A Suburban Affair: Part 1

Fiction.

Clem Fandango started all this.

Please don’t mistake this for my blaming him, though. That’d be ridiculous and unfair. It’s far from lost on me that the fault is all mine.

Dude is my best friend, for better or worse, and for a long stretch I was, to my knowledge, his only chum in this world unless there were living beings from his sordid past that I am unaware of.

A mercurial, ornery beast of a tiny terrier mix, he does not generally play well with others or even have the time for them. I guess he’s kind of a standoffish misanthrope, but the canine version, one who hates humans as well as his own kind and does whatever he can to be the opposite of a polite member of society, if there’s a name that encapsulates all of that. I guess you could just say he’s kind of a dick.

It even took him a little while to warm up to me after I inherited him from my uncle, whose dementia had hit a point where he’d occasionally forget to do things like let him out or feed him on time or at all or way too much, and nobody else was willing and able to take him in but me. Even though I and many people who know me best were wary of my capability to care for another living thing. I hadn’t even had success with houseplants. But loneliness cajoles you into doing potentially inadvisable things sometimes.

(I ended up with Clem Fandango and my brother took his parrot, Mazzy Star, under his wing. Mazzy also has dickish tendencies, and while it’s a bonus she’s usually in a cage, it is not a bonus that she has a fairly apt grasp on English language insults and will likely outlive us all, because parrots live forever and she’s one of those animals that seems like she’ll escape death for a drawn-out amount of time purely because she doesn’t seem to like living all that much, and those creatures end up having the longest lives, because life itself is not at all fair.)

Within a couple weeks, though we were copacetic, and before long became thick as thieves. He would only listen (sometimes, to a certain extent, anyway) to me, and remained aloof, if not wholly defiant, when anyone else tried to coax him into doing or, more commonly, not doing, something. I believe this was a friendship of circumstance, as Clem Fandango is abrasive, but also extremely intelligent, and likely reasoned that he had no choice but to get on my good side if he wanted to keep living a luxurious life that included twice-daily meals from the outlandishly priced The Farmer’s Dog brand and treats basically on demand that I doled out just to keep him from boisterously whining through the night and spending his days fucking up my apartment out of spite.

My Laissez Faire attitude toward what he did with his time as long as he wasn’t messing up too much of my stuff or generally killing my vibe was likely a factor in us ultimately becoming friends, as well. (I’m not big on the ownership aspect of pets. I think of them more as furry roommates and companions. I didn’t view myself as his boss or anything like that, because I didn’t see that I had any right to be. I was barely his caretaker.) It was mostly a “live and let live” dynamic in our household.

When my girlfriend Amelia and I shacked up in a small fenced-in bungalow on a cul-de-sac, as two suburban dwellers often do, it came with a doggie door, and he began going in and out as he pleased, spending hours on end barking at passersby and incessantly growling at what I am not exactly sure. Maybe his general disappointment with life. The wind. Or both.

Clem Fandango really hated Amelia. With more feeling than he hated most. Which was a point of contention, as you may imagine, given that she and I made the choice to cohabitate after two years together, and he is part of the package deal that is me. For the next several years, anyway, if we’re lucky and he stays in solid health. Nobody really knows how old he is, but he’s certainly past the days of his spritely youth. A positive thing, in some ways. I don’t want to know what he was like when he was full of even more vigor that was presumably dedicated mostly to his passion for abject hatred.

Amelia tried desperately to get on his good side, but in all our time together nothing really worked. Couldn’t get him to warm up to her to save her life, even when she started taking some of the feeding and walking shifts — the only ways to his little Grinch-like heart that I’ve ever been able to find.

Anyway, for some reason, he took an immediate shining to Julia.

I can only assume he sensed something intangible, and I couldn’t help finding it enamoring. If not for the dog, I doubt she and I would have ever exchanged much more than basic pleasantries when she stopped by with a package containing something Amelia and I probably didn’t really need when I happened to be in the yard chorin’ or attempting to get Clem Fandango to play fetch, for some reason, even though I knew attempts at forced fun didn’t pass muster with the little guy and all my efforts would be futile.

It would have been just like anybody else coming or going.

One day I was at my desk (read: kitchen table) when Clem Fandango came bounding in with something of a foreign, joyous spring in his step. It would be counterintuitive to be skeptical about a show of positive emotion from a “normal” dog, but it’s been established that he is kinda neurodivergent. A true individual. I figured he had finally managed to kill something, even though he had never to my knowledge attempted physical assault. All bark, no bite, as they say, but who knew? Maybe he had finally met his threshold, had fianlly broken or something, and could only fight off anhedonia by tasting the blood of a chipmunk. We all have our limits and can only be pushed so far, I suppose.

At the very least, I guessed, he was satisfied with himself for scaring the shit out of an innocent child who dared ride their bike past our domain on a nice summer day.

His fucking tail was wagging, swear to god. This ramped up my wariness. I didn’t even know he was capable of showing that type of uninhibited positive emotion.

“What’s going on, dude?” I said, and he responded with a bark that had a much different intonation than his usual. It almost sounded pleasant. “What did you do?”

He grabbed his favorite toy, a plush can of “Pups Blue Ribbon,” and sprinted back through the doggie door. I followed, finding him with his paws up on the fence, toy in mouth, and gazing longingly at an Amazon Prime truck making its way down the street to its next stop on the roundabout.

Longing was not one of his go-to looks by any stretch. i looked back toward the porch and saw a couple brown boxes next to the door, sitting on one of the matching rocking chairs we had bought from, of course, Amazon, because at one time we had aspired to be the kind of couple you might see in a Norman Rockwell painting.

“Hank must be on vacation,” I thought. Our normal delivery guy, he was up there with Amelia on Clem Fandango’s extensive lists of nemeses, try as Hank so often did to forge a friendship with him. I’d found through the years that the dog’s salty demeanor did not seem to suit its intention, a strategy forged, presumably, to help accommodate his desire to be left mostly alone. People gravitated toward him because they wanted to prove to themselves and whoever else that they were an exception to what was mostly a rule. The more obnoxious he was, the more many he encountered wanted him to like them. To the point they’d almost aggressively pursue his affection. Sometimes it goes that way.

The van stopped a few doors down and then I saw her get out with a stack of packages and head toward the door.

I’ve never been a big believer in love at first sight. But lust and longing? Different story altogether. I’m far from proud — especially since I was in love and had been for quite some time — to admit I scoped Julia out for longer than reasonable or appropriate, watching her stroll all the way to the door and then back to the van. Long enough for her to notice me standing out in the yard next to Clem Fandango. His jaw was agape (he’d dropped his only prized toy over the fence but hadn’t even seemed to notice) and I have no doubt mine was as well. She gave me a wave and gently shouted, “Cute dog!”

“Don’t let him fool you,” I said, and she laughed as she rounded to the driver’s side and got in.

“Okay, Clem Fandango,” I said. “I get it.”

Heads simultaneously on a swivel, we watched her drive away.