For Streak C. Lawson

I hear the uncoordinated patter of his long neglected nails on the kitchen tile from the basement.

“He’s not doing good.” Dad says in a tone so resigned it seems terminal.

It’s a rainy December in Chicago, like God’s trying to wash the city. But the city isn’t a car with bird shit on the hood and it’ll take more than a moderate drizzle to clean Chicago.(The zoological term for bird (and bat) poop is called Guano. Guano.) I don’t mind the rain though, it means the weather will hold its relative warmth and after the Polar Vortex last year I deserve a holiday season without the distinct displeasure of shoveling snow while mucus pour out of my nose and freezes in my mustache.

Over Dad’s voice and the murmur of the TV from the living room I  hear rain drops landing on the awning over the kitchen window. An impartial melody, like the strokes of keys from a pianist who doesn’t give a shit about what he’s playing. The world turns, the sun burns and rain falls. The ether doesn’t (and shouldn’t have to) alter itself because my Dog can’t walk anymore.

Dad and I are standing in our kitchen looking down at the dog, making grim plans to drive to the vet, holding together a frail artifice that this isn’t a tremendously horrible Monday and that we aren’t on the verge of bawling.

The Bears are losing and the Dogs hind legs are weak as _____  and for all intents useless.

Earlier that day we had taken a trip to the mall to do some Christmas shopping. I was to receive a sweater and watch. My mother was getting a sky blue robe and new socks (A pair of which she already wearing.) I got my Dad a book and an atrocious burgundy shirt-thing with a zipper that disappeared into fabric half way down. This had become our tradition; An afternoon at the mall in which we all indiscriminately buy each other whatever is chosen. Christmas made practical, albeit considerably less festive. 

When we got back, bags in hand and guts rounded from food court vittles, Mom noticed a batch of shit in the dining room. We share a collective forgiving sigh, noting that we were gone for a few extra hours and the dog, at 14 years old, hadn’t the bowel fortitude nor the shame of indoor dumping he used to have. Dad picks up the dropings with a plastic bag.

“Poor thing. He just couldn’t hold it.” Mom says.

“He just old.” Dad commiserates.

I give a whistle but the sound does little to summon the Dog these days. Long gone are the days of a whistle and an eager gallop, now he conserves his energy. So I go looking for him. Dad gives a glance downstairs at the basement from the staircase in the Kitchen and reports that he doesn’t see him. I run to the second floor and find nothing but a wet spot on the carpet.

Mom says that ever since I moved to New York the Dog doesn’t make the trip to the second floor. Too many stairs for too weak of hind legs. So that fact that he, the Dog, exerted the energy to make the pilgrimage was so impressive that I didn’t mind the piss soaked carpet, same way Tibetan monks probably don’t mind letting people use their toilet after they make the journey up Mt Kailash. (Tibet is called ‘The Roof of the World’ because its nearly 5,000 meters above sea level.)

No Dog up there. So, admittedly a little nervous, a hastily head to the basement. I flip the light switch and see The Dog laying on the couch. Mouth open, tongue flopping around like some alien appendage. A breath of relief then I take a seat next to him and stoke his black, dusty coat. Feeling the familiar heat pulsating from his vibrating, solid body. A few seconds Dad comes down the stairs and he too has an exaltation of relief in the form of smile. We probably look like a painting, on the leather couch with moss green pillows, looking at him, Dad. A boy and his dog and the inherent unspoken, vast, unsurmountable love.

Dad calls him over to him, to take him out in the backyard for his last bathroom break of the evening. The Dog and Dad had developed something in my absence. Something not unlike a symbiosis, something like parent hood or friendship or love. I’ve been in and out of this house since I moved away to college in 2008. Plus it was a busy few years, exiting the chaos of teenage years for a new sort of chaos of my 20s, I was busy and wasn’t the boy the Dog remembered. So in my absence Dad stepped in and they formed a bond that kept them both happy and fulfilled.

Adorable I’m sure.

The Dog goes to Dad and together they head up the stairs. Half way up the Dog slides down and comes to crash landing on at the bottom on the unforgiving tile.

“Fuck. Shit.” I say.

Sometimes in moments of extreme trauma or grief or anxiety I’m able to watch myself react as if my life is a movie filmed in second person. Watch the Dog slide down the stair was one of these moments and the cruses were a feeble natural reaction to the moment, like hitting the knee with a mallet and watching it kick out.

After about 15 mintues of observing the Dog and his clear in ablity to climb the stairs and our suspicions on wether or not he could even stand up. Dad goes to get an old pair of throw away pants. He’s good with this sort of thing. A savy man who’d probably make a decent run at life on a deserted island. Or at least think of an effective way to off himself once the solitude transformed into delirium and psychosis.

He explains to me once the pants are for; We are the position them under the dog, like a hammock going horizontal. Then once once the dog is firmly placed in the concavity of the pants were are to pick him up using the sections of the pants that are exposed.

This is way lego instructions come with diagrams. Because sometimes genius is inarticulable.

We rig the Dog up and hoist him up. He does some mild freaking out, kicks his legs and panics because he can’t feel the ground underneath him.

We get him up the stairs and take him outside but he doesn’t do anything. He only lays on the cold, wet ground, so we use the pants to get him back in the house and that where the end begins.

Hours pass and at some point Dad says through a shaky voice that we have to put him down in the morning. The Dog hears the words but is deaf to the meaning and I find that strange and insulting to discuss his demise right in front of him. My dad gets a phone call from a neighbor who is good with animals but about 15 seconds into conversation he implodes into tears and sniffles and hands me the phone but I have no desire to talk in times of misery. I prefer to write and cruse and drink and hope there is a decent movie playing on TV to watch. So I keep the conversation short and regrettably curt.

The fall took out what little remnants of strength his legs had left. Walking became more of a balancing trick, how could he support his heavy frame on two hind legs that had the durability and rigidness of uncooked noodles. But still he managed through out the night. He breathing was so heavy it that it sounded like the panting of an adult man with thyroid issues. And his walking was shaky like dying leaves in the wind. But I fear that’s too graceful to describe the stumbling of the Dog. It was more akin the sound of a CD skipping while playing your favorite track. Frantic and painful. An error in upkeep that destroys something beautiful.

My parents retire around 12. Leaving me and the Dog and the night and the silence that comes with knowing the end isn’t a far off finish line over mountains, but that the end of this thing is only a modest collection of hours away, less than 100,000 seconds.

He won’t eat which worries me because this is an animal whose main allegiance lied with his own gluttony. And looking at his the apathy chiseled into his sullen face while a wave a biscuit soaked in steak sauce (Our favorite.) under his face is a starling realization that behind his will to stand is a resignation. I wonder what that resignation feels like, does it wash you like wave, entering your nostrils and feeling your lungs. Or does acceptance of the end come like a bullet. Do you die before your heart stops?

Eventually I hear the desperate clamoring of nails and the panting kicks up again as if it were a fire being stoked. I gather my own strength, it’s getting late and all this worry is riding me like a cowboy in some morose rodeo. By the time I’m off the couch and he’s stumbling around and breathing fire and his heads down but he’s walking with so much fucking intent you can almost, and maybe for the first time, feel his presence. In this walk that scared by age and bad bones I can feel the flames of his will. He turns to the kitchen and pauses at the back stairs. I rush into to stop him, fearing a face first plummet. My hearts races and I realize this type of worry is the shit that kills people. I manage to put the child-safety gate we took from my aunt after her kids were too big for it to be an obstacle, in the doorway to block his path. He seems annoyed but turns around and makes his trudge to the front door. It’s apparent to me now that he wants to go outside. That he has already soiled the inside of the house and that he is still capable of making the trip outside to handle his business like any other respectable, housebroken dog. He has dignity. So I oblige and open the front door and he looks out and the wet pavement and the night sky that seems to have a deep purple hue.

There was something so amazing about this moment; Watching the Dog survey the stairs, watching him confront his limitations, and thoroughly ignore them for the sake of pride, for the sake of taking a shit in the designated shit taking area like a functioning member of society. Like there was nothing wrong, like he was fine.

His front legs make the first stair down with no issue, but it’s the back legs that give out on him. He plops down, on the second stair, sunk like an anvil. He looks around, his mouth open, confused, where had his strength gone. Why was this so fucking hard now? There he was, stuck on the second of six steps, the rain, still falling without regard, the sky wrapped in a dark lavender so brooding it would have been sexy with a cognac and oj and a ciggerete.

I go back in the house and get a the pants we’d used to lift him out of the basement. I position them under him again, wrap the pant legs around my fore arms and lift. He seems grateful, as if he understands this is the only way he’ll be able to move. Resignation like a wave, resignation like a bullet. While he gets why we need the pants, he doesn’t get how to fully use them, and since neither can communicate we fumble about in the rain for 3 minutes trying to understand what the other wants. Eventually I realize we are going to need to leash to. Which means I’ll have to wake up Dad. And I was so hoping not to. I don’t want to leave him on the steps, in the rain with pants tied around him so I hit the doorbell a few times. After about a minute I see Mom come down the stairs from the open front door.

“Whats the matter you got locked out?” She calls.

“No. I need some help with the dog.”

“Ok.”

Mom puts on her coat and shoes and I hand her the leash. We hoist him down the stairs and he pees and does some sniffing around in the lawn and Mom says that this won’t work for him. And then I realize Dad hasn’t told her about tomorrows plan.

That night my Dad slept on the kitchen floor with the Dog. Mom sat in the dining looking at them. The next day we use the pants system to put the Dog into the car. I’d been drinking and crying and my parents had been making small talk in voices too genial to be real.

In the car in the back seat he gives me a few last kisses. And I’ll never miss a womans tongue like I’ll miss that collie’s. He seemed to be crying with they gave him the shots. He eyes were watering and I don’t know if dogs cry and I won’t google it because sometimes facts get in the way of reality. I wanted to bury him in the back yard but Dad didn’t want to handle the body and none of liked the idea of not having a coffin for Streak, the Dog.

So I’ll remember him not as a headstone in the garden, but as the dog hair on my sweater. As the biscuits in the kitchen and as the warmth in the basement. I’ll remember Streak as friend. And every other dog I see will seem familiar, because I’ll know that somewhere in me on the borders of my mind, always orbiting inside, is the part of me that’s still just two eyes, two ears and the desire to run.