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Johnny Too Good

I’m reading John Dufresne’s short story collection, Johnny Too Bad. The main character in the collection, Johnny, owns a dog that reappears in many of the stories. His name is Spot.  Spot is incorrigible; he’s exuberant, destructive, and nearly human in his reactions to his master.  I love Spot. 

Even though I admit to not having seen Marley and Me, I’m a sucker for dog stories.  I’m not alone.  I found out that readers have strong reactions to dog stories when I included a bulldog named Bob in Right As Rain. I suffered a barrage of anger from my readers when I killed him off with a shotgun.  The reason I ended Bob’s life was my dad.  He’d told me about how he was forced to kill his own dog. And the reason I named him Bob, was that was the name Dad had given to the real life Bob.  “Blame my father,” I tell my readers.

 Perhaps one of the reasons I like sweet dog stories is that dogs have not fared well in my family. My first dog, Pee Wee, was a mixed-breed, brown and white short-haired dog. A small mutt that my brother and I decided to bathe one winter day.  Before she left for the grocery store, Mother warned us, not to bathe Pee Wee.  “It’s too cold,” she said.  “He’ll catch his death.”  Unsure of how one actually catches death, we decided to lather him up anyway.  Mother was right; Pee Wee shook, his body rotated like an egg beater.  We had to get him warm.  But where was a warm place for him?  Of course.  The oven.  We wrapped Pee Wee in a towel, placed him on the middle rack, and turned the dial to bake.  Within minutes Bobby Prescott knocked on the door with an armful of new comic books.  Sluggo and Nancy included.  Absorbed in great literature, we forgot about Pee Wee . . . until Mother came home.  “What’s that smell?” she screamed. Pee Wee lived, but Jim and I were deemed unfit for dog ownership and Pee Wee went to live on my grandfather’s farm where no one made him bathe even once. 

As the calendar pages flipped as fast as they do in the old movies to show the passage of time, so the years passed and my husband’s desire to own a dog escalated.  When daughter Angela was three, Butch insisted she needed a dog.  Katie was half poodle and half some kind of terrier.  Coal black, tiny, and abused daily by Angela who threw her down stairs, adorned her with plastic barrettes in painful places, and once played dentist and patient with her using scissors for the drill. Despite the violence in her home, Katie was a happy dog who may have thought she was a cat as she would only eat cat food.  Hated Purina Chow.  But Katie was lonely and one day Angela came home with a small stuffed poodle that greatly resembled Katie, who instantly recognized her as her own offspring.  She adopted the artificial dog and was as good a parent to it as any foster parent could be.  Each morning with Baby in her mouth she’d stand patiently at the glass back door until someone opened it for her.  She’d deposit Baby on the lawn to bask her fake fur in the sunny day.  If thunder sounded, Katie was frantic to get Baby inside.  Every night she returned Baby to lie beside her in her bed.  We occasionally had friends over and then Katie would fetch Baby and take it to each guest one by one like a mother showing off her newborn. There’s an antagonist in this story. The dog next door, named Gracie. She was insanely jealous of Katie’s baby.  Gracie was just about the ugliest dog I’ve ever known and her only talent was to chew gum dramatically by tossing it from side to side in her mouth.  A good trick, but Gracie could never rise to the heights of cuteness as Katie and her baby.  One fall day we left the house with Katie inside, Baby outside.  When I returned, the phone was ringing.  It was Penny, Gracie’s owner.  She was crying.  “I have terrible news.  Gracie has killed Katie’s baby. I found pieces of her all over the garage.  She must have snuck over there and stolen her when no one was around.”  Katie grieved.  She looked for Baby for days.  Under the couch, beneath tables, every square inch of the yard she covered with a sorrowful look on her face, and a whimper that haunted all of our dreams.  But dogs are resilient; Katie eventually recovered and lived on to hang herself on a tree vine when she was nearly 20 years old.

We weren’t there to witness Katie’s funeral and burial.  We were living in England and Katie had stayed with Butch’s brother, Jim, because we figured the six month quarantine the British required for foreign dogs would be too difficult for a dog her age.  I did attend my mother’s funeral in November of 1988, and after I returned to our little RAF home in Mildenhall, Butch thought a dog would be the perfect Christmas present for Angela.  That’s when Lance of Suffolk came into our lives.  Lance was a White West Highland Terrier, one of those dogs that Pedigree brand dog food uses for its model. Black eyes, white fluff around the face, cocked head, adorable. Lance was our first pedigree dog, and we quickly learned that blood tells all.  For starters Lance never understood that he was a canine, and not a human.  He slept on Angela’s bed with his head on a pillow, sheet pulled up to his neck.  When he arose, he headed for the bathroom, backed up to align with the toilet seat and let her rip.  Then he’d wait for his cup of water and toothbrush, and using his paws, he’d leverage the brush on the cup and shine his teeth to gleaming.  Lance was the smartest dog we’d ever had, and the most arrogant and manipulative non-human alive.  He was snooty to other dogs, eschewing their company, territorial to the point of paranoia.  Angela grew up and stated her intentions to take Lance with her when she moved to her long dreamed of apartment.  We’d need another dog.  We advertised for a mate, pedigree of course.  Shasta was the contestant number one.  Lance wasn’t all that interested, but Shasta was, and she was persistent.  After a couple of days, Lance finally succumbed to pressure and commenced to perform his duty.  I, however, didn’t understand the actual process of procreation between dogs, thought they’d gotten stuck, something gone horribly wrong, and screaming walked them hooked together into the house calling for help.  Traumatized, the dogs shivered and hid until Shasta’s owner came to retrieve and calm her.  “Shasta wasn’t good enough for Lance anyway,” I told Butch.  “We should look for a cuter dog worthy of him.”  That was Misty.  Misty was gorgeous.  Misty was frisky, flirty, funny, everything a suitor could want.  Lance ignored her.  He may have even hated her.  She tried every trick in her dog seduction book but it was all wasted on Lance.  Perhaps it was because Misty was trying to sleep on my bed, eat out of his dish.  She had usurped Lance’s turf.  We’d take them to the vet for neutral lovemaking ground.  After days I got the call from the vet.  “Every dog in our clinic is lusting for Misty, except Lance.  He may well be gay.”  It was my fault, of course.  I’d turned him homosexual.  “What can we do?” I asked.  “Artificial insemination is the only choice.”  I did not want to know how this was achieved, but success came.  Misty was pregnant. 

So Andrew of Suffolk came to live with us.  Andy did not get even one of Lance’s intelligent genes.  A dumber dog I have never known.  If Andy was thirty feet away in our next door neighbor’s yard, he hadn’t a clue of how to get home.  On really hot days, we’d allow the dogs in the pool to cool off.  After his refreshing dip, Lance would swim straight to the steps and get out just as we did.  After twenty or so dips in the pool, Andy never figured out where the steps were and would swim to the side frantically scratching for rescue.  Lance made sure he was rescued, running up and down the patio anxiously awaiting his son’s emergence to dry land.  Occasionally, Andy would run away from home.  He loved adventure and was welcomed to many a home of dog lovers.  They’d tell us he ate their food, slept in their doghouses, seemed happy to watch TV with the family.  When Andy would return home, Lance would scold him.  He’s put one paw on Andy’s back and whap away with the other.  Lance was a good daddy.  He was also the Alpha dog, and each morning when two water bowls and food bowls appeared, Andy would sit back and wait for Lance to choose one, and only after Lance picked, would Andy even go near his breakfast.  Of course, the life cycle applies to dogs as well as humans, and most parents expect their demise, hopefully, before their children.  When Lance died, we couldn’t get Andy to eat.  He’d sit back waiting for Lance to choose even though there was only one bowl.  It took a long time of coaxing before Andy finally understood that he was going to have to learn to think for himself. 

Andy died of old age, too, but by then we had a grandson Chess, who joined us in our grief.  Both Lance and Andy were cremated and sit on the mantel in my grandson and daughter’s living room today.  Chess wanted another dog.  “No, you’re in school; your mother works.  You can’t take care of a dog properly.”  Chess, who is nearly as smart as Lance was, asked for a virtual dog.  I didn’t know what one was, but virtual sounded better than real to me.  Chess named the virtual dog, a golden retriever, Landy . . . a combination of Lance and Andy’s names.  The mate he bought was Landra.  Pretty cute I think.  Virtual dogs don’t return your love, of course . . . and in my opinion are much like e-books.  Unsatisfying.  So my daughter brought home another dog, which returns me to John Dufresne’s short story collection.

Chess named the dog Spot.  Why? I asked. “Because he has a spot on his back.”  He does indeed have a spot which you can see once and a while when he’s not in motion and a blur to the human eye.  Like Dufresne’s Spot, Chess’s spot is incorrigible, exuberant, destructive, and nearly human in his reactions to everyone in the family.   I do not love him.  I do not like him. I dread his visits to my yard.  And yet.  And yet there’s something about Spot that appeals to me, and until now, reading about Dufresne’s Spot, I never understood what.  I have witnessed Spot eating foam ear plugs, plastic cups, bugs of every description, cigarette butts, half of a Frisbee, a plastic tablecloth, one tennis ball, and three golf balls.  I have also witnessed him leaping four feet into the air to land on his back on concrete. and immediately without one whimper, leap up for another crash landing.  Spot is indestructible.  He is half blue-heeler and half Jack Russell and if that doesn’t tell you something, you don’t know your dog breeds.  He’s cute, he smiles a lot, but who wouldn’t knowing they’re practically immortal? 

I suppose the point to all this saccharine reminiscing about the dogs we’ve owned is that it makes me think about the power of literature.  When John Dufresne wrote Johnny Too Bad, I’m certain he had no intention of becoming the catalyst and inspiration for this long journal entry.  But here he is, and here I am believing in the power of words.  They inspire us to create, they are gifts to readers like me, they evoke the past, we connect through them.  Our stories are the bridges between the banks of our differences and they unite us as sentient beings.  Thank you, John.