Dad looked sharp as ever in his suit from work. He thanked Mrs. Murphy and took me by the arm. I choked down any crying so Dale wouldn’t see. On the ride home, Dad yelled, “Where were you going? What were you doing?”
“Philadelphia,” I said, and “I don’t know why.”
The house was empty when we got home. He took me up to his bedroom, tossed me on his bed, and pulled off his belt. His anger must have thrown off his aim because the usual formality of this ritual went haywire. I screamed as he swung and swung. I kicked and squirmed, but his arm controlled me like a metal press. He kept asking why I’d done it. I wasn’t smart, or mature, or brave enough to say, “This” and “YOU.” I just repeated that “I wanted to go to see the Phillies.” I urinated all over myself, him, and the bed. He didn’t stop. When he finally released me, he told me to get fresh sheets and clean up. I never ran away again—for fear of failing.
For all these years, I’ve tried to forget my father’s behavior. But I have to figure this out right now, or I’m not going to make it. His father left when he was born. On top of that, when he was five, his mother committed suicide by mercury poisoning. He was the one who found her dead on the kitchen floor. That abandonment is incontrovertibly real. He would never allow anyone to disappear on him again. I sure couldn’t.
Sometimes it seems so ridiculous that I can’t let go of the dad stuff—and sometimes it feels like everything that I am. And now Roxy’s gone, and I’m in a panic. I’m wide awake like a bloodhound. At my father’s funeral, the priest asked me to read from Matthew 5:5: “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Really? I thought. I was bitter—for myself and for my father. He’d inherited nothing but pain and confusion, and he’d passed it on to me. What am I supposed to do with it? What am I supposed to do with Irene’s?
Do you believe in redemption, Sheriff ? Does Roxy? Does Irene? Do I?
I can’t become him. Maybe instead of ignoring it, if I figure him out, I can get somewhere. The best I can see it, his anger was forged by a paradoxical mixture of ego and self-loathing. He always felt that he wasn’t getting what he deserved in life, yet he hated himself for his own lack of achievement. Yes, he was rough on me, but he wasn’t all bad. He also made every concert at school, etc. And he had a happy drunk side. He could be an awesome drunk, funny, caring, hand-on-your-shoulder, partner-with-you-in-the-egg-toss-at-the-Bowlers-Picnic dad. You always think that good side will stay. It doesn’t. You try to cajole it back by laughing around him when you’re sad or smiling when you’re afraid, like when he throws up on himself next to you in the backseat of the car on the way home from that same Bowlers Picnic.
Were his unresolved frustrations passed down to me? Have I been avoiding some cosmic pathway of trying to make them right?
After his birth parents were gone, he got a new life through adoption. He was so reticent to talk about his early childhood that I only learned about it through the jagged filter of my mother, who always spun it with sarcastic remarks like “He was brought up by a nice enough Irish Catholic family but was never smart enough to accept their help or advice, only their love of beer.”
It is true. One of his favorite things to say was “Beer is my best friend.” I think mine is wine.
But he had enough fight in him to make a life for himself. With a tenth-grade education, he worked his way up in banking from emptying garbage pails to functioning in middle management, assistant vice president, which, whatever that meant, got him a desk and a chair but never an office.
In the early ’80s, when an MBA became the GED of the finance industry, he was passed over time and again, and they eventually sent him back to the streets to pursue customers who were behind on their mortgage payments. “Chasing slows,” he used to call it. “I’m on the outside looking in,” he’d grumble as he reached for his black overcoat on the rack by the front door.
They’d handed a life-altering humiliation to a man who’d prided himself on his talent for choosing good accounts. At his funeral, a couple who’d gotten their mortgage approved by him many years before came to me and said, “Your father saved us. When the bank didn’t want to give us our loan, he personally came to our apartment, dined with us, listened to us, met our children, and then went back and told the bank that he had faith in our future. We’ll never forget him for that.”
The meek inheriting the earth.
Now it’s all computers and credit scores. When that was starting, they pushed my father into his red Pontiac Bonneville, tossed him a wind-up Polaroid instant camera, and assigned him to sit outside these “slows’” homes and photograph their properties and belongings for potential repossession—and, if possible, document any behavior that might show financial shenanigans.
“On the outside looking in”—through the lens of a Polaroid camera, and the bottom of a beer glass. This was the refrain of his heaviest drinking days, high school for me. “In the rain, in the snow,” he’d grumble to himself, his lower jaw clenched like a fist as he threw the contents of his pockets into his desk drawer after coming home from work and a few hours at Chick’s Bar.
Dad remained an almost silent man at home, except for those Saturday Evening Soliloquies, the overture of which opened with the crashes and thuds of dishes and chairs being banged around in the kitchen. Then he’d get angry about the dishes. “Three sets of dishes,” one dirty on the counter, one soaking dirty in the sink, and one clean in the rack, not yet put away. “Pile up . . . Pile up . . . Pile up,” he’d say, pushing his arm into the garbage can to compress it down. And he’d sweep—sweep and sweep—at the floor furiously, poking and jabbing the broom down in quick strokes. “I can do this. See me? My sons can’t do this? Look at me. I can do it.” I have three older brothers. And eventually, “My sons—they’re NOTHING,” he’d spew, and then he’d trod down a repetitive, ugly, curse-laden list of filial disappointments, calling all of us out. (Ally, being the oldest, was out of the house by then, lucky her.) But I wasn’t “nothing” then. I’d been president of my high school class, Latin Club president, playing trombone professionally in a wedding band and a local-events concert band.
What he said to his pals at Chick’s all those hours after work each day, I’ll never know. They weren’t helping him, that I do know. Likely, they spent their words bitching about their own problems in a deeply depressed decade of an already dead town, saved by the fact that bar glasses of Stegmaier beer were only thirty-five cents each. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. I couldn’t wait to get myself out. I would never get trapped there. And I was going to be something big, not a cog. But I’ve failed at everything, and I’m “on the outside looking in.” And I’ve turned to alcohol, because it’s good—and it’s my friend. And I’m frustrated and disappointed and angry and sad, like my father, and they’re good. In the moment, these things disguise themselves as useful. They pass the wretched time.
And now, from having gone next door, I know that Irene’s life is a mess that I couldn’t have imagined. And I feel I’m no better off than my father.
4:00 AM
Still up, can’t get my heart rate down. The Roxy box keeps calling out to me. I need to get rid of it, but I also want to go in and touch her things one last time. Her perfume is still on her clothes like flowers that won’t perish. It’s in the cardboard now. OK, I admit, I just did that. Her fragrance is like wine. I’ve also had some wine, and by some, I mean I don’t know how much. My mother used to count my dad’s beers. She’s not around to count mine. I also had some pot-infused goldfish that my friend Nick gave me a while ago. I’m so tired. And wired.
My mother used to say, “No matter how bad you feel, there’s always someone else in the world who has it worse.” Well, everyone else in the world who has it worse can take it easy for a day, because it’s finally spun around to me. I think I’d be better off just gone. Gone . . . gone. I’ve thought about doing it. I love how Fredric March walks into the ocean at the end of A Star Is Born. But I’m a good swimmer. I’d have to weigh myself down with som
e kind of anchor, a ball and chain or something, and drag it along the sand as I plod into the tide. Not nearly as elegant as the movie. Maybe I can just suffocate myself under a stack of overdue bills. Calculate myself to death. Second-guess myself to death. I could double up on this dog log with a hunger strike. But that’s no good without publicity. Is there anything sadder than an unpublicized hunger strike? “He starved himself, apparently, while writing in this log here.” Coroner’s diagnosis: he thought himself to death.
You either give up or fight, I guess.
December 27, 7:00 AM
What a night. Didn’t sleep. My apartment is freezing. There’s no insulation in these old places. At least I have space heaters. Irene’s is probably worse. Lauren started barking at 6:30. She probably didn’t sleep either. I’m sure Irene’ll be home soon. Hospitals always rush you out for release first thing in the morning.
11:45 AM
Cloudy, chilly day. I haven’t heard any human activity at Irene’s. If she’s not coming home today, then surely someone will come over to get the dogs. I can’t face stepping into that sulfur mine again. I don’t care if they piss and shit. If Irene didn’t care, why should I?
Every creative bone in my body has been gnawed to dust. I have to design a logo and website for an anesthesia consultants group in Culver City. They’re having a meeting some time after New Year’s, so they want to see something, but I can’t fucking think. I haven’t even done the logo looks, let alone the site.
I wonder if I could bargain with them for some anesthesia. How nice it would be to slip away right now—loopy with sedation. A pretty nurse talking to me in calming tones, touching her hips to my cheek for a moment as she leans over to reach for that wonderful rubberized mask that she’s going to set so gently over my nose and mouth.
“Breathe in, Richard. Relax and breathe normally. You look very handsome today. Do you mind if I caress your cheek whilst you go to sleep?”
She might say “whilst.” She’s an Elizabethan princess, too.
Help me, Nurse Princess—help me escape Sophie sensory overload.
“Don’t you mean Lauren, my sweet?” she’d ask.
“Yes, my angel, Lauren too. Save me from them all.”
I could die this way.
In high school, my friend Paul’s mother was a nurse at Mercy Hospital—and among my most prized female fantasies. One night an ambulance took me to their ER after a car accident. A pal and I had been out partying. I was in the passenger seat of his Ford Pinto wagon, no seat belt. Not his fault. Both of us had been acting nuts that night, blowing off steam. The car swerved and hit a lamppost. My face went through the windshield and back. Paul’s mother held my hand while I got hundreds of stitches on the left side of my face, forehead, and neck—whilst I got them. They wouldn’t knock me out because of the head wounds. I had to watch the needle coming at me, ripping at me, over and over, and she whispered in my ear to keep me calm and strong. If I can make it through that, I can make it through this. I still have scars on my jaw, face, and forehead. You’ll see them. I cherish that painful moment with her.
12:20 PM
I guess if no one shows up by 2:00 or 3:00, I’ll go over and throw some food in their bowls again. Lauren’s barking, but at least there’s reason in it in that dark, forgotten well. No less irritating though.
Irene only broke her arm or something. She was awake and talking and everything when they took her in the ambulance. You’d think she’d call a friend or someone about her dogs. Then again, why should she start to have true consideration for her dogs at this point? I’m not surprised, are you?
1:00 PM
How long can dogs go without eating? Pretty long, right? Aren’t there stories of dogs walking for weeks to find their masters—going across state lines—over deserts and mountains? I guess they find some way to eat though. Would these two Yorkies? We can go for weeks. I’m sure dogs are tougher than we are because they don’t think into the future, and stress, and get killed by the sadness, right?
I guess water is the issue. We can only go without it for a few days, I think. That’s why those survival guys on TV are always pissing into evacuated snake skins and carrying them around their necks. Well, those two dogs have plenty of piss puddles in the kitchen to keep them alive.
If something happens to the dogs, here I am writing about my knowing that they’re there unattended. So, is this somehow my responsibility now? How ridiculous is that? What right has she to abandon her animals like this and then blame me if they dry out to death? A pet owner is supposed to have a plan in case of emergency, aren’t they? And does a broken arm keep her from calling a friend or telling a nurse about her stupid dogs? I’m certainly not going to take care of them.
You’ve smelled death, right, Sheriff? They take you to the morgue like in the old TV opening of Quincy, M.E. when they show the rookie cops fainting at an autopsy, right? Well, over there it’s living death, an abscessed malodor that reproduces upon itself as the bacteria chews it down and then the dogs replenish it from the top. If things were normal, maybe, but it’s a horrid nightmare, and I shouldn’t have to go face it just because I happen to be living the closest. Nope. I absolve myself of responsibility. I don’t even have to do that. I have no responsibility to absolve myself of. What I am doing is refusing to take responsibility here. It’s an entirely proper reverse “moral imperative.” I didn’t create that hell over there, and I didn’t raise two untrained, hurly-burly-haired monsters in my home.
2:25 PM
Holy God, I was just over there. So much worse in the daylight. Have you ever been inside a hoarder’s house, Sheriff? This is not like one of those cases on TV where you have to climb over things to get from place to place, but it is the hoarding of someone who is seriously messed up.
I covered my nose and mouth again with my T-shirt and tossed some food and water into the bowls. What a stench. The dogs are nasty. I don’t mean that in a biting way. I don’t think they’d bite me because they’re responding to me a little more calmly already. Although, if one of them did bite me, I’d probably go down in five seconds, considering the bacteria that they’re able to house in their jaws and gums with built-up resistance. I’m not touching them because they’re so dirty, and these aren’t “visits.” This is just feeding.
I’m hoping by the end of the afternoon someone’ll come by.
6:30 PM
Are dogs supposed to be fed once or twice a day? I’ve never had a dog, and it’s not something you think about until two of them are staring up at you. I can’t let them starve over there, even if Irene can. If she’s not home by 8:00 tonight, I’ll go and feed them again.
7:30 PM
“It’s the First Law of Karma,” Ally says to me.
“These are laws to you people?”
“They’re called laws because they govern human nature, inescapably.”
“Inexplicably?”
“You know, you’re the one who keeps asking about karma. It’s simple, the Law of Attraction: like attracts like. So who you are is what you will bring into your life.”
“Well, I have nobody in my life. So that means I’m nobody.”
“You’re an incredible pessimist.”
“You cannot defeat a defeatist, Ally. We always win.”
“By losing.”
“By knowing. Come over to our side. The expectations are so much easier.”
“Pessimism is low tone and could lead to death.”
“That’s optimistic. OK then—I’m completely alone, sad, angry, poor, frustrated, powerless, and depressed, not to mention out of shape. The person that I had ‘attracted’ is gone.”
“You have to deal with that.”
“I want to ‘attract’ her back.”
“You know I think you should move on. I hate seeing you hurt.”
“But I can figure this out. She saw me as resisting, or hesitating, or something. Maybe, deep down, for some reason, I was—Mom and Dad, something, the house we grew up
in.”
“But when you love somebody, you don’t leave them. You believe in them, even when they no longer believe in themselves.”
“She made me happy.”
“That’s another thing, Richard. You have a ‘You-Make-Me’ complex: ‘Roxy makes me so happy’ or ‘Irene makes me so mad.’ Do you realize how much control you give other people over your own life?”
Sheriff, people don’t make you happy, angry, sad? You arrest a perp, he spits at you and kicks you in the balls, you don’t get angry? And that stuff doesn’t pile up on you and make you an angry person? Conversely, doesn’t your wife—even just seeing her—make you happy? Your kids, with that wonderful, unadulterated innocence?
“I was in love, Ally. Please.”
“Your happiness has to come from within, not from someone else.”
“It’s not possible. Look, since I’ve un-attracted Roxy, what do I have as the prominent forces in my life? A barking dog and a bitter old woman.”
“The Third Law of Karma: whatever you resist persists in you.”
“Another law?”
“Whatever you pay the most attention to is what you’re going to experience. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”
“Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You’re actually not. Who’s the one who’s always complaining about everything—me or you? When you were at school, did you teach the kids to empower themselves, or did you tell them not to bother because circumstance would always control them anyhow?”
“Maybe Irene attracted me. It’s her fault then. But if ‘like attracts like,’ then that means that I’m ‘like’ her, and I’m a wretched human being.”
The Dog Log Page 7