Deliriously Happy (19 page)

It should be fairly easy finding a scumbag in New York City, you would think. I approach several groups of youths congregating on corners.

—I'm looking for a scumbag.

—Who you calling a scumbag?

Followed by some kind of a beating. Eventually, one fellow owns up to being a scumbag. We make arrangements. For an admitted scumbag, he has a very inflated view of his worth.

He is supposed to come on Tuesday night, but doesn't. I'm out a thousand bucks. Never trust a scumbag.

He comes on Wednesday night. I can hear him banging down the hallway. He'll wake the wife.

He'll kill the baby.

The scumbag has a knife.

The wife is downstairs, waiting to let the paramedics in. I am in the baby's room, pinching my gut, trying to form a tourniquet out of a fat roll. I should probably tell the police he was a black guy, or maybe that's racist. I wonder if they'll believe a Chinese guy. The baby wakes up and starts to cry. Great.

My wife won't like me getting blood all over the baby, but I pick him up anyway. Something about my warm, wet lap soothes him. He looks up at me, into me.

—
Dah-dah
, he says.

He puts a pacifier in his mouth and closes his eyes. I close mine. I'll get some sleep in the hospital, I think, and it's going to be all right.

The growth overtook Grover's mouth and he could no longer eat. “Please,” I begged my father. “He needs to go to the doctor.”

“Well, we'll see how he does,” he said, waving me away…

Grover died.

—From
A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
, by Augusten Burroughs

“That's not true,” [Mr. Burroughs's mother] said, then quickly corrected herself. “I should say we have different memories.”

—
New York Times

She is writing her own memoir.

—Same article

I'm not naïve. I knew the reviews might be bad, like that hatchet job in
Dog Fancy
. What I did not expect was to be sucker-punched by Oprah, or denounced from the floor of the U.S. Senate, or the mass crap-ins on my lawn. The price of truth, I guess.

I wrote
Tyrant Rex: His Life as My Dog
as a much needed corrective to
Speak: A Memoir
, and I stand behind my version, which costs three dollars less and contains many never-before-published candid photos of Rex.

His name
is
Rex, by the way, not Roo, or Rowr, or Bow Wow, or whatever it is he's calling himself these days. He's also mixed breed, not a rare Arubian Cunucu, or part dingo, as he has variously claimed. I know, because I raised him from a pup. I was the one who taught Rex to sit, to heel, to speak, and to speak English. His first word was not “out”—as much as that serves his current political agenda—it was “eat.” I was there, and so was my chicken Parmesan. My therapist can confirm this.

I never struck Rex. If he now flinches at the sight of an open hand, he does so instinctually (or possibly for effect). I may have, on one or two occasions, rubbed his nose in something or other, but this was a widely accepted dog-rearing practice at the time.

Rex did, I'll admit, beg me to take him to the doctor to check out a “lump” that he found. But you have to understand,
he
begged for everything: for scraps, for ear scratches and tummy rubs, to go out at all hours of the night, to yet again rent
The Lion King
. He just barked all the way through. I would have happily taken him to the vet, if not for the simpering, and if not for the fact that we had been to the vet three times that month, twice for “anemia” that he attributed to a lack of “wet meat” in his diet, and once when he thought he was having a heart attack, which turned out to be the UPS guy. What Rex leaves out of his telling is that I did eventually take him to the vet, and the vet told him exactly what I had told him: the lump was his testicles. And let the record show that it was Rex himself who insisted that they be removed. Why would I force sterilization on a dog who could talk, if I am as greedy as his attorneys contend?

As Rex's fame grew with that ridiculous talk show (he scores an exclusive with Ahmadinejad and asks, “Do you own cats? You smell like cats”—please), his begging turned to growling. He barked and expected me to obey. He demanded wet meat, first cows by the carcass, then more exotic fare. He'd see something on the Discovery Channel and expect it in his bowl that very evening. He wanted to “taste all the animals,” he told me, and once confessed his desire to “eat the last of its kind.”

The cats.

God forgive me. I procured the cats.

But Rex ate them. In all likelihood, he is still eating them.

Need I point out that there remains one animal he has not yet tasted? (To my knowledge.)

Around the time he won the Peabody, the biting began. First, little nips at my heels for motivation; later, vicious bites on the calves and buttocks. (He was always careful not to break the skin.) One morning, I awoke to find him on my pillow, jaws agape, his fangs resting on my throat. He stood, licked my Adam's apple, and trotted away without saying a word.

The success attracted fleas: Rex lost himself in a cloud of sycophants and agents. He was doing a tremendous amount of catnip, even though it had no pharmacological effect on him. I pleaded with Rex, “Quit the show—we can make ends meet with the occasional corporate gig and go back to being what we are: a master and his dog.” The next afternoon, I'm sitting backstage when one of Rex's pack sidles up to me and whispers, “Rex doesn't want you hanging with us anymore.” Just like that. Rex could have told me himself. But he sends
Danny Bonaduce
.

The revisionist memoir was inevitable, I see now. Rex's true, loving upbringing didn't jibe with the Rex myth. Still, it hurt. I couldn't go into a Starbucks without his eyes piercing me from seven thousand counter displays, accusing me of unspeakable crimes against Canidae. I chose to remain above it, until I read that
Speak
was being made into a movie, with the part of me being played by Danny DeVito.

My reaction has, I believe, been measured and meticulously documented. If anybody is interested, my book can be purchased directly from www.tyrantrex.com. I will have nothing more to say publicly, except to extend my hand and issue one final, heartfelt command: Rex, come home.

Rü responds:
It saddens me that Mr. Doyle has chosen such a public forum to discuss what is, despite my celebrity, a private matter. Clearly, we have different memories of my owned years. Pending litigation prevents me from commenting further. But I would like to add that while I can no longer call Mr. Doyle my master, and in spite of everything, I consider him my best friend.

I'm going to do a lot of fishing.

—Ed Nabors, co-winner of a $390 Mega Millions jackpot

Good question. Here's a hundred dollars.

The truth is, I haven't really thought about it. I mean, I suppose I'll have to hire a lawyer to start preemptively suing people who claim I owe them money or fathered them or blinded them in a bar fight. And I'll need bodyguards with double-0 clearance, for insurance purposes. And another lawyer to sue the first lawyer. But beyond that, my life is going to stay pretty much the way it is, only with the Mega Millions.

Cheryl has been a good wife, financially supporting me all these years while I pursued my dream of winning Mega Millions, and I'd like to keep her. She's not really a Mega Millionaire's wife, though, as she would be the first to admit. But in light of all her years of loyal service, I'm going to give her first crack at the position.

Out of my own pocket I'm advancing Cheryl up to $300,000 for a series of upgrades. She has all sorts of complaints about her face that frankly I don't see, but fine, we'll fix all that stuff. We'll also be installing state-of-the-art breasts, right above the original ones, which we'll keep around for old times' sake to remind us where we came from. To go with her new Mega Millions looks, Cheryl will be getting extensive training on trophy-wiving from Melania Trump, on loan from my new friend Don, at a special discounted rate.

I do hope it all works out, because Cheryl was with me back when it all started. All those scratch-offs. All that black stuff all over the bed. She's probably wishing she hadn't bitched so much about it now.

As for myself, I can't think of anything I want. Hair, maybe. Specifically, George Clooney's. So far he's been unwilling to part with it at any price, but we'll see how he feels about playing Khrushchev or Gorbachev or Blofeld or Mr. Clean in the new movie I'm financing. Plus he travels a lot, often to countries where it's possible to get what you want done done. You know what—that was off the record. Oh, and I forgot: here's a thousand dollars for each of you.

Also, I may get a heart transplant, just as a precaution.

We're going to keep the old house. We love the neighborhood, and we'll love it even more without a lot of the neighbors. We'll probably do some additions, preserving the original house as a centerpiece in the new living room, or maybe as a playhouse for all those grandkids we will no longer be denied. Cheryl's going to be too busy pleasing me to keep a house that large, so we'll need some kind of staff: just a few French maids, one of those sinewy masseuses with Chinese tattoos, some house lawyers, a night masseuse, and a butler. A really good butler, from England.

Out back I'd love to put in a small lake, where Tim Herlihy's place is now. We'll dock the yacht there, and copter it to whichever coast, as necessary. I haven't decided what to stock the lake with, but I've been thinking a lot about the environment now that I'll be owning so much of it. And it seems to me that the “greenest” thing to do would be get a bunch of those
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit models, brush some scales on them with biodegradable body paint, strap them in helmets rigged with a giant eyehook or an industrial-strength magnet on top, and toss them in. Maybe. Like I said, I haven't given it much thought. But I guess the short answer to your question is: I'm going to do a lot of fishing.