Boozer

All right, you People!! (Not you, dear reader…I’m talking to the Dorks)  Who brought that dead rat back here on the carpet for the Morning Frolic?  I’m positive that Winston--the Scourge of the Night--made the kill; but this is NOT his modus operandi!  He simply lets the fallen fall wherever and whenever he abandons his gruesome little meal.

That’s the Green Peace way: organic disposal of vermin without pesticides or germ-laden traps; left in the grass for the ants and the maggots.  Ralph Nader has read this and he approves of this message!

Now, which of you mutts trotted back here with that tiny carcass (well, not so tiny) and so casually dropped it in my egress to the coffee pot where I could step on it?  Must I now push my slides afoot in order to move freely about my own domicile?  You KNOW how much I hate…(no, no, not hate.  Bad word. Scary word.  Trying to purge that word from the old cranial dictionary)…You KNOW how disgusting it is to have to gingerly pick that rodent up twixt thumb and forefinger by its long naked tail and dispatch it to the garage garbage? Gawd almighty!  I want an ANSWER from you people!  Cease with those eager upturned faces and wagging tails and TELL ME!

Now you jerks have gotten me shouting in caps on the page.  I’m losing what little decorum I may have built with my readers.

Arrrgggh, sheesh.  Hiding behind the great furry wall, are y’all?  Everyone D and D to the deed, are you?  You pack of nee’r-do-wells.  I’ll just bet it was Scooter.  Clancy only stuffs his mouth with a squeaky toy; Stick and Jypsi couldn’t get their jaws around it; Momma never joins us in the backland; and Goofy is still loafing under the pillows feigning sleep to postpone reveille.

Scooter Scooter SCOOTER!!!  YOU are the culprit!  I call you forth, varlet!  STOP with the face!  I can’t stand to look down into that worried expectant village-idiot countenance.  It’s an unfair advantage, it is.  How am I supposed to pronounce sentence on that unveiled look of love and devotion?  Unfair, I say.  Here is your punishment:  you will be the LAST to get your mid-morning treat, so help me Jehoozaphat! 

Some of you are used to reading along with me and gather how much I intertwine these monographs with an indulgent (some would say Cuckoo) attention to my animals: their antics, their idiosyncrasies, their need to always be close at hand to Daddy.

To further that end, I went to Costco yesterday and purchased two enormous oversized pet beds, came home and cleared enough space behind the office chair to accommodate everyone (Ahhhrrr Mates!  It be the Capn’s Chair!).

As I write, alone in the dark before dawn, they are all here with me; chewing on soup bones, trotting in and out for Kibbles, water…a dump.  Or just lounging on their fresh new cedar-stuffed beds; asleep, content just to be here.

I am not alone.  I am not lonely.  All of them come up in turn to the chair, waiting anxiously for me to scoop them up and give each a thorough scritching, a hug, a pat on the butt, a kiss on the forehead.

All, except Goofy: I ain’t heaving that tank into my lap.  But then, he rests close by under my desk, never leaving my side.  If I go anywhere—the bedroom, the garage, out to the truck--when I open the front door or round the corner to the pet gate: there he is, patiently waiting, just where we parted a short time before.

Miss Tree never ventures forth from the bedroom, so my ministrations to her take place back there where she lives.  She doesn’t like to be handled or picked up.  So she comes to my bedside while I dangle my legs, feeling the luxuriant softness of my footstool Clancy underfoot.  There, she acquiesces to my two fingers gently scissoring her tiny ears, clucking her under the chin or gliding my lax hand along the flank of her long grey coat.

When I go to sit on the commode, she jumps to the bathtub side, demands a little more sissified scritching and waits expectantly for me to run a clean shallow puddle of water, to spring down in the tub and delicately lap a drink.

She will only slake her thirst from the tub; despite always having fresh water available in the bowl next to the bed.  At nine years, she ties Momma for elder pet.  I hope she turns out to be one of those remarkable felines that live to be twenty.

Sadly, Momma, made decrepit by years of abuse and neglect, will likely be the first departure; but she ain’t dead yet by a long shot.

I sit upon my throne and here comes both Winston and Kali for their roughhouse head-rubs.  Doing my business, I have become skilled in the Confucian ways of concentration--in the face of these multiple distractions.  They approach the royal chamber one at a time, however; they don’t play well with each other.

Winston is the perpetual outdoor cat, unless rain or cold forces him to retreat to his closet-crib.  Sleeping in the laundry hamper is an optional accommodation, but the long fur and pet dander go out with the wash; so I leave sleeping Puss-in-Boots alone, curled up in what I see as an uncomfortably cramped posture. He prefers the light off, please.

Arriving home and backing my truck up the driveway, there is a loud thump!  before the engine dies.  It’s Winston, sitting on the tailgate, waiting for some more attention before I disappear from his domain into my own. 

Let me adjourn this dote-athon with a mention of Scooter, my mid-sized twenty pound Daschund. He was delivered by caesarean section when his miniature mother, on the operating table prepped for spaying, was discovered to be a little farther along in term than originally guessed; about a week short of term, by the veterinarian’s reckoning.

This preemie-puppy, straight from the womb, was fed with a rubber syringe worked down his throat to his stomach; until he matured enough for a bottle.  He has grown in less than two years from a field mouse to his hefty fighting weight of today.  No, he’s not a fighter; but he is not a lover either. Both the pack and the pride were fixed in infancy.  No puppy farm, this!  No kits and cats on their way to St. Ives, either.

Scooter’s most beguiling trait is in his face; he gazes up in submissive adoration with big brown eyes, a permanent frown of worry on his brows.  Every time I look at him, I see Boozer, my Viet Nam dog.

There were dogs running everywhere on Service Craft causeway.  We would feed them C-rats and red meat comshawed off the reefer barges.  They ate much better than our gook workers, who steamed white rice and some foul-smelling greenery in small metal pots for their lunch.

Between the smell of the food and the deadly blue cloud of native tobacco smoke drifting above their squatting tete-a-tete, we were well advised to grant them their own lebensraum for the duration of their break.

More than just companionship, the Division pack of mutts was a constant source of entertainment.  At the first call of “Dogs Stuck!” all hands would come running with the intensity of general quarters, to jockey in position for the show.  No one was particularly interested in watching the actual coupling.

Maybe that was penis envy with a capital ‘P’. It was a done deal that none of us sailors were getting any, in the broad daylight of working hours.   But when Daisy and Pork Chop had concluded their biological duty; then got twisted butt to butt still connected by the nozzle not yet flaccid, everyone clambered to see.

This is a quite natural and frequent occurrence with dogs, but to us, it was very much like the forbidden thrills little boys relish, when they trade farts out on the playground.  

Justifying this kind of adolescent behavior to the fairer sex, I might add, will gain you nada but the sniff and snub you so richly deserve.

If the situation lasted for more than ten minutes, a bucket would be had, dropped over the side and the water sloshed on both celebrants. When the joyful union was severed and the fun concluded; with the quiet rapidity of a seventh inning loser, everyone one of us would simultaneously turn heel and turn to.

Some days there were as many as three dog-trysts, there being so many animals in the Division.  Each of the twenty pusher boat crews kept one, in addition to the snipes and the Boathouse Pirates.    With that many unspayed unneutered contestants abroad, there was humpin’ a-plenty to cheer us for a scant ten minutes from the Viet Nam Blues.

Then there were the dog fights.  Unlike the love-fests, a bucket would be immediately dispatched and the dogs doused to break it up.  With paradoxic incongruity, no one wanted to see the dogs injured, but then, no one ever made any effort to get them fixed; and reduce the overcrowding that caused most of the aggression in the first place.

Please indulge me for a while to bear witness, as I dally on some of today’s thoughts and activities.

After an excellent lunch of Chinese, it was my intention to read one of my monographs to a small gathering of drama devotees.  I wanted to hear their thoughts, criticisms and suggestions because the seven people gathered there were the best collective in my sphere of writers, playwrights, poets, actors, actresses, stage directors and teachers—all of whom I have worked with and worked for in the pursuit of the dramatic arts. They were all my friends of many years.

I was the youngster in that group, but no senility looked back across our round table at me; rather, a limitless compendium of knowledge, life experience and creativity waited politely on me.

In the end, for reasons yet unclear, I decided to decline a reading.  Shyness?  Not I, said the thespian.  Fear?  Not I, said the old-timer in Recovery.  Shame? Not I, said the venerable veteran coping with PTSD.

I graciously accepted a role in the group’s next production after the director asked if I was ready to perform on stage again.  It is a small part, but plum.

I left the restaurant and drove straight home.  That was six hours ago by the clock, and I have sat here all that time staring at the text on my big screen.  I truly wished that I was suffering from writer’s block, but that ain’t it.  I just can’t seem to bring myself back to my memories of Boozer.

I had thought, when I began this, that I could conjure endless anecdotes and hilarious little scenes, but laughter will not come from what I must tell.  This is just the first really painful thing, one of those things I don’t want to talk about.

Boozer was the boathouse mascot long before my arrival at Service Craft.  Before I was there, they told me, he had broken a hind leg somehow.  Someone, perhaps a sympathetic corpsman, had placed the leg in a cast; and for the next two months, he skittered around the causeway, amusing everyone with his foibles.

When I came to him, he bonded with me as no other and became my loyal and devoted companion, following me everywhere as a bonded animal will do.  I was amused and flattered, but there was no bond for me.  Boozer was just another distraction—like beer, dope, speed and expeditionary larks—to either color my vision with myopic gaiety or pull down the shades on all the bad bad people, experiences and injustices that descended into view.

As my days in-country neared conclusion, the War was de-escalating through a desperate ploy by Nixon (Kissinger, really) to turn the war back to the homeland forces of ARVN.  They called this bullshit playbook Vietnamization.

(Turning the war back to the natives and heading for home.  Sound familiar?  But I’m not doing this to throw stones at the national tendency to wriggle out of situations that become politically gauche.)

Service Craft was being systematically dismantled, the boats turned over to the gooks.  More on this later.  Now, I was ten days short in-country, and relieved of all duties as was the protocol, to wait out the last day and the flight back to the world. The crews all dispersed, their pets were left to fend for themselves.  They became wretched scavengers, covered in dirt and sores, their gaunt ribs testament to the dwindling supply of food.  Boozer was one of them.

It was dawn and overcast, I remember that.  I was waiting across the road from the causeway for the cattle car to take me down to Tien Sha.  This was the last I would see of my home for most of this year.  I watched a pack of dogs across the road, milling and begging around men who didn’t see them.  Boozer looked around and spotted me.  His tail wagging and that tongue lolling out in his version of a grin, he leapt to cross the road…and a fast moving jeep struck him without slowing or stopping.  Just kept on going.  Boozer screamed and I could see that his back legs weren’t moving.  He was paralyzed.  The other dogs of the pack immediately set upon him; and as the cattle car rolled up obscuring my sight, I climbed aboard, took a seat and never looked back as it pulled away.

I had no remorse, no guilt no impending sense of responsibility.  This is how I came to deal with this and all the moments of powerlessness yet to come in a life that has continued to this moment.  It was that shrug of mental shoulders, the denial of all sensibility to the impact I had on others.  That poor little dog, lying dead on the side of the road has taught me more about the mutuality of loving devotion than all my teachers since.

At the time, all that swam before me was that bus ride up to Freedom Hill, the boarding of that garish jet and the sound of the wheels locking as the big bird soared east and out of Viet Nam airspace.  It was all I was living for. 

The ignorance-is-bliss thing worked completely, until eight months ago, when all this came flooding back to mind, seeking payment…and payback for my transgressions, my neglect of spiritual principles, my sins as a boy never fully grown to manhood.

So, if now, I dote and coddle and care for my little family of dogs and cats, it is to say to Boozer and all I have left behind, that loyalty and devotion is a two-way bond that must be perpetually nurtured…and protected.