A friend of mine was driving up from DC to NY and so she brought Burleigh up with her. I went to her apartment to pick him up. She had warned me that he seemed “stressed out.” I opened the door. This was not the dog I knew. Crazed and barking, he acted as if he didn’t even know me. As if the night we had shared together never even happened. I wanted to tell him, “Look, pal. YOU initiated it. YOU came into my room. YOU were the one with all the slick moves. The paw on the shoulder? One of your patented moves, perhaps?”
I brought him back to my apartment. Gradually, we warmed up to each other as the days and weeks went on. I hadn’t counted on the fact that although he was now getting the companionship I assumed every dog would want, he was extremely stressed about being in new surroundings. At his old home, he went for hours without an interaction, but I guess that’s how he knew life to be. At least his barking died down, and we went on plenty of long walks together since, like I said, I was a highly unemployed actor at the time. So what else was there to do? He woke me up at six thirty every morning to be fed. Then we’d have the morning walk, the midmorning walk, the long early afternooner, the prenight, and the bedtime walk. He showed a high interest in tracking pigeons and squirrels. As soon as we’d enter the park where these critters resided, he would get extremely excited, as if he was collecting points in a video game for each critter he could charge. At first he slept on the rug next to my bed, but he soon took his place on my bed and yes, quite soon after he moved in, we began sleeping together.
He wasn’t as connected as he had been back in Utah. He didn’t gaze into my eyes or spoon me. But he would follow me wherever I was going in the apartment and lie at my feet. I realized after we began living together, though, that Burleigh had two sides: the charming side that I saw when we first met and a dark side, the snarling beast that had greeted me at the door … the side I referred to as Cujo.
Most of the time when I’d come home, he’d happily run up to greet me, tail wagging. But every once in a while, I would be faced with Cujo. It was truly a Jekyll and Hyde situation. His entire physicality would change. I knew I was dealing with Cujo when I could see the whites of his eyes. That meant he was in crazy mode—disconnected, hyper, spazzy, feral—some vestigial behavior relating to unknown traumas before he landed in an animal shelter as a rescue. “Isn’t that so like me?” I thought. Once again I had managed to pick a bad boy with a complicated past who seemed really sweet and nice the first time we met and saved all his bad shit for after we were fully involved.
Then came the day I found out just how dark this Burleigh was….
I ran into my friend Jenny and we were going to hang somewhere near my apartment in the East Village. I just needed to walk the dog. “I love dogs! I’ll come with you to walk him!” Jenny is a sweet, wide-eyed dancer who had once done a reading of a musical with me. We arrived at my apartment and right away I saw … it’s Cujo time. Burleigh was crazed. He was jumping, he was barking like crazy. The whites of his eyes were gleaming in full effect. He was even nipping a bit. We took him out for a walk and he continued to behave like a madman. His barking was not dying down. I ran into a store, and while Jenny had the leash with him outside, he barked loudly nonstop. I came out of the store and we turned off of Houston onto First Street at First Ave. There’s a little park there with a wrought-iron fence. I was holding Burleigh’s leash pretty closely. “He’s not usually this crazy!” I said.
The following happened in a split second: Burleigh thrust his head under the wrought-iron fence in a whir. He emerged with lightning speed; in his jaws, he was holding a pigeon. It was like a city version of a National Geographic film, where out of nowhere the crocodile appears from the water and chomps down on an antelope; only this was the urban jungle and pigeons were the prey.
“Oh my God! He’s got a pigeon!” screamed Jenny. Burleigh had finally won his video game. I dropped my bags and was trying to pry his jaws open to free the struggling bird. A small crowd was watching. We were yelling, screaming, “BURLEIGH, NO!!” The pigeon’s wings were moving in Burleigh’s mouth. “There’s blood,” I said in the clinical voice of a trauma doctor. I was still trying to free the bird. Blood started dripping on the sidewalk. Burleigh would not let go, until finally he did. The pigeon was not quite dead. He was trying to lift his head and move a wing. When I have told this to my friends, some people say, “Well, who needs one more pigeon running around New York!” but I felt really bad for the bird. He was just minding his business in the park. He wasn’t even all dirty and scrawny. He was kind of pretty before Burleigh got ahold of him. When Burleigh dropped the bird, Jenny and I just stared at each other. Adrenaline was pumping, I was breathing hard, my hand covered with pigeon blood. I think both of our brains were trying to figure out how to go back in time two minutes and undo what had just happened. Seeing that bird futilely flailing on the sidewalk was a sickening sight for me, and even more so for Jenny, a strict vegetarian who doesn’t even eat fish, for humane reasons.
As we stood panting on the sidewalk, out emerged a sort of New York angel. We could have encountered anyone there—a scolder, a laugher, someone to make us feel bad. Instead, a woman came up to us who had seen the incident. She looked a bit like a New York hippie—a bit older than me. In a calm earth-mama voice, she said, “They’re animals. That’s just their nature. It’s what they do. I know it’s traumatic to see, but that’s just what they do.” “Thank you. You’re really nice,” I said.
I have to confess, I did not look back to see what was up with the bird. I hoped it had died by then for its own sake, but I knew if it hadn’t, I didn’t have a pioneer woman living inside me who would pick up a brick to do a mercy killing. I’m not a manly woman. I just play them on TV.
We walked the fifteen blocks back to my apartment. Jenny had a large, long spot of pigeon blood on her new jeans. My hand was still covered in it as well. We got to my apartment and without many words, I went into repair mode. We sat on my porch. I robotically brought my speakers out there and flipped immediately to Joni Mitchell and poured some wine as emergency medication.
And there was Burleigh. Now that he had satisfied his quest for blood, he had reverted out of Cujo mode and lay at my feet like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. He was calm. He was sweet. What was it with this guy? He could not be controlled! Completely unpredictable! One minute causing me extreme anxiety and distress, the next, a damn dreamboat. I had sworn this inconsistent energy out of my life. IT’S NOT GOOD FOR ME. You hear that, mister? You aren’t good for me!! I can’t take the chaos!
That night, Burleigh went to assume his sleeping position in my bed.
“No!” I said. “I cannot sleep with you tonight, Burleigh. Your violent tendencies are a reeeal turnoff.”
Turns out the decision to keep Burleigh around or send him packing was not mine to make. My assumption that Ida might want to unload him on me turned out to be wrong.
Another friend of Ida’s came to pick him up to bring him back to DC. In the moment, I was sad to see him go. I sure wouldn’t miss waking up at six thirty A.M. to feed him, but I would miss him settling his head onto my leg when I was lying on the floor watching TV.
I felt bad about the way we said good-bye. One minute he was lying on my bedroom rug next to me, and the next I got the call that the pickup was here. I put on his leash, trying to convey the meaning: This isn’t just an ordinary walk; this is good-bye! Needless to say, he didn’t get it. When we got to the car, he eagerly jumped into the back. This girl didn’t know what she was in for. I had taken him on several car rides, and he had barked ferociously and incessantly for four hours. I tried to warn her. “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” she said. “Um … yeah. I don’t know,” I said in a high, falsely optimistic voice. I handed her a bottle of wine. “Here. You might need this when you get home.”
I went back into my apartment. It had an empty feeling. The only reminder of Burleigh was the mountains and mountains of black fur that were all over my floors and bed. Coun
tless Swifferings brought him back into my life in the weeks to follow. I guess I wasn’t cut out for dog ownership, at least on my own. I hadn’t taken into account that when we had my childhood dog, there were four of us to take care of her. I imagined having a dog would enhance my life: There I am, coming home from a night out, being greeted by the ol’ lovebug! Oh! Now I’m hanging out at the dog park, talking to the cute guy with the boxer after our leashes get tangled! Now I’m on the beach on Cape Cod, tossin’ Burleigh the tennis ball! In actuality, Burleigh tied me to my apartment much more than I would have liked, because I felt too guilty leaving him alone for any length of time.
Here’s a secret: I had to admit to myself that somewhere deep inside, I was looking at this experiment in dog ownership as practice for “What if I ever wanted to have a baby on my own?” I would never have voiced this to a soul, but it was a tiny thought in my head. I mean, the dating wasn’t working out—and I was in my early forties. I had to think about these things, though I seldom did. Was the fact that I was relieved to unload Burleigh back on his owners proof that I was too focused on myself to care for another being? Did I care more about hanging out with the funniest of friends and comedians over a bottle of Montepulciano and a bowl of tagliatelle Bolognese than I did about nurturing a tiny human life? (I’m talking delicious and expertly made tagliatelle Bolognese, so take that into account.)
It was a distinct possibility.
Attack of the Tiny Pants
I never liked going to baby showers. Here are people who like baby showers: women in their twenties, grandmas-to-be, people who already have babies, people who love to look at Stuff. These are the Shower People.
Here are people who hate baby showers: women in their late thirties to early forties who think they might want kids but haven’t met the right guy yet, aka me. Also people who don’t like looking at Stuff and having to pass it around and say, “Ohhhhhh! It’s a shirt! Only it’s a tiny shirt!” or “Ohhhhhh! It’s pants! Only they’re tiny!” aka me. This deadly combo made me really have to steel myself to go to a baby shower.
Back when I was on SNL, I went to one very fancy shower that took place on my one day off, a precious Sunday afternoon. The guest of honor was about an hour and a half late, so all the small talk had been small-talked. It was a huge shower and there was a mountain of gifts. And this mom-to-be was going SLOWWWLY. When the first item was opened and about fifteen minutes was spent slowly passing it around, with everyone commenting on it, I felt a wave of rising panic set in. I looked at the mountain of gifts. Let’s see, fifteen minutes per gift times what looks to be fifty gifts. Oh my God! I could be here for five hours. And I was.
This was when I still had “plenty of time” to have a baby, before I hit my forties and my own personal panic that I might never have a child was thrown in for good measure. This was just my Anti-Shower Baseline.
In addition to the mini clothes and smiling stuffed animals, there was also this category with which to contend: things you’ve never heard of and have no idea what they do that start a big discussion among the mommies in the group. I would sit quietly as a chorus of mommies oooed and aaahhed over things I didn’t even know existed.
“Ohhhhhh! Yes. You’re going to NEED that.”
“The Nipple Prepper. I used it all the time.”
“I would have been LOST without the Nipple Prepper.”
“YOU NEED TO HAVE THE NIPPLE PREPPER!”
Next gift. A Red Tent howl of excitement rises up among the mommies.
“Aghhhhh! Yes! The Swaddling Wizard. Oh my God! That was invaluable to me when I had Maddie.”
“You cannot LIVE without the Swaddling Wizard.”
“The doctor told me if I hadn’t used the Swaddling Wizard, Logan would have ended up on the spectrum.”
Next gift … Tiny Dress. AHHHHH! AWWWW! NOOO! OHHHHHH! OOOOOOOH! HOLY FUCKING SHIT! IT’S A DRESS BUT IT’S TINY! IT HAS A DAMN BEAR ON IT! WOOOOOOAAAAAHHHH!
These showers were getting tougher for me with the increasing realization that I would probably not be having kids, but when I was invited to a baby shower for some of my best friends, David and Russell, I wouldn’t have dreamed of missing it. David was one of the Dartmouth in-the-closet-during-school-out-after-graduation crowd. David and Russell met right after David had graduated college. They had been together for twenty-plus years and they had just adopted a baby, so this shower took place after little Sadie had been born. The shower was coed, which made it easier (cuts down on the ooo-aaahh factor by quite a bit). While I was there, I bumped into a college classmate whom I knew enough to greet but not enough to do any serious cooing over the new baby he was holding.
“Hi! Who’s this?” I said halfheartedly.
“This is Sam. He’s six weeks old.”
“Awwww,” I said, like the trained monkey I had become when looking at babies to whom I have no connection. Sam produced a smile.
“Oh, just look at him,” says new dad. “Is there anything better than this?”
And congratulations! Ding Ding Ding!! (Balloon drop/confetti) You have just won the contest of “Things not to say to a forty-two-year-old single woman who is spending her Sunday afternoon at a baby shower.” Is there anything better than this? No. That’s what I keep hearing over and over again and that’s what I’m “missing out on” and the whole world has babies and it’s the life experience and if you don’t have it, YOU SHOULDN’T EVEN BOTHER TO LIVE BECAUSE THERE ISN’T ANYTHING BETTER THAN THIS AND OH! IT’S TIME TO GATHER ’ROUND AND LOOK AT TINY PANTS!
I just wasn’t one of those women who would want to have a child on her own. I knew I wasn’t cut out for the sperm bank or solo adoption. Motherhood was something I had always imagined for myself, but I didn’t think of myself as a “baby person,” the first one to say “Ohhhhhh! Can I hold your babyyyy?” when a friend had a child. If I found a partner, yes, I definitely wanted kids. But here I was at forty, forty-one, forty-two, now forty-three. I kept moving up the window of fertility and possibility, trying to block out the statistics with which I was bombarded, but to be realistic, I started to adjust to the fact that I wasn’t having kids. I was trying genuinely and oh so gradually to become OK with that; I had to focus on the benefits of my life. Some friends’ marriages were beginning to crumble and other friends were completely consumed with shuttling to soccer games and swim meets, while in my jet-set lifestyle, I was flying off to the Caribbean for a last-minute getaway or to Burning Man to see old-man dicks.
Sure, I’d still have mornings where I’d wake up thinking, “Wow. I may be alone forever and never have a family. I may miss out on a really big LIFE THING,” which could create a rising panic in me. But for the most part, I realized that as we grow older, we adjust and roll with what we have in the present, though it may not be the future we had dreamed up for ourselves in the past. I was forty-three years old and I was actually seeing the benefits of not having kids and was accepting my fate after all those years of struggling.
Then, I met a guy in a bar.
Girl Walks into a Bar
On a Sunday night at the beginning of summer in New York City, I went out with my friend Lisa. Lisa is a total New York City character, the unofficial mayor of the Lower East Side. I met her back when she was the bartender at my favorite New York restaurant, and we eventually struck up a friendship. She is brash and loud at times, but she also has a surprising wisdom about human behavior, like a stereotypical bartender you’d see in a movie. Lisa has long black hair and a complexion so pale it tips the fact that she rarely ventures out in daytime. She knows her wine very well, maybe too well, in fact. The woman likes to drink. I remember one time she said she was giving up drinking.
“You are?” I said, totally shocked.
“Yeah,” she said in complete seriousness, “I’m only drinking white wine.”
Lisa is also best kept in the ten-block radius of her neighborhood. One of the only times we lured her out of her turf, she came to see the live show of SNL. At the after
-party, she approached Dennis Haysbert, who had done a guest spot on the show. He is perhaps best known as the Allstate Insurance guy, though also a legit actor whom I knew of from the movie Far from Heaven. Lisa started talking to him and cornered the guy for about twenty minutes. He was completely gracious about it, but from then on, we realized we had to be careful when we took Lisa out of her usual society of ne’er-do-wells and oddballs. “I’m inviting Lisa to this party,” I’d say to Daisy. “But keep an eye on her and don’t let her Haysbert anyone.”
Lisa was pretty much always up for going out on the town at a moment’s notice. She is gay and practically the only person with whom I manage to meet guys, because she literally forces me to talk to them whether I want to or not. She usually facilitates conversation, then ditches me with the guy, often someone I have no interest in speaking with, saying, “I’LL JUST LEAVE YOU TWO TO GET BETTER ACQUAINTED!” or some other subtle phrase such as that. When I don’t feel like chatting up strangers and I try to object, Lisa will usually come back at with me a loud “Step away from the lesbian!”
This particular night, I suggested we go to Zum Schneider, a fun outdoor beer joint that’s conveniently located near her apartment, but to my surprise she texted back, “Let’s go to Shoolbred’s,” a bar near my apartment. So I met her at Shoolbred’s. We sat outside, but the waiter was taking a really long time to come out and take our order that night, so I went in to order for us at the bar. I walked up to the bar, and a man standing next to me turned to me and said, “Hey, we’re about to order absinthe. Have you ever tried it?”
“Uch! Don’t do it!” I said. “That stuff is disgusting!”
The only other time I had tried absinthe was with Horsemeat, and we all know how that one turned out. I talked to Absinthe Man, whose name I learned was John, while I waited for my order. He told me he worked for a wine company and was in New York on business for a food show. He was there with his niece and her boyfriend, who lived across the street. He was from Northern California, which was a strange coincidence because a mere three days before, I had gotten desperate enough to start browsing on Match.com. Oh, I wasn’t bold enough to take action or ever create a profile. I was just window-shopping. I checked out the New York offerings and couldn’t imagine myself with any of them. I thought of the guys in Northern California—how I always find cute guys there with varied interests who are so much more down-to-earth than New York actors I had encountered. So a mere three days before I met John, I had been looking at Match.com San Francisco, and now here I was meeting a handsome, friendly, funny guy from the Bay Area. Universe??
Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle Page 11