Another Bad-Dog Book

by Joni Cole

  “Just look at those long legs!” Mrs. Herr, in her skirted bathing suit, seemed compelled to greet me every time I encountered her at the pool.

  “They just go on and on and on,” round Mrs. Dorfmann concurred, observing my great height from her low-slung beach chair.

  There was this to be endured, and then there was my own unfortunate habit of measuring my looks against those of Dale Zug’s girlfriend, a dancer I’ll refer to as Thumbelina. As the name implies, Thumbelina was petite, which is not to say underdeveloped, with glossy blond hair that turned up at the tips, and pretty, delicate features. In comparison, with my disproportionately long legs and a face still padded with baby fat, I felt like a colt with the mumps.

  At Skyline, as in school, certain social protocols prevailed, meaning everyone knew the expanse of lawn to the right of the snack bar was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria. On this section of grass, the popular girls spread out their towels, thus marking the center of our teenage universe, around which the other girls orbited in order of popularity. In the solar system that was my high school, the placement of my towel indicated that I was the equivalent of Uranus, a word I still have trouble saying without embarrassment.

  All this is to say that for me, going to Skyline Pool was sometimes fun, but more accurately a labor of love. I went every chance I got because Dale Zug showed up with just enough frequency to keep hope alive. It was a thrill to watch him saunter across the grass, his broad, bony shoulders tapering down to a pair of baggy, turquoise swim trunks.

  This was not one of those much-anticipated Dale Zug days, or so I thought when a bunch of us decided to play Nerf Keep-Away in the pool, boys against girls. The game was simple. You tossed the Nerf to one of your teammates, and tried not to let anyone from the other team intercept it. Basically, the game was an excuse for the boyfriends to get physical with their girlfriends, all under the guise of Nerf fun. Because I didn’t have a boyfriend, most of my time was spent standing in the shallow end, yelling, “I’m open, I’m open,” while waving my arms like a shipwreck survivor.

  The sun was out in full force that day, creating a sharp glare across the water’s surface. I had to visor my eyes with my hand to follow the Nerf action. My friend Cathy had the ball, but a boy named Doug, whom everybody called Zit, was fast approaching her.

  “I’m open, I’m open!” I yelled.

  Cathy tossed me the Nerf—a bad throw, wide and high—but with those long legs of mine I catapulted out of the water, arm raised toward the sky. Thwack. I caught it!

  Before I had even landed, Dale Zug was behind me, squeezing me tight around my middle. I twisted, still holding the Nerf over my head. The front of our bodies connected, hip bone to hip bone. He jumped, grabbed for the ball, missed. He tickled my sides. We wrestled. He picked me up by my waist, lifting me out of the water. Dale Zug was strong. Oh my God! Dale Zug was strong and could sing!

  Then he dunked me and tugged the Nerf from my clenched fist. I had never wanted to hold onto something more tightly in my whole life.

  Fast-forward thirty years. By now, maybe because my attraction to Dale Zug had formed mostly from adolescent hormones and romantic fantasies, he lingered in my memory more as an ideal than a real person. Dale Zug, my teenage heartthrob; Dale Zug, my sexy boy of summer. While I never saw him again after graduation, at least, I thought, we would always have Skyline.

  Over the years, my imagination has replayed that encounter in the pool many times, except with a different ending.

  Dale Zug and I exchange a heated glance, the Nerf ball long forgotten. Water drops sparkle off his cheekbones. He hooks a finger into the band of my bikini bottoms, drawing me to him. Our hip bones meet, then our lips. He reaches behind my neck and slowly, teasingly, releases the bow to my bathing suit top. I put my arms around him, feeling the muscles in his back. My fingers begin to trace the waistband of his turquoise swim trunks . . .

  Considering how much Dale Zug meant to me in high school and beyond, it was only natural that the first thing I did after I joined Facebook was to try and find him. At first, my searches yielded no matches, but every so often I’d try again, and then one day—Dale Zug! I clicked on his name. The page showed no photo, and revealed only one bit of information: Texas was listed as his current home.

  My pulse picked up, just like it used to when I imagined myself talking to him in high school. This had to be him, I thought. How many Dale Zugs could there be? Plus, a Texas address made sense. I recalled the thrill of hearing those slow Southern syllables as he recited his few lines in the high school play.

  But should I send Dale Zug a request to be friends on Facebook? Now that I had found him, I wasn’t sure what to do. What if he didn’t remember me from school? Would he assume I was some kind of weirdo stalker? Or, what if he did remember me? Then he might really think I was some kind of weirdo stalker, since that pretty much fit my profile back then.

  Back and forth the debate went in my head: Did he know I used to have a crush on him? But he couldn’t have known, not unless that Patty blabbed. But would she blab? Maybe not to Dale Zug directly, but what about to one of his friends?—until eventually I asked myself, What am I, in tenth grade again? Instead of answering, I quickly clicked send.

  The next day, Dale Zug approved my request to be his friend! He even wrote me a short message. “Joni, Nice to hear from you.” Oh, what I would have given to hear him say those words to me in high school! (Yes, I’m talking about my virginity.) I wrote back to confirm that he was, indeed, the right Dale Zug and not by some eponymous fluke a different one. In his response he explained that his family had moved to Pennsylvania when he was in high school, but Texas had always been home.

  Not wanting to seem pushy, I didn’t write back. I also needed time to process this new reality. Dale Zug and I were friends, or at least Facebook friends. This had to count for something, but what?

  By the time Dale Zug posted a photograph of himself online, I’d already had the experience of seeing other high school classmates age thirty years overnight. Or so it seemed, given my mental image of most of these people remained frozen in the late ’70s. I clicked on the Facebook page of my former high school friend Susan, for example, expecting to see her as she appeared in our old field hockey team picture. Instead her father’s face loomed back at me, or at least his heavy jowls. When I found our homecoming queen, a pretty Mennonite girl, her profile picture looked remarkably similar to the church lady. How had this happened? When had this happened?

  Still, it wasn’t the fact that my lean, teenage Dale Zug had been replaced by a much beefier, middle-aged man that shocked me so much as the fact that, in his Facebook photo, Dale Zug was chomping on a cigar, holding up a hooked fish, and putting the squeeze on a fifty-something gal showing Texas-sized cleavage. I don’t care how much time changes us all, Thumbelina this woman was not. Dale Zug had captioned the photo: Me and my Baby!

  Baby? What kind of grown man publicly refers to his spouse or significant other as baby? The options were depressingly obvious: cigar-chomping Texans, men on their fourth marriage, and any male the opposite of appealing to me.

  Within a short time, Dale Zug became one of my most active Facebook friends, intermingling daily updates about his life with political commentary. He described himself as right wing and conservative. He was a diehard Cowboys fan. He loved to cook and fish and golf. He cited a deep and passionate love for God. He asked people to pray for his “Daddy” who was going in for surgery. He denounced the president and all those “lunatic liberals” who were trying to take away his freedoms.

  “Finally!” Dale Zug enthused in one post, “Got my concealed handgun license in the mail yesterday! Dale is armed. Don’t tread on me. Come and try to get it NObama!”

  Reading his Facebook entries, inundated with a bring-it-on mentality and atrocious misspellings, it quickly became clear that if I had met Dale Zug as an adult, I never would have sought out his company, let alone built a fantasy life arou
nd him. For one thing, I was one of those lunatic liberals he was constantly railing against, though I prefer to think of myself as a liberal Democrat who believes in strict gun control. In contrast, if Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter had an unprotected orgy, their resulting spawn would be Dale Zug’s long list of Facebook “likes”—the Tea Party Patriots, The Heritage Foundation, Fox News, Anything about Guns . . .

  Still, I was glad I had found him after all these years. Dale Zug and I had a history, even if he didn’t know it. Call it nostalgia or sentimentality, but I wanted us to be friends. Plus, it felt like something bigger was at stake. Several years ago, a friend of mine who is a professor had described me as a hybrid of Red and Blue America. While this was putting way too much stock in the fact that I listen to country music, I liked this vision of myself, as someone who could transcend the rancor polarizing our country.

  Meanwhile, Dale Zug continued to barrage his social network with more news of government wrong-doing and impending disaster: Obama sells billions of dollars worth of arms to Muslim terrorists! Illegal immigrants create leprosy epidemic! Liberals put America on the brink of collapse!

  About the only issue Dale Zug wasn’t alarmist about was global warming. “A freaking hoax,” he called it.

  Yet, despite our opposing views, a part of me had to hand it to him: he wasn’t afraid to wear his beliefs on his red, white, and blue sleeve. This touched a nerve. Not only am I not politically active, I actually feel embarrassed for that same group of five or six protestors I drive by every morning, waving their hand-painted signs at commuters. I want to stop the war, too, but not if it looks that pathetic.

  Maybe it was Dale Zug’s influence, or simply that Facebook makes it easy to register your opinion, but one day I decided to click on a checkbox to show my support for healthcare reform. At this point, the reform bill had already become law, but Republicans had been ratcheting up their threats to have it repealed. It felt good to make this small, public gesture, to give voice to my beliefs.

  “Are you a Communist?” Dale Zug responded almost immediately on my Facebook wall.

  “Say what?!” I wrote back. Except for our brief initial exchange, this was the first personal message he had sent me.

  “Be afraid,” he warned. “Be very afraid of government death panels.”

  Let it go, I told myself. For one thing, trying to have a meaningful political back and forth through those little comments boxes was exhausting, not to mention the fact that those idiotic, nonexistent death panels didn’t even dignify a response.

  “Let’s just agree to disagree,” I wrote back, trying to maintain my equanimity. I could feel something slipping away, call it my patience, or hope, but I just couldn’t, I wouldn’t, let political differences come between me and my teenage heartthrob.

  Months passed, and each time Dale Zug let loose with another burst of moral outrage, I had to steel myself to read it. But to not read his comments felt wrong, like sticking my fingers in my ears and chanting la-la-la just because someone was saying something I didn’t want to hear.

  Call it cowardice or a lack of conviction, but I never countered any of his opinions with my own, not after his crack about me being a Communist. For all Dale Zug knew, I seconded his views. You’re damn right mosques don’t belong in America! Hell no, I won’t press one for English! And all you folks on the dole, if you can afford alcohol and cigarettes, you sure as hell don’t need food stamps!

  In contrast, Dale Zug had no problem confronting me when I ventured an opinion or acknowledged an interest he didn’t like.

  When I became a fan of the White House, for example, he felt compelled to set the record straight. “O.B.A.M.A.,” he wrote, “One Big Ass Mistake America.”

  When I became an online supporter of National Public Radio, he called the organization elitist. “What makes any of you so dam [sic] smart?” (As always, I was tempted to call him on his misspellings, until it struck me that this was what he was referring to when he labeled me elitist.)

  Because most of my other Facebook friends were liberal Vermonters and writer-types like me, or at least not right-wing extremists, this made his comments stand out all the more. Amid all the excited chatter about the BBC book challenge and how to decrease your carbon footprint, a shout-out to the Liberal Nut Company was bound to get noticed.

  “Who is this guy?” several of my friends asked me, clearly surprised to see someone like Dale Zug in my social network. Sometimes they took it upon themselves to respond directly to his right-wing outbursts, occasionally in measured tones, just as often with equal vitriol. More than one person suggested I unfriend him.

  Usually, I have no problem unfriending people on Facebook—the cousin who sent me one too many quizzes, the author whose status updates never failed to mention her new book, the father who thought every sentence out of his kid’s mouth was worthy of an Art Linkletter special. But if Dale Zug and I couldn’t be Facebook friends, I worried, what hope was there for the rest of a divided country?

  Besides, I reminded myself, politics were just one aspect of the man. Thanks to Facebook, I had plenty of other windows to peek into his life. He posted pictures of Texas wildflowers. He advocated for local charities. He shared his favorite recipe for green-bean casserole. I liked green-bean casserole, sort of. So why should it matter that he was stockpiling weapons, or that one of his photo albums showcased his 38 Special, 9mm Kahr, and Glock 32? Here was a family man with a generous heart. In one post he gushed, “Just bought my baby a new shotgun for her birthday!”

  And so our Facebook friendship continued, until one day I noted my support of the Coffee Party, a grass roots movement formed to counter the Tea Party, and to promote cooperation in government. Even as I agreed to the group’s pledge to conduct myself in a way that was civil, honest, and respectful toward people with whom I disagreed, I knew this one gesture would probably be the extent of my involvement.

  As I should have predicted, Dale Zug sounded in all too soon. He wrote on my wall that the Coffee Party was nothing but a bunch of pathetic progressives. “If all you brainwashed, Birkenstock-wearing . . .” his message continued, but that was it. I didn’t even finish reading his sentence. In a spike of anger, I went to Dale Zug’s Facebook page and removed him from my friends. With one click, I took a stand. With a second click, I confirmed, Yes, I was sure I wanted him gone. He was an asshole! An idiot! For over a year, I had put up with his stupid rants against the government. When he questioned my intelligence, and trashed my beliefs, I told myself not to take it personally, to try and understand his point of view. But this time he had gone too far.

  Birkenstocks! I would never, ever be caught dead wearing Birkenstocks, no matter how popular they were in Vermont, or any other blue or red state in the country. Those tire-tread soles, those hideous cork foot-beds, those thick buckled straps. How could anyone look at those straps and not think of in-patient restraints? Dale Zug had gotten away with calling me many names since we had become Facebook friends, but he crossed the line when he presumed to put shoes on my feet.

  At first it was a relief to open my Facebook page and experience a relative peace and quiet. I didn’t miss for one second Dale Zug’s apocalyptic warnings about Mexican murderers taking over the good old U.S. of A., his battle cries to restore America’s traditional moral principles, or his links to Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

  Yet, over time, other emotions unsettled me. First, there was a niggling of shame. For months, I had remained silent as Dale Zug espoused views that resounded with hate, intolerance, and racism. Yet, only when he challenged my fashion sense, only when his mudslinging splattered onto my vanity, did I bother to do anything about it. I was an activist, all right, at least when it came to foot-wear.

  And then there was the image of myself as the common ground between Red and Blue America. My one small effort to promulgate civil discourse had left me feeling bruised, purple. In the end, just like Dale Zug and all those other people I blame for the anim
osity within our country, I had responded to our political differences with knee-jerk anger and name-calling.

  But my illusion of tolerance wasn’t the only fantasy I had lost.

  Months have passed since I unfriended Dale Zug. I know now that my teenage heartthrob is long gone, and probably never even existed, at least not in the way I had imagined him. Still, old habits die hard, especially when it comes to matters of the heart. Sometimes, I close my eyes, and there we are again on that hot, sunny day, back in the water at Skyline Pool.

  Dale Zug and I exchange a heated glance, the Nerf ball long forgotten. Water drops sparkle off his cheekbones. He hooks a finger into the band of my bikini bottoms, drawing me closer. Our hip bones meet, then our lips. He reaches behind my neck and slowly, teasingly, releases the bow to my bathing suit top. I put my arms around him, feeling the muscles in his back. My fingers begin to trace the waistband of his turquoise swim trunks . . .

  And that’s when I feel it, and reality returns. Dale Zug, my sexy boy of summer, is carrying concealed, and all my romantic fantasies, all my schoolgirl notions about a bright future together are blown right out of the water.

  My People

  A friend and I were shopping the other day at one of those eclectic gift stores that sell everything from exotic Roman glass jewelry and fart-putty to hand-crafted gutting knives alongside the latest Webkins.

  “Oh look, they have mezuzahs,” my friend said, pointing to a row of small, intricately carved cases displayed on a wall.

  “What’s a mezuzah?” I asked.

  “You know what a mezuzah is,” she said, “Your people invented them.”

  My people?