I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (17 page)

As the weather got colder my father asked my mother if we could move Chico and Coco into the house, but she stood her ground and suggested putting an electric heater in the garage and moving the sweatpants and concave basketball in there next to the car. My parents fought about such a plan and for the first time I took my father’s side against my mother. She looked at me as if I were a traitor after all the times she had told my father to leave me alone in an attempt to protect me from his anger. I think the reason she had such trouble dealing with the presence of Chico and Coco in those first months they became a part of our family is that she saw how my love for them had slowly begun to switch my allegiance from her as my preferred parent to my father. She couldn’t fathom it. But it wasn’t something I fathomed. It was just something I felt. I had more love for those dainty dogs during their first months with us than I did for any family member. Maybe my empathy for them was the result of their physical exile just outside the boundaries of the house, for it corresponded so with the emotional exile I, a dainty creature as well, felt just outside the bonds of the family itself. I thought of myself in many ways as no longer a son or a brother but a third Chihuahua, cherished but apart. I knew I was Chico’s protector. I was Coco’s. And I knew by protecting them I felt protected for the first time myself.

*   *   *

When I was about to turn fifty years old I was once more alone and in need of protection. I was stumped as to what to give myself as a fiftieth birthday present. I had already lived in Paris for a time in my forties, so a trip to Europe seemed redundant at that point. I already had too many clothes. Too many pairs of shoes. My shelves were shrugging with books. I didn’t have a driver’s license, so even the extravagance of buying a sports car, which often men of fifty consider doing to make themselves feel younger, was not only too impulsive and expensive but also impractical. Perhaps I should just ignore the damn day, I thought.

Yet the day, damn it, was not ignoring me.

It loomed.

Abjectly lonely, I would walk around my Chelsea neighborhood in New York City and realize I was no longer being checked out by men of any age. I hadn’t had a date in years and the only sex I was having was fueled by different forms of drugs and the fleeting hours-long flings one sets up when on such drugs while dredging up the semblance of company from Internet sites. I finally had to face this as my birthday approached: A fifty-year-old man finding sex online just wasn’t dignified, dignity the one characteristic, if one wasn’t indentured by it, which most endures.

All of these thoughts were on my mind in the month leading up to my milestone birthday when I happened by a pet store on 19th and Ninth and looked in the window. There inside was a dappled puppy that seemed to be delighted I had turned to look his way. A Chihuahua? I couldn’t really tell. He had spots—brown ones atop his tiny white body—like my steer skin rug back on the floor of my studio on 21st Street. I stood looking at him and for the first time longed for Coco and Chico and how they could make me feel when I’d curl up with them—not less alone exactly, but alone together.

I went inside the pet store and stared down into the glass box in which the puppy was contained with a few other assorted pups—a piebald dachshund, a Yorkie, another Chihuahua or two. The spotted puppy tried to climb the glass walls up to me but to his frustration kept sliding back down onto the floor of his glass encasement that had shredded bits of newspaper on the bottom of it to cushion his fall.

“Can I help you?” asked the plump, willfully pleasant Asian woman emerging from the rear of the store. She had flung back a makeshift curtain to reveal the sheepdog she’d been grooming back there, its coat in the midst of being clipped by her, a clump of fur lying matted, motionless, on the floor like an indolent rodent.

“May I pick this little spotted puppy up?” I asked.

She nodded and flicked her clippers back on. Walking back behind the curtain, she flung it closed. The sheepdog barked. “Shut up!” I heard her voice too clearly tell it over the hum of the clippers. “Hold still.”

“Hey there, Archie,” I said to the puppy as I picked him up and he excitedly began to lick my face. Archie? Why had I instantly called the puppy that? The only Archie I could think of in that moment—other than the puppy itself—was Archie Manning, the quarterback from Ole Miss who went on to play for the New Orleans Saints, the favorite two football teams of my Mississippi youth. There was also the comic book Archie, but I had never read a comic book in my life. “Oh, Archie,” I told the little dog. “Stop licking. Stop now.” I lowered him to my chest and let him nuzzle me a bit like that before I put him back in his glass encasement with the other puppies. The Asian woman, her clippers still buzzing in her hand, came back out to the front of the store. She motioned toward the glass encasement with them. “You want him? He’s fifteen hundred dollars. You can have him for thirteen hundred dollars. I can give you papers. He’s a Chihuahua. I get ’em from a Mexican women in Michigan.”

“Maybe,” I said, and made my way toward the front door.

“That’s the cutest one. You got good taste,” she said, blowing at the vibrating clippers and sending bits of sheepdog fur flying toward me. “He may not be here if you come back. Many of the men just like you around here like that one,” she said.

I smiled at her but left to walk home without purchasing a companion, it feeling in the moment too much like the times in the past when I’d purchased a human one.

Many of the men just like me?

Archie?

I continued to walk home. I began to plan which Internet sex sites I’d sign on to when I got there.

*   *   *

During the next couple of weeks running up to my birthday, I stopped by that pet store more and more to see the puppy I had for some reason instinctively called Archie. I stopped by so often he had even begun to respond when I called him that. “You have to buy him now. He knows he’s Archie,” said the Asian lady each time I’d go inside. “Just look at the way he looks at you. That’s love.”

That first moment I held Archie I felt a kind of emotional click I had not felt since the moment my father tentatively placed Chico by my side and I suddenly, at six years old, sensed that something had fallen into place. For six long years of my Mississippi childhood I had not felt comfortable in the world, yet that shivering little presence against my body there on my father’s sweatpants conversely calmed me, gave me comfort, as I attempted to calm and to comfort him. As I trained Coco and Chico during my childhood, I trained myself. Together we all learned to traverse a world that could be treacherous for creatures like us who found ourselves in places we did not expect to be. I found a home by making one for Chico and for Coco. It was the first time I felt concerned for something other than my six-year-old self. With Chico and Coco by my side I felt more comfortable in the world. Their presence became my home.

The world had certainly grown more treacherous for me to traverse in my late forties as I got further and further away from the innocent comfort of that six-year-old I had been back in Mississippi. That was the click I felt when I picked up Archie: That six-year-old’s innocence was awakened inside me that had not been completely curdled by an adulthood of glamour that had become methodical, a thudding presence, no longer thrilling but something that was simply there like weather—not even the threat of it but the dullness of endless cloudless days. I waited until the official date of my birthday, March 28, and strode back to 19th and Ninth to purchase the gift I had decided to buy for myself if Archie was still there. He was. I pulled out my credit card and took a breath when I signed my name under the little over fourteen hundred dollars he ended up costing me when the tax and food and new carrying case and a toy or two were added in. The next few weeks were taken up with toilet training as well as talking to him about everything in my life. That first night, I allowed him to sleep with me, and whenever we’re together he has slept with me every night since. From that first night he curled up next to me I have never been in need of another sleeping pill. Archie ushers in my dreams.

*   *   *

A few months after Archie entered my life we were taking a walk when we ran into an old colleague of mine from
Interview
magazine. “You always loved feeding Brigid’s pugs Fame and Fortune and hanging out with them,” he said to me. “I always wondered when you’d get a dog of your own. What’s this one’s name?” he asked, bending down to give Archie a scratch behind his pointy ears.

“Archie,” I said.

My friend straightened up and looked a little shocked but pleased. “No. Really?”

“Why are you looking so surprised?” I asked.

“Did you name him after Andy Warhol’s Archie?”

“Andy had a dog named Archie?” I asked. Had I known that and just forgotten it? Then it dawned on me. Andy did once tell me how much he missed someone named Archie when he saw me feeding Fame and Fortune one morning, but I let it pass, thinking maybe it was an old boyfriend. When I asked Brigid about this person named Archie, Brigid laughed at my lack of knowledge about Factory lore and told me Archie was instead a dachshund. She told me how much Andy had loved him and how inseparable they had been. “God. Yes. Now I’m remembering. How could I have blocked that out?” I asked my old colleague. “I didn’t consciously name him for Andy’s dog, no, but maybe Andy’s ghost was inspiring me. I called him that the first time I ever held him.”

“Yeah, Jed Johnson, Andy’s boyfriend back around 1973, suggested that they get a dog and Andy let Jed pick one out,” my friend told me. “Jed chose a short-haired dark brown dachshund. Andy named him Archie. Took that damn dog everywhere. He was always in the studio with him or, when Jed couldn’t go with him, he’d take Archie as his date to art openings. He’d even take him to restaurants and put him in his lap hidden under his napkin and feed him bits of food from his plate. Archie became a kind of alter ego for Andy and when he’d give press conferences—which he hated anyway—he’d take Archie along. When he didn’t want to answer a question he’d direct it to Archie, who also refused to answer, though Archie would look back at the journalist with an expression at least a bit less blank than Andy’s. Archie was finally a bit friendlier than Andy too. More outgoing. Jamie Wyeth even did a portrait of Andy and Archie. They were becoming more of a couple than Andy and Jed at one point. I think Jed was getting kind of jealous of Archie. So he suggested they get another dachshund. That’s when they got Archie a playmate named Amos, but he wasn’t as much of a socialite as Archie was. When Amos came into the fold, he and Archie stayed home a lot more and played with each other at Andy’s town house. Archie and Amos were the forerunners to Fame and Fortune at the Factory.”

Archie stood on the sidewalk and listened as intently as I did to the story. He wagged his tail each time my friend said the name “Archie” and put his paws on the calves of his legs. I said good-bye to my friend and walked Archie home, saying a silent thank-you to Andy Warhol for guiding me to 19th and Ninth that first day I ever picked up my own Archie and held him to me.

*   *   *

I put my own Amos into my own Archie’s life about five years after that fiftieth birthday of mine. I had ducked in one rainy Thursday afternoon to take a tour of the replicated childhood home of Teddy Roosevelt on East 20th Street before stopping in a pet store on Eighth Avenue to buy Archie some food. When I entered the store I encountered a harried old Hispanic lady trying to quiet the stray dogs she had brought in to try to convince the store’s customers to adopt or foster. Her presence there seemed to be a public relations ploy by the store’s owners to quell any protests that they might encounter about being suspected of acquiring the array of for-sale puppies displayed in the back from puppy mills. All the little old lady’s straggly dogs were yelping and barking in their stacked cages—about five or six of them—except for a tiny brown one that she held in her lap. I stopped to give him a little pet on his silent, shivering head. He looked up forlornly at me, his fur filthy and his body in need of nourishment. When our eyes met I knew I was in trouble. Not since Archie had first looked at me five years before had I felt such instant rapport. The woman sensed too that I was a goner. “I just got him this morning,” she said. “Everybody in this neighborhood knows I come here on Thursdays even before the store opens so I can set up with my babies. Around six o’clock—when that rainstorm was really bad; I got caught in it myself—I heard a knock on the front door and a woman who was out in it walking her dog was waving at me. She was holding this precious little thing and trying to get my attention. I opened the door and she told me her dog—it was some kind of big Labrador mix—had gone chasing after this one. Told me he had almost broken his leash when he went after it. At first she thought it was a rat, but then she realized it was a little pooch—so skinny and scared and drenched to his bones. See how his bones show. Sticking out so. Poor little thing. He’s starving. I’ve been trying to get some food in him. You want to hold him? Hold him. Go on. I give him to you.”

“I’m not sure…,” I said, hesitating.

“Oh, go ahead,” she said, handing him over to me to calm his shivering. I took him and whispered in his quivering ear, “It’s gonna be all right. You’re all right. You were saved this morning. You’re safe.”

“See? He likes you back. I already give him a name,” the little old lady said. “I don’t know why. I usually let people who save my babies give them names. But this one just looked like a Teddy to me. He’s Teddy. It’s like he told me so. Teddy.”

I’ve always lived my life by signs and omens. Having just left Teddy Roosevelt’s childhood home, where he had been a sickly creature himself, I knew I was about to play out a kind of narrative for myself. But first Archie would have to approve. After buying the dog food I had come for, I went home and walked Archie back to the store to meet Teddy. I was nervous he would not get along with Teddy, since Archie is fine with older dogs, but puppies make him peevish. To my surprise, he remained calm around Teddy and even took a few sniffs and licks at him. Archie didn’t bark or growl or snip at him, so I took that as a good sign as well. “See. Already brothers,” said the little old lady.