A Small Furry Prayer (2 page)

2

About six weeks before I bought the farm, I decided that life weighed too much. So I gave away three thousand books, six garbage bags of clothing, four bookcases, three chairs, three backpacks, two tables, two pairs of skis, two surfboards, two computers, an old skateboard, a torn tent, a packed filing cabinet, a small comic book collection, some entomological gear left over from the bug-collecting phase, a bit of pornography—two-thirds of everything by the end. I had decided to move in with my girlfriend. She lived in a very small house.

My girlfriend's name is Joy. Her small house sat just south of the Santa Monica Mountains, just north of Hollywood, in the township of Los Feliz—two words that translate from Spanish to English as “the happy.” Nearby is the Griffith Park Observatory, the Greek Theater, and the three thousand other acres that collectively make up Griffith Park. The park was bequeathed to the city of Los Angeles in December 1896, a sort of Christmas present from the appropriately named Griffith J. Griffith. His gift came with only one condition: “It must be made a place of recreation and rest for the masses, a resort for the rank and file, for the plain people.” We were the plain people and—for a short while—we lived in
the happy
.

Our house was rented, cheap, possibly haunted, and measured out to exactly 666 square feet. It perched atop a steep cliff, surrounded by a dense thicket of tall trees. Inside, a small living room gave way to a smaller bedroom and on into a kitchen the size of a ship's galley. Everywhere, the paint peeled and pipes broke. There were cracks in the walls, holes in the floor, and doors that wouldn't quite shut. Even the stairs leading up that cliff were not much more than a makeshift ladder of rotting wood, but life at the top was quiet and calm and the living room was a wall of windows. We had fallen in love looking out those windows, looking at our view of the happy.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed,” and while I agree completely, two weeks after Joy and I moved in together, we moved out together. There was no other choice. Our landlord had bought too many properties back when the getting was good. In person, he'd told us ours was the last he'd planned on developing. “Two years at least—and a six-month warning before I give you the boot,” was what he'd said. We had been going on faith here, as none of this was in writing. In writing was an already expired lease followed by a month-to-month contract. That contract gave us thirty days to vacate and no recourse. When we mentioned lawyers, he mentioned the ASPCA. That, as they say, was the end of that.

Our problems were more than a few. The first was simple economics. We were broke. Certainly I had the money to buy that house in New Mexico, but that was the entirety of my savings account, and we'd been living off that savings account for much of the past year. We were both writers. The magazine industry was in the tank, and the publishing industry wasn't far behind. It was a silly time to try to make a living out of words, but it was a silly time in general. Anyway, our real problem was the dogs.

The reason we lived in a broken-down house atop a steep cliff was that that house came with an exceptionally large yard and exceptionally few neighbors and we needed both because there are seven animal shelters in Los Angeles and dozens more in surrounding communities. At capacity the bigger ones hold about two hundred animals, and they're almost always at capacity. There's only one way to make more space. Canines may be man's best friend, but most of these shelters still have ninety percent kill rates. They euthanize more than a thousand dogs a month in the City of Angels, and Joy spent much of her time trying to even those odds.

Dog rescue involves plucking a dog off death row in the hopes of eventually finding the animal a home. Most of these animals arrive in pretty poor shape. Rehab takes months of hard work. It often takes thousands of dollars in medical care—much of which comes out of the rescuer's pocket. Occasionally, after all that, some of these dogs end up too sick or too difficult to be adoptable. Dog rescuers call these “lifers.” In my late twenties, an old girlfriend awoke one morning to end our relationship. “I want eight kids, you don't want any,” was her reasoning. While I couldn't fault her logic, she'd long known of my antipathy toward children. It had taken her over a year to realize there was no changing my mind. Not much later, for advertising purposes, I printed up a T-shirt reading
Dogs Not Kids
. I still feel that way—but lifers add a whole other dimension to the equation.

Years back, Joy had started out rescuing English bull terriers. For those unfamiliar, these are squat white beasts created by some eighteenth-century madman intent on crossing a bulldog, a pit bull, and a Dalmatian. They were bred for bull baiting, a process that involved leaping at the underbelly of a bull, clamping jaws to testicles, and applying something like sixteen hundred pounds per square inch of pressure to said testicles. Eventually the bull fell down. Then the dogs released the balls and tore out the throat. Until it was outlawed in 1835, this is what passed for fun in Britain.

Afterward, bull terriers became fighting dogs, meaning they were still bred for aggression. Their albino coats are highly prized, but the inbreeding required for such coloration leaves them with compromised immune systems and limited social skills. They also have an extremely short intestinal tract, which leads to bad digestion and worse gas. The results are an aggressive, easily agitated, stubborn, single-minded fireplug of a fart machine so damn macho that the only other dogs Joy's bull terrier wouldn't attack on sight were Chihuahuas—thus she had five of them.

And there was also some kind of dachshund-beagle hybrid, and then my half-husky, half-Rottweiler got added into the mix. We totaled out at eight—and they were all lifers. This was a little tricky since Los Angeles's canines-per-household law specifies three as the legal limit. Trying to find a landlord willing to bend this rule under the best of circumstances was difficult. Then the real estate market stalled and the rental market soared. The city's occupancy rate stood at 96 percent. Under such conditions, finding an affordable apartment that took eight dogs was right up there with world peace and ample leg room in coach class on the list of things that weren't going to happen anytime soon.

It was a Sunday when we found out our house was being sold. I came back from running errands to find Joy crying on the couch. She told me the landlord had dropped the hammer, and then told me she had made a decision. She was moving to Mexico, where life was cheap and they didn't care how many dogs one owned. I had no desire to live in Mexico. I had no chance to revive my career in Mexico. This wasn't, it is worth pointing out, her first choice. It was her last chance. She knew I couldn't move to Mexico with her, but it had taken over two years of constant looking to find our small house and we didn't have two years. We had less than a month—and almost no money. She couldn't stand the thought of being a burden. “You want a life in the city, a great career, and you're not going to get that with me and my dogs.”

All of which might be true. It was also true that I didn't want those things anymore. What I wanted was to feel like something in this world mattered, even if it had been a long time since that had been the case. What was the case was that I've been downright silly for Joy ever since the day we met. I gave away a lot of stuff to move in with her, and truthfully, it all could have gone. Most days, my gal and her dogs were the only things around worth keeping. So no, none of us were going to Mexico, though all of us were going somewhere—that much for sure.

3

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” are nine words that T. S. Eliot once wrote. During the period of time I'm talking about I would often repeat these words to myself as some kind of talisman, meant to ward off … well, I was never quite sure. They were often stuck in my head when I was stuck in traffic, among the hundred-foot billboards, the thousand-dollar haircuts, the everybody with their shopping bags, the endless repetition of strip malls and strip clubs and suntans—this whole mad crush that was often Los Angeles. These words were my way of putting into perspective the feeling that had become much of my day. I was forty years old and no longer sure my life meant much of anything.

I had come into adulthood equipped with the essentially romantic delusion that life would get easier. It had not gotten easier, but had gotten something. I began making choices. I gave up cooking for thirty seconds in the microwave. I wrote books but stopped reading. I missed the days when the drugs did the work. I wasn't unhappy so much as unsure. Just the constant sensation that whatever else might be true, this was definitely not what I'd ordered.

It was a time when I wasn't alone in questioning the way I was living. Joy and I had been having philosophical differences. When being polite, we called these differences “art versus altruism.” We were not always polite. I believed in creativity, the act of making something from nothing, the high-minded transfer of inspiration, and other such claptrap. She felt the making of art was inherently selfish, and instead trumpeted the quiet generosity of laying it all on the line for every blessed creature. It doesn't sound like much of a fight—but it was.

What seemed to be at stake was the best way to live in the world; what was really at stake was the best way to live together. Dog rescue is often emotionally exhausting and physically time-swallowing, while freelance writing is more of the same. Love doesn't always hold up under those conditions. Joy's had both ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands grow jealous of her dogs—which helps explain how they became exes—while I hadn't managed a long-term relationship in decades.

Then there was our financial future. Neither of our causes came with a great paycheck, a downside I combated with the traditional metaphysics:
do what you love and the rest will follow
. But with both of us doing what we loved, would the rest really follow? And if one of us had to get a real job? Since her higher calling involved living creatures and mine involved putting words together in a straight line, common sense said I should be the one to make the sacrifice. Unfortunately, in my experience, common sense and higher callings are contradictions in terms.

It was into this debate that a dog named Damien arrived. He was not much over ten pounds, flea-bit and back broke. His entire life had been spent tied to a radiator, his home range a two-foot patch of hard-packed dirt, his collar a thin metal chain dug so deep into his flesh it required surgery to remove. There were plenty of available comforts lying around; Damien was past the point of available comforts. For his first three months with us, he stayed beneath the house, living inside an old truck tire, trying to kill anything that came close. And more and more, I was coming around to his perspective.

It was clearly time for a change. Joy's side of the argument hinged on the crucial fact that besides doing animal rescue she was also a writer, with two books to her name and more success than had ever come my way. She had lived the art and preferred the altruism. Until I'd done the same, in her opinion, my opinion remained suspect.

“Now wait just a minute,” I tried to protest. “I definitely have some experience with altruism.”

“Which is?”

“Like everybody else who backpacked through Asia after college, I had sex with a Peace Corps volunteer.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, “absolutely, that counts.”

So I guess you could say that when I traded forty years of the mostly ordinary for a world made of dog, I was trying to prove her wrong. Or me right. Or something else entirely. Turns out it was something else entirely.

But what that something is—is a bit of a longer story.

4

Chimayo has always been a place people came to in times of confusion and despair, though sometimes their arrival was not entirely voluntary. Its earliest inhabitants were outlaws, sent to this backwater as punishment. The town began in 1680, established as a penal colony for the Spanish Empire, and has never completely escaped this past. It sits thirty miles north of Santa Fe, in the middle of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, on what is locally considered the “high road” to Taos. The high road also turns out to be something of an apt moniker, as Chimayo is further known for being the black tar heroin overdose capital of these United States and, well, for miracles.

Those overdoses occur at four times the national average. Those miracles occur at El Santuario, a small church said to be the “Lourdes of America.” Lourdes is the spot in southwestern France where the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858. In the years since, its waters have become the stuff of therapeutic wonder. While the Virgin has yet to appear in New Mexico, sometime around 1810, Don Bernardo Abeita saw a light bursting from a nearby hillside. The record is unclear about whether Abeita was a farmer working in his fields or a local friar performing penances, but we are certain that after digging in the spot where the glow emerged, he unearthed a peculiar crucifix:
Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas
, known colloquially as the “Black Christ.”

The Black Christ is a religious icon native to Guatemala. Not sure what it was doing in northern New Mexico, Abeita called in the local priest, Friar Sebastián Álvarez, who brought the cross nine miles down the road to an altar in a church in neighboring Santa Cruz. Overnight, the crucifix disappeared from the altar and reappeared in its original hole. The next day, Álvarez brought it back to Santa Cruz and back it went to Chimayo. When this happened a third time, folks decided to leave well enough alone. A small chapel was built near the hillside, the Black Christ installed on the altar.

Not soon after, the miraculous healings began. In a letter to the Episcopal See of Durango, dated November 16, 1813, Friar Álvarez told of people traveling hundreds of miles to “to seek cures for their ailment.” By 1816, these healings had became so numerous that they needed to replace the small shrine with a larger adobe mission. The mission has since become a National Historic Landmark, with pilgrims still showing up in droves. Every year, nearly three hundred thousand make the trek, some traveling on foot from as far away as Albuquerque. The crucifix remains on the chapel altar, though its curative abilities have recently been overshadowed by
El Posito
—the sacred sand pit.

The sand pit is the original hole from which the crucifix was unearthed, the dirt said to be the source of its power. While El Santuario is among the holiest Catholic sites in America, this is actually a bit of divine appropriation. When the Tewa Indians lived nearby, they called the place
Tsimajopokwi
, which technically means “waters,” but nominally means “medicinal hot springs.” The Tewa were slaughtered by the conquistadors, the hot springs long dried up. When it came to naming the spot, the Spanish dubbed it Chimayo, for “good flaking stone,” a reference to the local abundance of obsidian. Whatever the case, just off the main chapel, there's a little alcove known as the “healing room,” littered with cast-off crutches and canes and thousands of notes of gratitude for the thaumaturgy performed by this holy mud.

It's a long thirteen hours from California to New Mexico, and by the time I got there I was tired and sore and could have used some of that mud. Worse, I'd left LA in a hurry, throwing on whatever was around and jumping in my truck and only later realizing that whatever was around was perhaps not appropriate. Some dogs, they'll piss on anything. By the time I'd noticed the stains the road had been hit and the hours logged and it was late evening and pouring rain. I had arrived in downtown Santa Fe, parked, and gone in search of coffee. I was crossing a gas station parking lot when a voice called out to me. I stopped and turned and found a homeless man sitting on the side of the curb. He was dirty and skinny and missing most teeth and both shoes, but took one look at me and said: “Jesus—you got a place to sleep?”

I had yet to choose a motel, so shook my head no.

“Shelter's two blocks up and one block left,” he said, then looked me over again and added, “I don't mean to be rude, but I've got some clean pants you can have.”

There was no need of pants; there was some need of booze. I bought us a six-pack at the gas station. With no dry spots to be found, we headed over to a nearby park to drink beer under the dead branches of an old tree. Along the way, he recounted a recent speed binge in Tijuana. He was Native American himself, apparently didn't have much truck with Mexicans.

“Fuck-fuckers, throat-slitting, piss-takers,” was how he put it—whatever the hell that means. “But tell you what,” he continued, “damn Mexicans finally figured out how to cook themselves some meth.”

I didn't know what to say to that, so we sat in silence for a while. Eventually he took another swig of beer and asked what I was doing in Santa Fe. I didn't know what to say to that either: There are some demons we kill and some that kill us, and after a while these too become hard to distinguish? Instead, I settled on the truth.

“I came for the dogs.”

“Sure as shit,” he said, “ain't no shortage of those women in this town.”