The Dog Log

by Richard Lucas

  Well, I’ve had many people tell me to do horrible things. My friend Tom: “We grew up next to a beagle that wouldn’t shut up. One day Dad put ground-up glass in his food on their back porch, and the problem was solved in twenty-four hours.” Those are morals ravaged by exacerbation. I bet Sophie’s a finicky eater. Anyway—no matter.

  Did you know that there’s no word for “the murder of an animal,” like homicide, patricide, suicide? I just looked it up online. How could it not get a word? Of course, now the Internet has a record of me searching “murder a dog.” I should type in something about “liking dogs” to balance out my browser history.

  November 4, 10:00 AM

  Irene is the neighbor in question, Sophie’s owner. (I know the West Hollywood City Council voted 3–0 to ban the term pet owner in favor of pet guardian, but that’s so ridiculous it makes my eyeballs boil.) I mentioned she lives on disability. Don’t cry for her already, Sheriff. Believe me, she’s selfish, arrogant, and ill-tempered. Yes, people with disabilities can be jerks, too—welcome to the human race. Plus, as you know, Irene yells at me when I mention Sophie. I suffer from neighbor abuse! Anyhow, I’m losing work productivity because of this—so I’m virtually disabled too. What are you going to do about that?

  I thought things might have turned out better around here. Early on the second morning after I’d moved in, a knock at the door invaded my privacy. I threw on a T-shirt and opened the door to see a small, round, aged woman in a long dirty black cotton housedress, which looked as if she’d been wearing it for several weeks of chain gang work. The morning sun rim-lit her ostrich-egg figure, silhouetting her face through my still-closed screen door.

  “Good morning,” she said, “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” That’s what people always say when they’re disturbing you. Her voice sounded torn in half, and her overprojection of it hit my ears like feedback at a Van Halen concert. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m the very best neighbor you’re ever going to have,” she offered.

  I smiled and thought, This could be good news. “Why do you say that?” I asked, still not knowing her name.

  “Because I’m blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.”

  I’m not half bad at guessing riddles, Sheriff, but I would have never gotten that one. And how do you respond to that? “Wow, that’s fantastic—too bad you’re not full-on Helen Keller, you could be famous!”? But “Oh? That’s just awful,” was all I sputtered out. It wasn’t important, however, because her determination to tell me her story was not to be daunted.

  In some circumstances, this might have been an appropriate moment for me to invite her in for a cup of tea, but tea gives me a sour stomach, and, more important, I had no interest in establishing a spontaneous tea date relationship with the ancient, intruding busybody next door. Once you give them a little Orange Zinger, Sheriff, they keep coming back.

  So, remaining outside, she jabbered on, explaining that her blindness, deafness, and vertigo, which had all colluded to quicksand her into a most unjust poverty, stemmed from a brain tumor. “I had it removed, of course.”

  “Often that’s the best course of action,” I concurred.

  “I’m OK, but it left me unable to work anymore or function much. I used to be very successful,” she asserted from behind her exaggerated Jackie O sunglasses, which, thankfully, hid the mystery of her one-sided blindness, what Edgar Allan Poe might have imagined as the “vulture eye,” as she prattled on. Maybe it was the slight slur dragging her speech along—likely a result of the tumor—but something about this worn package of human being presenting itself had prejudiced me against any belief that she’d ever been “very successful.” Was that unfair of me? There but for the grace of God go I, I reminded myself. My mother used to say that. And if I were to be diagnosed today with a tumor such as this woman’s, I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that I’d ever been any kind of “great success” before its discovery.

  And a great success she claimed to be. “I’m Irene. I used to be a lawyer, Vassar and UCLA. I owned my own family law practice in Beverly Hills. I worked over three thousand divorces. So, if you’re getting a divorce, you can call me,” she smiled.

  I wanted a divorce from this conversation. I guess not inviting her in for tea isn’t stopping this from happening. Her “greatest neighbor ever” status is quickly coming into question, I thought.

  The unconnected, I assumed concocted, and unwelcome details of her life came flying at me now like a snapped rack of pool balls, and all I could do was stand there on the other side of the screen, listening like a priest at a confessional, gathering up the shadowed image of her face through the moiré. Occasionally I tossed in an “Oh” or an “Uh-huh.” Perhaps I should have offered up a handful of Hail Marys as well.

  “I had eighth-row season tickets to the Showtime Lakers at the Forum, you know, Magic and Kareem,” her words now frolicking with pride. “My second husband has a wing named after him at Cedars-Sinai because he donated $12 million to them in 1974. My third husband and I divorced after I found him in bed with a young, blond-haired man who looked just like me. I saw him and yelled, ‘Well, he’s just me with a penis!’”

  My appreciative bewilderment at her one-phrase histories was zapped to clarity by her use of the word penis.

  “I wanted nothing from that bastard,” she went on. “So, I just walked away, took nothing. I’d had success of my own. I was a big women’s-libber back then. Look where that got me—Gloria Steinem, good Lord. Well, I could use that money now. Who knew?” With that she let out a laugh/sigh that could have been the Frankenstein monster’s last breath under the funeral pyre.

  “You seem like a pretty independent lady,” I said, trying to be charming, but it came out as pure condescension, exaggerated by the extra volume I was throwing aloft to find her good ear. She ignored it. Maybe she didn’t hear me, or maybe she didn’t want to be talked down to. I wondered if she was mad at me. Then she stumbled for a moment, just standing there, and steadied herself with her hand against the doorknob.

  “Do you need help?”

  “No, it’s just the vertigo,” she said. “I’m fine.” She drew a deep breath and continued on, “Oh, I had a beautiful house on Coldwater Canyon and a staff of six at my office.”

  Lies, lies, lies, I thought. None of this is even remotely possible, and a continual fiction such as this might have no boundaries whatsoever. I have to get this door closed. I just moved in. Give it some time, Irene. Give me my space.

  “I hope you don’t mind my plants and flowers,” she said, referring to her attempt at a potted Eden that intrudes on our walkway. But it is pretty, in a dingy way, and what else close to beauty does this woman have? “Randall won’t let me grow anything in his precious front yard, so I have to do it all in planters.”

  She’s trying to draw me outside, I thought. No way, no garden tour. Too much, too fast. “I hope they don’t attract bugs,” I warned. Look, I was open to the possibility of a guarded friendship some day with an occasional lemon water and sugar-free cookie, but Everything in due time seemed the smarter plan. We were new neighbors, and we needed good fences.

  November 5, 12:30 PM

  Irene and her garden. This morning she was gardening out front, watering her plants. She had her little blue watering can and her hand spade, but what she’d forgotten, unfortunately, was her pants. Nothing but a ragged black T-shirt and cream-colored Hindenburg panties.

  “Good morning, Richard,” she said, her pale cheeks reflecting the yellows of her marigolds.

  “Good morning to you, Irene. What a beautiful day.”

  “It’s too hot,” burst out her auto-complaint.

  “Yes, it’s hot. It’s hot for November—but not too hot for pants.”

  “Oh, who cares. No one’s looking at me.”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Well, stop looking. I’m only going to be out here for ten minutes.”

  “Irene, I insist you put on pants.”

  “Oh
, you’re being silly.”

  “I’m deadly silly, Irene.”

  She laughed. Sophie’d been barking away.

  “Don’t you hear Sophie?”

  “What’s she doing?”

  What? “Umm—she’s going nuts behind your door.”

  “Oh, it must not be too loud because I can’t hear it,” she said.

  “You’re half deaf, remember?”

  “Ha!” she laughed. “Sometimes I forget.”

  “But you hear me. If you can hear me, then you can hear her.”

  “Oh, I can’t believe such a tiny dog can be such a big problem to you,” she said, laughing. “She only weighs three pounds.”

  “It’s all throat.”

  “Listen,” she went on, “if she’s barking when I’m not home, it’s only because she’s lonely. I should give you a key, and then you can go over and visit her. She’d like that.”

  “I’d pack her up and ship her to a hungry family in North Korea.”

  “Oh, you’re just mean.” And the humor vanished. “She’s not that loud, get over it.”

  “Well, please get her to stop. You’re a very selfish person, do you know that? And, I reiterate, please put on pants.”

  Good morning, world.

  Sophie visitations? I’m not a dog babysitter. I have no intention of spending time with it over there staring at me—and probably barking. I’d make Lennie Small—the way that he squeezes small animals to death in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men—look like Dr. Dolittle. Her idea is entrapment!

  I get so embarrassed when I let myself get angry like this and I can’t let it go—makes me feel awful. Maybe it’s a problem. I get it from my father. He was a drinker. We had to do our best to avoid him each night when he came home. Saturdays were the worst. He’d rant and rave, alone in the kitchen, about his job, the house, each of us. “The Saturday Evening Soliloquies,” we called them. “No communication in the house,” he’d say to himself over and over. Who could communicate with that? Mom encouraged us to stay at friends’ houses on Saturday nights.

  This is complicated to say, but I know he loved us. He just was a hardened, nonloving person. He showed love by paying the mortgage on our small house. He’d bought it in 1966 for $10,000, yet the payments were still a struggle sometimes, five kids and all. I’m not him. I’m just saying. I’m not him.

  November 6, 12:30 PM

  Casino just told me that Irene scratched my car out back—two days ago, apparently—and no one told me. He saw her leave a huge gash on my driver’s-side door while she was parking. He said, “She just got out of her car and walked away.” When he stopped her, she begged him not to tell me about it. That’s the kind of person we’re dealing with, Sheriff.

  When I went back there, I flipped. We called Irene outside. She admitted everything but was snarky as can be. “You shouldn’t take things so seriously,” she said. “I’ll pay to have your car fixed.”

  Lies. What am I going to do, scrape off of her Social Security checks? I’d rather her buy a pair of pants. All I said was, “If you can’t manage back here, why don’t you just park on the street?”

  She turned to walk away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You’re yelling at me, and I won’t be yelled at. I’m leaving!”

  “I’m not yelling,” I yelled. “I just want to make sure you can hear me.”

  “I said I’d pay for your precious car,” said the portly, petulant, unwashed prom queen, and she blithely waddled away in her protective nest of senior haze. My anger blasted in me like a hot virus. So, I still drive an old Integra—so what? This decrepit old woman is going to give me shit about my car? Her Honda Civic has personalized license plates: 2URKEEZ. Vanity plates for a peripherally impaired, side-swiping menace? She’s vain enough to pay for those but not vain enough to give the dogs a bath. California is a disgusting place.

  Frustrated, I turned to Casino, who stood there, arms crossed, shaking his head. “What?” I insisted.

  “That went bad,” he judged in his smooth, younger–Lou-Rawls baritone, glass-of-Glenlivet-on-the-rocks voice.

  “Well, how else was it going to go?”

  “You’ve got to check your anger, man. She’s an old lady.”

  “You know she shouldn’t be driving.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, “but there’s no way to stop her. Nothing tougher than taking the car keys away from an old person. It’s like pulling a tooth out of a tiger’s mouth. Plus, you know where she goes every day?”

  “To the vampire clinic for blood transfusions?”

  “No. You don’t know? She goes to hospitals and stuff to visit hospice patients. So if she stops driving, they stop getting those visits.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yep,” he said. “So, it’s tough to get too mad at her the way that you do all the time.”

  At that point, all my anger, topped with the sixteen-inch laceration on my car and the Nuremberg judgment from Casino, had never seethed with more fluid ferocity. But Casino jammed a cork in it with the hospice announcement. How can I be angry at someone who’s volunteering like that? Our little city-within-a-city has an inordinate need for hospice, as you know. It’s very sad. And, by the way—what volunteering do I do? None, Sheriff, none. I sit around simmering with sorrow for myself and trying to pay the rent. But it’s her leaving her apartment that’s the cause of my problems. I’m in a bear trap. Do you see why I don’t tell Randall and have her dogs taken away?

  When I told Roxy about it, she said, “Oh, what a sweet person.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want her visiting me in hospice. What about my car?”

  “Really, Richard?” was all she said.

  November 7, 10:50 AM

  One day after confessing to hitting my car, Irene has the chutzpah to ask me for help with hers. “Richard, can you take a look at my car?” beckoned the creaky voice of the cretinous care-faker outside my door. “It won’t start.”

  Great, I thought, then you won’t be able to leave, and Sophie may stay calm, at least when other dogs aren’t walking by. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “How would I know? Can you take a look?”

  “OK,” I say. And why not? I can’t refuse, now that I know she’s probably going to visit patients at hospice. We went out to her car. I turned the key—no sound. Dead battery, like my soul. But wait, do I want to solve this so quickly? I thought. Can I not buy myself some peace and quiet for this one afternoon—my own hospice for a day?

  I glance over at my own newly wounded car, and I find my hands gripping the spark plug wires as if the group were Sophie’s wiggly spine itself. If I yank these out and snap the distributor cap, not only would the streets be safe from this nearly blind freewheeling terror, but I’d be safe from Sophie’s shrieks.

  “Where are you heading off to?” I asked, with the restraint of Gandhi.

  “The nursing home on Third and La Jolla, Sharon Care,” she answered.

  “Oh yeah?” I joked through my anger, “Do they take cars, too?”

  “Oh no, does my little Honda need a doctor?”

  This poor, purple, long-suffering, shriveled-up Honda Civic, Sheriff—if it were a boxer, it’s the Tex Cobb of the auto world, beaten and bloodied after fifteen rounds with this elderly undefeated champ behind the wheel. Some friend had willed it to her, still in immaculate condition, a couple years ago. It now has dents and scratches 360 degrees around, duct tape holding the front lights onto the body, and a twisted coat hanger keeping the rear bumper from jumping free. She scrapes the car along the concrete wall as a guide to get down our driveway, and there’s clear evidence, in the form of paint streaks all over it, of the colors of the many cars she’s struck. It’s like a Jackson Pollock entry in a demolition derby.

  With my hands still on the wires, “It might need a doctor,” I said. “Give me a minute here.” The hospice patients will just have to hold on for one more day, I thought. Sweet mercy, let me do it. Great Red
Dragon, Tempter of the Meek, come to me and let me be the absolute destroyer of this engine. Pull, Richard, do it! Pull! Take your revenge!

  “I have a seventeen-year-old girl there who’s in her last weeks with AIDS, poor thing,” she explained.

  My hands sprung off the wires.

  “She wants her baby daughter to go to her grandmother, rather than to her rat of an ex-boyfriend who’s the father. It’s so sad. I’m giving her legal advice for her will.”

  Damn it. I’m not a terrible person, Sheriff. I got my jumper cables and defibrillated her Civic. And off they both went.

  November 8, 4:20 PM

  Got home from Target, my last $62.40. Friday afternoon. I’m wiped out. Haven’t seen Roxy for days. Says her stomach is still bothering her. I could hear Sophie going before I’d even put my key in the lock. I yelled, “Shut up! Shut up!” standing there outside shouting to nowhere. Then I noticed a note on the door from Irene: “Our showers are backed up. My bathroom and bedroom are flooded again. I called Randall, but will you call him also, please? I can’t wash my hair. I should sue him, the bastard. And also, please don’t shower until it’s fixed, or my place will continue flooding.”

  Our drains marry into one old pipe underground. It backs up about once a year, and we simultaneously get gunk on our shower and bathroom floors. Her side deservedly gets the worst of it. Sad timing that this is the day of the year that she washes her hair. I called Randall, and he said that he couldn’t get his plumber here until Monday. In other words, he’s too cheap to pay a weekend rate. “Would you mind terribly using the bath till then?” he chirped. Roxy’s a big bath person. I love to see her in there, suds up to her shoulders, knees poking out above the surface. Not for me, though. The dirty water makes no sense, and aromatherapy is an expensive myth. Plus, now I have power, Sheriff—the shower power. Confession: I’ve done this before—I take a “trickle” when this happens. That’s the way my dad always showered—a “trickle”—to save on the water bill. Sometimes he’d come into the bathroom while you were showering, reach behind the curtain, and, with one quick twist, turn the water pressure down and grunt, “Water!”