Collected Essays (79 page)

When we moved to California from Lynchburg in 1986, Arf came with us. I thought a little of leaving Arf behind, but by then he was a member of the family. He, for one, wanted to make absolutely sure he wasn’t left behind, and the whole time we were packing the Ryder van he was jumping in and out of it. On the drive out, Arf rode with me in the van every day plus each day one of the kids; they took turns. Sylvia rode in our purple whale station-wagon with the other two kids. One thing Isabel and I noticed was that Arf would stand up whenever we passed a pasture with cows. He was effectively imitating a cow. He was so bright it was frightening. We started calling him the cow-detector.

Arf did something memorable after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. The hardest-hit buildings in our town of Los Perros were only two blocks from our house; two of them were restaurants. A few days after the earthquake I was walking Arf on a leash downtown and a city worker said, “There’s that dog!” to his partner, who chimed in, “That’s some dog.” They went on to tell me that the day of the quake, while they had been cutting off the gas and electricity in one of the ruined restaurants, they’d seen Arf come trotting in, take—get this—a bucket of bacon out of the gaping ‘fridge, bite the bucket’s handle in his mouth, carry the bucket out behind the ruined building, and there wolf down as much of the bacon as he could hold, i.e. all of it. Arf was, in other words, a looter. This wasn’t the only time that people would recognize Arf downtown; it wasn’t unusual to hear people say, not always in a friendly fashion, “There’s that dog.”

Arf’s habit of running away got more and more troublesome in California. Although there were no dogcatchers patrolling the streets, the area we lived in was much more urban, with many more people, and they would often assume that Arf was lost, and phone us up about him. Busybodies. In the California years I must have gone to pick up Arf fifty or even a hundred times. Arf never looked apologetic, he simply took my taxi-service as his due. Some of the people would be real priss-pots, trying to lecture me—as if I had any control over this godlike avatar of a dog.

Only once, back in Lynchburg, did I try smacking Arf when picking him up—that time it was a dogcatcher who had him, and he told me not to smack Arf or he’d give me
two
tickets. “He can’t help it, sir. That’s the way he’s made.” It was useless to reason with Arf. He was so bright it was frightening. But, again, he was only bright about things that
he
wanted to do. If you threw a stick or a ball, he would just look at you. If you tried again, holding the stick out to him, he’d sniff at it to make sure it wasn’t food, then watch you throw it again. And then look away.

Eventually I had to start keeping Arf penned up on our deck all day, or leashed in the driveway. In order to exercise him without have to get calls from busybodies, I took to jogging with him every day. It was great for my fitness; I started calling Arf my personal trainer. One thing he liked to do a lot when we were jogging was to npak (pronounced
en
-pack). “Npak” was a Georgia-invented expression for Nose, Pivot, Arfie Kick. The origin of this was a Georgia-drawn three frame broadside she put on our fridge in about 1982 in Lynchburg:

HOW TO SHOW PEOPLE YOU’RE WAY
WAY
TOO GOOD FOR ‘EM.

(1) Nose. Point your nose up in the air.

(2) Pivot. Turn on your heel.

(3) Arfie Kick. Scrape your feet backwards, one at a time, trying to toss up dirt or gravel towards the victim.

The older he got, the more Arfie loved to npak. I think it would release musk from glands by his dewlaps. Arf and I often jogged up the hill to a local winery with a fountain in front of it. Arf would always stop at the fountain and lap up some of the water. He was a complete creature of habit; he always had to drink for awhile, step down, step back up, and drink some more. It was such a beautiful spot with Arf there; I always meant to bring my camera and take a picture: a redwood trunk on the left and a palm growing out of the ground on the right; the fountain in the middle, a pool of water lovely green with algae and a plashing trickle of water being forever pumped out of a wine-barrel. I’d think of a woodland animal at a spring, my animal drinking his water, and in the background would be a meadow lit with the California sun and overhead the bright blue California sky.

In the last few months of his life, Arf went deaf. He got more and more like an old person, everything always had to be the same. Grazing new-grown grass-blades, peeing at special places, drinking from the vile water-dish outside Gwen’s Hair Salon, crapping on the bridge to Los Perros, shaking his head over and over and over, chewing himself endlessly, and if he sensed a car might slow down for him, he always made a point of getting in front of it. I would get kind of tired of him. But going out in nature with him was always good.

One sunny day in December, 1994, Rudy and I went up into some hilly wilderness behind our house and sat in the middle of manzanita chaparral for a long time with happy lolling-tongue Arf hanging around in the vicinity, and then we pushed on over the hill to some entirely new terrain, a steep near-cliff that dropped down the back, covered with native plants; we three worked our way down it like—I imagined—divers dropping down off the continental shelf, we went down a few hundred feet and sat there with Arf, we three boys, perfectly dog-happy, me watching for ages a cloud of gnats over a manzanita bush, marveling at how the strange attractor of the gnat swarm would form over and over in the heat plume over the manzanita. When the wind would blow the gnats out of the attractor, they’d hang down off to the side of the bush in the wind-shadow, and then when the breeze died down, they’d work their way back up into the plume to where they knew the others would meet, Rudy and I discussing this a little bit. At our side, Arf’s relaxed Nature face was inhumanly beautiful. Dear Arf.

The way Arf finally died was that he figured out a way to escape from the deck where we always penned him up. I’m still not sure exactly how he was doing it, maybe he was squeezing under the railing and jumping down to the ground. On January 31, 1995, Arf broke out and ran away, and while he was deafly crossing a Los Perros street a car hit him in the head and killed him. He was thirteen and a half.

I used a pick and shovel to dig a four-foot-deep grave in our backyard, the deepest hole I’ve ever dug. There’s a lot of big rocks underground. Having lost both my parents in the last couple of years, it felt kind of cathartic to be digging a grave. I got Arf’s body from the Humane Society and laid him down on the grass next to the grave. I cried a lot. Arf looked about the same, except his tongue was hanging out and one eye was open and one eye was closed, like a dead creature in a cartoon. His fur was as orange as ever. I clipped off some bits of the fur, and then I put him down in the hole. Sylvia and I threw some wildflowers from the yard down in there with him, and then I filled the hole up. We went inside and listened to
Old Blue
, a song by The Byrds about losing your dog: “Bye bye, Blue. You good dog, you.”

Note on “Memories of Arf”

Written February, 1995.

Appeared in
Seek!

I can’t add much to what the essay says. I was so saddened by Arf’s death that I wrote this up—a writer’s way of dealing with grief. I sent copies of the essay to my three children with locks of Arf’s hair. Even now, I still miss him.

Bob’s Three Miracles And Me

So I saw the ads and I sent a dollar to the SubGenius Foundation in Texas. The pamphlet came and I got the picture pretty quickly, though at first I was scared they were crazy. But…hey,
slack
??? Yes. I wanted more of this, I wanted to be a fully shriven member of The Stangian Fist-Temple of the Risen “Bob” Dobbs Remortified…whatever it took.

I also sent the Foundation my mass-market paperback Hilbert Space fantasia,
The Sex Sphere
, pointing out that when asked how people apply to join the Hell’s Angels, Sonny Barger once answered, “You don’t
apply
to be an Angel…you’re
recognized
.”

I got in return a tape-recorded letter from one Doug Smith, also my full ordination papers. The voice on the recorder sounded small and honest, just a guy like me. I was in! This incredibly hip outfit was so desperate or crazed they’d even let in a bumpkin like me! Yeee-haw!

I put the big picture of “Bob” on the front door of the abandoned house I was renting there in Lynchburg, Virginia, home of that fat, smarmy, God-Pig Jerry Falwell; home also of neighborhood winos, mostly black; home also of several weird redneck enemies of mine; home also of the Design Group, a commercial art outfit who rented me said abandoned building there at 1324 Church Street, a crumbling two-story wood house with kudzu. It was only $50 a month. It was my office for writing; at this point I was unemployed except for writing.

Writing on my beloved rose-red Selectric typewriter in 1982.

One of the gigs that the Design Group had was to produce the covers for
Security Magazine
, a trade publication for private security officers. One day my friend Nancy Blackman from the Design Group came over and said, “Rudy, I need a photo for a
Security Magazine
cover story on ‘Stopping Drugs in the Workplace,’ and I remember you said you had some pot in your desk, so could we photograph it?”

Well, yes, I did have a bud or two handy for the odd day of hi-res cerebration. Chuckling, Nancy and I tarted my desk drawer up with foil and papers and various over-the-counter stim pills—No-Doz, diet aids, decongestants. Nancy photographed my drawer and put the picture on the cover of
Security Magazine
for all those amateur pigs to contemplate. Great idea, right? I glued the magazine cover into my journal, a large ledger into which I rubber-cemented whatever of interest came out of my printer or pen or hands.

And then, a month after this, I joined the Church of the SubGenius and, as I said, taped my spanking fresh giant Church icon of “Bob” to the glass window in my crumbly office-house’s front door. He looked fine there, with his shit-eating hyena grin.

The next morning when I come in to work, I found my building’s door wide open, and people milling around inside. All my papers had been dumped out of all my desk drawers, all my books pulled out of my bookcases, my two heaters were stolen, and the pot from my desk was of course gone. My journal lay on my desk, opened to the page where I’d glued the
Security Magazine
cover, and resting on the picture was a ticking wind-up toy valentine heart.

A real Church initiation prank; Dobbs just a wild crazy Shriner, maybe, or maybe the cops had done it—they came and looked around and kept straight faces—or the winos, or a
Security Magazine
fan, or this one particular redneck who worked at the Design Group, or—

If I’d been as crazy as Phil Dick, I might have obsessed about the break-in for years, but instead I only worried for about six months. The one thing I did pronto was take that paper Dobbs-head off of my front door and put him in a punishment zone, the bathroom floor, till he was all wet from spills, but the paper he was printed on never fell apart, a minor miracle.

I forgave “Bob,” though still feared him, and finally stuck him to the inside wall of the unused bathtub and draped an old towel over his triumphant jackal leer, only unveiling him as a small wonder-spectacle for those few who came to visit me in my art-drenched lair.

My writing office building at 50 Church St., Lynchburg, Virginia, 1986. I worked in a room in the right rear corner, second floor.

The break-ins continued, one a month for several months. Finally I put a big sign on my door saying, “There is nothing in here: no food, no booze, no drugs, no money, NOTHING. Please go Away!”

But still there were break-ins. One more step was called for: I testified for “Bob” from the pulpit of our Episcopal church. It was a simple thing, a small, homely act, but it drove the Dickian deskrapers from my office for good. (
First miracle.
) When called on, as a lay reader, to read the Old Testament Lesson on that last fateful day of my time of trial, I simply substituted “the priests of
Bob
” for each occurrence of “the priests of
Ba’al
.” The preacher’s head twitched, my children giggled, and slack suffused me.