More Dog Stuff

                 Job Description

When I drove to the puppy farm

just south of Ngaruawahia

in response to a classified ad

for cheap fox terrier puppies,

and strolled into the shed where they were,

a particularly enthusiastic ball of spotted whiteness

zoomed up to me.

I scooped the pup up

and she licked each of my ears in turn.

She had the job.

Almost eleven and a half years later,

as I was composing this verse,

whenever she got up on my lap

she still made the perfunctory gesture

of giving each ear a tiny lick –

or at least almost.

That was, after all, how she got the job,

and although she never knew

whether it really was a good thing

for her to get the damn job,

she did know that it was her job,

and she did it.

  

                               Sticks

One morning at the dog exercise park

I saw an obese young bloke,

maybe 25 or 30,

wearing skaties,

with a bland-looking sidekick.

The blob was pretending

to throw sticks into the river

so their dogs would swim out looking for them,

and he was shouting disparagingly and abusively

at the dogs

to get those nonexistent sticks.

That was a fucked-up game,

played by a fucked-up arsehole.

It failed all the reasons for playing stick,

which I know from extensive experience

over many years

are to provide exercise for both dog and human,

to provide the dog with multiple opportunities

for self-actualisation by combining with the chased object

whilst providing the human with the joy of helping it to do so,

and to provide the experience of

interspecies communication, cooperation, sharing, and trust.

The porcine shithead was chortling

with an ugly, disgusting attitude

of superiority and self-satisfaction

about his ability to fool dogs

who trusted him.

He seemed to be thinking, proudly,

that he was outsmarting them.

The sidekick said hi to me

as I walked by.

I didn’t answer.

I’m conflict-averse.

            15 August 2011, 9:15 am

For the first time ever

I wimped out at the park

and cut short the canine's excursion.

The wind chill factor was -4^o C,

we were walking into a 40 kph southwesterly with gusts,

the website told me when I got home,

of up to 56 kph, when a fine but heavy mist

started blowing into my face.

I knew it'd be folly to open the brolly,

so I turned tail and called for my dog,

who seemed to be enjoying the conditions,

to come on!

When we got home I collected the recycling bin from the kerb

and my hands felt frozen

for about ten minutes

after entering the house.

I should’ve worn my oilskin and my gardening gloves, eh?.

                         Somalis and Dogs

Living near my city’s only mosque

I also live near many Somali families.

Walking my dog around the neighbourhood

every afternoon when she was alive

I received frequent reminders

of Somalis’ less-than-positive attitudes towards dogs.

This is partly because Islam teaches that dogs are haraam, or unclean,

right up there with shit and piss and cadavers and swine,

but I think it may be more than that.

Someone told me that people used dogs as weapons

during Somalia’s 1993 civil war,

but I can’t google up any support for this,

although I’m a dab hand at googling.

Still, from time to time small Somali-Kiwi children

approached us timorously and asked,

“Mister, does your dog bite?”

And once one of those elderly Somali religious nuts

wearing a long robe – called a jellabiya,

an embroidered fez – called a koofiyad

(I just googled them up), sandals,

and a beard dyed reddish-orange with henna,

as the Prophet is supposed to have done with his,

attacked my harmless little fox terrier with his cane – jab-jab-jab!

Although I respect other people’s right to embrace

their traditional cultures and beliefs,

the old fart was lucky that she was too quick for him.

              Dog-Brain Ones and Zeros

When we hit the mouth of the driveway,

and instead of turning right,

which meant going through a bit of the hood

and then around the park,

we turned left, which meant going to Martin’s house,

at least inside my fox terrier Rhonda’s dog brain,

she became a dog on a mission.

Unlike our turn-right walkies,

she was out in front and dragging me by the lead,

and didn’t stop to sniff at something sniffable

every few metres.

Going to Martin’s house, you see,

meant stealing cat food from Martin’s cat Pepper,

something that clearly meant heaps to Rhonda.

Martin being often not at home

his house being locked up when we got there –

as had been the case the past five times as I composed this –

did nothing to reduce her keenness.

On the way back home, of course,

I had to drag her.

             Dog Farts

I know that they’re innocent

and intrinsically funny,

but when Rhonda farted

when she was on my lap

I had to shove her to the floor.

          No Embarrassment Here

I adopted a nine-year-old male dog.

He pees like a girl.

I don’t see how this constitutes a problem, though.

It certainly doesn’t bother him,

and it’s certainly no skin off my arse, either.

                          In the Balance?

A short, wiry, ragged-looking man missing most of his teeth,

his arms covered with inartistic, dangerous-looking black tattoos,

walked along the Victoria Street footpath

with a precious baby puppy – maybe six weeks old –

cradled against his chest under one arm,

its eyes closed and its face full of trust.

The man’s facial expression was much more complex.

In the moment I had to see it as we passed each other,

I received impressions of, among other things,

emotional pain, repressed violence, wavering self-control,

and a sort of defensive tenderness.

It was completely unclear to me whether

the man would eventually transfer his anger to the dog,

or allow the dog’s unconditional trust and love,

perhaps the first the man had ever experienced –

I had no way of knowing –

transfer its sweetness to him.

Urban Life

                          Christmas In May

She had her tinny little electric keyboard thingy

set up on the footpath on Victoria Street

that cool and hazy May afternoon.

I like buskers, so I thought I’d go up and listen,

maybe make a request.

I thought that for a keyboard a good request would be

‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’.

Good, old-timey stuff, y’know.

As I approached I was able to focus better through my cataracts,

and I saw that although her facial features

were regular and well-proportioned,

they were tight and pinched and serious and disapproving,

as if she were sitting in a non-dispersing cloud of a sour fart,

her beautifully strawberry-blond hair

tied back tightly in a skimpy ponytail.

She was playing a Christmas carol,

‘The first Noël’

over and over again,

in May,

her scrunched-up scowl frozen in place.

I decided against asking her to play some Jerry Lee Lewis.

When I walked by in the other direction

a half an hour or so later

she was gone.

Literally this time, rather than figuratively, as before.

                      Fairfield Shops

There they stood,

just outside the dairy

at Heaphy Terrace

and Howden Road,

both of them young women,

in their early twenties, I’d say.

One seemed to be Maori

and was wearing cut-offs and a heavy-metal t-shirt.

The other had Middle-Eastern features

and was wearing an Islamic headscarf

and multicoloured hijab clothing

that covered her from her chin to the footpath,

except for her hands.

There they stood,

eating ice cream and laughing together,

chatting the way that people

who’ve been close friends for years chat.

I felt cheated because I’ll never know their story.

                    Rangi on the Bridge

They were three abreast on the narrow footpath,

basically blocking it,

unsmooth-looking men in their late thirties,

at about the same spot where I’d come to grief

the last time I’d crossed the bridge in that direction

four-and-a-half weeks earlier.

The one on the bicycle, though,

pulled away and smiled a good-morning at me as he went by.

As I passed the other two I nodded, ‘Hey,’

and heard the shorter one say, ‘Richard.’

I turned around

and heard him say

to the medium-sized one with the round head and face,

‘Mr Selinkoff.’

Then he turned and faced me and we shook hands.

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘Ummm …’

‘I’m Rangi.’

And I saw the resemblance,

despite the lines on his face and the scraggly beard,

to the skinny little kid in my third-form English class

and junior basketball team

at Otorohanga College 24 years earlier.

His nana had been my postie.

‘Damn, Rangi,’ I said, ‘you sure aren’t thirteen anymore, are you?’

He laughed and we walked off in our separate directions.

Not being 43 anymore, I couldn’t recall his surname.

  Suburban Bunny Encounter

I thought it was a cat at first

in the half-light of dawn,

but when, strolling along,

I came closer to it

I saw that it was a rabbit

there on the Winter Street footpath.

My instant response,

an urge to kill it,

surprised and shocked me,

and I suppressed it instantly.

From what primeval

part of my brain

that bunnicidal reaction emerged

I’ll never know.

Apparently unconcerned by my approach

the rabbit

turned unhurriedly

into a driveway

and hopped past the hedge

toward a house

as if it knew

where it was going.

        Recognising Achievement

He was a sullen-looking kid,

maybe eighteen or nineteen,

working behind the display chiller

in the supermarket’s seafood section.

When he saw that I was waiting for service

he just short of glowered at me

and muttered something unintelligible.

I ordered a hundred grams of marinara mix.

He grabbed a small pottle,

spooned some of the mix into it,

and weighed it: 98 grams.

‘Hey!’ I said, definitely impressed,

‘That was really skilful!’

An enormous, happy smile spread over his face.

‘Nah,’ he said, ‘it was just luck.’

We smiled at each other for another moment

and then I was off to pick up some soy milk.

                                  Good Legs

Neither one of them noticed me.

I was just a harmless old man in the background

who looked as if he’d be worthless in a dust-up,

which is what I was.

The bloke, who was in heavy-metal drag,

came up behind the young woman,

who was wearing lycra work-out shorts,

while she was pushing keys at the ATM

and said, ‘Hey sheila, you got some good legs!’

She turned around and half-smiled and said,

‘Yeah. They keep me from bouncing along the footpath on my arse

and let me reach the money machine,

which I’m trying to concentrate on without being disturbed.’

He replied, ‘Y’know, you have a really cute smile,’

and reached a hand out toward her hip.

Her right uppercut sank wrist-deep into his gut –

or that’s the way it seemed to me,

my view being partially obstructed –

and a whole lot of air oomfed rapidly out of his mouth

in the instant before her high martial-arts kick

caught him just below the ear,

making him collapse in a heap.

‘Yep, good legs, eh?’ she said. ‘You bet,’

before finishing her business and walking away.

Neither had noticed me and I hadn’t said a word.

I walked around the man, who was struggling to his knees,

and used the ATM to get the twenty dollars cash

I needed to buy a tinny.

At my advanced age I find that this is a world

that I can appreciate better

moment by moment from the perspective

of a somewhat odd angle.

                     The Hols

If you want my opinion,

and it’s unlikely that you do,

the school holidays suck.

It’s not just that I couldn’t find a car park

at Chartwell Square when I went to renew my car’s rego,

or that the municipal natatorium

(look it up)

is overcrowded,

or that the burglary rate goes through the roof –

the worst thing

is that my beloved city

becomes increasingly fraught with ugliness

as the hols drag on

and those hideously reptilian,

egomaniacally sociopathic

pubescent children,

go swaggering along the footpaths

in their tedious uniforms

with time on their hands,

and cans of spray paint under their hoodies,

and raise the level of tagging from disgusting to disheartening,

lowering my quality of life

by exposing me to huge expanses

of public, dimwitted ugliness.

I want to spray-paint their bedrooms.

                 A Vocation Discovered

After I’d crossed Heaphy Terrace with my dog,

but before we’d crossed the footpath into the park,

a young bloke, maybe twenty or so years old,

with a decidedly downmarket self-presentation,

centring on bad and missing teeth

approached us on his beat-up old bike,

slowed down, and exchanged greetings with me.

He clearly wanted to chat.

This happens from time to time,

the conversations usually ending with an appeal for funds.

This bloke was different.

He was excited and wanted to share.

He told me that what he does is take care of old people.

I replied that I thought this was cool,

being an old person myself.

He went on to regale me with an account

of an incident the previous evening

when, just after dark, he’d spotted a ‘couple of young fellas’

at the far corner of the park

mugging an old fella in a mobility scooter.

Well, actually, he didn’t really know the term ‘mobility scooter’,

but we got there.

They’d knocked the codger off his machine

by the time my raconteur arrived like the bicycle cavalry;

he’d fought them off and then helped the old guy on his way.

We continued talking, him walking his bike and adding details.

He told me not to worry;

he was going to help old people cross the park after dark

from then on.

I told him I thought that was a really nice thing.

I haven’t seen him since.

More Actual People

                                 Bobby Bunting

When I was nine my mother, from time to time,

dumped me off with strangers,

one of them being one of my recently deceased father’s patients

who lived fairly close by

and had a boy about my age

named Bobby.

The first time I was there

Bobby invited me to go down to play in the cellar.

Sure. Why not? Cellars and basements can be fun places.

It was wash day, and Bobby matter-of-factly

went to play in the newly washed clothes and stuff.

I thought this was odd,

and glanced somewhat longingly

at all the cellar-appropriate junk here and there,

but was curious about this clean-clothes game.

It involved dressing up.

It involved dressing up in his mother’s undergarments.

I didn’t think that was much fun, but he did.

The second time my mother dropped me off there was another washday,

and Bobby took me down to the cellar again to play.

The same game.

It didn’t make sense to me, and I asked my mother about it later.

It was the last time she took me there to play.

That was in early 1956. As Bobby grew older,

I hope he managed not to learn to hate himself.

I hope he managed to avoid serious bashings.

I hope he managed societal disapproval with style.

I hope he managed latex girdles’ fall from fashion in the 1970s

without undue inconvenience.

I hope frilly, satiny ladies’ undies, bras, stockings, and such

have brought him life-long fulfilment.

          Isabel

I was seventeen.

I’d been drinking

raw local rum

for hours, it seemed,

dancing through the streets

of Christiansted,

even cluelessly trying to play

a steel drum myself

for a while after a Cruzan

slung its strap around my neck

so he could concentrate

on the rum.

Then a shortish, blond-haired girl

with a round, spotty face

dancing between

two huge Cruzan men

somehow induced me

to join them –

I don’t remember how.

Later we descended

to a below-street-level bar

to drink better rum.

Her name was Isabel.

She lived in DC,

where I was going to uni soon.

Contact info changed hands.

When sober I learnt

that her father,

Count Knuth-Winterfeldt,

was the Danish Ambassador

to the US, and the two Cruzans

were her police bodyguards.

We had fun for about a year,

hanging around the embassy,

raiding its kitchen for snacks

and plenty of Danish beer

before diplomatic functions –

friends but not lovers.

She invited me

to embassy young-people parties,

where I hung out with nobs.

Then the Danish government

transferred her dad to Paris

and I hung out with nobs no more.

About 45 years later

we reconnected on facebook.

A countess herself by that time,

she was running an equestrian school

in the mountains

of southern Spain,

a particularly healthy outdoor lifestyle,

judging by the posted photos.

We became compadres again,

both of us dog people –

a strange but good friendship,

despite living, as I googled it,

at almost exactly the opposite

sides of the Earth.

Then, the day before

her sixty-seventh birthday,

one of her daughters

posted a status on facebook

saying that she’d died –

no explanation included

or cause of death mentioned.

She was only a few months

older than me.

                       Zoe Watt

I was maybe nineteen or twenty

the first time I met a stripper.

She was a friend of one of my fellow stoner students

who took me to her apartment to get stoned.

She was about the same age we were,

and really gorgeous, of course,

but in her t-shirt and jeans just another hippie, really,

and despite being light years more mature than I was

she treated me just like a friend

as we sat there toking in her kitchen.

That impressed me.

Her stage name was Zoe Watt.

That impressed me even more.

I never saw her again,

and I never saw her dance.

I wonder if the sophisticates

who frequented the downmarket clubs where she worked

appreciated how the beauty of that name

enhanced her physical beauty.

           Hank & Me & La Hondureña

I’ve met a few noted poets,

but been friends with only one.

An ex-groupie junkie friend of mine

had a groupie friend from her groupie days

who somehow had a connection

with Bukowski.

My friend knew how much I loved Bukowski’s prose

and wangled me an invite.

Hank and I –

the ‘Charles’ was just for print –

drank beer together

two or three nights a week

from March through August 1972.

He gave me some good advice:

“It’s all mateerial, baby,”

“Wine’s the best thing to drink when you’re broke,”

and some bad:

“She dumped you? Go over and hit her.” (I didn’t.)

Then I got a roadie job with a management company

that ran club tours headlined by

has-beens and C-listers-who’d-been-on-TV,

and fell in love with a Honduran woman

who was the desk clerk who checked us in at the Sheraton Biloxi,

where we played the penthouse ballroom.

After my employers went belly up we moved into New Orleans,

where we got married and I found out that she suffered

from schizophrenia.

She destroyed my address book,

cutting me off from contact with Hank.

Mental illness doomed that marriage, of course,

and in the decades since I’ve bounced around,

any chance of really connecting

with anyone else

being really only a doomed illusion.

Thanks, Hank – you lived longer than you had any right to,

and I’ll live longer than I really want.

                   Police Authority

He was fairly tall and not all that old,

but his face was sagging prematurely,

accentuated by a pale, thin, drooping moustache,

thin, straight, colourless hair

hanging lank to below his collar,

and his gently paunchy body

sloping down from narrow shoulders.

He played drums in a working band from Indiana

that at the time was backing

a zoftig, forty-something chick singer

who seemed to exude all the desperate flashiness

and bourgeois vulgarity masquerading as hipness

that stereotypes everyday Las Vegas.

He told us in his soft voice

over beer and doobies

about how as a teenager

he’d enlisted in the Air Force

because he’d wanted to play in the Air Force Band.

They’d assigned him to the Air Police instead.

Almost as if in a daze, he recalled how,

before his first police patrol of an air force base,

he’d donned the white helmet,

Sam Browne belt,

holstered handgun, billy club,

and white armband with “AP” on it:

“It was against my will,”

he told us with his voice almost quavering,

“I didn’t want to, but so help me,

I swaggered.”

                       Two Texas Women

Cheryl came from Clarendon, a tiny two-horse town

out in the Panhandle, about 60 miles from Amarillo

as the pickup rattles.

She had that twanging-banjo West Texas accent

accentuated by a voice that’d shatter glass.

Her grandfather – or maybe it was great-grandfather –

was John Wesley Hardin, the legendary outlaw.

She was a serious alcoholic

and prided herself

in being able to drink me under the table.

By profession she was an on-the-ground

disaster relief provider with the Red Cross –

tents, blankets, bottled water – that sort of thing

for victims of tornadoes, hurricanes, floods – that sort of thing.

She’d seen my picture in the paper,

was breaking up with the man she’d been living with,

and had asked her next-door neighbour,

who worked at the paper and was a close friend of mine,

for an introduction.

Cindy came from New Braunfels in the Texas Hill Country,

a tall, blond ex-cop with big, strong hands,

having left law-enforcement

to work in a department store

to which I sold newspaper advertisements.

She told me that the best thing about being a cop

had been working the night shift

and ripping off drunk drivers for their weed.

She admired the way I drove,

from her professional perspective.

Early one evening I was expecting the ex-cop

when the outlaw’s progeny came by

to give me a kitten.

That was the end of it with both of them.

                          The Wisdom of Al

He’d been an adventurer,

a teen-aged pilot in the Amazon in the 1930s

and then a combat pilot in the Pacific Theatre.

He’d worked as a reconstruction quantity surveyor in the Occupation,

became fluent in Japanese,

then became involved with the, um, State Department,

who arranged for him to become fluent in Russian.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis he worked as a translator

of intercepted Russian military radio messages,

amused by the Russian pilots’ penchant for singing lewd songs over the air.

Of course he was in Vietnam,

living with some hill tribes along the Laotian border,

providing the US with quantity-surveyor information

about materials the villages needed for fortifications and so on,

learning their languages,

and, in order to secure their confidence,

marrying the women each offered him

(but not telling this to his Irish-Catholic wife during visits back home).

He was himself a secular humanist and a closet socialist.

After retiring he went back to school and became a teacher,

eventually teaching world history, Japanese, and Russian

to high-school kids who were absolutely unable

to recognise how cool he was.

I did my student teaching in the next room.

We became great friends, and I spent some time chilling with him

at his comfortable house in the country.

He tried to steer his luscious daughter in my direction,

but she was married to the Navy, for which she piloted helicopters.

He was addicted to gummy bears,

and by his mid-sixties had put on some weight.

Referring to this, he told me, “Y’know Richard,

men my age tend to get fatter and fatter,

until, of course, they get cancer,

after which they get skinnier and skinnier,

and then, just when they start looking good again,

they die.”

Saying this made him chuckle with impishly twinkling Irish eyes.

                   Gangsters to God

The last season that I coached basketball,

some time in the late nineties,

I struggled with Hamilton Girls’ High School’s

team in the local premiere league.

Once, when I was driving three players

to a tournament in Rotorua,

as my contribution to the car pool,

they played gangsta rap on a boombox

the entire way there.

No ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ for them.

“It’s what,” the point guard explained, “gets our juices going.”

Well then, okay.

About a dozen or so years later

that point guard and her three children

moved into a place in Claudelands,

and I began seeing them around the ’hood.

She was always smiling and friendly,

as if we were old mates, when I did.

Her oldest boy had a job delivering something on his bike,

and she often helped him,

or serviced his route when he didn’t do it,

peddling her bike when she did

with glossy, athletic legs that emerged from white short shorts.

She almost always stopped to chat with me,

her smiling, full-lipped mouth distracting my attention

from those somewhat-less-than-half-my-age legs.

The major problem was that she’d found Jesus – fanatically,

and after I politely declined to see her boy’s performance

in her church’s xmas pageant,

even though she’d brought him by my house

to invite me personally,

she stopped dropping by.