The Borrowed Dog

It’s the night of freaks.

I’m on night desk and I came in a little early because Hank Crow’s been so cool the last couple of days covering for me. Tara’s due by at eleven and she’s bringing chocolate almond ice cream and some Buster Keaton videos and we’re going to chill at the desk.

Around nine, I’m relaxing, feeling good and listening to South San Gabriel’s amazing Welcome, Convalescence album, when Tony Vic and Willie What’s His Name stop by and try to sell me a lazy Susan. The two of them are always selling something. You name it, whatever useless crap someone tossed aside, or they stole, they’ve got it and they’ll try to pass it to you.

I met Tony Vic the day he tried to sell me a wheelbarrow full of sod.

“You want sod?” he asked me.

And I looked at him. I mean, he knew I was night manager at a hotel. We don’t have any dirt—nothing but concrete. I didn’t think it required an answer.

“Well?” Tony Vic said.

I said, “What the fuck do I want with sod?”

That’s how it started with us, and while I’ve never bought a single thing from Tony Vic or Willie What’s His Name, they keep coming around and this time it’s a lazy Susan.

They come in the front door and the blown-glass wind chime I got at the downtown craft market clinks its little announcement and I look up.

“Hey, hey, my man Nick,” Tony Vic says. Willie What’s His Name shadows him like a Muslim bride, three steps back and quiet as dust. Willie What’s His Name has two habits: he rolls his toothpick over his tongue, sharp end to sharp end, and he smokes plastic-tipped Swisher Sweets that foul every room he follows Tony Vic into and out of. He has the last Afro in Long Beach and looks like Link from The Mod Squad.

“Gentlemen,” I say, and I shake hands with him and Willie. “What can I do for you?”

“Not what you can do for me, but what I can do for you—let me tell you what I got.”

“I’m not buying,” I say.

“What you’re not doing is listening,” Tony Vic says. He looks back at Willie. “How can a man do business in a world that won’t listen? It’s a crime.”

Willie nods.

Tony Vic leans in. “You know those spinny plates?”

And I know right off what he means, because I can see it out on the sidewalk under the streetlight—but I’m bored and I decide to play with him.

“Spinny plates?” I say. “Like Ed Sullivan, you mean.”

“What the fuck are you talking?” Tony Vic says.

“Like jugglers? Plate spinners?”

He shakes his head and waves with both hands. “You’re way off. On Mars. On Pluto, Nick, my man.” He takes a breath. “You’re having dinner—but before dinner, you put out a dish of nuts. Say one dish of M&M’s and some other things—you put the three dishes and they all fit on one spinning platform together.”

“A lazy Susan,” I say.

He snaps his fingers like it had slipped his mind. This is one of Tony Vic’s little things. He acts like he’s a moron so you’ll feel smart and flattered and buy from him. Trouble is, he really is a moron and so it’s not that flattering to realize you’re smarter than Tony Vic, so the technique doesn’t take. You can’t feel good about seeing where Tony Vic’s headed any more than you should feel proud about outsmarting a puppy. “A lazy Susan,” he says. “That’s right, Nick my man. Always knowing the name of things.”

“I don’t need a lazy Susan,” I say.

“You haven’t seen this one.”

“Don’t need to.”

“It’s a beauty,” Tony Vic says, and Willie rolls his toothpick rhythmically.

“I’m sure it is. I just don’t need one.”

“You don’t entertain?”

“Not enough for a nice lazy Susan,” I say.

“You’re killing me, Nick, my man.”

I tell him I’m sorry, but facts are facts and I’m not a lazy-Susan guy.

He looks disappointed. You’d think he’d just bought a flatbed truck of these things. I tell him I’m sure he’ll find a buyer.

“Not here, man. Not in the LBC,” he says. “I’m seeing that this is an Orange County item.”

“It’s a suburb dish,” I say.

“You pick up on what I’m putting down, Nick, my man. A suburb dish—true words. Truer words have not been spoken.” He starts to leave. Willie What’s His Name pivots, waits until Tony Vic is three steps ahead, and starts to follow him out. Tony Vic turns around.

“I got something else,” he says.

“I’m tapped out,” I say.

“I hear you, but maybe you can help me? Spread some word and I can help you out for your troubles?”

“I’m listening,” I say.

Tony Vic looks deep in my eyes, this is serious, he’s milking this, and I begin to think he might have a major score, maybe coke or heroin, but more likely he tripped into some crystal meth garage and needs to move fistfuls of the crap. He’s close enough for me to feel his breath from his nostrils and intense enough to bother me.

Finally, he says, “Fetal pigs.”

He isn’t moving, so I roll my chair back. I have no idea what to say.

“I got a great deal on fetal pigs,” he says.

“How would you know?”

“I was thinking you could help me, Nick, my man.”

“I’m not your man,” I say. “Not your fetal-pig man.”

“You know people,” he says.

“I know people who need pigs?” I say. “Who needs pigs?”

“Sometimes there’s a need and you supply a product—sometimes it’s the other way around,” Tony Vic says.

Willie What’s His Name takes his toothpick out of his mouth. “Pet Rocks.” He pops the toothpick back in and rotates it.

“Pet Rocks is right,” Tony Vic says.

“You want to create a need for fetal pigs?”

“Now you’re just being obstinate,” Tony Vic says. “Help a man, here.”

I don’t say anything.

“I’d help you, Nick.”

“Look—I don’t need lazy Susans—I don’t need fetal pigs. I don’t need anything you’ve got.”

“I’m hearing you, Nick. But help me out here—you don’t need what I’m selling and that’s fine. It is. But what say you spread the word?”

“You leave me alone?”

He salutes. “Scout’s honor, my man.”

“I’ll spread the word you have fetal pigs for sale.”

That makes him happy enough to leave and Willie slugs out behind him, picks up the lazy Susan, and follows Tony Vic down the street.

Tara comes in about fifteen minutes early. She’s wearing a gray sweatshirt with paint stains, purple Chuck Taylors, and a floppy pair of old 501s with a rip in the knee that shows black stockings and she’s looking as cute and goofy as bowling shoes. My insides uppercut themselves when she walks in the door and I feel myself smile.

“Hey stranger,” she says, and holds up the bag.

“I scream, you scream,” I say.

She nods and slides behind me, kisses the back of my head, which shoots warm and chills simultaneously through me, and sits next to me. “And what’s new in the world of the lovely Lincoln Hotel?”

“I can get you a deal on fetal pigs,” I tell her.

She bends down and shoehorns the ice cream in the dinky freezer section of the minifridge me and Hank Crow keep by the desk. “Bad break,” she says, sitting up. “I just ordered a whole bunch of fetal pigs off the Internet.”

“Really?”

She nods. “Fetalpig.com. Can you do better than fetalpig.com?”

“Probably not.”

Tara leans back in her chair and looks over at me with a friendly, confused smile. “What the hell are we talking about?”

I fill her in on the situation.

“Do you get some points?” she says. “Something on the back end of this fetal-pig venture?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Finder’s fee? If I want a gross of these pigs, what’s your cut?”

“Tony Vic promised to leave me alone if I told people he had the fetal pigs.”

She pauses like she’s doing math in her head. “That’s not a bad deal,” she says. “But he’ll never keep his end of the deal.”

It’s around one in the morning. Tara and I are watching Sherlock Jr. when Scooter closes the video place, comes in, and says he needs some advice. Scooter wants to make movies, wants to be a director, and he was all psyched when he found out Tarantino had worked as a video-store clerk—as if there was some cause and effect. It makes him feel better, the way all the shitty painters of the last hundred years have gotten all pumped up by the fact that van Gogh couldn’t give his stuff away.

“What can I do for you?” I say.

“Actually,” he says, “I was hoping Ms. Norwood could help me. It’s a legal matter.”

“I’m not a lawyer,” she says.

“But you know lawyers?” Scooter says. “Isn’t your girlfriend a lawyer?”

“Sure.”

The mention of Jenny makes me kind of tense. I say, “Maggot Arm Joe’s a lawyer—at least he was.”

Scooter says, “Is he around?”

“He’s asleep,” I say.

“This can’t really wait. Things are getting bad,” he says.

Tara says, “I’m not sure I can help you, but try me.”

Scooter says, “It’s about my girlfriend. And what you need to know before you hear the story is that she’s a genius.”

“It has a bearing on the story?” Tara says.

“People don’t understand her,” he says. “Understand her vision. She’s in film school up at USC.”

“What’s not to understand?” I say.

“That’s what I’m getting to,” Scooter says. “It’s about a film she made. Now, you need to understand, it’s an art film.”

“It’s an art film,” Tara says. “Understood.”

“Now there’s a lot going on in this film, other than the problem, but the problem centers on this borrowed dog.”

And Scooter goes on to tell us about the art film his girlfriend Eva made. It seems she borrowed a friend of hers Labrador retriever and had it, in one scene, lick tahini sauce off her shaved cunt. He uses the word cunt and says to Tara, “No offense.”

“None taken,” she says. “I like cunts. Big cunt fan.”

Scooter looks at her and seems unsure of what to say.

Tara says, “So, Eva’s a director slash actor?” She’s playing with Scooter, but he doesn’t pick up on it.

“I told you,” he says. “She’s a genius.” He pauses, as if to let this sink in on us. “So, they show the film at the student festival—and her friend Marsha sees the scene with the dog and she goes apeshit and starts making noise about suing and stopping Eva from showing her film. Now the school’s into it and they’re talking about kicking her out of the program.”

He stops talking.

Tara says, “So what’s your question?”

“Do they have a case?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?” Scooter says.

“What are they saying she did?” I say. “What are the exact charges?”

Scooter looks disappointed. He expected better news. We’re authority figures letting him down. This is that little-kid pout that says there’s no Santa Clause. No Easter Bunny. People are mean. “Something about dognapping. Animal abuse. Obscenity. Some other stuff.”

“Bestiality?” Tara says.

“Yeah, that was one.”

Tara’s got her feet up on the desk and her chair creaks as she leans back. “That sounds right. The dognapping may be a stretch, but the rest sounds on.”

“She didn’t abuse the animal,” Scooter says.

“She had it go down on her?” Tara says.

Scooter nods.

“People frown on that,” I say.

“You’re not a lawyer,” he says to me.

“You got me there.”

He looks back at Tara. “But she’s a genius,” Scooter says. “You watch the film, it totally works.”

“The tahini scene?” Tara says.

“The whole thing. I’ve got it next door,” Scooter says. “You want to see it?”

Tara and I look at each other. I shrug. She says, “What the hell?”

Scooter says he’ll bring it over and he heads out and comes back a couple of minutes later.

Scooter puts it in the VCR and reminds us again that it’s an art film with a capital A and Eva’s the great misunderstood genius of modern film. The VCR starts to play and I pick up the remote and begin to fast-forward.

“When does the scene come up?” I say.

“What are you doing?” Scooter says.

“What does it look like?”

“You can’t see just the tahini scene,” he says.

I say, “But that’s all I want to see.”

Scooter says, “You can’t look at it out of context—that’s no way to see if it’s legal.”

“What are you?” I say. “Clarence Darrow?”

Scooter starts to say something, Tara plays peacemaker. “How long is it?”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

Tara takes the remote away from me. She motions for Scooter to take a seat behind us. She starts to rewind back to the start. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s see what we have here.”

And what we have here is pretty much what you might expect. A shitty black-and-white art film with a jumble of seemingly unrelated images. Shot on digital video with some cheap film-grain aftereffect—I’m guessing she edited it in Final Cut or Adobe. It plays like a silly parody of German expressionism, with a dog licking an absolutely gorgeous woman’s shaved cunt in the middle. In the scene, she walks in front of the camera and sits, wearing just a black bra. She really is stunning and I wonder what the hell she’s doing with Scooter, even if she is some nut job who has sex with dogs.

She stares into the camera. There’s a cut and then she’s doing her lipstick in a handheld mirror. Another cut and she’s staring into the camera. Another cut, and there it is—the dog scene. She still stares into the camera without showing any reaction to the dog. Another cut, and someone’s pouring motor oil into a circular bundt-cake pan Cut to a shot of a flower being picked. Then the flower gets put in the pan with the oil and put into the oven. And so on, until it ends.

Tara turns it off when Scooter gives her the nod. Tara shakes her head. “That was … quite something.”

“So now you understand?” Scooter says.

“What’s to understand?” I say.

Scooter ignores me and focuses on Tara and her legal opinion. “So what do you think now? Do they have a case?”

“Of course they do,” Tara says. “Several cases, probably. Obscenity’s a matter of opinion—but this is pretty obscene. And there’s no argument on the bestiality.”

“But it’s art. She’s a genius.”

“What the dog’s name, Scooter?” I say.

Tara gives me a dirty look. “Bestiality’s a law,” Tara says to Scooter. “Across the board. It doesn’t say only dumb people can’t fuck animals. It’s everyone.”

Scooter’s amazed. I wonder what’s going on in his head, but his devotional admiration for Eva is kind of charming and attractive in its warped way. “You sure?” he says.

“Pretty sure,” Tara says. “Plus there’s the animal-abuse charge.”

“But the dog was borrowed—not stolen.”

“Still probably animal abuse.”

“No one made that dog do anything,” Scooter says.

I say, “I don’t think a dog can consent.” I pause. “Legally, I mean.”

Scooter gives me a look like I don’t know anything, which is probably true, but I feel on solid ground here. He snatches his tape off the desk. “This is so fucked up—this whole situation.”

“She fucked a dog, dude,” I say

“Fuck you,” he says to me.

“Sorry,” Tara says.

“I’m not blaming you,” Scooter says, and shoots me a hard look. “It’s just that no one understands Eva.” Scooter takes the tape and heads back into the night. We don’t say anything and I can hear his boot heels scuff their way down Long Beach Boulevard’s sidewalks until it fades.

“Poor kid,” she says.

“Why? ‘Cause he’s an idiot or because he’s in love with dog woman?”

Tara tilts her head, raises eyebrows. “Little of both.” She cranes her neck, looks at the old Esso clock on the wall. “That’s probably enough for me.”

“You can’t stay?”

“I’m getting tired. Going home.”

“You could crash up in my room—I’ll be done in six hours. I’ll bring you breakfast.”

She touches my shoulder. “You’re sweet. But you don’t have sheets, Nicky.”

“Didn’t bother you last night.”

Tara’s being nice, but she can’t be budged on this one. “Last night I wasn’t sleeping. I’ll fuck on anything and I was too tired to go home. But I can’t sleep in your room anymore.”

“I’ll buy sheets,” I say.

“You romantic schemer,” she says, and flutters her hand over her heart like a mime. “See you tomorrow?”

I nod, tell her to give me a call.

After she’s gone, the night gets quiet and lonely again, so I turn on the talk-radio show. And, as promised, they’re talking to the guy who talks to plants. The thing is, and these radio people, they’re always telling you what the thing is, see, the thing is that plants are okay with being eaten by us. It’s their destiny. They feel privileged to play this role in our survival.

The host is treating him like he’s her average guest, like he just said he was for low taxes, or some other bland shit that passes for an opinion in this world. I wonder what her life’s like, sitting across from the foreskin reconstructor, and the plant guy, a whole life of them, and she’s nodding and being polite. The horrors she must dream of.

All-night radio. Web sites. Everyone’s talking at once and it’s all just so much static and I wonder if there’s anyone left who doesn’t feel the need to document their existence. Maybe I need sleep, but the last few nights, I’ve found myself edgy, jumpy and dangerous as downed power lines, and I need to mellow. I flick the radio off.

I put on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Fox-trot, which crackles with a ragged beauty and starts to make me feel better. Then I see this white guy across the street lighting a cigarette in the doorway of the old jewelry place. Jeff Tweedy sings about trying to break your heart. The guy across the street’s Zippo lights up his face, all squinty and full of young trouble like Marlon Brando about to shake the hell out of some sleepy little California town in The Wild One.

The store’s been closed for a couple of months, after something like eighty years at the same location, and people tend to sleep in the doorway until the cops roust them. But this guy, I’ve never seen before. He looks too well put together to be homeless. Blue denim jacket. Tight jeans. Boots. Give him a cowboy hat and a sunset and he’s the Marlboro Man.

He keeps looking over here. I watch him through the second song on the CD. And I don’t know if it’s my lack-of-sleep jitters, but I’m seeing this clown as a direct line to Mr. Fudge. Maybe to Mr. Frank Carr. I’m seeing myself a phone call away from a bad time. I call up to Maggot Arm Joe’s room. I can tell he’s been asleep.

“Look out your window,” I say.

I hear him shuffling across the room. “What am I looking for?”

“A guy across the street.” I say. “At Walker’s Jewelers.”

“I see him.” He pauses and I hear him yawn. “What’s up?”

“He’s out there,” I say. “Looking over here.”

“You call Sergei?”

“I wanted to know if you knew him.”

“The man’s new on me,” he says.

The cowboy crushes out his cigarette. He looks up at one of the rooms in the Lincoln.

“He see you?” I say.

“Hard to say. I can’t see where he’s looking.”

The cowboy stares up at our building for a second, then he looks right and left, and heads, slow and lazy as smoke, south toward the ocean, down Long Beach Boulevard. I watch him as far as I can from behind my glass.

Maggot Arm Joe says, “He might just be some hustler.”

“He might be looking in on us,” I say. “Sergei’s been talking us up.”

“More bad news,” he says. “Bring it up tomorrow with the man—see if he knows your cowboy. But let me get some sleep.”

We hang up and I go out the front door to see if I can find the cowboy down the street. He’s gone. It’s cold. My breath steams. Newspapers kick and roll in the wind. I don’t see anyone. It’s neutron-bomb quiet and I feel like I’m the only person in the world. It’s like that scene in On the Beach where the last guy alive in San Francisco goes running down the street screaming about how he used to live there. That kind of aloneness.

I wonder if that’s how the cowboy felt out here a minute ago. How Mookie feels under the freeway down by the river. I read in the paper a while ago that people who work nights were twice as likely to have serious mental disturbances as other employed people. Five times as likely to kill themselves. Work nights you’ll feel it creeping in on you, that despair that no other person can reach, the despair that it takes to kill yourself. An aloneness that has a pulse, a steadiness, like the hum from the streetlights. I take a deep breath and try to stay away from these thoughts.

I walk out into the middle of Long Beach Boulevard, to the train tracks that hook the working poor of Long Beach to the shitty jobs of Los Angeles and vice versa. I look one way, then the other. There’s a sound from the harbor, maybe a freight whistle. I lie down on the tracks and look at the sky and it feels peaceful. There’s a vague hum from the tracks, but it’s not from the Blue Line train, since it doesn’t run at night. The lines vibrate and I think again of the talk-radio people buzzing their troubles in my fingertips. All these uneasy hums that reminds us how nothing ever stops, nothing’s ever still or quiet.

But, I feel, briefly anyway, good, calm maybe, for the first time in a while. Things seem fine—all the crap, all the violence and loneliness and night suicides and the sad people who talk to plants, they fade for a minute. And, even though I know that things could go very wrong with the whole deal with Sergei and the computer list, I feel calm as a lake. Easy. Maybe happy to be alive. Things feel okay.

I watch my breath mingle with the night air for a minute before I start to feel dumb thinking these thoughts. I look over at the Lincoln and see Jessie, one of the hookers that lives up on the third floor. Jessie and I have a good scam going. She lives at the Lincoln, but she always tells her johns that it’s a hotel where she only does business, so, rather than going straight to her room with her key, she checks into a vacant room and she and I split the forty dollars she gets on top of her fee for the room.

She’s knocking on the Plexiglas, looking for me at the desk. Jessie’s wearing this vinyl minidress and black knee-high platform boots. She’s got eyes as green as a pigeon’s neck and skin the color of coffee ice cream and she’s among the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. How she’s ended up doing what she’s doing, I don’t ask, but I know she drinks and she’s from one of those rectangular states in the Midwest. Nebraska, maybe.

The two of them keep rapping on the glass. Jessie’s dress rides up her ass when she raises arms to pound on the window and I get up and head back inside the Lincoln and check Jessie and the man in. The CD’s playing “I’m the Man Who Loves You” and I sing along, absentmindedly, while the guy pays with cash. Jessie winks at me as she heads to the stairwell. I put one of the twenties in my jeans, and slip the other one under the register for Jessie to pick up later. A half hour later, the guy comes down, doesn’t meet my eyes, and heads out. I wait for Jessie to come pick up her cash, but she doesn’t, so I read my way toward the morning when Hank Crow will come down and relieve me. Every once in a while, I look up and see if the cowboy’s still out there, but I don’t see him for the rest of the night.