While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Pug worries, or what to do when your dog starts having seizures

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When Cubbie was a younger pug, I took him everywhere I went. He was my constant companion, a rotund, game-for-anything, kindhearted creature with an infectious grunt.

I took him to bars. I took him to restaurants. I took him to stores that were cool with dogs. I took him to ice cream shops that were cool with pugs. Each week for four years, I took him to the bank to make a deposit and get a bone. At the mere mention of the word bank, he’d pounce off the couch, run for the door and hop into the passenger seat of my car. It was our Monday morning ritual.

I took him to our wedding. I dressed him in a tuxedo and a top hat. I tied a little white pillow to his back and asked him to carry our rings. He obliged, as he obliges to most things most of the time.

I took him to the top of a mountain in Colorado and to the bottom of a valley in Idaho. I took him to Graceland. I took him to Chicago. I took him to the Oregon Coast and let him run without a leash into the Pacific Ocean, the memory of which is so fresh in my mind I can still smell the salt on his fur as I smuggled him past the front desk in a no-dogs-allowed hotel.

I can still see the wild look in his eyes when, after spending three weeks on the road, sleeping in a tent with me, I let him crash on a pillow in a queen-sized bed. King Cub.

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Pregnancy Confession No. 4

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[I've always loved dogs more than babies.]

I'm an unabashed dog lover.

When I see one, my heart leaps. I get younger. My mind quiets.
My instinct is to nuzzle the dog. To let the dog nuzzle me.
I know not all dogs are people-lovers, as all people are not dog-lovers.
But it doesn't matter. I turn to mush. Dog putty.

I want to curl up in a ball on the floor,
surrounded by fur and paws and dog saliva
and not communicate with people.
I know this sounds disgusting to non-dog lovers, but it's how I feel.

Give me a yellow tennis ball and a chocolate lab
and I'll be out of your hair for hours.

My affection for dogs is pure and addictive.
I'm like a boy at a monster movie,
cupping a supersize Coke, guzzling and burping.

No need to come up for air.
In the presence of dogs, I boil down to my purest self.

Most four-legged animals make me feel this way.

I wish I could say the same for babies.

Babies and I operate on a different level.

My insides don't turn to apple sauce and cherry cobbler
in the company of babies.

It's an honest admission from a pregnant woman.

I'd rather watch a two-hour Discovery Channel documentary
on the mating habits of otters
than tune into some TLC reality show
about 25 screaming kids and their tummy-tucked mother.

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The tent diaries 6

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“On such a trip as mine, so much there is to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking minestrone.” – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I was wrong about Wednesday’s post being my final tent diaries entry. I remember I wrote this kind of sloppy epilogue after I returned to Sarasota.

People who had followed my journey in the newspaper said I ended things so abruptly with no tidy conclusion or rewarding epiphany. Of course by then it was too late. I had hogged full-page spreads in the newspaper for six weeks. So for myself and my friends I wrote this, a little thank you note.

I was feeling pretty sappy and as usual, verbose.
—

The tent diaries 5

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Just before I left Florida, my friend Ricci gave me a dragonfly, with this message written on the wings:

“All that glitters is not gold. All who wander are not lost.”

I’m sleepy now as I write this. Uninspired for the most part, sneezing in an auto repair shop, where I’m getting the oil changed in Joe’s car. It’s 9 a.m. on a Wednesday and I’m drinking Timmy Ho’s out of a plastic travel mug. Mechanic’s coffee is always too black and too dank for my taste buds, so I usually bring my own.

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I fell for him dressed as Courtney Love

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It was a blip of a moment in an overly air-conditioned bedroom.

Joe was wearing a souvenir alien T-shirt from Area 51. I was wearing his heaviest red sweater. We both had our glasses on, which doesn’t happen often because Joe hates wearing his glasses. He says they make him dizzy.

I was about to embark on a solo road trip from Sarasota, Florida. to Bandon Beach, Oregon, which Joe ever so delicately suggested I return from.

Stubborn, fiercely independent, and at times straight-up flighty, I couldn’t promise him that. At least not in the beginning.

The first time we met, I was standing by the Pac-Man Bubble Bobble game at a bar in St. Pete, drinking Miller Lite and making good on a dare by pole dance around a fat oak beam.

When he asked me about myself, I told him how my family had installed a corn-burning furnace in the basement of their Western New York home, and how when it burned, the whole house smelled like Orville Redenbacher’s.

The second time we met, I told him I was outta here, that I was moving to Oregon or Idaho or Montana. I told him I was writing a book about a girl who spends her days righting ordinary wrongs, who makes a living on a ranch and sleeps in a hayloft that smells like manure and maple syrup.

“I have to live it if I want to write it,” I said nonchalantly.

We were at a birthday party in Sarasota, at a bar with a punching bag. I was dressed as Courtney Love – pink baby doll dress, combat boots, mascara smudges, the whole getup. The theme was “high school flashback,” and I was never so happy to resurrect the 90s. A 1993 graduate of an all-boys Jesuit high school in Tampa, Joe was wearing a too-tiny suit and tie that made him look like Ben Stiller.

I told him I was reading a memoir by Mary Karr that was written like none other I’d read before. He asked me if my novel would be a memoir and I replied that it was pompous to write a memoir at the age of 25.

“Not that what I’m writing isn’t mostly true anway,” I conceded.

I was chugging too many Miller Lites, filming the party for my roommate Zac, confessing on camera in a slurred lisp that I was fed-up with doing his dishes.

Joe drove me home that night in his blue Honda Accord. Unlike most of the cars that belonged to people I knew, his was immaculate.

We went back to our friends, Max and Meredith’s house – a beach cottage – where we drank some more, played games and ate leftover pasta from the fridge. Joe heated up a bowl of bow tie macaroni with red sauce, and in between rounds of (was it Taboo?) he offered me several spoonfuls, which I found comforting.

As we sat there on the steps leading into Max and Meredith’s 10-by-10 living room, our knees touched. Joe was still dressed in his Jesuit uniform. I was still dressed as Courtney Love. Spooning noodles out of his bowl and into my mouth, it was as if I had slopped off his plate for years. When he walked outside to have a cigarette, I stumbled out of the living room with my roommate and left. It was late and I was tired.

The third time I saw him we were on an actual date. At the urging of my roommate, who had observed our Lady and the Tramp pasta moment, I went ahead and asked Max for Joe’s phone number.

“Tell me he’s not one of those too-nice, sappy guys,” I said.

“No, but he’s not an asshole either if that’s what you’re asking,” Max replied.

For four days his number sat untouched. Written on a Post-It note and stuck to a cardboard-box-night stand by my bed, I agonized over making the first move. I was nervous. Feeling sheepish. Feeling like perhaps I drank too much that night, or that I had left coldly without saying goodbye.

When I finally called, he answered on the second ring. He knew right away who I was and why I was calling. He fired off date plans like a semi-automatic weapon, as I joked that simply willing your phone to dial on its own never works.

“Lucky for you, you picked up on the second ring,” I said. “I probably would have hung up on the third.”

This phone call was huge for me. I was still hellbent on moving to Oregon, or Idaho, or Montana. But if the way we shared pasta was any indication of things to come, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, all of it would scarcely measure up.

However, none of these moments were as compelling as the one I mentioned earlier that came two months later, a week before my Jack Kerouac-ian gallivant across the country.

We were lying on his bed – Joe in his souvenir alien T-shirt, me in his heaviest red sweater, and the pug curled up like a Roman snail beside us. He was questioning my blind love for the Dakotas. I was romanticizing The Badlands.

Reaching around my side, he kissed me somewhere near my armpit and said, “If your body were the United States, this would be South Dakota.”

Though not in agreement, I let him go on.

Next, he kissed my elbow. Called it Iowa. Then my wrist. Called it Missouri. My spine – Oregon. And on it went. Lazily, languidly, and with no regard for geographic accuracy, he mapped out my road trip with kisses.

When he finally reached my lips, our glasses clanked together like timpani drums. He didn’t say it, but I knew. In that overly air-conditioned bedroom, in that heavy red sweater, in our similarly prescribed eyeglasses, his lips were home.

—

PS. Joe proposed last week. I said yes.

Existential scavenger hunting

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Distractions are everywhere.

I woke up this morning first at 7:30 and then at 8:30. At 8:30 I shuffled to the kitchen. Made coffee. Made toast. Sat on the couch and opened this page. Two and half hours later I’ve accomplished nothing. Nothing. I blame MySpace, Facebook and random news stories about Broncos players diagnosed with diabetes, Britney’s preggo sister, a story about an Asian man whose skin turned to tree bark and another story about an Asian man whose face developed gargantuan tumors spilling out from under his chin like tsunamis of yellow flesh. Freakish stuff. This is what I chose to do with my precious three hours before Joe wakes up.

(He’s still sleeping by the way.)

Maybe if I go out on the porch in the sunshine.

Anyway. When I was in Gaitlinburg, Tenn. last summer I set up camp beside a 20-something couple from Baton Rouge. Their names were Rachel and Shawn. Newly engaged. I remember several key things about Rachel and Shawn. Namely that their tent leaked in a rainstorm that night and Rachel, totally pissed about this, stormed Shawn’s truck like an army sergeant first thing in the morning, hauling armfuls of wet clothes into the cab, cursing in a southern tongue that their “god damned Wal-Mart tent was a piece of goddamned shit.” I also remember that Shawn surveyed my car one night between bites of Smores and said, “That’s a Honda HX yer drivin there.” And I nodded and said yes. And he said, “Funny. I never seen an HX before.” And that was that.

I think about it often. Probably every day since that night in Tennessee. Whenever I’m driving and I pass another Civic, I check out the rear model name – LX. EX. CX. DX. Never HX. I drove from Sarasota, Fla. to Coos Bay, Oregon and not once did I spot an HX on the road, in a parking lot, at a traffic light. I was floored by this, so floored that I made a habit of announcing the make and model of every Civic I passed from there on.

“LX. Not an HX.”
“EX. Not an HX.”

It is a lame road trip game, but one of many Rain Man-ian ticks I developed while driving and camping alone, spanning our country’s most lunar surfaces – specifically northern Utah – doing maniacal things like rolling my tongue into a Tootsie Roll on the roof of my mouth, making noises I thought only my dog could hear and of course looking for Honda Civic HXs and never once finding one.

… Until yesterday on Siesta Key Beach, under the North Bridge facing the Ringling Causeway at 4 p.m. I obliviously parked next to one. A red HX. My car’s hamster-like twin, dustier and littered with fishing tackle. Its owner, a Mexican kid in a Hanes undershirt, knee-deep in salt water, was futzing with a bucket of oily jacks flopping to and fro. And since I was in the middle of photographing someone for the paper, I stupidly forgot to snap a photo of the car.

Though I’ll probably never see the thing again I drove home yesterday with a renewed sense of worldly order like now I can scratch the missing HX off my existential scavenger hunt. It’s one of many scratch-offs on an assignment I gave myself years ago. The existential scavenger hunt assignment.

It started four years ago with a dog in the passenger seat of a truck. I was sitting in traffic at McKinley Parkway and Southwestern Boulevard in Hamburg, New York, staring at the truck parked next to me. Riding shotgun was a dog mangy from age, with a beaky face and once-crazy eyes. I remember sitting at the intersection we all called Seven Corners and looking over at Mangy Dog and thinking, shit Mangy Dog, I’ll never see you again. This moment I’m sharing with you now at the Seven Corners in Hamburg, New York in one minute will be over and I’ll never see you again.

At that time I had only a month to go before leaving New York for Florida. I was in that mode we all slip into before leaving a place for whoknowshowlong. It’s a state of mind I describe as Steely Sadness. Before leaving a place you grow balls of steel. “I can do this. I’m cool. I’m free spirited dust in the wind. I’m the stuff you write home about. Eck. Ugh. Sigh.” Which is such a farce, because really what happens is this:

You spot a mangy dog riding shotgun one day at an intersection famous for its deadly crashes and you start crying in spastic waves because you know this is It. You’re looking into the once-crazy eyes of a beady-beaked dog and you’re saying goodbye, out loud and in between snot-sucking sobs, you think: ‘I’m 23 years old and this is the most pitiful moment I’m ever going to have. (Which we all know is not true.) And if I weren’t at the wheel of this rattletrap jitney, at the deadliest intersection in Western New York, I’d be brought to my knees.’ But you’re wailing now like a breeched newborn slapped on the ass. And the dog is cocking its head and not blinking. And in his once-crazy eyes you see a shimmer of recognition (because glassy eyes make ghostly mirrors) and you know that in .3 seconds the light will go green, you’ll grit your teeth and say buh-bye.

Thus you are born into what I call steely sadness.

Light turns green. Dog looks away. You press your foot to the pedal and accelerate. With the window down you hear the sound of your car’s engine – not smooth, not steady, but high-pitched and throaty – and you shrug, because nonetheless you are moving.

I’ve not had another mangy dog moment. And like finding the HX yesterday (or as Joe calls it, “lampooning my white whale”) I have no idea what it will mean if it happens again. I like to reckon it’s one more kill in an existential scavenger hunt, though I fear it’s just one more asinine thing I do to distract myself.

Ps. The picture above was taken in Jerome, Idaho. If anyone ever calls Idaho ‘West-bum or East-bum’ anything please dismiss it. Idaho is beautiful and solitary. Idaho sunsets cast the best pink-ish light I’ve ever seen blanket a field at dusk.