What am I Now?

My face feels like it's trying to crawl away. I haven't eaten. Not for awhile. I lie on the couch and screw my head into the cushions. Grind it in good and tight. My dog, an overweight Sheep Hound, makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich in the kitchen. The smell stinks up our apartment.

He started off by pawing Morse code onto the pavement. This worked out great as I have never learned nor do I intend to learn Morse code. As a matter of fact, fuck Morse code! If not for the infernal simplicity of Morse code, this whole fiasco might have been avoided, or at least put off for awhile longer. Dashes, dots... you can tell when someone is trying to use Morse code. Granted, hearing it come from a dog is quite startling at first. Certainly there is going to be denial. I mean, I knew for a few months that my dog was trying to communicate with me, I just didn't care. And honestly, I still think he's kind of bitter about it. But can you blame me? I never asked for a talking dog. Hell, I never even asked for a dog. I only ever walked the thing because I didn't want it shitting in the apartment. I'm very sensitive to smell.

There's this French psycho that works for the apartment complex my dog and I live in. In his current life the Frenchman is responsible for all repairs that have to be made to my apartment: electricity, plumbing, all that junk. In his former life the Frenchman had supposedly been on some ship on some island during some conflict somewhere. A Navy man. I think his story is horseshit. He's a total pirate wannabe: leathery skin, scowling all the time, rag on his head, shoes with buckles on them. He even drinks grog! But at the same time, he's the guy who checks for parking passes in my parking lot. The guy is a sham.

So one day I'm walking my dog and smoking a butt. The Frenchman runs up to me shouting. Arms all flailing-like. I brace myself for something crazy. Some half-pirate Frenchman onslaught. But he's shouting about my dog. I look down. Lo and behold the stupid bastard is smoldering beneath a glowing raisin-sized ember I must have inadvertently ashed onto his back. Now if he'd have just been a normal fucking dog and howled or something, I'd have known, right? Nah. Not my rotten dog. He's sitting there slapping and scraping his paws against the pavement while my ember singes the shit out of his backside and I drag his stupid ass along the pavement. (He still has a place on his rear end where the fur won't grow. I call it his ashtray. My dog hates it when I mention his ashtray.)

Once I realized he was on fire, I extinguished my dog. The psycho Navy Frenchman asshole is ranting about the Morse code my dog was hammering out on the pavement. I guess he'd heard my dog's paws pounding out a distress call from around the corner. The guy has nothing better to do so he must've just jumped to attention. He tells me my dog is a genius and that I am very lucky. I tell him oh gee thanks yeah Morse code great stuff. If you asked me to pinpoint the specific day on which my life as a human being began to end, I'd likely say this was it.

Looking back on it, the Morse code was a blessing. So long as my dog could only communicate via Morse code, I never had to know what he was saying. But soon after he began to speak orally – fluent English, no less. A few nights ago, my dog actually spoke in Spanish. I can't even speak Spanish. I failed it in high school – twice. And yet, we went to the bar and I could hear my dog Spanish-ing away with the locals and shooting pool while I stewed in warm rum and coke.

Everyone thought it was great. Talking dog? Hell yes! People liked calling him Pig Fucker in an eclectic-and-offensive-at-the-same-time-dog-name sort of way, you know? I call him Pig Fucker too. His name is Pig Fucker, however when I gave him the name I meant it in a more I-hate-you-so-I'll-give-you-a-shitty-name sort of way. My dog speaks Spanish and sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, I have trouble finding a reason to climb out of bed.

Once I took him to the mall to try and find a pair of sneakers. Somehow, he'd gotten it into his head that it wasn't proper for a guy to be wandering around town barefoot, canine or no. I told him to put plastic bags on his feet and to keep them tight with rubber bands. My dog asked me if I would wear plastic bags on my feet. I told him no, because I'm not a fucking dog. He told me that I was the Pig Fucker, not he. I told him to eat shit and die. We didn't speak for two weeks. The best two fucking weeks since I got that infernal dog.

Why not a talking ferret or a talking rat? Something small, something I could toss in a bag and dump in a river, traffic, whatever it is people do nowadays. A fat talking Sheep Dog is so… so noticeable. How do you get rid of a talking dog? Eventually I got desperate. I threatened to throw him out of my apartment. He could talk, he's too good for bags on his feet – so why shouldn't he pay rent? 

A few days later it's around noon and I'm in the living room playing Nintendo and eating a tuna fish sandwich. I have this game where you run around with guns and just kill everything in sight. I mean that's not the goal really, but that's sort of how I play the game. I've gotten pretty good at it. I set all the other people in the game to be fat and stupid like my dog and I just run around blasting them with shotguns. It's one of the few things I get any pleasure out of anymore. So I'm playing my game when Pig Fucker and the Frenchman barge in. My dog's all bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm. Well I don't care what the stupid dog has to say regardless and I give even less of a shit if I know it's something the dog really seems to care about, so I don't listen and respond to whatever he says with grunting and nodding. My dog, pissed off that I'm ignoring him, responds by getting up in front of my television set and making an ass of himself. Almost immediately I heave my controller at him. He dodges the controller, which then bounces off the screen and goes smash against the floor.

While I seethe over my broken controller, Pig Fucker explains to me how the Frenchman "knew a guy" and got him an agent; how he's probably going to be doing some spots on television and maybe radio too. The Frenchman confirms all of this by jabbering like a pirate and scowling. He says something like, "Yar, thar's a pretty big bounty fer hounds that be speakin' in the king's English, yarrr." And I respond with "Well that's a fucking surprise." I've actually got a Bachelor's degree in English, but there's no market for me. I'd been working at a lumberyard for the last six months and they only even hired me because I said on my application that I was an Eagle scout. The woman who interviewed me had a son who was an Eagle scout. It was a total lie on my part. My application was just looking so empty that I figured it couldn't hurt. It just came to me, and I put it on the application. The next thing I know this woman can't stop gushing about "how much respect she has for my achievement." It was terrible.

I spent my entire life going to school under the assumption that I would eventually develop into the sort of character that people would want to hire; that school would sculpt me into the sort of man that leads a happy and fulfilling life. I was confident that if I worked hard, never missed class, never complained, and turned papers in on time, these things would be enough. I had confidence in school. And here my fat uneducated dog is landing acting gigs because he can talk.

My dog became quite a successful television personality. He has this one ad now where he sits in a large leather armchair wearing a smoking cap, a pipe in his paw. Ever-so-gently, he places the pipe upon the table beside him, replaces his paws on his lap, and then proceeds to whore himself out for Tasty Tak Tuckerby's Bar-B-Q Burger Joint. He makes an appearance at the restaurant once or twice a month. Kids love it. He's become a local celebrity. His television jobs make more than enough to pay rent for the both of us, and he makes sure to remind me of this whenever possible.

When I first graduated from college, I worked nights in a warehouse stocking shelves. I was still in decent spirits then. I was convinced that I was in a transitional period and that before long I would have an opportunity to prove myself to a more significant employer. I worked all night and slept through a majority of the day. On nights off, I'd pace about and try to occupy myself all night long so I wouldn't allow my body to get out of synch. Being at work all night was bad enough, but being at work all night after being awake all day was just enough torture to weaken one's sanity; to make brittle that already weak human fiber I once held so dear. As the months passed I slowly degraded.

Pig Fucker was a gift. A gift from a girl I'd known in college. A girl who has since become highly unimportant. I guess I am a pig fucker. She thought I shouldn't be wandering around the apartment alone all night. She worried about me. She thought it was unhealthy. She thought I was lonely and she wanted to help. She was right about that. I was lonely. But what am I now?

I often lie awake in bed thinking about how rotten it is that something so brief can have such long-term effects – or what's equally as bad, when something brief completely abandons you. Why can't people just leave you alone? Why do they interfere? On these nights, I usually get up and sit at my computer. Sometimes I'll drink vodka from a plastic bottle. Perhaps I'll even chase it with a few bong hits. Scatter things a little. I have this funny screensaver with animated pirates slicing and dicing one another. A ship full of pirates is sailing when suddenly it's beset upon by more pirates. Then there's this little animated swordfight and the outcome is somewhat random, although occasionally a big sea monster dubbed "The Kraken" bursts out of the water and goes ballistic. In that case, everybody dies. I'll drink, smoke, and watch it for hours.

After I got the dog, I lost my job working nights at the warehouse. You see, once I realized that the people around me could detect how miserable and lonely I'd become, I got so embarrassed that I turned the ringer off on my telephone and hid in my apartment for a week straight. When I finally got my feet back on the ground I called work. They assumed I had finally been imprisoned for driving under the influence and were not impressed when I told them I had actually been hiding in my room for a week straight. Before that I'd never missed a day on the job. My boss was a sport about it and said I could come back if I felt like it. I told him I would be in Monday and then I just never showed up. After that I worked as an English tutor, a cable installer, a dishwasher at a pizza restaurant, and finally a forklift driver at the lumberyard.

Which brings us back to the present. Me on the couch; my dog in the kitchen making a grilled cheese sandwich. I'm not quite sure what's gonna happen next. I can't pay the rent without that dog, but who even cares if the rent is paid when each day is more useless than the one before it? I haven't spoken to another human being in weeks. I never eat. I sleep all day. That dog has somehow swindled me of my humanity. If only I could do something. Find a job. Make some money. I can't even aspire to buying a gun anymore. No. It's hopeless. It looks like I'm staying here on the couch, head screwed into the cushions good and tight. And here he comes. That rotten dog. He emerges sandwich-laden from my kitchen. And what's that? A treat? For me? Get the hell out of here! I don't want anything from you! But God… I'm so hungry….

[back]