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I may not hear you coming up the front stairs, even with that broken oak plank of the fourth tread just before the landing. My bedroom door will be closed, the air conditioner on, the TV at a soft volume, but once that Klonopin kicks in, I won’t hear you creeping up those front stairs. You’ll be disoriented, anyway. It’s going to be dark.

Say you make it to the top without tripping. You’ll look around the dark hallway and see all of the upstairs doors closed. Which one am I in? You won’t know. Your first instinct might be to your right, but that’ll only lead you into the upstairs living room and with its deep dark blue paint, you’ll fumble around.

I still won’t hear you.

You’ll back out of that room and head toward the other end of the hallway. You’ll try the next door, but it only opens to a large bedroom, and the bed will be empty. No luck, buddy. Now you have a choice—one door leads to me lying asleep in my bed, and the other guarantees you, at the very least, a lifetime in a wheelchair.

Which one are you going to choose?

I’d bet my next paycheck you reach for the knob across the hall. Stupid move, sucker.You’re standing close to the door, your ears tuned for any movement, but the timer I set for the TV has already done its job and no matter how hard you try you’ll not hear anything. Not a peep. Your hand grips the worn brass knob and you slowly move forward.

You didn’t have a prayer. Your hands flail to grab onto something and one of them might even make it to the rickety handrail, but your feet are out from under you and it won’t matter if your butt hits the first or the second stair or if you’ve managed a comical swandive, because you’ll end up at the same point—at the bottom of the eleventh step, right where it takes a ninety-degree turn.

I hear the commotion, sit up in bed, shake my head, and laugh. Caught another one. Steve is barking and I’ll tell him to hush up, open my door, and walk across the hall. I’ll switch on that bare bulb that you didn’t know about, and stare down at your wreckage. Are you still conscious? I can’t really tell and I don’t much care. I just see you’re not moving.

Maybe I’ll call the police, maybe I won’t. One thing’s for sure, though. You’re going to be there for a while, so you just make that twisted body of yours comfortable.

Shit, you’d have gotten through the DMV line quicker than I’ll help you out.

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When I landed In NYC mid-afternoon yesterday, I listened to the dire voicemail from the vet, so when the car dropped me off at the vet, I was on the people-mover forcing me toward something bad, real bad.

The vet’s receptionist, instant sad eyes when I told her who I was, brought me into a room. The doc followed behind her wearing the same mask of regret and concern. She explained that Eddie was bleeding internally and in extreme pain. And then she carried my boy in along with a polka dotted fleece blanket for the floor.

I laid next time him, doing the familiar rub on his impressive ears, the rub I’ve been doing for twelve years, looking into his eyes and wondering what he saw back. His panting was fast, desperate. And I just talked, saying those same words he knew, over and over, and we didn’t break eye contact. The doc peeked in the window of the room and I nodded.

She laid down with me and two shots later, I held Eddie’s paw for the last time, kissed that beautiful nose, and rubbed his eyes closed.Eddie slept in the same bed with me longer than anyone else in my life ever. Twelve years. My Eddie. Jim’s Eddie. Stephen’s Eddie. He took care of us all. I’ll tell the story of how we met sometime later.

WRITTEN 02/09/2019

*********

DAYS LATER:

A deep purple shopping bag made of strong stock met me when I opened my apartment door last night. Eddie’s ashes. Jim’s daycare brought them when they dropped off the little girl. I peeked in the bag, looked over at Jim jumping her signature jump, squeaking every time she reached her apex.

After kissing her warm paper-thin pointy ears, I put her running feet onto the floor, she gained purchase and bolted into the kitchen for dinner. I followed leaving that purple bag where it was. After she’d eaten and I put some chicken in the over, she curled up on the beige sofa, the one she shared every night with Eddie.

I opened the bag a little more and saw Eddie’s collar. I just wanted to hold it. I plucked it from the top of the wooden box that anchored the bag. When I did, his dog tag, the one Eddie wore for twelve years with engraving almost completely worn smooth and invisible, tinged. Just twice.

Jim popped up instantly, eyes fixed on the door, her expression of hope and expectation and where-the-hell-have-you-been and well, longing. The longing for her keeper, her best friend, that expression.

I clenched the tags in my fist to quiet them, put them down so they wouldn’t make that sound again, and scooped her up, holding her as tight as I could without breaking bones, her ears righteously kissed, cooing how much I loved her. She was warm; she let me sway her. I put her back onto the couch cushion where immediately she sniffed her butt.

You see, every time Jim receives affection, she sniffs her butt. Don’t ask. I have no idea, either, but it’s the way she came to me and that’s just fine.

WRITTEN 02/14/2019

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The surgery was ten days ago. They reattached my muscle to the tendon to the bone. The first things that I remember when I woke from my propofol Neverland were the soothing lights and an anvil attached to my right arm. I looked down at the armpit-to-fingertip plaster cast. It weighed eight pounds. I know. I weighed myself later when I got home, groggy and itchy-faced from narcotics.

I swam in and out of consciousness for four days on so much dope that I couldn’t follow the plot of House Hunters. A lighter, yet still unforgiving rigid plastic brace is now my constant companion, extended into a casually bent position, a little McCain-ish, although he seemed to have more mobility. It’s almost jaunty, if actually I knew what that word meant. And only seven more weeks!

I’ve learned that I have the dumbest left hand in the world. Simple things–brushing my teeth, pulling on pants, bringing a fork to my mouth–are slapstick. I now eat in shame as food is always at arm’s length and when my wobbly leftie brings a bite toward my mouth, my food flops to the floor or onto my lap.

I should be put in a striped tent with a hood over my head, traveling from town to town, my handler selling tickets to watch me. Instead, I’m taking my act to Rome for a few days.

Pain’s gone. Just constant annoyance, so no fun sock-pic-on-the-footrest today. Just this. Arm.

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I’m not sure Stephen and I even liked each other very much when we first met. My great friend Robyn Zeiger, who’s a brilliant therapist and specializes in pet loss, told me that it’s best not to get the same breed, gender, or color as my Bob Slobbers, the smartest most intuitive dog in the world. Bob was a mighty eighty-plus pounds of black lab mix, a proud boy whose strength held me together when we both lost Billy.

Two years later when I was in a position to get another companion, what did I do? I chose Stephen, a five-year old black lab mix, lankier than Bob, less substantial. He didn’t cuddle, refused eye contact, and he seemed dumb. He was on one couch, I was on the other. We stayed that way until Eddie sauntered into our yard about eight months later and never left.

I always joked that “Of Mice And Men” was playing out in my house–Eddie was “George” to Stephen’s “Lennie.” They were inseparable, yet Stephen grew closer to me, my couch nuzzler, curled up into the size of a large basketball in the crook of my knee.

He was my little big dumb boy, almost special needs, really, but he’d look right into my eyes with his big browns with nothing but love and care.

When I returned from Chicago this past Tuesday, I could tell something was wrong. I feared the antibiotics that scotch-taped him together since last September had stopped working. By Wednesday night, his breathing was labored. I squirmed through Thursday at work and the evening screening I attended, rushed home and took him to the emergency room.

They drained almost three liters of fluid from him, pink viscous bad news surrounding his lungs. We left at two in the morning. He felt a little better, ate a tiny bit. I held him all night long until the morning when we could go to his regular vet.

We were there for hours yesterday as she tried test after test to see if there was a Hail Mary that might work. But it was that damned fluid that was unexplainable, or rather, was the answer I didn’t want to hear.

Stephen’s friend, Dean, called me, asked if he could cover over. He knew. I am so grateful he did. In the fourth hour, our vet, tears in her eyes and syringes in her hand, got down on the floor with Dean and me, and did what we had to do.

I kissed his nose over and over and over, telling him how much I loved him, how Dean loved him, how much Eddie would miss him. And I thanked him for taking such good care of me these past eight years.

Stephen, you could never have been Bob Slobbers, but you were something just as good. You were my Stephen.

WRITTEN 04/19/2014

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Turns out you can. When you’re a lucky man like me, a man who’s been able to extend that guileless magic found in Paris and bring it to LA, well, I guess anything is possible.

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WRITTEN 06/27/2007

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When I pulled into my driveway on Thursday evening, it was dusk, and I saw an older Black man in a chocolate velveteen jacket with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge. He was scraping white dollops of poo from the black paint. Steve was pulling on his leash in a desperate need to be near some random vine on the fence, but then Steven’s always desperate to be somewhere where he’s not already, and I was trying to balance his water dish, my few books from work, and a sack of groceries that held nothing more than cookies and a twelve-pack of caffeine-free Diet Coke.

As I undid the front gate of my yard, I turned to the man, awkwardly because I still was navigating the desperate Steven, and I said, “Those birds sure do a number on your car, huh?” I knew this from experience. My black car had been violently speckled more than once in the past few months.

He looked up from his soapiness. “I lost my neutron detector.” I thought I heard him right and I thought he was making an odd and possibly funny joke about birds and their defecating habits, so I laughed because that’s what I do when I don’t understand something. I’m a friendly guy, though, so I thought it might be good to ask for clarification.

“What?” I was still smiling.

“I’m a physicist.”

I laughed again, still not in on the joke, but maybe it was going somewhere familiar, a place where the two dots could connect and my laugh might turn into something genuine.

“And you’re a carp.” He said this with such authority that at that moment, I didn’t have any doubt that I was a goldfish looking for my plastic castle. “I work in physics and I lost my neutron detector,” he stated for the record, again.

Slowly closing my gate, making sure its clasp was firmly in place, I fished around my mailbox and walked up to the porch.

Not wanting to be rude, I waved after I opened the front door and wished him well on washing his car. “And I hope you find your detector,” I added. I didn’t want him to think me insensitive.

Written 05/05/2006

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(Written 10/04/07)

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