Cake or Death (16 page)

I had this awful salesman come and sell me new windows for a ridiculous price. In the end he just screwed me. The contract meant nothing to him; the project was a disaster. Such a stickler am I for avoidance that I started using the side door rather than the front door in the porch I had replaced at such expense. Yes, that’s a big barrel of nuts, I agree.

But I signed and paid in advance. Do you know why? Because he acted like a person on Prozac who wasn’t on Prozac. Or else he was imitating the mannerisms he recalled from the days when Prozac worked. He was chirpy and perky. His voice was artificially high. He said “Gosh” and “Dandy” a lot. All his mannerisms were “up.” If I can extend the analogy perhaps a little too far, he was up in the
same way that Italian, especially Venetian churches, are always up. The paintings are on the ceilings. Jesus is hovering over the altar right at the very top. As the oboe and the flute rise, your head lifts to see his halo painted gold on the fresco. You come out of Venice with a neck that aches. The doges intended this. People always forced to look up don’t look down and see filthy cobblestones and churchmen accepting bribes for a passage to heaven.

In the same way, raising one’s voice up and talking optimistically about a new beautifully windowed future distracts you from the contract and the cheque which you sign, not thinking that these lower things mean nothing to the Up Man.

But what do you expect from a guy named T. Randall anyway? I bet he’s from Kentucky. Same with those millions of American men with a first name that sounds like a last name. Spencer, Cable, Kendrick, Hayward, Sumner, Fleenor. They’re just distracting you horizontally. Look up. Look over there. Look anywhere but where you should be looking.

The phenomenon of Furkids has probably been around for decades but it hadn’t come out of hiding until recently. Old ladies and their hundred or so cats, fur-coated society ladies and their tiny bald doglets, that we knew.

But now that people can choose when to have children and now that old people have been fatally (in the taste sense) encouraged to dress and behave like children (pastel tracksuits and fanny packs, my dear lord)
while spending their children’s inheritances on cruises and gatherings where they can bore each other like a trepanning instrument, it’s time for Furkids. I lay bare our latest societal shame.

Furkids are children. Except they are not human children. They are standard household pets, i.e., cats and dogs, that are dressed, groomed, fed, spoken to and treated like beloved children. They are kids but they have fur and they lick themselves. You’d think the latter would disqualify them, but I asked around and there’s your answer as to how people can stand to have dogs in bed with them. Licking is a good thing in this case. Your other question—what about the hair?—shrivels by comparison.

There’s nothing wrong with having Furkids while you’re waiting to have human children. In fact there’s nothing wrong with having them along with your human children or as company when your children have left home. Sorry, I meant there’s nothing wrong with having pets. Furkids are not pets. They are hairy children and are treated by their mummy and daddy (never referred to as owners) as such.

This is sick.

Here’s how to spot a Furkid. It has its own website. I don’t have a website, mainly because the kind of people who tell me I should have one invariably refer to it as a “marketing tool.” I’d call it “boasting.” So no website for me.

Furkids don’t eat pet food. They eat special treats bought at great expense from the local dog bakery. In a world where four billion of our total six are ill-fed to the
point of affecting life expectancy, the entire concept of a dog bakery makes me swill with rage liquids. I walk past a canine bakery preferring to think of it as a place where Furkids themselves are baked. This comforts me.

Furkids have cute names. They are never called Spot or Rover. It’s always Mrs. Muggles or Clooney or Chewbacca III.

Furkids have wardrobes. By this, I mean matching hat-and-coat ensembles, often in tartan and often matching their parents’ outfits, and I don’t mean Chewbacca II, I mean Mr. and Mrs. Finnerty next door whose kids left home and never come back to visit. Doubtless the Finnertys have some version of the deep dark family secret that torments everyone else on my street, but I notice that most people’s kids still visit, bearing grandkids or grimaces or something, but they’re there.

Does it ever occur to the Finnertys that the kids don’t visit because they come second to Thatcher Baxter, a small yappy-type dog with a urinary problem that has his parents wringing their hands in a way they never did for young Spencer Finnerty? He has a wife, two children and a secret fear that training for and starting a career in outplacement consulting (he fires people on a contract basis) was the biggest mistake of his life. He cannot talk to his parents about his growing panic, indeed despair. For his parents have transferred their affections to Thatcher Baxter.

I actually know a woman who invited her daughter on a trip to the Bodrum resort in Turkey, tickets bought, itinerary planned. Daughter puzzled, thrilled, possible new
relationship with maddening mother, zippety-doo-dah. Then Ma billed her for it. Daughter, who could not afford the trip, paid with postdated cheques and the equivalent of rolls of pennies. Ma then spent precisely twice that much having her Furkid’s teeth capped.

Affections? I meant
in
fections. Furkids have endless infections. I note this is also true of small children who gobble germs daily. But their illnesses are almost cute. Their button noses run, they cry for mummy, they cling and cuddle. But Furkids get disgusting illnesses, the hallmark of which is their parents’ willingness to treat them at immense cost and talk about them at unspeakable volume. Thatcher Baxter–type Furkids invariably need glands massaged, invariably get damp-ass blockages in the crotch. Whatever goes wrong with them is always foul-smelling and hard to get to. They have elaborate diets and often become obese like their owners.

It’s easy to make a dog lose weight. Make him run for his limited Kibbles. But parents of Furkids are as indulgent to their offspring’s wants as they are to their needs. Hence, fat cat.

I never notice when animals are morbidly obese as I have no idea what the ideal weight is for seven hundred breeds or mixed breeds of dog or cat. Dalmatians are skinny is about all I know. People with Furkids become medical experts. They’re like vets and vets are weird. My girlfriend took her dying dog to the vet (yes, she was terribly sad but she wasn’t insane about it) and he actually offered to keep the animal at no cost if he could test a new medical treatment on it. I couldn’t tell if it was vile
experimentation or an unhealthy attachment to his patients. But I could tell it was somehow inappropriate for little Sparky. So could my girlfriend, and she had the dog put to sleep lest he end up like Terri Schiavo, on life support but looking too good on video to starve to death.

I used to think the worse thing that could happen to a cat was getting run over. That’s one reason I don’t have a cat. I can’t even come to terms with my own certain death, can’t seem to plan for it. But way worse things than flattening happen to Furkids.

Furkids get breast cancer, feline leukemia complex, roundworms, hookworms, tapeworms, whipworms, and heartworms. They get fleas and lice, mange and mites, ticks and toxoplasmosis. I don’t know what any of this means but it came right off Google. After that came nuttier stuff like websites recommending homeopathic remedies for animals pursued by Big Pharma. I didn’t even know animals got vaccinations. But Furkids get them.

Then there’s the senior Furkids, whose teeth give out. They take longer naps, their fur turns grey, they get deaf, fat and arthritic and they vote Republican. They pee themselves and you have to get pee samples for the vet by following Thatcher Baxter around with a pie plate. They need special toothpaste, and Furkid parents recommend installing baby-gates so your “senior pet” can’t climb the stair, stumble and break a paw. Furkids get better medical care than we do. You know how men won’t go to the doctor even when we tell them to, even when the bone is practically piercing the skin? If your husband were a Furkid, not human, that is, he’d go to the doctor every time you
recommended it. He’d have no choice. Furkids are permanently in a veterinarian’s care. It’s not normal. It must be so embarrassing for a male Furkid, because they can’t say, Nah, it’ll grow back, the way a human husband does.

This is why hairy children are so popular with a certain type of human parent. They do as they’re told. They wear what they’re given. And they’re given Furkid booties, diapers, pyjamas, ponchos, and special outfits in spring and at Christmas.

I give you this from an online pet supply store for the criminally insane: “Tennis anyone? This adorable little tennis dress is the perfect style statement for your pooch. Choose either white & blue or white & pink. Your dog will look like she just came off of the court in this new dog style statement. Tennis ball sold separately.”

The site also sells a Happy Trails Plus pet stroller for your obese or non-ambulatory pet (perhaps a new mom!). It looks like a regular human baby stroller but shorter, like a hot-pink ball on wheels.

The site has a section for other types of kids but I don’t have the heart. Imagine the kind of clothes they sell for Fishkids.

By the way, Furkids die. If only their Furmoms and Furdads lived in pet years, but no, they live on to buy coffins which look eerily like what you’d purchase for a baby, a human infant, except nicer. Furkids get their own cemeteries. Yes, they take horses. The University of Florida maintains a website offering advice. Parents can call Pet Grief Support Hotlines whose FAQs warn the bereaved not to tell their human kids that the Furkid is
only sleeping. Real children often have trouble sleeping after hearing this.

They also answer questions like “When will I feel better?” “How long will I feel this way?” “How will I get over this?”

I hope you never feel better. I hope you suffer forever. I had a part-time dog once. His name was Skipper. We moved away, and I guess he died. He ate dog food. I can still remember how bad he smelled. That was fine with me. He used to hug my leg when I went to school. I guess I’d give my leg to have him back, but that’s a stupid idea since he’d be about four hundred years old now, so, unlike you people I’ll shut up about him.

He was a great dog, but he was no Furkid. How will I get over this, my ass. Screw you and your dogs with hats. I mean it. Pull yourselves together, for God’s sake, and stop making public fools of yourself and embarrassing your pets.

Honestly, Furparents today …

Each year I stage a protest at Doris Lessing’s failure to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It must be said that my protest consists of me rolling my eyes, perhaps thumping my fist on the table at dinner during a discourse ignored by all present, and writing a sarcastic column about the undoubted worthiness of Dario Fo but what were those old Swedes
thinking of that year, et cetera, et cetera. This has little effect.

I am a great worshipper of people whose work I admire—the living ones include Lessing, musicians Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and Kate Bush, the American essayist Anne Lamott, the linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky, journalists Robert Fisk and Seymour M. Hersh, British novelists Margaret Drabble, Ruth Rendell and Margaret Forster (to name but three of fifty)—but I’m not a fan in the standard sense. Why would I want them to sign my books? They don’t know me; I can’t pretend I know them.

But it galls me that I had a ticket to a Doris Lessing reading at the Harbourfront Festival in Toronto and on the night I could not bear to go. The thought of all those wealthy intelligent women readers in expensive cloaks of fine Irish wool in the audience was suddenly unbearable. I was too depressed to face Lessing’s formidable and indeed admirable fans. Better to stay home in the fetal position with one of her novels and admire her the way a great writer should be admired, with some silent reading. Lessing despises the modern view of “author as personality,” and what sane writer doesn’t? You may be desperate to get out of the house, but after the first day of the tour, you long for your nest again. You’re just a writer after all, a private person. Having done Lessing the favour of not pestering her fifteen years ago, I will not write about the extraordinariness of this woman. Her famous book is
The Golden Notebook
but it was before my time and I cannot warm to it. People shouldn’t worry about disliking books widely
accepted as great, or avoiding them for decades. They should wait for the stage when they are ready for the book, for it will come. I have read with such excess all my life that I could always use the excuse that I had another book on the go. I didn’t know this when I was young, but I would still have plenty of time to encounter the great unread.