Dog Days of Summer

We're temporarily without children.

And this would be a Good Thing except that the children are the first line of defense in the constant offensive that is Dog Care.

Dogs need to walk. Dogs need to eat. Dogs like to be tossed objects that they can chase and then they want to be praised extravagantly for retrieving said objects even though this is obviously a sucker's game. Dogs, in other words, are High Maintenance. Which is why I've always preferred cats. Cats have no personalities or character traits beyond those you project on to them. Let's say you're too busy to project anything at all. Then cats are perfectly content to live their lives without being anthropomorphized.

Yesterday was a bad day almost from the get-go. Ben woke me up around five AM with a high-pitched scream. He'd had a nightmare: Milo, sitting on the couch, panting and grinning, surrounded by several thousand dollars worth of shredded cash. In the dream, Milo had gotten in a bank deposit bag. In real life, Milo has gotten into every cushion of my late mother's couch, her matching white chair, Robin's mattress and most recently my only good pair of boots. The dog has dental issues.

Ben went back to sleep but once I'm awake, I'm awake. Thus I repaired to my office to play wack-a-mole with my ever-growing stack of bills. My office is actually the front porch of this house which at some latish point in its construction cycle was roofed and turned into a semi-functional room. The room has no door separating it from the rest of the house so while I sit at my desk frantically pursuing vendors on the phone or tallying up long lists of COGs, I am still fair target for every human and animal in the house. Milo corners the cat underneath the fax machine. A little later, Ben wanders into the doorway to tell me he has solved the problem of terrorists on planes.

“What you do is fly pigs,” he says.

“Huh?”

“Well, see, any Muslim who dies in the proximity of a pig goes straight to hell. So they're not gonna blow up a plane with pork on it.”

“Do not pass Go, do not collect seventy-two virgins,” I said.

“So what do you think? Should I write Donald Rumsfield?”

“The plan has a certain elegance,” I allow. “I like it!”

What I don't like is this charge for $9.99 on one of my credit cards which after two phone calls and a couple of dead end web searches I trace back to SONY online entertainment. Apparently Robin signed up for one of those thirty day Everquest free trials. And then neglected to cancel the subscription when the meter started to run.

The odd thing, though, is that Robin does not own Everquest.

Identity theft? Or is it possible in some moment of supreme absent-mindedness while Robin was nattering away at me -

“And then Mr. Bailey gave us a math test and my pencil wasn't very sharp so I asked him if I could get up and use the pencil sharpener, and Mommy do you mind if I raid your vicodin stash, download Daddy's little hoard of Internet porn and borrow one of your credit cards so I can hang out in an Internet chat room and lie about my age to other geeks who are not only lying about their age but also their gender?”

“Uh huh, uh huh. Sure, honey. Whatever you like. Only Mommy's kind of busy now.”

- that I actually gave him permission to use the card?

Whatever. The important thing now was to make sure it didn't happen again.

So then I was on the phone for literally two hours trying to get the credit card company to block the fucking charge. “You have to go through the company that placed the charge,” they told me.

“I can't do that,” I said. “The phone number they give out feeds you into an endless voicemail loop with no options for human customer service. And, by the way - how is the weather in Darjeeling this afternoon?”

Finally I gave up. I'll pay the fucking charge, I'll cancel the fucking credit card, I thought grimly. It isn't as though I don't get twenty offers for new credit cards in my mailbox every fucking day.

Something fell on my foot. A ball.

Milo.

Beach time for doggies.

Generally it's Max who takes the dogs to the beach for their hour a day of running wild, running free. But it's actually a chore I enjoy very much. I just never have the time to do it. But Max is up in Berkeley for a couple of days playing tour guide for the ever-compliant and drop-dead beautiful Maya. “I want to show her where I spent my childhood,” he tells me portentously and I forbear to point out that at 17, many people - including the fine legislators behind the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 - would consider that his childhood is ongoing. No matter. Max was very sweet actually. He spent two whole days cooking food to take up with them - “so we won't have to spend money in restaurants” - and looking up directions to the Tilden Park merry-go-round on Mapquest. I didn't have the heart to tell him that eating in restaurants would probably have been cheaper.

(I wonder whether he intends to take Maya to the Long's on 51st Street, the scene of one of his more famous childhood tantrums - the one where I realized that Linda Blair's 360 degree head spin in The Exorcist was not a special effect at all but something screaming two year olds do on a regular basis.)

Beautiful day on the beach. Damp waterline sand catching the blue reflection from the sky. We tromped two miles down and two miles back. Milo saved numerous sticks from near drowning. Xena barked imperiously at many larger dogs.

Then when we got back to the car I realized I'd lost my car keys.

I will spare the reader the gruesome details of searching for said keys, the ordeal of marching both dogs on their leashes three miles through middling to heavy traffic back to our house. Suffice it to say, that if Mao Tse Tung had led an army of canines… Seriously, I thought I might have permanently damaged Xena. Short-legged Jack Russell terriers are not designed for eleven mile hikes.

On the plus side I got a lot of exercise. And a lot of sun! Today I'm fairly glowing.

Blood Simple

So while I was scribbling the above, Jeanna called. Teary. All is not good with the gene pool - Deneene, my youngest half-sister, was just picked up for methamphetamine possession. Expected to get serious jail time. This is in Kansas. I guess Kansas has changed a lot since Dorothy and Toto lived there.

I've never actually met Deneene. Not even when we were children. I was 12 when she was born and the way I learned of her existence was by eavesdropping on a conversation my mother had with Annie. “Can you believe it?” my mother said, wringing her hands together in that way she only did when she was very excited. “The man's not human! He's a rabbit! This makes - what? Seven children he's had with that woman? You'd think he'd send some money to support the one he's already got -“ head jerk in my direction - “but no-o. He's too busy making more.”

“Lynnie,” said Annie uneasily. “She can hear you.”

“Oh, relax. She's reading. She doesn't hear a thing when she's reading. I could talk and talk till I was blue in the face. She wouldn't look up once. You know what the best part is? Wait till you hear what they named it.”

“Lynnie -“

“Deneene. Is that not the most perfect white trash, trailer camp name you've ever heard? Fucking Deneene.”

Sometimes when I was alone I recited my half siblings' names to myself. Jeannie, Teddy, Jimmy, Dale, Dane, Denise and Deneene. There were seven of them. This seemed mythologically appropriate somehow - after all, there were seven dwarves and seven deadly sins. For a while I made up stories about them.

But by the time I was an adult, I'd forgotten all about them.

Fast forward thirty years. I was in Santa Fe advising an over-the-hill movie star how to make big bucks off her web site. On impulse, I decided to call up Jeannie whom I knew lived somewhere in New Mexico.

I was safe, I figured. New Mexico was a big state.

But as it turned out, I wasn't. Las Vegas was only fifty miles away, a two hour drive. She insisted on making it.

I was very nervous about meeting her.

She was much shorter than I am and her long hair much wilder, much curlier than mine.

But there was my nose in the middle of her face - that gouche 19th century woodcut nose. Maybe my mouth.

There were other connections too. Most notably, a serious drug history now far behind us. Also Jeannie had rebaptized herself “Jeanna” in much the same way that I took “Patricia,” gave it a more exotic consonant and turned into “Patrizia.”

We stayed in touch. On subsequent visits grew close. I don't really know what having a sister feels like since I grew up as the consummate only child, self-involved and lonely. But if I knew what it felt like, I imagine it would feel much like this.

The other half-siblings, though, were not interested in me at all. Mostly because they had little energy left over to be interested in anything what with all the boozing and hustling and forging drug prescriptions that occupied their time. Yes, drug abuse is a family pastime though not something any of us do or did together. I suppose the current wisdom on the subject would point a finger at an errant gene. Though I think it's very difficult to parse nurture out from nature here. When people are in chronic pain, they look for ways to numb themselves.

“Oh, Patty,” said Jeanna. She was crying openly now. “When they picked her up, she was living under a bridge. How did she get the money to score the speed?”

“Jeanna, honey, don't ask me that. You already know and you don't want to hear it said out loud.”

“I told her she could come here! I said the only conditions were no drinking and no smoking -“

“Well, honey, give her credit. She didn't want to set you up for a heartbreak.”

“Do you know what she did? She called up Jimmy and asked for rent money -“

“Did he send it?”

“Of course. Jimmy feels so guilty. Like he shouldn't have joined the army. Like he should have stayed and protected those girls from Dad after our mother died.”

“His first responsibility was to himself,” I said.

“Oh, you should have heard some of the things Jimmy told me. What Dad did to them. How he kicked them and beat them -“

“He abused her sexually, didn't he, Jeanna?” I said. “I mean every woman Dad ever married - how many were there? Five? - was sixteen when he first started in on them. The man's a fucking pedophile. So did she use Jimmy's rent money for speed?”

“No! No. Her son Anthony had flown in from California to visit her. She used the money to buy him a plane ticket back to California.”

“So she has some pride,” I said. “She loves her son. Jeanna, that's a good thing. It means she has a chance at redemption.”

Deneene would be 40 now, 12 years younger than me. Too old to be foistering responsibility for the wreck that is her life on a miserable childhood. But what else is there?

Ripples in the pond.