I took out my phone and called Michelle. I recounted the day’s events, and what the vet had said.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Well,” I began, “I’ve been better . . .” But I couldn’t articulate what was going on. “The bottom line is, the dog is in the hospital. So I guess it’s up to them. Or up to him.”
“Did they say what they think his chances are?”
“Fifty-fifty,” I said. “It depends. He may have to be euthanized.”
I didn’t have to say any more, and Michelle knew me well enough not to press. She knew me well enough to know what those words did to me. She understood me like no one else, which was why our marriage had endured owning and running two businesses together. She understood, as best she could, the trauma that had shaped me, and she knew why I would be so affected if we lost the puppy. The love we shared was strong, and as tangible over the phone as it would have been if she was there beside me.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I said, and then I hung up.
I kept the phone in my hand, thinking there was a chance that Michelle was going to call me back, worried about me. I knew, however, that she knew to leave me alone when I gave the signal that I needed to put some time and distance between me and what I was feeling. In a different place, I would go to the gym and lift weights until all I could think of was how tired I was.
She also knew me well enough to know how the dog in the canyon and I had something in common. We’d both been the victims of senseless cruelty. Maybe that explained why the dog’s survival was so important to me—if he could survive, I could, too. But if he couldn’t . . . In the desert, under a canopy of summer stars, I thought of the dog, for the first time, as another motherless creature. If he died, I knew I would take it personally. I would feel like I let him down, the way people let me down.
Then I’m ten, and my mother and I are at the mall, shortly before Christmas, and I have twenty dollars in my pocket, so I buy the game Battleship at Walgreens, but when I meet my mom in one of the restaurants at the mall, she says, “Nice going—Gary already got you that game.” She could have told our neighbor, Gary, to return his present, rather than tell me to return mine. I feel deflated but know better than to ask her to help me return it, so I go back to Walgreens on my own. When the girl at Walgreens says she can only give me store credit, I get flustered and buy twenty dollars’ worth of pure crap, candy and worthless plastic junk that I buy because I have to buy something and I’m running out of time.
When I return to the restaurant, my mother asks me what I bought. I show her. She tries hiding her laughter at my predicament, covering her mouth with her hand and snickering at me.
I’m ten, and my mother is laughing at me. . . .
5
I lay on an air mattress in the back of my truck, looking up at the night sky.
Most people think the brightest star in the sky is Polaris, or the North Star. It’s not. It’s Sirius, or the Dog Star, for its place in the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog. It’s the brightest because it’s also (after the sun) the closest, and getting closer. To my mind, it’s a stretch of the imagination to see a dog in Canis Major, which is basically a Y with a leg at one of the ends of the Y and another leg at the solo end. Both legs are about the same length and pointing in the same direction, but it could be any animal with four legs and a long neck. People see what they want to see.
That night, waiting to find out if the dog was going to make it, I was finally able to see the four-legged animal in the constellation. I thought of all the other ways the word “dog” was used in the English language, and it struck me that most of them applied to or resonated with me. “Die like a dog,” as in what I wanted the kids who tormented me to do. “Sick as a dog,” as in how I felt so many times as a kid when I was afraid to go to school. “Dog eat dog,” as in how the world seemed to me, and I was definitely the underdog in that regard. “Every dog has its day,” as in what I was still waiting for. “Dog tired,” as in what I felt physically. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” as in what some people thought I should do. If that phrase meant letting go of the things that hurt me, I couldn’t live up to it, because I wasn’t holding onto them; they were holding on to me. One last one: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight—it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” an adage I’d learned to apply, and adopt, almost as a slogan, but at great cost.
My favorite word, though, was “dogged,” meaning tenacious, stalwart, and untiring. I’d read about researchers who put heart monitors on sled dogs to see what sort of heart rates they were able to sustain over long distances. The researchers were shocked to learn dogs could sustain heart rates of three hundred beats per minute for hours, which was astonishing because scientists had previously thought the only mammals capable of sustaining three hundred beats per minute were tiny ones like mice or shrews. It explains how a pack of wolves can run down an elk, even though elk are faster than wolves. Wolves can outlast anything. I told myself the dog in the hospital had heart, in both senses of the word. I hoped it was enough.
Then I told myself I did, too. Surviving my childhood wouldn’t have been possible without it.
I grew up in Cudahy, Wisconsin, which is on the western shore of Lake Michigan, on Milwaukee’s “sout’ side.” You don’t pronounce the “th.” It’s about five square miles, with a population of about twenty-four thousand people, mostly white. The beaches are rocky and the water is freezing cold, with weather-beaten concrete breakers every couple hundred yards that constantly fight a losing battle against the waves and the winter ice off the lake, and woods laced with bike paths on the bluffs above the beaches. General Mitchell International Airport abuts the town to the west, putting the town, every few minutes, directly in the flight paths of low-flying airplanes taking off or landing, depending on the wind direction, but when you live there, you get so used to it you hardly notice.
The town was founded by a guy named Patrick Cudahy, who built a meatpacking plant/slaughterhouse that suffered a large fire in 2009, on the Fourth of July, as irony would have it. The fire put about a tenth of the town out of work. Apparently a couple of local kids were shooting off illegal fireworks and one landed on the building and burned a hole through the roof, which sounds exactly like something that would happen in Cudahy. There’s a massive foundry for Ladish Forging that runs half the length of town, on Packard Avenue, that makes castings and machined titanium parts for the aerospace industry. The other big employer is Bucyrus-Erie in South Milwaukee, the neighboring town to the south, where they make the giant strip-mining shovels, the ones that chop the tops off mountains. It seems like there’s a bar on virtually every corner, places called Rollie’s Tap or Vnuk’s Lounge or Sparky’s, filled with Polish guys with hardworking hands and maybe axle grease under their fingernails and burn holes in their Carhartt overalls. My first “real” job was working for such a man, a concrete mason named Bob who was truly a hardass. Not having a father in my life, I found his temper and directness pretty intimidating.
People didn’t drive fancy luxury cars in Cudahy, at least not when I grew up. They drove station wagons, minivans, and cars that were quickly and badly rusted from the winter road salt. I was thirteen when I saw my first BMW, and I assumed the driver must be rich. If you ride a motorcycle in Cudahy, and you probably do, it had better be a Harley, because they’re made in Milwaukee. The people who live there think of themselves, accurately, as hardworking and straightforward, connoisseurs of life’s simple pleasures, with traditional family values. To be fair, I can’t criticize an entire town just because I have some horrible memories there. I also have some truly incredible memories, like falling in love for the first time, exploring the steep lakeside cliffs as a kid, or qualifying for the state swim meet my senior year. But the difficult years at home and at school tend to discolor the rosy memories I do have. The most traumatic and difficult times of my life happened in Cudahy. Sometimes it’s hard to think fondly of my time there.
My father, Mark Anderegg, was competent and respected at work, but at home, he could be cold, arrogant, narcissistic, crude, and downright mean—in short, a bully. As he aged, his hair changed from dark to salt and pepper, and he had a close-cropped beard his entire adult life. He was probably just shy of morbidly obese, with a massive beer belly, and he wore wire-rimmed gradient eyeglasses that turned dark in the sunlight but never seemed to turn entirely clear indoors. He also, frequently, wore bandanas as head bands, though his hair was never long enough that he needed to hold it back from his face, and he seldom did anything strenuous enough to work up a sweat. While married to my mother, albeit briefly, he told his coworkers she’d tricked him into getting her pregnant. “I hate kids,” he would later tell Michelle. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with Zak until he was sixteen.” He was cheating on my mother, Sandra, with Robin before they divorced, and he later cheated on Robin, or so I was told. Any semblance of cordiality between my mother and father ended when she was forced to sue him for falling behind on his child support payments.
Robin was also overweight, with large thighs and fleshy upper arms. She had a pale pinkish complexion, an up-turned nose, eyes that narrowed as though she were frequently squinting, and a small mouth set in a face that was broad and round.
Robin resented me because I was the baggage that came attached to Mark. After my mother sued Mark for child support, the contempt he and Robin had towards Sandra increased, a hatred that Robin took out on me.
Sandra was my primary caregiver, though she was, by any measure, a mess. She was also overweight, with a weak chin and a prominent overbite, blue eyes that drooped and made her look sleepy, eyebrows that were so light as to be barely noticeable above her narrow wire-rimmed glasses, thin light brown hair that hung straight down to her jawline like a helmet, and bangs. She came from Polish and German extraction, raised in a strict Catholic household and educated at a Catholic school by nuns who were, as she described them, harsh on a good day and sadistic on a bad one.
A child, of course, sees his parents through a child’s eyes and interprets parental behaviors in a child’s terms; yet even then, it seemed to me, though I couldn’t explain it or understand it, that she did not know how to love. It was just like the way some people can’t carry a tune or tell a joke or cook a meal. She wasn’t like other moms I knew, and our relationship was not like the relationships other boys had with their moms. We were more like squabbling siblings than parent and child. If there was supposed to be some sort of parental authority she had over me, she never established it, or she was too timid to assert it. I did not try to please her or win her love because she couldn’t express love in a way that made me want it.
Instead of hugging me or holding my hand as I crossed the street, she would sit on me and pin me to the floor by the wrists and say, “Tell me you love me.” If I said it, it was only to get her off me. In truth, I felt scared and trapped when I was around her.
Her inability to understand what I was experiencing at school, as the victim of a prolonged bullying campaign, was entirely consistent with the way she dealt with the feelings of others. She was cognizant of the way they felt, but she was incapable of honoring these feelings when it conflicted with her condition, her OCD. She was, for example, utterly incapable of ever being on time, for anything, anywhere, ever, despite any and all efforts she made to be punctual. She worked for a doctor for almost thirteen years and she was late for work over half the time, until, when I was in seventh grade, the doctor finally had to warn her that if she was late again, he’d have no choice but to fire her. Most people would find a way to be on time, but my mother could not. After she was fired, she spent nine months on the couch, depressed. She lost job after job for the same reason, sabotaging herself over and over again, but each time she would say only, “I don’t know what my deal is—I meant to be on time—I failed again,” incurring punishment and punishing herself without apparently realizing that being chronically late wasn’t just about her—it was, quite simply, rude to the people who expected her to be on time. This wasn’t enough to get her to change her behavior, though.
And so we fought, day in, day out, about what I should wear, what I needed to do, how I combed my hair or didn’t comb my hair. They were never, to be clear, substantive disputes over whether a movie was appropriate for children my age, or if I needed a second helping of whatever was for dinner. Instead, there were violent efforts, at least on my part, to have my feelings recognized and validated—to be heard, and seen.
Once, when we fought in public, she decided she would teach me a lesson. I was in fourth grade. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, but when we got to the car, she unlocked her door and got in but didn’t unlock mine, and then she drove off without me. She came back for me, but I’d felt completely abandoned and alone. She did this on multiple occasions, until eventually I’d had enough. The next time she tried it, I ripped the radio antenna off as she pulled away, which embarrassed her because a man in a nearby car had witnessed the scene.
I knew only to be afraid of her anger and her irrational behaviors. That fear translated quickly into hatred, because she was supposed to be someone I could count on, and she was not. At first, I hated how lonely I felt, how unseen and unheard and isolated I was, but that sort of loneliness can turn into a kind of armor you wear and embrace. You realize that if you’re on your own, so be it. You decide you can’t depend on anyone, so you depend on yourself.
Because Sandra worked nine to five, I had a series of babysitters up until I was in about sixth grade. At that point, I was old enough to let myself in and take care of myself in the empty house. Calling it an empty house makes it sound like something I dreaded, but the opposite was true. I liked it. I could do anything I wanted to. Too often, to my regret, what I wanted to do was plunk myself down in front of the television in the rocking chair with a Coke and a bag of potato chips and watch reruns of ’80s sitcoms like Family Ties or Gimme a Break or Duck Tales, which was about Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, though Scrooge McDuck was in it more than Donald was. If I had a time machine and could go back and redo those after-school hours, there are surely ways I could put them to better use.
Feeling lonely wasn’t all bad, because lonely meant safe. It’s hard to remember exactly when or how it started. I wasn’t antisocial, at least not at first. I was in the Cub Sc
outs, and the Boy Scouts. I played on sports teams. I played with my cousins at family gatherings. But it was a label I wore, at school, and it was the same label, year after year. I felt like I carried the label with me, the stigma, wherever I went. How is someone’s social standing established in kindergarten? I dressed like everyone else. I acted like everyone else. . . .
It started out as verbal chastising, and it seemed to get worse, or more entrenched, with every passing grade. I was able to tell myself that life is just like that, some kids are more popular than others, and if somebody had to be the most popular, then somebody had to be the least popular, and that was me, but I couldn’t make sense of it. No kid should ever have to experience that.
Each time it happened, the wound reopened, and it was like hitting your shin over and over again in the exact same spot. The wound never healed, and the pain got worse. To endure it, I’d lock myself into a kind of mental or emotional survival mode, but the simple act of bracing myself was traumatizing. Trauma is what happens to you, to your mind and perhaps to your soul, when you can neither fight nor flee. Those are the two options Nature gives animals in the wild. A kid on a school bus can’t flee, and he can’t fight. When someone called me a name, I’d laugh and pretend I thought it was funny, too. I’d retreat into myself, but not too far because if you retreat too far, you get attacked again. It’s like the advice you get about what to do when you encounter a bear on a hiking trail or a mean dog on the street—don’t run, because if you do, you just invite them to chase you—just curl up in a ball and play dead. On the school bus, I couldn’t hide, and I had to keep an eye on the people teasing me, but the fifteen-minute trip was torture. Nice way to start the day.
Early grade school was tolerable, if not particularly fun, the abuse mainly verbal. Kids called me names, and after school, I was never welcomed to hang out with them or invited on play dates. I lost sleep, trying to figure out why it was happening. The stress actually made me sick. I had insomnia. I developed a hyper-vigilance because I felt like I was on display all the time, conspicuous and singled out.
Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself: A Man and His Dog's Struggle to Find Salvation Page 10
