes. Of course, we’re all slightly too much like ourselves, and I found myself, during her reading of the Freud letters, taking the greatest interest in my own kind. The things that intrigued me most were not to do with the death drive, whatever that is, or the early tendency towards bum-worship, which canines know well enough, but were chiefly to do with Freud’s deeply affectionate silliness when it came to the comings and goings of his pet chow Jo-Fi.

  In the apartment at Berggasse 19, Freud had begun to resent his wife’s slow-burning malice. Martha had all the cardinal virtues, but some vital part of her was disturbed by Freud’s commitment to his work. She couldn’t wash a cup without seeing it as an act of self-sacrifice, which becomes quite exhausting after a number of years. Freud tried to remember her abili
ties, her tenderness, her former beauty, to recognise how much of herself she must have held back in order to live with such a man and love him. But as time passed she had grown secretly dependent on religion, and, increasingly, she was able to experience none of the old pride or comfort in her husband’s preoccupations. Her silence formed a gloomy prospectus. He sometimes went from room to room in a state of confusion, and, of course, he blamed his own mother, which is a natural place for a man to start if he is shopping for someone to blame. Martha had a point, by the way: the man was not merely a hard worker but an embalmer, a museum-keeper, and that study was the great tomb of their lives. He said very little about any of it, but you could find the story between the lines of the letters, among the unsaid things.

  For Freud, reliable companionship came at that time in the form of Jo-Fi, who appeared to share his instincts. The dog would lie on the rug or pad around his treatment room, always giving Freud a clue as to the mental state of his patients. Every old man requires a rescuing accomplice – or a saving lie, as Ibsen preferred – and for Freud it happened to be a fuzzy chow with tender and independent feelings. ‘I miss her now almost as much as my cigar,’ he wrote in one of his educated swoons. ‘She is a charming creature, so interesting in her feminine characteristics . . . wild, impulsive, and yet not so dependent as dogs often are.’