Jan 12, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
A snow-white Pit Bull with a metal chain leash that gleams in the hot southern California sun is just across the street. I watch as the dog sits down on the curb the way well behaved dogs are supposed to. His master is all in white too. He’s a pumped up youngish guy with really nice arms. Something is gleaming around his neck.
Henry and I are standing outside the house. We’d been out just a half an hour before this, but moments ago, I found him at the front door, as if to say, “I can’t hold it in another second!” Sometimes he doesn’t, so I am, to say the least, rather well trained to meet his demands. Now that we’re out again, he doesn’t want to walk or relieve himself. He just wants to sit and watch the people go by. He wants to bark at the skateboarders. He wants to ingratiate himself with the random someone or other who pleases him. And there’s absolutely no way of predicting who that will be, though usually the someone will be pretty and young. Henry is a real chick magnet. And if he’s at the beach he goes right for the cleavage.
I see the guy in white is moving the arm that’s holding the leash and the pit promptly getting to his feet. By now Henry is barking his little head off. Jumping up and down and biting the leash. And I’m embarrassed, especially in front of this well-trained Pit Bull.
They are heading toward us now, the guy in white and the snow-white pit. Henry is pulling and yowling. And jumping so high he’s practically at my chin.
“I’m sorry,” I say abjectly to the guy in white. “It’s a good thing he’s little –I’d never be able to control him if he weren’t.”
“Not to worry,” says the guy. “My dog is perfectly trained. No matter what your dog does, he’ll never attack him.”
The guy in white with his gleaming metal leash and his pure white dog smiles pityingly at me.
“Sit!” he tells the pit. The pit sits. “Lay down!” he tells the pit and the pit complies. “Roll over!” and the pit rolls over. His legs are in the air and Henry thinks this is the funniest thing he’s ever seen, he isn’t yowling anymore; he’s grinning from ear to ear. You can’t imagine how big his grin is.
“Would you look at the schmuck?” he seems to be saying.
The pit, I notice, now is sporting the most elaborate metal collar I’ve ever seen. In fact the closest thing I can think of to compare it to is behind glass in one of the Medieval rooms at the Met, where they house armor, chastity belts, and other form of torture used on men, women, and animals. It has prongs and it’s made of metal; probably every time the pit moves it does something shocking to his beautiful thick neck.
The thing that’s gleaming around the master’s neck is a big silver crucifix. I think of something my father-in-law said once: that he thought crosses were alarming like wearing a little replica of an electric chair around the neck. I’ve just now googled the Star of David; it’s much more mellow, and certainly a Buddha is even more so, though truthfully, I’ve met quite a few hostile Buddhists. Never mind hostile Jews.
I wasn’t saying anything like that to the guy, however.
He’s telling me, “You have to run them until they are dead tired. I mean dead tired.”
“I do that,” I say. “We run every day.”
“Then you have to put them through twenty-minute intervals of rigorous training. At least five times a day. And you must withhold all affection unless they totally obey you. And only feed them once a day.”
“Yeah, well.”
“He’ll never obey you.”
“No, I guess he won’t.”
Henry calms down a little after they move on, the well-behaved dog and his master. And we go inside again.
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Jan 8, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
It is December 30 and I am in a terrible mood. Lots of noise outside at home. Hard to work. Traffic so bad, I can’t just escape and go to yoga. Henry looking at me reproachfully if I don’t take him with me every time I leave the house. Gridlock reigns on the street I take to the Whole Foods where I’ll be ripped off as I am several times a week and maybe more today because I’m buying all the ingredients for the stuff I’m bringing to various parties. The Whole Foods parking lot is so crammed full of upscale automobiles they’ve hired two people to direct traffic. Things wouldn’t be so bad if I could just walk to the damn Whole Foods market where I spend all our money.
Shoulders hunched over the wheel, a couple of hundred dollars poorer, I’m driving home when I see him: he’s got to be homeless because only a homeless person would eat a plate a food off the top of the newspaper box. I also wonder how long newspaper boxes will be on the sidewalks. When will they go the way of the phone box?
This is on the corner of Olympic and Barrington where he’s finishing his lunch. There’s a bone of some kind and he’s lifting the last piece of bread to his lips. He’s smiling. He’s so happy. He’s grateful for the plate of food. And I get it suddenly, I get it long and hard and it’s now January 2 and I still get it.
Mary Marcus, quit complaining about stuff that doesn’t matter. Count your blessings. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Resign your long standing role as one of the kvetch sisters.
Remember his smile and be grateful!
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Jan 5, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
We are going to a Christmas party in a few minutes. The host is one of those truly inspiring individuals who doesn’t just say he’s thankful, he does something about it which is to collect toys for children during Christmas. I always bring stuffed animals, because I loved them when I was small and so did my son. Every year they get a little cheaper. The Chinese are geniuses at making plushy toys. I did a lot of research on stuffed animals when I was writing a book a couple of years ago. It isn’t a nice feeling knowing the toys that feel so nice in the hand have been created on assembly lines populated by Chinese children who are working to put food on the table and often live in labor camps.
And, even if I could locate some hand-made expensive toys sewn here in America and sooth my own superego, everybody knows the kids don’t want the p.c. well made stuff, they want the popular world wide schlock advertised on TV.
Which brings me to the subject of the only nice memory I have of my father, who died so many years ago, I wouldn’t know who he was if we passed each other in parallel time machines. He inhabits my subconscious and appears in dreams mostly disguised as other people, ones who are going to rob me, kill me or make me suffer long and hard for the sin of being who I am, which was a baby, a toddler and finally a child he just happened to hate.
But one day, he didn’t hate me. I didn’t know what I had done to earn his sudden approbation, but we were at the Louisiana State Fair, the whole family, and in my memory, it is just the two of us, who have found ourselves at one of those booths where you shoot a fake gun and shoot some fake ducks and for your prize you get various sizes of fake dogs.
I wanted the big one who was a character in a cartoon on TV. I wanted it the way a starving person wants food, my life depended on it. And for some magical reason, my father was for once cooperating with my desires. I can see him with the gun over his shoulder, the cigarette dangling from his lips.—he smoked four packs of unfiltered Chesterfields a day.
Shoot Daddy! He had told us so many times he had been a crack shot in the army, and now he was willing to prove it. And to me, which meant of course, that maybe he finally loved me the way he loved other people, my cousins, my brother, even my sister once in a while, his own brothers with a passionate love.
He put a few quarters down. He got four shots. He felled two ducks. He put some more quarters down. He felled no ducks. This went on for a long time. He was sweating, he was cursing. People didn’t say fuck in those days, that I remember, shit was a big one, so was goddammit. I was frightened because I had never asked anything of him before, and now I was asking for the thing in life I wanted the most: his love. Proof of his love, via the stuffed dog.
I believe I even knew that the dog had nothing to do with me. That what was going on with my father and the gun and the fake ducks was his party, his story, and his thing entirely. But I was there. I was heaving as he was heaving. I recoiled when the gun recoiled. I would have smoked if he had let me, in fact, I started smoking not long after that when I was eleven, two years after he died. And the guy behind the counter kept egging daddy on. He shot one, he shot two. And then the miracle happened: he shot three down and he cried out in pleasure, and I jumped up and down. “Pick!” , he said, and I pointed to the dog with the floppy ears that was brown, and was a stuffed basset hound, one I immediately called “Manfred” and hugged and held onto and the old man didn’t take it away which I more than half-way expected. Neither did my brother or my sister. He was all mine. It was the happiest most immense event in my short and small life so far.
I slept with Manfred, every night after that, I brought him when I spent the night with my friends, I kept him next to me the night my father didn’t come from the hospital. Manfred was beside me the night before I went off to college and my mother wouldn’t let me take him with me because she said ‘everyone will think you are a baby.’ Perhaps she was right. Perhaps she was wrong. When I was pregnant with my son and miserably large, it was Manfred I longed for.
I bit his eye out the night my father died. And after that he had one eye for the rest of his time on the planet. I don’t know what my mother did with Manfred. She was certainly cold blooded enough to toss him in the trash.
My son had at least thirty stuffed animals. One by one, I’ve handed them to other children, who have come to visit. Only Fee remains. Fee his very favorite bear, who I wouldn’t part with for all the bears in China. He sits on the top shelf of my closet and sometimes I take him out and sit him on my lap. I only do this if my puppy Henry isn’t in the room because I would never give Fee to Henry. If I’m lucky enough to ever get a grandchild, I might not even give Fee away to him or her, that’s how much I love Fee.
If I were anywhere near Louisiana, I would drive to that grave-yard, up the hill to the Jewish section. I’d march over to my mother’s grave, I’d say, “Manfred? What did you do with Manfred?”
photograph © sarahglidden / flickr
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