CATS AND DOGS
Tinkerbell and Cleopatra invited me out for dinner with the girls, and I felt somewhat honored to be taken into this inner sanctum of feminine mystique. But they were all my own age, and I wanted to meet the 22 year old daughters if there were any around. Having been an observer, while working in the service industry, of women haggling over who got the watercress on the check in a restaurant, I was amazed at how their system actually worked when put into operation. The efficiency of the human memory, even the memory of the alcoholic blackout-prone Cleopatra, when it came to seventy-five cents for extra blue cheese, could not be matched by any computer. I knew I didn’t want to be one of the girls. I played along for the evening and watched Tinkerbell pretend she was a kid. I was an observant fly watching the spider. I had to be careful—no attachments, no games. I felt there were plans being devised for me that would take my mind from my work.
The old wolfhound howls at the moon. He’s a loner. He gnaws on old dead bones. He doesn’t need to chase cars. He’s creatively active while the church bells ring in the sheep and the old women talk about what really matters, the person who isn’t there, the most important person of all, the one who isn’t there.
The day after the trip to Chapel Hill, we composed a letter to the King, Dr. Brinkhaus, and invited him to lunch the very next week. We also invited Kay, who hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, and mentioned this in our invitation.
He responded immediately, asking permission to bring along an assistant, Steven Pemberton, a young historian who was helping Dr. Brinkhaus with his archives. The Doctor actually asked us permission to bring someone along. Certainly.
Cleo began inviting me over her house nights, for beers and bongos. She played the bongos when she was drunk. The corporate moll was a wild woman from the jungle in her own hut, blasting rock and roll over the stereo and pounding her skins. The jungle, the jungle, I was in the jungle. I drank very little and retreated as early as possible to the solitude of my cave.
Tinkerbell became a regular on afternoons for bicycle rides and beers. She had all of these wild ideas about alternative treatments and remedies for everything from cancer to cold sores. I soon found myself brewing teas and drying and grinding shark cartilage. Eventually I told her she was too old for me and she stopped coming around. I was left with a lot of old shark cartilage to gnaw on while I howled at the moon. I also found a recipe for shark fin soup and felt really blessed.
We attended a business luncheon for networking that Cleo had set up, as a pillar of the business community. It cost more than I could really afford to pay for a small salad, a stale roll and a cup of bad coffee to listen to people promote their business cards for an hour. I sat next to a woman who said her daughter wanted to break into the movie business. I gave the woman our card to give to her daughter. The amount of materials we were accumulating had to be put in some kind of order, and it seemed like we were getting ready for a break-through on the gathering of experts: Susan Resnick and her thesis, Dr. Brinkhaus and his assistant, and Fabio from the North Carolina film Foundation. We continued to send out proposals for funds, but nothing happened. Money trickled in from up North from the water man, and I sold plasma twice a week so I could continue to buy pork-neck bones and cook for the dog. The dog.
Cleo became a little more assertive about my ownership of Argo.
“Keep him over there,” she said, “he’s your dog. I’m filling in the hole in front of my house and I don’t want to see another one.”
The dog refused to stay in the yard, though I did convince him to stay out of Cleo’s hole. The fence was four feet high, and the cow was able to get over without any problem whatsoever. He did it when nobody was looking. Every morning he was inside the fence, and by the end of the day he’d greet me in the front yard, covered with mud from his dip in the lake. Cleo granted me the privilege of hauling scrap lumber from one of her warehouses so I could build on top of the fence. We didn’t expect the landlady, Saint to return for some time, and I was walking on broken glass with Cleo already. I had agreed to keep the dog, I even liked him a little. It certainly wasn’t the same as with Toots the cat. I couldn’t seem to make the same deal with the dog, about going on adventures, as I had with Toots. Cats don’t infringe upon the personal territory of others the way dogs do. Cats are good writers; they steal their prey without anyone being any the wiser. Dogs are bad actors; they need attention and don’t care how they get it. And Argo was a bad actor. He grabbed the attention of every passerby he could, with his bright smile and wagging tail and big wet nose. He was a butt sniffer. I added another foot to the top of the fence by screwing in long floorboards across the tops of the fence posts. I actually deformed Saint’s estate so I could keep a dog that I didn’t really want to cook for anymore, and that I wasn’t even supposed to have, for the sake of trying to keep the peace with a crazed and somewhat powerful woman, who evicted people by day for doing just what she wanted me to do, and played the bongos by night. Everybody LIMBO! I didn’t want to be a BUTT SNIFFER! Butt, butt, everybody GUMBO!