The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (14 page)

A week later, she travelled to Mexico to divorce Arthur. At first Victor the doorman was going to look after me, then his wife got a temperature and he was forced to spend the week boiling kettles in Queens. Then May Reis, Marilyn’s secretary, said she would stay at 444, but Marilyn needed her on the trip, she needed May’s professional loyalty as well as her loyally disapproving face, so in the end the three of us headed south on an extremely bumpy plane. As we boarded, the navigator chucked my chin: I had begun to think of myself as one of those fluffy companions, those charming vertebrates that are known to chaperone elegant individuals across the globe. Like Leoncico, for instance, the yellow hound that belonged to Vasco Núñez de Balboa and sniffed along at his side as he discovered the Isthmus of Panama. Leoncico’s voice had a similar background to mine, though history fails to record whether there was anything Scottish in his pedigree. There was more tolerance in his moral character than there was in his master’s. The dog protected him against everything except his own viciousness. (Typical problem, I have to say.) He even climbed into a barrel with Balboa to escape his owner’s enemies. Maud Gonne’s chaperone was actually called Chaperone, nicely enough, a grey marmoset filled with Celtic lore and Hellenic rhymes, poems, for the most part, to the impotence of human passion.
^*
Alas, the little primate was not set to cavort with his owner through the years of her national widowhood. Gonne took him on a spying trip to St Petersburg where the cold put a quick end to his life. Thinking of marmosets as companions, there was also poor Mitz, ‘that horrid little monkey’ as Vanessa Bell used to call the animal, who accompanied Virginia and Leonard Woolf through Germany in 1935. According to Vanessa, the rise of the Nazis was nothing compared to the increasing power of Mitz, who made the Woolfs quite ill with parental angst. Vanessa was always happy to report how jealous her sister had been of the little beast’s powers of concentration. ‘He always behaved as if the world were a question,’ said Virginia.

* Marmosets are known for their nationalism. Miss Gonne needed no encouragement in that department, but the beast made her worse.

These creatures were on my mind as the plane chugged over Hanover, Pennsylvania, and the thought of them continued to grow and yap in my sleep, as we passed the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Sinks of Gandy in West Virginia. We sat in the big tin bird, leaving a trail above the Cumberland River in south-eastern Kentucky. I saw the world down there in my sleep, the open fields, the farmhouses, and the faces at the farmhouse table in the chirrupy shade of the evening. We passed over Memphis, Tennessee, and DeGray Lake, Arkansas. I thought perhaps I could be a navigator when I grew up. Anyhow, soon we were flying over miles of empty space, single houses standing in the middle of nowhere, then we roared above Franklin and Hopkins, a place called Rains. My journey came to an end at Dallas Love Field.

I was delighted with the ensuing chaos and its resolution. One of the reasons I love Trotsky is because he took so well to being a picaroon, travelling the earth looking for a place to dwell and work, encountering new people and fresh enemies in Turkey and France and Norway and Mexico. At Dallas, the authorities forbade me a seat on the Mexico plane. Wrong forms, no permission, quarantine issues, what a riot. (I was reminded of Noël Coward’s first encounter with American Customs. ‘Little Lamb, who made thee?’ he said to the grumpy official, and all hell broke loose.) May Reis tried to call the Mexican Ambassador, but then a helpful woman from the airline said she knew some dog-sitters. My owner and May were only going to be in Mexico for one day to tie up the divorce. I felt sad but I knew I’d get my chance to go to Mexico before too long: it was written.
^*
While we waited for the dog-sitters to come I managed to knock over a bucket of detergent in the airport lounge. Marilyn was mournful, sitting at the bar with May and a martini. The television was lined and fuzzy, but it showed pictures of the very thing that was on her mind that day: the inauguration of Senator Kennedy as the thirty-fifth President of the United States.

The Russian novel sat on the counter. She filed her nails and she watched and drank, just like any white girl in America. A man in a business suit picked up a cigarette butt from the floor of the bar and smoked it. The people on the television were wearing heavy coats. You could see the white clouds of Kennedy’s breath as he spoke. ‘Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,’ he said. Marilyn suspended the glass an inch from her lips and noticed the businessman bending down to lift another butt from the floor. She began to get nervous and then she smiled most perfectly. ‘You know, May,’ she said, ‘I think I could live very happily on the streets. Like a bum, I mean. Don’t you think I’d be . . . you know, resourceful?’

* Every dog must go to Mexico at least once before he dies. It is said to be the place where we are most at home. This was said to me by one of the Duffs in the earliest days of my puphood, and it stuck. Not every dog makes it there, but it is our dream project. It is our Mecca, our Never Land, our Xanadu.

‘I think you’d hate it, Marilyn.’ But I loved the idea of Marilyn turning her face to the wall and refusing all luxury. Before we parted, I had that last image of a fur-coated Marilyn as Diogenes of Sinope, refusing all comforts while the street dogs looked on in admiration.

Raymond and Arlene were the two young dog-sitters, fairly daft the pair of them, beautiful and cool, into beer and sweaters and necking in cars. Raymond was holding up the
Dallas Morning News
as we walked back outside. ‘This is too darn crazy,’ he was saying. ‘This dawg’s too crazy. This jaaab.’ He looked away from the paper for a second.

‘D’ya see that lady’s face?’ asked Arlene.

‘I saw she was lookin’ away. The ol’ lady was doin’ everythin’. D’ya think she was somebody?’
‘I’m thinking she was,’ said Arlene. ‘I’m thinkin’ she was really somebody. Her coat hangin’ off her shoulders like that, like she’s somebody.’ Raymond went back to his paper and I got to tune into Arlene as she walked in silence and chewed gum. ‘I sure wish we could meet somebody,’ she said.
‘New Ross, Ireland,’ Raymond read. ‘The people of this tiny coastal village where John F. Kennedy’s ancestors once lived danced on the Charles Street Pier last Friday night to celebrate the inauguration of their favourite son.’
‘That’s neat,’ she said.
‘It was from the Charles Street Pier’, he continued, ‘that President Kennedy’s great-grandfather set sail to seek his fortune in the new world. Friday night there were bonfires, a torchlight procession, songs, jigs.’ He looked up. ‘What’s jigs?’ he asked.
‘Dances. Dancin’. Like all them Irish people dancin’ together.’
‘. . . and good cheer. And at the hour of the actual Inauguration the Stars and Stripes was raised alongside the Irish tricolour by Kennedy’s fourth cousin, James Kennedy of Duganstown.’
She put me down on the back seat of the car, next to a generator and a heap of empty bottles. I licked a Lone Star label and then chewed on a ticket from the Jefferson Drive-In for a movie called
The House of Usher
. I liked Raymond and Arlene instantly, which was more than a little promiscuous of me given I was only passing through. But the rule for us picaroons says that a rogue will always like a rogue. They moved up the highway looking for trouble, my tousled dogs, my friends, powered by
l’esprit humain
. I’m sure they could scarcely spell their own names, but that can be quite charming of an afternoon, when the sun is high and the world is yours. It turned out the kids were very happy to be making some extra cash, courtesy of Arlene’s uncle Arnold, who ran an agency fixing people’s problems. Two days before they had delivered two giant bags of ice to a funeral parlour in Duncanville. Last night it was cups: seventy paper cups for a doctor’s house party in Lake Highlands. But mostly what the kids did was steal – they were shameless and quite accomplished thieves. All the beer was stolen, apparently, and when they stopped at gas stations or drug stores they had a tendency to bring back items of temporary usefulness. Arlene was especially brilliant at bringing home the nonbacon: plastic sunglasses and barbecue instruments being the sort of thing she would chortle over before tossing them onto the back seat.
‘
Yeck!
’
‘Am sorry, li’l pup. That was jest me bein’ clumsy now, wasnit? Beg your pard’n.’
We drove south and came to a town called DeSoto, not at all large, the sound of distant cowbells competing with the car engine, and they put me on a leash and came out to see what there was to steal. Waiting for them, I looked up and saw a pair of sneakers dangling from the wire between two telegraph poles. From Judah’s Jot-em-Down Store, a grinning Raymond made off with a fishing reel and a packet of household candles, and at Mrs Gallagher’s Grocery across the street, Arlene nabbed two fan magazines and a bottle of purple nail varnish. The trunk of the car was full of stolen items, but they also had a sack of Scamp and they poured the biscuits into a bowl for me out in the parking lot. Arlene had the cheek to go back into Mrs Gallagher’s asking for some water for the dog
.
‘
Yam yam
,’ I said. ‘All property is theft and hallelujah for the young.’
I will never forget that night in Texas. First they met up with all these teenagers: Joyce, who was shameless, Margie, who was brainless, Scott, who was brainless and horny, Hintze, who was horny and scientific, and Eddie Kimble, who was more or less psychotic. When Raymond stopped the car they all came tripping out of Kimble’s house, some in Bermuda shorts and others in brand new jeans, the boys carrying fourpacks of beer and pitchers of some grape-juice concoction. Kimble was antsy about his share. ‘Hot damn, this here’s a whole nuther thing,’ said Hintze. He was swigging from the pitcher as he sat on the back seat.
‘Nu-uh.’
‘Ah pipe down, Kimble. You gettin’ your turn. Here’s the stuff am gone be looking after.’
‘You talkin’ ’bout that li’l dawg?’ said Margie.
‘Nu-uh, I aint, Miss Plug Ugly. I’m braggin’ ’bout this here jungle juice. Kimble made it.’
‘Give it here, Hintze!’
The Margie girl rubbed me around the ears and put me on her lap. ‘Hey, Arlene. Look at this li’l feller. You had him all day?’
‘All day. All night,’ said Raymond. He liked to think he was the daddy of the group.
‘No way, man.’
‘What?’
‘Pass the juice.’
‘What?’
‘Arlene, the li’l dawg here’s like a gnat in a rainstorm. Can’t we drop him off somewhere?’
‘He’s bin dropped off somewhere. With us,’ said Raymond looking in the rearview mirror.
‘He’s fixin’ ta bite your hand off,’ said Kimble. He lit a cigarette and looked sideways with his puffy eyes, looking all crazy towards Margie and me. ‘He’s one agger-vated dawg I’m tellin’ ya, and you, girl, are one sorry-ass babysitter tonight. You better keep this li’l chicken far ’way from them flying saucers! This pony gone be shit-scared.’
‘Am more worried about you,’ she said.
‘Yeah, pass that here, you maniac,’ said Arlene. She twisted the radio dial and everybody laughed at nothing while taking large, acrid swigs, the vapour in the car becoming so dense you could lick it off the windows. It was dark outside and the cicadas were
veep-veeping
. Their wild conversational gambits rolled around the car from window to leatherette seats, the young people saying things then unsaying them, clicking their fingers against the beat, spewing cigarette smoke and feeling embarrassed about nothing in particular, while Raymond wound down the window and countless small essences escaped into the trees and the lighted houses, the voice of Eddie Cochran falling behind us on the road to Cedar Hill.
Over the town, the TV antennas blinked like fireflies. The Texas sky seemed placid enough but grave, too. People were talking and the sound they made was burnished by yet more of the insect noises. Together they made a happy sound in the grassy amphitheatre of the hill. This was, they said, the highest point in the state between Red River and the Gulf of Mexico, and the height, the fireflies, the cicadas, the flash of cigarette lighters and the sudden gleam of tilted beer bottles and of moisture in the eyes of maybe a hundred or so young people, brought the evening into line with some great Aztec evening of yore. That’s what I thought as I watched them peering and necking up there at the edge of Cedar Hill State Park: they were watching the sky in the full flow of their youth and in the face of the changes that their youth would bring about, but the gesture was old, the instinct to look up was old and the hope of awe was older still. They all sat on the grass and I liked them and ambled among the sneakers looking for something to eat.
Joyce was telling Hintze that she once saw one from the top of the rollercoaster at the Schaeffer Carnival. It was long like a cigar and definitely wasn’t a weather observation balloon or any old thing like that. Hintze tried to feed me a piece of beef jerky from his pocket but I left it on the grass and he frowned. ‘My dogs’d cross the county to git some of this larrupin’ stuff,’ he said. ‘Hey, Raymo. What kinda uppercrust hound dog you got here? The ole cuss won’t even eat his jerky.’
‘He’s a good ’un,’ said Raymond. ‘He’s one of them dawgs from New York.’
‘Some business-lady’s rascal,’ said Arlene. ‘And what a cute little fella all the same with his dirty old collar.’
‘We think his owner is somebody. Ain’t that right, Arlene?’
‘Sure. A lady from New York. Some kinda person from New York with shades on.’
‘Well, it’s the easiest ten bucks you ever made, brother,’ said Kimble, now chugging the last of the pitcher and looking up.
‘We won’t be gettin’ no ten,’ said Arlene. ‘Uncle Arnold will hit us with five if we’re lucky.’ I walked over their knees and ducked beneath the plumes of smoke. ‘Ole rascal,’ said Arlene, kissing my nose while the smell of a dozen campfires rose on the breeze.
‘Feline,’ I said
.
There was something in Arlene that smarted for rhythm and rhyme, her brown eyes perhaps, the sense that dwelled in her nervous smile that life could never be easy. She wanted the heights of everything. She stroked my back and I felt a small yearning in her hands, the need for poetic glories in love and belonging. She looked at Raymond and he blew four perfect smoke-rings in the air before turning to wink at her, able to wink without doubts in his mind. I felt there was a story here, a story about these girls never leaving Cedar Hill. They were my opposite. They would never leave and this stone cold fact felt like one of the lessons of the evening breeze.
‘My daddy saw a heap of ’em,’ said Margie. ‘Flyin’ saucers flyin’ like ducks in formation. He saw ’em above Carswell Air Force Base. That’s the truth. The honest-Gawd truth.’
‘Darn right,’ said Hintze. ‘Elmo Dillon saw one of them land in the middle of his mamma’s lawn. I’m talking some crazy-lookin’ gizmo.’ He sat up. ‘It lands right there in the yard. Elmo says his mother passed away. Not that night but a hundred days later and she was babblin’ in a hundred languages an’ deluded and shit.’
The UFO hunt had all the kids on the hill looking the same way. They looked upwards and they pointed at stars and shooting debris. Many of them were tangled in one another’s arms, others sat alone, with Christmas telescopes trained on an infinity of eyes they imagined to be looking back at them from the blue-black sky.
‘Deluded is right,’ said Eddie Kimble. ‘It’s all hoaxes my friend. You know what I’m thinkin’? I’m thinkin’ we should git from here and find ourselves a whole new basket of beers.’
‘We’re staying,’ said Raymond.
‘Do you think we’re being watched?’ asked Arlene. After a second Raymond turned and his expression told her she’d asked one of the great questions. He nodded. Yes indeed. He nodded like one who was forced to carry the wisdom of ages.
‘Definitely, man,’ he said. Raymond was wondering whether he might get work as a grocery clerk before the summer. It seemed the night to ask. Maybe they should stop by on the way back into town. Maybe he could run more errands for Arnold or look for a bar job in Fort Worth. Tips were good for bartending. Come the summer, it should be the Marine Corps: the air base at Corpus Christi. He’d never been anywhere. Maybe he would see places and tell them all about it. Far-away places.
^*
The sky was a bastard for secrets. I remember my keeper at the Griffith Park quarantine saying there were over five thousand pieces of astro-junk floating up there, broken engine parts and jettisoned fuel cylinders, the shiny detritus of our battle to master the cosmos. The kids felt planted and watched, but out there the space chimps of the United States were running out of oxygen and the astro-dogs of the USSR were passing through the solar system in a state of ample loneliness. Alien races would meet those thirsty dogs and take them in for questioning – tell us what you can, they’d say, about the strange beings who paint the walls of caves and send their fellow creatures into the boundless dark of space. I wonder if the Russian dogs care for Plutarch as much as I do. I can see the lost Laika opening her maw and planting the flag of comedy on the terra firma of Mars. ‘Consider a monkey,’ she might say. ‘Because it cannot guard property like a dog, or endure weight like a horse, or plough land like cattle, abuse and sarcasm and jokes are heaped upon it.’ Posidonius, in
The Fragments
, has exactly the same notion about monkeys. The choice of monkeys over dogs for use in the national space programme might begin to describe what Billy Wilder called the comic nature of American reality.
Hintze came up the hill with hotdogs. ‘The top two’s mine so keep your mitts off,’ he said.
‘Gawd, Hintze. Insane amount of mustard.’
‘We say
moutarde
in France, dear Raymond.’
‘Yeah. Blow me, Hintze.’
‘Come on, guys. Let’s get outta here,’ said Kimble, flicking a cigarette butt down the hill. ‘There ain’t nothin’ gonna show up there. No saucers. No damn UFOs. Let’s go into town. This is a bust.’ As Kimble was speaking, I kept my eyes up and believed that something would show. They all liked rockets but none of them understood how rockets had turned them into an endangered species. I wanted to see one, just for the adventure.
‘No, it ain’t a bust,’ said Raymond. ‘This is how you get to see them. You keep watchin’.’
‘That’s right. You keep watchin’,’ said Arlene. ‘There’s only nothin’ there if you don’t keep lookin’.’ She lay back on the grass. Her eyes were fixed on the sky and her hands were crossed in front of her. I put my head on her lap and watched as the fireflies blinked above us, the Texan sky wide open and nothing happening.