by John Grogan
Marley may have won the battle, but we knew it was just a matter of time before we won the war. Nature’s call was on our side. Sooner or later, what went in had to come out. As disgusting as the thought was, I knew if I poked through his excrement long enough, I would find it. Had it been, say, a silver chain, or a gold-plated chain, something of any less value, my queasiness might have won out. But this chain was solid gold and had set me back a decent chunk of pay. Grossed out or not, I was going in.
And so I prepared Marley his favorite laxative—a giant bowl of dead-ripe sliced mangoes—and settled in for the long wait. For three days I followed him around every time I let him out, eagerly waiting to swoop in with my shovel. Instead of tossing his piles over the fence, I carefully placed each on a wide board in the grass and poked it with a tree branch while I sprayed with a garden hose, gradually washing the digested material away into the grass and leaving behind any foreign objects. I felt like a gold miner working a sluice and coming up with a treasure trove of swallowed junk, from shoelaces to guitar picks. But no necklace. Where the hell was it? Shouldn’t it have come out by now? I began wondering if I had missed it, accidentally washing it into the grass, where it would remain lost forever. But how could I miss a twenty-inch gold chain? Jenny was following my recovery operation from the porch with keen interest and even came up with a new nickname for me. “Hey, Scat Man Doo, any luck yet?” she called out.
On the fourth day, my perseverance paid off. I scooped up Marley’s latest deposit, repeating what had become my daily refrain—“I can’t believe I’m doing this”—and began poking and spraying. As the poop melted away, I searched for any sign of the necklace. Nothing. I was about to give up when I spotted something odd: a small brown lump, about the size of a lima bean. It wasn’t even close to being large enough to be the missing jewelry, yet clearly it did not seem to belong there. I pinned it down with my probing branch, which I had officially christened the Shit Stick, and gave the object a strong blast from the hose nozzle. As the water washed it clean, I got a glimmer of something exceptionally bright and shiny. Eureka! I had struck gold.
The necklace was impossibly compressed, many times smaller than I would have guessed possible. It was as though some unknown alien power, a black hole perhaps, had sucked it into a mysterious dimension of space and time before spitting it out again. And, actually, that wasn’t too far from the truth. The strong stream of water began to loosen the hard wad, and gradually the lump of gold unraveled back to its original shape, untangled and unmangled. Good as new. No, actually better than new. I took it inside to show Jenny, who was ecstatic to have it back, despite its dubious passage. We both marveled at how blindingly bright it was now—far more dazzling than when it had gone in. Marley’s stomach acids had done an amazing job. It was the most brilliant gold I had ever seen. “Man,” I said with a whistle. “We should open a jewelry-cleaning business.”
“We could make a killing with the dowagers in Palm Beach,” Jenny agreed.
“Yes, ladies,” I parroted in my best slick-salesman voice, “our secret patented process is not available at any store! The proprietary Marley Method will restore your treasured valuables to a blinding brilliance you never thought possible.”
“It’s got possibilities, Grogan,” Jenny said, and went off to disinfect her recovered birthday present. She wore that gold chain for years, and every time I looked at it I had the same vivid flashback to my brief and ultimately successful career in gold speculation. Scat Man Doo and his trusty Shit Stick had gone where no man had ever gone before. And none should ever go again.
CHAPTER 12
Welcome to the Indigent Ward
Y ou don’t give birth to your first child every day, and so, when St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm Beach offered us the option of paying extra for a luxury birthing suite, we jumped at the chance. The suites looked like upper-end hotel rooms, spacious, bright, and well appointed with wood-grained furniture, floral wallpaper, curtains, a whirlpool bath, and, just for Dad, a comfy couch that folded out into a bed. Instead of standard-issue hospital food, “guests” were offered a choice of gourmet dinners. You could even order a bottle of champagne, though this was mostly for the fathers to chug on their own, as breast-feeding mothers were discouraged from having more than a celebratory sip.
“Man, it’s just like being on vacation!” I exclaimed, bouncing on the Dad Couch as we took a tour several weeks before Jenny’s due date.
The suites catered to the yuppie set and were a big source of profits for the hospital, bringing in hard cash from couples with money to blow above the standard insurance allotment for deliveries. A bit of an indulgence, we agreed, but why not?
When Jenny’s big day came and we arrived at the hospital, overnight bag in hand, we were told there was a little problem.
“A problem?” I asked.
“It must be a good day for having babies,” the receptionist said cheerfully. “All the birthing suites are already taken.”
Taken? This was the most important day of our lives. What about the comfy couch and romantic dinner for two and champagne toast? “Now, wait a second,” I complained. “We made our reservation weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said with a noticeable lack of sympathy. “We don’t exactly have a lot of control over when mothers go into labor.”
She made a valid point. It wasn’t like she could hurry someone along. She directed us to another floor, where we would be issued a standard hospital room. But when we arrived in the maternity ward, the nurse at the counter had more bad news. “Would you believe every last room is filled?” she said. No, we couldn’t. Jenny seemed to take it in stride, but I was getting testy now. “What do you suggest, the parking lot?” I snapped.
The nurse smiled calmly at me, apparently well familiar with the antics of nervous fathers-to-be, and said, “Don’t you worry. We’ll find a spot for you.”
After a flurry of phone calls, she sent us down a long hallway and through a set of double doors, where we found ourselves in a mirror image of the maternity ward we had just left except for one obvious difference—the patients were definitely not the buttoned-down, disposable-income yuppies we had gone through Lamaze class with. We could hear the nurses talking in Spanish to patients, and standing in the hallway outside the rooms, brown-skinned men holding straw hats in rugged hands waited nervously. Palm Beach County is known as a playground for the obscenely rich, but what is less widely known is that it also is home to huge farms that stretch across drained Everglades swamp for miles west of town. Thousands of migrant workers, mostly from Mexico and Central America, migrate into South Florida each growing season to pick the peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, and celery that supply much of the East Coast’s winter vegetable needs. It seems we had discovered where the migrant workers came to have their babies. Periodically, a woman’s anguished scream would pierce the air, followed by awful moans and calls of “Mi madre!” The place sounded like a house of horrors. Jenny was white as a ghost.
The nurse led us into a small cubicle containing one bed, one chair, and a bank of electronic monitors and handed Jenny a gown to change into. “Welcome to the indigent ward!” Dr. Sherman said brightly when he breezed in a few minutes later. “Don’t be fooled by the bare-bones rooms,” he said. They were outfitted with some of the most sophisticated medical equipment in the hospital, and the nurses were some of the best trained. Because poor women often lacked access to prenatal care, theirs were some of the highest-risk pregnancies. We were in good hands, he assured us as he broke Jenny’s water. Then, as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.
Indeed, as the morning progressed and Jenny fought her way through ferocious contractions, we discovered we were in very good hands. The nurses were seasoned professionals who exuded confidence and warmth, attentively hovering over her, checking the baby’s heartbeat and coaching Jenny along. I stood helplessly by, trying my best to be supportive, but it wasn’t working. At one point Jenny snarled at me through gritt
ed teeth, “If you ask me one more time how I’m doing, I’m going to RIP YOUR FACE OFF!” I must have looked wounded because one of the nurses walked around to my side of the bed, squeezed my shoulders sympathetically, and said, “Welcome to childbirth, Dad. It’s all part of the experience.”
I began slipping out of the room to join the other men waiting in the hallway. Each of us leaned against the wall beside our respective doors as our wives screamed and moaned away. I felt a little ridiculous, dressed in my polo shirt, khakis, and Top-Siders, but the farmworkers didn’t seem to hold it against me. Soon we were smiling and nodding knowingly to one another. They couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Spanish, but that didn’t matter. We were in this together.
Or almost together. I learned that day that in America pain relief is a luxury, not a necessity. For those who could afford it—or whose insurance covered it, as ours did—the hospital provided epidurals, which delivered pain-blocking oblivion directly into the central nervous system. About four hours into Jenny’s labor, an anesthesiologist arrived and slipped a long needle through the skin along her spine and attached it to an intravenous drip. Within minutes, Jenny was numb from the waist down and resting comfortably. The Mexican women nearby were not so lucky. They were left to tough it out the old-fashioned way, and their shrieks continued to puncture the air.
The hours passed. Jenny pushed. I coached. As night fell I stepped out into the hall bearing a tiny swaddled football. I lifted my newborn son above my head for my new friends to see and called out, “Es el niño!” The other dads flashed big smiles and held up their thumbs in the international sign of approval. Unlike our heated struggle to name our dog, we would easily and almost instantly settle on a name for our firstborn son. He would be named Patrick for the first of my line of Grogans to arrive in the United States from County Limerick, Ireland. A nurse came into our cubicle and told us a birthing suite was now available. It seemed rather beside the point to change rooms now, but she helped Jenny into a wheelchair, placed our son in her arms, and whisked us away. The gourmet dinner wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
During the weeks leading up to her due date, Jenny and I had had long strategy talks about how best to acclimate Marley to the new arrival who would instantly knock him off his until-now undisputed perch as Most Favored Dependent. We wanted to let him down gently. We had heard stories of dogs becoming terribly jealous of infants and acting out in unacceptable ways—everything from urinating on prized possessions to knocking over bassinets to outright attacks—that usually resulted in a one-way ticket to the pound. As we converted the spare bedroom into a nursery, we gave Marley full access to the crib and bedding and all the various accoutrements of infancy. He sniffed and drooled and licked until his curiosity was satisfied. In the thirty-six hours that Jenny remained hospitalized recuperating after the birth, I made frequent trips home to visit Marley, armed with receiving blankets and anything else that carried the baby’s scent. On one of my visits, I even brought home a tiny used disposable diaper, which Marley sniffed with such vigor I feared he might suck it up his nostril, requiring more costly medical intervention.
When I finally brought mother and child home, Marley was oblivious. Jenny placed baby Patrick, asleep in his car carrier, in the middle of our bed and then joined me in greeting Marley out in the garage, where we had an uproarious reunion. When Marley had settled down from frantically wild to merely desperately happy, we brought him into the house with us. Our plan was to just go about our business, not pointing the baby out to him. We would hover nearby and let him gradually discover the presence of the newcomer on his own.
Marley followed Jenny into the bedroom, jamming his nose deep into her overnight bag as she unpacked. He clearly had no idea there was a living thing sitting on our bed. Then Patrick stirred and let out a small, birdlike chirp. Marley’s ears pulled up and he froze. Where did that come from? Patrick chirped again, and Marley lifted one paw in the air, pointing like a bird dog. My God, he was pointing at our baby boy like a hunting dog would point at…prey. In that instant, I thought of the feather pillow he had attacked with such ferocity. He wasn’t so dense as to mistake a baby for a pheasant, was he?
Then he lunged. It was not a ferocious “kill the enemy” lunge; there were no bared teeth or growls. But it wasn’t a “welcome to the neighborhood, little buddy” lunge, either. His chest hit the mattress with such force that the entire bed jolted across the floor. Patrick was wide awake now, eyes wide. Marley recoiled and lunged again, this time bringing his mouth within inches of our newborn’s toes. Jenny dove for the baby and I dove for the dog, pulling him back by the collar with both hands. Marley was beside himself, straining to get at this new creature that somehow had snuck into our inner sanctum. He reared on his hind legs and I pulled back on his collar, feeling like the Lone Ranger with Silver. “Well, that went well,” I said.
Jenny unbuckled Patrick from his car seat; I pinned Marley between my legs and held him tightly by the collar with both fists. Even Jenny could see Marley meant no harm. He was panting with that dopey grin of his; his eyes were bright and his tail was wagging. As I held tight, she gradually came closer, allowing Marley to sniff first the baby’s toes, then his feet and calves and thighs. The poor kid was only a day and a half old, and he was already under attack by a Shop-Vac. When Marley reached the diaper, he seemed to enter an altered state of consciousness, a sort of Pampers-induced trance. He had reached the holy land. The dog looked positively euphoric.
“One false move, Marley, and you’re toast,” Jenny warned, and she meant it. If he had shown even the slightest aggression toward the baby, that would have been it. But he never did. We soon learned our problem was not keeping Marley from hurting our precious baby boy. Our problem was keeping him out of the diaper pail.
As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, Marley came to accept Patrick as his new best friend. One night early on, as I was turning off the lights to go to bed, I couldn’t find Marley anywhere. Finally I thought to look in the nursery, and there he was, stretched out on the floor beside Patrick’s crib, the two of them snoring away in stereophonic fraternal bliss. Marley, our wild crashing bronco, was different around Patrick. He seemed to understand that this was a fragile, defenseless little human, and he moved gingerly whenever he was near him, licking his face and ears delicately. As Patrick began crawling, Marley would lie quietly on the floor and let the baby scale him like a mountain, tugging on his ears, poking his eyes, and pulling out little fistfuls of fur. None of it fazed him. Marley just sat like a statue. He was a gentle giant around Patrick, and he accepted his second-fiddle status with bonhomie and good-natured resignation.
Not everyone approved of the blind faith we placed in our dog. They saw a wild, unpredictable, and powerful beast—he was approaching a hundred pounds by now—and thought us foolhardy to trust him around a defenseless infant. My mother was firmly in this camp and not shy about letting us know it. It pained her to watch Marley lick her grandson. “Do you know where that tongue has been?” she would ask rhetorically. She warned us darkly that we should never leave a dog and a baby alone in the same room. The ancient predatory instinct could surface without warning. If it were up to her, a concrete wall would separate Marley and Patrick at all times.
One day while she was visiting from Michigan, she let out a shriek from the living room. “John, quick!” she screamed. “The dog’s biting the baby!” I raced out of the bedroom, half dressed, only to find Patrick swinging happily in his windup swing, Marley lying beneath him. Indeed, the dog was snapping at the baby, but it was not as my panicky mother had feared. Marley had positioned himself directly in Patrick’s flight path with his head right where Patrick’s bottom, strapped in a fabric sling, stopped at the peak of each arc before swinging back in the opposite direction. Each time Patrick’s diapered butt came within striking distance, Marley would snap playfully at it, goosing him in the process. Patrick squealed with delight. “Aw, Ma, that’s nothing,
” I said. “Marley just has a thing for his diapers.”
Jenny and I settled into a routine. At nighttime she would get up with Patrick every few hours to nurse him, and I would take the 6:00 A.M. feeding so she could sleep in. Half asleep, I would pluck him from his crib, change his diaper, and make a bottle of formula for him. Then the payoff: I would sit on the back porch with his tiny, warm body nestled against my stomach as he sucked on the bottle. Sometimes I would let my face rest against the top of his head and doze off as he ate lustily. Sometimes I would listen to National Public Radio and watch the dawn sky turn from purple to pink to blue. When he was fed and I had gotten a good burp out of him, I would get us both dressed, whistle for Marley, and take a morning walk along the water. We invested in a jogging stroller with three large bicycle tires that allowed it to go pretty much anywhere, including through sand and over curbs. The three of us must have made quite a sight each morning, Marley out in front leading the charge like a mush dog, me in the rear holding us back for dear life, and Patrick in the middle, gleefully waving his arms in the air like a traffic cop. By the time we arrived home, Jenny would be up and have coffee on. We would strap Patrick into his high chair and sprinkle Cheerios on the tray for him, which Marley would snitch the instant we turned away, laying his head sideways on the tray and using his tongue to scoop them into his mouth. Stealing food from a baby, we thought; how low will he stoop? But Patrick seemed immensely amused by the whole routine, and pretty soon he learned how to push his Cheerios over the side so he could watch Marley scramble around, eating them off the floor. He also discovered that if he dropped Cheerios into his lap, Marley would poke his head up under the tray and jab Patrick in the stomach as he went for the errant cereal, sending him into peals of laughter.
