I was back at the house by six, getting ready to receive my family of four. They arrived out back in their German car, and I saw the profiles of two adults in stately posture up front and two bashful little smiling faces in the back seat window staring at me. The wife was driving and she got out first, followed by her husband. She came around to greet me while he opened the back door to let the children out. I met her at the trunk, which she popped open with the remote control in her hand.
“Hi,” I said, “welcome.” I gave her my hand to shake and she took it limply. She tucked the sleeve of her blouse back up the arm of her jacket as soon as I dropped her hand. I also said hi to the husband, but he didn’t seem to hear me. The children were grabbing onto his legs; the girl was sucking a lollipop.
“Mmmm, that looks good,” I said to her. She smiled and said yes it was. “Where’s your big green lollipop?” I asked her brother. The boy giggled. I put him at about four years old, the girl maybe a year older. I returned my attention to their mother and began taking the luggage she removed from the trunk.
“I’ll take your luggage through the back door here where I have my apartment,” I said, “and then I’ll meet you up at the front door. The entrance is just around the corner and up a flight of stairs.”
“We walk down the sidewalk and it’s left at the corner?” she asked to make sure.
“Yes, I’ll meet you at the front door.” I took their considerable luggage, quite heavy, and banged my way from the back door to the front. The doorbell rang impatiently three times and as I opened the door, I saw that he was about to do it again.
“Ok, all ready now, come on in.” They entered in single file, the father guiding the children to the couch where he sat himself as though upon a throne.
“Now, do you all speak English?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, fluently,” the wife answered. The children smiled and nodded.
The family was from one of those countries whose governments like to do things for their people but not with them and who are supposedly doing a lot to help defeat terrorism but never find the time to explain why so many terrorists carry their passports.
At this point, I couldn’t help notice that the husband hadn’t once looked me in the eye. It would soon be obvious that he was unwilling to speak directly to me, and would do so only through the intermediary of his wife. He was so unwilling to acknowledge my existence that I thought he was perhaps a tenant from next door who had wandered in here by mistake.
The children were adorable, a beautiful shade of brown with big eyes and impeccable manners, yet silly and mischievous as small children should be. I’m sure the father would remedy that soon enough. Their social skills being slightly more mature than their father’s, I chatted with them while their mother did the drudgery of filling out the registration card and soiling her hands with the money.
I usually don’t throw superlatives around, but the husband was a perfect ass. He had this exaggerated arrogance that I’ve observed before in certain men from third world countries where apparently I would be forbidden by law to address them or look at any part of their persons besides their feet. They probably see me as someone whom in their own countries they would feed slowly to their pet crocodiles for amusement.
The husband said something in another language to his wife, she then asked me where a toilet was for him to use. Well, two can play this game of disdain and I had made up my mind never once to address or look at him again. I looked her in the eye and motioned over to the bathroom door in the hallway. She relayed this information to her husband and he repaired to the john; I half expected her to follow him in order to pull out his penis and point it for him so he wouldn’t have to touch it, but no, he managed to do the dirty work himself. I couldn’t help but be amused at his conduct so I stepped just outside the ‘customer is always right’ comfort zone to ask his wife, “Is he always like this?” Her face reddened and then she looked me in the eye and with quiet, despondent rage, said “Yes.” And she continued holding my eye, which made me hopeful that there was a revolution brewing back home.
Domestic petty grievances
After settling them in their rooms, I called Tipton to give him their credit card number to process and to let him know they were checked in and reasonably happy, all things considered. I informed him that since Celestine hadn’t returned yet I was getting out while the getting was good. I had restlessly decided on a far, brisk walk to the Marina and told him so.
“You’re going to the Marina!?” he said breathlessly, “Oh, that’s wonderful. I haven’t checked in on Bruno yet and I’m not sure when I can get over there. Could you just poke in on him?”
Tip had begun a dog sitting/walking service (‘Pooch Smooch’ was its working title) to supplement his reduced income from his sparse hotel bookings. I helped him out when he needed it and we’d talked about my taking on the business as his partner. I’d begun sniffing around for clients of my own to bring in; that was the deal we had agreed on before I got a stake in the company. Tip wanted to see how hungry I was.
“Yeah, I can do that, but how would I get in without a key?”
“I’ll call the landlady, she lives on the first floor and she knows me. She’s always there; she can let you in. You just need to give him some water, take him for a good walk, you should run with him a bit too – he needs to run every day – and then give him some treats when you’re back at the house. This is a very important doggy account.”
“That’s a little bit more than poking in on him, but I think I can manage.”
“Enjoy your night of freedom,” he said musically.
“Yeah, Werke ist Freiheit,” I replied.
“Huh?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, I just read that somewhere. German I think. Talk to you in the morning.”
I skipped out of the house clandestinely, my lapels pointing skyward like the wings of some furtive angel. It was nearly dark and I began walking to the Marina, San Francisco’s whitey-straighty collegial ghetto. The heterosexuals in that neighborhood are promiscuous and sexually aggressive; they’re recruiters. I don’t hang out there often though because the crowds are a bit too young and pretty for me and young women with raging libidos tend to look for young men with same.
It took me about forty minutes to walk to the Marina. I found the address, a late 1940’s apartment building that was in a transitional style, late Streamline Deco, too chicken to be full-on International. I pressed the buzzer to Apt. 1, that of Verna Fueling the land lady. I saw a cat jump down from the window ledge, agitating what had to be the longest Venetian blinds I’d ever seen. The gate was buzzed open and I stood before the door to her apartment. I heard the faint scraping of slippers on linoleum tile, then on terrazzo and other unidentifiable surfaces. Several locks were disengaged before the door opened just as far as the lock chain would allow it. I had a feeling Verna Fueling had spent more than a few years living in New York City.
“Hi,” I said as soon as I made eye contact with a woman in the kind of house frock that seems to be the standard issue uniform for land-ladies and shut-ins, “I’m….”
“Just a minute,” she said, cutting me off abruptly. I heard a television in the distance, the meowing of a cat, the opening and closing of drawers and the jangling of keys before I saw that face again, one with thin lips and a lazy eye set in a head held together by hairpins.
“Upstairs,” she said, as we climbed the stairs to the second floor. The steps were thin concrete slabs supported by an open steel spine running up the middle, the modernist kind of stairway that acts as a cage for items dropped into it. A small door in the wall of the enclosed stairwell beneath it added a note of mystery – perhaps the entry for some wild animal, or maybe gnomes do exist after all.
Before we got to the apartment I could hear some rather un-Bruno-like squeaks and scratches. I hadn’t thought to ask Tip what kind of dog it was and when the landlady opened the door I saw one of those miniat
ure dogs whose respiratory systems are a hopeless jumble. He wore the name Bruno lightly.
“Buzz when done,” the landlady said as she turned round and headed back to her place. She left a distinct, musty odor in the air – ginger cookies and lint, a combination I’d yet to see in personal care products.
There it was before me, that overgrown insect with the inappropriate name.
I never did have the kind of uncomplicated relationship most people have with dogs and cats. I refute the notion that one has to be firmly in one camp or the other; they’re all just four-legged animals to me and I treat them equally. I’ve always for the most part liked them, but it was a guarded affection, not because I’ve ever been afraid of them, it’s just that I’d always viewed pets as competition for sympathy, affection and money, kind of like small children.
When I tell people that I’ve never, nor will I ever, want a dog, they usually say ‘Oh, you don’t like dogs,’ with a mix of pity and contempt. Or they say, ‘Oh, you’re a cat person,’ like they’ve reached some new depth of understanding about me. And then when I say I’ve never wanted a cat either, they say, ‘Oh, you don’t like animals.’ How stupid!
I like both cats and dogs, but I don’t want to be a caretaker for some stinky poop machine. I don’t want my day to revolve around an animal’s anus; I don’t want to dole out food with unappetizing odors and zero plate appeal; I don’t want to mop up regurgitated puddles and lumps of the afore-mentioned nasty smelling food. I can, however, enjoy coexisting with them as long as someone else is providing tactical support.
I even lived with a cat for a while a some years ago. She belonged to my housemate, Ted, who had rescued her from a bad home. They had a tight bond. When I would visit Ted before I moved into his place she was pretty affectionate, allowing me to scratch her and rolling over on her back for some tummy and pussy rubbing. We developed a good rapport; there was tenderness even. We got along.
Pussy
When I agreed to take Ted’s extra bedroom (I’d just broken up with a substance abusing girl friend and so had he) and started moving my stuff in, she was puzzled. She’d never had a problem with me before, but something had changed for her. After my third night of living there, when it finally dawned on her that I was to be a semi-permanent fixture for the foreseeable future, she went totally cold on me. She wouldn’t give me the time of day, couldn’t look at me and if she had to look my way, she looked through me.
She’d already had the habit of waiting at the top of the stairs for Ted’s return from work; she would greet him with a few maudlin meows and one of those slow figure eights of frottage between his legs. Now she added another feature to this obsequious behavior – the rant. As soon as she sensed him coming up the stairs, she’d start screeching in short, angry bursts. We just laughed at the bitterness of her plaint – and people call female dogs bitches!
She hated the very flesh of me and frequently showed me just how willing she was to take her socio-pathic grudge to extremes. For example, there was this one time when I was in the living room reading and I sensed through my peripheral vision that she was standing at the threshold engaging in situation assessment. She was readying herself for yet another of the many daily trips she made back and forth from Ted’s room to her food bowl in the kitchen. It was a straight shot from the kitchen to his room and it was a journey she would usually make chin-up, tail flagging, like she was strolling on God’s highway. This time however I had moved one of the armchairs back so that it blocked the way. I hadn’t done it on purpose to aggravate her, but merely to be more directly under the lit wall sconce to read, so I wouldn’t have to turn any more lights on and waste electricity. (I later had to swear the truth of this for Ted while my hand rested on an old, empty bottle of Jack Daniels.)
She stayed at the threshold a good ten minutes before she began to make her move. She cozied-up to the doorframe, gingerly tapped her right paw onto the floor of the living room and then froze. When I shifted slightly in my seat she flinched and immediately withdrew it. She tried again two times with the requisite action from me and only when I’d become bored at toying with her did she begin creeping out from her perch by the door frame. She then started walking along the wall of the living room so closely and carefully one got the impression she was traversing a mountain range on a path so treacherous that one little kitty sneeze, one little false paw-hold on the shifting shingle of the mountain, would plunge her to her death thousands of feet below. She hugged the three walls of the room like they were life itself. I followed her every move and at one point she looked over and locked eyes with me, her movement abruptly stopping. Then she scrunched her head down into her shoulders and redoubled her effort. When she was finally near the end of this strange journey, she leapt into Ted’s room and vanished into its shadows.
Economic necessity has now forced me to warm to the idea that pooper-scoopers and kitty litter are my bread and butter. Bruno was an early test of my will to oblige even those animals that fall into the gray area of my consideration.
Bruno was friendly, irresponsibly so, as he seemed to have no problem with giving me complete run of the place, rendering him useless as a guard dog. I know that some people would be falling all over themselves petting him and showering him with diminutives, but frankly I was embarrassed at the thought that I would be seen in public with this little animal. What does it say to good-looking women when they see me associating with a dog that could fit in a size 10 shoe? I’ve always had to resist the urge to kick dogs like this just to see how far they could go. I think he sensed all this because that was his self-image; the world was out to get him and would never accept him as that secret Napoleon he longed to be. Smelling my disappointment, he began a show of over-compensation – strutting, darting back and forth with little snips – but like small men with small penises, there was no escaping the sadness and we both knew it. It had him cowed, despite the periodic displays of bravado that showed he was still in the game, that he wouldn’t be forgotten. In my book though, he didn’t have the pluck necessary to stay on the radar screen – I placed him in a category other than girl magnet.
Sexy dead people
Right after I got back, I carefully checked to make sure Celestine wasn’t in and then began preparing my blackout. I stockpile some food on the table next to the computer – dry shredded wheat, low-fat cheese, dates and yogurt, the diet of a Bedouin or a middle-aged American odd-ball. I make sure I have a clear path to the toilet so I don’t trip over anything in the dark, I do a few quick calisthenics, I roll my computer desk away from the window and into the kitchen, where the crackling of my fingers across the keypad will be muffled. I shut the blinds, draw the curtains and then I oil the creaky joints of my old wheeled office chair. I briefly considered the fact that I was over-reacting, getting it wrong again, but I didn’t want to take the chance. I know people, they’re fragile, liable to crack at any moment.
I got on the computer, checked my email and started immediately deleting the flood of pornographic messages – “desperate housewives need your cum,” “horny school girls dripping for your love,” etc. that were in my ‘in’ box.
They say people use the internet more often to seek their family roots than to look at pornography. In that I’m atypical, as I use it in an average 70/30 ratio, porn to genealogy.
As one gets older, it’s natural to start preparing for death and what better way than studying the lives of dead people? When I was younger, my attempts to trace my family roots had been half-hearted because I was wary of what I might in fact discover about my family. I was also getting laid more often. Maturity has brought more focus to my life (and less sex) but I wasn’t really prepared for the difficulty of gathering information about people for whom their names were just rocks to hide under.
I thought that studying the history of our family might help repair the damaged relationship I’d had with my parents since I’d stopped teething. I had visions of us sit
ting around the dining room table for hours with our steaming cups of coffee, me taking notes while they speak wistfully about their lives and the lives that had gone before. But I discovered that genealogy, like revenge, is a dish best served cold.
My parents were completely unhelpful; it was hard enough to get them to show some interest in living people, dead people were beyond the pale.
“We live in the moment,” my father responded one time when I’d asked why they never share memories of their youth. His statement was true only if you call sitting in front of the television for four hours every evening living in the moment. What was I expecting from people who have a ‘TAKE IT TO THE GRAVE’ bumper sticker on their car?
When it comes to genealogy, all roads lead to Mormon, so I visited one of their local data repositories. I got a few possible leads, but I kept running into what serious genealogy sleuths call ‘brick walls’. “Have you tried looking for your Gritsons in prison, dear?” said one old lady, Data Bank President (stingy with her loans), who was getting a little irritated with me because I pointed out that some of her data and historical memory were inaccurate. She called them ‘my’ Gritsons, because genealogists take possession of dead people; I wondered how many Jews she had posthumously converted that day.
Here’s the funny thing: the old lady’s name was Alzheimer. People’s last names are hysterical; like See, Spot, Down, Hill or the Parcels, the Goods, the Rabbits, the Kicks, the Runs, the Bends, etc. I found a Jeremiah Cost married to a Hannabel Price, their progeny bore the hyphenated Cost-Price – I’m not even making these up and I saved the best for last: the Pricks! German of course. I write all of them down in a log and it’s always good for a chuckle.
Well, old lady Alzheimer was right. I looked into court records and convict rolls and came up with some bona fide ancestors; seven boys in one family, five of them in constant trouble with the law – mostly theft, minor assaults; one was declared criminally insane and two seem to have died under suspicious circumstances. That was more than I wanted to know. Like most people searching their ancestry, I was hoping to hook up with royalty or at least some lower tier aristocracy but it became obvious that my family had more in common with the mongrel dogs that roamed our neighborhoods; our pedigrees were complex and obscure.
In the hope of finding something besides this legacy of shame, I began frequenting websites devoted specifically to genealogy. They have message boards where people post information about dead people they’re searching for. I’ve made attempts to contact some of the people who I thought might have relevant information. Nobody has ever responded to even one of my many requests for help, and it is this fact that leads me to believe these people are indeed related to me, since everyone in my family treats me exactly the same way.
At nine o’clock I was still sitting at the computer, thinking that if I could only figure out a way to combine genealogy and sex on one website, (prominent member seeks…), I could probably make a fortune, when I heard someone coming up the front porch stairs. I froze. Then I put my computer to sleep to quiet the thrum of its workings and listened to the key in the latch, the heavy sound of the door re-engaging with the lock, the measured padding of feet up the main staircase and the corresponding creaks. I stayed silent and motionless, listening to the waters of the toilet flowing down, the occasional muffled bang coming from the rooms of the family of four and Celestine’s descent to my door, which she knocked softly. I stayed still, breathing as quietly as I could until the gentle volley of her fist against my door stopped and I heard her door upstairs close. I then knocked back some of the pills I’d picked up earlier that same day and went to bed with a book that I would soon abandon.
I dreamt about hair, great thick strands of it, and fingernails and tears.
Chapter VI: Third Whirled
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