Until the Last Dog Dies

by Robert Guffey

  “Oh, that’s good. Why do you do that shit?”

  “Gotta eat, man. Better than workin’ at McDonald’s.”

  “That’s where I was workin’ before I was busted.”

  “Now I know why you’re in jail. L.A. County is a picnic compared to stuffing those damn Happy Meal boxes. What’re you in for anyway?”

  “I didn’t pay my child support.”

  “They threw you behind bars? Just for not paying child support?”

  “Well, I committed armed robbery before, then when I didn’t pay the child support they said I broke my probation or some stupid crap like that.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair. Why can’t the damn kid pay his own way?”

  “Shit, that’s what I said.”

  “So what was the reason for not paying it?”

  “I didn’t have the money.”

  “You should’ve just robbed someone.”

  “I did. But I spent it all on cocaine and shit, man.”

  “I see.”

  “Hey, do they videotape you doin’ this shit?”

  “What shit?”

  “Having sex with dead bodies.”

  “Oh, of course! Through a two-way mirror.”

  “You get a lot of money for that?”

  “A shitload.”

  “Who pays you?”

  “My boss.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Matthew Fuller.”

  “Shit, man. That’s some weird shit. What’s that trim feel like?”

  “It’s as cold as ice.”

  “Oh, shit, man. I need a girl who can move.”

  “Yeah, not like Rob.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s not good in bed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I had sex with him.”

  I heard the sound of laughter. Billy turned to Rob and said, “Hey, he says he had sex with you.”

  In the background: “Shit, I don’t even know him.”

  Billy turned back to me. “Hey, what’s his asshole like?”

  I didn’t even hesitate. “It’s like a sick donut.”

  “He says it looks like a sick donut!” A chorus of laughs erupted from the background—sounded like a dozen people, perhaps.

  “He has a tattoo on his ass, too,” I said.

  “Of what?”

  “A teddy bear.”

  “What?” He turned back to Rob. “Hey, you got a teddy bear on your ass, man?”

  Rob grabbed the phone from Billy and began yelling at me. “Why you sayin’ that shit, man? I don’t even know you.”

  “Oh, c’mon. Don’t you remember that romantic night out on the veranda overlooking the Pacific as we stared into each other’s eyes and whispered sweet nothings?”

  “Oh shit, man. What the fuck’re you talkin’ about?”

  In the background, amidst the hooting and guffaws, I heard: “Hey, you got a teddy bear on yo’ ass!” followed by a bunch of kissing sounds.

  Deciding to spare him temporarily from the subject at hand, I said, “Hey, how did you get my number?”

  “It’s written here on the wall.”

  “What?”

  “It’s even got your name written under it.”

  “Oh, Lord. Can you do me a favor and cross it out?”

  “Yeah, if you tell these assholes I’m not a fag.”

  In the background: “Teddy bear on yo’ ass! Teddy bear on yo’ ass!”

  “All right, all right, you got a deal. But you gotta do something else for me. Cross out my name and number and write in this one instead.” I gave him Brother Lundberg’s name and number.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Just a friend of mine.”

  “Does he know any bitches?”

  “Sure. Rich bitches.”

  “Yeah? Can he hook me up?”

  “Just call him up and ask him. He’ll come through. He’ll even send you money. Maybe some funny cigarettes too. He’s been in stir. He’s down with the whole penal scene. Uh, say, can you hold on a second?”

  “Sure.”

  I switched over to the other line. “You still there?”

  Danny yelled, “What did you do, go to the fuckin’ grocery store?”

  “Listen, did you by any chance write my name and number on some wall in there?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “If you did, would you remember it?”

  “Well … maybe not, no.”

  In my mind’s eye I had this image of Danny calling me on the pay phone while two phones down Rob and his friends were calling random numbers scrawled on the wall, hoping they’d reach someone stupid enough to accept the charges. I was just about to ask Danny to glance around and look for a group of young convicts yelling “Teddy bear on yo’ ass!” at some gang-banger talking on a pay phone, but by this point Danny’s time had run out and the call was terminated. Upon hearing the dial tone I switched over to the other line. I had just enough time to jot down Rob’s full name and prison number. Right before the line went dead I promised to send him and Billy a money order along with a free copy of the Book of Mormon. I hoped Billy would remember this kind gesture when his computer company bought out Microsoft a few years from now.

  I immediately tried calling Diane Evans, but the phone just rang and rang and rang. I tried his father next. Same thing. Since I could do little else, I dragged myself out of bed and took a shower. About twenty minutes later, with the towel still wrapped around my waist, I sat down on the edge of my bed and tried Diane again.

  This time a deep-voiced Lurch-like fellow answered: “Yeah, what is it?”

  “Hello, is Diane Evans there?”

  The man sighed. “Unfortunately.” I heard the receiver being set down and heavy footsteps lumbering away from the phone.

  What seemed like another twenty minutes later, a middle-aged woman with a phlegmatic voice said, “What do you want?”

  “Hi. Uh, are you the dealer?”

  “What?”

  “You’re the drug lady, aren’t you?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I just want to know, do you deliver? Are you offering a special on china white today?”

  “What the—?”

  “Aw, I’m just kiddin’. Danny wanted me to call you. He’s in jail at the moment.”

  “What?”

  After I’d passed along the required information she started babbling: “That Danny I told him I told him he came to my house last night and I walked him out to the curb I told him please go straight home and call me when you get home but when he never called I got ahold of his father and he told me Danny had stepped out for a moment to talk to the manager but apparently he did go out last night didn’t he didn’t he?”

  “Apparently so.”

  She sighed in frustration, sounding quite pissed. “I’m gonna call down there right now and find out what’s going on.” She sounded like she knew what she was doing. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, quite frankly. Baking a cake with a file in it was the most sensible idea I’d had.

  After I hung up with her I tried calling Danny’s father again. Instead of the incessant ringing, this time I got ahold of a now familiar-sounding mechanical female who said, “The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected. If you think you have dialed the number in error, please hang up and try again.”

  I cradled the receiver. Oh, well. I’d done everything I could do. Now it was up to Miss Evans and her Howling Crackhead Attack Battalion to follow through and bust Danny out of the joint. I was certain a full-frontal assault would do the trick. I could see a bunch of addicts hurling specially-made crackbombs at L.A. County, breaking down the walls with massive battering rams, firing cannons filled with hypodermic needles at the machine gun turrets. In a perfect world perhaps this would occur. Of course, in a perfect world Danny wouldn’t be in jail in the first place.

  At that moment, fo
r some reason, the reality of the situation struck me like at no other point. Danny was in jail. Danny Oswald was a heroin addict and he was in jail. How the hell had that happened?

  I remained on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall for a very long time as if expecting it to give me an answer. None came.

  CHAPTER 16

  Rain of Frogs

  (November 13, 2014)

  A little over a week later I read an item in the newspaper buried at the bottom of p. B-22. Someone staged a rain of frogs in the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California. How this stunt could have been accomplished was not known. All that was known for sure was that custodians spent days recapturing the leaping little amphibians. I carefully cut out the article with a pair of scissors and pasted it into a scrapbook.

  I had no idea why.

  CHAPTER 17

  Until the Last Dog Dies

  (March 26, 2015)

  It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning of the downhill slide. Perhaps when Danny was thrown in jail. Perhaps when I saw that press conference back in September. Perhaps when Danny freaked out on me for the first time that night at Prospero’s. I don’t know, I don’t know. It all seems a jumble now. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle I can think straight enough to remember any of it, much less minute details. All I can do is to tell it the way it happened and hope it makes sense.

  Clubs began closing late in November. At first this didn’t worry me. Older comedians assured me they’d lived through such busts before. When the comedy boom of the ’80s—which gave birth to thousands of clubs with names like Chuckles and The Laffery—finally came to a screeching halt at some point during the first Bush administration most of the alternative comics were relieved. After all, too many clubs could only mean too many bad comics. I had a similar reaction when I first heard The Rumor, which was spreading through the back rooms of comedy clubs all over the city early in December. The Rumor was this: The humor virus had taken its toll. Five major clubs in L.A. were going to be shut down in the same week. All across the country fewer and fewer people were showing up at the clubs. Why should they? Imagine a blind man paying hard-earned money to go to a strip joint. Even the core clientele, who I think had continued to show up for the past couple of months just out of pure force of habit, had ceased coming in. Playing at the clubs, once the high point of my life, had now become a torturous ordeal that I underwent only to pay the bills. I ceased coming up with new material. Why bother? No one was listening. That was my excuse at any rate.

  When I first stopped coming up with new material I told myself it was because I was on strike, protesting a God that would hook Danny on narcotics and spread a destructive new disease around the planet in His spare time just for the hell of it. Later I tried to convince myself it was Heather’s fault that the jokes had stopped coming. She was my muse, always had been, even back when we were just friends; she had always been the filter through which my ideas were refined into something worthwhile. Beginning in late January, however, she began to change. She was never quite sure which of my jokes she liked and which worked better confined to the trash heap. “They’re all okay, pick the ones you like,” she’d say. “You’re better at this stuff than I am.” Then she’d wander into her bedroom and watch old television shows. The woman who had once been so egotistical and cocksure was now incapable of picking a variation of a simple one-liner over another. It was like living with Heather’s reflection, a ghostly image who had escaped from a mirror and taken the real Heather’s place. Ever since that Saturday night when we first made love, we had been so happy, overjoyed that we’d found each other at last. Sometimes we spent whole days and nights just improvising new material and laughing at each other’s jokes like little school kids. We laughed a lot then. Though I know it was a very short period of time,— from the beginning of October to the end of January, only about a hundred days really—in retrospect it seemed much longer.

  Heather gave her last performance on January 31st at the Uncabaret. She stumbled through it like a ninety-year-old Bob Hope reading off cue cards the size of Mount Rushmore. No one in the audience seemed to notice or care. Immediately after the performance she collapsed into my arms and cried for twenty minutes straight. I took her out to her car where I held her for a long time and stroked her hair, told her not to worry. “Take a little vacation,” I said. “Don’t even worry about paying the bills. I’ll take care of everything for awhile. I’ll move into your place and pick up the slack. I’m there all the time anyway, and I’m tired of that little rathole I live in. Just rest. Forget about being funny for awhile.”

  “I’ll never be funny again,” she said. “I’ve lost it.”

  “Don’t say that. You’ll get it back. You’ve always been funny, you always will.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m just glad I’m still sane enough to know it.”

  She lapsed into silence after that. Over and over again I insisted she was wrong, but I knew I was trying to convince myself more than her. Heather had changed. I still loved her, I loved her more than any other person in the entire world, but she had changed. Simple as that. She knew this full well, but I was too sick with love to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, when you’re that sick love can be perverted very easily and transformed into resentment. Yes, I resented her for coming down with the virus; her condition only served to remind me of my own fragility. Every morning when I awoke and saw her face I was reminded of how easily my humor could be stripped from me. No one knew how the virus was transmitted. Was I at risk merely by touching her? This kind of thinking soon led to paranoia. That’s when I began to blame her for my inability to come up with new ideas. I stopped having sex with her altogether and even avoided using the same silverware. I became distant and cold. Early in March I allowed Marsha to book me in a whole string of clubs all across the country. I hoped this time away from Heather would allow me to recover from the disease I believed I had picked up from her, the disease that was blocking my creativity.

  I was so crazy at this point I didn’t even want Heather to drive me to the airport for fear of further infection. Instead I took a bus to LAX. On the way there I stared at the familiar L.A. scenery, my depression broken only for a moment when the bus stopped to let off a passenger. Just outside the window was a mural that had been painted on the storefront of an Army Recruiting Center. It was a picture of Uncle Sam being anally raped by what looked like a giant frog-like humanoid wearing a skintight camouflage suit, like something a deep sea diver would wear. The expression on Sam’s face was one of utter ecstasy, while the expression on the frog’s face was one of infinite sadness. Judging from the style, it appeared to be the same artist who had painted the previous crazy murals I’d encountered from one end of L.A. to the other. I glanced around to see if anyone else was staring at the mural, but they weren’t. They didn’t even appear to see it.

  At that moment an old man hobbled onto the bus and sat right next to me even though there were plenty of empty seats surrounding us. The man was thin and gaunt with grayish stubble staining his elongated chin. He wore thrift store clothing that included a plaid button-up shirt, black suspenders, and dark brown slacks pulled up to his belly button, and carried a long bamboo cane with a curved head. As he stared at me through thick Coke bottle eyeglasses, I suspected I would have to fend off his feeble advances with a swift left hook to his jaw. His entire body smelled like cigar smoked mixed with cheap liquor.

  “Nice day today, isn’t it?” he said.

  I shrugged. “S’okay.”

  He glanced down at the luggage tucked in between my legs. “Goin’ somewhere?”

  “Yep.” I prayed he’d shut the fuck up.

  “Nice day for an airplane trip.”

  As I’ve already stated, the paranoia quotient in my life was running high at that time. I squinted at him with some suspicion. “How do you know I’m going on an airplane trip?”

  “This bus goes to LAX, doesn’t it? Mind if I smoke?” He reached into his shirt pocket and
pulled out a large black cigar, the tip of which he held into the high flame of an ornate lighter with the initials M.H. inscribed upon it. Thick clouds of acrid smoke soon blew into my face.

  The old woman in front of us turned around and said, “Excuse me, sir, could you please not smoke on the bus? My asthma—”

  “Your asthma my ass!” the old man said. “Jesus H. Freakin’ Christ, it’s gettin’ to the point where you can’t even shit where you want to!” He slammed the burning tip of the cigar into the sticky floor. “Smoking cures asthma. Don’t you know that, lady?”

  The old lady seemed shocked and confused. She turned around and tried to ignore him.

  The old man rolled his eyes. “I can’t stand some people. Can you stand people?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  He didn’t get the hint. “We’re two of a kind. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted Jesus to come back, but not so’s I could go to Heaven. Fuck that. I just wanted him to take everybody else away and leave me behind so’s I could live a happy life. Alone.”

  Since I knew the ride was long, and there was no way of getting out of the conversation, I decided to at least take command of it.

  “Uh, what do they stand for?” I said, pointing at the initials on his lighter.

  “Wha—? Oh, these?” He chuckled. “Manny Horowitz, that’s me, all right. At least it was the last time I looked.” He held up the lighter, admiring it, turning it from side to side, watching the sunlight glint off its golden surface. “This is the only memento I have from the old days. The owner of the Sunset in Vegas bought it for me after my tenth anniversary. It’s real gold, through and through, at least he told me it was. I’ve never really bothered to check it out. I was always so flattered by the gesture, I didn’t want to chance finding out that it was all just a lie.”

  I nodded. Even through those thick portals of glass you could detect the sadness within his eyes. I wondered what his job had been at the hotel. Had he been a night clerk, an elevator operator, a waiter? None of these jobs seemed worthy of such an expensive lighter, not after only ten years. It takes at least twenty to get a necktie.

  Manny continued, “I’m not sure I want to know how much it’s worth, because if I did I might try to sell it. I have to admit, I’ve come close plenty of times. Sometimes I’ve been so hungry I think my stomach shrank to the size of a fucking peanut. The world hasn’t exactly been kind to me. Lost my wife, my career, even a kidney, but through it all I held onto this little lighter. When the owner gave it to me, Al was his name, he said, ‘This is for making me laugh my ass off all these years. If it hadn’t been for your jokes I never would’ve gotten through my divorce. Hell, I probably would’ve offed myself a long time ago.’ It’s the kindest thing anybody’s ever said to me. Believe you me, I know how tough a divorce can be. Eats you up inside. Makes you crazy. Can push you right over the edge if you let it. It managed to push me right off the stage and into the gutter. Sometimes I think if Dolores hadn’t left me maybe I’d still be working Vegas, drawin’ down a nice salary, gettin’ some hot young pussy on the side. Those were the days.