#bull cyberpunk girl pink room

[iamnotthedog]

CHICAGO: NOVEMBER 20, 2012

I found a children’s book the other day. It was in a large leather trunk full of dusty old records and CDs being sold for a quarter a piece. The trunk had me contemplating currency inflation—having one of my now-daily panic attacks about the passage of time, and freaking out about how nothing costs a quarter anymore. I mean, you can get a nut or bolt at a hardware store, I guess. Pretty much nothing else. But at this random surplus shop on the north side—with its hip, just-dirty-enough twenty-something owners, its scratchy old albums playing through vintage Radiola speakers from the 1920s, and its entire kitchen furnished with 1960s appliances, dishware, and utensils—you can also choose from hundreds of subpar-to-terrible albums: The Spice Girls’ Forever, Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk, Dylan and the Dead, Billy Ray Cyrus’ Some Gave All, David Bowie’s Never Let Me Down, Christmas in the Stars: the Star Wars Christmas Album, The Rolling Stones’ Dirty Work, Milli Vanilli’s All or Nothing, Stevie Wonder’s Woman in Red, Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, Mariah Carey’s Glitter.

The children’s book was nestled between Oasis’s Standing on the Shoulders of Giants and Alanis Morissette’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. It was about ten inches tall and a foot wide, and it was thin—maybe thirty pages with a cardboard cover. The picture on the cover was a full-color drawing of an old dog sitting on a sidewalk in front of some evergreen bushes. He was some kind of adorable slate-colored Catahoula Leopard Dog mix with floppy ears, huge, icy blue eyes, and a long, skinny snout, and he was sitting facing forward, with his head tilted to the left and his ears cocked as if someone had just asked him, “Do you want a treat?” in that voice that dog owners use when trying to get a rise out of their precious little beasts. In an arch of yellow bubble letters over the dog’s head, the cover read, So Long, Buddy.

I stood there over that trunk of records, in the far corner of the back room of the store, under a big velvet painting of Abe Lincoln and some Mahogany-mounted deer antlers, and I read So Long, Buddy. The story goes something like this:

Buddy is a fourteen year-old dog who has been a part of the Smith family since he was a pup. The Smith family also has a boy named Charlie—a short and skinny six year-old with a mop of blonde hair and cheeks so rosy that it looks like he spends his mornings digging around in Mom’s makeup cabinet. Charlie has always known an existence with Buddy at his side. He knows nothing else. When the story begins, it is a blue Sunday morning at the scrambled egg-laden breakfast table, and Charlie has just been told by his obviously intelligent parents (who look like caricatures of the parents in the Happy Days sitcom from the ‘70s) that Buddy is going to go away tomorrow, and he is never coming back. When Charlie cries and asks, “Why?!” the parents don’t hide from the truth, or make up any fairy tales about there being a dog heaven and all of that kind of bullshit antiquated talk that I’m frankly quite sick of. No, Charlie’s parents tell him that Buddy has a heart, just like all of them, and that Buddy’s heart isn’t working so well, and is going to stop soon. But then, before the thought even crosses Charlie’s mind, they also assure him that THEIR hearts are still working GREAT, and so is his. It will be a long time before any of them have to go away forever, they tell him. And they tell him that this is a day for them to celebrate Buddy. They have set aside the whole day to do nothing but play with Buddy—to do all of his favorite things. Then, that evening, they will all have to say goodbye.

Charlie gets really upset, of course. He runs up to his room and dives face down onto his blue race car bed, where he cries into his pillow. But then Buddy comes upstairs and lies down with Charlie, and Charlie snuggles with him and asks him why he has to leave. Buddy licks his face, and Charlie wipes away his tears and laughs. Then Buddy rolls over on his back, and Charlie rubs his belly. This calms Charlie down, and his mom comes upstairs and helps Charlie puts his jacket and boots on, because they are all leaving to take Buddy to the park.

In the backseat of the car, Charlie pets Buddy and lets him climb over him to stick his nose out the window and sniff at the rush of air in his face, as first the city then a flowery countryside roll by in the window. Charlie has a memory of himself as a much younger boy, riding in the same backseat with Buddy. Buddy pulled off his little baby boots and licked his feet. Charlie also remembers the time he fed a whole cheeseburger to Buddy in the backseat, and then his dad got mad and yelled at him, but then said, “Well, we can’t have a full dog and a hungry boy!” and took them back to the drive-thru to get another cheeseburger for Charlie.

The whole family goes to the park and plays fetch with a stick for a while, and then they go to a river and it seems a lot warmer all of a sudden—there’s lots of sun and people are in short sleeves. Charlie was wearing a coat and boots before, remember? But it doesn’t matter. The story and images are still tugging at the ol’ heartstrings with all they’ve got. Then—after hours of playing, which we realize have passed because of the red sun lying low on the horizon—Buddy lays down in the green grass, and he looks tired, and Charlie can tell that he’s not feeling to good, and Charlie leaves his parents and walks over to Buddy and lays down next to him and tells him that it’s okay. That he’s been a great dog. And that he can go away now if it’ll make him feel better.

A couple nights after I read that book, Jim and I had just played a show, after which we went out for some drinks with a few friends from Schubas.1 We were in a 4 o’clock bar over on Western, just north of Belmont.2 Jim was talking to some of our friends from Schubas, and the band we had played with—three guys from Cleveland—were entertaining themselves by flirting with some women down at the other end of the bar, trying to find themselves some nice warm beds to sleep in for the night. I was watching the boys do their thing, reminiscing about the days when I used to spend nearly every night doing the same, and talking to a co-worker about dogs. I was drunk and, despite all the action that night, I was feeling a bit sad, as most people in 4 o’clock bars are most of the time. My co-worker, Kirsten, was telling me about her latest foster dog that she had taken in from the pit bull rescue shelter she volunteered for.

“He’s amazing. He’s really smart and loyal and nice and well-behaved. Such a sweet boy. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him,” she said. She was smiling, but looked like she wanted to cry, anyway. She put her face in her hands. “Not only does he need a home, but I need him to find a home. Having three dogs has already pretty much eliminated my chances of ever getting laid again,” she said. “I can’t keep taking more.”

I put down my empty bottle of beer and ordered another. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked. “Why was he given up in the first place?”

She lifted her face from her hands and sipped her pint. “Nothing is wrong with him,” she said. “He was born at the shelter. My dog Anna is actually his littermate—his sister. She was the runt of the litter. She looks just like him, but she’s half his size, and gray instead of blonde. So when I adopted Anna, I also volunteered to take him for the first three months. Then we found a woman to adopt him who we thought was going to be great, but she ended up being a total bitch.”

A huge man in a cigar-scented flannel shirt moved in between us and loudly ordered a Corona and four shots of Patron. I waited for him to get the drinks, pay, squeeze a lime into his beer, dole out the shots to a few perfume-soaked girls in low-cut dresses, propose a toast, clink glasses, take the shot, return the shot glasses to the bar, apologize to Kirsten, try starting a conversation with the bartender, and finally retreat when the bartender pretended not to hear him.

When he moved and Kirsten finally reappeared, I asked her, “What’d she do?”

“Who?”

“The woman.”

“Oh.” Kirsten sipped her pint again. “Well, the first thing she did was lose him. She lost him for a whole week. Then the shelter helped her find him, and then she went to San Francisco and left him with a friend for weeks, and when she got back he had an ear infection. Then after THAT, she took him to the vet with a broken toe. The vet asked, ‘How’d he break his toe?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t watching him.’”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. So finally, when the woman called the shelter and said she wanted to move into a condo that didn’t allow dogs, the shelter was like, ‘Great! Please give him back!’ None of us wanted her to have him any more. We want him to go to a home that will actually pay attention to him and love him so he doesn’t turn into a trouble dog.” 

I took another long pull from my beer and quickly ran through my income and monthly expenses in my head. “How old is he?” I asked.

Kirsten looked at me and smiled. “He’ll be a year old on December 10.”

And now I have a dog. He’s a sandy blonde American Staffordshire Terrier—fifty-seven pounds and twenty inches tall at the withers—with a white chest and throat, a pink belly, and white front paws up to the wrists. His entire body is solidly built, with a short, shiny coat and a well-defined musculature—he often reminds me of a horse in that you can literally see each muscle on his body, and his upper thighs and arms ripple like well-toned biceps when he gets worked up about something and starts pulling on his leash. His head is topped with floppy ears that pull backwards when he is excited, and it is broad at the skull—very broad—with a wrinkly forehead that makes it look like he’s always concerned about something. On either side of those wrinkles are large, bright eyes with copper-ringed, bluish-green irises. His round cheeks are each accented by one fluffy little bump with two long white whiskers coming from them. Between those big cheeks, his muzzle is about as long as a regular ol’ coffee cup is tall, and tipped with a pink nose that is always wet and cold. Two maybe three-inch long white whiskers hang down from his chin, giving him the air of Confucius (though I am possibly the only one that thinks this), and his huge mouth of evenly-spaced white teeth and pink everything else is always smiling when open, and locked in a tight, cute little frown under his floppy jowls when closed.

I named the dog Willie, which is a tribute to my uncle, who passed away back on May 28. Memorial Day. Uncle John was a Navy man—he had served as an electronic technician on two Western Pacific tours during the Vietnam War. He returned from the war to get married and have three handsome sons, then get divorced and spend the rest of his life working his ass off and drinking. A lot. Then he went and died alone in his apartment in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Memorial Day. Jim and Adam and I were attending a Memorial Day barbecue, and we were stuffed full of barbecued brisket and potato salad and macaroni and cheese and beer and happiness when Mom called and told us that Uncle John died alone in his living room, sitting in his favorite chair, watching Comedy Central on television.

Uncle John was Mom’s younger brother—only 64 years old. He was a father of three, a brother of six, an uncle to many, a husband, a son. He was also an electrician, a gardener, a freelance frog hunter, a golf caddy, and even a butcher for a time. But more impressive than all of those things were his skills at the almighty karaoke. Uncle John was an unabashed Willie Nelson fan, through and through. He had the hair to prove it. He had a big gray beard and this long, grayish brown hair that he would part down the middle and weave into two thick braids, and he would tie a red bandana around his head and let the braids fall over his shoulders and over his flannel shirt down to his belly. He would dress up in that outfit and go to karaoke nights at the local pubs to sing Willie Nelson songs, and he did it so much that he actually got a bit of a reputation around town—enough of a reputation that he was invited to sing a Willie Nelson song on public access television. They played that video in the middle of the night all over southeastern Wisconsin. And now Uncle John lives on forever not only in his three handsome young sons, but also in a video on YouTube in which he sings an off-key version of “Blue Skies” into a microphone with a hilariously stern look on his face, and a video of strippers and kabuki dancers spliced with stock scenic footage playing behind him as he croons his big ol’ heart out.

So my new dog’s name is Willie, and I think of Uncle John and his sad, beautiful life any time Willie does anything. And Willie does a lot of things. Willie snores in his sleep. He grunts like an old man, and sighs heavily when he lies down. He stretches in the Downward Dog yoga position until his back cracks, which I tell him might give him back problems one day, but he doesn’t care. He always wants to cuddle—to be touched, even if that touching is just his back pressing against your leg. If Willie starts out the night sleeping spread out on the floor or on a couch in the living room, he will nevertheless end it sleeping curled up like a cat at the foot of your bed, usually with his head resting in the crook of your ankle or knee. In the morning when you first begin to stir, he’ll work his way up from the foot of the bed—crawling slowly on his belly until his whole body is up by your head, where he will proceed to lick your face and push at your shoulders and back with his big paws.

When you are finally up and walking around and Willie has eaten his bowl of salmon kibble and wants to go outside, he will trot up to you, looking up at your face with those big, sad eyes of his, and he will reach out his right leg and put his paw on your shin. If you are brewing coffee or looking at your computer or brushing your teeth or doing anything else that is distracting you from him, he’ll try this paw-on-the-shin technique several times before he abandons it and begins jumping up to put both his paws on your midsection, pushing at you with all of his fifty-seven pounds.

When you get Willie’s harness down from the coat rack, he will sit until you drape it over his head, then stand so you can easily clip it under his arms. And when you grab his leash, he will already be at the door, wagging his tail and moving around, and it may be difficult for you to clip the leash to the harness because the poor guy is so excited, and now he really needs to pee. Or poo. Or smell another dog’s pee or poo. Or just run and pull and get out that energy that has been pent up in him for the past several hours, as he laid around and huffed and whimpered and chased rabbits in his sleep.

On walks, Willie will pull you from smell to smell, occasionally stopping to look back up at you over his left shoulder just to make sure you are having as much fun as he is. If it is raining, he will stop every half block or so to shake off the wetness. If it is cold, he will stop every block or so to shake off the cold, after which he will lift each paw, one at a time, off of the frozen pavement. He likes the smell of pine. He likes stuffing his nose down into the wider cracks in the sidewalk and sniffing and huffing and making a lot of noise. He also likes the rat that was hit by a car in the alley, and has now been frozen and thawed and run over and thawed and frozen again so many times that it no longer looks like a rat, or anything, for that matter. It has become a part of the pavement.

If you tug upwards on his leash when approaching a puddle, Willie will jump over it as if he’s been doing that his whole life. If you don’t tug upwards on his leash, Willie will walk directly through the puddle, splashing through the mud, and he’ll maybe even stoop to smell it or try taking a drink before you pull him away.

Willie knows the street that takes you south, down across Belmont and over to the dog park, and if your walk takes you by that street, he’ll try to pull you that direction. He always wants to go to the dog park. Sometimes you’ll give in, and you’ll walk him there and walk across the baseball diamond and past the tennis courts and you’ll stand inside that tall black fence in the frozen gravel, and the steam from your breath will fog up your glasses under your hood while he runs circles around the trees with the other dogs and sometimes chases the tennis ball you throw. Willie will never bring the ball all the way back to where you stand, but will try to make you take a few steps to get it, and when you bend over and are just about to pick it up, he’ll snatch it up in his jaws and run away with it. He’ll do this until you punish him by ignoring him, when he will finally approach you as if to say, “Okay, okay. You win.” So you’ll pat him on the head and throw the disgusting, drool-soaked ball for him again, and if another dog gets to it before he does, he’ll growl a bit, but his wagging tail will show that he’s really just messing around, and then he’ll wait for the other dog to drop the ball, when he will snatch it up and chase the other dog around for a while before stopping to smell his or her crotch and maybe trying to mount him or her and tighten up his muscular little butt cheeks for a good ten seconds of humping before you and/or the other dog’s owner can get yourself over there—both of you laughing—to pull them apart. And he’ll do all of this—the running, the sniffing, the humping—with that tennis ball in his mouth.

When your fingers are tingling with the cold and your feet hurt and it is time to go so you get Willie’s leash ready, he’ll see what’s coming and immediately run over to the one bench in the park, which he will lay under. He knows when it’s time to go, and he never wants to go. And he’ll work that tennis ball in his mouth—he’ll get it deep down in his throat where it will get covered with a thick lather of white spit—and to get him to drop it you’ll try saying “Drop it!” a good twenty times before you finally have to resort to tricking him into thinking that you are going to throw another ball, then quickly putting both balls where he can’t get them, clipping the leash on him, and getting him out from under the bench and out of the fenced area quickly and efficiently before he even realizes what you’ve done or has time to react. You’ll say, “Good boy!” and he’ll look up at you and smile with his tongue hanging out the left side of his mouth, and he’ll wag his tail, but really you know that he’s still just thinking of that damned ball—that standard, optic yellow tennis ball, approximately 6.7 centimeters in diameter, rubber, covered in that distinctive fluffy fibrous felt and soaked in dog spit. He loves that damned ball.

I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t thinking of old Bronco Bill and his good ol’ dog Kojak when I decided to adopt Willie. I mean, I was obviously also thinking of So Long, Buddy, which I had just read a couple days previous, and I was thinking of my family’s first dog, Aggie, and of my Uncle John dying alone while watching Comedy Central in his living room, and of the fact that I’m about to be alone again most of the time. But sitting there in that dark 4 o’clock bar, coming down from the adrenaline rush of playing a raucous and meaningless rock show, feeling sort of low and being presented with the idea of a companion to ride with me through the next fourteen-to-sixteen years or so, I can definitely say that I saw Bronco Bill’s face shining in those dashboard lights back in June of 2001, and I could smell the weed in the Chevy Cavalier and feel the sunburn on my neck and ears and the dirt in my socks, feel the intense loneliness and dreamlike sense of un-being, and I could hear Bronco Bill slap the dashboard—BOOM—and hear him say those words:

“And now, whenever I get worried about my health, I just put my hand on Kojak’s big ol’ chest, and I feel his weird, irregular heartbeat—the long spaces, the heavy pounds, the quick pumps—and I look into his eyes—calm as ever—and I think, ‘Shit, he’s not worried about anything. I’ve got nothin’ to be afraid of.’”

Jim and I formed a two-piece garage rock band when I moved to Chicago a little more than six years ago. Playing in a band with my big brother—my big brother who brought that first acoustic guitar into my life, and who was the first person to introduce me to music other than pop radio—playing in a band with him was actually one of my main motivations for moving to Chicago in the first place. I had a couple dozen songs that I had written over the course of the previous several years out in California, where I had been playing them in coffee shops and in front of friends on an old acoustic guitar—just for kicks, really. When I first came to Chicago and was crashing at Jim’s, I played him a few of the songs at an open mike at the Innertown Pub one night and he liked what he heard, so he came up with the idea that we should get me on an electric, turn it up loud, and he’d lay down some drums and we could play a few shows. Maybe record an album or two. Be a band. It’s been several years now, and we’ve worked the band into our routines. We practice once a week, play a show once a month, and record an album once a year. It’s a good release, and we keep it fun and relaxed because we have no delusions of grandeur. We don’t see fame or fortune in either of our futures. We just enjoy playing together. It gets us in a room with each other on a regular basis, and that is a good thing, because we genuinely like each other. ↩︎

Most of Chicago’s bars close at 2 o’clock Sunday through Friday and 3 o’clock on Saturday, but several stay open until 4 o’clock Sunday through Friday (and 5 o’clock on Saturday). These bars usually get very little business until all the other bars call last call at around 1:30, when they fill with drunks who just want to get drunker, kids that are high and only want to get higher, and lonely types making a last ditch effort at finding a one night stand. No one enters a 4 o’clock bar devoid of desire. Ever. There’s no reason to. ↩︎