“Brother Dog”, written by The Rose City’s Rick Rubin, appeared in Wild Dog #4:In Search Of The Inner Puppy (April 1993) – JDW
Katherine, who lives up the street, was walking her yappy little yellow dog, and I was walking my shaggy black medium-sized dog. She mentioned her dog had been sick, and to the vet, but the vet hadn’t be able to discover what was wrong with the pooch.
There had been some discussion of exploratory surgery.
I snorted and said I couldn’t afford exploratory surgery on myself, and I doubted she could either. Neither of us had medical insurance.
I said her dog ought to run the same risks we do.
But she told me her son Ell, 15, would be devastated if she let the dog, his friend and companion of many years, die.
Without thinking much about it, I told her, “My mother had my dog killed.”
As Katherine gave me a look of shocked horror, I realized I hadn’t thought of Jerry’s death for a long while. Had I grown so callous?
Had I forgotten the effect of that dreadful event of my early adolescence?
Katherine’s son is the same age I was when it happened. It went like this: My father had died untimely. In his early 50s, leaving my mother a widow of 46. In that era middle-class women did not go as easily out to work as they do now. She had two children – my sister just starting at Stanford University and me in my first year of high school.
To cut expenses, she decided to sell our four-bedroom house. Yet, to diminish the trauma to me, she would move us to a duplex only across the street.
Unfortunately, the duplex owner didn’t care much for dogs. Yes, we could move in, but no, the dog couldn’t come with us.
We’d had Jerry. a border collie-Shetland sheep-dog mix, for 10 years. A brown-and-white bob-tail mutt, feisty and independent, Jerry’d chosen to come to live with us when I was 5.
He’d run away from previous owners and showed up on our doorstep. He’d become my brother. A free dog, as city dogs no longer can be. He’d roam off for three or four days, then return stinky and unkempt.
He was an incorrigible car-chaser, ran after any bitch-in-heat, slept on my bed and kept his own counsel on how a dog ought to behave.
He was a barker and hereditary watchdog, and he accompanied me everywhere.
Need I say I loved him more deeply than life?
She told me she would have him “put to sleep.”
I must have argued, but don’t recall it. The idea was too stunning to dwell on. One day she told me tomorrow she would do it.
That night Jerry slept on my bed one last time. I cried all night, then went off to school. When I returned, there was no such dog. Neither of us said a word about it. I didn’t cry again for 15 years, until one blow harder than the rest – never mind her name – finally unplugged my tear ducts for me.
Men are, after all, encouraged not to cry.
The anguish went deeper than not crying. My mind became addled. At school, my grades plunged. For three years I could do nothing right, until, during my final year, I began slowly to reassemble myself. I said no to everything. I was as hellishly bad a teenager as I knew how to be.
I suppose everyone blamed it on the death of my father. I blamed it on nothing. I only hurt.
The dog’s destruction was far from my mind, apparently all but forgotten.
How long later I realized the centralness of the dog’s death I don’t know exactly. Ten or 20 years. I was a man grown before I recalled what had happened. A man misshaped, one might say. A man who said no, automatically, to everything. A troublesome fellow, unable to accommodate himself to society’s rules. If they told me white, I argued black. If they sent me right, I went left. If she said yes, I answered NO!
After I remembered Jerry’s death, and connected it to my wretchedness, I taxed my mother with the act once or twice. Yet, by then I understood she’d just been a frightened middle-aged woman, trying to do her best for her children. I mentioned it enough though, so she realized finally what a wrong she’d done, killing my only brother a year after my father’s death.
It was convenient to blame someone, and she’d so clearly been wrong – there were, after all, a great many places we might have moved to – that I never questioned the event, only rehearsed in my mind, grinding in silent pain.
But Jerry’s destruction floated unspoken between us as long as she lived.
I’d learned how they “put dogs to sleep.” His agony in the decompression chamber was the stuff of my nightmares.
My mother was a frightened woman who wasn’t sure she’d be able to hold her world together. She had done the best she knew how, by her lights, in having my brother “put to sleep by decompression,” in the year 1946.
It was only three or four years ago, exploring my psyche as a writer must, that I came to a realization. I saw my negativism, that different drummer I’d marched, staggered and crawled to, was Jerry.
I saw that I’d said NO! from that day forward. Because I ought to have said it one day sooner.
When she told me she was going to have my brother dog killed, I should have stuffed my Boy Scout pack and taken my dog and gone out into the world. You should not let even your own mother kill your dog of 10 years.
But I was too young. So I cried, and then stopped crying and began saying NO.
NO was the motif of my life. NO separated me from all the rest. NO made me a writer, as surely as the syllable MU, repeated for many years, makes you a Zen Buddhist, or Sieg Heil, repeated many times, made them Nazis.
I wore NO on my sleeve and carried it in my heart.
I tacked on my wall a slogan, from some nameless sufferer of a European education: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
Saying NO all the time is not the best way to get along in a world such as this one.
Sometimes you have to say no, but not every time. Not as an unthought instant reflex. No. Decades later when I realized I’d started saying NO one day too late, the blame shifted from my little mother, to me. Yes, it was my fault, too. If I loved the dog so much, I ought to have taken a powder. Gone south. Hit the road. But I was too little, too young, too weak. And a docile, tractable boy. Until then.
Strange that when I realized it was partly my fault, the burden fell away.
Easy to nurture a memory of someone else’s fault; not so easy when it’s your own. I quit thinking about it.
Within a few years I was capable of suggesting my friend Katherine should let her dog take its chances. I’d become as hard as the rest.
NO! I shout up the street to Katherine, now. You’re right. Don’t let your son’s dog pass lightly.
Be the mother I wish I’d had, and struggle valiantly against such a fate.
Say YES! now, so that he will not blight his life by saying NO! incessantly, ever after.