On Crusher the dog
Thinking about failure
When she’s here, we get up early. Around 6 AM.
I turn the lamp on and Crusher The Dog sticks her head out of the blanket. The light reflects on her muzzle, coloring her white chin hairs golden. I rub her belly. She yawns. “Old lady, old lady, old lady,” I chant. She does not look at me. She makes herself long across the bed. I pat her stomach lightly, then get up.
I dress myself, then put a sweater on her and we’re out the door. It’s dark out and usually wet. I try to avoid salt, but it doesn’t always work. Her feet burn, she tries to hide it. Limping forward until I force her to stop and I wipe her paws. She gives me a look like I’m embarrassing her.
Outside, Crusher pulls hard on the leash. She is excited. Her tail wags hard, her nose never stops moving. Everyone is her best friend. We are avoided because of her perfect, small, pit bull butt head. She doesn’t know people are afraid of her. She doesn’t know what fear is, even, I don’t think. If she pulls too hard for too long, I pull hard back hard. She looks at me and walks slower.
We arrive at the park. I take her harness off and she goes. Leaping, sprinting so fast the skin on her face goes tight and you can see the white of her eye. We chase each other until the sun’s up and people start leaving for work. After, we mosey back slowly, taking what I call “the scenic route”. At home, I feed her, then myself. She waits under the table, hoping I’ll drop a piece of egg for her to hoover up. When it’s time for me to leave, I wrap her in a blanket on the couch and take a picture. She pretends to ignore me, moving only her eyes as I walk out the door.
A bit over a year ago my apartment had mice at the same time I was participating in a poetry workshop about surveillance. I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of the year I started watching everything.
I’m not a natural poet or even a try hard poet, so I produced nothing of value during the month of weekly meetings. I sat slackjawed and silent as beautiful NYU students shared articles about Archive Fever and Google’s then freshly approved nuclear reactor. When I’d get home from these workshops, I’d lay in bed with my coat on, exhausted and embarrassed. From my bed, Crusher and I watched mice squeeze their horrible little bodies under the crack of the door, against the moulding, out to parts unknown in my room. I’d stay up at night imagining them crawling over my books and eating crusher’s food, drinking her water. Getting her sick.
I did the natural thing. I bought a trail cam and set it up to watch the hole I suspected mice were coming in and out of. After a week of checking every night with no success, I finally got it. 6 shitty images of the back halves of mice, their tails cartoonishly twisted into question marks. I sealed the hole with steel wool. Another slam dunk.
Realizing I had spent 50 entire dollars on the camera, I set it up to watch my bed from a nearby shelf. I wanted to see what Crusher did when I wasn’t there. I had some incredible early success with the night vision. I saw her stare at me while I slept, getting her nose dangerously close to my ears, wet willy averted only because in my sleep I lifted up the covers and she was able to slide under.
Rober Gober was in a show near my office recently. On a Wednesday I walked over with a coworker to see it over lunch. It was Gober, Nancy Shavers, and a few other people I can’t remember off the top of my head. I’d been to this gallery before, but not so recently. It’s the bottom floor of a brownstone. They share the space with a dermatologist, a dentist, and a private residence. The front door was unlocked, so we kicked the slush off our boots and walked in.
Gober’s mostly impenetrable to me, but a lot of people I know really revere him. I figured it was one of those things I was destined to never get, like oysters or Bob Dylan. The gallery’s a tiny little room. The work had an emotional resonance that practically hummed. It was like walking into an altar for a religion you’d never heard of.
I walked counter clockwise around the gallery, sort of scanning photos and sculptures. The last piece in the room before the cycle restarts is Deathmask. A wall mounted, plaster sculpture of a human face with piercing, blue, husky eyes and a dog’s snout. The work is unnerving, but hilarious. I spent an inordinate amount of time with it.
After awhile, my coworker and I left and headed back to the office. I talked about how much I liked the show, how I wished there was more work like that being made. Things that felt like they were done not even urgently, but like they were connected to something deeper and strange. How I wished I could make anything that approached being as weird as that mask. “How does someone even think of something like that?”
Deathmask was made by Gober after his dog, Paco, died. Gober, overwhelmed with grief, covered his face with plaster and sculpted a dog’s nose over his likeness. The work is quiet, desperate and screaming at the same time. I received this information right as we were crossing the threshold of the office. I went upstairs to my desk and didn’t do anything the rest of the day.
I grew up with a string of dogs that didn’t stick. There was Blondie, then Blondie II. When I was around 8 we had Max, a german shepherd that I adored. He was stronger than me, but sweet. Completely untrained also. One day I was giving Max a walk and we came across some neighborhood kids who were much more amazed with him than whatever urban legend I had been trying to tell them about. They told me I could come back anytime to play as long as I brought Max.
At the same time, my younger brother, Griffin, was showing signs of being allergic to Max.
“Can’t we just get rid of Griffin?” I remember asking my poor mother, hiding my face in the couch cushions.
“No, of course not”
One day we came home from school and Max was gone. I retraced my steps to the house with the kids that loved Max so much and screamed at their front door. I said Max was gone and wanted to know if they were happy. When an old woman came out the front door, I sprinted home.
Next we got Buddy, a runt golden retriever with red hair and a white patch on his chest. For whatever reason, Buddy stuck. He moved with us every year and graciously accepted every new sibling as one of his friends and loved ones. He would growl when you would pet him and if the door was open for even slightly too long, he would sprint through the gap outside. He’d roam the neighborhood for hours. When he was finished, he’d sit at the front door and bark until someone opened the door for him. Buddy died more than a decade ago. My dad still calls him “The best damn dog that ever lived.”
My dad moved in next door to my brothers in Lawrence, Kansas after he and my mom got divorced in 2020. Around 8 months into living by himself, he brought his brother Danny in to live with him also. Danny had been drifting in Wichita, Kansas after getting kicked out of his duplex because he kept letting other transients stay with him. He was a good person in the same way that my parents were good people who wouldn’t let my homeless friends spend a night outside. Nevermind the 13 children already living there. Somehow we always found the room for at least a few more on the couch, the floor, the roof, in the yard. So did Danny, this was a problem for his landlord.
Danny brought Bear with him. Bear was an ancient mutt with long, flowing halloween mask hair. His eyes were wild and he breathed like he had just done a 6 minute mile. He was gentle in a grandparent way. He was too tired to do anything crazy.
Bear was the last dog that my dad’s brother, Danny, owned before being stabbed to death in a Dillon’s parking lot in Lawrence, Kansas. Bear was also stabbed, but lived for a few more years. Living to the ripe (estimated) age of 15 years old. Recently, the man that killed Danny got 2 less years in prison than Bear had on earth. The judge that sentenced him had little plastic toys on her desk in front of her when she went on and on about how “if you were going to be in jail, you’d be hard pressed to find a better place to be in jail than Lawrence, Kansas”.
I’ve thought about her little toys a lot in the last few weeks. They’re small and opaque, like fruit snacks. I think they were horses, but my photo is too grainy to tell. It’s cold comfort that the judge that handed down the sentence is a fellow animal lover. But at least now my dad can “leave this whole thing behind him”
My dad now lives in Florida with my older sister and her Fiancé. He moved in with her not long after he was diagnosed with cancer. He doesn’t work a job anymore, though he tried for awhile. His treatments just wipe him out. Despite this, he manages to get every morning to go on miles long walks with Olive, my sister’s pit bull, the same way he did with Bear. They get up early, around 6. He calls her an old lady and drums on her belly, she sighs. He lets Olive lead the way. If she pulls on the leash too hard, he pulls back sharply. She glances at him and slows down. When they get back he wraps her in a blanket and they both go to sleep.
Crusher is a goddess among mortals.
crusher the dog forever