THE DOGS ON MAIN STREET HOWL
I am a professional dog sitter. This is not an advertisement, I am not currently accepting new clients. I just thought you should know that about me. Anybody can watch a dog but not just anyone can be a five-star-rated professional, okay?
In my dreams I take the train.
I pick out perfect green stalks of celery.
I watch a strange movie
about three people trying to steal a rocket ship,
and I am in the movie, and it is not a movie,
and I am watching the movie
from the inside.
In my dreams I hold our dog who died when I was seventeen. My family gathered around me like a bible painting, out of place with so much color and shadow against the clean white vet’s office. Something loved and glowing at the center. In the role of baby Jesus, a small dog.
In my dreams he is alive and I hold his warm, wriggling body in my arms, and bury my face in his fur to breathe his beagle smell, and his soft little head feels exactly the way I remember it. Exactly as soft, exactly as smooth, and a shining copper penny color that gleams long behind my eyelids.
I pick out perfect green stalks of celery.
I watch a strange movie
about three people trying to steal a rocket ship,
and I am in the movie, and it is not a movie,
and I am watching the movie
from the inside.
In my dreams I hold our dog who died when I was seventeen. My family gathered around me like a bible painting, out of place with so much color and shadow against the clean white vet’s office. Something loved and glowing at the center. In the role of baby Jesus, a small dog.
In my dreams he is alive and I hold his warm, wriggling body in my arms, and bury my face in his fur to breathe his beagle smell, and his soft little head feels exactly the way I remember it. Exactly as soft, exactly as smooth, and a shining copper penny color that gleams long behind my eyelids.
My aunt makes homemade treats for the dogs in her neighborhood. One time I was staying at her house and they were cooling on the counter, and I thought they were cookies so I ate one. I was thinking, damn these are kinda nasty cookies. But I kept eating them anyway until she came back into the kitchen and said why are you eating the dog treats..?
The dog dies at the end the dog dies at the end the dog dies at the end the dog dies. (These are the kinds of books I liked to read as a kid). Hey siri, does the dog die? www.doesthedogdie.com.
Just once, couldn’t the boy die instead? Vomitting up blood under the stairs when nobody’s listening. Gutted in the woods by some other animal with much bigger teeth and claws. Mercy killing out behind the shed with a shotgun. Stoic, loyal. Just once couldn’t we allow the boy to lay himself down at the foot of something sweeter and say yes, I’ll do this for you.
Just once, couldn’t the boy die instead? Vomitting up blood under the stairs when nobody’s listening. Gutted in the woods by some other animal with much bigger teeth and claws. Mercy killing out behind the shed with a shotgun. Stoic, loyal. Just once couldn’t we allow the boy to lay himself down at the foot of something sweeter and say yes, I’ll do this for you.
By Allah you people are dogs. I will go on as usual.
Sometimes the Griffith Park coyotes start howling when they hear a siren.
First the eerie cry of the coyotes, then the dogs across the hollywood hills chime in, flocks of geese start honking, and these are sounds you might hear anywhere, but don’t expect to hear in the city.
Country dogs bark at coyotes just the same as city dogs, and country geese honk at the country dogs, and on and on and on.
Country coyotes don’t howl at as many sirens, but I’m guessing they would, if they had the chance.
I wonder what it’s like to be a coyote living in the middle of a city. Sometimes I see them crossing the exit ramp into my neighborhood and try to imagine the network of back alleys and empty lots and parkways they take to get there.
Country coyotes cross the road too. There’s less cars, but more roadkill.
What is a dog, if not a city coyote? They know, you can hear it in their voices as they howl at the pack howling at the siren. We are different, we are the same, you scare me, I want to be you, I’d never be you, I have a life so much warmer and better fed but sometimes, I wonder.
And maybe the Griffith Park coyotes think that about country coyotes too.
Can coyotes think like that? I don’t know if dogs can wonder about things beyond their own nose. I don’t know if the Griffith Park coyotes know there are any other kind. Or if it is only their moon and their park and their streets and their exit ramps and their gutter garbage that makes them howl. Is it better if they live their lives not knowing? Is it better if their world is small? Better than so wide and out of reach?
What you need to understand is that there was never any sacrificial lamb. No shivering prey animal to fight, or fly, or freeze. There is no fawn.
There is only a stray dog refusing to bite the hand that hits, so that he doesn't accidentally bite the hand that feeds.
And another stray dog who bites him and licks his wounds and bites him and licks his wounds and bites him and licks his wounds until they both snap.
Background: Larousse du XXème siècle, 1932. Image 1: “The Duffless.” Episode. The Simpsons 4, no. 16. Fox, February 18, 1993. Image 2: Lassie Come Home, 1943. Image 3: The Thing, 1982. Marquee Text: Broadcast. MEMRI TV, January 2012. Image 4: I was unable to track down the source of the original painting, or the first person who gave it the caption “choices made in anger cannot be undone.” if YOU know the source, email me at berlinmair@gmail.com, I’d love to know.