Until the Last Dog Dies

by Robert Guffey

  Danny handed the needle to Mike, who then held it out to me and said, “You want to do this first? I’m kind of like, HIV-positive, you know.”

  Before I could respond Danny said, “He doesn’t do drugs.”

  Mike looked at me for a moment as if I were a Fabergé Egg under glass, some rare artifact he’d never seen before (certainly not in this bedroom). Then his attention drifted away from me as he ran his fingertip along his forearm, searching for the proper vein. All of a sudden I grew self-conscious when I realized I was staring at him with far too much fascination. As the needle punctured a bulging blue vein near the crook of his elbow I glanced away, embarrassed, as if I were peeping through a keyhole trying to catch a glimpse of a couple making love.

  Danny, at last realizing that I was standing in the middle of the room, gestured toward the wicker chair. “Have a seat,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to do. Should I move the pile of books and risk Rod Serling biting my hand off?

  “Oh, I’m sorry, man,” Mike said. His embarrassment seemed genuine. “Let me clear that off for you.” With the needle still dangling out of his arm Mike got up and began pushing shit off the chair. This was the strangest image of the whole evening: that needle bobbing up and down like a jack-in-the-box as he waded through strata of dinosaur fossils, uranium deposits, dead television stars, and who knows what else.

  Staring at the needle with some uneasiness, Danny said, “Uh, let me do that for you,” and finished shoveling the shit onto the carpet. Mike sat back down on the bed and tended to his business.

  I settled into the wicker chair. At random I plucked a paperback book out of the pile that was now on the floor. It was called Hunting Humans Vol. I. On the inside front cover was an advertisement that read, “Wait for Hunting Humans Vol. II!” How many volumes could there be?

  After the brown liquid had descended into Mike’s vein, he handed the needle back to Danny. I said nothing as Danny drew more of the brackish substance into the syringe. I didn’t understand why Danny was using the same needle, particularly if Mike was HIV-positive. I’m not sure why I didn’t say anything. Shock, perhaps? Or maybe I just figured, hell, he must know what he’s doing, right? Besides, I couldn’t think of a polite way of saying, “Hey, uh, you really think you should be sharing a needle with this AIDS-ridden freakazoid?”

  Within seconds he had already slipped the needle into his arm, had already injected the substance into his vein as if he were a past master at this, a life-long user. The sight brought back memories of one of Danny’s earliest routines, a story about being forced to go to the doctor as a kid. He used to do five minutes on needles, on how much he hated them. What the fuck had happened to change his mind?

  I glanced back at Mike again. I was surprised to see that he was staring at me; that bemused, Fabergé-Egg-look had returned to his eyes.

  “So … you don’t do drugs?” he said. He looked like he couldn’t believe it.

  Falling back on one of my old routines, I laughed and said, “The other day I stopped at a Wienerschnitzel to buy a hot dog and I saw a big banner outside that said, ‘Do Dogs, Not Drugs.’ I thought, What the hell is this? Does Wienerschnitzel advocate bestiality?”

  Mike continued to stare at me with a stoic expression. Don’t feel bad, I thought, perhaps he’s laughing inside. He said, “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a comedian.”

  He nodded. “You make good money doing that?”

  I wiggled my hand in the air. “It fluctuates.”

  “You know, you could pick up a lot of extra cash with your urine.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah, some people even make a living off it, especially in D.C. In D.C. the whole drug testing thing is out of control. If you’re arrested you can’t even see a judge unless you piss in a bottle first. There’s a huge demand for clean urine out there. I know a guy who makes about $20,000 a year.”

  “That’s pretty good—for urine, I mean.”

  “Fuck yeah, I’d take it! Hell, you can make fifty bucks a pop from scumbags in the street. You could probably rake in even more from the white collar areas like Orange County. Those guys are desperate ’cause they’re all on speed. Speed will stay in your system anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. A surprise drug test on Monday morning is their worst nightmare.”

  “Maybe I’ll head on over to Orange County tonight and set up a little lemonade stand on the sidewalk.”

  “Or Silicon Valley. That place runs on cocaine, and coke can stay in your system for up to twelve hours. Those guys have lines of cocaine waiting for them in their office. It’s a perk of the job. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had a coke break clause in their contract. I think they do lines at their board meetings.”

  I instantly had an image of yuppies in neckties standing around a long table, all of them bent over one of those large graphs, snorting cocaine sprinkled along the jagged red line that measures the economic growth of the company. The image made me laugh. “I think I’d rather peddle my urine in D.C. It seems more appropriate somehow.”

  “Yeah, D.C.’s a cool place if you’ve got a stomach for high strangeness. I was thinking of maybe moving back there soon. Hell, any place that had a crackhead for a mayor for as long as that can’t be all bad, eh?”

  The scariest part of this conversation was that I was only half-listening; the other half of my mind was seriously considering how to begin selling my urine. “So … where would I advertise my urine, the Yellow Pages?”

  “Word of mouth would work better.”

  “Is, uh, selling urine illegal?”

  “You wouldn’t think so, but they’d probably find some way to classify it as a drug-related crime. Everything else is.”

  All of a sudden we heard a noise out in the living room. Mike said in a panic, “Shut the door! That’s my dad. He’ll get mad if he sees me shooting up heroin again.”

  Well, you don’t hear that sentence every day of your life. I started to get up, but Danny (with the needle bobbing out of his arm) leaped off the mattress and made a mad dash for the door, slamming it shut and slipping a chain over it. Two seconds later someone knocked on the door so hard I thought it was going to fall off its hinges.

  “Michael, who’ve you got in there?” a gruff voice boomed through the door. “Are you shooting up heroin again?”

  “No, Dad!” Mike said. “I’ve got a couple of friends over! We just want a little privacy, is that a crime?”

  “If I find out you’re doing heroin in there I’ll rip your fucking head off!”

  Mike rolled his bloodshot eyes. “So do it already! Put me out of my misery!”

  “Don’t tempt me!”

  Mike picked up a black combat boot and threw it against the door. “Get the fuck out of here! Leave me alone, that’s all I want! That’s all I’ve ever wanted from you, you stupid son of a bitch!”

  I heard heavy, Frankenstein-like footsteps lumbering away from the door. My hands were clutching the arm rests of the chair as if I were hanging on for dear life. Mike leaned his head against the wall and covered his eyes with his hands. In the pocket of silence that followed Danny sat back down in the bed and slipped the empty needle out of his vein.

  Finally the silence became far too nerve-wracking. I said, “It looks like you may need my urine in a few minutes.”

  Mike removed his hands from his face and said, “I think you’re right. How much would you charge me?”

  I shrugged. “Fifty bucks.”

  “Aw c’mon, man, no discount? You wouldn’t even have thought of it if I hadn’t suggested it first!”

  “Okay, forty.”

  “Thirty.”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Uh … all right.”

  “Bitchin’.” He slipped his hand beneath the mattress and pulled out a blue velcro wallet that was falling apart. He withdrew three tens and a five, crumpled them up into a ball and threw them at me. They pulled apart and drifted through the
air like feathers, falling onto the carpet between us. I leaned over and snatched them up with great eagerness. You know how many cans of chicken noodle soup you can buy with that?

  Mike rose to his feet and began rifling through the top drawer of his dresser. He pulled out a tangled ball of torn socks, a narrow glass jar containing a katydid on a slab, and a plastic toy that looked like Lumpy Space Princess from Adventure Time before he found the object of his search: an empty mason jar. He tossed the jar to me and said, “Fill it.”

  “What, here?”

  “Hey, I coughed up the cash, now you cough up the product!”

  “Excuse me, but if you want me to cough it up we’re going to be here for awhile.” Mike waved his hand in the air, then plopped back down on the mattress. I glanced over at Danny, but he just shrugged. How had I gotten into this? “Can’t I do it in the bathroom?” I said.

  Mike pointed at the door. “With him out there?”

  I could still hear the echoes of those elephantine footsteps reverberating through my skull. “I guess you have a point.” I released a huge sigh, rose to my feet, wandered over to the corner of the room. Turning my back to Mike and Danny, I unbuttoned my Levis and held the jar up to my penis. “Can’t you run some water or something?”

  The best he could do was play a New Age CD of whale sounds. That didn’t quite hit the mark, I’m afraid. While I thought of rain storms and garden hoses, desperately trying to make something happen, I said to Mike, “So your dad makes you take urine tests, huh?”

  “Ever since I was fifteen.” He sighed. “Man, I told myself I’d never do this shit again.” He turned to Danny. “I was doing fine until you came over.”

  Danny said, “Dude, don’t worry about it. We’ll stop doing it—tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, right. Tomorrow. I just realized it’s been six years to the day since I was diagnosed HIV positive. I know people who were diagnosed at the same time and they’re all dead now. They took AZT, I didn’t. Did you know that AZT is nothing but fucking salmon sperm? Oh God, oh God, I’m so depressed. I look in the mirror these days and say, ‘Jesus, you’re thirty-four. Where did all the time go? It went by so fast.’ Not only that, my girlfriend’s being a fucking bitch.”

  “I hear you,” Danny said. “Hell, my girlfriend’s a fucking dyke. She cheats on me almost every day. She’s probably cheating on me now.”

  “Sometimes I start crying for no reason,” Mike said. “At night. Around three a.m. When I’m all alone.”

  “I cry too,” Danny said. “All night sometimes.”

  “One day I cried for twenty-four hours,” Mike said. “At least, it seemed like twenty-four hours. I cried today. I’m so depressed. Sometimes I feel like killing myself. I know exactly how I’d do it too. My dad keeps his .22 in the drawer next to his bed, says he keeps it there in case of ‘intruders.’” He released a hollow laugh. “Man, it’d be so simple to sneak in there, slip the gun out of the drawer, press it against my right temple, and then just—” He placed his index finger against his temple and lowered his thumb as if it were the trigger of a gun. Then he dropped his hand to his side, his eyes glassy and without emotion. “Actually that’s what I was thinking about right before you came over.”

  There followed a long, uncomfortable moment of silence. I said, “Uh … I had a hangnail yesterday.”

  At that moment someone pounded at the door. A long, arcing stream of golden liquid shot out of my penis. I didn’t anticipate it having such a long reach; I had to compensate as quick as possible and just barely managed to catch the piss in the jar.

  “Do I hear someone pissing in there?” said the voice.

  I immediately cut off the stream, stuffed my penis back into my Levis, and buttoned up.

  Mike said, “No, Dad, you’re just being paranoid!”

  I screwed the lid on the jar as tight as possible, then hid it behind a pile of porno magazines on the floor as Mike’s dad said, “If I find out anyone’s been pissing in there, I’ll rip their fucking head off!”

  Of course, I wondered which head he was referring to. The sudden and unsurgical displacement of either one was an experience I preferred to avoid as long as possible.

  “I’d like to see you try it,” Mike yelled.

  “Don’t tempt me!”

  I waved at Mike to please be quiet, but he wasn’t paying attention to me. “Get out of here,” he screamed, throwing another boot at the door. “Leave me the fuck alone!”

  Once again those golem-like footsteps thundered away from the door. I realized I’d been holding my breath during the entire exchange. “How’re we gonna get out of here?” I said.

  “Oh, don’t be scared of him,” Mike said. “He talks loud and carries a small stick.”

  “How small? Small sticks can cause as much damage as big sticks if used properly.”

  “Speaking of getting out of here,” Danny said, glancing at his watch (since when the hell did he start wearing a watch?), “we better get scootin’ if you don’t want to miss the beginning of the movie.”

  “What’re you seeing?” Mike said.

  “The New Beverly’s showing Destroy All Monsters.”

  “Is that the one where Godzilla and Mothra and Rodan and baby Godzilla are all on Monster Island and they have to fight those weird alien dudes on the moon?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Damn, that’s my favorite.”

  “You want to come with us?”

  Mike thought about it for a second, then waved his hand in the air. “Nah, I’m way too depressed. I’ll just bring you down.”

  I couldn’t disagree with that. Danny glanced at his watch again and said, “Okay. Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah, later.” He just stared at his mattress, as if thinking about smothering himself with it.

  “Uh … you think you can walk us out?” Danny said.

  “Can’t we just crawl through the window?” I suggested.

  “Don’t worry about my dad. I’ll cut him if he tries anything.” Mike reached under his pillow, whipped out a switchblade, and dropped it into one of the pockets on his shorts. A determined, implacable expression washed over his face as he rose from the bed and opened the door. Danny and I fell in behind him, peering over his shoulders fearfully as if expecting ninja warriors to erupt from the shadows of the hallway and begin attacking us with Samurai swords. Somewhere in the house I could hear a television blaring some kind of game show. I was relieved; perhaps we could reach the front door without laying eyes on the fearsome apparition I imagined Mike’s dad to be.

  Just as we were about to leave the hallway one of the side doors swung open and out shambled a huge bear of a man with broad shoulders and a thick neck, two hundred and seventy pounds of angry flab that may have been firm and muscular twenty years ago but had since softened into a mass of walking dough. We froze. The man’s eyes, as bloodshot as his son’s (though no doubt for different reasons), bulged out of his head as they scanned all three of us as if considering which one to attack first. At last a pair of meaty hands reached out and grabbed my head; toughened, leathery skin pressed against my skull and began squeezing like a vice. “Have you been giving heroin to my boy again?” he yelled.

  I grabbed his wrists, which were so thick my fingers couldn’t even wrap around them, and tried to scream, “It wasn’t me, it was the other guy!” but he was pressing my cheeks so hard the words came out garbled and incomprehensible.

  Somewhere to my left I heard Mike say, “Leave him the fuck alone!” and the next thing I knew I was watching a long silver blade plunge into my attacker’s right forearm. Blood squirted out of his flesh as he howled, released my head, then swivelled around to face his son. I staggered backwards into the doorway of Mike’s bedroom. Danny ducked under the mad man’s outstretched hands and followed me into the room. We slammed the door shut and slipped a chain over it once again.

  “Maybe the window wouldn’t be a bad idea after all,” Danny said.

&n
bsp; I couldn’t disagree with that either. We trampled Mike’s mattress, unclasped the window above it, and spent the next two minutes struggling to raise the damn thing—which apparently hadn’t been opened in years—while behind us we heard shouting, the crash of large heavy objects, and the dull thumping sound of flesh beating flesh. In the end Danny and I prevailed, thank God. We slid the window open just high enough to squeeze through, landed head first into a tangle of bushes full of those annoying little brown prickly things which clung to our hair like fleas, then rounded the house and ran toward Danny’s car as fast as possible. We scrambled inside with as much finesse as a pack of drunken clowns piling into a midget car in a three-ring circus, while behind us we heard the front door slamming open. I peered through the window to see Mike’s dad stumble out onto the porch, blood pouring down his XXL Beefy-T Hanes t-shirt, and wave his hairy fist at us.

  He yelled, “You come back here again I’ll rip your head off and stuff it up your ass sideways, you hear?” This alone would’ve been disturbing enough, but the fact that he said it while dashing across the lawn toward us made it even more distressing.

  I rolled up the window and said, “Get us out of here, get us out of here!”

  I glanced over at Danny to see him picking through the three dozen keys on Griffin’s key ring. “I’m just trying to find which one’s the key to the car,” he mumbled.

  “Hotwire the damn thing then! That guy’s gonna kill us!”

  Mike’s dad slammed his full weight against the side of the car. At that moment I noticed I hadn’t locked my door. Just as he made a grab for the door handle I slammed my fist down on the lock, then did the same to the door behind me.