Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (19 page)

After one year, the business was still in the red. Michelle and I were working twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and we were under constant financial stress, postponing bill payments and unable to repay a good friend who’d invested in the business by loaning us the startup costs. Worse than that, the business itself was growing in the wrong direction. We’d initially offered, for an extra fee, the services of an on-site consulting mechanic, and that part of the business was booming, but it was turning the self-service shop into a hybrid assisted-service garage, which was never the original idea. Now there were too many people, wanting too many things, having too many conflicts in need of mediation or resolution.

“It’s going to be all right,” Michelle told me.

I reflected on these thoughts and memories, among others, as searched the tributary canyons, looking for my backpack. Michelle had rescued me from the Marines, from the Virgin Islands, and in many ways from the falling out I had with my father. And she was going to be at my side now, with the Wrench-It Center, come what may, and with the dog.

Part of being bullied is growing up believing you won’t ever be loved. It can seem only logical, because if it’s so hard to simply be liked, being
loved
can seem as impossible and out of reach as walking on the moon. Some kids, of course, console themselves knowing that at least their mother and/or their father loves them. For reasons I couldn’t understand, I never had that either. Then Michelle found me, and then I was walking on the moon.

A moment later, I saw the weathered deflated soccer ball, and I knew where I was. That was all I needed—a sign that I was headed in the right direction.

I received a sign that the puppy was headed in the right direction when I returned to the animal hospital, around three that afternoon. I immediately noticed something different: there was a small cup of dry dog food next to the cage door that he’d been eating from.

Krista said he was still in rough shape, and couldn’t be expected to function normally yet, but he was on the mend. She was capable and professional, and perhaps a bit inured to the anguish I was feeling, but there probably wasn’t any way for her to do her job if she didn’t learn to distance herself. All doctor and nurses lose patients, I knew. I wondered if the statistics were higher for veterinarians, whose patients are unable to report their maladies and miseries.

I opened the door and put a piece of dog food by his mouth. Without raising his head, he opened his mouth and gulped it down. I fed him the whole cup. They told me to feed him as much as he’d eat, so I poured more in and fed him an entire second cup.

On my way out the door, I saw the cat I’d seen Dr. Roundtree treating earlier in the day. It wasn’t moving, but I assumed it was still hanging on, because if it wasn’t, they would have moved it somewhere.

The cat set me on a darker path. I thought again of what kind of person might have put the dog in the slot canyon where I found him. I came up with one possible answer.

I
n one way, I was lucky. I was a kid just before the digital age, which introduced a new era and a whole new way of bullying. In my day, I was afraid I’d see my name written on the wall in the boys’ room at school. Today, kids get picked on in places like Facebook or Foursquare, Twitter, Instagram, and things are written on virtual walls. There’s no way to erase the hurtful comments, the names, the insults, and the verbal aggression if they don’t have control of the page. On the Internet, hurtful comments get copied and pasted and reposted and go viral, and the victim has no recourse whatsoever. The verbal harassment is more anonymous than ever before. I assume that if someone from another country sees an unflattering picture of a kid who’s being bullied, they might feel free (and why not—who will ever know?) to add a hateful and hate-filled comment beneath the photograph. Now, when some poor kid feels like the whole world is against him, he’s not being metaphorical.

The solution to bullying, experts will tell you, now and when I was a kid, is empathy. For me, though, it was lifting weights and learning how to literally make myself stronger. In doing so, I learned to respect myself in a way I never had before, and once I respected myself, and really started to know who I was, the kids who’d bullied me stopped. They didn’t necessarily turn around and instantly become my best friends, nor did I want them to, but they stopped bothering me, which was all that really mattered.

I can’t say I could point to any particular individual who learned empathy and stopped bullying. They stopped not because they realized I had feelings, but because they sensed continuing to bully me would come at a cost. If Leona or Ben or Matt or Scott or Joey or any of them tried to hurt me or humiliate me, with my new body and my new self-respect, I would have retaliated and then, just as Mrs. Kulba had predicted, even if I lost the fight—and I didn’t think I would—the game would be over, because it wouldn’t be a game anymore. They would realize I had feelings, and that I could make them feel, too.

The irony is that as much as I tried to make myself invisible, and I succeeded insofar as I was invisible to them—they did not recognize that I had feelings, or rather they could not empathize with what I was feeling. That is to say, they were afraid to. There’s a line in the movie
Casablanca
where Ugarte, the character played by Peter Lorre, says to Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, “You hate me, don’t you?” Bogart replies, “I probably would if I gave it any thought.” I read a story in a magazine, or maybe it was a newspaper, in which a man, now grown, arranges a meeting with another man who had bullied him mercilessly when they both were kids, but the ex-bully (if ex-bullies can truly be said to exist) didn’t remember it that way, couldn’t recall being mean, and hadn’t really given it any thought. I was invisible to my tormentors in that they never really considered me, didn’t really know what they were doing, or—more to the point—didn’t care, because they never put themselves in my shoes.

If there’s hope, it’s in the belief sociologists and psychologists have that empathy can be taught. I am not so sure. I mean, yes, perhaps it can be taught, but the thing that makes psychopaths pathological is their inability to feel or empathize, and if it’s not there . . . it’s just not there. They are not going to suddenly start growing a conscience and realize what they do is wrong. Perhaps a small percentage of them might, but the majority are themselves damaged, and the damage is unlikely to be undone.

Cruelty to animals is one indicator FBI profilers look at when they’re trying to parse the motivations and origins of criminal personalities. According to the ASPCA website, various reports and surveys suggest that anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of battered women seeking protection in women’s shelters report that their abusive partners were also abusive to the women’s pets and companion animals, and that often women stay in abusive relationships because they don’t dare leave their pets behind and they know they can’t take them when they seek refuge at a shelter. There’s been a recent effort to get women’s shelters to accept and accommodate pets for this very reason.

Leaving the Page Animal Hospital on the second night, it occurred to me that that was the only logical reason—if twisted psychopathic thinking can be said to have its own internal logic—why anyone would bother to take the puppy I’d found and rappel three times into the deepest part of an inaccessible canyon to leave it behind. They probably did it not to hurt the puppy, but to cause misery to the dog’s owner. I could almost imagine the taunts that came with it, possibly even with a photograph attached:

“Look what I did to your stupid dog—I put him where nobody is ever going to find him. I want you to think of him every night as he slowly starves to death. After what you did to me, it’s the least you deserve. . . .”

Or words to that effect.

Somebody, probably male, was getting even, avenging a hurt. Again, according to the ASPCA website, people who abuse animals in domestic relationships do so to “. . . demonstrate power and control over the family; to isolate the victim and children; to enforce submission; to perpetuate an environment of fear; to prevent the victim from leaving or coerce her to return; and to punish for leaving or showing independence.” All those things might explain why someone demented and evil would go to such lengths to abandon an innocent puppy. To this person, it was not only a way to hurt a loved one, but also a way to demonstrate continuing power over her.

That might explain the question as to why someone did it, but when I left the animal and went to check into the Motel 6 again for one more night, I was thinking more about the cat I saw than the dog, because the cat triggered another memory—another time when I was probably feeling as lost as I’d ever felt, even more than when suicide seemed a viable option.

One day after school, I’m sitting in the rocking chair, watching television, and I notice that the cat’s tail is under the front arc of the rocker, so I rock forward, causing the cat to screech in pain and bolt for the next room. Part of me feels a rush of energy, a feeling of power, though the cat had never done anything to me. I did it only to see what would happen. I justify it by telling myself it wasn’t as if I’d hurt another human being, another sentient creature who deserved to be treated with respect, as an equal—it’s just a cat.

The worst abuse comes one night when I’m lying in bed with one of the cats lying on the bed with me. It begins accidentally, when I move and the cat falls into the space between the mattress and the wall. The cat is momentarily stuck and manages to extract herself by digging in her claws and pulling herself up. It is a bit of an ordeal for her, but she survives, no worse for wear, panting, her tongue out. I idly wonder what would happen if I do it again. It’s almost like an experiment. If she could get out of a space that tight, what will happen if the space is even tighter? I don’t hate the cat. I actually like this cat. I’m not being malicious. I’m curious. I just want to see what will happen. The cat’s feelings don’t enter into it; I don’t stop to consider the possibility that she has any. I hook the cat by the collar and jam her back into the space between the mattress and the wall, but this time, I push against the mattress to make her escape more difficult. After considerable struggle, she pulls herself out, trembling and so scared that she defecates on the bed.

In an instant, I realize what I’ve done was wrong.

I stop, horrified. Now I’m scared, as if something monstrous inside me has made me do something I didn’t want to do. I hold the cat and stroke it and try to undo any damage I might have inflicted, and after a few seconds, the cat takes me back, so it seems, and returns the affection.

This is the worst of it. I am confused and troubled by the fact that I have knowingly tormented my mom’s cats, in this terribly difficult period in my youth. I have become as bad as those kids who’ve tormented me—it’s as though I have been infected by whatever malevolent force drives them to torment me.

As pathetic as it was, dominating those cats was a means of affirming that I was not always the victim; I could be in control of something. I had power over them, and having power over them proved I had power, which, when you feel so powerless in every other way, affirms something. I failed to realize, before I did it, that it meant I would be guilty of the same sort of behaviors I faulted others for, and that was a sign of my immaturity, but it also took a long time for me to realize I was a person of value, a worthwhile human being in my own right. That I was better than that. A bullied kid can start believing the things people say about him. I’ve also read that the frontal lobes in teenage boys, the part of the brain that controls impulses, is late to develop, and that sometimes teenage boys do things and honestly don’t know why they did them.
They really can’t perform the prognostic computations that would let them foresee the consequences of their actions. I wasn’t thinking, but that’s exactly the point.

Lying in bed in the Motel 6, not tired enough to turn out the lights, I felt the guilt I still carry about mistreating my mom’s cats, but in a way, that’s what kids do—kids push to find the boundaries of their lives, and since there was no one to set boundaries for me, I set my own and learned, the hard way, what it meant to go too far. I had a sudden attack of empathy, as if I’d temporarily forgotten myself and then remembered, but I could see how other kids might not have the same revelation. That is perhaps the other side of bullying: victims turn around and become bullies themselves, thinking that inflicting abuse can ease their own in a self-perpetuating vicious cycle, or cycle of viciousness, where the powerless, fearful of their own weakness, lash out at people who seem even less powerful. This moves on down the social ladder, extending even to the dogs and cats and animals that live with us, which we assail in proxy, symbolically hurting not them, but what they stand for or represent.

My best guess, then, as to who put the dog in the canyon was that he was a male who had felt powerless as a child, and who had tormented animals at a young age but never had understood that animals are sentient creatures that, to some extent, experience the same fears and emotions we do. He was probably someone who felt isolated and alone and hurt as a kid and who had learned that hurting something else made him feel better. As despicable as the act was, it seemed reasonable to speculate that whoever did it was himself the product of a dysfunctional, abusive childhood. I supposed that if a good police detective were interested in canvasing the neighboring towns and ranches, he might have been able to figure out if there were any battered women, and if they’d reported pets missing, but then there was a chance the dog would be returned to the abusive environment it first came from, and that wasn’t going to happen.

If I could, I would have said to the abuser, “Something went wrong for you. I’m sure putting this dog in the pothole wasn’t the first time you hurt an animal. Your wife or your girlfriend hurt you, so you wanted to hurt her back in the most vicious way possible, and you thought you got away with it. You never considered what the dog might have been feeling, so let me paint a picture for you. When you climbed up out of the pothole and looked down as you were pulling the rope up behind you, he was probably staring up at you, wagging his tail, wondering what was next. After you left, he probably kept staring at the place where he last saw you. Kept hoping you’d come back. Eventually, he lay down to wait. When he was thirsty, he drank from the water at the bottom of the hole, but as he got hungrier and hungrier, he began to whimper, maybe even bark a little, even though he knew no one could hear him. Eventually, he lay down and waited for the end to come. You live in a world of payback and retribution, a world where you think nobody is going to mess with you because if they do, you’re going to mess with them. If that’s your idea of strength, it’s really your prison, just as surely as the pothole you left the dog in was his.”