The Adventures of Spike the Wonder Dog

by Bill Boggs

  “Oh, he so funny he make Chris Rock look like ‘The Rock,’” James Two says.

  A couple of laughs come from the crowd, and behind Money Piles I see Monstro’s eyelids fluttering.

  “But Cartier not choppin’ off Spike head, ’cause Ike ‘I Got Money’ Piles is sendin’ full head-on frozen body of Spike to Thailand to my friend Abouti…for…”

  He pauses, while I get set to calculate my per-pound price by dividing seventy into…

  “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  The crowd roars just enough to make Money Piles feel good, even though they want him to get the hell outta the ring so they can watch another fight.

  The roar startles Monstro. He sees me stuck under the metal thing.

  Is he gonna charge to try to finish me off while I’m trapped here? We eye each other. He nods: “You’re good. I had you, but you still beat me.”

  Then he spots Ike “I Got Money” Piles, and Monstro’s eyes go dark. His mouth curls back and uncovers long, yellow fangs.

  I don’t know if he did it ’cause Money Piles’ cousin in Costa Rica stole Monstro from a family where he had a happy life, and forced him to fight boars with a partner he hated. I don’t know if he did it ’cause Money Piles shipped him in a way-too-small crate all the way to New York on a cheap, slow freighter. Or if he did it ’cause Money Piles has him livin’ here in a tiny cage in a dirty corner with no daylight.

  I don’t know why, and I never will, but Monstro rises, and even faster than when he took me down, leaps on Money Piles’ back. He knocks him over.

  Money Piles lands on his bandaged hand and screams. Monstro starts biting him, rippin’ away at his leg muscle like he did to dozens of wild boars. He mangles the back of his knee and starts biting again and again on his calves.

  “Kill him, kill him, kill him, shoot him, you motherfuckers!” Money Piles screams at his men.

  But seeing Monstro come alive stuns the Jameses into some kind of ghost dog trance.

  “Kill him, kill him, kill him, you bug-eyed bastards, shoot him!” Money Piles yells.

  Monstro starts rippin’ through the basketball pants to get to Money Piles’ balls. Cartier runs in the cage, pulls a little pistol from her bag, and shoots Monstro, who takes the bullet and doesn’t even howl. She fires again, twice into Monstro’s shoulder. The bullets go through him into Money Piles’ arm.

  “Bitch!” Piles screams. “You shootin’ me! You shootin’ me!”

  “My bad,” she says.

  Three blasts from James Plus’ Beretta knock Monstro down. He crawls toward me. Collapses. His eyes close. He’s dead.

  Don’t know who’s got more blood pourin’ outta him—Monstro or Ike “I Got Money” Piles.

  Half the bloodthirsty crowd is standin’ outside the cage carrying enough firepower to take down a special-forces platoon. They’re in line, hopin’ to get in on the action and have some fun pumping slugs into a twitching, dead dog.

  “Call nine-one-one! Call nine-one-one!” James Plus yells.

  “Fuckin’ no way,” Piles yells at him. “This look like animal shelter to you? We get turned in. Pick me up and drive me to Saint Mary’s!”

  “Who car we use, Money?” Plus says, lookin’ around. “You just buy all your Jameses new SRXs with fine hand-stitched leather cargo bays; who wanta get that all bloodied up? Car still smell new.”

  “Fuck your cargo bays!” Piles screams.

  “Maybe we just get Chicago Bob the vet take taxi over and patch you up?”

  “That horse doctor patch me up? You see the white thing down there where I suppose to have a goddamn leg? That called thighbone. Get me to fuckin’ Saint Mary’s, now.”

  “Money, how ’bout we carry you to walk-in urgent care down street near hairdresser and tell them coyote nip you? No long wait line there, plus you got no insurance anyway,” James Two says.

  “It called walk-in because you gotta be able to walk the fuck in,” Piles yells. “Get me outta here!”

  “I’ll take him in my Malibu,” Cartier says. “Just load him in the back, but put blankets down.”

  Ike “I Got Money” Piles passes out. Considering that his leg is dangling off him like a loose tooth and he’s squirting blood like a fireboat, I think he’d be disappointed to learn that Cartier takes time to fix an eyelash, brush her long blond hair, and put on even more lip gloss and foundation for the trip to the hospital. She wants an armed guard with her, so the daytime security man is going along.

  Just when I need it, I get lucky. Two things happen that give me a chance to escape—James Plus takes the mesh thing off me, and the security guard’s helping one of the Julios carry Money Piles to Cartier’s Malibu. The open door’s gonna be unguarded, and after they go through it with Money Piles, it’s gonna take around six seconds for it to swing back and automatically lock.

  The instant they go through the door, I race out of the fight cage draggin’ the stick and dogcatcher wire. I figure if I make it to the street, I’m gonna be walking around looking like an escaped convict ’cause of the stick, but I’ll deal with that later.

  I tear across the room running faster than I ever have. The door’s slowly closing. They’re chasin’, but I’m way ahead. There’s about six inches of space before the door closes. I wedge my head between the door and the jam, and swing it a little bit wider and wriggle through. I start runnin’ but get snapped back by the wire, ’cause the door closed on the end of the long stick.

  I try biting through the stick, but they got me.

  James Two says, “Nice try, Spike. You faster than rabbit. But now, I takin’ you back to cage.”

  Outta luck.

  20

  The Freezer

  Waitin’ for me in my cage is a five-thousand-calorie feeding.

  James Plus says, “You’re gonna love this, Spike. Your last tasty meal add nice sizzling layer of fat on you by time you be shipped outta here tomorrow morning.”

  I got no intention of eatin’ anything that makes me a better stewing dog. My red collar’s the only thing here with me, so I start chewin’ on it. I had that bad habit as a puppy of chewin’ on collars, but Bud trained me to stop. I figure in my final hours, collar chewin’s the only comfort I got, just like returning to heavy drinking’s gonna be the only comfort for George W. Bush at the end. Wonder if he’ll get real drunk like in the old days and admit he fucked up by invading Iraq?

  I got a little time now to reflect on things at my end. I get so sad thinkin’ of Bud. We had unconditional love, and that’s a hard thing to find. I gotta block him out every time I see his face before me.

  Just a few regrets—never got the quality time with Cher that I wanted, never really enjoyed New York, but when you sign on with an owner, you go with them. Never got that Pizza Pouch gig right, never had puppies with Daisy. Never made it to an ocean to surf. I always admired those dogs on YouTube gliding along on waves. The rest of my brothers and sisters have probably been neutered, so I guess our bloodline’s dyin’ with me, like Last of the Mohicans—regret that.

  But I’ve been one of the lucky dogs of the world. I heard Lombardo say, “Bud, a measure of a person is what you do with the luck that’s left you.” I got lucky when Bud picked me out of the pen; he had his choice of other, smarter, better-lookin’ dogs—like Billy, who I heard won Best in Show in Pennsylvania—but he picked me. So now, even though the freezer’s waitin’, I’m feelin’ lucky as I’m lyin’ here watchin’ the trainers shove scared-looking strays in the fight cage to time how quick the new dogs can take ’em down.

  I’m wonderin’ about these strays. They started out like every dog—just a cute innocent little puppy. What went wrong for them? What bad luck came their way? Same kinds of questions I got about the grim-faced people I seen rooting through trash cans for food—what went wrong for them? They were once just someone’s cute little baby.

  I gotta let you know, from the bottom of my soon-to-be-frozen heart, how much comfort it’s been telling you my story. No
thin’ else to say. I’m just waiting as calm as I can to get led across to that dark corner to the freezer hidden in the wall.

  I enjoy spending the next hour watching the two sparrows who somehow live here. They got a nest on a ledge, and two baby sparrows hatched this morning. Real strong possibility those little sparrows will never fly free of this place. Tomorrow, they’ll be one day old, and everything they see is gonna be the usual—dog trainin’, dogfights, crowds screaming—except the big white dog will be gone.

  James Plus comes over and opens my cage. “OK, Spike, this is it.”

  He’s wearin’ arm-protecting gear. I bite his forearm anyway, but it’s like chompin’ on a giant roll of aluminum foil.

  I turn to get my red collar, but he jerks my head away. “Might be able to sell that as Spike collectible.”

  I’m findin’ no comfort in the coincidence that Tupac Shakur is rappin’ “Death Around the Corner” as I’m being led to the freezer. I’m walkin’ with head high and tail straight. Why make him drag me and look like a coward at the end?

  The two Julios and the Jameses are leanin’ against the wall getting drunk. They’ve emptied a cheap bottle of Jose Cuervo and are cracking open a second one.

  The Julios pick up small, battered guitars.

  James Two opens the freezer. “Julios have special song they sing to send you on way, Spike. They sing it to all dogs before they go in,” he says.

  Wonderful, this’ll be like music therapy for people in hospice care. What could it be? I’m hopin’ for a teary rendition of the Astaire classic “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” But since the Julios barely speak English, let alone would sing lyrics about fiddlers fleeing or sharing teardrops, I get what I was expecting—a drunken rendition of “Besame Mucho.”

  In my last hour, it’s like I’m alone with a bad lounge act in Cancun’s Hilton Garden Inn.

  If only the Zebe were here to give me a simultaneous bar mitzvah, funeral, last rites, and rabbinical certification, so those terrorist bastards over there would know they’re eating a Kosher dog who’s a friend to the state of Israel.

  I look up at everybody—all of the Jameses with the stupid tattoos on their heads, the two scrawny Julios, a couple of the blood-loving dog trainers, who’re scratchin’ their balls from fleas they got from the strays, and three puffy-lipped blonde bimbos from Money Piles’ pleasure squad, who’re snorting coke off their fingernails while balancing on five-inch platform stilettos on the dirt floor. The song ends on a bad, screeching high note, then they start kicking me toward the freezer.

  No way they’re forcing me in by kickin’. A song pops into my head—my favorite from back home in High Point. I give them the deepest, meanest growl I ever made, and jauntily stroll into the freezer singing to myself, “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning…”

  “Look at him; he so bad, he march in there like he Denzel goin’ up to get an Oscar,” James Plus says.

  “Yeah, he bad but he dead,” someone says, and I hear a click. The door’s locked.

  “Turn it to eighteen,” they say. “That’ll take a while. Ike ‘I Got Money’ Piles said to make it slow, ’cause he like slow freezin’ process, not dry aging like in Mexico.”

  “This is my ‘This is it,’” I think.

  I see my brother Billy’s kind face. Now I remember: “Horam expecta veniet,” he told me. “Await the hour; it shall come.”

  It’s just the ordinary sound of a freezer door clicking shut. No machine guns cutting me down on the beach at Normandy, no doomed plane with screaming passengers plunging to earth, no Bud holding my paw and comforting me in my final moment—just a click.

  In the first minute or so, it’s not feelin’ too cold; it’s just makin’ the wounds on my sides and face sting more than before.

  Inside the freezer’s a surprise. Ever go someplace and it’s way smaller than you thought it would be? Like maybe that resort in Aruba, where the beach was only the size of a tennis court, not the length of a couple of fields like you were expecting from the glorious pictures on the hotel website.

  The freezer’s way smaller than I imagined. It’s just about big enough to park a Fiat inside. You could do that if you didn’t mind drivin’ around later with a frozen dog stuck to your hood. Sad, though, if you were driving home on Christmas and the kids thought you were bringin’ them a pet, but they had to use ice scrapers to get it off.

  There’s a little peephole, probably to check on me without opening the door and letting in some comforting warm air.

  I figured the freezer’d be empty, but lookin’ around, I see they put some stuff on the walls.

  I spot a sign instructing the morons who work here to “keep fecal material away from ice cube trays.” Next to that is a headshot of Nicki Minaj with pink and blonde hair, autographed to someone named Ralph. There’s the mandatory-for-the-inside-of-any-freezer photo of Kim Kardashian looking over her shoulder at her ass like she spotted a pimple. A photo of Cary Grant is next to one of Judy Garland, which maybe confirms that the Julio with the thumb ring and “Judy Judy Judy” tattooed on his hand might be headed to Chelsea after work.

  I’m feelin’ the cold set in on my paws and tips of my ears. Gotta stay calm, which I do for three seconds before I spot a frozen-solid Scottie dog standing in the corner.

  Awful sight. I never saw frozen eyes before. Frozen eyes look right through you, worse than Putin’s at a press conference. There’s a tag on the Scottie’s neck: “Thirty-four pounds at twenty-five degrees = dead in four hours.” There’s a pile of other tags like that on the floor with dog weights and temperatures and times till death. If Birds Eye wants to produce frozen dog dinners for the Southeast Asia market, these guys have research.

  Studying tags, I figure I got about three hours to live. You never know how valuable time is until you’re runnin’ out of it. Don’t forget that.

  Hour One: Getting Drunk

  On the floor in the back are a couple of bottles of Tito’s vodka. I figure getting as drunk as possible is gonna ease my—usin’ the words people who never mention “death” say—“transition”; and then they act like it’s just a ferry ride across a river “to a better place on the other side,” like you’re away on a swell vacation.

  So why not show up on “the other side” really loaded? And I mean really loaded—falling-down-drunk loaded—like I’m Sid Vicious after a binge with Amy Winehouse? That’ll be fun, and I’ve never been real, real drunk before. Yeah, OK, that one time with the Bloody Bull shots.

  Also, I got an idea: Maybe if I slurp up enough booze, it’ll be like antifreeze and I’ll just pass out. Then they’ll think I’m dead and I’ll wake up packed in ice under the fish. I’d escape with only a drinking problem and a minor cut from bitin’ off the top of the bottle.

  I pour vodka into a stained blue plastic dog bowl and start lappin’ away. One bowl later, the whole body’s even more relaxed than after a tranquilizer dart. The booze is helping me stay a little warmer, even though I know I’m getting colder and colder and can’t stop the base of my tail from quiverin’.

  I heard there are two kinds of drunks—mean ones and happy ones. Maybe it’s just the circumstances, but I’m fallin’ into the mean category, ’cause I wanna ram my head through the door and go out and kill everybody I see. Maybe endless vodka drinking is how Quentin Tarantino gets inspiration for his movies?

  I even feel like pickin’ a fight with the frozen Scottie. If this is the way I’d been drinkin’ at Nello on a normal Friday night with Donna Hanover, I’d’ve developed a bad reputation. I don’t think wanting to rip the balls off the guy on the stool next to you is why they call it happy hour.

  I’m angry they’re taking my life away from me. The one and only thing I really got. I’m angry at every terrorist in the world for killin’ innocent people. I’m angry at all the school shooters who ever lived, and people who club baby seals, and man’s in-fuckin’-humanity to man! Why?

  Life is bein’ takin’ aw
ay from me, and I loved life, loved every minute of it, except for dealin’ with Mayor Gordon and his stupid wife, bein’ painted green, and the shit they put me through in here.

  But I liked bein’ in those fights. Enjoyed combat, and I was fuckin’ good! Fuckin’ good—and you know it! If I ever get out of here, I’m gonna find some kind of friendly sparrin’ partner. Maybe Daisy and me could wrestle around? Shouldn’t a thought of Daisy! Oh God, now I’m cryin’ over her. Cryin’.

  I lap up a second bowl of vodka, and I’m slobberin’ and slobberin’ and dizzy. Big dizzy.

  But I’ll tell you this: I might only have three hours like another notable had while he was dyin’, but you’re not gonna hear, “Bud, Bud, why have thou forsaken me?” This shit is not his fault.

  If I was a prayin’ dog, this is where I’d pray to Dog God for help, but my friends who do waste their fuckin’ time sayin’ prayers to Dog God tell me nothing ever happens. They figure Dog God’s probably always out bein’ walked.

  Now I’m thinkin’ about God, who I never thought about, but bein’ drunk is doin’ wonderous things to my brain. Here’s something every drunk in every Irish bar in New York oughta ask the bartender…. Hold on; I gotta drink more…

  Slurping, slurping away. Lapping delicious ice-cold vodka straight outta a freezing-cold dog bowl—try it!

  Ahh! Stuff’s good, helpin’ me fight the cold…sort of…. Anyway…so, if Jesus is God’s son, why the hell does God let his only begotten kid get nailed to a cross and suffer all to prove he’s “the way, the truth, and the light?” Why doesn’t Jesus hold a big rally…a huuuge one? And then Jesus just says, “OK, believe in me, folks, and you can go to heaven just like this. Watch, everybody; here I go, one, two, three”—and wham, he vanishes! Like I saw Penn make Teller disappear in Vegas, except God is doin’ it to Jesus at this huuuge rally and he’s gone. Huh? Huh?

  I’m gonna pass out. Fuck ’em all. Fuck ’em. For takin’ my life from me. Fuck fuck fuck and bite them where it hurts the most, bite bite bite…. Oh God, I wanna disappear. I’m so cold.