Paws and Reflect

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I’ve played Auntie Mame three times, and when I do it, I’m just channeling Aunt Lillian. She encouraged me to be everything I was meant to be.

  I flourished with Aunt Lillian. She was an amazing lady. One hour with her would exhaust Leonardo da Vinci. She was helpless about some things and unstoppable about others. For instance, she would get lost every time she left the house, even in her own neighborhood. But she could fix a broken radio or make a matador’s costume, and she was a woman who could get the president of Condé Nast on the phone if she decided she needed to speak to him about what happened to her November issue of Vanity Fair.

  Moving in with her was the best thing that could have happened to me. But it was the end of my connection with dogs. Hansie stayed in Westchester with Aunt Belle and my sister. It was kind of odd, how our nuclear family kept switching around. Aunt Belle kept house for my sister for another few years. When my sister was out of college, Aunt Belle moved to New York City and took Hansie with her. Hansie lived out his days with Aunt Belle. He had a wonderful life.

  The protagonists of all of my plays are the women I grew up with in that matriarchal household. When I wrote The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, people were asking me how I could write such great dialogue for the female characters. They are women who struggle to find a place in the world, and create a new persona for themselves.

  I don’t have a dog right now. I wish I did. But I think I’d feel horribly guilty every time I left the apartment. My partner and I don’t live together, for all kinds of reasons. We each have busy lives and need privacy. You could go into Eric’s place any time of the day and think you’re in House Beautiful magazine. My style is messy. My place is a cross between Sarah Bernhardt’s boudoir and a 1960s steak house.

  We live down the street from each other. It works for us. But there’s not that constant company that dogs need.

  The dog I’m most in touch with now is my therapist’s dog. Shortly after I started therapy, my therapist rescued an adorable part German Shepherd, part Collie. His name’s Clarence. I went in for my appointment, and the dog was right there in the room. During therapy, at one point I started to cry. The dog came right over and put his head on my knee and leaned against me. He looked up at me in that way dogs have of letting you know they want to help you.

  A friend of mine leaves his cat with me on weekends. I’m not a cat person, not at all. But I didn’t expect this cat not to like me. He ignored me. I was doing everything I could to establish a bond with him. And he would look right through me. I felt very rejected by this cat. He made me feel like I was Joan Crawford, the awful stepmother.

  Finally I started making his food a little more artistic—not just putting it down on the plate, but taking some time to arrange it. He liked that. He started to take an interest in me and the whole project. I didn’t know cats were like that. The whole thing confirmed for me that I really am a dog man. A dog is available for you to hug and love. Cats are kind of sneaky.

  Wolfie came into my life at a time when I was completely vulnerable. And that made me bond so intensely with him. He was enormous, he was mystical, he was white. He was the constant, strong, loving, lovable dog that took care of me. It was like he came from an enchanted land. He made me feel that I belonged to somebody.

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  Jonathan Caouette: THE TRIUMPH OF TARNATION

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  One of the nicest things that dogs provide for us is the blissful relief of their company. They make few demands and issue no ultimatums. Dogs let us relax. They let us be ourselves. When your dog is with you, there is someone on your side. In the presence of your dog, you have his attention, affection, and devotion.

  As a boy in a family roiling with mental illness, Jonathan Caouette desperately needed all those things. Jonathan is the groundbreaking filmmaker whose documentary, Tarnation, tore through critics’ assumptions of what documentaries could be. It was selected to be shown at the Sundance, Cannes, New York, and Toronto film festivals. It was awarded Best Documentary of 2003 by the National Society of Film Critics. It was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Roger Ebert called Tarnation “a triumph. A film of remarkable power.”The New York Times’ reviewer wrote, “Nobody has ever made a film like it.”

  The life Jonathan showed on film was ragged and raw and painful to watch. He had started filming his family from the time he was eleven years old, first on Super 8, then Betamax, VHS, Hi-8, and mini-DV for the next twenty years. He added movie clips, pop songs, and scenes from television shows he watched as a child. He created a soundtrack from songs that he loved. He edited the whole thing at home on an iMac, with the structure of the film taking on elements of his own mental illness, which he calls a “depersonalization disorder.” The result is a combination of feverish diary for himself and love letter to his mother, whose crazy parents put her through years of electroshock therapy.

  It is the ultimate reality program, giving the viewer a “fly on the wall” perspective of an unstable life. So many terrible things happened during his childhood that I was relieved to know that there were sometimes pet dogs for him to play with.

  Are dogs helpful to people with mental illness? There is now significant research showing that they are. Service dogs are being trained to help people who become disabled by panic disorder, posttraumatic stress syndrome, or depression, and conditions attributed to brain-chemistry malfunction. They are taught to bring medication, alert someone that help is needed, and nudge their human during an attack of disassociation.

  But it’s interesting that much of the healing work of dogs is based simply on their presence. The dog’s job is to stay near the patient and steady him if he’s dizzy, provide stability during a panic attack, nuzzle him if he loses touch with reality. Dogs are able to help mentally ill people by doing what they are best at: being there. Jonathan Caouette made that discovery with his dogs. If only he could have held onto them.

  Two dogs appear, briefly, in the film. His current dog, Shiny, wanders in the background of the opening scenes, hovering close to Caouette, who is anxiously waiting to hear if his mother will survive an overdose of lithium. Shiny’s son, Miel, plays with a stick in the snow. There have been other dogs in Jonathan’s life, as I learned when I spoke to him between his trips to Mexico, where he was screening his film.

  I’VE LOVED DOGS since I was about four years old. In general, my memories are tied to two things. A lot are tied to what music was on when a certain thing happened. I think a lot of people associate like that. But also, when a memory comes to me, I’ll remember the dog I had then. They were always a poignant part of my life.

  My first dog had two names, Sport and Christy. What name we called her depended on what kind of mood we were in. Sometimes she was Sport; sometimes she was Christy. She had come around during a time when there was a lot of tragedy going on in the family. The family circumstances were very bizarre.

  My Mom had gotten very sick and had to go into the hospital. She suffers from severe bipolar disorder.

  Just before that happened, my mom got this dog from one of the neighbors. She was some kind of terrier, a dirty-golden color. I don’t know if she was a purebred or not, but she was a beautiful dog. I have this great picture of her with me when I was about four years old. She’s sitting with me, and I have my arm around her. I never wanted to go anywhere without her.

  There was a lot of dram a in our house. That’s what happens when you have someone who’s bipolar and schizoid. On those occasions, I would retreat into our backyard to my Slip ’n’ Slide or swimming pool. We had this really great overgrown fig tree. I would hide in the fig tree with Christy and pull the branches over us.

  I would sit alone with Sport and try to communicate with her psychically. I was trying to see if I could read her thoughts. I still do that every once in a while. You know, dogs are so hypersensitive to whistles and sounds. What would be so strange if they could actually, if not read your thoughts
, read your body language? Even if it’s just a subtle look in your eyes or a changing of your face?

  I would be sitting and Sport/Christy would come up and look at me as if she was trying to tell me something. Or warn me about something, maybe. She would look me in the eye and I would get the sense of a thought, and I would sit still and try to understand what she wanted to say… and then someone would call me. Or I’d hear my mother screaming. Or my grandparents would come over to me. And the moment would be broken. I never got the message.

  My grandfather and grandmother were raising me. My grandmother had a hysterectomy and took a long time to recover. My grandfather had to work to pay the bills, so there was nobody available to take care of me. Children’s Protective Services got word of that and yanked me out of the home. I had to go into the foster-home system.

  When I remember Sport/Christy, it seems to me that she represented the last vestige of normal family life. I was four, almost five. When the foster home happened, I never saw Sport/Christy again. It was devastating. I’ll always remember her. She was an amazing animal. After her, stuffed animals had to take over for a while.

  I was in the foster-home system for two years. It was a very brutal time. I was beaten and starved, and went through a lot of abuse. There were no dogs in my life during those two years. Finally, my grandparents got legal custody of me when I was seven.

  What I really wanted then was to have a normal family. And to me a normal family would include a dog. I would have these conversations with my grandmother and tell her I was getting a dog. There was never a “yea or nay” response. I was one of those people who would stop along the side of a street when I saw an animal, and whether it had a tag on or not, I would kidnap it. Now I know that was a horrible thing to do. But I was so desperate for a dog’s company. There were a couple instances where I grabbed a tagged dog that probably belonged to someone in the neighborhood, took it home with me, and fed it for a couple days. Sometimes the dog lasted a week. Sometimes it lasted a month. But my grandmother would call the pound to come pick up the dog, and I would come home, and the dog would be gone. I hope my grandparents didn’t call the pound on any of those tagged dogs. Hopefully they just opened the door and let it find its way home.

  If I ever asked my grandmother what happened to a dog, she would always pass it off as “He (or she) just disappeared. I just came in the house and the dog wasn’t there.”

  I was careful with these dogs. I fed them, and walked them, and slept in bed with them, and when I left for school, I always made sure the dog was locked up safe in my bedroom. There was no way the dog would have gotten out on its own. Every day when I left for school, I would pray and hope that the dog would be home when I got back.

  I went through many dogs that way. Probably ten during my childhood years. I got a Chow, around the time that I accidentally knocked three of my teeth out roller-skating in the swimming pool around the corner from my house. That Chow lasted about a week. A mutt or two or three thrown in the mix. I got a precious little poodle when I was nineteen that was in the house for about a week and a half.

  When I was ten, I had a dog named Boomer, after the TV show, Here’s Boomer, about this cute little stray that traveled the country helping people with their problems. My Boomer was amazing. He would follow me everywhere. We met when I walked to our local park in the suburb of Houston where I grew up, and he followed me home. After that, he followed me everywhere. There was never a need for a leash.

  It was very European of us. I love how, in Europe and Mexico and all these other places that I’ve been, these dogs can be so cool about walking in these big, urban areas with all these buses and cars and pedestrians going by, and they’re right by their master.

  What I really wanted, during those formative years, was to experience having a puppy, raising it and keeping it for a long period of time. But I never got that, because of my crazy grandmother. On many levels, the animals seemed saner than what was going on in my house. It was the stability factor that I got just by being with a dog in one room, the two of us, hugging each other in our own little world where there was no crazy family and no troubles.

  I got so much affection from those dogs. I always let the dog lick me without making a face. I loved to let the dogs lick me on my cheeks, on my nose, on my lips, everywhere. They slept on my bed (and they still do now).

  After the poodle at nineteen, I wised up. I left my grandparents’ home when I was twenty-three, and there were no animals until I was twenty-four, living in New York City, with my own place. That was the first time that I got to have my own dog and have it stay with me.

  My partner, David, initiated us getting what we thought for a long time was an Argentine Dogo by the name of Shiny. We’ve since learned that she’s a mix of something, maybe half pit bull and half Dogo.

  David is from Colombia. One day he got a frantic phone call from a friend of a friend from Bogotá. They were living in an apartment in New York temporarily, and had all of these puppies with them. Shiny had been born in Colombia and then flown to Miami and then flown to New York. This poor dog must have been so traumatized just by the air travel! Shiny was about six months old. It was the summer of ’97.

  All those puppies were beautiful, but Shiny made the most eye contact. And she seemed like the scapegoat.

  I think David and I empathized with that. There was something very heart wrenching about her, something that made her very special. The other ones seemed really macho. She’s white with black freckles all over.

  She was the icing on the cake of the relationship between David and me. With her here, it was obvious that what we had was something definitely along the lines of a marriage. It felt very official. That echoes what I was looking for as a kid. We’ve had Shiny for almost as long as we’ve been together, almost ten years. So we sort of measure our relationship by how old Shiny is.

  In my film, there’s a real transition when David and I got this apartment and made a family for ourselves. We lived in this wonderful railroad apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Shiny adjusted immediately. The only problem was that she chewed the hell out of everything. We had so much wonderful furniture, and she just destroyed it all. After a while, I was angry and frustrated but had succumbed to a kind of complacency about it. I collected books and CDs, and she destroyed tons of them. I had to let go and let the universe be what it was. She’s trained at this point, to a certain extent. She’s out of her chewing stage.

  In my early twenties, I was working in a hair salon in SoHo as a receptionist and occasional shampoo boy during the day. Shiny was still a puppy. I walked her around. I think it’s cool to see the way people will interact with you if you’re walking a dog. I don’t think you should get a dog exclusively for this reason, but it’s a really cool thing, the way dogs connect people. People say hello to the dog, and want to stop and pet the dog, and they just start talking to you. I enjoyed that.

  One day I had to take Shiny to the Humane Society clinic. I hadn’t been in New York very long, let alone with a dog, so I didn’t know all the rules. At 14th Street, I had to transfer from the N to the R train, so I was standing on the platform when this big walrus of a policeman walked up to me and said, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you have this dog here? Is it a Seeing Eye dog?”

  I said, “No, I’m just taking her to get her shots.”

  He said, “Come with me.”

  We followed him down the platform to an office. I thought maybe he wanted to show her to somebody. He went in the office and came out and handed me this ticket. It was expensive! Three hundred dollars!

  I said, “I had no idea it was illegal to take a dog on the subway.”

  Isn’t that terrible? It’s ridiculous. We had a muzzle on her and were very careful with her. You would think in a city like New York it wouldn’t be a big deal to take your dog on the subway. I was in Mexico City last week, sitting in a cafe where they were serving food, and three stray dogs walked in. They have a lot of homeless dogs there
. I don’t know if this is a cultural thing, or a Latino thing, but left and right, people were embracing the dogs, petting them, without any fear. I thought, This would never happen in New York.

  Just after I got the ticket, I took Shiny on the subway to get home. Just before we got off at our stop in Brooklyn, Shiny peed in the subway car. She’d never, ever done anything like that before. The subway doors opened, and just before we walked off, she peed like mad. It was her way of saying, “Fuck you!” to the system.

  Then Shiny had thirteen babies. We had moved to our third apartment at that point, so Shiny was about three years old. We mated her with a pit bull. David ended up walking around the neighborhood and passing the puppies out from a basket. It got to that level because we couldn’t give them away and we didn’t get any buyers from an ad. When they hear the words “pit bull, ” people tend to run and hide.

  We kept one of her puppies, and named him Miel, Spanish for “honey.”Unfortunately about two and a half years ago, David was walking here in Astoria with Miel very late at night down a one-way street toward a park. A car with a drunk driver zipped around the corner and came down the street, the wrong way, at light speed. Miel wanted to protect David. Just as the car came roaring down on them, Miel jumped out in front of the car. The car killed Miel. We came to the conclusion that Miel saved David’s life. That was a really sad time for us.