Eddie’s Shorts
Volume III:
The 22nd and 24th President of the United States of America
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
By M. Edward McNally
Copyright 2011 M. Edward McNally
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to another installment of Eddie’s Shorts, wherein I unearth an old pair of my shorts, long lost in the sands of time. That was probably too dramatic, but it’s a result of living in Phoenix, AZ. One more good haboob and I may well awaken in a dune.
So these two, I guess, represent the “Love Collection.” You can tell, because there is no real sex to speak of, just a couple first-person narrators torpedoing their relationships. Guys, of course. These are fiction, keep in mind, as I myself am a real Sweetheart, ask anybody. Well, not “anybody,” but…hmm. Anyway, on with the show.
Thanks always for reading,
Ed
PS: Oh, and as after some six months of doing this I am finally starting to figure out some rudimentary things, the stories are followed by a couple additional pages. The first highlights my Musket & Magic fantasy series, which is the main thing I am working on now. The first three volumes of that series are available. Also, please take a gander at some of the books available from the Indie Eclective: A truly fine set of writers who, owing to a momentary lapse of otherwise sound judgment, let me hang out with them. These folks can all write, they cover a wide array of genres, and I am sure all literary tastes can find something to enjoy among them, from Paranormal YA, to Parody, y’all.
The 22nd and 24th President of the United States of America
Grover Cleveland hates my guts.
He's clever about it though; playing his cards close to the vest and generally displaying a wilderness cunning that has survived generations of domestication and translated fully intact to his Mommy's living room. The first time she leaves the two of us alone I look over at him seated across the coffee table - his white moustache and goatee neatly trimmed - and for some reason I feel underdressed. While he has been politic if not friendly thus far, his brown eyes are not warm as he regards me in the lengthening silence.
"So, Gee Cee," I say, making an effort to reach out. "How's life treating you?"
He blinks. Stares. Then gives a little noise like a throaty cough, sort of an, "Eh-oooh." He looks at me for another second, then turns away with clear disdain.
I'm bugged, or fretted, or something, but before I can respond Grover's Mommy comes back into the room and I snap my mouth shut, cutting off anything sharp.
*
The next day at work, Tony Dilmont raps on our mutual cubical wall shortly after nine and his face and fingers appear over the top, hovering above me like a Kilroy-Was-Here drawing.
"So Mitch," he says eagerly, "how'd it go?" Tony has been married for three years and is convinced that every “single” person in the office is regularly engaging in wild sexual escapades with an exotic variety of partners. At least he seems to hope that somebody is.
I can only shrug. "Good, or not bad, at least. We got along okay, but I think her dog hates me."
"Her say what?" Tony asks. His head moves from side to side and there's a metallic squeal from within his cubical. Tony is standing on his chair, and it's trying to twist out from under him.
"Her dog. She's got this little terrier-thing, named Grover Cleveland."
"What?"
"Dilmont!" Our supervisor's voice booms out from across the office.
"Look, I'll talk to you at lunch," Tony says before he disappears and the sound of industrious key-strokes erupts from his side of the wall. Before I go back to my own keyboard I have time to think: What is this? Junior high school?
*
We set a second date for the next weekend, but after careful consideration, I find that I don't want to wait that long. I call her on Wednesday, trying not to sound overanxious, but feeling it slightly.
"Well, sure," she says, I think trying not to sound overanxious.
Jeeze, we are in junior high.
I suggest a drink after work. The office full of cubicles I work in is on the seventh floor of a building two blocks away from a virtually identical building which houses her office full of cubicles on the fifth floor. There is a coffee shop halfway between, where we met in the first place, and it seems to me it would be a simple matter to meet up there after work.
"Oh, well, not right after," she says. "I have to get home and feed Grover."
She lives out in West Seneca. With the rush-hour traffic that would be better than an hour round trip. We both try to come up with another idea, but finally forget it and agree to wait for the weekend.
I'm really starting to dislike the dog.
*
Despite scheduling conflicts arising from the terrier's dietary needs, his Mommy and I still manage to see each other a few times over the next month. It goes well, maybe even remarkably well, with the exception of the time that I spend out at her place, where Grover Cleveland still holds office.
He is never openly hostile, though. If he was barking at me or peeing on my car tires, that would be one thing. Instead, when we come into the house and his Mommy calls, "Grover! Mommy's home!" he comes bounding out of the back, short claws clicking on the faux-tile in the entryway, and nuzzles his Mommy's hand while she kneels and scratches his ears. Me, he doesn't even acknowledge, and for the rest of the evening or weekend day, he won't so much as look in my direction. Oh, I try to get his attention mind you: "Hey Grov, here pup." Nothing. He just keeps looking up at his Mommy and doing a little prance around her, and she turns to me and shrugs. "Funny," she tells me. "He's usually more social."
But when we are briefly alone (Grover and I, he won't leave his Mommy alone with me), then he'll turn on me. Stare. And even though he's the dog and I'm the upright biped with the opposable thumbs, that look is so unbelievably condescending I can't think of a word to say. Sometimes I manage to get my mouth open, but that's as far as it goes. I'm wondering if I should risk trying for a pet, a friendly scratch maybe, and he just stares and makes it clear that he's barely tolerating my presence, my existence. After the first couple weeks of this, I can hear his voice in my mind's ear, coarse words in a tone I can only describe as Presidential.
You gonna try and touch me, monkey-boy? I double-doggy dare you.
I don't. A second before his Mommy reenters the room, or the yard, or wherever we are, Grover turns away and she walks in to find him pointedly ignoring me and me sitting there staring at him with my mouth open. For the rest of the evening I'm a flustered mess.
I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm at least mildly retarded.
*
Fortunately, we don't get together solely out at her place. Her neighborhood out in West Seneca is nice enough, but the town itself is just suburb - strip malls and fast food joints - so when we go out at night it is usually in Buffalo. But even though the dog is twenty-odd miles away, he's a presence.
A weekend in mid-October for instance, we meet on Saturday night at MacGuff's, a lakeside restaurant with much better food than the name might suggest. We wait in the bar for a table, which is fine because MacGuff's also has the best Irish Coffee in town. Sometimes that is about the only thing that makes a Buffalo winter bearable.
We order a couple and sit at the bar. There are about three minutes of small talk originating totally on my side. She seems distracted somehow, thinking about something else. I'm suddenly convinced she's about to dump me, and my feet tap nervously against the brass piping along the bottom of the bar.
"Have you ever had a dog, Mitch?" she asks out of the blue. This probably has nothing to do with whatever sentence I just finished saying, but I'm not sure because I haven'
t really been listening to me either.
"Uh, no," I say. "I had some fish for a while in college, but a roommate killed them with a glass of vodka." God, I'm babbling. She's going to dump me and who can blame her?
Instead, she flicks her eyes over and gives me an amused smile. "Vodka?"
I nod. "Yeah. He said it was an experiment for a drugs-and-behavior class or something. Apparently tropical fish have a low tolerance for Russian alcohol."
She laughs and I take a too-large swallow of Irish Coffee, almost burning the roof of my mouth. Maybe she's not going to dump me. Maybe I still have her fooled. She might not yet realize I'm an imbecile.
"Something the matter with Grover?" I ask.
She nods and sips at her coffee. She puts an elbow on the bar and bends the arm, tapping the pale pink nail of her index finger against the small earring in her right ear, tilting her head slightly to do so. It is a little absent gesture I've noticed before, and found myself thinking about when I should be doing something else, like working.
"My neighbor wants me to get Grover fixed," she says.
I blink and wonder for a second exactly what part of a terrier can break and require repair. Then it dawns on me what she means and I unconsciously tense and make a small, involuntary sound of sympathetic dismay. She smiles at my discomfort.
"Probably not a suitable topic for a dinner conversation, huh?" she asks.
"Oh man, ouch!" I say and shake my head. "Why does your neighbor care about Grover Cleveland's...um...." I search for a neutral phrase but the only term in my idiot head is Executive Branch.
"Because he has a Welsh Corgi, named Molly, I think. Anyhow, Grover's taken quite the shine to her." She sighs. "He's constantly trying to dig under the fence, and terriers can dig, let me tell you. When I make him stop he just sits there looking towards Molly's yard, making this really awful whimpering."
"I'm familiar with that sound," I nod. "I think I was making it most of the way through high school."
We both have a good laugh at that, and the bartender looks at us a bit oddly when he comes over to tell us our table's ready. We go on to dinner and other topics, but even as I'm going home alone after another cup of coffee afterwards, and after a kiss in the parking lot I'm sure was that close to turning into something more, I keep thinking about Grover looking mournfully out a window at night to the house next door.
It still wouldn't break my heart if he got hit by a bus, but there's something else now. Kinship, of a kind. When it turns out the next week that Molly and her owners are moving away, and Grover will be spared the knife, I'm surprised to find myself feeling sort of relieved for him. The next time I am out at their place and momentarily alone with the dog in the living room, I reach out a hand to scratch his muzzle. He gives such a sudden, violent growl that I get spittle on my hand, and I'm still wiping it off on a pant leg when Grover's Mommy comes back in.
*
"So that's Grover Cleveland, huh?" Tony asks.
I nod, and we both stand there in the entry of my cubical. There's a new object on the desk, beside the Halloween card from Mom. It's a slim picture frame, the inexpensive cardboard kind that props up against its own fold-out back. The photo is of Grover Cleveland's Mommy standing against the worn post of a gray fence on her folks' farm in Ohio. She has on jeans and a bulky sweater and is looking off to the left with one foot on a crosspiece of fence, one hand palm up against a hip, smiling unselfconsciously off towards what must, judging from the orange-ish lighting, be a sunset. The pose is too good to be anything but unintentional.
Grover saw it coming. The dog is standing in front of her, sideways with his flank against her leg, head turned toward the camera. He looks like an encyclopedia illustration for a Wirehaired Fox Terrier: Forelimbs ramrod straight, hind legs with a slight belligerent spread, thick short tail standing at attention and looking vaguely phallic. The brown and grayish swaths of color along his loins and withers look somehow like pieces of an art deco mobile hanging in front of the otherwise white dog. The shadows of the setting sun that make his Mommy's narrowed eyes look bottomless fall away from the side of Grover's muzzle, concealing his right eye entirely and making the left stand out as a bright chip of yellow light. Though Grover Cleveland's shoulder barely comes up to his Mommy's knee, he looks prepared to stop a rhino charging at her.
"She's really cute," Tony says.
"It's a he," I say.
*
When I was a kid I always wanted a dog: A big, furry Newfoundland or a Wolfhound that I would ride around the neighborhood like a pony and name "Chewbacca." That idea didn't fly in the Varney household though, apparently we just weren't "pet people." I never got a good reason why we couldn't get a dog, much less the dog itself.
Instead, I would play over at the houses of friends who had dogs, hanging out more with the canines than with their masters. The dogs loved me, probably just for the attention I'd shower on them, and for a while I even planned to pursue a career as a dog catcher. Then my smart-mouthed older brother had to go and tell me in graphic detail exactly what happened to stray dogs picked up on the street. I’d had some vague idea that the dog catcher kept them, somewhere out on a big farm in the country.
My brother ruined the whole Santa Claus thing for me, too, but I felt worse about the strays.
*
Things escalate early in November. Though I get too discombobulated to try petting anything at Grover's place, his Mommy and I have done a fair amount of nuzzling at mine. But when "The Night" finally comes, it is not my apartment we wind up at after dinner.
She doesn't call out to Grover as we enter the house. We've been engaged in a sort of heated-running-kiss since getting out of the car, but after a couple seconds of trying to fumble our coats off we're distracted by a rough snort from the floor. Grover Cleveland sits there with his head cocked sideways, looking disappointed up at his Mommy.
Young lady, what are you doing with your mouth on monkey-boy?
"Hi Grover," she says absently, turning back to me. "Put him in the kitchen, would you?" she says, then heads for the stairs, pulling her galoshes off on the way.
For the first time ever, I grin widely down at Grover.
"C'mon doggy," I say as I walk past him to hold open the kitchen door.
Grover keeps looking up the stairs for a moment. Then he gets slowly off his haunches and strolls in my direction, like he just happens to be heading in that direction anyway. He passes me without a glance, but in the kitchen he turns around and gives me his old baleful glare.
I've had a few glasses of wine, and in any event no blood is making it as far up as my brain just at present. I lean down to just inches from Grover's face, getting a little whiff of Milk-Bone, and quietly sneer, "Well, Mr. President, I'm gonna go upstairs now, and do the deed with your Mommy."
He bites me in the face.
*
"I'd kill the bastard," Tony tells me the next day. We're sitting in a bar after work, beers between us, and I'm trying not to scratch at the goatee of bandages covering the eighteen stitches in my chin. I consider his statement seriously before responding.
"I don't think killing her dog is going to endear me to her."
"No, you don't just rush in and brain him with a shovel in front of her," Tony says. "What you need is an assassination plot. Are there any grassy knolls near her house? Does Grover Cleveland ever go to the theater?"
Tony is clearly as amused as hell by all this, and I didn't even give him the full blow-by-blow of the Emergency Room visit. Grover's Mommy drove me there, apologizing profusely all the way, while I was busy bleeding all over her car and trying not to squeal, "Oh God it hurts!" every ten seconds. When we got there, the doctor (who looked about fourteen) narrowed her eyes at my face and said, "What did you do that made him bite you?" I could only blink at the floor and mumble.
"I am not going to kill Grover Cleveland," I tell Tony firmly, closing the subject. He shrugs.
"Well, you're going to have to do somet
hing. Look, dogs are descended from wolves, buddy, and they'll defend their territory to the death. Now that blood has been drawn...hell, you better not go back over there ever again."
That is a real possibility. I could probably explain to Grover Cleveland's Mommy that I can't go back to her place now, and we could meet exclusively in town at my apartment. I could do that, I'd just have to face the fact that this dog doesn't like me and never will, and that whatever canine camaraderie I had with dogs in my youth died with Santa Claus and everything else that was good and simple.
I could, but I won't. I vow then and there that Grover Cleveland is going to love me.
*
Grover Cleveland sniffs at the squeeze-toy on his Mommy's kitchen floor. It's shaped like a pork chop, and if he'd bite it, it would emit a squeak. He doesn't though; he just pushes it around with his nose, then looks up at me.
What's this, monkey-boy? You trying to bribe a public official?
"Go on, Grover," his Mommy says. She's standing at my side, back half a step to allow Grover and me our little act of reconciliation, but close enough to grab his collar if he springs for my jugular.
Still eyeing me carefully, Grover dips his head and lightly jaws the pork chop. It squeaks, and seemingly against his will, Grover's tail gives a slight wag.
Okay, the squeak's cute, I like that. But don't get too cocky, monkey-boy. I've still got my eye on you.
*
By Thanksgiving more progress has been made. The stitches are out and I've spent a small fortune in rubber bones, tennis balls, and doggy-biscuits that I've taken to filling my pockets with whenever I drive out to Grover's. Thanksgiving Day as both our sets of folks and family are otherwise engaged, his Mommy and I do the whole meal-thing at their place, and I slip Grover small pieces of turkey and stuffing from the table.
Grover Cleveland has deigned to play fetch with me on occasion, and after the meal we go out in the snowy backyard. Grover springs and bounds through drifts, bringing back the tennis ball with admirable speed and placing it in my hand every time. After a while, he drops it at my feet, and licks my hand instead.