Authors: Luis Carlos Montalván,Bret Witter
Until Tuesday (17 page)
I soon realized that if Tuesday and I were going out, I needed to leave an extra half hour in case Wellington mugged us. Twenty minutes were for the dogs to play. It usually took that long for Wellington to collapse, panting in exhaustion and sprawled out on the cool floor at the base of the stairs. Tuesday often joined him; he was usually smoked by then, too.
The other ten minutes, unfortunately, were to clean the Welly-slobber out of Tuesday’s ears. Tuesday has big floppy golden retriever ears, and after Wellington bit and tugged at them for twenty minutes, they were dripping like dish towels. Tuesday was my buddy. I couldn’t let him out of the house like that. It had to be cold. And uncomfortable. And, um . . . gross.
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every
experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. . . .
You must do the thing which you think you cannot.
—E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT
With Tuesday breaking the social ice with Wellington,
and with my optimism about the future growing by the day, I decided to attend Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration on January 20, 2009. From a PTSD perspective, the event was potentially as disastrous as the party at my professor’s apartment in November: hot, loud, and crowded. And instead of twenty people, there would be twenty thousand. At least I wouldn’t be making a public presentation.
But the situation was different, too. I was more comfortable with Tuesday, and we both knew much better how to handle public gatherings. I was no longer naïve about the challenges of a service dog, especially in a crowd, and I was mentally prepared to confront them. And perhaps most importantly, instead of being in a negative place about the event, I was ecstatic. The George W. Bush era was over (I won’t say Republican era, because the two have little in common), and I was enthusiastic about the new direction Obama was promising. Hope and change. Change and hope. In the three months since the election—the three months I had spent with Tuesday—I had lived the reality of those words.
In the years since, like many people, I have been disappointed. I never thought things would change overnight. My life has taught me that only through continuous hard work, by progressing one step at a time over a protracted period of time, can worthwhile accomplishments be achieved, whether that’s training an army for combat or learning to thrive with war wounds and a service dog. I think the concept of hard work, in the end, was a major stumbling block for Bush. He never really worked for his rewards, especially as a young man, so he didn’t understand how much hard work was involved in, for instance, invading a country and establishing a democracy in a deeply divided society where none had ever existed before. He assumed it would be easy, and he planned accordingly.
President Obama, who came from a middle-class background, understood hard work. I think he appreciated our soldiers’ extraordinary daily effort and meant to do right by them. He increased the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, which has alleviated the problem of inadequate care for veterans, though, unfortunately, has not come close to solving it. But he missed the most important thing for me and a lot of other voters who were primarily interested in military affairs: he never demanded accountability. The commanders who wrecked the war effort through terrible planning and egotism, from Secretary Rumsfeld on down, were given a free pass. The real officers who created the environment of abuse at Abu Ghraib were never named, much less punished. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a man deeply involved in the unconscionable lies about the death of Pat Tillman—a former professional football player turned Army Ranger (who was killed by friendly fire, as it turned out)—was the president’s handpicked leader for the war in Afghanistan. It’s like the country was staring over the cliff at the shattered remains of a bus, but Obama, like Bush before him, refused to acknowledge someone was driving it. Accountability indeed.
Of course, that was in the future. On January 20, 2009, I was celebrating possibility—both of a new direction for the U.S. military mission and a new life of my own. On the train to Washington, D.C., that weekend, with Tuesday at my side, I felt free. I was going to the kind of event that, less than three months before, would have produced crippling anxiety, and I wasn’t even thinking about the crowd. Instead, I was watching Tuesday and laughing. The dog loved trains. He loved the noise, the motion, the people passing by in the aisle, and the land sweeping by out the window. We were moving, Tuesday and I, in the right direction.
At the party in November at my professor’s house, everything went wrong: bad dogs, bad memories. and a service dog snout in a tube skirt. In Washington, it was exactly the opposite. Everything went right. Tuesday and I were guests of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), so we were with a group of like-minded people. Most of the event was outdoors, so it was less claustrophobic. Tuesday was the only dog, other than the bomb-sniffing German shepherds lurking at every entrance, so there were no yipping purse-puppies to distract him.
And Tuesday was focused. I’ve always felt, as his companion, that it was my responsibility to give Tuesday a life he enjoyed. I didn’t know how he’d feel about his first full-scale party—the music, the lights, the balloons and streamers—but I was prepared to slip him enough refreshments under the table to keep him happily at my side. I didn’t need to worry, though. Tuesday never left me. Never. Not once. Not even when the waiter came by with a full tray of donkey-shaped dog biscuits (okay, that didn’t happen). But we did ride in a crowded elevator together. That’s one of those things you never think about, riding in a busy elevator with an eighty-pound dog. At every floor, people sauntered on, then stopped abruptly when they saw Tuesday staring at them. “Service dog,” I told them. I don’t know if they knew what that meant. They might have thought he was a Secret Service dog for all I know, or a military service dog back from a tour in Iraq, but they never questioned it. By halfway down, poor Tuesday was smushed in and staring at derrieres, but that didn’t seem to bother him at all. (And no, he didn’t sniff . . . I don’t think.)
At the party, everybody wanted to meet Tuesday. When they heard I was a wounded veteran and Tuesday was my service dog, they wanted to give both of us hugs. I didn’t let them, of course; we weren’t ready for that. When I ran into two attractive women at the bar (literally ran into them, it was very crowded), Tuesday was a perfect gentleman, bobbing his eyebrows while they commented on his beauty and deportment.
What the heck
, I thought,
it’s a party. Let them pet him
. You’d have thought I let Tuesday catch the chuck wagon from those old dog food commercials, he was so ecstatic. Lynette and Jeri were from Miami, and since I’m a Cuban American with several relatives in Miami, we transitioned easily into other subjects. Life stuff. Normal people stuff. We talked for twenty minutes, and I’m not ashamed to say it was the best and longest conversation I’d had with anyone, outside of my family and landlord, in more than two years. I even got a phone number, but after the high of the party wore off I chickened out and never called.
Soon after, Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of IAVA, pulled me aside. He wanted me to meet someone. When Paul walked into the VIP-only section, Tuesday and I followed. I don’t know why we weren’t stopped by the bouncers, but it was a magical night, everything was going right, and they let us pass without question, even though we were far from VIPs. I guess a man with a cane and a service dog doesn’t seem like much of a threat.
“There he is,” Paul said, walking toward a man on the other side of the enclosure. He tapped the man on the shoulder—“Hey, Al!” he said—and there I was, face-to-face with that old
Saturday Night Live
–starring,
Trading Places
–mugging, senator-to-be (the election was still being disputed in court at the time) Alan Stuart Franken. I mean, the guy was almost a senator,
and
he knew Eddie Murphy—back when Eddie was the funniest person on the planet.
“This is Captain Luis Montalván, a wounded Iraq veteran,” Paul said, “and his service dog, Tuesday.”
As it turned out, Al Franken wasn’t just a great
actor
(ahem), but a friendly, intelligent, down-to-earth gentleman. He was genuinely interested in my perspective on the war, and we talked briefly about my two tours of duty and my injuries, both mental and physical. He was most interested, though, in Tuesday. Al Franken was a serious dog lover, and in between stories about his own dogs, I told him about Tuesday and what a difference he made in my life. While the senator-to-be was down on one knee petting Tuesday (how could I refuse?), I told him it would mean a lot to many people if he considered championing the cause of service dogs for veterans. We talked for a long time, but I didn’t think much about it, even when he asked me detailed questions about Tuesday’s training and the program that had matched Tuesday and me.
Eventually Franken moved on, and Tuesday and I spent the next few hours wandering the VIP section—no way we were leaving, now that we were inside—in a low-key state of joy. So many well-known, recognizable people approached us to talk to Tuesday that, by the end of the night, I really did feel like a VIP—or at least the wingman of a dog that was a pretty big deal. When the fireworks finally blasted into the sky to close the night, Tuesday and I took a cab to my parents’ house and, exhausted but happy, fell into bed like best friends on a spring break trip to Cancún.
“You’re a true VIP, Tuesday,” I said, stifling a yawn. “Or maybe a VID: a very important dog.”
Tuesday licked my face, a gesture both goofy and sweet, and laid his head on my shoulder. On the edge of sleep, I felt him rise out of the bed and, peeking out of one half-closed eye, saw him wander to the window, where he stood looking out at the moonlit yard.
A few weeks later, I received a call from Al Franken. He had been moved by our story, and he wanted to ask me more questions. We spoke several more times in the coming weeks, and it soon became clear that he was serious about service dogs. In fact, he planned to introduce a bill to help provide them to wounded veterans—if and when the court cases ended and he officially became a member of the U.S. Senate. Tuesday, I realized, really was a star.
Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they
mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?
—L
EO
T
OLSTOY
*
President Obama’s inauguration was an exception. I was
not, in my ordinary life, much more comfortable with crowds than I had been before. I avoided them as much as possible, in fact, just as I did social interactions, subway rides, and sit-down restaurants. What I did feel better about was walking around New York City during the day. Although Tuesday and I had both missed the deranged alley cat, I felt more and more comfortable as the winter progressed with Tuesday’s ability to recognize danger.
He had a few quirks. He didn’t trust homeless people, for instance, and always alerted me to their presence. I understood his concern. Homeless people were often situated in unusual places, like dark vestibules, behind bushes, or at the bottom of the subway stairs. They didn’t act like other people, either, sitting where most people walked, gesturing toward you as you passed, or fishing around in garbage cans. I know it was wrong to single them out, especially since so many were wounded veterans with problems similar to mine, and I tried to reach out to them as best I could. On good days, I talked with them briefly and offered spare change and assistance. On bad days, when I was too anxious to interact, I walked by them without making a scene. Tuesday often watched them a little too intently for my comfort, even after we passed, but I can’t fault him for that. He was trained to notice people behaving strangely and to alert me to their presence. His profiling of homeless people, in an unfortunate way, proved he was doing his job.
It was ironic, then, that a similar sort of profiling was the biggest source of trauma in my new dog-based life. It started the first night, when I went into the convenience store for my usual after-midnight food purchases.
“No dogs, sir.”
“Excuse me?”
“No dogs.”
I explained that Tuesday was my service dog, not my pet, and by law he was allowed to stay with me at all times. I had been to this store probably a hundred times. I knew the clerk questioning me. But this was the most I’d ever spoken to him.
“Okay, okay. Go.” Not friendly, but resigned. As in,
Shop and get out of here as quickly as possible
.
The incident bothered me. I didn’t like drawing attention to myself, and I didn’t like having to explain that I was wounded. I was never comfortable walking into stores anyway because there were too many blind corners and not enough exits, and during my time without Tuesday in Sunset Park I had narrowed my errands to a small number of places, maybe ten, where I knew the staff. It was difficult for me to trust, so I liked to see the same faces. Establishing familiarity is fundamental to dealing with PTSD, which is another reason it’s unconscionable that the Brooklyn VA hospital made PTSD-suffering veterans see a different resident every appointment, especially when that resident’s first question was always, “So what’s wrong with you?” It’s like nobody in the system understood the most basic aspect of the most disabling disorder among veterans today.
It was a betrayal at the VA, and it was a betrayal in Sunset Park. That’s how I felt when a familiar clerk questioned me about Tuesday. The first few times, I didn’t think much about it. I was able to push it out of my mind in the exuberance of those early weeks with him. But as the incidents piled up, often three or four a week, they started to wear me down. People I trusted were turning on me. A few questions were fine, but I was blocked at the door of my favorite bodega. I was harassed at the counter of the one deli I felt comfortable in, first by the employee taking orders and then by a customer. One restaurant refused to seat me. Another took my money and gave me food, then had the manager throw me out of the dining room. There was a sign on the door that said
NO PETS ALLOWED EXCEPT ASSISTANCE ANIMALS
. I tried to point that out to the manager, but he threw me out again.
“No, no,” the owners of the mom-and-pop shops said. “You can’t come in. One dog hair and they shut me down.”
“But this is my service dog. He has to come in.”
“No. Dogs against the law.”
“He’s my
service
dog” I said, pointing out the red vest and medical cross that marked him as a working dog. “It’s against the law
not
to let him in.”
I understood the problem. Many of the shopkeepers were immigrants with limited English. Others were low-paid clerks trying to get through the day. They didn’t understand the intricacies of American law, and they lived in fear of the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, one of the most dog-phobic sanitary patrols in the country. But these store owners were discriminating against me. They were violating my civil rights. They were playing with my mind. PTSD is a dwelling disease, where the mind fixates on an issue or image and relives it over and over again. Death. Dismemberment. Betrayal. Every time I entered a store, I felt all the past instances of discrimination. I felt every betrayal, from not having enough soldiers at Al-Waleed to being tossed out of a deli the night before. “No dogs” felt like a push out of the ordinary world, a rejection because I was broken and different and less of a man.
Imagine if a store owner said every day to a customer, “Sorry, no wheelchairs. We don’t want people like you in here.” Horrible, right? Well, that’s what physical barriers like steps say to wheelchair-bound people every day. And that’s how it felt every day with Tuesday, who was as vital to me as a wheelchair to a paraplegic. The store owners, the government, society—they didn’t want me here.
It wasn’t just a matter of hurt feelings; these encounters damaged my health. In addition to the PTSD, since Al-Waleed I had been dealing with traumatic brain injury, the result of my initial concussion and subsequent blows to the head. For years, I had lived with tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears. I had such humiliating memory problems that, before I left my apartment, I always wrote down in a little notepad where I was going, why I was going there, and when I was expected. Bleak moments of confusion forced me to consult that notepad on almost every excursion, even when I was only going to the corner store. I remember glancing at a man selling newspapers by a subway entrance one day, feeling the world suddenly spin away from me, and tumbling down the stairs, severely bruising my tailbone. Before Tuesday, I would occasionally “gray out,” as I termed these episodes to my therapist, and find myself thirty blocks from home, unable to remember how I got there. That’s a long way to wander, especially since at the time I limped badly, used a cane, and walked at the pace of an eighty-five-year-old man.
The worst aspect of the TBI, though, was the migraines. To call them headaches is to compare a firecracker to the atom bomb. A headache is a little man inside your skull, pushing to get out. A migraine is two enormous hands slowly squeezing your head into the size of a golf ball, ratcheting up the pain centimeter by centimeter until, finally, in a fiery cataclysm, your skull explodes and splatters your brain all over the room.
They came in a variety of ways, these atomic explosions. I was sensitive to both light and sound, and sometimes too much of either would set the crushing machine in motion. Sometimes, the head pain seemed to bleed out of physical discomfort in my back or knee. At other times, it seemed to arise for no reason at all. The most reliable trigger, though, was extreme tension and anxiety, and the most common reason for this level of agitation was discrimination by shopkeepers.
It wasn’t just verbal confrontations. It was also more subtle issues, like being singled out and watched. The
supermercado
near my house, for instance, had an employee follow Tuesday and me around the store. I don’t know why they thought this was necessary, but you probably realize by now that being followed is not a good thing for a PTSD-suffering veteran. It triggered all my symptoms: anxiety, hypervigilance, alienation, outrage, and perhaps most importantly, the overwhelming feeling of imminent danger and threat. I was as tight as a cord, and within a few minutes, I could feel the pressure in my head. At that point, I knew it was inevitable, the migraine was coming, so I struggled home, pulled the blinds, turned off the lights, and lay down in the darkness just as my skull came apart. In that state, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. Even opening my eyes was like jamming two sabers into the pain center of my brain.
If I was lucky, the migraine lasted only an hour or two. That was the best kind. The other kind, the bad one, lasted two days. Usually, I lay in the dark the whole time, in exquisite pain, trying not to move, while Tuesday, who was aware that even the jostling of a paw on the bed would send shock waves through my brain, waited patiently on the other side of the room. Once, I remember, the pain became so intense that I couldn’t take it any longer. I stumbled to the bathroom and turned the shower on scalding hot. I could hear myself yelling, as if from a great distance, but I stood under the burning water for twenty minutes until I felt my knees buckling and knew I was going to pass out. I stumbled back to the bed and slept for hours, and when I awoke the pain was gone. It felt like I was coming out of the worst stages of the flu, but for that time, at least, I was cured. The experience was so intense, though, such a shock to my system, that I have never tried it again.
Instead, I stopped going to the
supermercado
. I stopped visiting all the stores, in fact, that questioned Tuesday’s presence. I tried to limit those experiences, to wall them off from the rest of my existence, because despite spending probably 20 percent of my time in mental or physical pain, that was a vast improvement over where I’d been a year before. There was no way I could allow bad days and worse incidents—no matter how distressing—to undermine the positive aspects of my life with Tuesday. For the first time in years, I felt comfortable most days and confident about the future. I wasn’t just surviving; I was beginning to build a life and a productive career. My freelance editorials were gaining attention, especially several articles on how the actions of New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, were not backing up his public pronouncements of support for veterans, and I soon found myself being invited to speak on veterans’ issues.
In the past, my public speaking engagements had been like a mound of greasy french fries: something I couldn’t turn down, but which always left me feeling nauseated and remorseful. In March 2008, for instance, eight months before meeting Tuesday, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to participate in the Winter Soldier rally mobilized by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). As a captain, I was the highest-ranking veteran present, so I felt compelled to accept their invitation to speak in front of several thousand people. I have only a vague idea of what I said. I had doubled my medication to combat the anxiety, and I was loaded to the gills on rum. That’s how I did things back then, when I did anything at all. The effort left me sick in bed for almost a week.
With Tuesday, public speaking was different. He gave me confidence, but even better he gave me something to talk about. How could anyone, after all, not love hearing stories about a beautiful and specially trained golden retriever? It was mostly speaking panels and community events, but I took it seriously because there might be one person in the audience, one caregiver, parent, or sufferer of TBI or PTSD, whose life I could change. Sure, I was opinionated. But I had done my research. I was passionate. And, thanks to Tuesday, I was usually stone-cold sober, too. I still don’t remember what I said most of the time, or even what most of the panel discussions were about, but I remember the woman in charge of one of them. She was beautiful, smart, opinionated, and socially conscious, exactly the kind of woman I like.
So I asked her out. I hadn’t been on a one-on-one situation with a woman since my last girlfriend left me with an apology and a picture she had drawn of me with half my face stripped off and replaced with barbed wire, guns, and grenades. I hadn’t gone out with anyone, anywhere, even for a coffee, in more than a year. That’s the size of the difference Tuesday made in my life. He changed everything in me, right down to my heart.
She agreed to meet me at my apartment in Sunset Park, a necessity since I would never make it through an evening in a new neighborhood. I planned a night at a Lebanese restaurant I knew in Bay Ridge, a short bus ride away. The trip was complicated, at least in my condition, but the evening was special. It felt like a turning point, an entry back into normal life, and as always I went all the way.
The date started out perfectly: The woman was fantastic. She loved Tuesday. And after a day spent steeling myself for conversation, I was my old sociable self. She made it easy, and so did Tuesday. I didn’t even have to be entertaining because Tuesday handled that part for me. He gave us something to talk about and filled the awkward silences, and that helped me relax and enjoy myself. By the time the bus pulled up on Fifth Avenue, we were laughing and having a good time.
I let my date step up first, like the traditional gentleman my mother had raised, then stepped into the small entryway with Tuesday.