Yes, my little dogs breath stinks, but for a thirteen-year-old it’s not so bad, not as bad as Calamity Janes’ Chihuahua, Cowboy. Bless his little heart, he’s gone onto heavenly, sunlit meadow-runs with plenty of baco-treats, but his little mouth was capable of filling her entire craftsman with a liver and onions atop sulfur-yellowed, rotting-eggs-yolk dish, a noxious and thick cloud she endured for his precious little yaps.
My own mouth souring as I write this, background muzak blasting on speaker (on hold for an insurance agent) as I sip cold coffee from my porcelain, gold-rimmed wild dog mug I excavated from the wolf house Biff’s Dad bought and had to clear the piss-infested, hoarder stacks that closed off entire rooms before being able to re-sale.
There were some great finds in that old, unpainted Victorian and we were invited to help haul garbage into the rented industrial bin with our pay being the taking away of anything that fed our whims, the problem being everything in that house was covered in a nasty-smelling film.
I was told the owner had traded a Harley Davidson for the rundown, mini-mansion in the sixties. His wife had died, his Culture Club loving daughter (as evidenced by framed Boy George pics from Tiger Beat) had run, I imagine a Duran Duran inspired get-away, Hungry-like-the-wolves pack her father kept as house dogs. What friends would ever agree to spend the night at the place on the hill where a gang of real wolves paced incessantly the tall, chain-linked fence?
The hundred and fifty year, ornate stair banisters, deeply scratched, sprayed and with white-gray tufts still attached to these splintered spindles, led to a room in which iron gate, floor to ceiling, had been added, the smell and remnants of hair here were pronounced, and the space carried the energies of suppression and abuse, sex-slaved secrets, the bad vibes of the worst parts of humanity, boxes of porn magazines in the next room and all of the piled trash, spoke of dark living.
We wore dust masks and gloves and I only lasted an hour, mainly a voyeur to the horrors, but I did retrieve a stack of albums, Dylan, the Stones and The Psychedelic Furs, the vinyl inside the greasy sleeves pristine. I wiped the jackets with damp rag and air-dried them in the sun. And, the set of wolf mugs from a tightly packed box in the attic, where the dogs never climbed the bring-down ladder, were clean, and really who could ask for a better souvenir from the man who loved wolves?
Ironically, while waiting on an operator to break up this same ‘ole song, I have lost track and boiled away all the water on the two eggs I’d put in a pan as I’d dialed—the ick smell of burnt egg cancelling any hint of my dog’s breath.