Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself: A Man and His Dog's Struggle to Find Salvation

by Anderegg, Zachary

  The answer was simple. She couldn’t teach me how to do something she couldn’t do herself, any more than I could teach someone how to knit or fly an airplane. She could only teach me the lessons she’d learned.

  She could not have meant to, but in a sense, my mother prepared me for a period, if not a life, of victimization simply because she was victimized at nearly every stage of her life. I’d seen how she sabotaged herself, making herself late for everything, her way of making herself a victim before anyone else could, similar to how the victims of bullies make self-deprecating jokes and, for example, call themselves fat before anybody else can. Part of being a victim is lacking basic problem-solving skills, not understanding what people wanted and never learning how to negotiate with them. Getting to work on time is important. Being late all the time is a problem. No one can argue it isn’t a problem, but it’s one anybody can solve. You get an alarm clock. You set it. But she couldn’t do it.

  I’d seen how she exhibited obsessive compulsive behaviors, like cleaning the sink or the stove, as if she didn’t know what else to do to be a mother. As if a clean stove or a clean sink were the only things she knew she could do to be proud of herself for achieving something that was, in her mind, significant, and that was all she saw. The rest of the kitchen could be a mess, but the stove was clean, so she’d fulfilled an obligation. She was self-absorbed because it was her way of minding her own business and keeping her head down, the same way I was when I was eating lunch in the cafeteria, shielding myself from hurt by not making eye contact with anybody. She’d modeled the behavior, and I’d copied it.

  I was far too young to remember anything about the time when she and my father were married. I do have faint memories of them interacting, albeit awkwardly. I must have been five. My dad dropped me off at my home in Cudahy early in the morning on his way to work. He came upstairs a few times and I witnessed something that didn’t make sense, because I was too small. My mother was lying on the couch, where she would often sleep. Mark sat down next to her and taunted and teased her, tickling her. Her words said stop, but her tone said she liked the attention. She even asked me to help her, a ridiculous thing to say, as if a five-year-old could physically stop his dad from grab-assing with his mom. I remember feeling a plethora of confusing emotions, from helpless to angry to confused. Was this normal? Was this what parents did? How was I to know any different? It was all just too much for me to process.

  But to understand someone, of course, you need to look at where you’ve come from and what forces shaped them. When I did that, it became easier to understand how she could be both so timid and subordinate when she felt she was in a position of weakness, and so mean spirited and controlling when she felt the need to push me around. She was like a mouse who’d grown up in a household of cats.

  She was raised in a house in Milwaukee where she lived with her brother, Sean, her mother, Alice Simon, and her father, Roland Simon, but her paternal grandparents lived downstairs in the same house. Her paternal grandmother could be a nasty old lady, a mean small-minded person who would call the police when the neighborhood kids cut through the yard, unaware that the neighborhood kids, to retaliate, would beat up my mother.

  There was no love on display, ever, between her mother and father, who bickered and fought constantly and never hugged or kissed, not each other, and not her. She was constantly punished and told she was bad, a label she ultimately accepted, until she thought of herself as a bad person, a person of little value or worth. Cruelty and negative reinforcement were everywhere, every day, a constant. Praise was nonexistent. When Sandra got A’s on her report card, Alice wouldn’t look at it. When there was a mother-daughter function at school, Alice would not attend. She sometimes used what was once called a “switch” to administer corporal punishment for minor offenses, a believer in the old parenting adage, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” My mother shared with Michelle a story where she recalled a hot summer day when Alice bought a group of children ice cream cones, but she would not buy a cone for Sandra, who was told she was being punished and deprived of ice cream because she’d been bad. Even if being deprived of ice cream was a suitable punishment, why would Alice go the extra mile and buy all the other kids ice cream, just to make Sandra feel even worse than she already did? In high school, when my mother modeled a dress for her mother before a school dance, proudly twirling in the belief that she had successfully prettied herself up, Alice said, “You look ugly.”

  It was, unfortunately, not the last time she’d hear that. When I was in third or fourth grade, I became aware that she was trying a dating service called Unique Encounters, which at the time, before the Internet, meant arranging telephone conversations with potential dates or partners. She would do alright until they asked her to send them a picture. One man in particular seemed particularly enthusiastic and kept begging her to send a picture so that he could see what she looked like. When she finally complied, he stopped taking her calls and he never called her back again.

  Such are the stories she told me and Michelle. I assume they’re accurate, but I wonder how much she remembers, and I wonder what she might not be saying.

  My grandfather, Roland, was of German descent, raised on Pierce Street in Milwaukee, the son of a man who worked for the city. I remember hearing that his father had been an amateur boxer. I don’t know what my grandfather did before he joined the army air corps out of high school during World War II and served in India.

  When he came home from the war, he was sent by the military to Woods Hospital, a psychiatric facility, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and treated with shock therapy. My mother and her mother would visit him there, and he would occasionally come home on weekends. He scored high on the intelligence tests they gave him, but he never fully recovered from the illness, which he claimed he’d come down with in the military. I wasn’t sure if it actually worked that way, where schizophrenia is a contagious disease you “come down with,” like the flu or chicken pox, but I knew he got disability checks from the government for the rest of his life.

  My mother recalls her father as having a dual personality. She may have preferred the drunk one to the sober one, because the only time he ever told her he loved her was when he was drunk, though she didn’t believe it and felt it was the alcohol talking. If she and her father were close when she was younger, it deteriorated as she grew older. Once when they fought, Roland threatened to send her away to a home for girls run by nuns. Only a freshman in high school, she believed this to be a real place. She wrote her father a long letter and put it on his pillow. He never sent her to the home run by nuns, but he never removed the threat either.

  Schizophrenic is a pretty big word for a kid to understand. As a child, I believed this was something he’d contracted during his service in India with the army air corps. I thought it was something he had and got over. It didn’t really dawn on me that his being in and out of mental hospitals during my mother’s youth meant he had an ongoing problem. I saw for myself, on the many occasions that I would visit their house, that when my grandfather was home, he drank to excess, and then he became surly and abusive.

  The worst memory I have of such an episode was when I was very young, six or seven. My grandparents got into another one of their fights, but this time the hostilities erupted rather than dissipated as they carried their argument from the living room into the kitchen and then into the bathroom, where things got physical. I heard, above the screaming, the sound of my grandmother being pushed against the wall. She yelled at him to stop pushing her. That’s when I got scared. I snapped, walked into the kitchen, shaking, and screamed at them, “STOP IT!” before bursting into tears, and then I ran back into the living room and buried myself in the couch.

  It worked. I’d shamed them into stopping. They sat down in the living room and actually started talking, and there was peace. I was still scared and confused by what had happened. I ran back and forth between the two of them, burying my head in their laps, one aft
er the other, feeling sad for them, and for myself.

  Because they lived only thirty minutes away, I became fairly close to Alice and Roland. I knew him as the man who built little ships and boats for me to play with out of wood scraps and found household items. I knew he was a veteran because he talked about the war, over and over again, and told me the same story about how he’d put out an engine fire on an airplane and rescued the pilot, over and over, a hundred times, until I realized one day that he talked about virtually nothing else, as if he’d spent a lifetime in the military and seen combat action, rather than the year and a half he spent working on airplanes before he was sent home. I didn’t know what schizophrenia meant, other than that it was described at one time, probably at the time my grandfather was diagnosed, as having a “split personality.” It means crazy, paranoid or deluded to the point of hallucinations, with unpredictable behaviors and erratic emotional responses, and an inability to function normally or think logically. People who are schizophrenic can’t hold jobs, suffer from depression or anxiety disorders, and often, like my grandfather, are prone to substance abuse. Alcoholism is, in a way, its own kind of splitting, because it divides the parent into two people, the sober one and the drunk one, and little kids can never tell which one is coming at them, the sober one they can trust or the drunk one they can’t.

  As I said, I never saw any of this, because I was too young and it went right over my head, or because my grandfather managed to hide it from me, but my mother saw all of it. She grew up with it, and in her most formative years, it was what shaped her. It would have been difficult enough, having a crazy father, but having one who also self-medicated with alcohol made it impossible to know what to do. Sometimes the drunk one told her he loved her, but she couldn’t trust the drunk one. Sometimes the drunk one pushed his wife Alice around, and when Sandra tried to come to her mother’s defense, she got pushed as well. It was lucky that he was diagnosed while he was in the service, because the whole family lived off his disability checks, but it wasn’t lucky for my mother.

  She had no one to set a good example for her, no one to show her how to be a loving parent. As a young girl, my mother saw her mother experience a panic attack. She remembers getting on a city bus with Alice, but after only a few blocks Alice became convinced that the bus was going to crash, until eventually the driver stopped to let them out, five blocks from their stop. Alice was given a prescription for valium, one of the earlier psychotropic medications released in 1963 to treat anxiety.

  My information about Alice and Roland is incomplete, because Sandra didn’t like to talk about her childhood much. It was clear to me that her early life was not easy. She had nowhere to turn and no one to talk to. If she ever cried, her mother and father made fun of her for crying, rather than offer sympathy. She learned to hide, keep her head down and make herself invisible, and not to fight back.

  When I was about fourteen or fifteen, she had a number of brief hospital stays, but all she’d tell me was that she had a “chemical imbalance.” I’ve read that people who suffer from schizophrenia are hospitalized when they are considered to pose a danger to themselves or to others, which meant my mother grew up with a man who was probably diagnosed as dangerously insane. Sandra’s mother and father were both, to varying degrees, mentally ill. I’m not qualified to say whether or not my mother is, too, but even if she isn’t, she still grew up imitating her parents’ behaviors, unconsciously. They didn’t know how to show or express love, so Sandra never learned how to do it.

  She has had three romantic involvements in her life, to my knowledge, and she has intimated to Michelle that her first romantic involvement with a man, before getting involved with my father, was abusive. Her first impression of Mark was that he was, I quote, “an asshole.” Why, then, would she pursue a relationship with him, if not to refight the battles she’d lost as a child and, it turned out, lose them all over again? I should add that she was able to express love in one way: like many people too shy or introverted or troubled to love other human beings, she could love animals. She and my father, when they began their ill-fated marriage, had a Siberian husky named Reagan, whom my mother adored. She never forgave my father for taking the dog with him when he left. And she loved her cats—the same cats I hurt, perhaps because she loved them and not me.

  The lessons I learned from my mother were the opposite of beneficial. The way I saw it, they directly resulted in my constant bullying. But how did this happen? Why was I singled out for bullying?

  I once asked a therapist that. He dismissed the question and thought it was unimportant. I felt, to the contrary, that understanding what it was about me that drew the scorn and anger of my peers would be a crucial part of the healing process.

  From kindergarten on, I set myself up for punishment and abuse because I’d already built a protective fortress around me, a way of carrying myself that marked me as different from everybody else. I walked on eggshells where there were no eggshells. I anticipated hostility and expected trouble, and as a result, I generated hostility and trouble. I’d learned, at home, how to behave like a victim. My peers didn’t know what was different about me on any conscious level, what it was that they didn’t like. It was beyond all of us. All they knew was that they didn’t like it, they didn’t feel comfortable around me, so they attacked what they didn’t understand, afraid of becoming me.

  I had “please don’t victimize me” written all over me, and that invited the bullies to do as they pleased to me, knowing I wouldn’t fight back, because I’d already surrendered. I did that because that’s how my mother learned to cope and survive. I sabotaged myself because she’d shown me how to do it. She didn’t mean to, but she did.

  8

  I returned to the Page Animal Hospital the next morning, arriving around ten o’clock. It was another bright, brilliant Arizona morning, with blue skies and a warm sun toasting the sand.

  Both Krista and Dr. Roundtree were there, and I knew immediately, by the way they both smiled at me, that things had turned a corner. I was enormously impressed by how professional and caring they were. They brought me immediately to the back room. I quickly scanned the cages to see how the black-and-white cat was doing. Either he’d been moved somewhere to recover, or he hadn’t made it, because I couldn’t find him anywhere. But my concern was for the dog now.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  “He’s still eating and taking fluids,” Krista said. “We like that. And he’s pooping and peeing.”

  “He’s pretty weak,” Dr. Roundtree said. “But that’s to be expected.”

  He explained that he’d performed the same blood tests to check for organ function that he’d performed on the day I’d brought him in, which was standard procedure. You do the tests, rehydrate the dog, then do the tests again to measure the differences. As far as he could tell, the dog seemed to be bouncing back.

  “Why are his teeth so brown?”

  “He probably had distemper before his permanent teeth came in,” Krista said. “The infection disrupts the formation of the enamel.”

  Krista said he was on his third I.V. bag. To put it in scale, given his size and diminished weight, it would be like a normal-sized human drinking two five-gallon jugs of water. No wonder he couldn’t move. He would have sloshed himself to death. She showed me the reports of the blood work they’d done, how his electrolytes were coming back into balance, how his white cells were up, which would help him fight off infection. He was pulling through.

  “So what’s next?” I asked.

  It wasn’t a question I wanted to ask. By that, I mean that I felt responsible for the animal and wanted to pay his health-care costs. But beyond that, there was only so much I could do. Michelle and I had already talked about getting a second dog, and I had decided one dog was enough. We were also working long hours, seven days a week, to keep the Wrench-It Center afloat and the bills paid. Neither of us would have the time to stay home with a sick puppy and nurse him back to health. We also ne
eded to take Kohi into consideration, and while he got along fine with other dogs, those instances were quick meet-and-greets at the park or on the street. In his own house, he was the alpha dog, and we weren’t sure if he’d welcome the competition.

  “Wait and see, but I think we’re out of the woods.”

  “What about psychological damage?” I asked. “I suppose that’s hard to say.”

  “It is,” the veterinarian said. I knew the dog wouldn’t be able to talk it out with a therapist, of course. There was a chance the dog would be clingy or need a lot of attention. He could show avoidant behaviors toward people, or growl, or even nip or bite. “But dogs don’t think like we do. He’s not going to think somebody put him in the canyon because they wanted to hurt him. They can’t really tell what our motivations are.”

  The dog was also, I hoped, young enough that if someone was cruel to him, he might not remember, the way adult humans can’t retain anything that happened to them in the first year or two of our lives.

  “Do you think he’ll get along with other dogs?” I asked.

  “Impossible to say,” I was told. “It depends on how socialized he was before he was abandoned.”

  “Do you think there’s a chance his owner will be looking for him?”

  He didn’t think so. His best guess was that the dog was what they call a “res dog,” referring to the Navajo reservation lands outside of Page. “Res dogs” often wandered off, looking for food. However, he didn’t think anybody would have bothered putting the dog in the canyon. For one thing, few if any locals had the gear and experience to get so deep into such a technical canyon. He’d checked, but the dog didn’t have any subcutaneous microchips to identify it. I wondered what the chances were that someone would adopt him. There’s something called “black dog syndrome,” which describes why black dogs are always the last to be adopted. What it comes down to is that people just don’t like them.