How to do the wrong thing right
Pumpkins, grinning pumpkins everywhere! How in the hell did the most ridiculous of holidays ever invented — and not even a real holiday, mind you, but just some prefabbed nonsense for hawking tooth decay along with otherwise utterly useless, giant orange bulbous squashes — end up hogging the lion’s share of calendrical shelf-space? Halloween, for four solid months — from the very stroke of July 5 all the way up through to Nov. 1 — has the holiday merchandise run-of-the-show all to itself, impeded only by those insignificant “holiday” glitches known as, respectively, Labor Day and Columbus Day, both of them cash-cow duds, with the latter conjuring up no celebratory imagery whatsoever, and the former (if celebrated at all outside guild halls and political rallies) requiring only some charcoal briquettes leftover from the 4th of July, and maybe an appearance of Old Glory herself…. also recycled from the 4th. All the way forward from Independence Day fireworks up to icicles and frostbite, no matter which way I look or wherever I am, fang-mouthed, tiresome jack-o-lanterns stare hollowly back at me these dwindling days of October, reinforcing my every fresh concern about my evermore tired, old dazed orange American Shorthair, Boo, who, at the edge of 18 now (which equates to a mere sprightly 89 in human years) is suddenly showing every hoary minute of his octogenarian decrepitude.
Way back in the summer of 2001, the Katy Trail — which runs alongside my building — was still under construction and on weekends was virtually empty of all humans, allowing me to enjoy the former train tracks for my own private contemplations; whereupon one sunshiny, autumnal Saturday afternoon, I spotted glimmering in the distance an orange kitten perched primly in the middle of freshly paved asphalt, prettier than a pumpkin tartlet, apparently there awaiting patiently for my august arrival. “Murp!” he greeted me. “Well, hey there, little Boo,” smiled I, cupping him up and tickling his velvety ears. “Where’s your mother?” I glanced about. “Or anybody at all, Boo, for that matter?” (Where the “Boo” came from, I haven’t a clue.)
Boo wasn’t in the slightest distressed; obviously, he hadn’t been abandoned too very long — a couple minutes, at most. Strangely, too, I’d been expecting for weeks to find a kitten, even anticipating what color it would be, albeit admittedly, orange never quite manifested into focus as one of my options. Who can explain premonitions? Yet, as if by the wave of a magic ginger Ron Weasley wand, here now was amber-eyed, orange Boo; thus, home we sauntered, up to my upper-floor high-rise corner apartment, from where Boo has but rarely deigned to view that world he left beneath him since. Being most miraculously spared from certain roadkill death in a gutter or ditch, I chose for Boo an emperor’s name: Diocletian. (Look it up, bois.) Nevertheless, His Imperial Majesty has always been called just, simply, “Boo,” who took to his newfound, charmed existence in the same way, oh, the late Alva Vanderbilt — chief squanderer of America’s greatest family fortune ever— describes her first traveling experience via private railroad car: “It requires no getting used to; one takes to it immediately.”) Indeed, the first five years of Boo’s new life were nothing less than gilded… until, one fine spring day entered “the creature.”
But first, a question: Occasionally, in between my cracks of infidelity-versus-endowment questions, I’ll receive a few random, category-defying, pet queries; not often, but enough here and there to choose selectively for this issue’s uncharacteristically G-rated column — we’re going inspirational here, men, and for those of you nearing retirement, pay closer attention; heck, my words may even be helpful to some of you, for once. We’ll come back to grizzled Boo, plus his ball-an-chain nemesis in just a tomcat moment here; meanwhile, let’s get all animalistic right to it.
Dear Howard: I’ve been styling hair for more than 30 years. My retirement’s looming, so I’m trying to figure out some kind of geezer “hobby/business” that’ll serve the dual purpose of both keeping boredom at bay and my bank account bob-bob-bobbing along, except, I’m too old to hook. All joking aside, my only real extracurricular passion is dogs, particularly Miniature Dachshunds. I’ve owned at least one, if not a pair of them at a time, ever since I was 9. I’ve already got a well-fenced-in backyard; basically, I’m just a CKC certification application away from being able to open a Miniature Dachshund adoption agency: Toy Dachshunds are what they’re more commonly called, but that’s purely a marketing term, not a recognized designation. CKC, by the way, stands for Continental Kennel Club.
Best of all, I’ve discovered the web moniker, DachshundCentral, was available, so I bought the rights to it. Now, all I need’s a couple sire (father) dogs and a matching number of child-bearing dams (mothers), plus a pretty “Little Wieners” website, and I’m off to the races — a part-time business that not only keeps a happy grin on my face with my pants still on, but at last I’ll get to be a proud family man as well, after all! Do you see a downside here, Howard, that maybe I’ve somehow missed? — Wienerlicious
Dear Weenie Bob: None that I can think of; however, the accumulative total of factoids I’ve on file that involve men enjoying fun together with canines is, I’m quite certain, 100 percent unusable over at your place — nonetheless, I still can happily assist you here with just the three, basic common-sense necessities for making your DachshundCentral website successful:
1. Focus. As in never lose sight, or even stray very far from, your website’s central tentpole, which, in your case, is selling lots of wiener pups.
2. Passion. As in, is waking up every morning (at the age of 60-plus) to a blizzard of yapping, elongated hound dawgz your idea of Heaven come to Earth? And, most importantly:
3. Humor. As in, if your website’s dull, dreary and dry as a old gnawed bone, so then the clientele you attract shall be of its equal. All I’m saying, Wienerlicious, is mull over Howard’s three power points before you begin purchasing those starter sires and dams.
OK, now, with that done, sweet readers, let’s fast-forward five years: It’s 2006. Boo had recently turned 5-years-old when entered the serpent into Eden. To describe Roo perfectly in one word: Scrappy. I was traveling a lot, and had only intended to pick up Boo an extra bag of dry provisions for an upcoming trip to New York, rather than a diseased, deaf and half-starved new little baby brother, hairless as a sub bottom’s sphincter, and equally vociferous with his trembling screams. I spotted him in the adoption cage next to the cash register, curled up whimpering in an empty food dish. I popped open one of Boo’s FancyFeast tins. “There’s no food in this cage, Sir.” The cashier didn’t glance from his scanner. “It don’t need none. He’s the only one left. A new replacement herd comes in tonight. He’s awfully affectionate but, well, you know. Just look at him.” He nodded a pimpled chin to the opened can. “Did I scan that already? They found him in some abandoned apartment building, almost passed him by for dead… probably should have now, I guess. Today’s his last day.”
“His last day?” I stared. Slowly, it sunk in: “On Earth? You mean, he goes from here straight to the gas chamber?” The cashier shrugged, “We can only hold ’em 30 days. Nobody wanted this runt, man. The cards didn’t go his way. Some of ’em just pull deuces.”
“This runt just pulled four aces,” assured I, lifting out Roo and his near-devoured FancyFeast tin, both, in the palm of one hand. It’s amazing what love and good nutrition can achieve, and how quickly, too! I suspect Roo must have subliminally known how close was his call, for there has never been an animal on this planet happier than he to be alive: His glass is always half-full, his day is always sunny, and his tail always uplifted in an eternal candy cane of feline euphoria. Whereas Boo was pointedly imperious from birth and as far as he was concerned, into the purple born, Roo was his constant reminder that not all those deposits in their litter box were just Roo’s, alone. Anyone who walked through the door, Roo scampered to them delighted as a dachshund; and Boo to the furthest closet. Life of nary a want on this Earth, nor a bubbly little Beta brother too dumb to even grasp his pecking-order placement in the pyramidal scheme of things, was Boo’s daily hierarchal cross to bear.
Of my two toms, if faced with that rhetorical Sophie’s Choice quandary, I’d have to pick Boo: One is obligated to save the defenseless first, after all. Roo The Scrappy would be equally as content living in a dumpster as the sky ark, provided he could forage enough victuals amongst the trash to keep his Abyssinian belly from growling. Boo, in contrast, has always been too much a hothouse succulent to ever survive in an atmosphere less rarified than his aerie he was raised in; Boo would readily opt for suicide off our 16th floor terrace rather than move down anywhere, ever, with the likes of his embarrassing brother. And now to see Boo, hardly the great lion in winter anymore himself, if ever he was, liking to be nearby me, close enough to touch me at all times now; he can no longer even make it atop the bed, not even using his despised cat stairs. Diocletian The Imperial, who came to within but hours of experiencing the real world for actually being the fearsome hungry, deadly guttural place it truly is, instead never knew an inkling of any world’s existence other than one pampered with splendor, but who must now, ultimately, face what even I, this giant, fur-less creature who propels effortlessly about on but two legs (and daily fed him, petted him and tickled that favorite spot on his ears) could not shelter him from: My great, amber-eyed, hollowed-out orange pumpkin, imperceptibly shriveling day by day, grimly braving through it, his senior-cat onset of blindness and deafness, the gradually amplifying loss of weight and short-term memory, the tremoring motor functions and arthritic gait. Boo endures it with a majestic, graceful dignity, his long, slow goodbye paralleling, in perfect reverse, Roo’s extraordinarily tenuous start, and if Boo makes it to Halloween, he’ll be lucky. Boo, who has always hit jackpot. And with eight more lives still to fulfill, well, he’ll be lucky again.
— Howard Lewis Russell
Have a question about love, sex, etiquette or anything else hat needs a special spin from Howard? Send your problem to AskHoward@DallasVoice.com and he may answer it.
