Sammy's Dog

“Oh, but he’s adorable. We can’t just leave him here,” said Sammy, crouched beside the dumpster in the alleyway at the back of our tenement building.

I’d caught a glimpse of the thing earlier, and figured it was half dead, dying, and would be dead by now on account of the bitter Chicago cold, but apparently not.  I pretended I was deaf.

“Poor thing!” said Sammy, who looked up at me. 

There was no escape. I was forced to acknowledge the dying thing’s existence, but I could only go so far, lest the concession appear a weakness, and one thing led to another. I still had a way out. I could challenge its identity.

“What is it? A rat?” I said, in what I considered a posture of emotional indifference, hardly bothering to look at the thing, or at Sammy, who was about to get sucked into an emotional black hole unless I pulled her to safety, and to her senses, pdq. 

“No, Johnny, it’s a little puppy.”

Of course it was a fucking puppy. Why us? Why here? Why now? I’ve heard that the Greek Gods threw these kinds of challenges at you, just to see how you roll. 

“Well, we’ve got to hurry along, if we’re going to have any chance of getting the apartment on Logan Square.” I looked at my watch, I even tapped at my watch. Deny, distract, deflect.

Sammy kneeled close to the dumpster and reached for the puppy-thing. Brown and white, the size of a large rat, snot running from its nostrils, its eyes were crusted in ice. It was still an unnamed thing: I willed it to remain so.

“Sammy, please don’t.”

“Oh, but I have to.”

“We don’t have room for a dog in our lives. Where would we put it? Who’s going to feed it? Pick up the shit? Who’s going to take it out for walks? Take it to the vet? What about vacations? What about landlords? It’ll cost a fortune.” A gazillion futures were shutting down, and I was helpless to stop it.

“Don’t worry Johnny, I’ve got this. I will look after the poor thing.”

“It’ll break your heart one day,” I said.

“We’ll call it Dumpster,” said Sammy, and that was that.

And, of course, we were late for our appointment. The Logan Square apartment was great, perfect! We could have been happy there.

"What about the dog?" said Sammy.

“What dog?”

Sammy rolled her eyes at me. The little darling dog, Dumpster. The dead or dying thing tucked up in a towel in our dull little apartment in Evanston.

One thing led to another.

The dog survived and my Logan Square dream was extinguished. Coffee shops, and pubs, and bookstores and all the great things that could have been were not. The Evanston apartment was small, dark, dingy, but it was on the ground floor, so the back door opened onto a small brick patio, covered in green moss owing to 365 days of shadow. Hardly big enough to swing a cat, but big enough for a dog to shit. 

“When did it become my job to pick up after your dog?” This was not how I imagined my life.

Sammy rolled her eyes at me. “Our dog.”

“Your dog.”

It was a lovely summer day, and as I poured a thousand unappealing beads of hard brown stuff into the dog bowl in our kitchen, I was reminded of the truth that we are what we eat.   Dumpster must be made of fish meal, corn, something called 'tocopherols' and the occasional stick of bona fide broccoli. The same food every day; surely this was animal cruelty?

“Does the dog eat rotten sticks of celery?” I said, hopefully, holding a plastic bag full of green glop that I had found in the vegetable drawer at the bottom of the fridge. The bottom drawer, where nobody goes.

The dog did not eat celery, nor sprouting green potatoes, nor stale saltine crackers, but the dog did eat sticks of de-frosting butter, chicken fat, and the curried chicken dish that I left on the coffee table when I went into the kitchen to grab a glass of water.

And soon thereafter, I had a revelation. Dumpster was a girl dog, apparently. Who knew? Some kid in the park, building a snowman, that's who knew.

Chicago is brutal in the winter, the icy sidewalks are treacherous, and the wind lashes at your skin like an acid attack.

 “Oh, please take the dog out for a walk! I am so busy with the taxes.” Puppy dog eyes again; Sammy’s not Dumpster’s

“What about me? I’m busy too!” I complained.

“Busy doing what?”

Well, that got me in a huff. 

So, anyway, I took Dumpster for a walk in the nearby park. I forgot my gloves, and my hands froze in that weird yellow rubber-sausage way, and I knew that they would never be quite the same again. I would never be a violin maestro, or a seamstress, or a pastry chef. Another gazillion finger-related futures went dark on account of this dog. And Dumpster stood there, urgently and earnestly sniffing a specific grungy gray lump of snow that had been shoved up against the park fence. 

Which is when I had another revelation. The dog was out to get me. 

Summer came and Dumpster ate something nasty, and Dumpster got X-rayed, and Dumpster needed surgery, and Dumpster stayed overnight in the Animal Hospital, and I got a bill for nearly five thousand dollars for the removal of a foreign object from Dumpster’s digestive system. Dumpster wore a lampshade for two weeks; just before our long-planned European vacation.  

“The dog’s cleaned out our bank account,” I explained.

“Who’s going to look after the dog while we are away?” said Sammy. It was as if she were deaf.

“Doesn’t matter. We can’t afford the plane tickets,” I explained.

“Poor dog,” said Sammy. 

When the stitches were removed, we received another bill from the vet.

Seven years passed by, one thing led to another, and an idle thought crossed my mind over toast and coffee at the breakfast table in our little apartment in Evanston.

“How old is the dog?” I asked.

The dog was lying near the kitchen stove.

“That’s a good question. I think she’s about eleven or twelve”. Sammy was unsure.

“I thought one human year is equal to seven dog years?”

Sammy was not sure.

“Which means that Dumpster is about eighty years old.”

Sammy seemed untroubled.

Dumpster was twitching and farting, in a doggy dream state. An old lady. She’d been wearing the same choke-collar for over ten years, it was once green but had faded to a dull brown. 

I bought Dumpster a new collar, crimson colored with fake diamond studs; it cost twenty-five dollars, an impulse acquisition in the pet aisle of the supermarket. The dog collars were hanging next to the dog toys. I bought Dumpster a fluffy green lizard thing that squeaked when you pressed its tummy. It cost nearly seven dollars. I skipped Starbucks.

That was five years ago.

Dumpster died at home, in the small apartment in Evanston. She did not die alone, she was accompanied at the end by Sammy, the green lizard and me. 

“It was a big mistake getting a dog,” I said. 

“It was always your dog,” said Sammy.

I pretended not to hear her.

“I knew it would break your heart one day."