Abnormal Occurrences (17 page)

With the burgeoning of Sausage’s career, Vernon Bowers was ever less directly involved with his former pet. He preferred dealmaking and the income that derived from it and became a highroller at prominent venues of gambling, to which he traveled by private jets and stretch limos full of flashy women, iced effervescence, and sturgeon roe.

Print articles and TV commentary had at first gushed with awe and admiration of Sausage’s unique talent, but as the animal’s name became a household word they turned negative, embracing the scepticism of animal behaviorists, authorities on linguistics who quoted Wittgenstein’s bon mot to the effect that if a lion could speak we would probably not understand what it said, and zoologists who insisted that a dog, lacking a human sort of larynx, as well as the requisite area of the brain, was anatomically incapable of producing authentic speech.

Vernon’s position on such attacks was that they only made Sausage better known, upping the fees and further enriching himself—but not just that, as he revealed in the rare personal interview he gave to a female newsweekly reporter whose fetching ways suggested to male subjects more than was ever delivered: according to Vernon, Sausage lived equally high on the hog in doggy terms, being fed on Kobe beef and regularly furnished with healthy bitches in heat.

Dorothy Hornbeck’s subsequent bylined piece offered evidence that this account was cut from the whole cloth by a barefaced liar, a former member of the dog’s retinue having revealed to her that a hardworking Sausage had yet to engage in any kind of sex but humping the legs of the human beings around him, and was fed only a highly restrictive diet of high-protein, low-fat gruel.

On reading the widely publicized article, a grandstanding US senator called for an investigation, and a militant animal-rights group found another justification for fire-bombing a pet-food warehouse.

Eventually the vogue for Sausage began to recede when people were inured to the once devastating effect of the dog’s ability to speak a few words and short phrases, confirming the old law that a novelty must lose its appeal when it is no longer novel. So what else can you do for me, doggy? was the question to be answered before another year was out. Meanwhile, Vernon’s parents had shared in none of their son’s success, aside from the opportunity to swagger before their neighbors, and now, impoverished by a series of home repairs and medical expenses not covered by their HMO, his mother, formerly a smoker, had contracted emphysema and the senior Bowers was trying to recuperate after his second coronary episode. Learning of this state of affairs from an email sent by an envious cousin (“you dirty bastard, you always were a selfish, heartless little prick even as a snotnosed kid”), Vernon got a bright idea that promised not only to reverse Sausage’s decline in public estimation but also to benefit his ailing parents, to whom now that he was successful he wished to be benevolent.

Accompanied by a sizable posse consisting not only of his own employees but also a number of media types, Vernon took the dog back East to meet his folks for the first time since leaving home. Overwhelmed by the honor, they would have expressed apologies for distracting their son from his important work for the country had he not put a stop to the kind of thing that would not have looked good when reported, especially when he had taken pains to set up the meeting at a luxurious nursing residence for wealthy seniors and not at the Bowers’s now shabby home.

Deposited in the lap of Vernon’s mother, Sausage was immediately so fascinated by the oxygen tube to her nostrils that a worried handler quickly transferred the dog to Vernon’s dad, in a companion wheelchair nearby.

“Well, haven’t you turned out to be the one,” said he, trying to pat the little head with tremulous hands.

For its part, a silent Sausage evaded the caresses for a moment or two of canine protocol, performing a sniffing onceover, at the conclusion of which its tail signaled an okay that was expanded by, at the other end of the long cylinder, a protruding red tongue.

“Would you look at that?” asked Mr. Bowers. “He wants to kiss his grampa. I feel better already.” And soon he was as good as his word, rising from the wheelchair to move slowly but not feebly about the room, walking farther than he had in the previous month, and after an hour in Sausage’s presence, even though the dog had not been permitted to come close enough to interfere with her oxygen apparatus, Vernon’s mother pulled the tube away from her nose and announced that her lungs were on the mend, she could just feel it.

This was just what Vernon had had in mind. It had been proven sometime since that the company of pets was therapeutic to the ill, old, and infirm, but according to his research, nothing had been done by way of commercial exploitation on the national level. So he set about the creation of Dogdocs, Inc., with Sausage as honorary CEO, selling franchises across the USA to local branches that would provide canine visitors to hospitals and nursing homes for fees shared by the institutions, HMOs, and Medicare, with a low copay by the patient. It took a while for the business to reach the functional level, given the Byzantine complexity of getting federal and state accreditations, but eventually all was in place, and hundreds then thousands of dogs were gainfully employed in treating the afflicted, a process consisting of no more than being petted, with reciprocal hand- and/or face-licking and of course glowing eyes and wagging tails, but was remarkably efficacious beyond the capacity of statistical measurement.

“Just how often,” Vernon was asked in interviews, “do these dogs really heal anybody, and of what illnesses?”

“That could never be proved,” was his routine answer. “What
is
self-evident, though, is how much better patients feel when they pet a dog, whereas many medical procedures, however effective—and sometimes they
aren’t
—make the patient miserable.”

“So this cure is an illusion?”

“No. But the illusion may be curative.”

And while there were doctors who were disparagers, others doubted that the dogs could do any harm, so long as the animals had no diseases that could be communicated to human beings, and to be sure did not bite or make noises that would disturb other patients.

Vernon’s parents eventually died but certainly no sooner than if they had not enjoyed canine therapy and perhaps a good deal later. In any event their last years were more pleasant than had they not been regularly visited, when he could spare the time, by their son, who was now renowned and much sought after as a humanitarian.

Sausage too finally passed on, having acquired even more fame as a healer than he ever had as a talker, for the evident reason that making people feel better about their health is more appreciated than just amusing them with what, however miraculous, remains a novelty. A bronze statue of the eminent dachshund was erected in the park near that of Balto the noble sled dog who brought the serum to Nome.

“Why, as the person nearest him,” Vernon was asked in an obituary interview, “do you think Sausage never spoke publicly again after leaving show business?”

“Maybe he thought he had said it all.”

“Did he talk privately with you?”

“I don’t feel I am at liberty to answer that,” said Vernon, “since Sausage can’t be here to speak for himself.”

S
OME YEARS AGO, BEFORE
the era of “reality” television, I was associate producer of a series entitled
Courage
. We went under the seas with skin divers, climbed mountains, stalked polar bears, that sort of thing. Perhaps, when you were younger, you saw the show; many Americans did—though not multimillions of them, which is the principal reason we lasted only two seasons. Perhaps you even enjoyed it. If so, it is not my intention to reflect disdainfully on your taste when I herewith reveal publicly for the first time that certain portions of it were faked. We used motion-picture film in those days.

For example: the camera, hand-held by a crew member wearing waders, followed an anaconda across that Paraguayan pond and onto the far bank, whereupon the serpent turned and gave battle, flinging its giant coils around our Indian guide, and had all but choked the life out of him when, with a final desperate slash with his machete, he cut himself free—though, in deference to the snake lobby (already influential if not as vocal as it is today), that conclusion had to be inferred by the audience: no reptile was hurt, not even the phony one we used for most of the footage.

The living anaconda, which had taken our real guides a month to locate, soon vanished into the impenetrable swamps after we had gotten all too little of it on film. Despite its size, this serpent is anyway not the ferocious creature depicted in Hollywood potboilers, seldom taking on an adversary larger than a chicken, and remains as torpid as a garden hose for days after a meal—unless of course pursued by a TV crew, from which it flees in terror. In the wrestling match presented on our show, the antagonists were a thirty-foot anaconda made of foam rubber and a New York actor stained to represent a native guide; the jungle pond was a tank in a studio in Spanish Harlem.

The film as aired, genuine and simulated sequences intermixed, looked convincing enough for those days. As I remember, the only complaints we received were from snake-lovers who, despite the aforementioned pains we had taken to avoid offending them (which included an affidavit from a leading animal-rights group, appearing as a graphic on the screen), insisted that living reptiles had been mutilated for purposes of entertainment.

Octopus-fanciers were heard from after our skin-diver show, and a record number of written, phoned, or telegraphed protests (imagine what the volume of emails might have been; luckily the internet was a thing of the future) were provoked by our simulated killing of a reputed man-eating lion in Kenya. For the latter, we had used some old movie footage in which a Hollywood animal, toothless and nearly senile, collapsed on a cue from his off-camera trainer. Our worry had been only that sequence would be recognized by those hosts of viewers who had lately seen it on the television revivals of the ancient Tarzan movies.

It was not so identified. I cannot recall a single complaint on that or any other similar score. No one seemed offended by fakery in itself. We were never taken to task for falsely promising that which we had no intention of delivering: real human beings in genuinely extreme situations. Either the man was bogus, at least in the role portrayed, or the experience was rigged so as to render it harmless.

So much by way of introduction to the account of an incident in which the values were precisely reversed. Though every moment of this episode was recorded by our cameras, for obvious reasons the film could never be shown. Presented on the home screen, within rigid limitations of space and time and interrupted by commercial messages and station breaks, this remarkable event would have seemed pointless except as a cruel mockery of the moral proposition on which our show was based: that the intrepid man invariably vanquishes the menace; to put it crudely, that bravery pays off.

We, the staff and crew of
Courage
, were in Southeast Asia at the time. I shall not give the name of the country; it had but lately achieved its independence from a European colonial power, and was suffering the usual elation, pains, and doubts of such a status. There were riots in the capital city, buckets of filth were hurled over the wells surrounding the U.S. Embassy, and from time to time homemade bombs were lobbed into outdoor cafes by dissident elements.

I sat in such an establishment one afternoon with Bud Servo, our executive producer and my superior, who was naturally of the liberal persuasion but for his own reasons when abroad often posed as the vulgar, aggressive American whom he ritualistically deplored. At the moment he was loudly calling for ice with which to cool his
nugi
, a local sort of beer made from the fermented juice of some jungle flower. This potation was properly drunk just after it had been heated to the simmering point and decanted into tiny stone cups—a practice of which Bud was well aware.

“Hey, boy,” he cried to our waiter, an ancient, coffee-colored individual dressed in a striped sarong bottom. There were dark looks from nearby tables. Many of the non-Caucasian clientele wore the Nationalist costume of white-canvas mess jacket and trousers and fore-and-aft cap.

My visible embarrassment only caused Bud to shout the louder. As the Nationalists began to hiss in indignation, a shabby little man, his mahogany face pitted with scars, sidled up to our table and said: “Surr, you buy Jairmon camera?”

“I’ll buy ten,” said Bud, reaching for his money clip.

“
Amee schleepok!
” screamed the little man, meaning “American swine,” or the like—I had learned that much of the language—dropped the camera to the table, where it exploded with a great noise, broke all our
nugi
cups, and filled the area with pungent smoke. But oddly enough, as we discovered upon arising and shaking out our clothes, hurt no human being.

The Nationalists now made a handsome gesture, coming en bloc to apologize. They were concerned that we should form a negative opinion of their country on the basis of this single incident. Their spokesman, in serviceable though quaint English, blamed the “rude lot of revolutionist hooligans” for our inconvenience, and assured us that the vast majority of his fellow countrymen were of the democratic persuasion.

The upshot was that Bud proceeded to stand them several rounds of
nugi
, discoursed at length on the economic affairs of the country—with which he had somewhere acquired an astonishing familiarity—and eventually went off in their company to one of the twenty-seven-course dinners that were a local specialty.

Bud confessed to me next day that the little “hooligan” had been in his employ, had been furnished with the harmless camera-bomb and paid to detonate it on our table. Only in such a fashion, Bud had felt, could he genuinely make contact with the citizenry.

“You’ve got to neutralize their basic hostility,” he said. “Now that we have become victims, we will be trusted.”