The Dog Log

by Richard Lucas

  Another, Coral, wrote, “I am your friend forever, Mr. Lucas. Money is not important. For me, what’s most important is friendship without hypocrisy, and always speaking the truth—always. What you taught me.”

  These are fun to go through, but I have to shake my head—I’d never want these kids to know where I’m at now.

  My favorite remark was written from a kid named Lester: “I’ll always treasure my notebook from Room 208.”

  These should be good feelings, but sitting here knowing that the past was so much happier, holding the evidence of it in my hands, just—there’s nothing good.

  January 2, 12:00 PM

  Randall is having an open house for Jazmine’s apartment today. It’s been going on for two hours, people stopping in front to read the sign, walking back and forth down the driveway to see the place.

  “It’s mostly couples who don’t realize yet how small these bungalows are,” he joked, as if he knew why Roxy hadn’t moved in with me.

  As the searchers go by my window, hearing the click of a woman’s heels on the concrete driveway as she happily trots arm-in-arm with her boyfriend is like pulling hairs out of my head one memory at a time. It wasn’t long ago that Roxy and I were that couple. There is nothing more exhilarating than looking at apartments together.

  Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” It feels like everyone else’s futures have been flashing past my kitchen window all day. People walk and walk and walk by, chatting about the square footage, the parking, the stove, the colors, the curtains, the rent. Such glee and hope, even the ones who are criticizing it, because they are doing something so happy—looking, exploring, moving, changing. There were a few single women, on whom Casino will undoubtedly (and smoothly) pounce. Some single dudes and gay couples. I just hope none of them have dogs.

  I can’t stand people moving in and me not moving out.

  I remember when I first saw this place, I loved it. What a difference now. Nothing about it has changed, especially with its inhabitant, and that’s why it’s become this gray, stucco coffin. I can’t wait until this open house is over and the gleeful are gone away.

  3:00 PM

  Damn, that sucked! I got over there, harnessed them up, told them we were going for a walk, and took them outside. We turned south on Hayworth and made it only about eighty feet before Lauren yowled like a fire alarm and bolted back up the street. Her leash ripped out of my hand. I stomped at the end of it but was a millisecond too late. Fortunately, Casino was walking down our driveway and heard me shouting. Seeing Lauren, he brilliantly dove on the ground, blocking the sidewalk with his body just as she got to him, and he grabbed her with his baseball-glove hands.

  “What’s going on?!” he asked as he nearly smothered the squirming, screeching Lauren in his arms.

  “I tried taking these two dum-dums for a walk, and this is what I get.”

  “Is Irene home?” he asked.

  “No, and there has been no word from anyone.”

  “Oh, wow, that’s unbelievable.”

  “Seven days. I’ve been feeding these two all this time. I thought they might finally need some air. No more air, you two!”

  What happened turned out to be exactly what I was afraid would happen. As much as I’ve dreamed of these dogs disappearing, it cannot occur on my watch. I thought I was holding the leashes tightly, but you know how sometimes when you hold something too tightly it slips from your grip?

  Casino’s shirt was damp. Apparently, he hadn’t noticed in the excitement. “Damn, Casino, I think she peed on you. I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “What a day, and I’m late getting to the Valley.”

  “I owe you a silk shirt,” I said. But I don’t owe him a silk shirt. This wasn’t my fault. I was just trying to get them outside so that I would have less to clean up inside. I took the dogs back in and closed the door. I’ll go back there later to throw some dinner in the bowls. No more walks. Now I have to figure out where Casino shops.

  January 3, 6:45 PM

  I’m so embarrassed about yesterday. Am I a grown man? I couldn’t handle walking two tiny Yorkshire terriers at the same time? Where was my focus? I’m going to try again, because I’m tired of cleaning up the urine-and-all a couple of times a day. And as you may have figured out, as I continue to clean a further path for myself and areas where they feed, I’m removing layer upon layer of dirt, and muck, and mud, and animal waste that is stomach turning and horrifying. But the percentages are changing. My clean area is growing against the dry-blob sediment. It’s like unearthing Pompeii. Linoleum has truly earned my respect for having survived under this Vesuvius of putridity. As the white of my cleaned path rises, I feel as if I’m engendering change in something. If Irene comes home today, she’ll see the original color of her floor in the cleaned parts. I wonder how she’d react?

  What is a person thinking when she never cleans her floor, when she forces her own body to adapt to such horrendous conditions? The recovered patches might bother her. She might not want to think about what “clean” is and what it would mean for her, i.e., work, responsibility, maintenance, all the things that she has consciously given up. Is it depression? I don’t know. But when I’m on my hands and knees cleaning the floor, and I look up to see the piles of bags and magazines, food containers, books, Yorkshire terrier calendars, and all of the things that she will not let go of, I know there’s something overcast gripping her mind.

  Can I blame her? Now that I’m on the inside, it makes sense that, after all she’s been through, she sees nothing but darkness and misery. I’ve had a few rough months here, and my apartment’s now a mess. I don’t know when the last time was that I scrubbed my shower, for example. I wouldn’t want a stranger in there. What if I were old and weakened like she is?

  My dad had his stroke at sixty-six, just months after he’d retired. We thought it might mellow him out. But he’d lost the use of his entire right side from his jaw all the way down to his toes. It only made him more bitter. Then he had to battle colon cancer three times. But all the while, he maintained his patches of personal space impeccably—the area around the lamp near his chair, the end table next to his bed. The top of his dresser was perfectly clean and neat at all times. He also persevered against the cancer. As weak and uncomfortable as the surgeries and chemo made him, he never complained. His grousing ensued only if anything of his was out of its place—something left incorrectly in his area of the kitchen table, or his shampoo bottles in a different spot instead of set on his plastic seat in the shower. As I said, the stroke didn’t soften him a bit. He bitched and moaned about everything else in life—the family, the bank, the city, the neighborhood, the price of milk—but never the cancer. The one thing to really bitch about would have been the cancer. Even in his final days the doctor marveled that my father never requested pain medication—no morphine, nothing. He needed a nursing home only for the last few weeks. When he passed away, no one in the family was able to get there in time. In response to a nurse who asked if she should call anyone in the family, he uttered what would turn out to be his final words on this callous earth: “Don’t bother.”

  I think about him, Sheriff, when I’m at Irene’s apartment. Even though she has damage from the brain tumor, she’s in much better shape than my father was at the same age, yet she complains and complains about every little ache during the little spurts when I see her, every little issue with our landlord. And look at her surroundings. She does nothing to let herself have some happiness to look at inside below the level of those vases. It’s just her own smog of blues. And the dogs, whom she says she loves, have been made gross. When I’m there, I feel as if I’m crawling around deep inside the gray, slimy passages of her brain, scrubbing one tiny area at a time. Maybe if I could have helped my father’s depression and anger somehow, he could have had some OK years. But it was impossible to make him happy. Why w
ould I be doing that for this stranger? And why not just deal with my own depression right now, by the way?

  Irene claims to get companionship from these two dogs, but with the barking and the lack of training, I don’t see how they can add enough positive to outweigh the negative that they do. I imagine her life in this apartment, which could be a sweet little place for a person like her, without those two dogs, clean and maintained. She could have a pleasant existence.

  All this I get from the eight or so square feet of linoleum that I’ve cleaned up. I guess it’s a ridiculous thought.

  8:30 PM

  Why am I sitting here like a B. F. Skinner lab assistant, developing behavioral theories around Irene and these dogs? I hate these dogs. I hate this situation. And it’s sucking time and energy away from anything productive that might help me—as in me.

  All I wanted from this dog log was help, peace and quiet. Now I have freakin’ chores to do in taking care of those two. Working at home is a life of solitude. Having Roxy in my life, seeing her a few times a week, texting all day every day, I didn’t feel alone. I didn’t even think about it. And now suddenly that’s all there is. I wish I could think about something else, but she’s it. I’m constantly looking at my phone to check for her incoming anything. Even after five months, it’s only intensified. I can’t contact her because I’m the breakup-ee. Someone breaks up with you, they want you out of their life, and if you don’t respect that, you’re causing more problems. I have some pride. But pride is worthless. It’s just sad and difficult, and painfully silent.

  1:10 AM

  I don’t know what’s going on in Roxy’s personal life right now, but I’m assuming it has a great deal to do with a new pursuit of happiness. The idea that someone you love, your best friend, is making a concerted effort to replace you—your joys, conversations, your texts, your sex—is like a python squeezing all other thoughts out until your mind has only one purpose: to see the pictures that horrify you—an anti–Ludovico Technique for my Alex DeLarge (from A Clockwork Orange, Sheriff, you’ve probably seen it)—a therapy that disables aversion. I fill in the cavernous blanks because if I don’t create answers of some kind, even fantasies that hurt me, then I’ll have nothing but questions, rather than a place to focus feelings. The script ultimately needs moving pictures, and it’s a horror film. All the phony first dates: “Do you like wine tasting?” “The Getty Museum has a blah, blah, blah exhibit coming that I’m so excited about,” “Let’s skip the gym and hike Runyon Canyon instead,” “I just love how dominant the ocean sounds at night,” “Your neck is so warm. What’s that perfume?” “Oh, I probably shouldn’t have another cosmo . . .”

  I can’t compete with new. I’m jealous of each unwrapped element of happiness that she discovers, and I wish them all failure. In Oscar Wilde’s story “The Fisherman and His Soul,” the fisherman says of the mermaid, “For her love I would surrender heaven.” I’ve lost my heaven, or been cast out. Now, caught up in a net of my own bitter enmity, I’m actively picturing Roxy fighting with her whomever new man—I pray for it, for her feeling emptiness around her girlfriends, feeling desperate without our togetherness. And then my shame rolls whispering in like mist from the sea. All night, images unspool in unthinkably dark, flawlessly executed, punishing dreams. If envy is a sin, then I’m even sinning in my sleep.

  2:20 AM

  “Everything happens for a reason,” Ally says.

  “The condescension of that infuriates me, Ally, people telling you that there is a life lesson somewhere in all your pain. What a bunch of shit. I wish I could make them clean that up off of Irene’s kitchen floor every day.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what the reason is, but you’ll know it eventually. That’s the beauty of growing through hard times. What are you doing still up?”

  “I’ve learned my best life lessons from successes, not failures. The things that I’ve done well have brought me to the best people and the best situations. The failures have pushed me down, and people evacuate the area. Where I am—”

  “That’s where you grow. God, you used to be a poet. You used to see beauty in things. Write a song. Go read some Yeats and lighten up.”

  “Most poetry is sad, don’t you know that? Failures give you lost time that you can never get back. And there is so much lost time. Are there life lessons for people starving in Africa, Ally? Are there life lessons for people being tortured in prisons around the world? It’s bourgeois comfort talk, and you know better. I know people pay you to hear this shit, but they’re people who already have enough money for therapeutic massage.”

  “Oh, well—fuck my whole life then.”

  I apologized. It didn’t help.

  Life is so seldom good. Most of the time it’s painful and confusing. Loneliness is the worst poison of the human mind—so able to imagine better places, loving people, comfort and stability, just to emphasize the lousiness of whatever current situation.

  And I can’t just go “write a song.” Music hurts. I haven’t touched a guitar in at least five years.

  Lauren is barking and barking over there.

  I have been working on this poem though. It’s about waiting—beauty and waiting—inspired by a Matisse painting Roxy and I both loved:

  Zorah on the Terrace

  With your nature’s bliss,

  You bathe yourself in

  Timelessness,

  Your porcelain fingers lift it

  As water in a palm,

  Cooling,

  Spilling over your body,

  Forever coming home.

  Soft waves bring that to me

  Always,

  That somewhere sustained

  Happiness,

  That beauty of you

  From which I drank,

  Which may flow still,

  As when I knelt on the tile,

  We two, bathed in

  Sapphire skylight,

  My hand on your breast

  As we kissed, and cleansed,

  And whispered, and confessed.

  There is no water

  Without a shore,

  No immersion, or totality,

  Without the wonderful

  Longing for air

  And its answer in a kiss.

  I am with Zorah on the Terrace,

  She waits to Pray,

  Or to be loved,

  To be ravished,

  Or to laugh,

  To be listened to,

  To Weep,

  To hold,

  Or be alone.

  Beauty is never silent.

  We listen, Zorah and I,

  To the sky to catch the

  Whisper of providence.

  I hunger for you,

  And, with you, all knowledge.

  Zorah waits, unveiled,

  Her eyes to me,

  Her thumbs caress her satin tea gown,

  I am breathless that her lips

  May part and champion me.

  Agonizing stillness.

  And the constant rays yet drift west.

  Might we forget

  Our impossible solitude

  With my prayer that it is temporal,

  And that there is Infinity

  In our kiss.

  3:45 AM

  I’m not going to send it to her.

  4:00 AM

  They say a sign of serious depression is not being able to put problems in perspective, and lists of little things become the focus of all your energy. But to accomplish that, one would need focus and energy. My heart is slowing like the final clicks of the Wheel of Fortune wheel as it lands on BANKRUPT. If I die tonight from beating myself up—I’m too tired to write a suicide note—let everyone just read this log if someone finds me. Ally can explain it.

  I would take sleeping pills and get into a full bath. Cut a wrist to hurry the loss of consciousness, and then wait until I fall asleep and slide beneath the surface of life. The bathtub—Roxy’s retreat. How I used to love to caress her unde
rneath the surface. Maybe that’s where I say good-bye.

  January 4, 2:20 AM

  Bang bang bang with these “holidays.” Crushing. It feels as if all of the years have accordioned into one single, sour wheeze of notes that bend flat and are fading off. The entirety of activity during the day was feeding the dogs.

  By tonight I’d had it. I wanted just to float. Away. To find out if I could fly, eternally, or could I finally just crater into the ground—eternally. I took myself to a weird karaoke place called the Orchid in Koreatown. It’s where I knew I could float for a least a while. It’s like a gaudy karaoke motel, not a bar so much, all separate rooms they rent by the hour. You’re in there only with your group, so you don’t have to lose any time listening to drunk strangers strangling “My Way”—you can strangle it your own drunk self. I went there alone, to sing, to scream. I was more alone than I’d ever felt, having been drinking Jack since 3:00, thinking of better days when I hadn’t yet set my hand and footprints into the Walk of Failure.

  “I would like a room, please.”

  “OK. How many in your party, sir?”

  “One, and one ghost.”

  “Well, would you like to join another party? I can see if—”

  “No, thank you. I’m fine. I’m practicing for a thing—”

  “Oh, very good. Please follow me then to room 3.”

  Room 3 was empty, but the party had already begun. Red vinyl sofas, huge round coffee table in the middle with songbooks thicker than encyclopedias; streams of neon and LED lights pulsing like paparazzi; circular, convex mirrors everywhere reflecting dozens of tiny, flashing, distorted images of me and my gracious, bow-tied host. The front wall of monitors played videos of young Korean couples floating in canoes on lakes and walking on the sand on some Korean beach, the actors preening a perfectly impossible joy.