the real thing
we had a silver blue Weimeraner named Boo (after Boo Radley). he had yellow eyes and a sweet disposition that was unusual for his breed. most of the ones i’d met were high strung bugged-eyed and scrawny. Boo was on the mournful side. maybe because we had his balls cut off. what was left was an embarrassing prune that everyone could see under his clipped tail. and he hated being observed doing his business. he’d crane his neck around in the squat position to see if we were watching. ‘go away’ he seemed to be saying under concerned eyebrows. he also had a serious fart problem. they would hiss out of his ass like a steam iron and he’d look more world weary than ever, staring at his behind with an ‘oh God what WAS that?!…’ expression, rise and lope to another room, repulsed by his own stench. as a kid i remember they would issue forth under the card table where my Grandmother played bridge with her friends. tap, tap, tap she’d drum her forefinger waiting to snap down a card. Boo would erupt, get up and leave the room, with a left-behind odor so overwhelming it seemed to ‘appear’ under the table, wafting into the nostrils of Granny and Co. she was a Yankee stalwart with a no nonsense reaction: a single raised eyebrow. Boo’s best friend in the world was a neighborhood Dachshund named Mopsy who was as diminutive and ladylike as Boo was substantial. copper brown with tiny sharp teeth and clickity-clackity toe nails, she lived down the hill, across a skirt of lawn, over a stream and up a slope in a big brand new millionaire’s mustard stucco mansion. every now and then she’d wander out onto our field, a nearly invisible spot against the grass. one afternoon, when my dad and his pals were driving golf balls off an imaginary tee near our house, one of the balls hit her in the ribs. she blew up like a balloon, small black eyes in the middle of a ‘basketball’. (she had a habit of getting in the way.) one time i was painting a 4x8 foot ‘Picasso’ rip-off for an art show at high school. it had to be laid on the floor for me to work on it. Mopsy castanetted her sharp black nails across the painting i suppose in an effort to satisfy her curiosity or just to fuck with me. the paints were made from egg whites. (the fresco materials were a mix of pigment powder and egg) weren’t yet dry and Mopsy added her ‘art’ to the project. i picked her up by the skin on her back, heaved her across the room and out the door. i didn’t feel good about it, but Mopsy didn’t need human love. she had Boo who visited her every day. he’d befriended Charlie the milkman, who’d toss him a milk bone, let him hop into the truck and drive him down to the Mopsy Mansion. there they’d hang out, go on a garbage hunt, get their fill and walk back up the slope to our house where they’d sit, side- by-side, just off the flagstone porch and stare down the hill like a couple of old ladies in rockers. to us they were romantic lovers. when it was time for Mopsy to head home, Boo’d walk her the whole way down. he was dark after she died (at 17) and was never the same. left himself not long after.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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