The Man Who Wins Little Ones

(Originally published in Polk County News, November 23, 2005)

McCaysville, morning in a sunlit pasture. I watch as Dr. Bill Mitchell strokes the horse’s neck, murmurs into its upright ear—a secret, perhaps—and slips a needle through the glossy hair and under the skin. The horse nuzzles him, blinking shy brown eyes. Hot blood fills the sample tube.

We ride back to the Copper Basin Vet Clinic, the vial of blood cooling in the cup-holder between us, and Dr. Mitchell tells me, in his genteel Georgia drawl, why he left a three-decade career as a pathologist and veterinarian for the U.S. Army to come home and care for animals full-time.

“During Desert Storm I had to do autopsies, every day, every day, every day. And you’re doing autopsies on people that are perfectly healthy; the only bad thing is that they’ve been killed. And the thing that I could never—that always bothered me—I just couldn’t deal with their faces, with the expressions on their faces. It just got to me. And when I came back I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not dealing with humans any more.’ That was enough.”

When a man realizes he can’t win the big one, he tries to win a few of the little ones instead. At his clinic Dr. Mitchell leads me into his “rescue room,” a tragically crowded space in the back where he keeps the unwanted, the abandoned, the abused. Unweaned kittens claw a wire cage, malnourished dogs pace in kennels. And on a cushion in the corner lies a dog with long black hair, a white nose, and stumps where his hind legs once were. I stoop to pet him, to offer a little sympathy, but he cringes. This mutilated animal was a puppy once, a confident curious fuzzball; and now he whimpers at the sight of a human. I wonder: what horrible lesson has he learned about people? The same one Dr. Mitchell learned during Desert Storm?

The poor dog is a parable cast in fur and flesh; an appalling commentary on victimization. If Dr. Mitchell can no longer deal in human victims, he can still treat the victims of humans—or sub-humans, if you like—and as he and I sit in his waiting room and discuss his practice, I’m shaken.

Most people, thank God, don’t abuse animals, but Dr. Mitchell explains how pets can suffer even when owners and would-be caregivers have the best of intentions.

“I think that poor lady that had all these creatures up there, all these poor animals—” referring to the recent allegations of animal cruelty against Turtletown resident Maureen Vieira “—I think she had intentions of doing something good, but the sad part is, it turned out to be horrible. It was a horrible, horrible thing, and I wonder...what took so long for somebody to say, you know, that something needs to be done? Nobody did anything.”

He goes on to describe how economic circumstances in the Copper Basin can contribute to animal neglect. “What we have are people who are having a hard time making it. The boom days are long gone. The young people either have to find something here to do, or they’ve gotta leave. There’s no industry.”

“I deal with people who...are on a fixed income, that have to make a decision between food, and heat, and their animal. And the sad part is, a lot of these people, that’s their companion. There’s one veteran, he has this little dog, and his wife, of course, is in the nursing home. That dog is his companion, that’s his life, and if something happens to that dog, he’ll come in...and he’s just all to pieces. So I enjoy when I can do something.”

“You’re not making anything, but at least I do two things: I give jobs to people that need a job, plus I take care of some animals. I make enough that...ah...I think last year I lost a lot of money. This year, hopefully, I won’t lose so much.”

I don’t meet many business owners who are content to take a loss, but even Dr. Mitchell’s low fee structure is designed to benefit animals. His prices help some owners afford care, while bringing in others who might refuse the indignity of charity. So on Thanksgiving Day I guess Dr. Mitchell will thank the Army for providing the pension he uses to subsidize his little wins.

Some of his wins, though, aren’t so little. An exuberant Boxer named Rocky—yeah, it’s a bad pun—bounds into my lap and knocks my tape recorder clattering across the room. I remark on the aptness of the name; Rocky favors Sylvester Stallone, and Dr. Mitchell’s daughter Robbii surprises me by hauling Rocky’s mouth open to reveal his cleft palate. Robbii tells me Dr. Mitchell delivered Rocky by C-section from a dog show champion, accepting Rocky as his fee when he learned the champion’s breeder was planning to destroy Rocky in order to eradicate his genetic abnormality from her stock.

I’ve barely recovered from Rocky’s relentless affection when a Jack Russell mix named Little Girl explodes onto me, slinging slobber near and far. Dr. Mitchell smiles, reaches over to pet her. “This dog right here, I found her in a ditch. She was almost dead. I brought her down here and I put her on fluids and IVs, and I did all this stuff...I thought she was gonna die, but she survived. And ever since then, she’s been right under me.”

Right under him. Yeah, I can see why she’d want to be.

But an apparent contradiction occurs to me. As an Army pathologist he experimented on animals, studied tissue samples, tried to come up with ways to protect soldiers from anthrax and botulism. I ask if this bothers him now—why would an animal rescuer condone animal experimentation? His answer comes quickly, as if he’s known it since medical school.

“I’m a religious person. And when God made this earth, he made all the animals, and then he made man to take care of his animals. But he also made the animals to take care of man. It was a two-way street. When I look at research using animals...the animals are not being abused. They’re not being tortured. They’re making a gift back to us.”

“There are some really terrible human diseases. Spinal bifida. There’s an animal model for that, and that’s a Manx cat. By studying the genetic defect...the lethal gene, or whatever you want to call it...we can head off spinal bifida.” He goes on to describe how animal research is helping eradicate muscular dystrophy, and as he talks his manner is gentle, warm. Grateful, even. And I realize that not only does Dr. Mitchell help animals, but animals also help him.

When I get home from the clinic my family’s Scottish Terrier, Gracie, wiggles all over me. Then she backs off, sniffing me suspiciously as if I’ve been unfaithful to her with Rocky and Little Girl—how dare those tramps! My wife mentions she’s worried about Gracie’s breath. Maybe it’s a problem with her teeth?

“I know a good vet,” I say.

Two Ways at Once

The fry cook had yellow stains on his fingers, a black t-shirt with no sleeves, grey hair tucked under a scally cap. He grunted at me when I sat down at the counter, slid me a mug, topped it with smoking coffee before turning his back on me to shovel a mess of something around the griddle.

The coffee wasn’t good but it was hot. I sipped it and waited on a menu, studied the black flecks on the silverware

“Christ, Arlene, get the guy a menu,” he said.

“All right, all right, gimme a break. Arlene hurried over with a sheet of laminated cardstock, rearranging something in her apron pocket as she came. “Sorry, I’m still kinda new. More coffee?”

I thought maybe she’d rushed the makeup that morning. New? She had skin like old china, lines no amount of anything would ever fill in. “Sure, and pancakes,” I said, handing the menu back.

She wrote it down, pancakes, and read it to the cook. “Pancakes.”

“I heard him, I heard him.”

They wore on bickering as I read the paper. A man had been stabbed outside Corrigan’s pub the night before, something about a football bet and too much alcohol. I knew the place: a locals’ bar, you could get a B&B there...beer and a beating. Menino was still mayor and winter was still on the way in. Nothing changes.

The guy down the counter was wearing white-spattered jeans and his shirt had a drywall company logo. The cook dished the mess off the griddle at him. Eggs, maybe. He started wolfing them.

“Hot in here,” the cook grumbled. “You think it’s too hot?”

“I think it’s nice,” I said, “after being in that damp outside.”

Arlene was polishing the meat slicer. “It’s gorgeous out there. Hey, how do you get this cover off to clean the blade?” she asked the cook.

“I’ll take care of it. Take it outside, maybe let the rain wash it off.” He chuckled.

“Yeah, fry cook’s a hot job,” said Drywall. “I did it for four years before I got started in houses.”

“What’s that like? Good money?” The cook came out with a screwdriver, started backing the screws out of the slicer’s chrome cover.

“Not bad; I just bought a little place—a shell, burned out—for one-twenty and flipped it for one-fifty.”

“How long it take you?”

“Five months. Best money I’ve made since...uh...yeah, it’s good money.”

Arlene picked up my paperback, studied the tangle-headed youth on the cover. “I never liked this guy,” she said. “Or that Baez girl, either.” There was a silver cross on a chain weighing on her neck.

“He’s a hell of a writer,” I told her. “Regardless how you feel about his songs.”

She shivered. “Uck. Paul Anka, now there was a songwriter.”

I caught the word “recovery” out of one ear. “—and sober for five years and four months now,” Drywall was saying to the cook.

“Can I get a clean fork?” I asked Arlene.

She turned around and reached for a rolled-up napkin without missing a beat, placed it just so. “I hated how he toyed with people’s feelings. How he kept disappearing.”

“Well, I think that’s because he hated the life,” I said, straining my attention two ways at once. “He writes about that, how you can sell things you can never buy back. Privacy, for one.”

Drywall was leaning over his plate talking intently to the cook, who had put down the screwdriver, was resting his elbows on the counter rolling a toothpick between his teeth.

“One of the guys at my meetings, Navy guy, told me he liked how I handled myself,” Drywall said. “Hired me on to cook breakfast at his place. Even gave me the keys to the restaurant.”

“Oh, I know, that’s a temptation,” said the cook.

“I was like, all that beer in the basement! Those kegs. And that cash drawer!”

“Mmm-hmmph.”

Arlene put my book down, tapped the counter in front of me. “That’s true, y’know...I watch that biography channel, and that’s the first thing any of ‘em say. How they just want to have normal lives, be Joe Schmoe again.”

I nodded. “Joe Schmoe: the most looked-up-to man in America.”

“Pancakes up,” said the cook. “Arlene.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She frowned, fetched them.

The pancakes were heavy, glue-hearted, and Arlene gave me a helpless shot of syrup in a little steel pitcher. I dumped it in the plate.

“—an honor, to get trusted like that after—” The cook coughed.

He had a vein like a millipede burrowing under the skin of his arm and I looked down at my pancakes, suddenly ashamed for eavesdropping. There was a hair or a thread or something leaking out of one of them. I scraped it to one side. Arlene topped off my mug again. I opened my book, chewed

P.S.

One more thing.

The woman who bought the second-floor condo from us has the mechanical aptitude of a boxcar of Carolina salamanders. She just rang the bell and showed me a brown jug of sludge the guy at the hardware store sold her. He’d said it’d clear out her clogged bathtub drain lickety-split, and did I think she should use it?

I took it from her carefully, having seen unknown substances explode from mishandling before, and read the label. POISON, TOXIC, DANGER DANGER DANGER, and so on. And then I came to a line that went, more or less:

“May result in a gout of hot acid from the drain immediately upon application; use extreme caution and wear safety goggles.”

There was more to that effect, but I didn’t need to read it. I handed the jug back to her and cleared my throat. “Look, ask this hardware guy in what world is a gout of hot acid a good thing? This stuff removes clogs by melting the pipes out from around them, but never mind that...you’re gonna spray acid in your eyes and you’re not doing the environment any good either. How about taking it back and trading it for a plumber’s snake?”

“I hate snakes,” she said. So I Smote her Dedd and Rejoined my Work.

Dear Cassia, Part II

November 16th, 2005


Dear Cassia,

It’s raining very hard in Hyde Park right now—dark, cool breeze, maybe fifty degrees—and I just got soaked to the skin, right through my shirt and undershirt and jeans, even through my sneakers and into my socks. I was coming home from dinner with my good friends Sean and Seth, compadres brave & true, and I stepped off the train into the sort of driving rain that only comes down in New England. The rain on the train falls mainly in Ed’s brain: inhospitable stuff, a real downpour. Icepicks on the scalp and a clammy hand down the back of your shirt.

So I ran three blocks to my truck and jumped inside, cut the defroster on to clear the windshield, and hauled ass for...well, not home, because my family’s not here, but at least the house where I’m staying until Friday morning. And then I was sitting in the driveway, still catching my breath, when I realized that the goddamned garbage had to be put out, and that it was raining harder than ever. Yes, your father sat and blasphemed most foully, for a good while...and then, of course, ran back and forth in the rain humping the cans to the curb. Garbage, you understand, that wasn’t even his. Of such is his life this week.

If it weren’t for the fact that I just had a wonderful day at Harvard University I’d be slap out of my mind by now, what with the isolation and boredom and loneliness and wind-sucking karma and bone-freezing wetness of this idiot trip, but I got some wonderful writing done today and I got to see one mentor and, as I mentioned, two good friends. All of whom, incidentally, told me that I seem much less stressed out than last time they saw me. Go figure, since I had to root around all over the house to find my alarm clock while I was packing for this trip. And of course, that I live in a place where I can step out on the porch and squeeze off a round whenever circumstances warrant.

But getting back to it...first I sat in a coffee shop and wrote a short story about something that happened to me at a greasy spoon diner this morning—I was eavesdropping on two recovering addicts—and then I book-shopped until I discovered to my astonishment that Harvard Square is actually a shitty place to shop for books. You can get everything, but none of it is what you want at the moment. Which is odd, even for an old head like me.

I left book shopping for dead and stopped at another coffee shop—four or five cups by now, thrumming like a tuning fork—and worked on my new novel until three. I’ve got a good scene going where an aunt is throwing a birthday party for her live-in nephew, whose dad is a junkie, and when the dad shows up there’s a bunch of uncomfortable byplay. It’s a very hard scene to write; not only are there eight characters in it, but the setting and the mood and the prose and the symbolism all have to be mixed in and reflect each other, and I keep writing paragraphs and staring at them and then cutting them. And as you can tell from my use of the present tense, I’m still working on it.

I made a quick stop at a tobacconist, i.e., a peddler of Smoke-Weed, for a bitty of the aromatic stuff for a guy who’s taught me much about fly-fishing, Don Denney. I was confused and the clerk was helpful, as follows:

Me: “Um...I need some stuff, plain vanilla, for...ah...a friend.”
The Clerk: “A friend, mmm-hmm. What does your friend like?”
Me: “No, I know what that sounds like. Really, he’s a fly-fishing buddy.”
The Clerk (smiling): “It’s no big deal, man. What does he like?”
Me: “Uh. Plain vanilla. He likes cheap vanilla stuff he gets at the drug store.”
The Clerk: “We have this stuff, House Gold. It’s good, it’s vanilla. He’ll probably like it.”
Me: “Sure. “How does it...um...work?”
The Clerk: “Well, it’s pipe tobacco.”
Me: “No, I mean the prices. I don’t know how to relate to that.”
The Clerk (with great patience): “We sell it by the...ounce. OK?”
Me (lifting an eyebrow): “Ah...the ounce. I can relate to that. How much is in an ounce?”
The Clerk: “It’s about five bowls.”
Me (staring, slack-jawed): “Those are some big damn bowls.”

Right. At three-thirty I rang Chris Keane’s doorbell. He’s a capital-H-for-Hollywood capital-S-for-Screenwriter who plays golf with John Updike and has chilled in a hot tub, as it were, with Hunter Thompson. I respect the hell out of the guy; met him though another writer, Bill Martin, and I’ve kept in touch and even paid him to tutor me from time to time. Given his resume he may know whereof he speaketh when he tells me I’m a good writer. Not in the Updike/Thompson league, perhaps, but it’d be easy enough for him to tell me I suck since there’s not any money changing hands between us these days.

Yeah. We sat in the Harvard Hotel, a ritzy place that charged us six bucks for...you guessed it...more coffee, and shot the shit about the writing biz for an hour. He just finished a screenplay for Samuel Jackson and he’s working on one for Charlise Theron, or Charlize Theron, or Charlie’s Throne, or however you spell it. Remind me to get that cleared up when I’m a capital-H-for-Hollywood capital-S-for-Screenwriter myself.

Eventually I got up from the table, shook hands with him, and doo-daa’d over to 9 Tastes, a decent Thai place on a street named after a dead president, to meet my friends. I ate Golden Bags and Larb, hoping the dishes wouldn’t be what they sounded like, and they were what they sounded like, but not like what I was afraid of. Which may not make any more sense than that line about Harvard bookstores, I realize, so I ought to quit the Yogi Berra while I’m ahead. Don’t be frightened; it’s prose, and prose is only the skin on the soup.

I drank beer, not coffee. Coffee wakes you, whereupon you need beer to keep calm, whereafter you need more coffee to keep sober, et cetera. We talked at great length and then went for ice cream for Sean and Seth. I sat with them as they ate it, in a little steel-and-concrete room that used to be a bank vault, felt uncomfortably like a drunk tank, and was painted like...get this...a fishbowl, with waving seaweed, questionable seahorses, and goldfish out of a plastic diver’s nightmare. Pity the drunk who wakes up in a place like that.

We walked back to the Harvard subway stop and shook hands goodbye. But there was this guy at the stop twirling pairs of tennis balls on long strings, sort of a cross between yo-yos and nunchaku. Entertaining people. He was deft with them, artistic...spinning them around his head and torso and legs like tiny planets on tight orbits, and I figured he was getting a good workout because his arm muscles were rippling and his eyes had the faraway look of a man deep in concentration. But he kept spinning the balls into his own crotch every so often—whack!—and he’d flinch and lose his rhythm. He’d spin some more, get lost in his mind, and—whack!—lose it again. Whackity-whack-whack! Sean and Seth and I watched this for many minutes before losing interest, and for all I know the poor bastard is still standing there spinning those balls, with his member...er, I’ll explain what that is to you later, Cassia...with his member swollen up like a varicosed grapefruit.

OK, so then I rode the train home and drowned in the rain, and now you’re caught up with me. I’m sitting here wired from darting around hauling garbage in the rain—sizzling like 220 across a wet steel bar—and it’ll probably be a few more hours before I calm down enough to sleep.

Which give me time to tell you, dear Cassia, that there are many beautiful people in this world spinning around you like tiny planets on tight orbits. They thump their own crotches to entertain you, eat ice cream in fishbowls with you, praise your writing when you need it. They sell you strong fragrant Smoke-Weed and teach you to fly-fish. They serve you Golden Bags and breakfast, even if they’re battling a raging drug-hunger they can’t push down without confessing it every day to complete strangers, and they leave their garbage for you to carry in the rain so you’ll be able to stay awake, heart thumping, and write a letter to your own dear daughter. Beautiful, beautiful people, and I wouldn’t trade any of them for all the coffee and shitty bookstores in Harvard Square.

And I know when I take you to Boston and we go to Harvard Square together, someday, and I take your little hand and your Mom’s bigger hand in mine, that another guy...silver laptop on his table and too much caffeine singing in his blood, will think: hey, there go some beautiful people too.

I love you,


DA-DA

Dear Cassia

November 13, 2005


Dear Cassia,

I’m in Hyde Park, not far from the hospital where you were born, at the first house you lived in; the big brown triple-decker with the white picket fence on the noisy street. I towed our trailer to Hyde Park from Tennessee to pack it with the last of our stuff that’s still here and bring it back home so you and Alicia and I could use it in our home. It’s colder up here than where you are, more crowded and the air’s not as clean, but some of the people are good and later on I’m having dinner with two of them; an interesting couple you’ll get to meet next March.

It was a sixteen-hour drive to get here—but very pretty, through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Eastern Pennsylvania—and I’ve been taking a lot of naps, like you, because I stay road-weary for a couple of days after a drive like that. Not to mention that I was up late last night drinking wine and talking about fishing with an old friend who thought it was funny how you wouldn’t eat your bacon in the video I showed him.

This morning I woke up in our empty little apartment that the realtor can’t seem to sell and had breakfast out of the big steel cooler with the white Ocracoke sticker. I had Triscuits and raisins and coffee, probably not that much different from what you ate.

Then I had to go over to the hardware store and buy eye bolts for the trailer, and I came home and installed them on its roof (with my friend’s electric drill, because I forgot mine—I’m bad like that sometimes.) Now that I’ve installed the bolts I can lash the blue ladder to the roof of the trailer, and bring it home and use it to hang the new ceiling fan in the upstairs bedroom, to paint the side of the house where the woodpeckers hammered in hunting for carpenter bees, and to trim the tree that’s tapping on the roof keeping everybody awake at night.

All this theoretical productivity made me very hungry so I had lunch—peanut butter on a whole-wheat bagel—and worked on my novel until I got drowsy. A sign, perhaps, I should make my novel more exciting. Anyway, I laid down on the air mattress and listened to C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a wonderful book read by John Cleese, a very funny man, until I couldn’t hear him reading any more because I’d fallen asleep. Maybe The Screwtape Letters isn’t that exciting either. Eventually I woke up and wrote some more, and now I’m working on this letter to you.

So now that we’re all caught up I have to go away and do some other stuff. I’ll do it for a while and maybe write about it afterwards and then something else will happen and I’ll write about that too, and if I’m lucky it’ll be funny or important enough to use in more than one piece of work.

But before you know it it’ll be Friday and I’ll be back in my truck towing the trailer and the stuff and the cooler and—well, not my friend’s drill, I hope, because I’m supposed to return it—and the ladder and the air mattress and The Screwtape Letters...towing all this crap I’ve written you about through Eastern Pennsylvania and the Blue Ridge Mountains and right back to Tennessee where I started from. I’ll come into the house and you’ll grin at me and holler DA-DA! loud enough to startle the dog, but you won’t care two farts about the trailer and all that because you understand that people only need each other to live happily ever after, and not a bunch of stuff.

Which is a very strange way of telling you I love you, I know. But what the hell, writing about it kills the hours in Hyde Park.

DA-DA