I didn't even realize I was doing it until Boo-Boo was asking me for an explanation.We were out walking and it was a glorious autumn day—not too cold, but crisp and madly sunny which made the colours of the leaves on the ground, now, nutty-bright—which meant that everyone was outside. It was a weekend day so the world was battening down the hatches, preparing for winter: raking leaves, putting those strange sacks on the shrubbery, putting in the storm windows on the older houses and just generally tidying up the space that would soon be three feet of snow hiding mountains of dog shit. The weather also meant that the old folks—and the neighbourhood is rife with them—were out on their porches, sitting in the sun, or toddling with their dogs, saying hello to everyone.
That's when Boo noticed. There are a bunch of old men on the street who remind me of my last owner, the late, great Frank and because of this—when I first met them—I gave them the full cutesed-out treatment: the dancing, the licking, the jumping up and down, the nibbling on their fingers. Because it was so whorish, all of these men fell in love with me. I became the street's dog. There was the retarded janitor of the building at the end of the street. There was the neighbourhood pal and fix-it man across and down from us. There was the old, queer codger who is in and out of hospital and who truly adores me because I remind him of the little dog he had to get rid of when he got sick. At the beginning, when I saw them I ran up to them and we made each other happy (in the non-Biblical sense, if you know what I mean and I think you do). Then I simmered down. I would go and say hello, but I no longer did the whole five-act opera with overture and ballet.
Then they just said hello and I just nodded. I didn't even realize it had become like this 'til Boo mentioned it. "You're breaking their hearts. You're one of the lights of their lives, you know."
I sighed and said, "Do I need that?"
And that's when it hit me: I don't need all the love but that never prevented me from seeking it before and, even, of giving some to get it. You know what I mean: whorish.
Was it that I was getting enough affection and coddling at home? Well, no. The Boys were the same bitchy homos they had always been with problems to the ceiling into the bargain. Was it that I wasn't a puppy anymore and so didn't need to burn off all that energy? No. I still ran around the house like a fruitcake when I needed to and was always in the Boys' faces for walks, play or just energetic attention.
So what was it?
It was Frank. It was the whole thing of becoming attached. It was people disappearing. I mean, the three old men I had been nice to and, let's be frank, had liked a little too, were still there in all their stinky, lonely, old-guy glory. But something had happened on our street that I had noticed but the Boys had not.
There was a lady...
She looked desperately unhappy as she walked back and forth to the market or convenience store and it's no wonder because she had a widow's hump so pronounced she looked bent in two. She had always said hello to Skeet or Boo and me but that was all. And she's been gone for a long, long time.
Then there is the crazy Hungarian. He used to talk to me in baby talk in his native language (when he wasn't whipping out his dick to show Babs); he was more than half-senile. The other night someone with a flashlight was at his front door, banging on it in a kind of desperation that could only mean a few things: the old man had had his Great Passing or he had once and for all slipped into the dementia that had always been there to take him away permanently.
Then there is the cat lady or, rather, her mother. The older woman was always out there with her cat on a leash and I was friendly with both, if not crazy-loving. But something happened to her and she can't talk anymore and her stare is more vacant and she's so, so, old now. For all intents and purposes she, too, has disappeared.
I didn't share any of these thoughts with Boo nor, later, with Skeet. But I did wonder if humans were also like me: when they see the end coming for someone, they try to detach because the end is too hard. It's not sweet sorrow. It's just awful, full-blown sorrow. As I was sitting on the couch with Boo as the two of them watched their endless repeats of The New Adventures of Old Christine (Skeet has a non-boner crush on the Christines and full boner crush on Hamish Linklater), I realized something awful: my three old men on the street had let me go without a fight. They, too, had detached or, worse, had accepted that I had.
The next walk, with Skeeter, I ran into all three as it was a Sunday and it was a perfect day again. I went nuts on all their asses. I went so nuts Skeet had to rein me in because I wound the leash around the legs of two of them and threatened to take them down to the ground and maybe break their hips.
Skeeter and the old men were delighted but as we walked into the house Skeeter reminded, "You have to be careful with them you know, they're old and you could hurt them."
"Fuck it," I said, "that's life. You want the pleasure, you have to take the pain."
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