You never know when you’re going to get the look. You might know it’s coming. You might have been expecting it a long time. But the fundamental nature of the look requires that it always takes you by surprise. And don’t try to describe it. It’s like trying to explain what shit smells like.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when it happened with Jude. But I was. Despite the fact that in the back of my mind, even before she showed up with a moving truck full of framed French movie posters, Ikea furniture and daddy issues, I knew our little experiment in cohabitation wasn’t going to work out. Still you press on because if you don’t, what are you doing on the planet? You know it’s doomed, and you do it anyway. Just to see if, on the off chance, it’s not doomed. Because hey, it has to not be doomed sometime, right? (Spoiler alert: wrong)
And then, out of the blue, you get the look. And you realize you were wrong. I mean right. You know what I mean.
In Jude’s case it came one morning as she was getting ready to go to work. I was just telling her that I was having lunch with Scott. “Should be fun,” I said. “He just got divorced and needs a little crazy time. So I might be back late tonight. I’ll try not to get any new STDs.” I’m super funny like that, see.
That’s when I got the look.
Immediately I remembered. Jude and I were supposed to have lunch. To celebrate. It was the two-month anniversary of us moving in together. And that was it. Once you get the look, there’s no getting away from it. She didn’t say anything right then. She saved her words for that night, just before she slammed the door behind her for the last time. She handed me Piglet’s leash and said, “Maybe if you try caring about something other than yourself for once, you’ll finally grow up.”
Whenever someone asks where I got Piglet, I say “in the divorce.” Never mind that this wasn’t a real divorce, the kind that costs people half their possessions and two thirds of their dignity. It was just another banal breakup of yet another non-legally-binding romantic entanglement. But ever since turning 40 I’ve taken to saying things like “I got it in the divorce.” I’ve also started saying “ever since turning 40.” It’s my way of trying to seem more adult. The evidence suggests it isn’t working, but it beats not dying my hair.
I should clarify at this point that Piglet was a three year-old American Bulldog Jude rescued about a month before we moved in together. She weighed approximately 70 pounds, had a white and brindle coat and big floppy ears. Piglet was good looking, as American Bulldogs go, with just enough jut in her jaw to look tough, but not grumpy, and she wasn’t too jowly. Still, when she stuck her head out the car window on the highway her tongue and cheeks flapped like wet slices of bologna hung from a clothesline in a hurricane. She had eyes like a Drew Barrymore romcom — sweet, full of optimism and at the end of the day, pretty stupid.
A charitable person would have called her temperament “easygoing.” Then they would have gone over and poked her to make sure she wasn’t in a coma. This is not to say she didn’t have a zest for life. It was just that she exhibited no interest in traditional dog-like activities such as fetching things, running around in parks and being awake. It is no exaggeration to say that Piglet spent 98 percent of her life supine, slobbering and snoring on a tan leather chair by the television in my living room. If she smelled of Pall Malls, cedar and mothballs, I’d have sworn she was my grandmother.
To be fair, Piglet wasn’t completely sedentary. Early on I taught her a trick that killed every time she managed to drag herself up off the chair and do it. Using a treat as a reward, I’d point my finger at her like a gun. When I popped my thumb and said “pow” she’d roll over and play dead. Trouble was, she loved treats so much that eventually she just started rolling over and playing dead at random. Like when we were out for walks. And god forbid I didn’t have a treat on me, because until that reward came, she’d keep flopping over like she was taking multiple shotgun blasts to the chest, each time looking up to make sure I’d seen, confirming in her mind that I really was the stingy asshole she’d figured me for. Meanwhile I was getting stared down by strangers eying me like I was a long-lost member of Michael Vick’s posse.
The fact that Piglet required so little attention probably explains why she stuck and Jude didn’t. I didn’t have a lot of attention to spare. I was working my ass off day and night, trying to become some semblance of a success. I was doing this because I knew that successful people usually make a lot of money. And I grew up believing money meant freedom. I was wrong about that, of course. I now know that all that most successful people care about is remaining successful, and that most of them continue to work at it until the day when they’re old and worn and broke down and they stop and look around and think, “holy fuck, I’ve wasted my whole life working. I could have been living.” They never stopped to smell the roses their Mexican gardeners so carefully maintained for them all those years. And when they decide that enough is enough, and they’re gonna take that trip down to Oaxaca to that beautiful place Juan the gardener is always going on about — the resort where his mother and grandmother and brother and two sisters work — by then it’s too late. Because while they were spending year after year building an empire that filled their coffers with gargantuan amounts of cash, a $3 fastener in the engine of their G4 was slowly but surely breaking down. And when that fastener fails, they’ve barely cleared the runway at the Burbank Airport and the goddamned plane does a nosedive straight into the ground. All because they valued success above all else, particularly over hiring a decent maintenance guy for the plane. Of course knowing all this didn’t stop me working all the time, chasing success like all those other assholes. I just don’t seem to be as good at it as they are. I’ll have to settle for getting hit by a bus trying to cross Alameda.
So Piglet ate a bowl of dry food twice a day. We’d go on three short walks, tops. We never went very far because Pig had a bum right front leg. I never found out what had happened to it, but her tranquil temperament suggested the injury was the result of an accident rather than abuse. Who knows, maybe she had taken a bullet early on in life. Which would explain how she sold that trick move so effectively.
Piglet threw up the day after Christmas 2011. I figured she ate something she shouldn’t have. She puked the rest of the afternoon. I figured she’d be fine once she got it all out. But as night came on it became clear something else was wrong. She wouldn’t eat, not even one of her beloved treats. A white crust had formed around her mouth. She had a glazed look in her eyes. Piglet was a dog that turned laziness into art form, but this was different. She was worn out, worn down… just worn all to hell.
In the middle of the night I heard a noise. I turned on the light to find Pig taking a long slow whizz right next to my bed. I was half asleep, and my first instinct was to scream at her and slap her on the rump. She looked up at me, mournfully, mid-whizz, as if to communicate that she knew. She was fully cognizant that she was doing the most awful thing a dog could do. I immediately felt like the frontrunner in the World’s Biggest Dick Games (I’m a decathlete, if you must know). But that was nothing next to the way I felt two weeks later.
“It means she’s going to die,” the vet told me flatly, after the biopsy results revealed Piglet had a form of cancer called Mast Cell Disease. The fact that she’d lasted two weeks was apparently a miracle in itself. Within a few days after she’d started vomiting, her condition had deteriorated to the point where she couldn’t walk down the stairs to go outside. They ran a bunch of tests on her at the animal hospital and discovered an ulcer inside her stomach. They didn’t know whether or not it was cancerous, but they said her only chance at survival was to operate immediately.
So they cut my dog wide open, and the surgeon looked inside and she saw a reason to hope. It would be a highly risky and expensive surgery, and she gave Pig about a 40 percent chance of surviving. I told her to do whatever it took. A few hours later they called to let me know she’d come through the procedure, but that the next 48 hours were going to be touch and go. Her vitals could fail at any moment. Sure enough, she survived that too. And the following 48 hours as well. As I had always known, Piglet was one tough bitch. I went to see her every day, and even though half her body was shaved bald and she had large staples across her torso and feeding tubes sticking out of her nose and a large colostomy bag hanging from her side… she looked like herself again. She looked happy. She was alive.
The biopsy report came back the day I took her home from the hospital. She was still positive for cancer. Like super crazy cancer-party positive. Best-case scenario, she’d live a few months.
A few months? A few shit months after all this pain and worry and money and heartache?
Fuck yes a few months. I say this without reservation: That operation was the best 17 thousand dollars I ever spent. This next sentence is going to make me sound like a terrible, narcissistic shitstain of a person, but I’m going to write it anyway. I started noticing Piglet.
I started appreciating every little nuance of her day. From the first thing in the morning when I’d wake frantic to check on her, make sure she was ok, see if maybe she’d eat something. During the days, I saw, for the first time, the thousand individuated ways she’d lounge and loll on the tan leather chair by the television. In the evenings we’d go up to the roofdeck of my house, and she’d sit there by the edge watching cars roll by below, hot moms pushing their babies, homeless guys staggering to the liquor store, boats floating in and out of the marina, bugs swirling through the trees. I became convinced she wasn’t just watching, she was taking it all in. That she instinctively understood she’d soon be leaving it all behind.
A week in, I wondered how long this fascination/focus would last. After all the vet had said she had a few months, and a few means at least three. And three months is a long time to stay fascinated with something.
And I’m sorry to say my fascination only lasted three weeks. Because that’s how long Piglet lasted. On a Friday afternoon just before sundown, three weeks to the day from her surgery, Piglet gave me the look.
I’d never seen something so clearly in my life. The look said several things at once. It said “I’m ready to go” and it said “I love you.” It also said “please don’t cry,” and “it was me that farted all those times.”
At the vet’s that night, as I lay on the floor next to Piglet, the doc explained about the two injections they’d be giving her. The first would slow down her vitals and “mitigate any tendency toward spasm and other involuntary movement.” Translation: it would keep the dog from freaking out and crapping all over the floor. I was tempted to ask her to give me one of those too. I’m not going to say I needed it more than Piglet, but goddamn I could have used something.
The next injection — the “pink shot” — would finish the job. That’s the one that stops your heart. The plunger drops, the curtain lowers. Good night and good luck.
I’ve lost too many people I love to say that lying there on the floor with my arms wrapped around that dog as she died was the saddest moment of my life. But I don’t believe I’ve ever cried as hard as I did that night. And this next part is going to sound like I made up a bullshit Hollywood ending to my dead dog story, but goddamnit I was there and this is what happened. When the pink shot went in, during those final agonizing seconds before it did its awful job, Piglet lifted her head and looked at me and my tear-streaked face and gave me a different look. This one just said, “thank you.” Then she licked my face. A big, sloppy, bologna-tongued lick. Then she closed her eyes and stopped breathing.
I got rid of Piglet’s bowls and collar and the toys she never played with, but I kept the leash. The one Jude claimed would lead me to maturity. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s when someone who hates me is right. Today I used the leash to walk Buna, the rambunctious pit bull-Labrador mix I adopted a few months ago. I’m paying more attention to this one. She’s young and not in an apparent coma, which makes it easier, but still, my entire attitude toward her is different. I don’t think I would have gotten there if it weren’t for Pig. And thus, by extension, Jude. The only difference is, the lady is long-gone. Piglet, on the other hand, will always be my number one bitch.
