Have Dog, Will Travel

by Stephen Kuusisto

  Of course I wanted to say: “How does Mozart help you?” “Is music finally anything more than cultivated time?”

  But I answered their questions.

  “No!” said a woman who wrote librettos, “the dog waits for you to decide when to cross the street?!”

  She couldn’t believe it. She seemed put out. A myth had been ruined for her. My guide dog was supposed to be smarter than me.

  “It’s actually a kind of deep faith,” I said. “A dog won’t do anything dangerous or take action that defies its best instinct.”

  “So?” she said. The information was somehow disappointing to her.

  “It’s simple, really,” I said. “Corky won’t step into harm’s way. And she doesn’t know where we’re going. That’s my job. Which means I have to study always—ask questions—know where I am. Moreover, my job is to trust people. Talk with strangers. If you like, my job is to dare to be in the world.”

  I went on: “And over time your dog loves you and you love her. Then something very interesting happens. ‘You realize that behind the love is a person who hasn’t given up. Who still walks about in his nail-studded boots and laughs because of love.’ You understand your dog loves that person.”

  “That’s a Labrador,” I thought, “trained to guide me in traffic she admires a man who is both improbable and true.” This I did not say. One should never reveal all his secrets.

  * * *

  It wasn’t easy, this able-bodied people’s disability complex. “Complex” was Carl Jung’s term, and in psychoanalysis it means a core pattern of emotions, memories, and perceptions which are hidden from the conscious mind—buried traumas and the like. Disability bothered people or some of them. It was understandable. Disabled characters in drama and literature are invidious and often spell trouble. Maybe the disabled are vaguely dishonest. A woman who lived on the grounds of the MacDowell Colony—who wasn’t an artist per se but had a house that was grandfathered in to the larger property—told employees I was faking my blindness because she saw me walking with Corky on a leash in the woods. That a guide dog sometimes gets “leash time” hadn’t occurred to her. In her view I was cheating the system, bringing a pet into her domain.

  It was genuinely hard thinking about that woman. Contemplating her pettiness was like having a toothache in the soul. I was in the world but ineluctably separate, and if I was going to live without rancor or self-pity I’d have to become more philosophical. One afternoon I wrote a poem for Corky:

  Running to the Wood

  My dog, trained for the blind,

  Sees Rorschachs of wings.

  Vows of light, tongueless stones

  Call her to the door.

  All gods are avatars of width.

  They dance a bone dance

  Down the centuries of June.

  Dispensed by mists, I’m lonely too.

  The Roman gravity of our lives is inconsolable.

  * * *

  I thought of the gray flocks of people who don’t understand disabilities, all those citizens with their own wounds. “The last line of my poem was probably wrong,” I thought. Our lives, my dog’s and mine, were not fated to suffer dark, supernatural storms like the characters in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Just get out of the cabin and take a walk, I told myself. And we did.

  * * *

  We decided to go into the nearby town. Peterborough was one mile distant and the route required us to travel on roads without sidewalks. Corky had been trained in “shore lining,” a technique to keep us on the shoulder of the road. We were moving at a fast clip when she pulled me into a ditch as a car raced past, just missing us. The driver didn’t stop. I sat in the pine needles and weeds and cried. The tears came in racking spasms. They’d been long suppressed. I was crying in response to Corky’s great, life-saving maneuver and also because life was precious and so very fragile. Corky licked my tears and after a time we walked the rest of the way into town.

  We walked up and down the streets of Peterborough. “I am not who I used to be,” I thought as we passed the old Congregationalist church. “I’m Corky’s accomplishment. So that is really something.”

  I was talking to myself. Outside a hardware store a woman said, “Are you all right?”

  I said I was all right.

  * * *

  Back in our cabin I translated a poem from Finnish, which contained the lines: “sometimes I see a child / see in him what I was like / and I want to say I’m sorry.”

  Corky lay beside the open door scenting the breeze. We sat side by side in the growing dusk. Wind stirred the maples.

  Our companionship was intimate and richer than poems.

  With every walk she found dancing leaves or raindrops, lizards, flowers. And me? I profited, standing in the grass, knowing of my smallness in the scheme of things—and it all felt good.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Though I still didn’t have a job I had a vigorous life. Back in Ithaca I took Corky to the lake for a swim.

  I thought I might work harder at becoming good-natured.

  “Be kind,” said Plato, “for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”

  On the Ithaca Commons a very old man reached out to pat Corky. My first instinct was to reprimand him, but then I saw he was seriously ill. He said something I didn’t understand. He was momentarily happy. “Labrador,” he said. I let him pat her for at least five minutes.

  Corky made me sit the emotional curve of slow.

  She walked me down a path among hedges and I felt perfect.

  If some mornings I’d dark dreams still on my mind, she put shoes in my hands. If I was at a meeting with unkind people, she’d put her paw on my foot, feeling my distress from under the table.

  Dogs do these things for nothing. They don’t say: “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

  Canine empathy doesn’t require scales like those held aloft by the goddess of justice. A dog’s life is composed minutely of balanced curiosities.

  * * *

  Many books about service animals suggest they heal wounded people, but this is a bit of a misrepresentation. Disabilities never vanish. What a dog can do is entice you back into the world. That’s how a dog thinks of it.

  I got it. I was not my dog. My ideas about her were sprinkled over us like a garnish but her instincts, always in my service, were hers.

  I knew she loved me but recognized her affection was unrestrainedly alien. Human love is always balloonish, sentimental, but a dog’s—well, it’s primal, with a pulse, steady. She’s asked you in, given you parts of her heart. Some energies she keeps. And her life isn’t given to cosseted, overindulgent sweet talk, though she likes it well enough. The mysteries of her love and fast intelligence will never be knowable. I learned to like this as she guided me through streets I couldn’t see.

  * * *

  Meanwhile the blind kid still wanted to be liked beyond reason. I felt the highs and lows of service-dog life more keenly than was reasonable. Childhood’s demand that I act sighted meant I could easily substitute newer fixations—I imagined for instance I had to be the best guide-dog user ever. I thought I should live so perfectly I’d surpass all others in my appreciation of guide-dog life. Oh and I’d never make mistakes, either in my dog handling or my relations with the public. Of course no one can live like this.

  “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance,” said Confucius. Blind wisdom was grasping what I didn’t know, the upside of restriction. “All right,” I said, “let’s say successful people with disabilities are routinely tested by adversity and in lieu of being bitter (like the classic American victim who appears on TV talk shows) they say instead, we know nothing with the body is what it seems. Wouldn’t that be proper conviction?”

  * * *

  The folk singer Greg Brown has a song with the lines: “you come to me with too much laughter / and I teach you how to smile.” The song felt true. I didn’t want to be so enthusiastic about dog life that I’d p
retend by word or deed service dogs are a panacea. In rhetoric there’s a term—“proleptic,” which means, “the anticipation of possible objections in order to answer them in advance.” Living with a guide dog necessitates both knowing and rehearsing how you’ll respond to various types of opposition. You’re called upon to imagine the bad moments when your difference will be the focus of public attention. My first true experience of this—or the first time I had to put it in action—was in Manhattan. I walked into a large computer store on Sixth Avenue. I wanted to purchase a laptop. As we pushed through the door a security guard put his hand on my chest. “You no come in, no dog,” he said.

  I pressed forward and the guard stepped back. “Stop! Stop!” he shouted and waved his arms. Customers stared. My civil rights and the security guard’s dignity were equally delicate. I didn’t know where the guard came from, but his accent sounded East African. How could he possibly know anything about guide dogs? The store’s manager hadn’t given him information. All he knew was “no dogs allowed,” and there I was with a big-assed dog. As we stood in the doorway I figured it would be my job to foster dignity for both of us. They hadn’t taught me this at Guiding Eyes; they’d given me a booklet with access laws—a useful thing—I had the right to go anywhere the public went—but no one had mentioned emotional intelligence or how to engage in public mediation.

  I made Corky sit. “Listen,” I said, softly, “get the manager. This will be okay. This is a special dog for the blind.” I wanted to turn our misunderstanding into something respectful.

  The manager was one of those guys you see all the time in big-city stores: sadder than his customers, red-faced and put-upon. He had a scoured toughness. He approached and began shouting at the guard. “It’s a seeing-eye dog for God’s sake! Let him in! Sorry, sorry!”

  My fight-or-flee rush was subsiding—I wanted all three of us to experience kindness.

  I was in a Manhattan electronics store and dignity was in peril. It would have been easy to say “Fuck it” and look out for myself alone. I’d gotten into the store. I was angry. I could have pitched a fit. But I didn’t feel like doing that. The guard’s name was Ekwueme. My name was Stephen. The manager’s name was Phil. “Listen,” I said, “dogs for the blind are not common, you don’t see them every day. This is Corky. She’s very smart.” I let my voice become soft. Ekwueme and Phil both petted Corky. A customer approached, said: “I’ve raised puppies for the guide-dog school! Best dogs in the world!” Phil seemed suddenly pleased, as if he too was philanthropic, or could be someday. Ekwueme admitted he loved dogs.

  Outside with a computer under my arm, I reckoned life with Corky was more complex than just a story of freedom. Ekwueme and Phil would become legion in my travels but I didn’t know it yet. What I did know was reflected in a quote I’d always liked from Martin Luther King Jr.: “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

  I sensed that having a service dog meant something more than honoring my own rights. “Take the first step in faith,” said Dr. King. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

  * * *

  Even in the middle of the night Corky was ready for adventure. I felt the lure of the all-night drugstore and we headed through the half-sinister streets of Ithaca in search of vitamins, Mars bars, bubble bath, a styptic pencil. But we were really walking just for the sake of walking. There were no goods we needed to buy.

  We entered the twenty-four-hour pharmacy. I swiveled my hips, turning my back to the opened door, to make sure it wouldn’t close on Corky’s tail, performing the maneuver just as the guide-dog school had taught me. Always protect the tail. Then we were across the threshold, standing in the unforgiving fluorescent light of an average drugstore amid the soaps and ten thousand plastic bottles. Pastel shades assaulted me; there were the odors of newsprint and nail polish. We went up and down the aisles. I didn’t want anything. And yet what a curious thing! I liked doing this—just being in a common spot with its useless products was a sort of empiricism. I was awake and grateful in a vulgar commercial space and though I couldn’t properly see the products, I toured every corner of the store while praising Corky. No one spoke to me. There were three or four other customers and one cashier. I circled and left.

  “You see?” I said, “you’ve taught me to relish easy things Corky, just a few turns around a drugstore.”

  “Our life ahead,” I thought, “would be about moments of common release—not climbing the Alps but walking an ordinary Walgreens.”

  It was nice doing what other people did when they couldn’t sleep.

  Chapter Twenty

  Anyone who’s waited a long time for a job knows the thoughts you live with. You’ll never find another job. Unemployment symbolizes something truly unsavory about you. Even the grass knows it. The supermarket cashier knows you’re defective as you give her your food stamps. You’ll always be this way. Even sunlight knows you’ll never succeed.

  Pushing back is hard. You know you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. So what if you feel mummified? You write between the lines, try to forget pessimism. Not everything is how it appears. I kept telling myself these things.

  After fourteen months with Corky I received a telephone call alerting me I was a finalist for a job at Guiding Eyes. On a whim, with no expectation of success, I’d applied for the position of alumni director. I’d imagined they wouldn’t be interested in me. For one thing I was still a new guide-dog user who scarcely knew Braille—a necessity for communicating with many blind graduates. Also I hadn’t lived through the heartbreak of losing a guide dog, a tragic inevitability in the life of every guide-dog user. I could hardly imagine the pain of such a thing. Who could be strong enough for that? What would happen when the day came to say goodbye to Corky? I’d be reduced to jelly. Finally, I didn’t know as much about disability as I thought I should. There were agencies across the country that helped people get back on their feet and I was clueless about them.

  In the end they liked me because I was a seasoned public speaker. The president and CEO at the time was a former Manhattan business executive named Bill Badger. Bill was warm and encouraging when I recited what I believed were my drawbacks. “We need someone who can hit the road and talk about what we do,” he said. “I think you can help us tell our story.”

  A man who hadn’t known how to walk unfamiliar streets would now find himself in all kinds of places. A superlative village had made this possible, from the kennel staff at Guiding Eyes to puppy raisers; from orientation and mobility professionals to dog trainers. I’d met intensely giving people, those who love dogs and human beings equally. I hadn’t met many folks like them before training with Corky. But I knew a good thing when it hit me. In this way I was actually like a trusting dog. I possessed what dog trainers call “recoverability” and realized, owing to all these folks and my dog, I’d never be the same. I’d be more open. I wouldn’t be afraid to visit new places. “How,” I thought, “can life change so quickly?”

  The answer had much to do with the 1990s. Disability culture was blossoming in the wake of the newly ratified Americans with Disabilities Act. Writers and scholars were talking about disability studies—a field where bodily defects were seen to be less significant than long-standing cultural attitudes about them. We were not defective people or “broken” patients, but citizens whose differences are central to society. Along with many writers (whom I later came to know personally) I started addressing disability in my work. Like others I felt discomfort with the way disability is used as a metaphor both in literature and in common language. I read and reread Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and began thinking about blindness and figurative language.

  Vision loss is always symbolized as abjection, monstrosity, blankness, or death—or it grants compensatory powers of divination, intuition, spiritual grace—neither of which has much to do with real blindness. W
ith Corky sleeping under my desk I started writing abstruse prose about blindness and symbolism, and it dawned on me I should write something based on my childhood experiences. This approach eventually led me to write my first book, a memoir entitled Planet of the Blind.

  I set out with Corky on a new passage. I did know one or two things. For instance, losing my provincial teaching job had been a gift—or if not precisely a gift, a forced chance to try something new. How elementary it really had been. They’d sacked me and I’d learned how to walk.

  * * *

  I was leaving secure little Ithaca, New York, for suburban New York. Going through cardboard boxes and old letters I had to admit what a long road I’d been on. Fingering an old set of house keys, I thought of the time I almost died as a teenager—not from blindness but depression. At seventeen I stopped eating. I was gravely ill. On the advice of our family doctor (who was concerned but hapless) my parents shipped me to a psychiatric facility in Rochester, New York, an hour’s drive from our house, where again no one could unravel my problem. A psychiatrist (who actually had a gray beard) asked if the rawhide lanyard I wore around my neck was a fetish and I knew he was a fool. It was how I wore my house key—a matter any child of alcoholics would understand.

  My week in the institute did nothing save that it proved how badly we treat people in advanced suffering. My roommate was an old Ukrainian man covered head to toe with scars. He wept openly. Occasionally he’d ask me to look at him. I’d shuffle over to his bedside and he’d raise his gown and point out his map of scars—most, if not all of them, self-inflicted. He spoke no English.