The Stardust Lounge (17 page)

“He can't be attacking you,” Trevor states.

The next morning I call a friend of mine, the dean of the Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton and a veterinarian himself. He and I became friends a few years ago.

We met through a review in the
New York Times
of a book I'd written. Frank read the review and noticed that I taught at Tufts on the Medford campus. Because the book,
in part, described my childhood relationships with animals, the dean sent me a note through intercampus mail. In the note Frank commented on how much he liked the book, and he extended an invitation to tour the Grafton campus hospitals and wildlife clinic.

Since our meeting, Frank has come to our aid during our many animal crises. He faxed us information on how to care for our orphaned kittens, and he's kept an eye on Buster by way of sending us information regarding canine epilepsy.

Aware of the problems that Stephen encountered in Brookline, Frank also invited Stephen to visit Grafton. On one occasion we brought GQ. with us. Frank walked us among the horses, sheep, and cow barns, sparrows sailing the wide girth of the stables.

Like me, Frank believes in the significance and healing power of human and other animal relationships. As he listens to my story of G's attack, I am afraid he is going to suggest, as our local vet has, that G is too dangerous to remain with us. But Frank has another idea.

“I am going to put you in touch with our animal behaviorist here,” Frank says. “Let's make the appointment right away. There still might be something we can do.”

We live close to one another and to the animals. Stephen and Trevor share a tutor on weeknights. While they work I get dinner ready—four packages of ravioli and two boxes of broccoli dumped in boiling water that steams the kitchen windows, two loaves of bread and a salad, all of which will disappear when we sit down together in front of a fire.

Charles and I take turns feeding and walking the dogs. He usually takes them out in the mornings and midday, while I set out with them in the evenings. Often Stephen or Trevor comes with me. It's a good time to talk about problems they are having at school, or with one another.

Some of our older cats come along on our walks even when winter's at its worst. They dart far out in front to lie in wait behind a bush. As we approach they leap out to surprise us. Other times we find them lounging in the dust at the roadside.

And there is the ritual of the laundry. For most of our last two years together it must be taken to the Laundromat, our dryer hopelessly broken, in pieces on the basement floor.

Once he pronounced it unfixable, the electrician who came out to look at it left in a hurry—happy to escape what must have appeared to him a madhouse of activity and noise, the dogs joyously sniffing and circling him and his tools, the boys at work in the adjoining basement room mixing and recording, our cats batting lint balls around him as Rufus, grunting and growling, would try to corral them; Rufus, whom we believe to be going through interminable postpartum depression regarding the cats. They're fully grown and these days they mostly taunt and/or ignore Rufus, who mothered them in their orphaned infancy.

Because we don't have the money to buy a new dryer, we drop our laundry off to be done by attendants at a local Laundromat. But when we pick it up, we find notes taped to our bags that read,
Dear customer, we do not appreciate receiving dirty laundry that contains so much animal hair. Some of our staff is allergic.

Another time a note says,
“Dear customer, the sheets in the laundry you dropped off smelled of urine. We ask that you rinse these items before giving them to us.”

“This is humiliating. Buster can't help it. They're treating us like the Snopeses,” Charles says, referring to a family in Faulkner, as he unloads the bags from the car.

“I agree. We'll do it ourselves from now on,” I offer.

Going to the Laundromat for a couple of hours each week actually becomes a job I look forward to. Pretty soon
Stephen comes along as we discover a shared domestic pleasure, doing such mounds and mounds of dirty laundry—six to ten loads—taking up many washers including the huge industrial ones for the sheets and blankets soiled as a result of Buster's most recent seizures; and then our plotting for an entire row of dryers, one of us standing guard while the other deftly pulls laundry out of the machines, loads up several baskets, and triumphantly rolls them over, one in each hand.

Then there's the folding, which we enjoy most, folding clean, fresh-smelling sheets and towels, shirts, pants. The trunk I once packed full of clothes for Stephen has long since been ransacked for Trevor. As luck would have it, Trevor and Stephen are about the same size. The trunk serves as Trev's dresser.

One night Stephen and I find ourselves folding a run of twenty or so identical boxer shorts complete with sports insignia.

“Where did these come from?” I ask.

“I think they're a
gift
from Trevor,” he answers. “I guess you won't have to buy us underwear for a long time. I saw another couple of boxes of these in the garage …”

Besides maintenance and upkeep of the house, work, and schoolwork, our animals teach us rituals. Rufus loves to howl. He possesses a hound's deep baritone and will “sing” on command, sing passionately, starting in the lower octaves and reaching crescendos that so amaze and move us, we reward him with almost a whole pack of Pupperoni, the other dogs rewarded in the wake of Rufus's performance simply for being Rufus's friends.

And Buster, indeed, loves balls. At the sight of one he
cannot be distracted. He is compulsive about balls, perhaps owing to his epilepsy. Buster must be kept indoors if the boys decide to shoot baskets in front of the garage or he will steal the ball and boot it all the way down the hill to the retirement home.

Now and then we let him have the ball inside our fenced yard, but he's allowed to play with it for fifteen, at the most twenty minutes at a time or he will pop it, and/or bloody his nose, and/or work himself into such a frenzy he begins to seize.

As for G.Q., the behaviorist at the vet school in Grafton diagnosed him as dominant aggressive, a condition, he told us, that often surfaces about the time a dog reaches two years old.

“If he were in the wild, he would be alpha male, top dog,” he explained.

“In the wild,” I considered. “He's not far from it…”

To suppress his aggression, the behaviorist instructed us, we must engage G. in rigorous training, including disciplined walks on the leash followed by the exercise of the command of fifty to one hundred downs each day. The behaviorist also put him on Prozac.

All of us participate in G's training lest he get the notion he can bully any of us. During the early dark, sleet or snowfall, while I cook dinner or while the tutor instructs one or the other, the boys work with the bulldog in the dining room. Rufus and Buster drop in and try a few downs themselves. Over the drone of the tutor's explanations of algebraic equations can be heard: “G, heal! Good boy! G.Q., down! Good boy! Buster, down. Good boy! Rufus, down. Rufus, down. Rufus,
down …
.”

My friend Frank has sent us a video showing the beneficial effects of Prozac on animals. One weekend my sister Eve comes to visit, and while she and I shuck a huge barrel of corn, I show her the video. We listen to the narrator explain how a bird, once confined in a cage much too small for him, plucked out all of his feathers. Though the bird was rescued and moved to a larger cage, he continued to torment himself and was nearly bald, full of scabs and scrapes.

Given careful doses of Prozac, however, the bird is shown in various stages as he grows new feathers, until at last he is fully arrayed, content, and animated. You can see for the first time that the bird is a beautiful parrot.

“I've known people like that,” says Eve, a practicing psychologist now in divinity school.

Another segment of the video shows a dog who refuses to come out from behind the drapes of his person's living room, and yet another dog who has fixated on a particular stick and cannot be persuaded to put it down. As a result that dog hardly eats or sleeps.

“That's me,” I comment.

“I'm the one behind the curtain,” Eve answers.

Once on Prozac, however, both dogs behave more normally—the first now happy, apparently, to be a part of the household as he naps in the center of the living room. The second dog is clearly uninterested in the stick to which earlier he was enslaved.

The voice on the video discusses each case, comparing the bird with others confined too closely who did not pluck out their feathers.

And why, the commentator asks, did the first dog feel that he was only safe behind the drapes? Why did the second dog fixate on the stick while another happily gave it up to his person, played with other sticks, then abandoned them to go inside?

It is hard to say, the voice explains. Perhaps these animals lack the necessary serotonin, were born with low levels. Close captivity appears to have depleted the once-healthy bird's levels. After rescue, he still could not recover without help from the drug.

Prozac seems to be working for G.Q. Since he has been taking capsules in a piece of bologna every morning, we haven't observed him going strange, stiffening, narrowing his eyes, and licking his lips, though Stephen, if he is irritated about something, adopts the gesture.

Portrait of Frank / Photo by Stephen Digges

1.
Mettle:
The boys jumped from rooftop to roof op showing off their
mettle
to the onlookers below.

2.
Dour:
Her expression was
dour
when she told me I was going to fail the quarter.

3.
Beguile:
The boys would
beguile
the cops into believing that the fire was electrical.

4.
Ogle:
Her shapely figure caused her students to
ogle
blatantly.

5.
Cull:
Ms. A. has chosen to
cull
me out of the rest of the group as someone whose excuses are unacceptable.

6.
Deleterious:
The entire concept of grading the individual according to a standardized system can cause a
deleterious
self-esteem problem.

7.
Doleful:
His expression was doleful as he was led into the police station.

8. Ameliorate: He would ameliorate his friends’ problems by stealing a car to drive them home.

9. Reticent: The reticent man turned out to be a spy.

10. Subvert: With the help of many I will subvert the present social and political systems.

11. Raze: The kid will raze his room in anger if he isn't let out soon.