luckyleftythirteen

I always liked the beginning of Casino because of the opera song that is playing.  It’s when Robert De Niro is introducing exactly what Vegas used to be like when the mafia ran it.  It is called “St. Matthews Passion” and it was composed by Bach. 

            My dog Buddy, who has been blind for three years now and defying all kinds of Darwinian thought processes simply by living, loves his walks.  People think he must be an unhappy dog because he can’t see.  People who say that don’t often see the smile of a dog on a walk. 

            The wind in
San Francisco right now is honestly wretched, at least in the Sunset.  It is clear blue skies outside, birds chirping and sun shining, but for the last few days I have walked outside in shorts and immediately felt my dick shrink into my body.  My plan today was to listen to that song that I downloaded while I walked Buddy, and trick myself into thinking that I wasn’t walking in tornado whipping winds at a very slow pace.

            I pressed play and the symphony began its soft introductory measures.  It was already putting me in a sanctuary of tolerability.  It wasn’t that my nuts weren’t freezing hard marbles, but it was the fact that it mattered less with the music in my ears.

            A girl passed by me with her rambunctious
Akita pup. 

            “Is your puppy nice?” she asked.  Even Buddy was astounded by this question. Puppy?  Here was a robust black dog, grey surrounding his whiskers, completely heaving for oxygen after having walked no more than one hundred yards from our house.  He walked slower than a woman suffering from vertigo while high on helium and wearing high heels.  Is your puppy nice?  Buddy turned his head in her general direction; his ears perked up, he thought he was looking at her, but he was looking about twenty feet up the streetlight that was a few steps to her right.

            I smiled gently at the girl, and her
Akita who was chomping at the bit to acquaint himself with Buddy.

            “This puppy is blind.”

            “Ohhhh…” she kind of sighed, like she was fascinated but also sorry she brought up a touchy subject. 

            “Oh.  Oh well.  You and your puppy have a nice day,” she said and strolled off with her
Akita, bounding with youthful bottomless excitement.  Buddy smiled, drooled as he panted a bit and continued down the sidewalk of Robert Louis Stevenson elementary school.  Kids were getting out of school and running to their mothers.  Puppy, I thought.

            “You hear what she called you, Bud?”

            He took a piss on a hedge, then stopped, built up some energy, and shifted his stiff legs into action as he clawed dirt behind him onto the spot he pissed.  He nervously looked around to see if anyone noticed, panted some more, and slowly began walking diagonally towards the street until I lightly tugged him in the right direction.     

            Puppy.  The wiry little puppy who would bring me his rawhide bone while I was trying to do fifth grade math homework, and drop that slobbered, dripping hunk right on the papers in font of me.  He would stand still, his tail furiously wagging, and look at me with his ears in the air and his head cocked to the side, thinking, “Try and take that bone from me.  Try.”  And I would drop my pencil and pick up the bone only to have him charge at me with his deep harmless growls and engage in tug-of-wars.  My family referred to these moments as “face to face with the beast.”            When he was young, he slept with me.  Well I slept on the floor with him for a long time.  I would fall asleep in an ideal position with the blanket in its entirety covering me, and Buddy to my side curled in an innocent ball.  I would wake up with the blanket off of me entirely, and entirely under Buddies head.  Buddy would no longer be in a cute little ball, the kind where they circle around thirteen times before they finally settle on their position, then lie down and tuck all their limbs under their body.  No, not that.  He would now be sprawled out across the entire floor, his head at my legs and his asshole in my face.  Trying to move his contented, deep-sleeping dead weight was like trying to move an aircraft carrier’s anchor. Puppy.            My parents were in a really horrendous argument one time.  It was just aggravating and almost sickening to hear them bicker back and forth, and I would cower every time their voices raised even louder.  Buddy hated it, so he got up and left the room and walked into the furthest room from them and lay down nervously in the furthest corner, like he was worried somehow after this human argument he would be banished.  When the argument got so turbulent that it was almost comical, it was evident that Buddy had endured enough of it.  He  tip-toed with his claws clicking slowly and softly on our floor, with his tail limp and ears flipped back cautiously, towards my parents.  He sat down right in the middle of them, waited, and released a long-lasting fart that sounded like the unzipping of an incredibly large zipper.  Buddy got up and walked back to his spot in the far room.  My parents had immediately forgotten the worthless topic over which they were raging at each other.              Once in the Trinity
Alps, way up in northern
California, me and Buddy were walking down a creek.  He was ahead, unable to contain his excitement in a place that was so ripe with natural  smells.  He would catch a smell, then stick his nose in the creek and try to continue tracking the scent.  Immediately thereafter he would come up, snorting and choking, only to repeat the process over and over and never learn.  So we were walking down the creek and I was right in the middle and the current got unusually strong in one particular spot, causing me to slip and fall directly on my back.  I looked in to the cloudless sky and lay there for a minute while the water of the creek rushed over my face.  I could hear faint splashes down the creek get louder and louder until Buddy was hovering directly over me, pawing me gently and whimpering at me.  He barked and pawed me some more, then barked and whimpered, wondering what he could possible do.  I told him it was O.K. and his tail was quickly a blur of wags.  When I was up again, he immediately forgot about the incident and continued snorting up the water and gagging on underwater scents.

            “He want to go school,” an asian women said at the entrance of Robert Louis Stevenson.  She was pointing at Buddy, who had stopped in his tracks and happened to be looking in the general direction of the sign that advertised “Sign your kid up!” for the upcoming school year.  He was stopped, lifeless, looking at that sign.  She quickly realized that the eerie way in which Buddy was staring at the sign could only mean that he wasn’t seeing anything at all. 

            “Yea, maybe I’ll sign him up,” I said.  Buddy refused to move.  He kept staring at the sign.  For all I knew he was envisioning a canine playboy convention.  Or maybe he was thinking of the exact same things I just was.  I don’t believe humans are the only creatures capable of nostalgia.

            “He want to be young again,” she said to me in reference to the frozen dog staring at the elementary school.

            St Matthew’s Passion by Bach had played in its entirety and I hadn’t listened to anything past the first five seconds.  Bach had not kept me warm on this walk like I thought he would have.  Something else did.   

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