The Dog Log

by Richard Lucas

  I checked the mic as if I were serious about the night, but had to laugh. The volume in these rooms is outdone only by the amount of reverb, which simulates the empty hull of an oil tanker.

  I ordered a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and my host returned with something maybe Korean that was the same color, at least, with the added benefit of flame-thrower scorch that slashed its way down my esophagus with each hot and wooly swallow.

  Karaoke always takes a few drinks to get started. I’m sure you know that. I can imagine a bunch of sheriff’s deputies and their spouses blowing off some steam there. I lay down on a couch and let four random songs play through as my fiery fermented friend slowly cauterized the confluence of loss, anger, and self-loathing flowing beneath my skin.

  I thought about what Ally’d said, and I wanted to sing with abandon, find the ecstasy in music the way I used to. Tonight, I wanted to do something associated with joy—if I could put my arms around it for one moment and feel it kiss me goodbye and say, “I love you, Richard.” I don’t want another year to suffer through. Or a night. Or worse, a day. Tonight has the weighted suggestion hanging around its neck that maybe it should be my last.

  Have you ever been promised a promotion and not gotten it, Sheriff ? Multiply that by a thousand concerts in arenas around the US and the world, and you’ll know how I feel. I went there tonight to live with the past that should have been. I’d sing love songs and mean it with full-bore, unapologetic sincerity. I’d sing protest songs with righteous anger. I sang “Gimme Shelter.” I sang “Jeremy.” I sang “Fascination Street.” I sang “Burning Down the House,” “What’s Going On.” I sang “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” I sang “Karma Police,” “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Keep on Lovin’ You,” “Hello.” I sang “Waterloo.” I sang “Love Me Tender.” I sang “I’ll Stand by You.” I sang “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” I sang “The End.” I sang everything as if they were my last words on this earth—glorious, self-pitying, ugly, lonely, exciting, drunker and drunker, and ecstatic.

  This almost felt like the right time and right way to go out. I lay back down on a couch and prayed for it to come to pass through alcohol poisoning as loud, wordless music pulsed and spun around me. At closing, they peeled me off the vinyl and poured me into a cab.

  I’m no better now, really, and already the blade of the hangover is chiseling away.

  3:10 PM

  I can’t move without feeling like I’m going to puke.

  This might be more maddening than when Irene was home, the way that Lauren barks all day. There’s a new layer to it, added jabs of resentment. I get it. How did Irene show affection, just by feeding them? You can’t touch them. Sometimes through the wall, I could hear Irene’s voice, extra-high-pitched, calling them “the most beautiful doggies in the world,” and asking them a series of questions about whether or not they realize that “they are the cutest doggies in the world?” I’ve even heard her singing—“There She Is, Miss America.”

  But does she touch them? Their hair is dry-soaked with that mud mix of urine, dirt, and horror through which it drags all day across the floor. Drags? They sit in it on the kitchen floor all day. If she touches them, how does she keep from becoming diseased? Has she developed some incredible immune system antibody superpower? Has she actually discovered a secret to longevity, an antidote against death? I get colds all the time. I mentioned I had that flu in early December, spent my few post-Sophie/pre-Lauren days with a fever—because I’m normal.

  What is it that Lauren is longing for? Just Irene’s voice? How low a bar of companionship has she? And Lauren does have Nelson with her. How come she can’t just be happy to have him as her poop pal and let it be? The human she’s been living with has actually been making her life worse. Come to think of it, Irene makes my life worse. Bark.

  January 5, 1:20 PM

  Midday. It was so cold last night that I slept with gloves on. Maybe I should go over there just so they can see a human being. I don’t know. I already interrupt my day twice to go throw food at them, but now I’m thinking about, what, “visiting” them? Maybe I should try a walk again.

  2:15 PM

  Holy cow, those dogs have no idea what to do outside. They know to move up and down on the sidewalk well enough. Neither one darted away this time. But when I put them in the grass, they just stood there and looked up at me. Like putting an infant on a toilet seat. They didn’t sniff around, didn’t even lower their heads toward the blades. Nothing but empty stares.

  I couldn’t find a single patch of grass along our block that would interest them. Nor trees, nor bushes, nor walls, nor gravel, nor fences.

  I thought that when dogs walk, they’re out there following trails of scents, that they’re supposed to be leaving their own scents behind, right? Like social or sexual messages to one another? Checking their e-mail. Swipes on dating sites, right?

  Obviously, they’d already gone inside. But how can they be alive and not interested in what is happening on the rest of the canine planet? How can you knock that biology out of them? It was stunning to watch. And they don’t know how to walk. They were either tugging ahead or sulking behind. Going left. Going right. No pace. Maybe they’re not comfortable enough with me yet to behave like animals. What did they need me to do, pee on a tree to show them the process?

  My mind is boggled. If they’re never going to pee outside, that means that as I clean each area of the kitchen floor, they’ll only mess it up again and again. There could never be a whole clean floor. If Irene comes home tomorrow, nothing will change, so why put in any effort?

  That’s another shock. Not a single soul has knocked on her door, nor on my door, to ask about what’s going on. It’s been ten days. Where are they? Bastards.

  And, of course, as soon as I got the dogs back inside, Nelson peed on the refrigerator. That sneaky-as-a-U-boat little fucker was holding it in for when we came home. Amazing. Their olfactory senses must be so damaged that nothing can push their evolutionary buttons.

  When the hell is Irene coming home? What is going on? Is this just because I live nearest to her? When did that become the rule? Casino’s the one who was so friendly and charming with her. But that’s the way with “charming” people. So skilled at dropping intense focus into tiny moments with people—so smiling and kind seeming, with the unflinching eye contact and shoulders and feet squared to yours, so willing to say nice things, always seem to like your shirt or your sunglasses, then they don’t have to do anything else because people just think they’re so freaking nice. I saw it with my father. It confused me so much as a boy to see how everyone outside of our family thought he was such a great guy.

  I despise charmers—their compliments, promises—because little of it has even a tenth of a percentage of a chance of ever happening, i.e., being in touch, making plans, etc.

  And this is a perfect example. Casino has asked me about Irene only one time. Not that I have any information on her—as if I were the information center of her life all of a sudden, which I’m not. But my no-information is information. I want to tell everybody that I have no idea what’s happening, where she is, how she is, and that I’m getting screwed with these untended dogs next door. But this is exactly how it goes. Everyone disappears.

  6:00 PM

  Feeling a little better. Coping, I guess. Lauren is now refusing to eat. Strange since she’s overweight and Nelson is as thin as a forced confession. I don’t know what her eyes are telling me. I’ve tried to wait her out, but she just sits there by her food now like a nude model in a portrait class. She’s smart. Sometimes she pretends to eat—grabs a few pebbles of the food and moves them around to get me off her back. Sometimes she drops several on the floor next to her bowl to make it look empty. If I leave her food there and come home, Nelson will devour it.

  It makes me angry that she’s playing this game. She wants to be fed when she wants to be fed, and only how she wants to be fed—and she wants me to read her mind. Well, Lauren, I’m not very good at reading th
e mind of the female, apparently of any species, so you shouldn’t hold your breath. Do dogs know how to hold their breath?

  Should I call animal services? Irene’d kill me, though it’d serve her right. Likely she’d never get them back. They might end up being put down. That would be a great scene, huh? Old woman comes home from the hospital—slowly wobble-hobbling up to her front door, broken arm in a sling, fumbling for her keys with her left hand, looking for them through her one good eye, a slow curiosity drawing the smile at being home off of her face as the anticipated vibrations of the dogs behind the door is nothing but stillness streaming up to her one good ear.

  Yep, I want to be around for that moment when she gets inside and calls for her dogs and they don’t come. I want to be here when she calls out to me, “Richard, where are my doggies?” Yes, I want to be the one to explain that I had them taken away, and “Oh, by the way, welcome home.”

  Maybe if I just go over there to talk to them for a few seconds. Through my mask? And about what? That I have no idea what’s going on with Irene or when she’s coming back? About what verminous, miserable, little untrained rats they are? I’m losing it.

  January 6, 10:30 AM

  First thought of the day: what abject misery waits for me over there? I guess I’ll go and check in on them.

  11:20 AM

  Got over there. Two fresh ponds of pee. Cleaned them up, also expanded my cleaner area of the kitchen floor. Best move would be to just buckle down and do the whole thing, lessen the weight of the stench, if I can. Don’t know. When is she coming back?

  That was enough of a visit. I’ll go back later. The dogs do seem to be a little less frantic at my arrival. It’s amazing how they get used to a stranger. Why is that? I’m showing them no kindness or tenderness, no affection. Why would they look like they care about me? There’s nothing there, you stupid dogs. Just stop peeing all over the place.

  January 7, 11:20 AM

  I had a meeting with a graphic design agency this morning, a “creative staffing” place. I have to get more work. They place you into freelance positions at a prenegotiated rate, then take 10 percent. The rate is way less than I can charge on my own, but it’s been so slow that I have no one to charge my rate to.

  I haven’t done on-site freelancing for several years. I hate it. Grunt work. Early on, I spent six months at a studio in Santa Monica placing and proofing ingredients lists and nutrition panels, as per FDA regulations, onto Hughes Markets’ entire line of home-label generic products. You’re picking up files that ten other people have already tinkered with, taking orders from obsessive production managers who only know time and not creativity, as much as there can be in tweaking text kerning and the box outline stroke weight of a standardized ingredients panel.

  I think the meeting went well, professional. It gave me a reason to shower and use the iron. I have to wait for them to decide if they’re going to take me on. The guy said he’d let me know within a week or so. I went over to Irene’s. Fed the dogs. We walked, no progress. Cleaned a little.

  8:15 PM

  Stasya just told me she’s moving. Goddamn it. Her husband is having more trouble breathing, and they think it’s because of the paint dust from Pristine Automotive, the auto body place on Fairfax on the other side of our block.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. He says so,” she said with sad eyes. Then she shrugged, “It’s OK. It’s OK.”

  “It’s not OK. I can’t stand this.”

  She laid her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about anything, my Richard,” she said. “You are young. You have love.”

  “No, I don’t—”

  She touched her chest. “In here you do. That’s more important than anything outside.”

  I hugged her.

  “Roxy will come back to you. You are a good man.”

  “Thank you. I want you to come back to me, too.”

  “You will see. Love always wins. She will come back.”

  Even in leaving, Stasya gave me hope. Are you married or divorced or anything, Sheriff ? If you’re anywhere near my age, which likely you are, you’ve dealt with heartache. That’s a shitty fact of life.

  Everyone leaves. That’s a shitty fact of life, too. I’m slowly figuring out how my father was affected by, born into actually, an abandonment complex. I don’t know if there’s any such thing, but he knew that people can and will leave you without warning—and for good. It became part of his DNA. He passed that DNA on to me. I have all of the logic about it, yet here I sit in a situation with Roxy where I’m waiting and hoping for a solution. I’m like Jacqueline Kennedy climbing over the back of that motorcade convertible, grasping for the pieces of JFK’s skull. It has to be those broken pieces put back together—nothing else—so I can believe that abandonment isn’t a permanent law, that it’s fixable.

  In the meantime, you hope and cope. When someone leaves you, if you still love them, then you hope, hope that they’ll change their mind and come back. Maybe it’s part of the chemistry of denial, but hope can keep you breathing.

  When someone you love dies, you don’t have hope, because you have reality. You go into coping right away. But in relationships, when that former partner is still out there somewhere, you just can’t help but hope. Hope is high and cope is low—you drag yourself through each day thinking round and round about what she’s thinking: Does she think about me at all? What is she feeling? Does she have any regret about ending it? Thoughts about me?

  But as time goes on, if there’s no communication, or if there’s negative news between the two, then hope fades. That’s when “cope” can finally begin to rise, you see? You have a limited amount of thoughts to use in one day. And when coping thoughts do come, they allow you to imagine your life forward. It’s very difficult for me to get there because I want to conquer that abandonment via the abandoner. The cycle of wanting to hold onto and fix that event to maintain one’s own ego and self-respect begins.

  So I don’t feel good being alone, and I guess I fear abandonment—through my father’s experience—when I’m with someone. DNA. If I could just get better at being alone. Friends don’t count. It’s intimacy that’s the narcotic. And unfortunately, intimacy is something that some people can fake very well, or they’re skilled at having it and then being able to throw it away for whatever reason—they get scared, they get bored, they want another victim.

  I fear people in Los Angeles. Destroying others is like a quick high from a whip-it if you have no empathy whatsoever. I don’t know. Maybe I’m mixing things up with sociopaths or narcissism. But how does one find a non-narcissist in this town? We’re all people who were able to chuck everything—walk away from all we knew and the people we loved, and who loved us—to move here to chase thin fantasies. We begin our new lives in Los Angeles only after having abandoned everyone without pity.

  Do you have pity? I’m sure they try to train law enforcement officers not to have feelings either way, because that’d get in the way of procedure. Or maybe they train you to be human beings? Otherwise you’d be helpless against becoming a sociopath with all that power. I’m sure you’re not. I could be. Couldn’t we all turn? How do malicious armies arise out of ordinary citizenry time and time again throughout history?

  By the way, I’m not a sociopath.

  I told myself that if I get any call about work or from that agency, that I’d walk the dogs an extra time today. No call, but I might do a night walk anyway.

  January 8, 6:30 PM

  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this earlier, but I finally found a simple use for all of the newspapers that Irene has piled up. After I feed them tonight I’m going to lay a few down over the areas of the floor that I’ve cleaned so that I’m not cleaning the same spots over and over like Lady Macbeth trying to clean her bloody hands. This could make my mornings much quicker. I’m so damn excited, I may not be able to sleep tonight.

  January 9, 11:30 AM

  Waiting to hear from that freelance
agency. It’s possible they won’t even call if they don’t want me. People in this town are all so skilled at making you feel spectacular while you’re in the room. It doesn’t mean anything with regard to their decision on you. They say great things to make themselves feel powerful as they watch your face light up with found dignity. It must feel wonderful to make someone feel that good.

  I’m waiting to get something that I don’t even want, but I need the work. I do have a presentation meeting tomorrow with the anesthesia consultants group, but beyond that it’s just a trickle.

  Lauren just will not eat. Her bowl is near a pillow I’d set down with a towel on it, and her new ploy is to get a corner of the towel in her teeth, drag it over and then lay it on top of her bowl in protest. Absolute smartest damn thing I’ve ever seen. But, I have to confess, I get really pissed. I yell. Little girl dog sitting there shaking like an electric razor—I feel like an asshole, but she can be such a jerk. All I’m trying to do is feed her. And she’s an animal. Isn’t eating priority number one in the animal kingdom? In fact, that’s precisely what I was asking her in my shouting. Didn’t get an answer, just the eyes.

  I took them out for a walk to see if some time away from the bowl and some invigoration might make her hungry. But walking them only invigorated my own frustration. It is so crazy watching them not go to the bathroom outside. That incredulity on their faces when I tell them this is their time to do it, that it’s the right thing to do. It’s an alien concept to them, spoken in words they’ve never heard strung together in that order before.