“Yeah.”
“It’s pretty much always just one of those two things.”
“Yeah.”
“For me it’s always just, I get lonely, but I’ve found that people take it the wrong way.”
“Right.”
“What about you,” she said.
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
Outside the trumpeter was trying to teach the harmonica player the horn part to “Sweet Life” by Frank Ocean. Although actually it’s by Pharrell.
“It’s just loneliness for me, too.”
“Yeah?”
“But for me it’s because I can’t fuck.”
“You can’t?”
“Yeah. Because my dick and I got divorced.”
“Oh.”
Her reaction was kind of hard to read. But I decided to keep going for it.
“Yeah. Four years ago, we agreed to get one of those amicable divorces. It was just that classic thing of irreconcilable differences. Between the rest of my body and my dick.”
“Is that right.”
“Yeah. It sounds sad, but it’s not really that sad. It’s just that all-too-familiar story, you know, of, you get older, and you become different. You and your dick at some point just realize that you’re two different people than who you were. I turned thirteen, we had a talk, we realized we both wanted out, and honestly, it was just a huge relief more than anything.”
Ash smiled a little bit. But impatiently. But for some reason I couldn’t stop.
“But it still hurt when, not even a year later, I found out my dick had completely moved on and found someone else. And that someone else turned out to be, get ready for this, a dog.”
Ash snorted, and then immediately shook her head like she was trying to take it back.
“Yeah. That was super rough. A year later I see this big Bernese Mountain Dog shambling around, and it’s got a human dick, and—”
“Okay,” said Ash, cutting me off. “Now you have to tell me something real.”
19.
SOMETHING REAL
By now you’re probably like, what is up with Wes and dogs. Because he talks about dogs a lot. In fact, dogs seem to be kind of his go-to thing. So what’s up with that.
What’s up with that is, I used to have a dog. I was eight. His name was Dad Junior. I got him when I was playing alone in the churchyard around the corner from my house. I was trying to beat my record for how many times you can bounce a superball against the upper part of a wall using only your head, which at that time was a thing I did sort of a lot. I called it “dolphin bouncing.” This is the kind of thing that at some point in middle school you become super embarrassed about and stop doing, except that it does not stop being one of the funnest things ever, and in high school you’re sort of like, actually, why did I ever stop doing that.
Anyway, I was eight, and I was dolphin bouncing in the churchyard, alone, when a car pulled up nearby and a bald, stressed-out, middle-aged man got out, and he asked me if I wanted a dog, and I said yes, and he coaxed this huge, shaggy, oafish dog out of the car and told me he was a great dog, shots up to date and housetrained and everything, but they just couldn’t take care of him, they thought they could, but they couldn’t, so if you want him, here, and he gave me the leash, and before I even knew what was happening I was just sitting there hugging this enormous dog around the neck and watching a car pull out of the churchyard lot and disappear around the corner.
My heart was racing. Nothing this incredible had ever happened to me before.
I knew that I had finally found my loyal best friend for life. There was no name on his collar, so on the way home I named him Wes Junior. But I ended up changing it to Dad Junior in a frenzied attempt to win over my dad. Because my dad really, really did not want Wes Junior to be our dog. I mean, my mom didn’t, either. But it would have been stupid to call the dog Mom Junior. Because this dog was a dude.
In retrospect the obvious name was Both Parents Junior.
Anyway, yeah. Neither Mom nor Dad was in my camp when it came to Wes Junior. Clearly, the whole thing kind of shook them to their core.
[DAD, mid-mail-sorting, standing motionless with horror in the hallway]
[MOM, from the kitchen]
—Uhhhhhh.
—What exactly is going on here, bud.
—Hey, boo? Ramona? I need you in here.
—Sure thing booper!
—Okay. Wes, kiddo, we can’t just take someone else’s dog. So let’s get him back to his owner.
—I’m just having a little booper snack. Does booper want a snack, too?
—I’m sure he didn’t give you the dog.
—Ben? Can I get you a little old snack?
—Wes. Let’s not play games. This is a living thing we’re talking about here.
—Li’l snack never hurt poor old booper?
—You want me to believe he just drove away? You’re telling me, a man just handed you a huge, slobbering dog and then drove away.
[Mom emerges from the kitchen, eating ice cream directly from the container]
—Li’l boopy snack-snack? For a littlOH MY GOD.
[Dad leans out of the front door and addresses the entire street]
—Oh, I really don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.
—Hello? Whose dog is this? Is this someone’s dog? Anyone?
—Did anyone happen to see the unhinged maniac who drove up to my kid and gave him a dog? Jeff, do you know anything about this?
—This animal has a very negative energy. I am really not comfortable with this energy in my home.
—Wessie, look at its eyes. It has demented, violent eyes. No, it does, sweetie.
—Apparently some lunatic is driving around giving away giant dogs to kids.
—So, keep an eye out, and uh, maybe don’t let Sophie outside today.
—It literally looks insane.
—You know what it looks like? It looks like one of those old illustrations of the dogs of hell. A dog that lives in a fiery pit, snarling and chewing people’s souls.
—Ha. Yeah. Tell me about it. Okay. Well, take care, Jeff. Yup. You, too. Okay now. Take care.
—That is what it looks like, sweetie. I’m sorry. It’s true.
—Okay, bud. I’m sorry, but we gotta take this guy to a shelter. And they can figure out how to get him back to his old—
[Mom lowers her voice and points at the dog’s face]
—Sshhhhh. Hey. I know. But we can’t adopt a dog right now. It’s a huge decision, and a huge responsibility—
—His name is what? “Dad Junior”?
—YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE. WE FEAR AND DESPISE YOU.
—YOU ARE AN UGLY FEARSOME BEAST AND QUITE OUT OF PLACE IN THIS HAPPY HOME.
—Um . . . hello?
—Okay. That’s very sweet. But we still, uh . . . Okay. Don’t make this hard.
—“Mom Junior” was taken, I guess?
They let me keep him. I’m still not totally sure why. I guess it was the first time I ever really took a stand against what they wanted to do. I had always been a super docile kid, parenting-wise. I ate the vegetarian food they gave me. I went to bed when they told me to go to bed. I threw zero fits about our family’s complete lack of December gift-giving. I went willingly to the Dorje Ling Home of Tibetan Buddhism in Pittsburgh every couple of weeks to sit in a weird-smelling room and do two hours of chants. At no point was I like, guys, I’m really not into this childhood, it seems less fun than other childhoods, and it’s making it sort of hard to relate to every other kid at my school.
(By now you’re probably also like, Wes, in addition to dogs, what’s up with the Buddhism thing. The Buddhism thing is, my mom got super into Buddhism when she did the Peace Corps in Nepal for three years, which is also where she met my dad. He wasn’t doing the Peace Corps there. He was just randomly backpacking through Asia, which is maybe why he is not quite as much into Buddhism, less and less so over the years, to the point where last year without any
kind of warning he reintroduced Christmas into our family and we had a tree and stockings and stuff, and Mom pretended to hate it but also spent an entire weekend meticulously decorating the tree and then got furious at Dad when he threw it out the day after New Year’s.)
My point is, up until Dad Junior, I had been a faithful company man. So they let me keep him.
He was bigger than me and clearly pretty dumb. He didn’t understand any of the basic dog commands, and his primary objective seemed to be to eat whatever was on the ground. Also, he was one of those dogs with permanent crazy eyes. His facial expression was Total Disbelief and Alarm, a hundred percent of the time. So any major hang with this dog sooner or later was you sitting there and him chewing something he found on the ground and making a face like, “Hey! Wait a second here!! How did this get in my mouth?!”
But I was completely sold on this dog.
For the next two months, he was basically my only friend. I mean, there hadn’t exactly been a waiting list on my social calendar, but once I got a dog, the human species really lost all importance for me. It just became all about Dad Junior. He slept on my bed and ate at my feet. I woke up hours before school so I could walk him and play with him, and I ran home from school as fast as I could to play with him again. I literally sprinted home from school. I drew maybe a thousand pictures of him. I wrestled him in the backyard and chased him around the park. I tried to learn his language and communicate in barks and growls. I let him lick my face, and then I would lick his face. You probably think that’s an exaggeration. Nope. I licked a dog’s face every day, multiple times. The same face he used to clean his own butt. I licked that face without batting an eye.
He couldn’t learn tricks or basic obedient-dog behaviors, and in general he had way less personality than most dogs of his size. Mostly he just wanted to eat and sleep. He was in terrible shape and he got tired out way before I did. It was like being best friends with an overweight, senile person.
But I didn’t care. I loved Dad Junior so much that I couldn’t sleep at night.
About two months after we got Dad Junior, Mom and Dad took me out to a special dinner. It was at a Himalayan restaurant in Squirrel Hill. There were prayer flags and pictures of mountains everywhere.
“Wessie,” said Mom, her eyes kind of teary, “we have some incredible news.”
Mom was pregnant. She was pregnant for the first time in her life. It was completely unexpected, for reasons they didn’t and probably couldn’t explain to me. There were all kinds of medical reasons why it shouldn’t have happened. But it did, and Mom and Dad were really, really happy.
I was, too. I mean, of course, deep down I had some vague worry that it would be weird. There would be me and then there would be this other kid who was Mom and Dad’s birth kid. And I knew that the birth kid would on some level be more their kid than I was. Even if they were insisting that wasn’t true. You’re as much our kid as you could possibly be, they used to tell me, not realizing it probably should have been, you’re as much our kid as anyone could possibly be.
But despite all that I was still happy. Because I knew it was making them really happy, and even at that age, that’s what I was all about. I was a company man.
“And so, uh,” said Dad. And he buried his mouth in his beard and turned to Mom, and I knew something bad was coming.
“Wessie, my family had a big dog when I was growing up,” said Mom. “And one day he just kind of went crazy. And he attacked me and bit me on the arm.”
“Oh no,” I think I said, stupidly.
“At your mom’s age, bud,” said Dad, “and just for a number of reasons, this pregnancy is going to be a very delicate thing, and then after that a baby is an even more delicate thing, and we know you love that dog, bud, we really do.” And he kept looking at me, and his beard kind of crumpled, and he said, “But we just don’t know if we can keep him around.”
“Dad Junior is never going to bite anyone,” I promised them, shaking my head, desperately trying to keep my eight-year-old shit together.
“You can just never know that, Wessie,” said Mom kind of quietly.
“I do,” I told them. “I do. I really do. He’ll never attack you. I promise. He’ll never attack anyone. I know him. I really, really know him.”
I remember just losing it. I remember the smell of the food and the weird sitarry music and the red fake-leather seat cushions that I was pushing my face into and just completely losing it with sadness and powerlessness while my dad tried to explain that when a dog attacks you as a kid, you can never relax around dogs ever again, and so this has been bad for your mom’s health, Wes, and that means bad for the baby’s health, too, all this stress and anxiety. Meanwhile, I was crying so hard that I got to the point of getting outside my own body and looking at myself and thinking, It is somewhat fucked up that you need to cry this much.
Eventually, my mom said, “Could he become an outside dog?”
I knew deep down that he couldn’t. But he did, for a little while. We put his bed outside on the back porch and put all his toys out there, and I spent as much time out there as I could. But he was bummed out. He just wanted to be inside. It wasn’t even that he wanted to be with us. He just liked it better inside where it was cooler and cozier and there was more stuff to sleep on.
And so, after a few days, he ran away.
One morning when I raced out of bed to go play with him, he just wasn’t there. The side gate had claw marks on it, so we guessed he had probably jumped over it.
I ran out into the street yelling for him like a maniac. He did not appear. I spent the morning sprinting around the neighborhood, frantically looking for him, and then the afternoon, and then the evening, and part of the night.
For weeks I put up signs everywhere, went knocking on people’s doors, called all animal rescue shelters, wandered the streets and parks for hours saying his name, learned how to post to Craigslist and flooded it with MISING DOG POSIBLY STOLEN posts to the point where I got flagged for spam and none of it worked. He was gone. Every night I dreamed I had found him, and waking up from those dreams was the worst thing in the world.
Mom did not help look for him. Dad did, a little. But you could tell his heart was not in it. And he was sad for me, but he was a little relieved at the end of every trip that we hadn’t found Dad Junior, and I knew he was relieved, and I hated him for it.
And obviously I hated both of them for making Dad Junior an outside dog. Because that was why he ran away. Or at least that was part of it. He was never going to run away if he could sleep on my bed.
But I think I hated them most of all when they asked me if I wanted to talk about the baby that was coming, and if maybe that was really what was making me so upset, because how could they possibly have gotten me so wrong.
Mom lost the baby not long after Dad Junior ran away. She was about five months pregnant. It was because of whatever medical condition made it so hard for her to get pregnant in the first place, which is what made them decide to adopt. I still don’t know what that condition is. They never described it to me and I’ve never asked.
As a family we then went through a pretty terrible period, where Mom was home sick the whole time and Dad would whip back and forth between these two moods:
a) Overly Polite and Formal with Me Considering I Am His Son
b) Way Out-of-Proportion Angry and Impatient about Some Small Thing
It was especially the second mood a few days after the miscarriage when I asked Dad to drive me around again looking for Dad Junior. That was really the first time I can remember him raising his voice at me. But actually it worked, because afterward he apologized in that same overly polite and formal way and promised to make more of an effort to look for Dad Junior, especially on the Internet.
And sure enough, a day or two later, we found him.
Dad Junior had trekked back to his old family way out in the suburbs. He missed them so much that he jumped out of our backyard and ran all the way home. We
went out to visit him, and this time the bald, stressed-out, middle-aged guy told me they were going to keep their dog, whose name was actually Henry. They’d made a huge mistake that first time, and they were never going to do that again. He and his wife seemed to think it was all pretty hilarious what had happened. Their two sons understood a little bit better that it was not hilarious and instead incredibly fucked up.
I was watching this dog named Henry gaze with intense loyalty at the older son, and I was realizing I couldn’t blame Mom and Dad for what had happened. My dog hadn’t left because we made him an outside dog. It was because he was never my dog in the first place. He didn’t want to be adopted by me or given a name that wasn’t his. He just wanted his old family, because that was where he belonged.
I was watching Henry as we drove away and he was looking at us the way he looked at every car. He was sizing us up like, if he was in better shape, he might chase us, but he wasn’t and we all knew it.
I could have asked for another dog after that. But I didn’t. In part because I knew I just couldn’t handle it if my second dog didn’t want to be adopted by me, either. But mostly it was for Mom and Dad’s sake.
They were sad in a way that felt like they might never be happy again, and the entire house just seemed to be full of dark heavy air that wouldn’t leave.
Of course, I was sad about not having a brother or a sister, too. But I wasn’t nearly as sad as Mom and Dad. But actually, that was something to be sad about, too. It was some connection with Mom and Dad that I was failing to have, because I wasn’t them, or maybe because I wasn’t theirs, in some way that couldn’t be fixed. So maybe I did almost get to where they were in terms of sadness.