PeeWee is the thirteenth puppy of Princess, Elton’s late Belgian shepherd bitch, and Chico, a local black Labrador. He was born in the backyard of this cozy rented cottage, and because he was the smallest, Geneva named him PeeWee.
The houses here on Robert Street and in every parish for miles around are marked with the graffiti of loss: spray-painted x’s with a code from rescue workers noting the date they looked into the property and what they found. Just as often there are messages painted by the residents: “Outside cat, no bird” or “Two dogs, outdoor cat.”
We have showed up in time for lunch, and Elton feeds us hot pork ribs and red beans and rice and violently red hot dogs slathered with relish. “You got enough meat in there?” he fusses over our portions. “You want you another beer?” He has been working on cold cans of beer all morning, and Judy and I each accept one with lunch just to be sociable. PeeWee watches us, his chin on his paws, from his ivory sofa.
“Daddy comin’,” Elton says, his gold eyes catching PeeWee’s lighter gold ones. “What my boy say? My son say he ain’t hungry.”
The beer early in the day (for us) hits Judy hardest. Soon after lunch, she is nodding off on the other sofa. “You lay down and take you a nap and look at television,” Elton advises, cracking open another can and heading to the kitchen to wash dishes.
So we join PeeWee and watch the post-hurricane Mardi Gras that is unrolling just blocks away: the Boeuf Gras float glides down Canal Street, steam rising from a giant bull’s nostrils, wafting through his exaggerated eyelashes and an outsized garland of flowers on his neck. Brass marching bands strut through streets littered ankle deep with Mardi Gras coins, colored beads, and trash. People stagger, whoop and bellow, some carrying tall glasses of rum and fruit juice, a concoction called a Hurricane. The noise and color of the parade is flanked by block after block of dark and silent office buildings pitifully armored in plywood.
Around us, however, things are tranquil. The walls of Elton and Geneva’s living room display portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and a Jesus with a bleeding, radiant heart. Dozens of family photos are propped on the mantels of the four fireplaces, one in every room but the kitchen.
“I got three daughters, they live in Thibodeaux. I got no son; PeeWee my son,” Elton tells us. “I talk to PeeWee more than I talk to people. It works out.”
When Elton was hospitalized for nearly a week following a stroke a few years ago, PeeWee refused to eat. From the hospital, Elton asked Geneva at home to put the phone to the dog’s ear. “I tell him, ‘I am comin’ home, baby! Daddy comin’ to see his son. You got to eat your food.’”
PeeWee did. A few days later, Elton arrived home to an ecstatic dog that licked his face. And life went on smoothly in the bungalow on Robert Street. And then came Katrina.
When the boat driver agreed to let the dogs in his boat, Elton, PeeWee, and Mac got aboard. That led to rides together in a truck, a helicopter, a plane to Atlanta, and a bus to Eaton, Georgia, where housing was available for the hurricane evacuees. Since Mac’s owner didn’t want him back, Elton gave Mac to a friend there. PeeWee never left Elton’s side. And they both missed Geneva.
“PeeWee wag his tail every time a heavyset woman come by—he miss her too,” says Elton. Three weeks later, they rejoined Geneva, who was staying with family in Jackson, Mississippi.
The three returned home just before Christmas to a bungalow with a new roof. They bought new furniture and appliances, and Elton refinished the dining-room table and chairs and the wide planks of the wooden floor.
Today the music of Robert Street is black laughter and mourning doves and car horns honking. Sometimes Elton and his friends turn on a car stereo and leave the windows rolled down to share it. Far away there is a distant hyena howl of police sirens, as cops deal with drunks along the Mardi Gras parade routes. New Orleans is making a big show of being brave. A pink, yellow, and green billboard along the nearby highway declares: “Nothing cancels Mardi Gras. NOTHING.”
“Don’t look on the other side of Canal Street; it bring tears to your eyes,” Elton warns us, but that is just what we want to see, a place where many people did not or could not leave, and where many pets were left behind to the mercy of the fast-rising brown water.
So we pile into our rental car, Elton in front with me driving, PeeWee’s head between us, his torso and tail with Judy and the cameras in the backseat. From parish to parish, there are few street signs left standing and fewer working stoplights, but Elton navigates us around the sporadic street parties of Mardi Gras to the lower ninth ward. Everywhere signs are tacked to utility poles advertising for subcontractors, mold treatment, tree care and removal, or workers wanted.
When Elton gets out of the car, PeeWee gives an anxious gasp that turns to a whine until we let him out too. “Come on, son!” Elton calls. Then he trots after Elton, his tail waving happily, padding through clover that rises green through miles of wreckage.
New Orleans’s lower-ninth ward looks as if it has been mashed flat by a divine fist. The further east we walk, the more crumpled and splintered it becomes: cars tossed into trees and flattened; chain-link fencing whipped into snarls; beams, chairs, tables, and bedding crushed—an apocalyptic mess. Where fragments of houses still stand, doors loom ajar in a birdless silence. A few Red Cross and FEMA business cards blow across floors deep in dried, curling muck, the residue of the river.
“My sister lived here,” says Elton. “She had a little-bitty, expensive-ass dog she pay $1,000 for, but when the boat come and they tell her she cain’t take it, she leave it here. It woulda fit in her pocket, but she left it, and it gone.”
“Nobody live here now. They scared to come back. Imagine how many people not in they house—it make you sick just lookin’ at it,” says Elton. “They cain’t come back, they cain’t put nothin’ here. Gon’ be under the water sooner or later. That gon’ be our river.”
“My mama, she lost her house too,” he adds. “She don’t smoke, drink, or cuss, and she don’t never wear pantses. First time I see her wear pantses was to get in that helicopter.”
We make our way back to the car and to Elton’s house through jesters and courtesans, warriors and nymphs, bagpipers playing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and trios of velvet-caped riders on horseback with slit-eyed masks. Saddened by the blasted city, we ask Elton fewer questions, but PeeWee has had a good walk with his best friend. He assumes his perch: quiet, cheerful, and alert.
“I love dogs ’cause they can’t help theyself,” says Elton, who was unique in that aspect in his large family. “Mama had nine children, and I am the only one love dogs the way I do, any kind of dog ’long as I had a dog. She didn’t ’low no dogs in the house so I’d wait ’til Mama go to sleep, then I put the dog in bed with me. I caught plenty whipping for dogs. When I was eight, I had me a Belgian shepherd. Me and the dog could take and be with each other, and he wouldn’t tell Mama if I done bad things.”
“The last one I had when I was living with Mama was a cocker spaniel named Black Gal. She was blind, but she get in trucks better than you could, and you can see.”
Not all his neighbors treat their dogs well, Elton confides to us. There are men who beat them, who drag them behind cars, who kill their dogs trying to rule them. There are those who train dogs to fight.
“I tell ’em, man, you ain’t got to holler at your dog. I don’t want my dog to be scared of me. If I see somebody mistreat they dog, I’m getting in the humbug with them. I have to. It seem like it hurt me when they take and misuse they dog.”
“You talk to a dog like you talkin’ to children,” he advises, and we see he practices this with PeeWee.
“I just an animal freak; I love every dog; I love animals, period!” Elton says. “When I was comin’ up, I used to clean the stables on North Rampart, take care of they horses and mules after school in the evenin’. They was sightseeing horses for the carriages. Once I was bringin’ ’em to get shoes on, and the horse bucked me off on St. Claude Str
eet in front of a bus!” And he laughs at the memory.
“I love my wife and the ground my wife walk on,” he says with warmth. “I got a big wife, and I got a big bed. PeeWee take and jump up with us in bed ever’ night, and he fall asleep watchin’ television with us too.”
Surviving Katrina reinforced what matters to Elton. “In this neighborhood, when we gone after the hurricane, some of my so-called friends took stuff out my house—they figure we not comin’ back. And then they have the nerve to send us a weddin’ invitation. But it don’t matter. My mama livin’, my sisters and my brother, my wife. We got our dog, and we got our life.”
“He adores you, doesn’t he, Elton?” I ask.
“I live to adore him too,” says Elton. “And I ain’t gon’ leave him again.”
Sign in East St. Louis, Missouri, where dogfighting is an epidemic. Randy Grim works this neighborhood, saving dogs from death from fighting or being used as pit-bull bait.
13
SWEETNESS IN THE MEAN STREETS
RANDY GRIM, HIS DOG QUENTIN, AND STRAY RESCUE OF ST. LOUIS
WE WERE JOUNCING along the potholed, curbless tracks that pass for roads in East St. Louis scouting for Randy Grim’s “kids”—feral and abandoned dogs. A jerry-rigged capture net swung from the ceiling of Randy’s silver jeep, loose dog kibble rattled in the rear compartment, and Randy’s canine best buddy, Quentin, riding in front between Randy and me, kept skidding off the console into my lap, his claws failing to find traction as we turned corners or bashed into ruts.
Around us was a scene from a war zone: burnt roofs of bungalows collapsed inward, lawns given over to mattresses, garbage, clothes, and beer and whiskey bottles. Trees punched up through roofs and splayed through glassless windows; alleys so choked with brush they were no longer navigable; and discarded sofas and chairs littering the yards and empty lots. Against all surrounding evidence, several faded, hand-stenciled signs nailed to cottonwood trees declared JESUS LOVE YOU [sic].
Except for the fact that there were no cars upside down in trees, this urban neighborhood looked very much like the ninth ward of New Orleans we saw after Hurricane Katrina.
“There’s one! There’s one of my kids,” says Randy, pulling the jeep to the edge of a vacant lot thick with scrubby box elder and mulberry trees. “Here, honey, come on baby girl,” Randy calls as he walks toward the corner, where a golden dog lies curled in the chill winter sunlight. Circular depressions in the grass mark the spots where Randy’s “boys and girls” sleep and sun themselves and wait for him to bring them meals. Armed with a can of hot dogs and some beef jerky—“junk food, but they like it”—Randy moves quietly toward the dog.
At first, we do not smell her, but as we get closer we can see her black muzzle is frozen in a teeth-baring agonized grimace, and her left hind leg is broken, angled back and upward at the hock.
“She was pregnant, and she died in pain here,” says Randy, sitting on his heels close to the dog. “I am so sorry, honey.” He whispers a benediction over the body before returning to the jeep.
Randy is the founder of Stray Rescue of St. Louis, an organization that attempts to reclaim the strays of South City and East St. Louis. He is broad-shouldered, tall, and in his mid-forties with gentle eyes, fine tan skin, and graying ash-blonde hair. Under a heavy winter coat and a sweater, his right shoulder bears a color tattoo of his beloved Charlie, a rescued but not exactly wholly-rehabilitated pit bull, and his left shoulder displays the Chinese character for dog.
He describes himself as a “recluse until I have a martini in me,” and he is not exaggerating, but Quentin and a cause have helped him overcome that. Working the wasteland of East St. Louis with Randy, we see more dogs than people—only the occasional man or boy on foot in the crumbled silent road. Incredibly, some of the single-storey brick bungalows are occupied. They sit behind wrought-iron security doors, and there are dead cars and vans collapsed on flat tires inside padlocked, chain-link fences like wagons encircling the house for additional protection.
We spot one woman picking up trash in the ditch around her mailbox as two dogs scamper across her small, unfenced yard.
“Are those your dogs?” Randy calls to her.
“No, they ain’t mine,” she says. “They don’t belong to nobody.”
And that is the problem in the mean streets of East St. Louis. Dogs are born here; dogs are dumped here. (Randy rescued one with a microchip showing it had been adopted at a shelter on the other side of the Mississippi River.) Dogs are forced to fight and get shot and maimed here. But today, Randy’s usual hungry canine characters are largely missing.
“This is freakin’ me out,” he worries. “The last few days I’ve been looking for them and it’s gone, gone, gone—the only dogs I found are mutilated. Oh—here’s Daddy’s girl!”
Out of the weeds slinks a young tricolor bitch, hopeful, frightened, and lured by the aroma of the hot dogs. She licks her lips and tucks her tail, squatting submissively in the middle of the road, and Randy squats, too, and tosses her treats. Soon she is joined by a black male, limping, with hackles raised. He is more wary and runs wide of Randy, declining the snacks. The dogs are right to be distrustful.
“More than half the dogs we rescue have gunshot wounds,” says Randy, who has been shot at twice himself here. “And in that house right there,” pointing out a green house with yellow trim, “they fight dogs. We took one out of there; they had sliced him up to use as bait for the pit bulls. I think he’s gonna survive, but he may lose a leg.”
We circle around Galilee Central Church and Nelson Mandela School, up and down streets, until we pass a sign: “Pit Bull Puppies for Sale.” A black-and-white pit bull barks furiously at us from a short chain tangled even shorter in scrubby trees, while a second dog is chained to a box in the middle of a puddle.
“Oh, good, like we need more pit bulls,” says Randy, who pops out to check on the condition of the chained dogs. It’s not just curiosity—he has been known to steal starving or abused pets. As we start to drive on, a car pulls up to ours.
“You feedin’ them mutts?” asks the driver, a man with cornrows, outsized diamond stud earrings, and four gold teeth.
“Yes, I’m from Stray Rescue, and we work here trying to get the dogs off the streets,” says Randy.
“You ain’t helpin’,” says the man. “We ain’t got no choice but to shoot ’em—they all in the trash cans,” the man says and pulls away.
“Well, maybe if you fed them they wouldn’t have to eat garbage,” hisses Randy, once we are out of earshot. “If you are blaming the decline in property values around here on stray dogs, you need to wake up. And may you die a horrible, slow death too!”
Quentin has been silent throughout the search, tensely scanning through the windshield for the hungry dogs, whimpering only when Randy leaves the jeep. He is golden sorrel with gold eyes, pale toenails, and enormous bat-like expressive ears, broad through the jowls, with a tail curled happily over his back, a slight hump in his nose, and a tongue speckled with black, possibly the legacy of basenji and pit bull. Topaz yellow rhinestones on Quentin’s collar spell “Cha Cha Dog,” a gift from a friend when Randy performed on Dancing with the Stars. (Dogs and dance are the two things that can draw him out of seclusion.)
“Quentin is the smartest dog I’ve met in my life,” says Randy, who calls the dignified dog “Daddy’s angel muffin” or “Quent-a-lot,” among other endearments.
“It took awhile to bond with him, because it gave me the creeps at first, how smart he is. He opens the fridge with his mouth and says ‘come on’ to my other dogs. [Randy’s house holds a pack of eight.] I am not religious, but I believe in something higher than all of us, and he and I were meant to be together and make a difference. Together we are able to kick butt.”
The butt Randy and Quentin kick is antiquated municipal policies about animal welfare, and euthanasia nationwide. It’s vital to do euthanasia right—to do it with speed, kindness, and minimal pain. And Quentin gi
ves this cause “street cred” because, unlike any other known dog, he survived the gas chamber.
Quentin came to Randy after his former owners surrendered him to the St. Louis Animal Regulation Center and requested that he be euthanized.Randy Grim has helped save more than 5,000 dogs from starvation and neglect. He will take these puppies—found in East St. Louis—to his clinic for care and eventual adoption.
Their reason for wanting to kill the emaciated year-old dog? “We are moving to an apartment.” Quentin was placed in the gas chamber with other unwanted dogs. After the regulation thirty minutes, the doors were opened. Quentin was standing on a pile of canine corpses, growling and wagging his tail.
“I don’t believe in too many miracles because there’s so much sad in the world, but the vets don’t know why he survived,” says Randy. “And if the chamber leaked, why did all the other dogs die?”
Randy was already a lifetime animal rescuer, and Quentin became his best friend and ally in the effort, venturing daily into streets that are bad urban legend. “I am socially phobic, afraid of germs from people but not dogs,” Randy confesses. “I take Paxil and when it gets bad, go to Xanax, but I’m never afraid here. The only time I feel at peace is here, because I feel real purpose.”
Randy was born in Verdun, France, the middle of five children, and raised in Washington, D.C. His late father, an Army colonel, “was a jerk,” Randy says. “The only time there was harmony in our house was when there was a stray,” he remembers. “So I would steal a can of tuna and go sit by the sewer and feed stray cats; I could empathize with them. Our first dog was Rebel, an Irish setter. I was five, and my brother and I found him, bone thin, in the snow and saw the pain in his eyes. I connected with him on a level I don’t think five-year-olds are meant to. It was my first lesson in empathy. After that we always had four or five dogs at our house. It was the only time our father was normal.”
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