Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (2 page)

The next night when Arthur came into the bedroom and stared at him suspiciously, Dave said, “Get lost,” and Arthur sighed and slunk away

Now he was hogging the vent.

On the Saturday after Sam had solved the air-conditioning mystery, Dave picked up a
Reader’s Digest
while he was waiting in line to pay for groceries. He noticed an article called “Is Your Dog Your Boss?”

There was a test.

The test was straightforward. Get down on all fours and stare at your dog. If you are dominant, your dog will turn away. If your dog stares back, it means he considers you to be an inferior member of the pack. Dave drove home. He threw the frozen food in the freezer. He called Arthur. He dropped to his knees.

The thing that makes bad news worse is when it comes unexpectedly. Arthur had always been, if not considerate, at least obedient. Arthur might have pushed the limits but, unlike Sam and Stephanie, he usually did as he was told.

When Dave stared at Arthur, he fully expected him to turn tail. He had harbored the possibility of a little staring match. What he hadn’t considered was that his dog would stop wagging his tail, hold his gaze for a full minute and then curl his lip and begin to walk menacingly forward, growling.

“Arthur?”
said Dave.

Before the alarming moment resolved, Morley walked into the kitchen and Dave looked up at her, or more to the point, away from Arthur.

Arthur lifted his snout, sniffed derisively and ambled away, leaving Dave squatting on all fours, looking pathetically back and forth between his wife and the disdainful rear end of the retreating dog.

“Wait a minute,” he called after Arthur. “That wasn’t fair. Come back here.”

But Arthur wasn’t coming back.

“Arthur!” barked Dave, as firmly as he could.

Arthur was already around the corner, out of sight.

“Dave,” said Morley softly, “what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he said, struggling to his feet.

The summer Dave was seven he brought a notice home from Cubs about an overnight hike to the trouting pond behind Macaulays’ farm. Dave had never slept away from home before. The whole idea made him nervous. He told his mother he didn’t want to go.

“It will be all right,” she said. “You’ll see.”

The evening before the sleep-out his father took him for a walk. They ended up in front of Angus MacDonnell’s Post Office & General Store.

“You should have some supplies. For tomorrow night,” his father said. He handed Dave fifty cents.

Dave had never had so much money to spend on candy in his life. He bought two Jersey Milk chocolate bars, fifteen black-balls (three for a penny), five pieces of red licorice, a package of Thrills and a bag of pink candied popcorn.

He rolled the candy up in his sleeping bag as his father suggested. Knowing it was in there as he shouldered his bag on the laneway that twisted through the Macaulays’ sugarbush and over the hill to the trouting pond was the only thing that gave him the strength to turn his back on his father and start the long hike away from home.

After supper—burnt hot dogs and Kool-Aid—Dave sneaked into the tent and unrolled his sleeping bag. He had his mind on licorice. He didn’t notice Joey Talarico following him. Joey spotted the stash and told Gordy Beaman and Billy Mitchell, who were a grade ahead of them, and pretty soon there were seven kids crowded around the tent. Dave felt compelled to share his candy. He handed it out, piece by piece. When everyone had something, there was nothing left for him. Later, when he crawled into his sleeping bag, Dave found the gold foil wrapper from one of the Jersey Milk bars and he licked it, looking for traces of melted chocolate. He then fell asleep crying.

That was the same year Dave got his first-ever brand-new baseball. It was his Easter present. A round, white leather orb with red lace—a miraculously beautiful thing that was both soft and hard at the same time. He took it to school after the holiday weekend in a blue velvet Crown Royal bag.

When Jim McDevitt saw Dave pull the ball out, he carefully tucked
his
new ball back into his school bag.

“Nice ball,” he said to Dave.

By the end of summer Dave’s beautiful ball was a mushy, torn, grey lump. But Jim McDevitt’s was in the same pristine condition it had been on the Tuesday after the Easter weekend.

“You should’ve looked after it better,” said Jim one day at recess.

Perhaps if Dave had been a different sort of person he would have remembered Jim McDevitt and the candy-guzzling Cubs before accepting the job of road manager for a heavy-metal group called Thrasher. Thrasher was in the third month of a year-long Tour of the World! when Dave signed on. The fact that the position was open at that point should have told him something. He caught up with Thrasher in a hotel bar after a disastrous show in Evansville, Indiana, during which the sound man had hurled a bottle of Scotch at the lead singer and punched the drummer’s girlfriend—leaving her unconscious in the wings, while he stormed around the arena yanking cables out of speakers in the middle of Thrasher’s set. By noon the next day, on the bus and already halfway to Minneapolis, Dave had begun to appreciate just how irreparably dysfunctional the crazed enterprise was. The bass guitarist wouldn’t get on the tour bus and was driving himself to the gigs. The drummer’s girlfriend, who had been retching in the can since they left Evansville, had already been banned from a rival band’s tour by a road manager because of how badly she had messed up
their
drummer with the drugs she provided him. The keyboard player hated everyone, especially the bass guitarist; and the lead singer was so strung out it had taken them half an hour to talk him out of the hotel elevator that morning.

It took Dave four months to straighten things out. By the end of the summer Thrasher was more or less back together. Dave, on the other hand, was spinning apart.

His success didn’t go unnoticed. Whenever the tour lurched through New York or L.A., executives from the record company told Dave he was the best road manager they had. They praised his resourcefulness, and his diplomacy, and his ability to smooth out the most cantankerous local promoter. Most of all, they said, the band loved him.

Well, they should have. Dave was doing just about everything for them—picking up their dry cleaning, driving their dates home, preparing home-cooked meals on a two-burner camping stove he had bought in an army surplus store in Flint, Michigan, lending them money and writing “Dear John” letters for them as the bus rocked through the night. He finally quit the tour in Durham, North Carolina, after his fifth visit to see the lead singer’s mother, who was in hospital recovering from surgery. The singer said that the stress of visiting a hospital and spending time with his mother would be too much for him to bear.

Dave lasted eight months with Thrasher. When he left, he vowed that he would never allow himself to be taken advantage of again.

And here he was, a quarter of a century later. Apparently he hadn’t learned a thing about protecting his self-interest. Whenever he took a stand, especially whenever he tried to take a stand with his own family, no one ever paid him any attention. And if that wasn’t enough, he had just learned that the dog ranked himself higher than Dave in the family hierarchy.

The Saturday evening after Arthur had delivered that disturbing news, Morley said, “Who wants to go for ice cream?”

Sam said, “Yes!” And then he said, “Ice cream, Arthur?”

Now ice cream happens to be Arthur’s most favorite thing in the world. When Arthur heard the words “ice cream,” his backside began to twist toward his head, his tail started wagging furiously and he crab-walked across the kitchen to Sam—the picture of a dog in heaven.

Dave said, “Let’s go to the Dutch place.”

Sam said, “Ice cream, Arthur.”

Arthur’s eyes started to roll back in his head.

That’s when Morley said, “Dave, Arthur doesn’t like the Dutch place. They don’t have soft ice cream there.”

There was a pointed silence.

They went to the Dairy Queen. They took a bowl for Arthur’s ice cream. Dave watched the dog snorting it down, ice cream all over his face.

“Don’t you think this is kind of peculiar?” he said to Morley as they watched the dog eat.

She looked at him strangely. She didn’t understand.

Later in the week when Dave came home from work, he dug out the baseball mitts and said, “Where’s Sam?” He thought they could go to the park. He thought they could throw the ball before supper. Sam was in the yard. He had Arthur tied to his wagon, pulling it up and down the sidewalk.

“I’m busy,” he said. “I don’t want to play ball now.” Arthur gave Dave a look that seemed to say,
Butt out, Buddy
.

The next night Dave said he would make French fries for dinner. But there were no potatoes.

“Check Arthur’s basket,” said Morley.

Dave said, “What?”

When he is left alone in the house, Arthur steals potatoes. Somehow—no one knows how he does this, because no one has ever seen him do it—he can paw open the cupboard door where the potatoes are kept.

Arthur doesn’t eat the potatoes. He carries them across the kitchen, drops them in his basket and sits on them. There is something about the feeling of being near raw potatoes that Arthur likes.

The night he was trying to make the French fries, Dave found five potatoes in Arthur’s basket.

“Five’s enough,” said Morley.

“You mean,” said Dave incredulously, “that you use potatoes that Arthur has sat on? You’re telling me I have eaten potatoes from the dog basket?”

The final straw came a week later, when Dave found the socks. He was looking for potatoes in Arthur’s basket and uncovered a stash of socks instead—ten single unmatched socks stuffed under the blanket. Dave held up the socks in disbelief. It was like finding an elephant graveyard. He went through the socks one by one. Nine of them were his. He had already thrown their partners out.