ONE

OWNING A WEALTHY dog frees up one’s schedule. While other poor sods who don’t own wealthy dogs must work for the man, I can devote my days to any endeavor that takes my interest.

That was my trouble. None did. I remained uncommitted. I felt guilty about that. I listened to hours of jazz and played a lot of pool. While jazz uplifts the spirit, listening can’t be called doing in the participatory sense, and playing pool can’t be called productive, even if one wins a lot of money. I don’t. I was languid, torpid, depressed.

I had retreated inside my head. That had always been my way. As a child, I had thought of that solipsistic retreat as “going into the tree house.” My father got killed in an airplane crash when I was still an infant, and my mother, as I look back on it, launched herself on a quest to marry, then divorce, as many fighter pilots as possible. They were a swaggering lot, full of certainty and self-confidence. The absence of a shooting war was the most vexing problem in their young lives.

One high-ranking type with whom we shared a year in a sultry southern climate before he got transferred to Goose Bay, Labrador, was called Spider. Spider had brush-cut hair and boozy breath. He lived off base in a decaying mansion surrounded by live oaks already mature when Sherman’s army passed. In one of these, dripping Spanish moss, was a duplex tree house with a rope ladder and complete privacy. Up there, I fashioned my own reality. I’ve been doing that ever since.

But now solitude had degenerated into discontent, an itchy longing for something I didn’t have. What did I long for? I spent many an evening listening to bebop and musing on that question. Did I long for a job of my own?

Job…

The very sound of the word, its hard monosyllabic poke, filled me with dread. Besides, who would hire me? I wouldn’t hire me.

As he lay at my feet dreaming (paws flexing, tail thumping) I wondered whether Jellyroll would miss his career if I decided to retire him. Say I decided to chuck it in and move us to the rural regions, there to take up organic farming, or to the coast of Maine, say, to experiment in mariculture, would he grow dull and dispirited? (Would I?) The limelight’s hard to kick over, even for dogs. Yet lately his career had been making me feel absurd. Take, for example, the day the Space Traveler broke his tibia:

 

Intergalactic music swelled from out of the cosmic darkness. A pinpoint of light appeared, approaching, enlarging as it spanned imponderable distance at unearthly speed. What could it be? A spaceship, of course. It whooshed overhead.

Saucer-shaped, a stupid-looking dome in the center, the spaceship wheeled, turned, and reappeared, hovering. The engines didn’t roar or whine like you would expect spaceship engines to; they went, “R-r-ruff, r-r-ruff.” Steam and smoke swirled. The intergalactic music built to a crescendo. Red, green, and blue spotlights probed the ground before they converged—on a big yellow bowl of dog food.

Then a disembodied voice reverberated from the spaceship:

“Contact. We have contact-tact-tact. We’re beginning our approach-approach-approach.”

The music was intolerable, of course, the engine noise ludicrous, but the landing effect worked okay, and the lighting disguised the spaceship’s cheesy, cut-corners construction as it appeared to settle beside the bowl of dog food. “NEW & IMPROVED R-r-ruff” was painted in glossy red letters on the bowl.

The hatch creaked open. A gangplank emerged, but then it wedged in its track and stuck fast. It retracted and tried again. Nope. Again it stuck in the same place, poking out like a vandalized diving board.

“Cut, for chrissake!” Brian Thornbough, our director, bellowed from the control room. “What town is this? Hickberg, Indiana? No? New York City? Oh. You’d think in New York City, the capital of the stinking world, I wouldn’t have to be saddled with a rickety pile of pus for a spaceship!” His words reverberated around the soundstage like the Space Traveler’s.

Work lights came on. Sullen technicians—it wasn’t their fault, it was the budget cutbacks—scurried from the shadows. They braced their boots against the hull of the spaceship and, on three, heaved at the gangplank, but it was no use. The gangplank was stuck.

“It’s stuck,” somebody said.

“No shit?” boomed Brian from the booth.

“The whole frame has shifted,” said the floor manager, glowering up at the booth, “so the gangplank’s pinched.”

“Grease the slut!”

Chips flew as the floor manager took a hammer and chisel to the gangplank, pretending it was Brian’s brainpan. His crew waited to grease the slut.

“Are we about ready?” Brian wanted to know. Brian had tried to make a go of it in Hollywood, but he was pegged as a dog food commercial director, and nobody would give him a smell. That had made Brian bitter.

Work lights went off. Landing lights came back on. “Stand by, steam,” said the floor manager. “Go, steam.” The steam went. Music recrescendoed. They cued the plank. The plank worked perfectly. Its foot settled onto the floor right beside the bowl of New & Improved R-r-ruff.

Then Jellyroll, a cute brown-and-white mutt, ran happily down the gangplank toward the bowl of dog food exactly as rehearsed. (He doesn’t need rehearsal for a move that simple. In fact, I think it bores him.) Jellyroll enjoys everything, except baths and vacuum cleaners, and his delight with life is apparent on his face. That smile has made him a star and me financially, if in no other way, untroubled.

The Space Traveler wore a transparent bubble helmet, like an inverted goldfish bowl, over his head. His gleaming white suit was so bulbous and heavy he had to bounce stiff-legged down the gangplank. He stopped halfway and pretended to look around the landing zone. His helmet fogged up. The techies had drilled holes in the back to alleviate that problem, but apparently they were too small. He tried to do a double take when he spotted the dog food, but the move got lost in the costume. It just looked like someone had goosed him—

“Look, Ruff!” he said. “After all these intergalactic light-years we’ve found a planet that serves New Improved R-r-ruff. This must be earth!”

But something was wrong with Jellyroll…

He slunk up to the bowl and wrinkled his muzzle in repulsion. That pause, the silence, was terrible. We held our breaths. I thought for a moment he was going to puke…Jellyroll hated the New & Improved formula! He searched for me with confusion and alarm in his soft brown eyes. Why was I doing this to him, putting this shit in his face after years of loyalty?

It seemed days before Brian bellowed, “Cut!”

The technical folks tried to quell their giggles. A couple of them had to leave the set. Strangled titters bounced around the studio as Brian marched onto the floor. Christ, the spokesdog hated the New & Improved formula!

“Uh, since we’ve stopped, Brian,” said the Space Traveler, further fogging his helmet, “let me ask you this—” I had seen the Space Traveler do Robespierre in Danton’s Death off-Broadway, and he seemed to be a real actor. I felt sad for him up there in that helmet. “I don’t exactly understand the line, ‘After all these intergalactic light-years—’ Isn’t a light-year a measure of speed, not—”

The gangplank snapped. The Space Traveler plunged from sight like a hanged man.

“Deemer!” shouted Brian. Brian always shouted. “Get me Artie Deemer!”

“Right here,” I said.

“Did my eyes deceive me, or does that dog hate the New and Improved formula?”

“He didn’t seem to relish it, did he?”

“Relish? Are you kidding, relish? He about barfed at the stink of it!”

The Space Traveler began to keen in agony beneath the gangplank’s remains.

“I think he’s injured, Brian,” I pointed out.

“Space Travelers come a dime a dozen. He liked the other shit—the regular formula, right? Somebody get me a bag of the regular shit.”

“No,” said a somber voice from the rear of the studio, “we can’t do that.” It was Mr. Fleckton, the poor sod who had conceived and spearheaded the introduction of New & Improved R-r-ruff.

“Christ! She’s gonna go!” screamed a technician.

The spaceship was wavering on its landing pad, creaking and groaning, its structural members cracking. The Space Traveler cried out in terror. Techies scurried in all directions, but they knew exactly what to do. They ran back onto the set with wood and heavy hammers, shoved two-by-four bracing beneath the ship, pounded and kicked it into place.

“Why not?” Brian wanted to know.

“My leg!” wailed the Space Traveler. “I can see my leg bone!”

“Because I’d be a laughingstock, that’s why,” said Mr. Fleckton. He shuffled up beside Brian and me. He held his hands in a strange prayerlike posture under his chin. Beads of sweat sprouted from his upper lip. The man was watching his standard of living diminish to homelessness before his very eyes. He looked at me pleadingly and said, “Does he really hate it, Artie?”

“He hates it,” said Brian. “What can I tell you, he hates it.”

Mr. Fleckton kept removing his glasses, blowing on the lenses, and replacing them. “Our own spokesdog…hates it. Is there nothing you can do, Artie?”

The Space Traveler whimpered from out of sight beneath the spacecraft. “I can see my leg…bone!”

“I’ll try to hand-feed him,” I said.

“Food! Get me fresh food!” demanded Mr. Fleckton. One of his assistants hurried over with a twenty-pound bag of it.

“Come here, pal,” I said gently.

“God help us,” said Fleckton.

I scooped a few pieces of kibble from the bag and petted Jellyroll with the other hand so he’d know I wasn’t mad at him. I held a single kibble under his nose. He turned his head. He blew out his lips as if to expunge the stink of the thing. “He hates it, all right.”

Mr. Fleckton wavered like the spaceship. His assistants supported him. The R-r-ruff honchos would probably have him executed gangland style and dump his body in the Meadowlands beside that of the guy who invented New Coke.

“I think I’m gonna…pass out,” said the Space Traveler weakly.

“Fuck it, let’s just stick a steak under it,” said Brian.

 

As I mused subsequently in my morris chair, Brian’s words, “Stick a steak under it,” struck a metaphorical chord with me. That’s what I should do with my life, I decided. But what was the real-world equivalent of this metaphorical meat I’d stick under my life? I pondered that question, Jellyroll at my feet, listening to Ben Webster’s assertively erotic version of “Love Is Here to Stay,” when the answer struck me like an epiphany.

I needed to fall in love.

I had been in love before, and I remembered how love took the edge off the hideous, how it brightened the world and made one feel all warm and runny inside…But whom would I love? Where might I meet my new lover? I had read in a magazine that the two best places to meet a lover were at work or at recreation. I didn’t work, and for recreation I hung around a pool hall. I wondered what the third best place was.

Shortly thereafter, I met Crystal Spivey—in the poolroom.