by James Brown
Winter 1995
DAISY
When I’m trying to patch things up, I buy my wife a present. Perfume maybe. A box of See’s or her favorite peanut brittle. Later I’ll take her out to dinner, apologize profusely and promise to treat her better. But my last binge was particularly loathsome, I feel particularly rotten about my drinking and drugging, and I want to do something special for her. She is a homemaker who collects little ceramic piggies, piggy salt and pepper shakers, stuffed animal piggies and china with piggies painted on them, and because she collects these pigs it occurs to me, in my hungover state of mind, that she might appreciate having the real thing.
I’ve heard her talk many times about the Vietnamese potbellied pig, how intelligent they are, even smarter than dogs, and what fine and affectionate pets they make. So that next day, after another night of heavy drinking, and while my wife is off running errands, I dig out the newspaper. I turn to the classifieds and find exactly what I’m looking for listed under Livestock: Baby Potbellied Pigs. Wonderful pets. Registered. $150.00 & up. The number has a desert area code. I dial it and a teenage boy answers.
“Yeah,” he says.
“I saw your ad in the paper,” I say. “About the potbellied pigs.”
“Hang on,” he says. Then I hear him holler, “Mom, you got any pigs left?” I can’t make out her answer, the TV in the background is too loud, but a few seconds later he returns to the phone. “Yeah,” he says, “we got one female left.”
“Can you hold it for me?”
“First come, first serve,” he says. “You want to know how to get here?”
“Let me grab a pen,” I say.
Nature furnishes all of its creatures with a special ability to defend themselves against their predators. The deer, like the rabbit, boasts swiftness of foot and highly sensitive hearing. The bird possesses the gift of flight. The turtle has its bone-hard shell, the skunk a foul-smelling oily liquid. And the Vietnamese potbellied pig, a stout, short-legged mammal with bristly coarse hair, is blessed with a bloodcurdling, earpiercing cry that paralyzes its enemies dead in their tracks. To the baby Vietnamese potbellied pig I purchase that afternoon for the outrageous sum of two hundred and fifty dollars, I am that enemy. I am that predator. The first time the teenage boy places that pig in my arms it lets out such a painfully high-pitched squeal that my ears ring for several minutes afterward. I am stunned. I am dazed. That at this point it is no bigger than a puppy, weighing no more than ten or twelve pounds, makes its powers all the more impressive. Imagine, I think, what it will sound like when it’s all grown-up. This omen, however, doesn’t stop me from buying the little piglet, nor does the fact that I have yet to consider where we will keep it.
“How big do these things get?” I ask.
The boy shrugs.
“Hard to tell. All depends. We butcher the ones we don’t sell at about eighty, ninety pounds. But this is the runt of the litter,” he says. “I don’t see her getting past sixty, tops.”
To me the pig is a highly unattractive animal with beady eyes and chubby jowls and short bony legs far too thin to support its enormous weight. It’s a freak of nature. A bad joke from God. But the features I abhor in the Vietnamese potbellied pig, or any pig for that matter, are the very ones that my wife finds so appealing.
“Oh, how cute,” she says, when I bring it home that evening in a flimsy cardboard box. I set it on the living room floor. Her face softens, and I think I’m in the clear.
Upstairs, in the boys’ bedroom, I hear the beeping and fake explosions of the Nintendo game they’re playing. My wife kneels beside the box. She reaches in for the little pig.
“Better put cotton in your ears,” I say. “That thing has one mean squeal.”
In her arms, however, it doesn’t let out a peep. Instead it burrows its snout into the warm flesh of her stomach and closes its beady eyes.
“You probably scared her,” she says. “She’s so sweet. Aren’t you?” she says to the pig. “You’re just a sweet little thing.”
I’m pleased she likes it. Pleased that I did something good, something special to make up for the night before.
“Let me shower,” I say, “and then I’ll take you out to Papaguyo’s. Have a couple margaritas. A good dinner.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Her face hardens again. “You’re an asshole, that’s why not. You come home drunk at three in the morning, no calls, no nothing, and you expect me to be nice. I don’t think so.” She looks away from me in disgust and cuddles the pig. “Daisy,” she says, cooing in its hairy little ear. “I think I’ll name you Daisy.”
When I think of a daisy I picture a flower with a yellow center and white rays. I don’t, by any stretch, see a pig with bristly black hair and stubby legs. But when I think of myself, I see her point. And part of me wants to change. To right my ways. The alcoholic, however, like the pig, is created with certain defense mechanisms and mine are denial and rage. They make for the better part of me, too, and I explode.
“Fuck it,” I tell her. “Stay home with your stupid pig. I don’t give a shit. But I’m going out. I’m getting wasted.”
“So what’s new?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing’s ever new with us.”
She holds the pig closer and it makes a soothing, grunting noise in her arms.
“Daisy,” she says. “My sweet little Daisy.”
I don’t think anyone ever really knows why they get divorced or have affairs or regularly drink and drug themselves into a stupor. My memories of our last days together are splintered, lost in a haze of booze and dope, yet one thing remains absolutely clear. And that thing is Daisy. The measure of her growth is the final measure of my marriage: The fatter she gets, the worse my marriage seems to become.
I mean this literally.
Pound for pound. Blow for blow.
I am sitting on the floor in the basement. This is where I write. It is night and my wife and children have gone to bed. Daisy is asleep in her box in the kitchen above me and the house is quiet. Surrounding me are five neat piles of handwritten manuscript. I am struggling to get another novel off the ground. In fact, I am struggling to get five novels off the ground all at the same time and that’s the problem. I can’t focus. I can’t make up my mind. This has been going on for months, long before Daisy’s arrival, and I have sixty pages of one book, forty something of another. The others are shorter but they all have one thing in common: Each peters out, coincidentally, when the drugs wear off and I see them for what they are, these awful things I’ve written under the influence of methamphetamine and alcohol.
Tonight I am relatively sober. I’ve only drunk a few beers, and in terms of narcotics I haven’t touched a thing in two miserable days. But trace amounts of meth are still coursing through my veins, and as I read over the first sentence of one of the five manuscripts I am far from clearheaded. On a notepad, in long hand only I can decipher, I write and rewrite that opening sentence nine different ways. I excogitate on a single word. I contemplate its deep symbolic meanings in relation to the profound themes of my work. I am brilliant. I am divinely inspired. Then I apply this divine inspiration to the opening lines of my other four manuscripts, believing that if I only concentrate long enough, hard enough, that some grand truth will soon reveal itself to me and I’ll know, once and for all, which story most deserves the full attention of my genius. Only there’s a short circuit somewhere in my brain. The traffic of ideas runs in circles, round and round, and then shoots off down a thousand different streets. I don’t know which one to follow. I don’t know which way to turn or where to get off and I’m on this crazy ride now when a piercing squeal, like the screech of brakes, brings the traffic in my head to a sudden standstill.
I am not, by nature, a mean or intolerant man. After all, she is still a piglet. At this point we’ve only had her a couple of weeks, and like a puppy you have to expect a certain amount of whining and crying. But we all have our limits, a
nd when she squeals again, instead of losing my temper, I give in. I give up for the night and head upstairs to the kitchen. Her box is beside the stove so that the heat from the pilot lights will keep her warm and snug. But it’s too small for her already, this box. Just the week before it was roomy and now she can hardly turn around in it. As of this morning Daisy weighs exactly twenty-nine and one-half pounds. I know this because I put her on the bathroom scale when it struck me how quickly she seemed to be growing.
We keep a big sack of piggy food in the pantry, and I fill her dish from it, these hard green pellets of compressed alfalfa. She makes loud slurping noises as she eats, and when she’s done, which takes only a matter of seconds, she looks up at me with those beady little eyes and grunts for more.
“That’s it,” I say. “No more. Enough.”
I turn off the kitchen light and feel my way through the dark to the bathroom. I brush my teeth. I wash my face and gargle twice. Then I go quietly into the bedroom, undress and slip under the covers beside my wife. It’s maybe ten thirty, eleven o’clock at night. Her body is warm, and I curl up close. I take in the scent of her freshly shampooed hair.
“You awake?” I whisper.
“Not anymore.”
I pass my hand along her thigh. The skin is soft and smooth. We haven’t made love in over a month, and it’s been like this, off and on now for a couple of years. She bats my hand away.
“Knock it off,” she says.
“Honey,” I say. “Baby, don’t be like that.”
“You reek,” she says.
“I brushed my teeth. I gargled twice.”
“It’s inside you,” she says. “The stink. All the booze and cigarettes and God knows whatever else you put in your body. It doesn’t just wash off, you know. The whole room smells when you come to bed.”
She rolls over on her side, away from me, and I think about getting up. I think about storming off and sleeping on the couch. Or down in the basement. I don’t know why she stays with me, if it’s about love for the man she remembers, the one long before the drugs and alcohol really took hold, or if instead it’s about fear. Fear of having to strike out on her own with three kids in tow and not many marketable skills. That Heidi doesn’t drink or drug places the burden of our failed marriage squarely on my shoulders. I just lie there in bed, without any answers, staring at the ceiling until my eyes grow heavy.
It’s hard, if not impossible, for some people to fall asleep when they’re mad, but it’s like anything else. Practice makes perfect, and pretty soon, if you do it enough, it comes like second nature. Of course that next morning we wake up angry, and to compound that anger, when I pour myself a cup of coffee and head down to the basement to get back to work, I find my manuscripts—the manuscripts I’d left neatly stacked on the floor—chewed and mauled beyond recognition. All of them. Destroyed. Bits and pieces of paper are everywhere. Slowly I take a deep breath. Slowly I exhale. I call for her, sweetly, so she’ll come out from hiding.
“Daisy. Little Daisy, where are you?”
But my wife, who woke first this morning, is a step ahead of me. She is standing in the doorway, cuddling the pig to her chest.
“She got out of her box last night,” she says.
“I can see that.”
I start toward her.
“Give her to me,” I say.
She steps back, holding the pig tighter. “Don’t even think about it.” Then she looks at the scraps of paper strewn all over the floor. She laughs. “You’ll never finish another novel anyway. Face it, honey, you’re all washed up.”
I would like to think that I am not alone in my resentment toward the pig. I would like to believe that I have allies in my two sons, Andy and Logan, ages ten and six, respectively, but unfortunately this is not the case. Like their mother, the boys take to Daisy as they would to a new puppy. They enjoy petting its ugly coarse hair as they would a smooth coat of fur. They enjoy laughing while it gorges itself, devouring its meals and all our table scraps in record time. They enjoy playing with it and chasing it around the house and making it squeal until I think my head is about to explode. But what they do not enjoy is cleaning up the piggy litter box, and since their mother is also of little help in this matter, the chore is frequently left to me. For the good of the family, as Daisy’s appetite grows, it becomes increasingly clear to everyone that she must be relocated. It’s a rare occasion but for once we are all in complete agreement.
Soon after the manuscript episode, I drive down to Home Depot and buy enough wood, wire and nails to build her a nice pen in our backyard. The cost is ninety-three dollars. To shelter piggy from the elements, I also build her a nice house. It’s a large house, too, and the materials set me back another twenty-eight. Counting the two fifty I paid for her, along with the vet bill for her shots, another forty-five, I am now into Daisy for four hundred and sixteen dollars, not including the cost of piggy food.
That night after I build the pen and piggy house, between the hours of ten o’clock and five in the morning, I rest soundly believing I have solved at least one of the problems in my marriage. At exactly 5:03 A.M., however, that belief—like my manuscripts—is torn to shreds. Daisy is banging on her gate, demanding to be fed. For this she uses her snout, repeatedly ramming it against the gate until she wakes me from a deep sleep.
I throw open the window.
Our backyard is small and her pen is just a few yards from our bedroom. It’s dawn and I can see her beady little eyes staring up at me in the growing light. She snorts. She grunts.
“No,” I shout. “Bad girl. Bad Daisy.”
For a while, say a week, this approach works, and I’m able to fall quickly back to sleep. But it’s a process of diminishing returns, and soon the mild admonitions of “no” and “bad girl” escalate into threats along the lines of “shut the fuck up.” The pig, however, no longer fears me, she hasn’t for some time, and the more I holler, the louder the banging seems to get. Daisy is taunting me. Daisy is egging me on.
As usual my wife just rolls over in bed. Somehow it never seems to bother her. I don’t understand it.
“That pig,” I tell her, “is driving me crazy.”
“You bought her.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I do. You’re the one with the problem. You’re the one who keeps waking me every morning with all your stupid screaming. Grow up. It’s a pig and that’s what they live for. Food. That’s what they do. Eat.”
I know she’s right. The pig is only doing what pigs do best, and as an alcoholic I should understand this far better than most—the nature of obsession, of compulsion, the constant quest for more when there can never be enough. But having knowledge and using it are two vastly different matters. So that morning, spent and frustrated from hollering, as I lie in bed listening to Daisy banging at the gate, I come up with a simple but surefire plan: stack rocks in front of it. Big rocks.
Like a stone fence.
That same morning, with my head pounding and my mouth chalky and dry, I find myself hauling rocks up from the creek that runs alongside our house. It’s a hard job, and I break a good sweat. I also slip once and fall into the creek, tearing a hole in a new pair of Levi’s and cutting my hand.
Soaked, sweating and bleeding, I stand in the pigpen and look at my handiwork. Six heavy rocks, around thirty pounds each, are strategically positioned between Daisy and the gate.
“Now bang on it, bitch.”
I smile.
One of the rocks is smeared with my blood. At first Daisy just sniffs at it. She doesn’t know what it is. Then her tongue darts out and suddenly her beady little eyes spring open and she’s wild, grunting and snorting, sniffing the rocks for more of my blood.
Each day the pen grows a little smaller. Each day the nice roomy house I made for her is a little less nice and roomy. Inside of a month she can barely squeeze into it and her ass sticks out the door. That part I like—her discomfort.
“You should’ve antic
ipated this,” my wife says. “Look at the poor thing. She can’t even move. You need to build a bigger house.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. I promise.”
“Where have I heard that before?”
My wife is referring to my drinking and my repeated vows to quit. In my hungover state of mind, I don’t care to discuss it.
“Forget it,” she says, waving me off. “I’ll just buy one.”
And she does. It’s one of those igloo-style doghouses that they sell at Home Depot and it sets us back another eighty-seven bucks. The total outlay for Daisy rises to five hundred and three dollars, not including the cost of piggy food, which has gone up considerably. Eight days after the manuscript massacre I weigh her again and she comes in at an even fifty-four pounds. Two weeks later it’s ninety-eight. By the end of that month she’s topping a hundred and ten, and I get on the phone. I call that kid who sold her to me and he denies everything.
“I don’t know where you got your information,” he says,
“but it wasn’t me. They average about a hundred and fifty. That’s when we butcher them anyway, the ones we don’t sell. You want, we’ll take her back.”
I know exactly what he’d do. The idea strikes me as a good one.
“Let me think about it,” I tell him, and then I hang up.
As Daisy continues to grow, so do her muscles. Her neck is as thick and strong as a linebacker’s, and with it she is soon able to move heavy rocks. I discover this at five in the morning when I’m awakened from a deep sleep. I throw open the bedroom window. I look into the pen. In the dawn’s light she is prying with her snout, lifting with her neck, banging one of the rocks against the gate. She does this repeatedly. To taunt me. There can be no other explanation.
She pulls her snout out from under the rock. Stares up at me. Grunts.