Outside the Dog Museum

by Carroll, Jonathan

  I looked at my father for explanations. We were pals and he was usually straight with me, but this time he gave a small head shake that meant “wait till later.” So I turned back to the photographer and waited for what he’d do next.

  “Let’s go in and get you set up.” He pushed himself slowly off the floor and led the way into the house.

  To this day I remember the way his place was furnished: Dark “Mission” furniture, pieces of ornamental glass everywhere—Steuben, Lalique, Tiffany—that caught and turned light into beautiful, intricate performances for anyone interested.

  Some of his more famous photographs were on the walls: Fellini and Giulietta Masina eating a picnic lunch together on the set of La Strada; Tour de France bicycle racers steaming in a tight pack together down a Paris street with the Eiffel Tower looming behind them like a monstrous metal golem.

  “Did you take that picture?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s President Eisenhower!”

  “Right. He let me come to the White House to do it.”

  “You were in the White House?”

  “Yes. A couple of times.”

  I didn’t know who Fellini was, and anyone could race a bicycle, but to be invited to President Eisenhower’s house to take a picture meant you were big stuff, in my book. I followed Bob closely to his studio.

  Later I read in Layne-Dyer’s autobiography that he hated being called anything other than “Robert.” But “Bob” is a pair of soft familiar jeans to an eight-year-old boy, rather than “Robert,” which is the black wool suit you’re forced to wear on Sunday to church, or the name of a distant cousin you instantly hate on meeting for the first time.

  “What kind of picture are you going to take of me?”

  “Come on in and I’ll show you.”

  The studio was unremarkable. There were lights and reflectors around, but nothing challenging, nothing promising besides many cameras that said only matters were more formal in here, watch your step a little more. But I was eight, and having my picture taken by someone famous seemed only right: a combination of what was due me because I was Harry Radcliffe, third-grader, and because my father, a rich and nice man, wanted it. At eight you’re dead serious about what the world owes you: Civilization starts in your own room and moves out from there.

  “Sit here, Harry.”

  A pretty assistant named Karla started moving around the room, setting up cameras and tripods. She smiled at me sometimes.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up, Harry?”

  Looking to see if Karla was watching, I said confidently, “Mayor of New York.”

  Layne-Dyer ran both hands through his hair and said to no one in particular, “Humble fellow, isn’t he?”

  Which made my father laugh. I didn’t know what the word meant, but if Dad laughed then it must be okay.

  “Look at me, Harry. Good. Now look over there, at the picture of the dog on the wall.”

  “What kind of dog is that?”

  “Don’t talk for a minute, Boss. Let me get this right and then we’ll chat.”

  I tried to watch what he was doing out of the corner of my eye, but couldn’t make my eyeball go back that far. I started to turn.

  “Don’t move! Don’t move!” FLASH. FLASH. FLASH. “Great, Harry. Now you can turn. It’s a Great Vendean Griffon.” FLASH. FLASH.

  “What is?”

  “The dog on the wall.”

  “Oh. Are you finished taking my picture now?”

  “Not yet. A little while longer.”

  Halfway through the session he collapsed again.

  “There’s an art to falling down, you know. When you go like I do, with no warning, just plotz, you learn after a few times to watch and take as much with you as you can before you hit. The design on the drapes, whatever you can grab with your eye, a hand … Don’t go empty-handed, don’t just go down scared. Do you understand what I’m talking about, Harry?”

  “No, sir. Not really”

  “That’s okay. Look at me.”

  The dying have a quality that even a child senses. Not because they are already removed, but because even young hearts sense their inability to stay longer. Behind the looks of sickness or fear is also the look of the long-distance traveler, bags on the floor, eyes tired but nervous for any change that may come. They are the ones going on the twenty-hour flights, and although we don’t envy their coming discomfort or time-zone skips, tomorrow they will be there—a place that both terrifies and thrills us. We peek at the ticket they hold, the inconceivably far destination written there, impossible yet monstrously alluring. What will it smell like for them tomorrow? What is it like to sleep there?

  “Are you sick?”

  Karla stopped walking across the room and looked away. My father started to say something, but Bob cut him off.

  “Yes, Harry. That’s what makes me fall down.”

  “Something’s wrong with your feet?”

  “No, my head. It’s called a brain tumor. Like a bump inside there that makes you do odd things. And ends up killing you.”

  I am convinced he didn’t say it to spook or scare me. Only because it was the truth. Now I was entirely impressed by him.

  “You’re going to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s weird. What does it feel like?”

  The camera flashgun in his hand went off, making us all jump. “Like that.”

  When we’d shivered back to earth, he put the flashgun on a table and gestured with his head. “Come with me a minute, Harry. I want to show you something.”

  All three of us would have followed at that moment if he’d asked. I looked at my father to see if it was okay to go, but couldn’t catch his eye because he was watching Layne-Dyer so intently.

  “Come on, Harry, we’ll be back soon.”

  He took my hand and led me farther back into the studio, through a large woody kitchen with silver pots of different sizes hanging from the walls like drops of frozen mercury, a big bunch of red onions and one of ivory garlic.

  “Does your wife like to cook?”

  “I like to cook, Harry. What’s your favorite food?”

  “Spare ribs, I guess,” I said disapprovingly. Men weren’t supposed to cook. I was not happy with his disclosure, but he was dying and that was thrilling. At my age I’d heard a lot about death and even seen my grandfather in his coffin looking rested. But being near a death actually taking place was something else. Years later in a biology class, I watched a snake devour a live mouse bit by wriggling bit. That is what it was like to be with Layne-Dyer that single day, knowing something was killing him even as we stood there looking at his red onions.

  “Come on.” We left the kitchen and came to one last room that was quite dark and empty but for something that made me gasp: a house. A house the size of a sofa. From the first moment, it was clear this was no rinky-dink girl’s dollhouse full of pink curtains and little fringed Barbie beds. This was big serious stuff.

  “Wow! What’s that?” I didn’t wait for an answer before going over.

  “Have a look before I tell you.”

  I was a kid who loved to talk unless something was so fascinating that it shut me up without my knowing it, or stunned me into silence, or so glutted me with its presence that I’d lose all appetite for talking.

  The photographer’s house did it. Later, when I studied architecture and learned all the formal terms, I realized the house was postmodern long before the term ever existed. Its lines, columns, and color combinations predated the work of Michael Graves and Hans Hollein by at least a decade.

  But eight-year-olds aren’t silenced by postmodernism. They are silenced by wonder, the orange flame and thunder crack of the miraculous right in front of them. What was, then, so completely absorbing about Layne-Dyer’s model? The perfect details, at first. Carved brass doorknobs the size of corn kernels, stained or bottle glass in most windows, a copper weather vane shaped like the dog in the photograph in the othe
r room. The more complete something is, the more it reassures us. Time was spent here, someone’s world stopped for a while—hours? days?—while they worked to get it right. Their result tells us it is possible to do things till the end, till we—not God, not fate—decide it is finished.

  I couldn’t stop touching the house, and everything I touched was beautifully or solidly made. The only odd part was that on one side of the building a portion of the roof had been removed and one of the upstairs rooms seemed to be under construction. It looked like a cutaway diagram in a do-it-yourself repair magazine.

  After the initial delight passed and I’d run my hands over it like a blind man, pausing everywhere for little detours and hidden wonders, a second level of awareness set in. It eventually struck me that things actually went on in this house: Homework was finished, bread was baked, checks written, dogs ran across wooden floors when a doorbell rang.

  I watched “Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” on television and had seen shows where doll’s houses were malevolent, dangerous things full of toys from hell, or worse. But despite the very strong sense of motion and real life around Layne-Dyer’s model, I felt no danger; didn’t feel frightened or threatened by it.

  “I’ll show you something.” Coming around me, he went to the section where the roof had been taken off and put his hand down into the exposed room. When it reappeared, it was holding a bed the size of a small loaf of bread.

  “Did you ever eat a bed?” He broke off a piece of it and put it in his mouth.

  “Cool! Can I have some?”

  “You can try, but I don’t think you’ll be able to eat it.”

  “Oh yeah? Give me some!” I took the piece he offered and put it in my mouth. It tasted like salty plaster. It tasted like a model.

  “Yecch!” I spit and spit to get it all out. Bob smiled and continued to chew and then swallow his piece.

  “Listen to me, Harry. You can’t eat it because it’s not your house. Sooner or later in everyone’s life a moment comes when their house appears like this. Sometimes it’s when you’re young, sometimes when you’re sick like me. But most peoples’ problem is they can’t see the house, so they die confused. They say they want to understand what it’s all about, but given the chance, given the house, they either look away or get scared and blind. Because when the house is there and you know it, you don’t have any more excuses, Boss.”

  Once again I was baffled by what he was saying, but the tone of his voice was so intense that it seemed imperative I at least try to understand what he was so passionate about.

  “I’m scared at what you’re saying. I don’t get what you mean.”

  He nodded, stopped, nodded again. “I’m telling you this now, Harry, so maybe you’ll remember it later on. No one ever told me.

  “Everyone has a house inside them. It defines who they are. A specific style and form, a certain number of rooms. You think about it all your life—what does mine really look like? How many floors are there? What is the view from the different windows? … But only once do you get a chance to actually see it. If you miss that chance, or avoid it ’cause it scares you, then it goes away and you’ll never see it again.”

  “Where is this house?”

  He pointed to his head and mine. “In here. If you recognize it when it comes, then it’ll stay. But accepting it and making it stay is only the first part. Then you’ve got to try understanding it. You’ve got to take it apart and understand every piece. Why it’s there, why it’s made like that … most of all, how each piece fits in the whole.”

  I sort of got it. I asked the right question. “What happens when you understand?”

  He held up a finger, as if I’d made a good point. “It lets you eat it.”

  “Like you just did?”

  “Exactly. It lets you take it back inside. Here, look where the roof is gone. It’s the only section of the house I’ve been able to understand so far. The only part I’ve been allowed to eat.” He broke off another piece and popped it into his mouth. “The fuck of the thing is, I don’t have enough time now to do it. You can’t imagine how long it takes. How many hours you sit there and look or try to work it out … but nothing happens. It’s so exciting and frustrating at the same time.”

  Whatever he’d said after “fuck” didn’t go anywhere in my head because he’d said that word! Even my father didn’t say it and he was a pretty big curser. I’d said it once and gotten the biggest smack of my life. Whenever I’d heard it since, it was like someone flashing an illegal weapon at me or a pack of dirty playing cards. You were dying to look, but knew it’d get you in a hell of a lot of trouble if you did.

  “Fuck.” You don’t hear that much when you’re an eight-year-old. It’s an adult’s word, forbidden and dirty and owning a dangerous gleam of its own. You don’t really know what it means, but use it, and you sure get fast results.

  The whole wonder and awe of Layne-Dyer’s model house—what it was, what he said it was—fell from the horizon the moment this big orange “FUCK” roared up. The magic of death, the magic of great mysteries, lost to the magic of one dirty word.

  A short time later both Karla and my father began calling us from the other room. Bob put his arm around my shoulder and asked again if I understood everything he had said. Lying, I nodded in a way I thought was intelligent and mature, but my mind was on other things.

  The photo session ended soon after, which was just as well because I couldn’t wait to get home.

  When I was safely in my room and had locked the door, I ran for the bathroom. Locked in there too, I turned on the overhead light and said the word to myself over and over again. Loud, soft, as a plea, an order. I made faces around the word, gestures, I did everything. Hearing it from Layne-Dyer had set something loose in me and I couldn’t let that thing go until I had exhausted its every possibility. Fuck.

  WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, I saw Big Top lying on my foot. Venasque was looking at me and eating from a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips.

  “That was a dream I had twenty years ago, Venasque. The only thing true about it was I went to Layne-Dyer as a kid to have my picture taken and he fell down once.”

  “How old were you when you had the dream?”

  “I don’t know, graduate school, as I remember.”

  “Why do you think you had it then?”

  “Cause I was thinking a lot about houses then. I was studying to be an architect!”

  “Harry, don’t be a dope. Before, you were saying things like Karate Kid are bad because they water down important issues. That’s true, but here you were having a …

  “Listen to me carefully. Sometimes dreams turn into soldiers. They’ll fight your battles and defend your land, but you’ve got to take good care of them. Feed and protect them, give them the attention they deserve. Forget or ignore a dream that size and the soldier dies. That one especially. You’ve got to write that thing down as much as you remember and study it till you realize how important it is. And for God’s sake, keep it protected. You’re going to need it again, believe me.

  “Karate Kid is nonsense, but you were given a gift of real enlightenment, Harry, and you forgot it, till now. Wrote it off like it happened because you were eating hot peppers before you went to bed.”

  BESIDES THE “TRAVELING” AND clarinet lessons, Venasque had me do autogenic training to drag my flapping kite of a heartbeat back to earth, as well as create a new quiet room in the house of my life. It would be both easy and false to lie and say our time together was full of miraculous events, profound aphorisms, and enlightenment every step of the way. But being healed and helped by Venasque didn’t work like that. There was magic, times when my jaw dropped open and troops of cold-footed lizards ran up my spine. But the norm was quiet talk and laughter, always. I am convinced the great teachers do two things that outweigh everything else—they explain clearly, and they exude an almost palpable feeling of benevolence.

  A shaman, teacher … must be fundamenta
lly and at all times benevolent. None of this half-devil, half-angel stuff, which is a very modern, convenient conceit that misses the point. The point is that while the teaching methods these men sometimes employ are odd and unorthodox and even horrifying, ultimately they know something about us that we ourselves don’t know—they have faculties functioning in their brains that don’t function in ours. And most important, behind all their strange behavior is the benevolent intent to bring us to our spiritual senses.

  Since my time with Venasque I have met or read books about other so-called shamans. But these characters aren’t the real thing. They are simply mischievous, intuitive, supersmart little opportunists who pass for spiritual teachers because they have psychic abilities. But psychic powers are a dime a dozen. Someone made the point somewhere that we must learn to distinguish between the occult and the religious, between magic and true spirituality. The two do sometimes come together—saints do have magical powers, sure. But they don’t exploit these powers, and more important, they consider them only by-products of their real concern, which is spiritual development.

  Let me tell you one last Venasque story. When I was well again and he was preparing to return to his home in Los Angeles, he still hadn’t mentioned his fee. So I asked. He told me the normal charge was five thousand dollars, but because I was a famous architect, he’d rather I design a new kitchen for his house. The one he had was both old and too full of sad memories of the happy days he’d spent there together with his wife.

  “Now it’s your turn to figure me out, Harry. Decide what kind of environment I should have.”

  “Is this part of my therapy?”

  “No. I need a new kitchen and it’ll be a good way for you to get started again. Something small and tasty!”

  I went down to L.A. with him to look at his house, but wasn’t impressed by what I saw. The place itself was postwar, pseudo-Spanish, but the greater cause for concern was the interior: ghetto-chic, shag-rug hell. Too many colors, too many patterns, too many different textures of furniture that didn’t go together at all. It looked like a schizophrenic from Tahiti lived there, or someone wildly enthusiastic for variety, but color-blind down to the difference between blue and yellow.