Shortly after killing the ants with Jonathan Cooper, I was with Derek Samuel shooting Coke cans in his back yard with the pellet gun he got for his fifteenth birthday. Tired of missing the cans, he took aim at a bird perched in a magnolia tree and he finally turned into a decent shot and the bird dropped to the ground, fluttered for a few seconds and died. This I felt badly about and do so to this day.
All of this has me wondering which animals are OK to kill and which aren’t. If it scurries or has more than four legs or buzzes and flies, it’s entirely socially acceptable to pretend you’re the pilot of the Enola Gay and your kitchen is Hiroshima. And you’d be a fucking liar if you said after spending fifteen minutes in a dog fight with a horsefly and then successfully squishing the sonofabitch against the window with yesterday’s Sports section you didn’t feel some primal satisfaction.
So on the acceptable animal homicide scale, where between cockroach and crow, does Sophie the cocker spaniel next door who sounds like she’s attempting to wake the dead fall?
I’ll be honest I’m leaning toward cockroach. Now, before you condemn me and tell my father he was right because he said listening to Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden would surely make me a serial killer, please listen to all the facts.
I live on a bluff overlooking the ocean. On clear days, sipping a beer on my patio, it looks like I could toss the bottle and hit Catalina. I hear the occasional shrieking of little girls as they walk hand in hand with their dads at the tide line and are soaked with a wave they didn’t expect. I don’t mind being interrupted by the lifeguard’s muddled voice from the tower telling the swimmers and bodyboarders that the north side of the pier is for surfers only. And the constant rush and retreat of the waves? Jesus Christ, it’s the ocean, you know how it sounds and you know people spend a hundred dollars for a clock radio from Sharper Image to fall asleep to the sound that all I have to do is open my window or walk outside to hear.
I spend eight hours a day, five days a week on the seventh floor of a twelve-story building. The windows don’t open and every time the department secretary walks past my office her retched old lady perfume wafts in uninvited. Sometimes I enjoy my job and work hard. Sometimes I stare out the window at the tinted windows of other nondescript twelve-story buildings and wish I could see in and see what’s going on in their cubicles. It’s like driving alongside a limo and wondering if it’s someone famous inside. What goes on in all those twelve-story buildings? And the only sounds loud enough to penetrate the glass are sirens on their way to the twelve-story hospital down the block. Like probably most of the people sitting for eight hours a day in their offices or stationed in their cubicle farms, I work so I can come home and enjoy a beer on my patio. I’m lucky enough to have the sea as the soundtrack to my personal happy hours.
I absolutely do not tighten a Brooks Brothers noose around my neck every day so I can return each evening to my castle over the sand and listen to Sophie the hound from hell summon Satan’s spawn.
It’s Saturday and I’m on the patio banging away at my memoir. If you’ve tried to write a memoir you know it can be a tricky little task. Bouncing from half written chapter to half written chapter trying to make some sense of my life, I can tell you the last thing I need is a cocker fucking spaniel disrupting my fragile frame of mind. How can I write about love and make sense of the random acts of my time on this planet when a jogger passing by Sophie’s yard on the way to the beach sets her off like a car alarm.
All I want to write are short stories where puppies die.
Before you start again with the convicting, I’ll say I have nothing personal against canines. I’ll admit I’ve never had one nor do I intend to. I was allergic to dogs as a child and being around one too long would send me wheezing and running for my inhaler. So I never really became a dog person. I also like staying out late, and sleeping in, and taking last-minute vacations. I can’t fathom my life revolving around getting home to walk the dog, or getting up early to let the dog out, or not making a late-night run to Vegas because I can’t find someone else to get up early and let my dog out. And besides, who wants to read a memoir about a guy in a hoodie and pajama bottoms who spends his life following around a dog waiting for it to take a shit and then picking up that shit with an inside out plastic grocery sack?
But writing short stories about a puppy trouncing off the front lawn and into the street and freezing with wide eyes as looking on in horror with even wider eyes is the puppy’s best friend little Suzy just when a black Cadillac Escalade comes around the corner and the only sound is a thud and a whimper followed by a scream … well I can tell you that is doing no one any good.
Now in real life I don’t want Sophie to suffer and her owners are perfectly nice neighbors who always mow their lawn and have flowers blooming in their yard year round. The word on the street though is that they smoke a lot of pot. And somehow they can’t hear or don’t seem to care about the incessant yapping. Every once in a while, after a twenty or thirty-minute barking spree, I’ll hear someone from inside shout, “Sophie. Stop.” She doesn’t and they stop shouting.
If Sophie’s owners have so little respect for their neighbors, real live human beings, I can only imagine how they treat her. Would it be too far of a leap to say they probably don’t feed her? Those aren’t the barks of a happy puppy. I’m guessing they don’t flush the toilet and she drinks from it. I told you, they supposedly smoke a lot of pot. They probably take thunderous bong hits and blow them in Sophie’s face as she stumbles around the living room knocking over half-empty cans of stale Budweiser and then licks it up. Isn’t that animal cruelty, torture I dare say.
A suffering horse is put down in the name of mercy.
Wouldn’t I be doing Sophie a favor if I called up Derek Samuel and asked him if he still had his pellet gun?
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