My four-year-old son, Cooper, and I have little in common.
When he was born, I was the primary caretaker. It was a natural role for me, and Cooper and I had an immediate, primordial bond. I was scheduler and night feeder, burper, soother, then organic baby food maker, onesie stocker, BPA-PVC-phthalate-free checker, lead tester, baby proofer. Toppling stacks of baby books, each over a foot high, were piled on and around my nightstand and, though previously a voracious reader of fiction and biographies, I did not open a single nonbaby book—all highlighted, underlined, and dog-eared—for nearly two years.
Danny was head-over-heels in love and couldn’t get enough of our son, but as he bounced the lumpy lox of a do-nothing infant who just ate and pooped and gurgled and spit, I could tell he was eager to get past this stage so they could climb trees and play catch and destroy things. When Cooper took his first wobbly steps, Danny immediately wanted to take him Rollerblading. I kept saying, “Don’t worry, there will come a day before we know it where it’s all about you guys.”
Call me clairvoyant. As Cooper has grown into a full-on little boy, I may remain the go-to guy for meals, boo-boos, permission, daily organization, midnight fevers, developmental research, hard-ass rules, and “feelings,” but now, well, Danny trumps all. His time has come. He is the fun one. He is goofy and crazy and Cooper laughs a particular sound of pure joy that is exclusive to Papa, which is what he calls Danny. I’m Daddy. Daddy is fun, but not that kind of fun.
I go with Cooper’s lead and we have a great time, but I have found myself searching for activities that interest us both. It’s hard. Very hard. I get bored. Very bored. Not with him, but with what captivates him. We sip from different sippy cups of tea.
Cooper loves cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time. I hate cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time. Or rather, I have no real interest unless I build a mini-racetrack out of empty Amazon.com boxes complete with a service garage painted in watercolors, where lunch is served at a juice box picnic table with an affixed cocktail umbrella. But I am not remotely drawn to the actual races or endless crashes—and least of all to the cars themselves.
In real life, when asked what kind of car I drive, I say “a Lexus Nebula” because that is the given name of the color. Nebula actually means “an interstellar cloud of dust” but it rings like the name of an Egyptian prince. I do not know the model of my car and I often get SUV mixed up with SVU. I did not test-drive the vehicle before I bought it. It was a Lexus and it was pretty. Nebula.
There are many more differences.
I hear about kids who painstakingly choose their clothing. Cooper has favorite colors and superhero shirts, sure, but comfort is his criteria and he doesn’t give a crap about coordinating. It is my duty to let him express himself his way, so I gulp a little as he romps out of the house in plaids mixed with checks and stripes and Spider-Man socks and Velcroed sneakers on the wrong feet because “I like them that way.”
Danny and I have always put looks before comfort. Danny is a button-down, dress-shoes man and has never left the house without checking his hair at least three times; then he continues to monitor it in any and every reflection or slightest facsimile thereof: a storefront window, a hubcap, a puddle. I swear I once saw him spit in his hand and gaze into it, tilting his head for adjustments. I admit that if I have no plans to leave the house, I don’t care what I look like and have gone for days without seeing my face. However, I weigh myself at least twice a day, no matter what, and even when alone, I wear heavy luggish boots because they add two inches to my height and allow me to buy jeans longer than my legs, which gives me a better line. I feel happier when I feel thinner and I am much more pleasant to be around.
When I was doing Grease on Broadway, I wore a cinch corset under my skintight, black-and-white, horizontally striped Lycra shirt to smooth the slightest side bulge that might’ve pooched over my high-waisted jeans. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t breathe. It mattered that I was V-shaped.
I considered having ribs removed.
I like clean lines and clean rooms and clean drawers. Cooper makes enormous messes, emptying bins of die-cast cars, action figures, minuscule pieces of Legos, and collected rocks, acorns, and dead leaves.
When I was his age, my toys were categorized and color coded.
Cooper loves firemen, policemen, football players, paramedics, and wrestlers—any man in a uniform.
So do I, but for different reasons.
He talks of blood and bones and guts and boogers. His figurines engage in battle, and the fatality list is long. Detailed explanations of appendages severed with knives and saws and lasers and axes abound. We don’t watch violent TV shows nor do we have any remotely weaponlike objects, except for a water gun, which we renamed a “water-blaster.”
I brought up my concerns at a preschool parent coffee. The girls’ parents were clueless, as their little princesses were already painting in oils, publishing short stories, and crafting. They did have guns—hot glue guns. The boys’ parents, however, nodded in exhausted agreement. With seemingly no influence whatsoever, the boys’ expertise in savagery is something they just . . . know. No one knows how they know, but they know—as if they receive secret messages from an alien informant through a frequency that only four-year-old males can hear. Like those dog whistles, inaudible to humans, but containing pertinent, violent information. We agreed it’s part of their Neanderthalic DNA . . . unless they like to play a lot of dress-up and their favorite song is “Defying Gravity,” in which case it’s another kind of DNA. Cooper is among the rescuers, soldiers, explorers, hunters, gatherers—with just a smidge of potential serial killer.
“I’m gonna cut off his head and the blood is gonna spill out everywhere all over everything!”
Apparently that’s all quite normal for his age. It was also normal for Jeffrey Dahmer.
Danny laughs. I pretend to.
Once, during a family trek up the trails of Griffith Park, recent rains had left the paths and porous bluffs in partial ruin. There were gullies and chasms and mounds of soft dirt lying at the foot of root-exposed summits. Danny and Cooper found long sticks and bludgeoned the vulnerable walls, watching them crumble onto the path like Zeus on a bender. “BAM!” “KAPOW!” “ZONK!”
I desperately tried to stifle my tongue, but after fifteen massacring minutes, I finally blurted out in a calm but pointed tone, “Cooper, do you know what erosion is? It’s when weather breaks down the hill, gradually destroying it for us and everyone who wants to come here. Forever! You and Papa are not helping. You are doing more damage than a tsunami. Please stop tearing down the mountain.”
Danny and Cooper rolled their eyes in unison as if to say, “Daddy spoils everything.”
I tried to redirect his interest. “Cooper, come over here and look at this black beetle. Notice how, when I put a stick near him, he turns around and raises his bottom in defense. He is planning to either sting or spray his attacker. Isn’t the insect world amazing?”
Cooper crouched down to get a closer look.
“Maybe he’s just gonna fart.”
I try to encourage creativity over destruction. I once used his Magna-Tiles, Lincoln Logs, Legos, and blocks to build a four-bedroom, three-bath dream house with gardens, a spacious kitchen with an island, a media room, a pool, a four-car garage, and a gift wrapping room, stocked with tiny rolls of real paper and ribbon. Eight seconds later, Cooper bombed it with a “meteorite” pillow followed by the proclamation “Everyone is dead.”
This behavior is so far away from my boyhood that I cannot relate. However, if I make the stretch, in the same way that Cooper can fashion a gun out of anything—a stick, a piece of cardboard, an apple core, a used tissue, bent and formed with the epoxy of fresh snot—I can walk into any kitchen, be told there is nothing to eat, and find enough stuff to make a scrumptious four-course meal that could be photographed for Food & Wine magazine.
Cooper and I do share a love of fine cuisine and I would define him as a miniature foodie. He has never met a calorie he didn’t like. He partakes in all cultures: French, Latin, Indian, Moroccan, Thai, Chinese, Italian (not spaghetti and meatballs—osso bucco with gremolata). He doesn’t like indigenous British food, but then no one does, not even the British. He loves sushi. Steamed mussels. Burrata with heirloom tomatoes. Pomegranate sorbet. He has a rare passion for raw oysters with just a touch of lemon. He loves tapas and is particularly fond of manchego-stuffed dates wrapped in rasher bacon. He has been known to request balsamic vinegar and can tell the difference between Himalayan and Mediterranean salt. This is due, in some part, to the policy in our house since he graduated from pulverized carrots and gooey oatmeal to real food: Eat what I make or starve.
Children’s menus in all restaurants offer the same things: hot dogs, mac ’n’ cheese, spaghetti, chicken nuggets, and grilled cheese. Kids seem conditioned and enabled to avoid real food. We don’t order from children’s menus and I have explained to him that chickens don’t have nuggets. There is no part of a chicken that is considered a nugget. I tell him, “Don’t ever order a meat that you can’t trace to an original body part.”
But sometimes I think it’s all for naught. Truthfully, Cooper could eat potato chips and waffles at every meal and be happy. His palate is not so sophisticated as it is driven by his endomorphic need for food. While I strive to cultivate his appreciation for varied cookery, which is artfully served on white mini-ceramic plates that match our larger versions (never plastic for dinner), there are personality issues that make me fear he will one day drink Coors from a can.
For instance, he is quite fond of the words “fart” and “penis” and is obsessed with asking us to smell his feet. He thinks belching is the highest form of comedy.
I make up songs with inner rhymes:
Cooper is a super trouper,
A loop-the-looper, a sometime blooper,
Hula-hooper, secret snooper,
And he makes me laugh!
“Now your turn—make up a verse!” I say. Cooper responds with:
Cooper is a pooper and he has a stinky butt.
Boy, is he a boy. And Danny loves it. At heart, Danny is a boy too. They have their own language. They wrestle, smash toys against walls, smash themselves against walls, belch, fart, and hike. They are magical together, and it relieves my concerns around Cooper being an only child.
More than once, they have entered the front door after one of their “adventures” with the singsong announcement “Da-ad! Don’t worry, we’re oka-ay!” so that I am not shocked when I find them muddied and bloodied from that slip down the hill that was “a little steeper than we thought.”
But with me, the apple seems so far from the tree. From a different orchard, even.
As my criteria for things in common widens with desperate necessity, I realize we do share an unnatural love for chocolate, but I don’t think it’s something we will look back on as a bond. If he didn’t like chocolate, I would consider it an aberration much greater than his fascination with blood and gore, and I would send him to a psychologist. I don’t trust people who don’t like chocolate or people with very thin lips, which often go hand in hand.
And books—we both love books. He’s a bit of a research freak, like me, and wants to know about everything, but with a particular interest in knights and volcanoes and dead skin cells.
And we do love playing out wild, ridiculous stories and characters in imaginative situations, although Cooper has most of them end up with casualties. Cooper “Tarantino” Harris-Jacobsen directs with meticulous, seemingly scripted detail and many retakes. “No, not that way, Daddy. Go out the door and come back in and die. Slower.”
It’s not that we don’t have a good time. We laugh a lot. And I am astonished by his infinite mind and freaky memory and extensive vocabulary. He uses words like “exasperating,” “transformation,” “paleontologist,” and “cinematographer.” The word “awesome” was used only once, as it is strictly forbidden in our household. I explained, “The aurora borealis is awesome. The Grand Canyon is awesome. A gummy bear is not awesome. Getting a parking space near the entrance of Toys“R”Us is not awesome.”
After a series of stinky-butt and amputation references, I am mollified by phrases like “It’s spring so the jacarandas will be blooming” or, to our talking GPS, which we named Shirley, “Shirley, we’re almost home so we are no longer in need of your assistance.” And when he says “Please turn off your cell phones and unwrap any hard candies before the performance,” I wipe a prideful tear from my eye.
Still, I look for any potential pea-to-pod-ness, and one night I thought I’d hit upon something.
In addition to an obsession with dinosaurs, Cooper loves animals of the current, Cenozoic period. He has lots of stuffed bears and tigers and alligators, which he animates with distinct personalities. And he loves dogs. He loves dogs. It occurred to me that if I shared my history with animals, it would give us another common passion.
At bedtime, after reading The Courageous Captain America for the seven thousandth time, after which I wanted to stab out my eyes with an ice pick, I said, “Cooper, you know Daddy loves animals like you do. I’ve had so many different pets. Would you like to hear about them?”
“Yes, Daddy. What kind of pets?”
I had him! I started at the beginning:
“When I was a baby, Nanaw and Bubba got a little white poodle for our family named Jimmy-John.”
Cooper thought that name was very funny.
“Jimmy-John liked to have his tummy scratched.”
“What happened to Jimmy-John?” Cooper asked.
I hadn’t thought this part would come up. Jimmy-John was only with us for a year when he got a rare cancer and died.
“Jimmy-John had to leave us . . .” I stuttered, “but we got another dog right away. His name was Duke.”
“Where did Jimmy-John go?” He wouldn’t let up.
“I think to another family that needed him more. But then we got Duke! Duke was a mutt. A crazy brown big dog that”—jumped the fence and never came back. Shit!—
“. . . visited us for a while and then went on an adventure.”
I remembered we got two more dogs that we also named Duke, both of whom escaped and were never seen again. We just kept replacing the dogs but maintained the name so as to live in denial and not have to fix the fence. I skipped the extra Dukes. I didn’t want him to think we might replace him with another Cooper.
There was also a psychotic beagle we named Columbo because he had a slightly wandering eye like Peter Falk. He yelped and yapped fourteen hours a day while constantly racing the length of the backyard fence. He couldn’t jump over it, but his OCD pattern soon created a balding runway that became a dusty trench deep enough for him to crawl under it. My father fumed and steamed. “That goddamn fleabag’s days are numbered.” One day, Columbo was just gone. No explanation.
Next came a scroungy mutt called Furfy, whose name I really wanted to share with Cooper because it was so funny, but I didn’t know how to explain that she bit the mailman and my father drove her to a wooded area twenty miles away and abandoned her there. Or that she somehow miraculously returned to us months later, exhausted and mangy and pregnant, and bore a litter of equally scroungy puppies, all of whom were suspiciously given away in one day, along with Furfy. I suspect my father actually crossed the Oklahoma border this time.
“Then we got Noni,” I said, skipping to a dog I could talk about. Once again, Cooper laughed at the name.
Even though we’d had Jimmy-John and Duke and Duke and Duke and Columbo and Furfy, Noni was the first dog around long enough for me to develop a real relationship. She didn’t jump fences or yelp or bite mailmen. Hers was the name I used when asked to create a stripper name, which is based on your favorite pet and the street you grew up on. I would be Noni Washington. Great stripper name. Or it could be a prostitute name, but it sounded more to me like a heroin-addicted lounge singer with sleepy eyes, who wore dulled lamé tunics with sporadic wiry threads popping up here and there, and seams stretched beneath armholes and at the hips. Noni Washington would kick off her shoes and sing songs of unrequited love and pain and torture and misery and despair. I could actually picture myself as some version of Noni Washington in the future. And it wasn’t bad.
“Noni was a sweet dog,” I said to Cooper, snuggling close to him. “And she loved to chase cars and she slept in the garage . . .” Damn it!
Once again, this wasn’t going well. What decent person would let his dog chase cars? Noni had, indeed, been run over several times, suffering broken bones and hemorrhages and everything but death. As a result, she had a noticeable limp and always veered to the left. She had to aim right to go straight. I didn’t want to portray myself or Cooper’s grandparents as irresponsible, or as people who kept their dog in the freezing garage in the winter with a metal pan of ice-capped water. If Noni was thirsty, she had to lick her water like a Popsicle from November to March.
I changed gears.
“One time I found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest and broken its wing. And Nanaw and I mended the wing and made a nest in a shoe box and fed it oatmeal and worms until it was big and strong enough to fly away. When living things can’t help themselves, we help them.”
“What was the baby bird’s name?” Cooper wanted to know, hoping it was also funny.
“Um, Harold. The bird’s name was Harold.” I paused for a giggle. “And every year Harold returned to our house and sang on our windowsill.”
Now I was just making shit up.
I flashed on the number of creatures who hadn’t made it. And the animal cemetery across from our house under a streetlight at the top of the woods. Dozens were buried there. Not only family pets—any creatures, critters, varmints, or strays that we found—birds, squirrels, rats, snakes, an opossum, an armadillo. Anything dead. If the area were ever excavated, one would think the Pol Pot of the animal kingdom had stormed Sand Springs.
I held a funeral for each animal and was obsessed with ceremony. There were songs and eulogies and robes draped from bedsheets. Tears were shed. Memories of beloved pets were shared and unfulfilled lives of strangers were mourned.
“We never knew his name. But this snail brought happiness to our neighborhood.” I’d gathered other snails and placed them at graveside, and when they drew themselves into their shells, I imagined them weeping.
Flowers were laid and crosses were planted. I decided the armadillo was Jewish so I built a crude pine box, chanted the Mourners’ Kaddish, tore my shirt, and sat shiva.
I fast-forwarded.
“When I was fifteen and I moved to my own apartment, I couldn’t have a pet and I was so sad.”
But I did have a sort-of animal mascot. I lived in a nondescript suburb of St. Louis off I-44 that had no road signs or any indication that it existed. You had to live there to know it was there. Driving home from work, I often missed the unmarked turnoff and had to backtrack, slower, to find the narrow gravel road that led to my tiny apartment. A couple of weeks into the summer, as luck would have it, a dog was run over on the shoulder of the highway at that exact intersection, and the carcass became my landmark: Dead dog—Turn right. The dog was never removed, and as it rotted in the equatorial heat, the corpse finally decayed into a discolored oily spot, which I still relied upon as my marker: Dead dog oily spot—Turn right. If not for the poor animal, I might have gotten lost, run out of gas, and wandered on foot along I-44, only to be hit by a car and become a discolored oily spot landmark for some other geographically challenged traveler. I was glad the dog was dead.
I skipped that story.
I also skipped the one about the winter I returned to Sand Springs and, late one night, skidded on a sheet of ice in front of our house, unsuccessfully avoiding a cute little cottontail bunny. I sprang from my car, slipping and sliding, and found the poor thing panting its last pants, the steam of its body heat rolling up like a funeral pyre, all eerily lit by the glare of my headlights. I lifted the limp ball of sticky fur and placed it gently in the snow as if that would help. It sank into the drift and its crimson blood seeped into the ice like a carnival snow cone. The rabbit died almost instantly, probably hastened by the shock of freezing snow after being plowed over by my beat-up Gran Torino, which I knew only as “my red car.”
The next day I made the mistake of sharing the saga with friends in journalism class, and Sheilah Nobles, standing stiffly in her calf-high, turd-colored leather boots and cowl-neck macramé sweater, leered at me through gigantic plastic-framed glasses that looked more like ski goggles than prescription eyewear. Then she murmured, “Rabbit Killer!” with a wicked, depraved snigger that grew into a howl and was soon joined by everyone in class, their mouths wide with laughter. Then the chanting began:
“Rabbit Killer!”
“Rabbit Killer!
“Rabbit Killer!”
Most of these kids were from families who regularly shot and ate rabbits, wore their pelts, and carried their sawed-off feet on key chains, but because it was sweet little sensitive me, I was now known as “Rabbit Killer” until I left home again, months later and for good, confident my work as a professional performer would supersede my reputation as a murderer. Still, when I received the token senior yearbook a year later, signed by all my classmates as a surprise, most of the personal notes started with “Dear Rabbit Killer . . .”
Cooper was losing patience for my silent, agonizing trip down animal lane and I knew I had to get to a good story quickly.
“And the next place I lived wouldn’t let me have a dog or a cat and I really wanted a pet, so . . . I got a snake!”
“A snake?” Cooper asked with wonder. “Was it poisonous?”
“No. It was a baby boa constrictor and his name was Joey.”
“Joey the snake! That’s funny.”
“All my pets’ names are funny. That’s part of why we have them. Because they make us laugh.”
“Did he eat snake food?”
Joey ate little white mice. I bought two and put them in a cage right next to the snake aquarium. In retrospect, it was a horrible thing to do—giving the furry little creatures a 24/7, up-close-and-personal, wide-screen view of their ultimate nightmare. I might as well have placed a giant stuffed hawk on the other side. In the blink of an eye, the mice population rose to fourteen, probably nature’s instinct to build an army in defense. Oddly, fourteen was the exact same number as was in the cast of the show I was doing. I named each mouse for a member of the troupe and every week, when I fed Joey, I would report, “Nancy is dead” or “Jeff was swallowed whole.”
I obviously couldn’t share this either.
“Yes, Cooper, I fed him snake food,” I said instead.
I recalled when Joey seemed to slow down, which is hard to detect in a snake, and soon after died of pneumonia. Boa pneumonia. I’m sure it was my fault and that his aquarium must have been left in a draft or something. I thought creatures of the wild would surely be made of sturdier stuff. Like there aren’t drafts in Nicaragua or Peru or tropical rain forests?
Desperate for a happy, uniting pet story to share with my son, suddenly I was questioning my love for, or at least my care of, all my pets. By the time I was sixteen years old, every creature I’d been associated with had fled or died or been abandoned or fed to someone else. Noni still lived with my folks but she was getting old, and at any moment could be walking seemingly straight but veer left into the street and get hit by a pickup truck. My parents would probably just get another dog and name it Noni, hoping I wouldn’t notice.
“Let’s see, what other great pets did Daddy have? Hmmm . . . When I was in college and I shared a house with Uncle Bruce, we got a kitty,” I said to Cooper with a cheerful cadence.
“Was it a boy kitty or a girl kitty?” he asked. “What was its name?”
“Her name was Frances,” I said. “After Frances Farmer.”
The actress who went insane. I couldn’t know how tragically fitting the name would be. We had her only for a day. Frances was a scrawny muslin-colored rescue with a dire but curable case of worms. I wanted to save her, and we were given a box of pills and instructions for her healing. We confined her to the laundry room and made a small bed of fluffy towels with kibble and water in reach before taking off for Musical Theatre Workshop at UCLA. When we returned, several hours and a medley from Guys and Dolls later, we found the pitiful pussy extended in a gruesome and heartbreaking frozen pose, covered in diarrhea, clenching the corner of a towel in her teeth, countable ribs barely rising. She was deeply comatose. We rushed her to the emergency vet. The doctor took one look at her and said, “What in God’s name did you do to this poor animal?!” We explained that we’d followed the prescription instructions. Frances was put on an IV but never regained consciousness.
She was the Sunny von Bülow of felines and there was no choice but to pull the plug.
“What did Frances do?” Cooper asked, eyes aglow.
“Not much,” I said, and quickly moved on. “Then we got two more kitties. Their names were Shana and Esther.”
“Shana and Esther are funny names.” Cooper laughed.
“Shana means ‘pretty’ in Hebrew, which is practically Daddy’s second language, and Shana was sooo pretty.”
“What does Esther mean?” asked Cooper, wide-eyed and hanging on every word.
“Well, Esther is a Persian name from the Bible, who was originally called Hadassah. Hadassah means ‘myrtle’ in Hebrew, which is an equally funny but hideous name. The Book of Daniel has stories of Jews in exile being given names relating to Babylonian gods—for instance, Mordecai means ‘servant of Marduk,’ who was a Babylonian god. Esther came from the Proto-Semitic name ‘Morning Star,’ which comes from the Babylonian empire in 2000 BCE, not to be confused with the Chaldean empire or the Persian empire. Got it?”
“Got it,” said Cooper. “Was Esther pretty too?”
“No, she was a dog. I mean she was a cat but she was a dog.”
“Which one was she, Daddy? A cat or a dog?”
“She was a cat . . . but she was a dog. Not pretty. And since Shana was so beautiful, Esther sometimes got a little pouty and whiny and self-pitying.”
I couldn’t tell him the truth: that Esther had committed suicide. One day when Bruce and I were sunning on our foldout rubber-ribbed chaise lounges, lathed in baby oil—which is like a wish for cancer—in the driveway of our small house, known as Tara, Shana was strutting around with her nose and tail in the air, in applause of herself. Esther, on the other hand, was glowering in the garden, jealous, a woman biologically wronged. She emerged and crept solemnly to curbside. Bruce and I watched. She looked to the left. Then to the right. No traffic. She remained still and focused. In the distance, the rumble of a truck could be heard approaching. Esther sunk low onto her haunches, waited until the truck sped directly in front of Tara, and then bound into the street—a clear choice for all to see—me, Bruce, and, most important, Shana. The truck never slowed and Bruce and I ran to Esther’s body, which spasmed, springing and bouncing off the asphalt like a demon-possessed wind-up toy, finally landing with a splat.
Shana took a few steps toward the street, at first, we thought, out of sisterly concern. But when she turned heel and trained her puckered ass in Esther’s direction, we realized it had been for confirmation. She wanted to make sure the whiny hag was dead.
I couldn’t share this part with Cooper either. Suicide stories are never good just before bedtime.
Shana remained with us until I woke one morning to find our landlady, Pat Chiang, leaning stiffly over my naked body with an accusatory Asian glare, accentuated by strict eyeliner lunging to her hairline like black knives. This wasn’t the first time I’d been awakened in this fashion—she felt she could come and go as she pleased—but it was always a startling way to begin the day.
Her accent was thick as hoisin and her voice scraped the air like chopsticks on a chalkboard. “Ma h-h-h-husband saw white cat in your guys’ window! No cat allow! ” she shrieked. “That Helen Funk in a-pot-ment in back have cat, I say no cat too! That Helen Funk, she a dirty woman. She have account at Kentucky Flied Chicken . . .” Pat Chiang paused, then added, inquisitively, “Your guys have pot parties?”
We were forced to give Shana away and hoped the new family didn’t have other pets with suicidal tendencies.
Cooper caught me choking back a tear but I put on a smile, continuing with a good story at last.
“My next pet was a dog. His name was Larry.”
“Larry is my favorite name so far. I love Larry the dog,” Cooper said with glee.
“I did too,” I said, relieved. “I had him for fourteen years.”
Larry was a dog’s dog. A man’s dog. Scruffy and ragged. He was an old soul. My friend Delia gave him to me, and when Larry and I saw each other on the street for the first time, we ran together like slow-motion lovers in the movies. “He was the best pal ever. And then Uncle Bruce wanted his own dog and so he got a Yorkie named Ethel.”
“Like Lucy’s friend?” Cooper asked. I was pleased at the reference.
“Well, she was named after Lucy’s friend, but she wasn’t much like her.”
Ethel was not an old soul. She was an idiot. She was in constant frenetic motion and always underfoot. She ran haphazardly into walls and furniture. When anyone entered the room, she choked and threw up from the excitement and then dashed to pee on their shoes. Ultimately, she was the reason I left Tara. “This house isn’t big enough for the both of us!” I declared to Bruce, though Ethel was only slightly larger than a field mouse.
On a weekend trip to Big Bear in a car stuffed with five people and Larry and Ethel, I knew it would be a horror show and begged Bruce to get some doggy downers for Ethel from the vet. The dosage was based on weight, and Ethel didn’t fit into even the tiniest category, so I gave her half a pill. I swallowed the other half and another three or five. Somehow, I ended up with Ethel on my lap and an hour into the trip, I noticed she was strikingly still. I knew that Ethel was never motionless, even in sleep, her paws quivering as she dreamt of running into walls and furniture and vomiting and peeing on shoes. But now, draped across my lap, she was inanimate and her breathing was undetectable. When I lifted her tiny eyelids, I saw that her pupils had rolled back into her head. I didn’t want to alarm Bruce so I asked that we pull over to let the dogs pee and get some water. When I opened the car door and nudged her, Ethel fell onto the pavement flat, facedown, with an indistinct thud, her legs splayed symmetrically like a miniature bearskin rug.
I didn’t know what to do. In a moment of subdued panic, I took a sip from my drive-thru Diet Coke and the liquid caught in that hollow place in the back of my throat like an emotion. The bitch was going to die and I knew Bruce would blame me. She needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but I couldn’t fathom how that was possible. Her entire head would fit in my mouth like a cupcake. I chewed on my straw and got an idea: straw-to-mouth resuscitation! I parted her black lips and found ample options to place the straw in the spaces where her teeth were missing—a result of too much Chinese food—specifically, General Tso’s Chicken.
I tilted her head back and placed my pinky over her scaly, dry nostrils and blew several spurting breaths through the straw along with a few remaining drops of Diet Coke. Her golden chest rose. I located her sternum and slightly pumped it with my thumb, then alternated with the straw breathing. In a few moments, her eyes fluttered and her beady pupils returned to center. I’d saved her.
I’d almost killed her but I’d saved her.
This was yet another story I couldn’t share with Cooper. But I knew the next one was surefire fun.
“A few years later, I got a pig! A Vietnamese potbellied pig named Lillian.”
Cooper screamed with laughter. “A pig? A real pig? Was Larry the dog there?”
“Larry the dog was there. He didn’t like Lillian very much, but he put up with her.”
“Why didn’t he like her?”
“Well,” I said, “she was a pig. Lillian wasn’t really a dog person. I mean a dog pig. She wasn’t really a people pig either. She made rash decisions. She was bossy and pushy and she bit choreographers.”
It was true. Lillian bit five people in two years and they were all choreographers. She could sniff them out like truffles and she hated them. Lillian possessed an almost human opinion about nearly everything and I thought perhaps she resented that her stout frame would never allow her to be a real dancer.
One day, I arrived home and the Nicaraguan housekeeper gravely and wordlessly gestured for me to follow her to the guesthouse in the backyard, where she lived. She showed me that Lillian had figured out how to open the sliding glass door, enter the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and raid its entire contents. Broken dishes and plastic wrap and empty Tupperware containers littered the floor. In the adjoining living room, Lillian lay at the base of a rough-hewn wooden altar that displayed a dozen burning Sacred Heart veladoras for the Virgin of Guadalupe. I wondered if she’d lit them herself. She was on her side, her bloated belly extending past the length of her stubby legs, which made it impossible for her to stand. Still, she appeared virtuous, saintly even, but for the sickly green foam that frothed from her snout and lips. The housekeeper pointed to a particularly ravaged, crumpled scrap of foil. “De puerco,” she spat with disdain. Lillian had eaten her own kind.
“What happened to Lillian the pig?” Cooper asked.
“Well, I realized she needed to be with other pigs, and people in show business were not enough. So I took her to a place called Hog Heaven, which was a special farm for potbellied pigs, and she was very happy.”
She was very happy because the moment she arrived, she was eagerly surrounded by a small herd of male swine parading corkscrew pig penises that twirled and twisted like a power tool demonstration at Home Depot. She engaged in group sex within seconds. I waved, misty-eyed, calling, “I love you, Lillian!” She never looked back. She was, indeed, in hog heaven and the word “pork” had an entirely new meaning.
“What about Larry the dog?” Cooper questioned.
“After a long, long time, Larry got very tired and his body wore out. And then, when I met Papa and fell in love, we moved to New York and got Zach and Emma.”
Zach and Emma were very old when Cooper was born. As a younger pooch, Zach was a handsome, brindle shepherd-Dane mix, and the best dog anyone could want, sweet and playful and solid. Emma joined us a year later when a neighbor, fiercely dedicated to rescuing basset hounds, asked if we could foster her for a day or two. She’d been in three different homes in the past month. Danny made me promise it would be temporary, but I knew the moment I saw her that she would be ours. She weighed sixty-five pounds and thought she was a lap dog, and we related. She arrived on Thanksgiving Day to a house full of friends, including Liza, who brought Lily, her cairn terrier. Lily knew Zach well and felt safe with him. Emma, on the other hand, was more volatile, and after dinner, when the turkey carcass was tossed into the trash bin, Emma positioned herself next to it and bared her teeth like a tigress, then attacked Lily by the scruff of the neck and shook her as if she were a stuffed dog toy.
I made the excuse that Emma was a victim of the system and never knew where her next meal was coming from.
I didn’t tell Cooper any of this, of course. Near-death Thanksgiving tales aren’t good before bedtime. But I did share that “Emma was fond of costumes.” I never understood people who dressed their animals, but I explained to him that she actually begged to wear strands of pearls and fur capes and a particularly alluring jeweled and beaded headdress that made her look like a canine Cleopatra. He thought this was a scream.
“She was also quite famous on the Upper West Side,” I went on. “She could sense when someone was feeling badly and she would walk up to them and press her forehead against their legs until they felt better.” She was a healer. People we didn’t even know would see her in the park, approach reverently, and say, “Why, you must be Emma,” recognizing her miraculous aura. Or it might have had something to do with the Cleopatra headdress.
I skipped the story about the time I opened the dog food bin and dozens of mice sprang out and scuttled into floor cracks and secret passageways in bubonic plague numbers. I considered various traps and decided on the most humane—the kind in which the mouse is caught live to be released elsewhere. For three days I carried expensive little plastic containers of squeaking, claustrophobic mice to Riverside Park. But I couldn’t keep up. Finally, I broke down and bought glue traps, which turned out to be teeny-weeny torture devices. The little furry rodents nearly tore their little brown bodies from their little gray legs in desperation. The instructions said to “simply discard,” which meant tossing them in the garbage and leaving them to die of thirst and starvation. I knew I couldn’t do that.
I picked up the first glue-padded mouse and slowly lowered it into the toilet bowl to drown the poor thing. Little bubbles pop-pop-popped to the surface and I sobbed, begging for forgiveness from the mouse, God, mankind, the entire animal kingdom. The next drowning was painful, but a little less so. The third was more brisk—just put it out of its misery. By the tenth mouse drowning, I was dunking the pests into the john like dipping ice-cream cones into sprinkles. It was an assembly line of death and I was the executioner who disengages for his own emotional survival as he indifferently releases the guillotine blade. My cold-blooded apathy grew into a sense of powerful purpose and I became drunk with it. I was the great protector and these disease-carrying vermin would contaminate my dog food no more! So long, little fuckers!
Cooper probably would have liked that story, but execution tales before bedtime are never a good idea either.
“A few years later we moved to Los Angeles and Zach and Emma loved it. They could run more and play more and it never snowed.”
I flashed on the first winter Danny and I spent in Los Angeles. Zach could get anxious sometimes. His brow would furrow and he would look troubled. One night, what started as a worry became a full-fledged nervous breakdown. His eyes darted from corner to corner, ceiling to floor, and he began pacing in circles with a thin, inconsolable whine. Soon he was drooling dementedly and his big, sad eyes started rolling around, unfocused. It was three o’clock in the morning and he was clearly having a seizure. Danny and I rushed him to an emergency veterinarian. After a quick examination, the doctor took us aside and said, slowly, seriously, thoughtfully, “Is it possible . . . that your house . . . is haunted?”
“Beg pardon?”
“I asked if your house could be haunted?”
“This is your professional medical diagnosis?”
“Have you seen anything strange?” he continued. “Heard any peculiar sounds? Felt a frigid presence? Has anything mysteriously moved from one place to another? I’m just asking if it’s possible.”
“Is it possible,” I responded, “that you have a degree and a license to practice medicine?”
We were, indeed, in California.
It turned out that a tree was scraping slightly against our Spanish roof tile in the wind and Zach had freaked out. We gave him sedatives until we could arrange for the tree to be trimmed to the tune of a thousand dollars.
We were a family and did what families do for each other. At the depths of my alcoholism and accompanying depression, when Danny was often traveling extensively, my obligation to feed and walk Zach and Emma was the sole reason I got out of bed. They were there when I was broken, and they were there through my frazzled recovery. Stalwart. Unconditional.
When Cooper was born, the dogs instinctively stepped up to a new level. “Cooper, did you know that when you were a baby, Zach would sleep outside your bedroom door to protect you at night? And Emma would lick your face and push her forehead against you if you were crying?”
“And then they went to heaven, right, Daddy?”
“Yes, Cooper. But they loved you very much.”
• • •
After fourteen healthy years, our baby dogs declined, seemingly overnight. Their joints became arthritic and their eyesight and hearing deteriorated. Taking them for walks, carrying them up and down steep stairs, and hoisting them into the back of the SUV or SVU was painful for all of us. And maybe, with a new infant at the center of our world, they felt their task was done. Not in a sad way. In a complete one.
One night, Danny and I got down on the floor with Zach and Emma and said, “You have been the bestest dogs ever. And we know you’re hurting. Please feel free to leave the party at any time. We’ll be okay.”
Not long after, Emma had a really bad day that revealed a ruptured tumor we didn’t know she had. And we had to put her down. Then, three months later, Zach had acute renal failure and left us as well.
I’ve always considered myself a true-blue pet person. But as I traversed the litany of my animal history in an effort to bond with my child, I realized that while it is brimming with love and compassion and laughter and tears, it’s also riddled with abandonment, disease, murder, suicide, genocide, and the supernatural—very much like a day in the four-year-old, action-packed imagination of Cooper.
Perhaps my son and I aren’t so far apart after all.
Danny and I believe that furry family is essential to a full life. We’ve promised Cooper a puppy of his own when he is five. He’s already considering names: Stinky, Farthead . . .
Danny will probably be the one who takes Cooper and the pooch on hikes and have wrestling matches and play fetch, and I will cook organic dog food and schedule vaccinations and invent funny puppy stories. Cooper will learn from us both.
And the dog.
He’ll learn the most from having the dog.