my girl
I woke up this morning body shaking and in tears, similar to how I feel when I hear Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, only instead of being hopeful that one day even a black man could become President if he smokes enough crack and blows the right people, my tears felt more ones of anguish, as if I were tied to a couch and forced to watch the whole season of “Sex in the City.”
…My family and I were just leaving a foreign country, someplace somewhat “militant Hispanic,” as there were a lot of guys with moustaches wearing khaki and smoking cigars as “La Cucaracha” played on the soundtrack. As we went to the airport, which seemed to be on a dirt field with a lot of checkpoints by angry señors, we encountered a problem.
I had left my dog, Abandon, back in storage and wanted to go back for her. My father popped an annoyed face and said, “We’re just going to leave her,” and at that point I knew I hated him and always would. They started loading onto the plane and in a panic I turned around and ran back for my beloved four-legged companion.
When I got to where she was being stored, the storage security guy, who seemed like a stereotypical lazy Mexican, said that Abandon was in the plastic container over there and that he hadn’t seen her move in forever, the implication being that she was dead. I lifted the lid of the airtight container thinking, “It’s not rocket science, Paco, you put an animal in an airtight container and it’s gonna suffocate to death.”
Abandon was motionless in a light green goop that looked like a sticky Jell-O, with only her head above the surface. The only thing missing was Bill Cosby doing a commercial for it. “Lime green Jell-O brand gelatin. Even with dog waste, there’s always room for Jell-O.”
I pulled her out of the container and slowly she started to move and then she did one of those full-body dog shakes and shook off all the green goop. I was thrilled. My girl!”
She struggled as Paco used his years of expertise as a cigar roller to help me to roll her into a paper so that I could smuggle her on the airplane, suspecting that in this Bizarro world of dreamtime, while a vat of Jell-O containing a dead dog may be okay to transport internationally, a live dog may not be given the same traveling rights. I was outside the plane with my “rolled up package”…
…when I woke up. I was curled in a fetal position and crying as deeply as when I found out that Rosie O’Donnell was taken off the female dating market when she publicly announced that she was gay. I remember the tremendous pain of that moment and the one thought that kept me from total emotional collapse: that at least she had the balls to be honest about her sexuality, unlike Tom Cruise.
What did this dream have to tell me? That I hate my father? That I should cancel my scheduled trip to Cuba? That similar to Rosie O’Donnell’s vagina, Tom Cruise is a gay pussy?
Perhaps it showed me that I am not totally free from attachment, that along with the concepts of “Truth” and “Justice” that my little Abandon is one of my last holder-oners, gripping me like little balls of toilet paper in a hairy ass crack.
I got out of bed and saw my little girl curled in a ball, motionless on the ground. Looking closer I could see her body rising and falling slowly with each breath she took. I kneeled down beside her and kissed her on her head and got a mouthful of hair, as she is shedding something fierce at this time.
I reflected on the last five years we’ve spent together, kind of like one of those cheesy montages in a T.V. series…when I went back to the shelter to take her home…when she first tentatively climbed the one flight of stairs up to my apartment, probably the first set of stairs she ever negotiated…giving her beets and pineapple tops to chew on…feeding her fresh food twice every day and having to clean up after her whether he poo is solid or runny…her starting fights in the dog run and park because another dog wanted to chew on her stick or play with her ball…explaining to the attacked dog’s caretaker that a dog can live a full and productive life with just one ear…killing rats, squirrels, birds, hamsters and small cats at her whimsy…chewing to pieces many of my valuable books and electronics…dog hair adding itself to every home-prepared meal I ever make…
Perhaps a trip to Cuba isn’t the worst idea after all!