The Dog Log

by Richard Lucas

  We passed by a young, attractive woman, very fit in her yoga pants and tank top, walking her little fluffy white dog along like Athena guiding a cloud. As the three dogs stopped to sniff one another, I asked if she could get her dog to pee in the grass to show these two dum-dums what’s supposed to be happening. Yep, that’s me with women, Sheriff—I always know just the right words to say. I’d also forgotten that I was wearing latex gloves and had a surgical mask hanging around my neck. And, of course, the two mangy, sad Yorkshire terriers make me look like Man of the Year.

  The only way for me to get myself to touch these dogs with my naked hands would be to wash them. But what use would it be to bathe them and then set them down on the dirty floor? Their hair is so long (and I’ve learned that it’s not fur, it’s hair) that it scrapes against the floor. It’s no use to clean them. I wish I could cut all that hair right off. But I’m so frustrated that there’s very little space between my wanting to help them and my going Sweeney Todd. Would I leave the meat pies for Irene in her freezer where Sophie was so ignominiously laid to rest, the way he would? Yes, I would.

  All this rushes through my head before I choke out to the girl, “These . . . aren’t . . . my dogs. I’m . . . taking care of them . . . for my neighbor. . . . She’s . . . an older lady, and . . . and is . . . she’s in the hospital.” I was speaking so haltingly and, I know, still in the habit of gripping the leashes as if they were a rope from a rescue helicopter, that I’m sure it only corroborated her assumption that I was criminally insane. My throat dried as I said the words “taking care of them.” Saying it to another person made it real.

  Yoga Pants squirmed in her cuteness—which actually made her cuter. She and her little Larry Tate dog didn’t like the dum-dums.

  “Well, have a nice afternoon,” I said as I pulled us all away. I should have said I’d been painting my apartment. Why do I always think of the right thing to say when it’s too late? I turned and shouted, “Hey,” as I held up my hands, “I’m just in the middle of painting my apartment. That’s why the gloves and the mask.” She turned her head and gave me a pursed-lip nod and quickened her athletic pace away. I doubt she’ll be walking her dog on Hayworth Avenue anymore. Fate? Fatal?

  Got them inside. Lauren still refused to eat. I decided to leave the food in the bowl and let whatever’s going to happen happen. Maybe Nelson will gain some weight and Lauren will lose some. I’ve lost a few pounds now. I won’t be the only one deteriorating with the stress. I laid down a square of newspaper and am hoping for the best.

  January 10, 11:00 AM

  I just got a text from Roxy. Totally out of the blue. Just two words: “Ubiquitous Zigzags.” That was one of our funny little phrases we used to send each other whenever either of us saw an Art Deco building around town.

  We’d been to an architectural symposium put on by the Los Angeles Art Deco Society at the Egyptian Theater. Then later we took a fun tour of the old Art Deco buildings and landmarks downtown. The guide kept on saying, “And, of course, once again, you see the ubiquitous zigzags” with every design he discussed, and we’d try to keep from laughing. Zigzags are elemental in Art Deco stylings. Once you know that, you notice them everywhere in L.A.

  Goddamn it, I miss her.

  I don’t know what to think. These tiny bits of communication, and now a text that, to me, recalls how connected we were, right? Intended to make me smile? It has—but what the hell? She’s clearly thinking of me. It can’t just have been a spontaneous accident of fondness, merely temporal. It’s a message. She’s warming up. Her resentment, or anger, or disappointment, or whatever it was might be softening. This is fantastic. And it’s funny. She still has a sense of humor about us. This is excellent. What should I do? Ubiquitous zigzags!

  12:30 PM

  I just texted her back. I did what either of us always used to do. I bounced the same words back. When we were together, these funny little things meant I love you and I love you, too. I sent it. “Ubiquitous zigzags.” It took me an hour and a half, but I did it. Excellent!

  3:30 PM

  Three hours and she hasn’t responded. I don’t know what the hell this is. Am I supposed to do something? What I do have to do is get myself together for the anesthesia group meeting at 5:00. I did somehow knock out some ideas to show them. Maybe I’ll be able to pocket some propofol on my way out.

  January 11, 5:00 PM

  Walking and feeding. No peeing or pooping. They are getting used to me and this routine. Not tugging at the leashes so much. Damn it, it’s a routine already. Nelson prances sometimes, both hind legs at once, then both front legs. Kind of cute. And he’s always sniffing, trying to sneak scraps that he finds into his mouth. I don’t let him. He allows me to grab his mouth and open it gently until whatever chicken bone or piece of fast-food wrapper he’s chewing on falls out. He looks straight into my eyes with a sense of guilt, being caught, but obedient. I tap him lightly on the nose, he grabs my finger with his teeth, and we shake on it.

  Still cleaning in kitchen.

  January 12, 9:20 AM

  Woke up early, and I realized that the dogs wake up pretty early, too. So, I went and fed them, cleaned a little more of a path. I may be able to walk in there without bags over my shoes soon. It smells so bad in the morning. The night holds the bacteria in a headlock until daybreak when it says uncle. And, of course, the dogs always leave me something to clean up. The 409 is surface cleaning, but it doesn’t do anything for the smell. How could it if it’s in the rugs, the furniture, every crack and crevice in the place? I got there early today, but they’d still already crapped in the living room. How early would I have to wake up to beat them to the pooping? I don’t feel like doing that, but cleaning up every morning is nothing to look forward to.

  January 13, 10:00 AM

  Still waiting to hear from that freelance agency. Makes for a long day, but my hopes are still up. I need work. People always say “Think positive.” So vacuous. How could any of my thoughts sitting here in my apartment affect the decision that the agency is making today or made yesterday or will make tomorrow? Vibrations or something that makes an impact. Is that how people and businesses make decisions—waiting for mysterious oscillations from miles away? What am I supposed to think positively about? Cleaning up after these two damn dogs every day, and breathing through a painter’s mask? Plus, my damn girlfriend broke up with me and won’t even talk to me outside of a two-word text. You have a good job, Sheriff. You have a pension, health benefits, etc. I’m sure that your wife finds a sense of security from that. I don’t even offer those things to myself, let alone to a mate. I promise that as soon as I find the positive thing to think about, I will try to think about that thing very positively. I’ll let you know.

  1:00 PM

  Fed the dogs. No word about Irene. Where would word come from? I’ve never seen a visitor over there.

  No word about work.

  2:30 PM

  OK, I found some positive things. Ready? I’m not in terrible health. Other than some facial rosacea that I have to medicate every day, and acid reflux disease, which I’m supposed to take a pill for every day, and prematurely graying hair, which I blame on Irene, my bad knee, the stupid shingles, and a family history of colon cancer and stroke, I have my health. I’m not bedridden, except when hungover, and I have all of my mental faculties—too many, even. So that’s positive. With the rosacea, in fact, I actually touched my face up with a little makeup before the meeting with the agency both to cover it up some, which I normally do, but also to try to hide the dark circles under my eyes from all the lack of sleep.

  It makes me feel self-conscious when I worry that someone would be able to see that I’m wearing foundation. I can’t stand the rosacea, and it’s worse when I’m stressed. But when I touched up the dark circles, I think it made the area under my eyes look too light, and I might’ve looked weird. But I felt I had to do it, because who wants to start to work with someone who looks like they were just dumped out of a coffin?
I used some tanning lotion, too, before the meeting. Because of the rosacea, I can’t spend any time in the sun without it getting really red and bubbling up a little bit.

  Another positive would be that I’m good at graphic design. My work is received well. Roxy thinks I’m great at it, wishes I didn’t hate it. About one in ten jobs are things that I actually enjoy thinking about and designing. I have no motivation or “dreams” invested in graphic designing, though. Every time the phone rings and it’s a new graphic design job, it’s another shovelful of dirt cleared to make my grave because it’s not the phone call or e-mail that I want. What is that call? I don’t even know anymore. It used to be a new manager, or a club, or a record company.

  Time has gone by so fast, I don’t know what I want. If I were a better businessman, an actual interested entrepreneur, then maybe I would pull in a little more business and some money would help me feel better. If I wasn’t driven crazy for so long by those dogs, I might have been able to figure things out these last couple of years, instead of just losing a girlfriend and work. And now I have to tend to these dogs a few times a day, so everything is interrupted, even the interruptions. But there—my graphic design work is another positive to think about today.

  Other than that, I think you’re supposed to think about the people who love you, be appreciative and grateful for that. My family loves me. None of them have expressed that they don’t. It’s not incorrect to go on under the assumption that family members begin with a love for you that must be sullied to be lost. My father and mother are gone. I’m not sure they count. In many ways it’s a positive that I don’t have to deal with my father anymore. A miserable man, made more miserable by those health complications. Worst part of that might have been that my mother left him before he got home from the hospital after the initial stroke. She’d had it, rightfully so, and wasn’t going to spend her late years caring for an uncaring man. I understand that now, but it devastated me at the time.

  Abandonment. More of it. Again. Bookended late in life. I fear that happening to me in my old age. What I’d thought about Roxy was an assurance that’d never be. But I won’t be my father. Not having to deal with him anymore is a burden lifted, so a positive, except that, genetically speaking, it pretty much spells out that I have a titanic stroke to look forward to.

  My siblings are spread out across the country. We’re not in very good touch, except Ally and me, so we’re able to avoid most conflicts. I don’t have the burden of kids’ birthday parties, or graduations and shit. It’s not that we don’t want to talk, I don’t think, but we each choose to play it safe and distant, less hearing and giving unsolicited advice and crap like that. The times when I do see people for weddings, etc., it remains relatively peaceful and polite until someone insinuates that I’ve thrown my life away—asks about retirement plans, IRAs, owning a house—and then I get pissed and drink more. But that doesn’t happen too often, so that’s a positive.

  There, I just put in a solid thirty minutes of thinking positive. That ought to do some good in “the universe.” The deranged people in Southern California say “the universe” more frequently than “hello” or “thank you.” Ally, too. Yes, I am cynical, or, I guess, specifically, becoming agnostic about there being a specific God who sees and hears all, who works miracles—yet at the same time allows people to suffer so—or who has never not given power to so few over so many. But I’m even more skeptical about a “universe”—something that is a chemical accident from millions of years ago, expanding beyond our knowledge of science and imagination—that somehow this nonhuman energy entity has power, thoughts, and an ability to affect our lives when we put thoughts and desires out “to” it. “Universe” people scoff at the idea of any God being omnipotent, but they just as easily pontificate that the “universe” is out there listening, acting, planning, and reacting. Where is this universe for me? Why is mine so tiny, pale, painful, so mired down in failure by these dogs and Irene? I would compare my universe to almost anyone else’s to show them that it—if it exists not just as an element of science—is not a friendly quasi-deity worthy of trust or admiration or hope. And yet I do pray once in a while.

  It’s a sunny afternoon. That’s a positive thing. I’m going to go over and check in on the dogs and walk them, because it would be “positive” for me to not have to clean up shit after them at dinnertime.

  January 15, 6:00 PM

  Two days walking and feeding. No appropriate peeing or pooing. Still cleaning. Nothing from Roxy. Nothing on work. Nothing on Irene.

  January 16, 10:35 AM

  When I went over there this morning, they’d already peed and pooped, and I was tired from bad dreams, so I just fed them and left. Why do I have so many dreams about Roxy? I dreamed that I could hear her on the phone having a teasingly sexy conversation with her new boyfriend, if she even has one, which I certainly don’t know. It was torture, yet I kept listening. Truly, since it was my dream, I was writing the dialogue for the two happy-faced new lovers. Why would I do that? Why can’t we control the content of our dreams? Ally told me to write the dreams down, which I’m not doing, but that one knifed me pretty good, so I guess I did just write it down.

  I know it’s part of the spontaneity of being human that we’re victims to the pounding subconscious for a third of our hours, but if someone could invent a way that we could guide our sleep-selves into joyous nighttime revelry, the increase of worldwide happiness would be exponential. There must be a pill. There are so many pills, antidepressants, anti-anxieties—why not thought-pills for the night?

  I don’t know what those dogs dream about. If Nelson or Lauren do have bad dreams, they couldn’t be worse than what they awaken to.

  I know that I said I’d walk them if I heard good news about any work, but I haven’t heard anything, and I’m sick of thinking about it, so I’m going to go over there anyhow.

  2:00 PM

  It finally happened—Lauren peed outside! So suddenly—and it seemed so simple. We were coming back down Hayworth from Romaine. I was frustrated as ever when she just stopped and peed against a wall. Didn’t sniff or anything. Then she looked up at me as I said, “Wow—good girl! Good girl! That’s what I’ve been insisting on all this time! You figured it out. Now you won’t have to go inside and be disgusting!” I don’t know if she gave a shit at all about what I was saying. Nelson stood there looking at us with his head tilted fifteen degrees and his tongue hanging out of the left side of his mouth. (That just started to happen. I think he lost a tooth.)

  January 17, 12:00 AM

  It’s midnight. I just got back after a late-night walk with them. A couple of weeks after I first moved in here Irene had a very bad black eye. She told me she had been mugged at 5:30 in the morning while on a long walk. She claims that she used to walk three miles every morning. Maybe she was talking about before the tumor. But the black eye was real, Casino saw it. Luckily, it was the eye she doesn’t use. She claimed that a guy tried to rob her at gunpoint and hit her in the face with the handle of a gun. She was only out there with the two dogs, no purse or anything. Seemed a strange story. I have a feeling now that she’d fallen, and it was a cover. I get that. I’ve seen her drive; I don’t think she has the ability to see or move in a straight line.

  It’s a long stretch between dinnertime and breakfast. Late at night, I feel like I can hear them breathing over there, looking up into the darkness wondering where Irene is, where their normal, as it were, life is.

  I walked them for the first time at night. They seem to appreciate the cool air against their faces. They trot, and I follow more than lead. Nothing comes of it. Even though Lauren had peed that one time, their habits are still the same. Failure.

  At least it gave me something to do. Plus, I put new bulbs in Irene’s front room light, the chandelier. So many days I just sit here waiting for Roxy to call, wondering why she isn’t. The way she said that “I love you, Richard” on the last day. It sounded like an accusation, as if it were something
that I wouldn’t understand—that she loved me more than I could imagine, and that imbalance consumed the joy in it all. Has that ever happened to you, Sheriff ? I think there should be a rule in breakups that if you are the one calling for it, you can’t tell the other person that you love them because that lingers for a long, long time. It might be unbreakable.

  Much better is to tell the person, “I don’t love you anymore, Richard.” If Roxy’d told me that, it would’ve hurt but helped me maybe.

  All these months we haven’t spoken. I didn’t know that Breakup Bags was going to be my only chance to tell her that I still loved her and that I wanted to work things out. And I’ve been waiting. Walking these stupid dogs gives me at least a distraction. The sad thing is, she was great with animals—as good as she was with the troubled kids at school. I wonder what she would’ve done in this situation. She wouldn’t have been able to stand the contamination at Irene’s, but I don’t think she would be able to look at the dogs in that pitiable situation and not do something about it. Plus, she loves to clean. Anyway, thinking about her has done me absolutely no good. Waiting for someone who is not going to come is a terrible, senseless, explainable anguish. But I can’t let go of what I thought our life was going to be—someday a house, laughter all the time, bottles of wine, stupid TV shows—tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. The way that it ended so suddenly has left all the days ahead of me empty.

  Then again, future-wise, I took out my retirement from my seven years of teaching to finance my album. Stupid. Gone.