It’s hard to explain to outsiders, the dog was part of us, the third partner on an expedition to find that perfect spot, that paradise where dichotomies unite in appreciation of their differences and somehow become a whole. I don’t know whether it helps to know what happened, or why, but it’s too late to kiss the booboo and make it better.

When I think of her these days, and I do think of her at least once everyday, it’s probably the bad times, two out of three times, that get deposited in my memory bank. Usually buried by time, these memories come back at the strangest moments. For instance, sitting in the company of heartbreakers in training, sweet young things asking me, “So what’s your story, dude?”

Whether it’s mine alone to tell, or show the feelings that go into the destination on the map that’s never reached, I can’t say without setting out to create it again with 40 tons of Borax and a 20 mule team across the painted desert of the imagination. There are so many sides to the question, consensus reality is hard to agree on even by myself.

But here now, we’ll try this one on for size. Once upon a time, as if by magic, boy finds girl. . . I know, you’ve heard this one before. But how many times have you heard it and demanded “Give me a definition! Cut the cliches! A DEFINITION OF LOVE ALREADY!”
Sorry, don’t know about definitions, but my interpretation goes something like this: Love is a four letter word. Or more accurately four words beginning with the letter L. I figured it out the hard way. By the e, by the x, by the p, by the eirence that lifts the dander every time you think, I can see now that I should have done it different.

Well sure, easy now looking back to say that, but in fact it is too late! You can’t go back, you missed the Off Ramp and have to go around the track again. So let’s start over. The first L, for those of you cringing in the slow lane, the first L is called Lust. Call it by any other name and you lie! It is a physical L, it is an animal L, it is a vegetable L, and if it pans out it is a mineral L.

The second L, the one that gets you coming back for seconds, at the least, is called Like. Gotta like or you’ll be hurled into a permanently adversarial universe, with nothing to hold on to except your addiction to each other.

The third L, if you get that far, if the first two don’t do you in, if you realize after 10 years you still Lust, you even Like more now than when you first met, but, and there is a but, you feel like you’re spinning in some bad rerun, immortalized forever in some late night sitcom hell, then look at the map: Is your Latitude together? Are you going in the same direction?

And if you are, have you agreed on the Longitude? Are you flying, swimming, driving, or burning the bridges before you cross them?

I make light of the dark sometimes, yet after all these years, when the air is still, time freezes, and her voice comes to me like wind chimes at the break of day. Even during the storm, the brutal neither of us could ever win, screaming and hurling accusations like thunder bolts and lightning rods bouncing off the walls, I would have rather fought to the death with her than gone to an orgy with celebrities. Hey, are we talking mainline addiction here, or what?

Towards the end, I was a glacier frozen in a desert state of mind. She, on the other hand, was a bouquet crying out to flower in the mountains. These conflicts make for the best opportunities to transform, but the worst odds to pull off the metamorphosis.

We were trapped out on the road, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in back of a Trailways station. All our earthly possessions in card-board boxes moving in different directions. A wooden leg on the way to Florida, a record player leaving for New York, the clothes that weren’t on our backs not even arrived from the Delta. So we waited. Looked at the walls.

I had no solutions, she cried a lot. Slept. Cried. Started smoking again, and quit, hating herself and me for making her. It was a no win, no way out, total paralysis, with only the good dog to keep us from the jugulars.

Two days earlier we had come all the way over from the flatlands of Mississippi, and moved in a house nestled in the mountains, across from what the real estate agent told us was the oldest river in the United States. The agent called the old river the New River. It just looked like a muddy spring creek to me. No big thing twisting through the rolling green breasts of Carolina, just like in all those Sweet Baby James songs on the radio.

No doubt, as the agent said, “nothin’ could be finer,” but there was a definite edge to the place I couldn’t put my finger on. As I stood on the front porch and looked out across the New River up into those old rolling hills I could see a cow grazing way up on the other side. So small to the eye from where I was standing it didn’t look like it would make a good New York rat. More like a roach nibbling on the crumbs of the tit. But I don’t say that. What would be the point?

Who diminishes who is not as important as why when you come to the split in the road. I couldn’t catch anymore shit, didn’t want to sling any either. So circumstance did its job.

I saw the shadow of the hawk up above the cow, circling like a Rorschach test spreading the sign of death over the rolling green hills on the other side of the river. Inside out, from the bottom of all the bottoms we had hit, I knew I couldn’t live in that house. There was a cold chill, a spring thaw between the toes. Off in the distance, lumberjacks, pig farmers, carpenters and plumbers of every persuasion were getting high on ordinary reality. “Yup,” no two ways about it.

I could no longer cut it in the vacuum. I didn’t want to go inside and fix what was wrong again, I wanted to leave it broken, buy a new one, and move on to the next. The next. Adventure, experience, beginning. . .

Well now here it is all these years later and this is the first time I’ve ever consciously looked back at the map, tried to locate the exact spot the tremor ripped us apart, or asked What exactly happened back behind that Trailways station?

No doubt death was stalking us. But try as I might I can’t remember a word that was said. Four days, five, a silence cutting through the anemic voices coming from the TV, punctuated only by the dog’s patient sighs.

Paradise was obviously a point of view we didn’t share anymore. Honestly didn’t know how. Though undeniably we were still stuck together.

There was nothing we could say to each other, so we chased down our boxes instead. Barreling down the highway like an open wound looking to close our deal, we headed South. Though it could have just as easily been North or East or even West.

First stop, the wooden leg. A theatrical prop and momento from happier days, it got buried in Fernandina Beach, where the beloved dog bought it bodyblocking a pickup truck out on A-1-A.

Desperately trying to hold it together as the blood trickled down the highway, I wrapped myself around her, enveloping her in my protective shield. Suddenly without warning though, she pushed me away and leaped head first into the pain, screaming, “Open up you bastard!” as tears began copulating in the pools of her wild blue yonder. Something snapped then, something broke, something tore me apart!

I was no Rin Tin Tin, to be sure, but for a couple of years the glue seemed to hold. Me and the dead dog were one. And the three of us continued pinballing across the topographic landscape of escape. Out-of-season on old Cape Cod, an extended trip to the Holy Land, tucked into the womb of Woodstock, a loft in Chelsea, a tent overlooking the Pacific in Mendocino. . .

Suffice to say, somewhere along the way I removed my protective shield, and completely made the transformation. Which is when I got the nerve to invite her into my room of dreams and embraced the myth of liberation she so fervently espoused. Blowing out the clogs of dirt in my carburetor, I could literally fly down open feelings I had never shown to anyone before, following the white line of truth wherever it led.

Eventually we quit running and settled down. Moved into a seven gabled, white clapboard compromise by the side of the road, and though I occasionally still went outside in the middle of the night and howled up at the moon, predictably I became a friend of man. She of course was pleased by my progress, but behind the back complained I had been house broken. And then was out the door looking for another thing she didn’t understand, to adore and tame.

© 2001 Mike Golden

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