Gus and Us -- Part Two

Adventures in Lonelyville

When you love a dog as we loved Gus our miniature schnauzer, the world is divided into those who share your love of dogs, the blessed who do, and the damned who don't. Our college friend Ted Flicker was of the first group, a fellow dog lover. He had directed and produced The Premise in Greenwich Village, one of the improvisational theatres that were precursors to Saturday Night Live; and he was later to become a Hollywood film director ("The President's Analyst"). In his New York days during the early sixties when these events took place, he was a genial, woman loving bachelor with an eye for comic talent. In Gus he recognized the genius of a Grock, the great Swiss clown, indeed there were hints that some long dead comic had taken up residence in our schnauzer.

Ted had rented for the month of July a beach house in a remote section of Fire Island aptly named Lonelyville. Clearly it was not a place to be alone so he invited us to join him for that month, assuring us that he looked forward to a few weeks catching up on our lives while tossing rubber balls and sticks to Gus during long walks on the beach. Here was a chance to spend time with an old friend, and for Gus to run free without car traffic, forbidden on the island. And it was one of those blazing hot city summers when you can think only of escape, so we eagerly accepted the invitation. Arriving on the ferry from Sayville we were met by Ted who placed our suitcases in a child's red metal wagon, making our way along a small boardwalk to the beach-house. Gus followed close behind, sniffing the sea air and chasing waves, but never so far behind that he wouldn't race to us if we were more than fifteen feet away. After my misadventure in New York when Gus was kidnapped, I now made sure that he was always in my line of sight, close by. We discovered miles of clean empty beach: high dunes covered with sea grass and gleaming poison oak. Gulls laid their eggs on the wide, isolated beach and then flying low, hovered over these eggs protectively waiting for the warm sand to hatch their chicks. What could be better than this with the endless blue Atlantic skies overhead?

Ted had also invited as a weekend guest a young actress friend to join him shortly after our arrival. We settled into the small second bedroom, and although the house was little better than a prefab shack with unreliable electric lights and a two burner stove, and a sofa bed in the living room, we determined that it would do wonderfully. The following day the attractive actress appeared with her dog Bran Muffin in her arms, a three year old Toy...Toy Ugly. This may appear to be a cruel appraisal of a hapless creature, but there are times when cruelty and reality are one, and no honest account can deny what the cold eye sees. No doubt about it; that dog looked like the spawn of a plucked kosher chicken and a pink Chihuahua, the chicken providing the more dominant genes. A panting black tongue hung out perpetually from the wide mouth, tiny bulging eyes no bigger than ball bearings surveyed the world with distrust, and that dog's bark came closer to an angry cluck than any known canine sound. BM, as she was so aptly called by the actress, had vomited copiously throughout the ferry ride that had brought them to Fire Island, and proceeded to have a bowel movement immediately upon her arrival in the small kitchen of our beach house, an event accompanied by much apologizing by the actress, an ostentatious display of wipe up with paper towels, and a somewhat poor performance of "I don't know what's gotten into her. She's never done that before!" This animal was a challenge to any dog lover, for if one could make room in your heart for BM you might well volunteer as an orderly in a leper colony, or ladle out rice and soup to the starving in the streets of Calcutta. And I was no such saint

Gus, who loved nearly every female dog who came without sight took an immediate dislike for Bran Muffin. She did nothing to mitigate his aversion. With her spindly legs, and her nervous, palsied tremble, one was inclined to pity her but pity soon turned to contempt, for she behaved like one who owned the world and owning it, thought poorly of her possession. When she was finally lowered down to the ground out of the actress's protective arms on to the beach, BM began shaking excitedly at the sight of the unfamiliar seagulls, as if the birds had been invented solely for her displeasure. She was only silenced by the doggie treats that her mistress fed to her continually from a large straw beach bag, which also served as travel carrier for BM. These treats were snapped at greedily, and failing to chew them, she threw them up with a speed that defied all known rules of the canine digestive processes. Her owner was affable enough, separated from her dog, although she kept sneaking glances at Joan, eyeing her with the suspicion that some actresses have for a great beauty who does not use that beauty for professional purposes. Quite simply she saw Joan as a damned fool who wasted her youthful good looks by not choosing the acting or modeling world, or using those looks to lure a rich husband, but most of all, for settling for a nobody like me. If the actress did not think that, then surely Bran Muffin did, for that dog regarded me with a contempt that I had only seen before in my own mirror on a bad day.

It was early evening and Joan was preparing a spaghetti and meatball dinner, a time when people still ate spaghetti by candle-light from dripping red candles stuck in empty Chianti bottles, when Bran Muffin decided to strike. It began gradually. She started by nipping away at his patience, first by seating herself on his cushion and starting to chew it, then by stalking him, sniffing his nether parts until he responded with the deepest growl that had ever issued from him. That warning sound did not stop BM who may have misjudged it as a fog horn rather than the earnest threat it was. Instead of regarding it as the end of Gus's monumental forbearance, she tried him even further by greedily gulping down her own dinner and beginning to sample his. When he attempted to stand between her and his bowl, she made a headlong attack on him. From then on it was all fur and fangs, a dog fight between two small animals who raced about, growling, snapping, barking, and biting with no end to the conflict in sight. The sound and the fury were spectacular. Although Gus had never been in a dogfight before, it was all too clear that BM, a serious bantam-weight contender, had been at odds with every passing dog she ever saw, waiting for this moment when she could unleash her fury on the astonished Gus. The actress knelt down to pull her dog away from the battle by BM's studded pink collar, only to pull the collar off, and have BM attack her, biting her wrist, and clinging to that wrist for dear life. Gus decided that there was some fun in this dog fight after all, if only he could only bite off BM's tail while she was distracted, her fangs fixed to her owner's wrist. He miscalculated. BM released her mistress's wrist long enough to leap at Gus's throat and draw serious blood.

There was nothing for it now but for Ted to take the spaghetti that was cooling inside the pot and toss it on the floor near the dogs - hoping to provide a distraction so that they could be separated. At least this was Ted's culinary solution for ending what now appeared to be a deadly battle. Most of the pasta landed on BM, who was shocked into pacifism by the warm tomato sauce with its cooling meatballs, but some of it splattered on Gus. I am shamed to admit that nobody offered comfort to the actress, or attempted to clean and sterilize her wounded wrist, or assuage the whimpering BM, now covered with spaghetti sauce and dripping water. Everyone ran to Gus to clean off the sauce and check out his injuries. Gus would be okay, but the same could not be said for our tremulous canine house guest whose nerves had taken on the pulsating rhythm of a Slinky Toy making its way down an immensely long flight of stairs, except that there were only two stairs leading from the shack to the beach.

The actress took the shaking BM for a walk along the empty beach to separate the combatants and gain a little peace for everyone. But peace was not in BM's horoscope for that day. Within moments we heard screams coming from the actress. Looking down at the beach we saw that BM had taken to sniffing at one of the gull's eggs in the sand, attempting to turn it over with her paw, and had succeeded in moving it ever so slightly in its sandy womb, as she prepared to crack its shell and enjoy it in the manner that the English upper class enjoy Plover's eggs at a hunt breakfast. At that very moment a pair of enraged parental seagulls swooped down at BM and started pecking at her in their effort to protect their un-hatched young. When the actress took the terrified dog into her arms, the gulls now regarded her as the ally of their enemy, the egg threatening BM, and they hovered over the young woman, swooping and screaming, as the actress herself, swooping and screaming raced towards the safety of the beach house to escape the enraged gulls. Hitchcock could not have done it better.

That very night Ted called the mainland and hired a helicopter to take the actress and BM off the island and back to Manhattan. We stood in awe as the chopper descended on the beach before us, landing within yards of the shack. Hiring a chopper was not the fortune that it would cost today, but still one of the extravagant, flamboyant gestures that Ted was capable of; gestures which the Puritan in me outwardly disapproved of but secretly admired. In this case, it was a rescue operation that could not be delayed. True, he did not have much choice. The ferries would not be running from Fire Island to the mainland for several hours. Six or seven more hours with BM? No price was too high to avoid that.

One last Gus adventure in Lonelyville: one that has metaphysical overtones; indeed, it may have had existential ramifications for the man involved, certainly epistemological ones, if I only knew what that meant. It happened on a Sunday, the last Sunday of our month long rental. Since the isolated Lonelyville was off the map for day trippers and thrill seekers there were few visitors, even on the weekends. No chance of gazing there at the sights for which Fire Island was then famous, a nude female swimmer her breasts flopping joyously in the waves, or two gay guys in a lip-locked embrace sharing a beach towel. You had to go to Ocean Beach, the Fire Island of legend for that kind of entertainment. Lonelyville was so isolated and uninhabited that you might not see another bather in a half hours walk, and for us that was its main charm. That was probably the reason that Mr. Can't Catch a Break, as I will call him, had chosen our isolated beach for his Sunday reading of the New York Times.

He was a man who represented all we had wanted to escape from in our young lives; a serious person of business who demanded respect and made sure to get it in his everyday life. Unlike the Yellens, or Flicker, all of whom wore sandals and bikinis on the beach, a sure sign of our San Tropez pretensions; this fellow had arrived within shouting distance of our shack in white socks, unlaced shiny black business shoes, plaid Bermuda shorts, and a Brooks Brothers shirt open to his slightly paunchy waist. His head was topped by a yachting cap hat that hid his face. What you mainly saw was a human blur, gleaming with protective Hawaiian sun-tan oil, his arms carrying both his New York Times, and his legal case load in his large black leather brief-case. He opened up a small portable beach chair and set it up at just the right distance from the water; close enough to admire the waves whose sound would tranquilize him after a tough week in the city, without risking a tidal tsunami that might engulf him and his legal papers.

Mr. Can't Catch a Break sat down in his beach chair, squeezed some Noxzema from a tube to protect his pale snub, freckle infested nose, sure now that his fair skin would suffer no burn from the untrustworthy summer sun. He opened his newspaper and began to read. He sat there for about fifteen minute - enjoying that splendid combination of Nirvana with Noxzema before Gus discovered him.

Now it cannot be stated often enough that Gus hated the horizontal in life. He found little of interest in anything that was not a building or a tree. He was very much a vertical loving dog. Once, during an extended stay in Los Angeles, we rented a place in Santa Monica Canyon, and he had gone on a urinary protest strike, refusing to pee until I drove him to the center of Westwood Village where he found the right kind of dog scents on trees and buildings among the shops and movie theatres.

The beach at Lonelyville was an exciting place for him with its gulls for chasing and its driftwood for chewing and shaking in his mouth, terriers like Gus can worry a stick like no other dog, pretending that they have captured a rat in a barn, a task for which they have been bred, but this beach lacked the city verticals and the scents so necessary to his acquired urban nature. You can probably guess what happened but it is worth summoning up the details in tribute to Gus. When Gus spied the man seated on his beach-chair, reading his Sunday Times, he approached the fellow excitedly, running as if he was greeting a long lost friend, hoping it might be one of my family, perhaps my sister Simi, or Joan's sister Linda with her new husband, George, all of whom were planning a visit. He soon saw that this was a stranger, not worth the greeting he had prepared, but why waste the windup of the run and compound his disappointment? He sprinted close to his quarry, lifted his leg, aimed at the vertical beach chair, and peed a long stream on the stranger. I had watched all this from our porch, uneasy to let Gus near a stranger after our recent dog-napping experience. But it was not Gus who was at risk now. I saw the look of dismay on the face of the unfortunate sun bather, and saw Gus run off delighted, back to our house. What had Can't Catch a Break done in another life, what bad karma had caused this to happen on this particular Sunday? One can only hope that it was a significant evil, some cruelty against the poor, or perhaps an angry kick at some dog for which he was now paying dearly. Flicker and I roared with laughter as I reported all the details of Gus's act. We congratulated Gus for his resourcefulness, but it was Joan who put a halt to our celebration.

"Can you even imagine what that man felt?" she asked, trying to shame us with a show of proper indignation. "He comes here seeking refuge from a world that metaphorically peed on him all week, and Gus literally does the deed on his chair and his arm. He must feel so unlucky. I would go over to him myself and apologize if I didn't think that..." here she paused..."I would die of laughter." In our young lives humor trumped all. And we didn't stop laughing at this and a thousand other things for that entire month, many inspired by the dog who clearly was Grock, the circus clown in another life.*

Abridged from Sherman Yellen's memoir, Spotless, a work in progress. Copyright 2008. The first part of Gus and Us can be found in Sherman Yellen's blog file on The Huffington Post. The concluding two parts will be published on The Huffington Post in the following weeks.

Comments

[madnana]

I have had up to five dogs of different sizes and temperaments at the same time plus a large foster dog. I am sixty and we are down to one elderly pit bull/brittany spaniel, one elderly cat, and one very fat middle-aged cat- plus various assorted fish tanks, toads and one anole lizard claimed (but not cared for) by the grandchildren. I too detest small, mean yappy dogs. But I fall prey to the love in the eyes of most dogs and can rarely resist petting one, if appropriate. Puppy breath (and baby toes) is still one of my favorite smells.
I am sorry for the man on the beach, If he could have taken his nose out of his newspaper long enough to greet Gus, I am quite sure Gus would have bestowed his attention upon him and permitted him the joy of so pleasing another inhabitant of this often lonely planet. I can't guaranteed Gus wouldn't have lifted his leg on his chair. What can I say about BM? Since dogs often resemble the people they live with, perhaps Ted was well-warned off from the actress. I bless Gus's memory. They are with us for too short a time.

[lungfish]

Thanks for sharing, Sherman...
For the majority of my life I had declared myself a cat-person. At times having as many as 8 or 9 of the beasties around. I learned their ways and recognized the beauty of their individuality. Then I learned to do it with reptiles and kept a small group of five Australian bearded dragons on the floor of my apartment, along with my cats. It was really fun and I was able to care for them all and maintain a home clean enough to attract a mate, Susan, who embraced them all as her family.
After 8-10 years of living this way Susan came home one day with Moe. A red-phase Queensland healer. Although he was a foundling he soon made his way into our hearts. Then along came Sarah, a pit bull puppy whom Susan rescued from certain death in the middle of a busy street. I was forced to learn dog ways and we raised and cared for Moe and Sarah - still living in Susan's home today. It was an education that I will never regret.
One day, here in Hawaii years after Sue and I parted ways, I was driving down the road and saw a starving and clearly suffering dog. I stopped to see what was up, and took her home. Now I have a companion that is joyful and bright and makes every day a little happier.
I can only shake my head and hope that those who are too closed to learn the simple lessons about other creatures find a way to open their hearts to someone else because there is somebody inside those four legged, hairy little bodies and it is often well worth getting to know them...
Thanks again for sharing.

[homesteader]

Never had a dog that would do that.

A cat, yes. When she got P.O.'d at me. Quite literally.