Dogrun Read online

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you serving a community service sentence?”

  “Yeah, for a few weeks.”

  “What was your crime?”

  “Prostitution violation,” she said matter-of-factly. I nodded sympathetically. “But, hey, I’d rather be out here working on my tan than inside some bullshit office somewhere.”

  She made community service sound even better than temping. She asked if I had a cigarette. I told her I didn’t, and wished her well. She walked off, finished her rounds, and exited the run.

  After ten minutes, Numb came running to me, hiding behind my legs. A long, bony dog that looked more like a fish with legs, maybe a whippet, came trailing after her. The anorexic canine kept sticking its pointy probe of a snout up poor Numb’s wide ass until it had enough. I was half hoping to meet with the Tattooed Man—Zoë’s mugging victim—so I could apologize, but he never showed up.

  When we got back home, I found my message light blinking and hit the replay. Zoë intoned, “All is forgiven. Go to Kinko’s and make copies.”

  She was going to call Jeff to secure the job. This gave me about five seconds of delight until I realized that it meant I’d be working at Kinko’s.

  “Hi Mary,” the next message unspooled, “this is Joey. How about din-din tonight?” I left a message on his machine that I had a date tonight, but we had to get together soon. I needed him to have me psychiatrically cosigned as non compos mentis and assume legal guardianship for my joining of a band just to meet an ex’s ex. Does a double ex cancel itself out?

  I headed down to Houston and walked a couple of blocks east to the strange new apartment building, Red Square. It had a clock tower with its digits all screwed up and a ten-foot statue of Lenin inciting the slacker masses from its rooftop. On the ground floor was Kinko’s. Jeff was wearing his official light blue cotton button-down shirt with the Kinko’s logo. He probably had a cabinet full of them. How did he resist the temptation to sew a y over the o?

  “Jeff?” I called out to him as he was replacing the ink cartridge of one of the machines.

  He came over and softly said, “Zoë called.”

  “I want to apologize about last night,” I commenced insincerely. “I was pissed and drunk, I’m really sorry. You were right about me being an idiot to judge you.”

  “I figured you weren’t feeling well.” He smiled coolly as if I were an annoyed customer. “The pay starts at eight bucks an hour, but we have a graduated pay scale, and you can work your way up.”

  “Sounds good,” I lied. A loud electromechanical squeal sounded as if James Cameron’s Terminator had just been bit in two by Steven Spielberg’s Great White Shark.

  “Christ, Lionel, what in the hell are you doing!” he shouted to one of the Kinkettes manning a large machine that looked like a space-age washer and dryer. Jeff popped open the hood of the apparatus, made some mechanical adjustments, closed the top, and came back over to me.

  “That Lionel is not the shiniest lure in the tackle box,” he said, amusing himself greatly.

  As with all of Zoë’s boyfriends, I did not like this guy. He gave me some forms to fill out and told me to “report” for work the next morning. Nine to five, Monday through Friday. I would come to work, I thought to myself, but I didn’t report anything.

  I had some time before my dinner with Alphonso, which I used to review my latest literary endeavor about two salespeople who fall in love while working at a Gap. I worked in a Gap clothing outlet for two weeks during my junior year, but only began writing the story recently. It was a silent scream of working with all those gapheads. The two characters talk compulsively about clothes, cut, color, and fabric, but are unable to communicate about much else. The redeeming quality that keeps them together is that they both suffer the same emotional limitations. They end up going to the guy’s apartment. With its polished wooden floors and recessed lighting, it looks like a Gap store. The girl just happens to have with her an album of photos filled with her friends, who all look like Gap models, just sitting expressionlessly against white backdrops. One friend looks exactly like Kate Moss. After tediously discussing courduroys versus khakis and denim jackets versus leather, they end up folding into each other, having wrinkle-free, drip-dry sex. Both fake loud orgasms and shortly thereafter get married. However, they never have sex again. (Both secretly hate its wild messiness.) But they do forever share a love of pocket Ts in assorted colors and jaunty baseball caps.

  At seven I glopped on some blush and eyeliner to convince the world I was a female and headed out. The handsome fraud was standing in front of the place with a mixed bouquet of flowers—four bucks at the Korean greengrocers. I didn’t mean to be an ingrate, but I didn’t want to tote them, nor did I own a vase.

  We went into the Sushi Garage, a former plumbing supply warehouse, and ordered some sushi rolls and saki. He talked about some action movie I would never see while I dipped my sushi pieces in a blend of green mustard and soy sauce and gobbled them down. Then he ate while I talked about being in an all-girl band. He smiled and nodded, not particularly interested. After we were done, the waiter put down the check, Alphonso put two brand new swollen-headed Andrew Jackson bucks down, and out we walked.

  “Where’s a good bar?” he asked.

  It was eight-thirty, and I had to be at rehearsal by ten, with no interest in fuzzing myself with booze. Figuring that he seemed safe and looked cute, I took a risk.

  “Want to come up to my place?”

  “Sure,” he replied.

  As we headed upstairs, I reminded him that I had to attend band practice tonight, so we’d have to end things early. He said fine. As soon as we were in my apartment though, he grew somber. The dog raced up but was reluctant to lick him, just giving him a weird eye.

  “Does he bite?” Alphonso asked. I told him no.

  “You mind putting him in the bathroom?” He got right to the point, which I half-liked and did. We went into my room, sat on the couch, and looked at each other. I knew exactly what he was thinking: How could he go from this awkward silence to kissing? From kissing things were clear: feeling, stripping, and sex. But how do you get into the damned kissing, especially if there is no precedent? As best as I could recall, all we did on the last date was rub.

  “You mind if I turn on the TV?” he asked, which turned out to be a stroke of genius. I consented, and he did. A video compilation called Animals That Attack was on. It was a collection of scenes in which animals attacked people, but not too seriously. Each time an animal took a chomp at a human I jumped back, inadvertently grabbing him, which allowed him the opportunity to do likewise. At a commercial I realized that during the frenzy of ferocious bites and maulings, he had slipped a hand on my breast.

  “I should produce a show called ‘Hands That Attack.’” He removed the sneaky hand.

  “Can I kiss you?” he asked.

  “Well, let’s see.” I picked up a copy of YM magazine that somehow had found its way into my house, and pretended to read aloud from an article: “’How to break past that awkward opening to the first kiss. Be playful, and amid a flurry of jokes and giggles he can slip you a kiss. Or with a few inexpensive scented candles and soft music, set up a more romantic mood so he can gently kiss you on the lips.”

  “Where does it say that?” He looked over my shoulder.

  I looked up, and he realized I was joking. He nodded awkwardly, and we waited, as though for a bus.

  Finally he cleared his throat and said, “How many Vietnam vets does it take to change a lightbulb?”

  “I know that one,” I replied.

  “You weren’t there, man!” he punchlined and started kissing me.

  To the growls of stressed-out animals savaging their once beloved trainers, we exchanged affections. His pursed lips pressed too hard, his wagging tongue was hot and soft like warm sushi, but I enjoyed the accompanying rub. He had large hands and well-toned muscles. I let him slip his hands under my shirt, but I resisted allowing him into
my bra. Not because I didn’t want him too, but because sex was all about pace, and if I just opened up to him, it wouldn’t be worth anything. I had already set up concessions on this date. I was going to permit him bra-access and maybe some minor touching, but no way would my clothes come off, and I certainly wasn’t planning on sex yet. I’d made that mistake too many times.

  Without asking, perhaps trying to give me a cue, he took off his shirt. Aside from the gloss of sweat, I could see that he had several creaky and incredibly amateurish tattoos.

  “If you take your shirt off,” he offered, “I’ll rub your back.”

  “Rub over the shirt,” I countered and lay belly down on the sofa. He sheepishly rose and started his rub. Looking over, I realized that it was already 9:53.

  “Oh, shit!” I had only seven minutes to get my bass and ass to the rehearsal space. I tried getting up.

  “Hold on there, little lady,” he said forcefully, still positioned on my lower back.

  “Get off, I got to run!”

  “You’re not going anywhere. I bought you dinner and spent the past two hours tenderizing you.”

  “Get the hell off me!” I shouted.

  “You can’t leave me like this, babe.” He had me pinned down; I could feel his erection grow against my buttocks.

  “Are you crazy!” I shouted.

  “Okay, get a grip, Alphonso,” he coached himself. “Get a grip, boy.”

  I heard him take a deep breath and then slowly release it. Finally he rose off me. “I’m sorry, Mary. It was just a bit sudden for me.”

  “No problem,” I replied, turning away from him, buttoning up my clothes.

  “Now, I didn’t do anything I shouldn’t’ve, right?”

  “Right.”

  “We got no problems here, am I right?”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I replied, restraining a genuine fear. He pulled on his shoes and shirt.

  “I’m hoping we can pick up from where we left off.” He smiled, happily trying to erase his pathology.

  “Me too,” I replied.

  “Should I wait here for you?” he asked, as though I would trust him alone in my apartment.

  “I’m probably going to be a while,” I said politely.

  As I rose to go, I noticed him do something strange. He took out a new twenty-dollar bill and stared at it. I had this awful sense that he was considering giving it to me as if in compensation. He slipped the bill back into his pocket.

  “Okay, later then,” he said and silently exited. I locked the front door, locked myself into the bathroom with Numb, and thought about the evening.

  Awakening to the fact that I wasn’t raped and late, I dashed out.

  chapter 10

  “It’s ten-fifteen!” Sue caught me at the elevator.

  “Please, I was almost date-raped.”

  “Date-raped?”

  “Well, date-massaged.” We entered the padded cell of the rehearsal studio, took our places, and played. I strummed while Norma drummed and Sue hummed, reviewing our set of songs. For twenty bucks an hour, Context Studio gave us a small, dimly lit room with a five-drum set, three small practice amps, and a cheap PA system.

  What bothered me most in there was the smell: the decomposing foam rubber didn’t merely absorb the noise but also the sweat and dander of generations of East Village musicians. It was the aroma of burned hope. Whenever I went to rehearsal, I could imagine the musically inclined kids who over the years had streamed through these studios on their way to the many local musical venues and then, eventually, off the face of the earth.

  Tragically I still needed that awful hope, that belief that something finer and grander would come out of life. After years of writing, my labors amounted to being published in three tiny magazines, Oblivious, Nada Quarterly, and Off The Ledge. No one I knew had even heard of the magazines, let alone read my stuff. I was suffering from validation anemia. I needed something to hope for so badly that I was willing to play a guitar in the middle of the night while being abused by an ex-boyfriend’s ex-wife in the process.

  After the last guitar chord finished resonating, I dashed down the stairs and back to my apartment. The dog mugged me at the door, wanting love and attention, but I was out of both and was in bed by twelve-fifteen. Only to be back up by seven-thirty. By nine I was under the fluorescent lights of Kinko’s, ready to be a copy whore for little more than minimum wage.

  What was foremost in my mind when I took the nowhere job was that I would be able to add another chapter to my great skinny work, The Book of Jobs. After the first day, though, I knew I had to churn this story out quickly before I went bonkers. Working at this particular franchise meant wearing certain clothes: khakis, the blue shirt emblazoned with the company logo, a bright red apron (fellas wore black ones), and a plastic name tag. It meant standing behind a long stretch of unbroken counter performing one of five boring tasks: computer services, order placement, order pickup, cashiering, or fax services. I was bombarded with questions, from the varieties of binding (velo, hole-punched, staples) to the different types of paper (résumé or executive, card stocks, or pastels).

  I found myself repeating: “Working from a single original, each page on white paper is eight cents per copy. Once you go over a hundred copies, the price drops down to four cents.” If I felt sarcastic, I’d add, “Thank you, come again.”

  The most popular East Village colors—for band announcement cards and wheat-pasted flyers—were Lift Off Lemon, Cosmic Orange, and Fireball Fuchsia. Of course there had been a reduction of these flyers since His Honorable Mayor (not an artistic bone in his body) was cracking down on street-corner advertisements.

  The one nice perk to this job that relieved me from the tedium was a cute guy named Scotty, a manager who had a palpable crush on me. Watching him work was amazing; he was like an idiot savant with Xerox machines. Once, while we were understaffed, I watched him doing several complicated jobs simultaneously, juggling three machines without double-copying a single page. Unfortunately, he had the personality of a blank sheet of bleached Hammermill paper.

  Jeff proved himself an unwiped derrière by making sure that each Xeroxee received a Customer Comment form with their receipt. This was one of the reasons I ceased hanging out with Zoë, since she became an accessory to the suited manager. We still talked every day on the phone, but that first week my social life was reduced.

  The most enlightening phone call I had that week was with Emily, the Bonnie Raitt protégé. Without telling her I was their latest addition, I asked if she knew anything about the local band, the Beautiful and the Crazy.

  “Sure, the disoriented Oriental,” she joked. “She’s nuts. I was at that performance in Coney Island High when she beat up her old bass player.”

  “Oh my god,” I muttered, not having heard this tale.

  “She’s crazy, but the band’s actually good. For a while they seemed to be going somewhere, but first Sue had a kid, then the drummer OD’d and had to go into rehab.” That sounded like Norma. “Then Sue had that fight with the bass player she threw out. But when they’re good, they’re really good. Very military, no fucking around. Why are you asking?”

  For a minute my tongue twisted in a million different directions as it looked for a place to run. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to tell her I was this band’s latest victim. Finally I hid behind the line, “I just saw these flyers for a bass guitarist.”

  “Do someone a favor,” Emily advised. “Tear them down.”

  That week Numb became my best friend. Together we strolled all over the neighborhood, hitting all the big shit-ins, at every park, square, and schoolyard from Chinatown up to Stuyvesant Town. I learned a lot about dogs that week. While in the East River Park, I watched her roll joyously in a filthy pile of leaves, only to find that she was rubbing on top of a dead rat, something dogs do to disguise their smell. I also discovered that male dogs hump each other as acts of dominance—apparently they are eternally struggling for socia
l position. But the greatest revelation occurred in a schoolyard on Eleventh Street, when the dog pulled the leash toward a hot Dalmatian bitch, and I saw this red thing that looked like a fleshless pinkie shoot out of her furry undersection. Numb was a boy.

  I felt like a widowed parent in this new dog owner clique. A few of the owners who recognized Numb asked me what had become of Primo. I would tell them the sad truth. Ironically, the one place I couldn’t bring myself to go was Tompkins Square Park. It wasn’t from fear of meeting Tattoo Man, whom I still wanted to compensate and apologize to, but something worse. If I had not been mildly intoxicated, and pissed off, I would not have consigned Primo’s ashes there. With each passing day I felt increasing guilt about the impetuous spreading.

  After rounding out my first week at Kinko’s, I was awakened late Saturday morning by the ringing phone. The machine picked up.

  “Hi Gloria, it’s June …” It was Primo’s mother, confusing me with one of his other ladies. “You’re not going to believe this, but the funeral parlor called. The fuckers gave us the wrong ashes, and we have to return the old ones.”

  I snatched up the phone before she could hang up and said, “I already spread them!”

  “Well, unspread them, dear,” Mama said. “They’re someone else!”

  “Who?”

  “A dentist from Syosset.”

  I told her I’d do what I could and hung up the phone. No good turn ever went unpunished.

  I dressed slowly, filled the dog bowl with pebble-like food, and thought about filling my own bowl with it. Saturday was always a sucky day for breakfast. There are no specials, and all the restaurants are bogged down by tourists.