Paws and Reflect

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Once he allowed himself to sink into my lap, he sighed and closed his eyes. I rubbed his big ol’ head and sang a little to him. I always sang a little to him, you know?

  When he was sweet and calm and happy, I’d find a chorus of “Sweet Thing” or “Gonna Take a Miracle” or “There Is a Rose in Spanish Harlem” somewhere in the back of my memory. When he’d given up the hard day’s work of looking after me and simply lie safe next to me on the sofa, curled up like a puppy, I’d sing low and growly to let him know everything was all OK. He’d yawn and stretch out those long Dobie legs and look up at me with dark brown eyes as if to say, “Everything is OK, isn’t it?”

  The doctor returned with the syringe. She knelt by us and warned me it wouldn’t be quick.”Travis is a big dog. He won’t go fast. I’m just telling you so you’ll be prepared, OK?”With that, she found a vein in his front leg and gave him the shot.

  When she had finished, she knelt beside us to wait. I leaned his big head over onto my lap and hummed because I was way past singing. I leaned over him to protect him from all that had bothered him so. And I crooned to him as the last of the fight and life went out of him. It seemed to last forever, but since I had brought him to this place, there was no way I could let him go any further without him knowing I was with him, and everything was going to be OK.

  After nearly five minutes, the doctor checked her watch, placed the stethoscope over his heart and listened.”He’s gone, ” she told me.

  I don’t cry easy, and I don’t cry often. What gets torn from me when I do is ugly and harsh and private. Lifelong smoker’s’ sobs aren’t pretty. They are hoarse and tearing and hurt to hear as much as they hurt to let go. You could pull concrete from my chest, and it couldn’t sound any worse. Practiced hardness doesn’t let go easy. What it holds back, the gravel of grief and the thick choking flood of self-hatred, sounds like hell breaking over a quiet room. Given permission to escape, every grief over every torn nerve and violated scar follows behind.

  The doctor laid her arm across my shoulder.

  “Why is it so hard?” I managed to say.”Why is it all so goddamned hard?”

  She couldn’t know I meant living. She couldn’t know I meant loving. She couldn’t know at all what I meant.

  Finally, I took Travis’s head in my hands and shifted away so I could put it gently down on the floor. I stood, thanked the vet, and made my way on home.

  The following Tuesday, I had to pick up Travis’s ashes. I’d paid to have him cremated individually. The box was cardboard with an agreeable wood grain print laminated on the lid. He was heavy, my Travis; he made a lot of ashes. I put the box on the passenger seat and tried very hard not to think about his ride to the vet’s. I only thought, Now I am bringing him home.

  In life, when Travis was outside his kennel and I was in the bedroom, he lay right by my side of the bed. Sometimes he would move away only as far as the sliding glass doors, where he kept watch for the evil and threats only he could see. I wrapped my own tattered sleep around me more tightly knowing the dog was keeping guard over me.

  When I got home, I took the box holding his ashes and put it in the drawer of the bedside table next to my side of the bed.”You’re home now, baby. You’re back where you can take care of me.”

  Laying down on the bed, the two girl dogs jumped up to be with me. Hailey fit herself into the curve of my legs. Patsy turned and snuggled herself onto my partner’s pillow. Travis rested in the drawer next to us.

  In the years that have passed since then, Travis has remained part of that tableaux. Still, I have caught glimpses of Travis out of the corner of my eye, panting and smiling, all around the house. My canine Marine sentry, Travis, my crazy boy dog, is never too far from my side, keeping watch to this day.

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  Randy Allgaier: THE BEAGLE’S GIFT

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  Can one man make a difference in this world? It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the world’s problems and feel there is nothing you can do. But that is not Randy Allgaier’s approach. He was dedicated to a life of service to community and country long before he acquired a dog, but his Beagle, Darwin, opened up a new path by which to help others.

  Randy helped prevent the spread of HIV by getting the California legislature to decriminalize needle exchange. As Randy says, the cost of one syringe is a penny, but the cost of AIDS is millions of dollars and endless suffering.

  Randy tested positive twenty years ago and developed AIDS eight years ago. He took the deep pain into which he was plunged and used it as a sword to protect others. He had harbored a secret desire for a dog for many years during his public life, but he knew that a dog would need an owner who wasn’t forever flying off to Washington or Sacramento. But eventually the time was right for Randy and his partner, Lee, to adopt a puppy. Randy thought that he knew what the simple joy of owning a dog would be like. But he was wrong. It turned out to be much richer and more surprising than anything he had imagined.

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  I GUESS MY LOVE OF DOGS began at conception. If you look in the baby book that my mother kept, my first steps were made trying to catch a neighbor’s dog, Tippy, a Cocker Spaniel mix. The entry reads, “Randy loves Peg’s dog Tippy.”

  As a kid, I begged my parents to allow me to have a dog and we had a few, but not for long, because my mother, who made Joan Crawford’s obsession with cleanliness seem low-key, couldn’t put up with the mess, so we would end up finding a new home for each one.

  Each dog wasn’t just somebody I loved and adored, but somebody who offered me refuge. One of the things that attracted me to having a dog is the experience of having a good friend. I never had a good close friend as a kid. Partly because I was gay and knew it, or at least knew I was different. But partly also because I went to a private school an hour away from where I lived. The bus would take me home, and I was isolated. Later I went to boarding school.

  After college, graduate school and a time in New York City, I moved to San Francisco, where I met my partner, Lee, in July 1988. I was involved with the gay community and joined an organization called Shanti, which provides support for people with HIV. Shanti put volunteers through forty hours of very intense training. Lee was one of the facilitators, and we started seeing each other as friends. Then our relationship grew.

  Lee’s HIV status is negative. He grew up with dogs on a farm in Tennessee. He had a little Chihuahua named Peanut that he talked about a lot. But maybe because he was allowed to have dogs as a kid, he wasn’t as obsessed as I was. Every dog I saw, I would stop and talk to it.

  We live in the Castro district. There is a playground and ball field a few blocks away that at the time was like a dog park. When I came home from work, there were all these people out in this ball field with their dogs. The dog people were acting like they were at a cocktail party while their dogs were playing. What attracted my attention was all these dogs playing together, big dogs hanging with little dogs who didn’t seem to know they were little playing with Great Danes.

  As our tenth anniversary approached, Lee and I decided it was time to get a dog, and we started to research breeds. We didn’t want to go the rescue route. I wanted to know the temperament of the dog. We began with these cute Jack Russells we saw everywhere. It took us about twenty seconds to realize that no way could we live with that breed. We also considered the PBGV, Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen, but we heard that they tore things up in people’s homes.

  I thought back to my childhood, and how I adored my grandmother’s Beagle, Brownie. I couldn’t get enough of playing with that dog. I remember spending a couple of days at my grandparents’ house, sleeping with Brownie, hugging and cuddling. I remember that sweet dog smell. We were the classic

  “little boy and his dog.” I said to Lee, “What about a Beagle?”We did some research on Beagles, and as far as we could tell, the temperament seemed perfect for us, more laid-back than playful. We started th
inking of a name, but we didn’t want something cutesy. Every other Beagle we met was named Lucy or Snoopy. The name that popped into my head was Darwin. Charles Darwin had done his research in the Galapagos Islands on the HMS Beagle. I thought that would be an interesting play on words.

  Since we were taking the month of September off to celebrate our anniversary, we decided it would be the ideal time to acclimate a dog to our household. We looked for breeders in the area and found one who told us about a beautiful red and white boy. I said, “We’ll be there this weekend.”

  We traveled with our best friend, Karen, to Napa. We got out of the car, and the breeder came to the door carrying this adorable little red and white Beagle puppy. And the first words out of her mouth were, “Oh my God, you all have red hair!”

  At that point the puppy was a little over three months old. He was tearing all over the breeder’s house, peeing on the floor, bouncing off walls. Everything that would be a horror to me normally.

  Before we left, the breeder told us, “If at any time in his entire life you need to place him, you can bring him back to me.”That was a wonderful testament to the kind of person she is. She said she bred not only for conformation but for temperament. We were very enamored of her.

  Our puppy was renamed on his registry as Shilagae’s Darwin’s Equality, which brought our activism into his name. We brought him home, and he immediately peed in the house.

  He was actually housebroken very quickly. When he was young, we wouldn’t allow him out of the kitchen. We had a child gate to keep him in there, but he learned to jump over it very quickly. He was a good jumper, and he found ways to get out, believe me. He was a very curious little guy. He was always trying to get behind our television, and he broke a VCR. But things that would normally make me crazy didn’t matter to me anymore. Once he got into our pantry and got a sack of flour. I came home, stared into the kitchen, and all I could see was white. It took me a second to realize it was covered with flour. He had peed into it, too. Pee in the flour, flour all over the place, his paw prints all over the kitchen in white. But because it was Darwin, I didn’t turn into my mother and say, “You have to leave!”

  Lee was really good about cleaning up after Darwin’s flour party. I was pissed. But through living with Lee and Darwin, I’ve learned to let go of a lot of stuff.

  When you say “Bad dog!” to Darwin, he immediately goes under the bed. He doesn’t like to be around anger at all. If I’m at the computer writing and say, “Goddamit!” loudly, he’ll get up and look at me, very worried. He’s very sensitive.

  At the time, AOL had a “Beagle Board” where people could post online. I started to interact with other Beagle owners. I got a lot of good advice from a few people who would always respond to my posts. I started to call them the Beagle Moms.

  In March 1999, my HIV changed to AIDS, with the diagnosis of pneumocystis pneumonia. At the time, I was working like crazy, running back and forth to Washington. I was on the board of the Human Rights Campaign and starting a statewide advocacy group for LGBT people called CAPE. I was stressing myself to the max. And in six months my health went from being good to just about dying.

  I was hospitalized for a week. Lee got the nurses to allow Darwin to come and see me. When I saw him, I cried. He, of course, was only interested in sniffing around the hospital. In true Beagle fashion, he said, “This is a new place—I want to explore it.” But when I got home, he didn’t leave my side.

  I recuperated at home for a month before I went back to work. Darwin was with me the entire time. Lee was bedraggled. He was taking care of me, and he had his work with developmentally disabled adults, which is stressful. So when he would come home and take Darwin out for a walk, it was his saving grace, his time alone. Darwin took care of both of us in a way.

  Darwin has an uncanny knack of knowing when I’m sick. He is a creature of habit, but he alters his habit to lay in bed with me all day long. He has this look in his eyes that feels like he knows. It’s like he says, “I’m here with you.”

  The jobs in my career have been very intense. I seem to work best under pressure. If there were deadlines and things were fast paced, doing stuff at federal, state and local levels, flying back and forth to Washington and Sacramento—I loved it. There was a lot on the line because we were trying to make a difference for people. Most of my colleagues were ten years younger than I was. They had a lot more energy. I kept up, but it took a toll on my health. Stress and HIV are not a good mix.

  I retired in March 2000. Leading up to retirement, though, was horrible. Like many people, I define myself by my job. I was a wreck about the idea. It was a bigger loss than anything I had experienced. Bigger than any death. And it was a decision that I was making, not a loss that was happening to me.

  In a weird way, the support that Lee and Darwin gave me was: They left me alone. That’s what I needed. Nobody in my immediate sphere of close friends had been through anything like that. I was forty years old, and I was retiring because of bad health. I didn’t want any support from anybody. I wanted to find it in myself.

  I made an agreement with Lee that for six months I would do nothing but take care of myself. During those six months, we went to a fundraiser for PAWS—Pets Are Wonderful Support— called Petchitecture. Very prominent local architects and designers build an array of habitats for dogs. They are on display and then up for auction. People are very generous because they have such a good time.

  I was so impressed by the organization. They keep people with HIV together with their pets because animals are such a good source of companionship, love and support when people are ill. This allowed low-income people with HIV to get food for their animals. Volunteers come in and walk dogs, do cat-litter maintenance. Having had the experience of Darwin when I was very sick, their mission spoke to my heart in ways that were very important.

  It was a small organization, but this fundraiser was huge. They put it on themselves, and I was impressed by that, too. So the day after my six-month agreement with Lee was over, I wrote a letter to their board president and their executive director, explaining my background and my resume. A month later I was on their board, and four months later I was the president, which I was for four years. During that time, we got their budget doubled. They were able to expand their mission to cover people with other disabilities and start an elderly program.

  I did aggressive fund-raising. It was a grass-roots storefront organization, and my goal was to make it more professional. I recruited board members who had experience in business. Then I left. I feel that organizations need new board members on a regular basis because it helps to keep things innovative.

  Darwin is a key reason I was involved with PAWS. It was a passion about their mission that had me so driven and motivated. I got it at the most basic level. PAWS was seen as a warm and fuzzy, expendable thing, but we were trying to tell people, “We are not expendable. This is an important mission.”

  PAWS also has a program for the homeless. A group of veterinarians reach out to these folks and make sure their dogs are cared for well and, ideally, spayed and neutered. A lot of homeless people do not want to spay and neuter their dogs. There is so little in their life they have control over. But if you gently work with them, they’ll do it.

  When Darwin turned two, we wanted to have a party for him. We’d been to other people’s parties for their dogs, and it seemed that everything at the event was focused on the people. One thing Darwin really would enjoy would be playing together with a bunch of other Beagles.

  Darwin recognizes other Beagles, and they have their own way of playing. They love to chase one another, though they don’t do as much wrestling as other breeds do. On the AOL Beagle Board, we’d heard about Beaglefests held around the country. There was nothing like that happening here in Northern California. So we wondered, Why not put a Beaglefest together ourselves?

  Before we did it, we checked out places where we could have it. Beagles are notorious escape artists. They just foll
ow their nose, and they’re gone in two seconds. Everything is focused on the scent.

  We decided to send out postings that we would have this Beaglefest in Sausalito. We made homemade dog treats for the dogs and a birthday cake for people that read “Happy Birthday, Darwin.” A few people responded, so we knew we would have guests, but we had no idea how many.

  When we arrived, on a Saturday morning, there were lots of people playing with their dogs at the park. Then one Beagle came, and then two. Suddenly, lots of other Beagles started coming in, and as the Beagles began to arrive, the other dogs started leaving, until it was a Beagle-only park.

  Other than Darwin’s breeder, and one of Darwin’s playmates from the same kennel, Lee and I didn’t know a soul. In all, forty-seven Beagles showed up. And had a great time. Over the years, attendance has grown to around 200.

  An amazing group of people come to the Beaglefests. You have African-American, Asian, and white, straight and gay, liberals and people who come from very conservative areas in the state, and none of that matters.

  We don’t ask for any money. For us, it’s a labor of love. We have various contests that only Beagle people would understand: “Longest Ears, ”“Best Owner/Dog Look-Alike, ”“Most Obstinate, ” “Does Not Come When Called, ” and “Turns Around and Goes in the Other Direction When Called”—all things that are very particular to Beagles.