Authors: Martin Kihn
Bad Dog (14 page)
The air is damper than last night, embracing us in its cool plastic arms, and I try to stay here, with these people, not back at camp or home safe in my kennel with Hola.
“Good meeting,” I say.
“I used to work with that woman,” says Clark.
“The speaker?”
“She was one of the top twenty M and A bankers in the city ten years ago. I wondered what happened to her.”
“Now you know.”
After we order our crap in the diner, I remember something Darryl said once in a meeting:
“When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, ‘As little as possible.’ And when they ask me what’s my legacy to the world going to be, I say, ‘Surviving myself.’ ”
Brilliant.
“Hey,” says Karole, sucking incongruously on a chocolate milkshake in the middle of winter, “how can you tell if an addict is lying?”
“His lips are moving,” says Darryl.
I’m studying Karole wrapping her own lips determinedly around the straw, and I say: “I couldn’t really eat when I was hungover. The only thing was vanilla milkshakes. I gained thirty pounds my last year out.”
Clark says, “At least you got some milk. All I ate was toast and, like, Froot Loops right out of the box—”
Darryl: “That’s something solid anyway. I lived on vodka for a year. Everything else came right back up the way it went down.”
Karole: “I remember a month I ate nothing but cocaine.”
Me: “You ate it?”
Karole: “You know what I mean. I wish I could have kept down some carbs.”
Me: “What did you weigh?”
Karole: “Eighty-five pounds.”
Darryl: “Ouch.”
Karole: “You lost your woody, huh?”
Clark: “The fourth or fifth time I was in the locked ward, the nurse there said, ‘Sir, hate to tell you this; you’ve got the heart, lungs, and kidneys of a ninety-year-old man on life support.’ And I’m like, ‘Where is he? I’ll give ’em back!’ ”
Me: “You’re kidding, right?”
Clark: “I wish—”
Darryl: “Ninety—hah! In my dreams. When I was in the ICU, Cedars Sinai, I heard later they gave me a fifty-fifty chance to live.”
Karole: “There were times I wished I had fifty-fifty. After my second DWI, I passed out in the back of the cop car; they’re taking me to the county jail in Little Rock. They call the EMT, guy takes one look at me, and says, ‘She’s dead.’ ”
Me: “You made that up—”
Karole: “I bought blow from the guy later. He told me.”
Me: “So you’re, what, a zombie?”
Clark: “My last time, I collapsed on the sidewalk outside Hooters. I’m lying in a pool of blood and shit; they can’t find my ID. So I’m a John Doe in the Bellevue ER, and they’re like, ‘This guy’s obviously a homeless derelict; let’s not treat him.’ ”
Darryl: “Sad.”
Karole: “I was left in a back room, some Mexican motel one time. These guys said they had some meth, but they just took me to this place to fuck. So I’m so drunk I pass out, don’t know what happens. I wake up, there’s blood everywhere, and I’m naked; everything’s gone.”
Darryl: “At least you were over eighteen. I was fifteen; one time, I’m at a porno movie with my rabbi, and he’s feeding me these pills and Southern Comfort, and I’m like, ‘Abba, I feel really weird,’ and he’s like—”
Karole: “Wait! Can I call too much information here? Please.”
Darryl: “Sorry.”
Karole: “I’m sorry for you.”
An awkward pause. Darryl puts two French fries in his nostrils and laughs. Then he stops. Silence.
Me: “Anybody see the
Real Housewives
last night?”
Karole: “That show is so fake.”
When we first get sober, for a while we wish our story wasn’t so bad. It embarrasses us. But after we get a little more time in the program, most of us start wishing our stories were much worse. In the inverted universe of recovery, the most dramatic stories—the nearest near-death experiences—are the ones that get the most respect. It is a strange but very real phenomenon we call Bottom Envy.
And it’s the reason why this conversation, so shocking to an
outsider, actually cheers me up a lot. We’re just people being people. Is everything my friends said absolutely true?
Like Darryl said, their lips were moving.
Clark and I linger a while after the other two leave to put their respective children and pets to bed, and I ask him if he’s okay.
“You seem pensive tonight,” I observe. “Kind of tired.”
“Oh, you know, work.”
“What work?” I look at him: his left hand is shaking very slightly as it lifts his coffee cup, and his eyes are rimmed black as though he hasn’t slept in days. “You’re rich and successful and all that—I know—but I have no idea what you actually do all day. Where’s your office?”
“And how’s Hola hanging? How was camp?”
“Are you changing the subject on me?”
He’s fingering his plate of cold onion rings, worrying one of them like it’s a wedding band.
“Can I make a suggestion?” he says.
“Huh?”
“You need to set a date.”
“For what?”
“For this Canine Good Citizen thing. Stop putzing around. Pick a day you’re going to do it and do it. Tell everyone—tell Gloria—and just do it.”
“What if we fail?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Taking this test is an estimable act. It’s how you build your credibility back with Gloria. You need to build it back.”
“By failing in public?”
“You’re missing the point here,” he says. “You need to start making real commitments, announcing them to everybody, and
then—the important thing here—actually doing them. I guarantee you Gloria will be impressed no matter what happens.”
“What if she shows up? Watches us screw up?”
“That’s the whole idea, genius. You
want
her to show up.”
I think about this scheme of Clark’s; it seems kind of flawed to me.
Estimable acts
. What? Meanwhile, he steeples his fingers under his chin, an onion ring still wrapped around his wedding finger.
“Can I make another suggestion?” he says.
“No.”
“And I promise this is not a selfish, manipulative thing on my part. Though maybe it is.”
“Huh?”
“How do you feel about cats?”
Ruby the Cat
A
FEW MONTHS EARLIER
, when Gloria was sick in bed with a cold, I thought she was sufficiently weakened to give me permission to do something I’d wanted to do for years: get a cat.
So I told her about my cat dream, while she was blowing her nose, and she said: “What?”
“I’d like a cat. She can be a friend for Hola. You know, during the day. And maybe Hola can mentor her, show her the—”
“You’re getting a pet for our dog?”
“Well, not exactly. More like a … a protégé.”
“You’re insane.”
“It will be fun,” I said, weakly. “More animals around.”
Luckily for me, Gloria’s illness ensured she was not quite so formidable an adversary as she would normally have been.
“I cannot take care of this cat,” she said. “It’s your idea.”
“No problem. I’ll do it.”
“You ever had a cat—
achoo
—before?”
“When I was a kid. GP. He wasn’t fixed. Impregnated the whole neighborhood. He came back scratched up sometimes. He was quite the womanizer. It was the seventies.”
“GP? What’s that stand for?”
“General Practitioner.”
“Of course.”
Momentarily at a loss, benumbed and bewildered, she dabbed
her red nose with a wad of soft tissue. Then offered, randomly: “Dogs are more popular than cats.”
“Meaning?”
“You never hear about a cat pulling kids out of a burning building. Cats never get sent into the snow to rescue people. Nobody has a cat leading them around the city or ub and down stairs. Cats don’t join the army or the FBI or protect our borders from egsblosives. You want to know why cats aren’t as bopular as dogs?”
“Not really.”
“Because they don’t
do
anything.”
“That’s not you talking,” I said. “It’s the flu.”
“Neber mind,” she said. “I need to tabe a nab.
Achoo
.”
As I left her there in the dark, I thought I heard a prophetic, subverbal muttering. It sounded something like:
“I hobe she liges Hola.”
The weekend after our late-night “Bottom Envy” session at the New World Diner on Broadway, I meet Clark outside his apartment building on the Upper West Side in the shadow of Roosevelt Hospital, and he hands me an aqua-colored cat box with a wailing little critter inside.
“I wish I could keep her,” he says, a little unconvincingly, “but my wife has bad allergies.”
“Is she always this noisy?”
“Oh, no,” he says. “Just when she’s hungry.”
What he fails to tell me is that—much like her bigger stepsister Hola—she is always hungry.
“What’s her name?” I ask him.
“Miss Ruby. You can call her Ruby.” I should have smelled trouble: already, the cat’s handing out permissions.
So I take the wailing cat box, say a regretful thank-you to Clark, and head to Columbus Avenue to look for a cab.
I still don’t know if Ruby likes Hola, but the two of them certainly keep me amused. They have been from the beginning like an operetta in the key of wow, dramatic and silly by turns, and enormously loud.
The Curtain Rises:
RUBY: I was not overly impressed by the human when he appeared outside my caretaker’s home. I told him as much through the holes in my jail. He moved me into a little room with the moving walls and the songs on the radio that use only a very small part of the audible spectrum. I’m screaming as we leave the room and get cold and warm again. He seems annoyed by me.
Note to humans: if we’re hissing at you, you probably deserve it.
We enter the region this big man obviously lives in. His kennel. I can tell because it smells like him—terrible. He takes me out of the jail and holds me incorrectly. Not supporting me underneath. What a yahoo. Meanwhile, I need to do whatever it takes to get under that sofa.
Ahhhh.
What’s that?!!
A monster!
An enormous black hairy beast! God, it’s big. I’ve never seen anything like it. And that gleam in its eye—it’s obviously hungry—the saliva. Shit. They’re going to feed me to it. These people are barbarians.
A short while later:
Oh.
Okay.
I’m in the back.
There’s a set of bars up—and the monster’s on the other side. They leave me in peace. Wonderful. I’m probably on deck for the pagan rituals.
HOLA: What is it!? A little dog in a cage. I must liberate her! Dad has imprisoned the little dog. She seems afraid of something. I must help her overcome her fear.
God, am I hungry. These humans are starving me. What? I forgot what I was saying. What a big day. There’s Dad’s shoe. I’m going to take this into the bedroom where it belongs. For my nap.
What would these people do without me to pick up after them?
RUBY
(a few days later):
The human has let me live, for now. I talk to him, but he only knows how to mumble. That’s why I stay behind this radiator. I’ve been here for days. It’s actually quite warm.
The mise en scène of this place is more tidy and congenial than my last human’s. He was not very good with details. Nor was he obedient. This person has some potential. If only I could find some way to get rid of the monster.
I think it’s time I introduced him to the new boss.
HOLA: Every morning I’m up. First thing: the little dog. I run into the back room. She hides behind the radiator. I’m bowing and sniffing. Practically doing backflips to show her I’m friendly. What more does she want? An engraved bag of poop. I’ll give it to her. What was I saying?
God, I’m starved. Dad is turning me into a stick. It’s so unfair.
I love that little dog so much. She’s so strange. Probably doesn’t make friends easily. Not a problem. Maybe some wrestling. A few rounds of Whac-a-Mole. I feel like we’re sisters.
Dad’s back! Maybe if I stand here and do that eye-batting thing, he’ll give me some Swiss Emmentaler. He always does. His training is coming along. Though lately he’s forgetting more. Where was I?
Ruby lets her pets relax
.
I return from church one day to find Ruby asleep in the middle of Hola’s doggie bed.
And Hola herself, enawed, airplaned out on the floor in front of the bed staring up at her new master.
Miss Ruby has assumed her throne.
Order sings out from the chaos, and the sun is released by the sea.
Unbelievable, really. The cat who is one-tenth Hola’s size and 5 percent as big as I am has established her dominance over the dog. She owns the space around her. Commands the higher plateaus.
It’s embarrassing. Mainly for me.
Working Dog
T
HE FOLLOWING WEEK
, during my annual performance review at my job, I find myself getting the same feedback I’ve been enjoying since I left business school a decade ago. I used to be outraged; then I thought they may be on to something; now I know that they are.
Smart people get sober, too. It just takes them longer.
