A Dog Named Motherfucker
Stories on being a particular kind of being on a planet teeming with beings.
[waves hello from the shitshow]
I came up with another title later in the process that I kinda fell in love with: “Pavlov's Schrodinger”. This is one of my many techniques practicing the art of procrastination. Titles just pop into my head and that’s it. A one-step sprint, then straight to the locker room of Not Writing a Damn Thing. I’m really good at it.
But, “A Dog Named Motherfucker” just punches you in the face. No clever. No flimflam. It’s brutally clear, disturbingly funny, and a true story. There can be no better title.
In respect of your attention, I have not buried the lede of the essay. Years ago I wrote a short bit of memoir titled “Great Moments In Family History” and the dog story was one of the compilation. It has been revised and made part of this group of new personal stories. I hope you’ll like it. I hope it haunts you, too.
This is how I roll.
Yours,
—C
PS: This essay wandered into the weeds, growing much larger and taking more time to complete than anticipated. If you are reading it via email, it may be truncated so make sure to click “View entire message” to read it in its entirety.
IT’S POSTSCRIPS ALL THE WAY DOWN: I rewrote another family story from the original compilation and it’s one of my more popular essays. You can read it here.
Will there be another race
To come along and take over for us?
Maybe martians could do better than we've done
We'll make great pets!
—Porno for Pyros, Pets
🦮
The family gathered in the kitchen to name our new blonde-coated cocker spaniel pup. There were even “papers”, making him officially fancy. We lacked the funds to purchase a dog, let alone this level of fancy, but Mom had a long-time friend who, in hindsight, was definitely running a puppy mill. The friend offered her a puppy for free.
Previously, we’d begged for a dog, my much younger sisters especially. Our newly built suburban home had a huge yard compared to the speck we had at the trailer park and the promise of suburbia was a great excuse for our want. Mom resisted and we persisted. She eventually caved under one condition: we would be responsible for it. Between puffs on her cigarette she barked, “I don’t want to be the one who ends up taking care of the goddamn dog, you hear?” We shook our heads in the affirmative. But our agreement lacked any true commitment beyond desire.
No one in the family was prepared for the reality of being a dog owner.
Especially this dog.
The meeting was proving indecisive until I gave my proposal. “How about Mofo?” It was a joke, not a serious bid. Mom’s eyebrows met in confusion. “It’s short for motherfucker!” I declared in comedic triumph. Everyone laughed and there was no further discussion about a name.
It was a prophetically appropriate naming.
We called him Mofie when he was good. He wasn’t good much. He pissed on everything. Stuffed animals, pillows, blankets, the side of the couch…anything in reach of his aim was fair game. And he’d do it seconds after being let in the house.
He ate anything. Leaves. Bark. Cat shit out of the litter box. Cigarette butts. Barbie heads/hands/feet. Balloons. Crayons. As a result, his turds often looked surreally festive.
Occasionally Mofo would sneak out and bee-line to the Hindu neighbors from Fiji two doors down, finding a way into their backyard where they had a fire pit with a big pot positioned over it. In it they’d cook with curry nearly every day and during summer the mighty odor would sometimes hang over the block and lay siege to the senses.
Mofo’s unrestrained feasting would be furious. Then he’d slink back home when we noticed him missing and began calling his name.
His fur drenched in enriched curry grease, we’d scold him from a safe distance. The scent was so powerful it emitted an aura of radiating light waves around him. This of course is an exaggeration, but if you were the one who had the repeated chore of cleaning his fur, you’d understand the hallucinatory nature of the olfactory trauma fixed to the memories.
Before the cleaning could begin, Mofo would first barf curry lava everywhere for about an hour. I swear it etched the concrete of the backyard patio and burnt patches in the lawn.
It was times like these when we called him by his full name, Motherfucker.
The Muses of Abuses
Our animal behavior corrective measures were constant and a perfect storm of tragedy. The dog was dumb as rocks, and we were a house of corporal punishment. It was an endless cycle. In the moment there was not much thinking about the nature of the relationship. As with the rest of the family, undesired behavior required punishment.
The beatings would continue until Mofo improved.
Alas, Mofo’s unassailable dumb would exhaust us punishers eventually. We gave up and banished him to the backyard and garage for the rest of his life. Which in hindsight is probably the cruelest punishment for a dog possible.
After Mom divorced my stepfather, he’d come by the house to pick up my sisters every once in a while. Sometimes he’d go out back and pet Mofo while he waited for the girls to get ready. It was damning to witness because Mofo would lean onto my stepdad’s leg and stay perfectly still for as long as the attention would last, like a plant reaching towards sunlight.
I would avert my eyes. Because if I didn’t, I’d have to acknowledge the sad, terrible sin we were continuing to commit.
Like a lot purebreds, cocker spaniels are predisposed to particular list of physical ailments. Eye problems are predominant and Mofo had them. Being a product of uncaring puppy mill inbreeding sealed his fate. There were attempts to treat the issues over the years with medication, even a surgery, but money was always scarce and a source of persistent anxiety so Mom never properly addressed Mofo’s chronic problems.
I had moved out long before it became gruesome.
When I would come back to visit, I began to notice one of his eyes had begun to bulge, likely due to glaucoma, and the eye only grew larger each time I’d visited. Mom was struggling with her own health issues now after a lifetime of smoking, and mentioning the dog would send her into a tailspin. My sisters were nearly out of the nest, and I was chaotically forging my own path, so Mofo was on his own.
Eventually the eye ruptured.
I don’t remember how long Mofo lived after that, but it was longer than you’d imagine. When the time came, Mom called and asked me to take him to the vet to be put down. The price of refusal was some traditional verbal abuse, which I expected and accepted.
I was trying to escape our familial patterns. Part of the strategy was refusing to shoulder past burdens. I was too young to understand that freedom is tricksty and family is sticky.
Time offers insight and wisdom, which in turn can cast the curse of guilt and shame. And there is a mountain of guilt and shame when it comes to Mofie.
But Initially, There Was Awe
As a cosmic newcomer, I was astounded by the world, by life, by being alive. I had questions.
As my curiosity bloomed, Mom did her best to explain. She was intelligent and a straight-shooter but I was relentless. Where other children would rest satisfied, I had only just begun. A question answered only begged a deeper question until I wore her down to an intellectual nub.
One day I asked her, “Who made the sun?” Haggard and fed up with my insatiable inquisition, she answered, “God did.” She had attended a Catholic school growing up, but we adhered to no specific religion or attended church. So when I replied with a bullshit detector “naaah”, she laughed. I was so young my memory of the moment is murky at best. But Mom loved to retell the tale so that’s why I remember it.
Another story she loved to tell was the first time I saw an Asian person while we were at the grocery store. She said I completely flipped. Mind blown. Eyes bulging. I would not stop staring and pointing and asking, “WHAT’S THAT?”
She quickly carted me away and did her best to explain the diversity of human form to my wee awareness.
Somewhere between exhaustion and trying to get me to shut up, she started to buy me books. But instead of children’s fiction, my first memories of books were ones titled The Sea and The Forest. These were part of a hard-bound collection called Life Nature Library, published by Time-Life.
Mostly I looked at the pictures since they were written beyond my comprehension. Sometimes I commanded Mom to sit with me to add commentary. She renounced reading about insects because it creeped her out.
I returned to them again and again as my reading skills improved. Over time my questions became knowledge that the adults in my life didn’t have. Not long after my “well, actually” corrections began, an aunt bought me The New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set.
I inhaled them, favoriting information on nature and its endless, splendorous variety. And in the volume of “E” was the topic of extinction. Specifically, that which is caused by human behavior. I reread it often out of morbid curiosity. I’d look at the list of lost life and I’d think something to the effect of, we can erase other beings?
Yet I was ignorantly young and the world still vibrant and new from my point of view. Existential thoughts couldn’t compete with my revelry. Later, my awareness and awe would go further and further astray, but encountering the word extinction marked the beginning of when the chambers of my heart began to fill with worry and dread.
A Childhood Pageantry of Pets
🐈
A cat was my first pet. Like the cats who followed, it was a stray, so they chose us as much as we chose them. Mom let them come and go as they pleased. We never bound our cats to only the inside the house.
Mom liked them because they tended to be clean, and did not need constant attention. And they made me happy, so it was wins all around. At least until the heartbreak.
Our first cat was not spayed so it was only a matter of time before she was pregnant. I got to watch the kittens be born and then mama cat take each and hide them under an end table wedged in the corner of the living room between the two couches. I remember the herculean task of pulling the loveseat back just enough so I could peek at them.
Mom was less fascinated. One cat had turned into a herd, and this was untenable.
After the kittens were weened, she decided to take the whole family to an animal shelter. This was the 70’s so I don’t know how humane it was, but child-me howled when she announced what was happening. I remember mom putting the kittens in a pillow case and us driving to the shelter. I cried the whole way there and back. My pet had miraculously became many and then quickly none.
🐁🐁
Mom came home with a pair of female rats one day and trained them with food to step on a pedal which would lever a rod to strike a tiny drum. It was a project for a psychology class she was taking at a community college. After the class, the rats stayed. Their cage was kept on my bedside table.
The memories are vague, but I remember playing with them. Shame demands that I still remember that I would toss them up in the air and watch them swing their tails in a circle like a helicopter to maintain steady orientation. I knew Mom would not approve but they seemed* okay with it and I was sneaky enough to not get caught.
*They were not okay with it.
At first the tosses were short, but as I became comfortable they went higher. I did it over the bed in case I missed catching them. I never did, but then came the day I tossed one up too high and it hit its nose on the ceiling, making it bleed. A small, pale red stain was left where the rat hit. I stopped launching the rats in the air after that. And when I would go to bed my eyes would inevitably return to the stain on the ceiling, reminding me of my sin.
Mom was cutting my hair in the bathroom when she told me the rats had to go. She said that rats do not live long and it was time. “Time for what?” I asked. “Time for them to get put down,” she responded. Death was a foggy concept buffered by afterlife myth, but assisted death was beyond me. Mom said something about suffering as cut hair mixed with my tears.
🦀🐚
Hermit crabs filled the void for awhile. They don’t do much.
🦜
Once a parakeet landed at my feet while playing outside. It felt like a miracle when it hopped onto my hand. Mom was not pleased when I came in the house wide-eyed, wielding a bird. “Birds are filthy,” she said. Still, she agreed to give it a trial run. My stepdad crafted a cage out of cardboard and wire mesh. It was pitifully small. Within a week I requested it be taken to the animal shelter.
I was disturbed with a bird as a pet in a way I couldn’t quite articulate.
In Which I Become the Collector-Captor
🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎
The only part of the Sacramento Zoo that I enjoyed as a child was the reptile exhibit. It was housed in a cinderblock building and named Kenneth Johnson Reptile House.
The interior was stark and the lighting dim. Portals of various sizes lined the winding walls and through them you could spy on various reptiles through their glass enclosures. I’d make sure to marvel over each one, especially the giant python. My attention captured, the exit out the back of the building would always sneak up on me and I’d beg to go back around to the entrance and do the whole thing again.
I wanted my own reptile house.
Suburbia hadn’t swallowed all the open space yet near the mobile home park where we lived and I would often wander in the open fields nearby. Wildlife abounded and I became an expert catcher of small beings. Bullfrog tadpoles. Toads. Crayfish. Snakes. But my specialty was lizards. We called them bluebellies because of the blue scales that ran along either side of their abdomen. And after a day researching at the library, I found out their proper name was western fence lizard.
Western. Fence. It just screams of Manifest Destiny-mindedness.
At some point the catch and release became collecting. Over one summer I caught a horde lizards, keeping them in a desk drawer in my room. I’m not sure what the final count was, but it was over twenty. Maybe thirty. It was a point of pride.
Some of the lizards were pregnant and when they laid their eggs the other lizards ate them.
Obviously a desk drawer isn’t very secure, so there were escapees. The sight of one skittering across the hallway tipped Mom off to my stash. Then she found some dead ones and that was the end of it. She commanded me to free the lizards. In the process, one of the lizards bit my finger and I dropped it with a yelp. It ran under a couch. While moving the couch to recapture the lizard, it was pinched by one of the couch legs and injured badly.
Mom scolded me to not let if suffer. My stomach turned. My hands went clammy. I took it outside and found a large river rock. I set the lizard down on the ground, lifted the rock above my head, apologized, and then the lizard knew no more.
I stopped imprisoning lizards and other critters after that. Mostly. I hadn’t quite learned the lesson. While camping in the Sierras, I discovered a different kind of lizard: a skink. They are bigger, more colorful, and definitely more snake-looking. I decided it was a keeper.
On the way home the skink escaped containment in the car, and looking more snake than lizard, Mom lost it. She commanded me to release it as soon as we got home. In the field behind our trailer I found a soda bottle and put the skink inside and hid it in the grass upright, while I schemed of a way to keep my prize. After about an hour, no solution came to mind so I returned to where I stashed the bottle to release the lizard. I found it dead, glassware-cooked in the summer sun.
That was the end of my crimes against lizards.
Murder, He Wrought
Mom did not allow me to have toy guns. I wouldn’t say she was a pacifist, but she’d lived through the tumults of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the riots, the assassinations, and the police brutality that gripped America in the decade before my birth. She wanted no part in the glorification of violence. But America = guns. There were guns on TV and in the movies. My friends had toy guns. I could, and would, make them out of Legos or sticks or steal them from the grocery store and stash them under my bed.
I even found a loaded semiautomatic pistol when I was seven or eight. The gun had been tossed into the high weeds growing beside the road beneath the overpass that loomed just behind our trailer. It was wrapped in a paper bag, but my eagle eyes had noticed the tip of the barrel sticking out through the paper. Mom lost her mind when I brought it home.
This was a regular thing I did to her.
I pined for a BB gun as a grew older but I knew it was an impossibility to own while under Mom’s roof. I would have to settle for using friend’s BB guns when I had the chance. It turned out I was a good aim. I didn’t target animals though. Bottles and cans and other inanimate objects were my prey. Perhaps a random window, if I was feeling mischievous.
Then came the day where I crossed the line.
At a friend’s house shooting random objects, a bluejay landed on the fence line across the yard. I decided I was going to scare it by shooting just below where it was perched. I steadied and aimed. As I pulled the trigger, the jay flew downward and into the line of fire. It landed in the grass, limp.
I ran to the bird to see it gasping for breath. Alone and panicked, I tossed the bird over the fence. I didn’t have the guts to finish the job and I desperately wanted to put the deed out of my mind. I felt ill. I had committed a terrible wrong and my body thrummed in judgement.
There’s many tricks one can play on their own mind, but the body does not deal in denial, secrets, or lies.
Familiars
Living on my own, I didn’t immediately get a pet. Years passed before I considered it. Then Mom called saying she had a cat problem and asked if I wanted one. My soon-to-be wife and I picked out an all-black kitten. We named him Bubba. It was nice to have a pet again.
Bubba secretly lived with us in an apartment, so one cat was plenty. But within the year we bought a house and Mom, still herding cats, asked if we’d take another. We brought home Bubba’s brother and named him Blackjack.
The cats and I bonded tight.
They both grew to be big cats. So big the vet commented on it. Bubba was a little smaller, and with a wagging belly. Blackjack was all muscle—a scaled-down panther. In bed at night, they’d both attempt to sleep on my belly and chest, which was adorable but it made it hard to breathe. If I had my legs propped up on the coffee table while watching TV from the couch, they’d inevitably occupy my legs until their combined weight made my knee joints ache and I pushed them off.
Blackjack was the more regal of the pair, and Bubba a charming and sometimes vexing character. Both were prolific hunters. Our house was part of a new subdivision, and our backyard bordered what was previously cattle grazing land, soon to be host to a sea of homes. Most of their prey were an endless supply of mice and voles, but a gutted adult jackrabbit was a surprise find on the back porch, as was a couple of duck-sized waterfowl of some sort left in the garage.
The first was discovered after I ran it over with my truck while backing out of the garage. Fun.
Bubba had a weird habit that only manifested under specific circumstances. Not a peep out of him until I picked up a phone and started talking. Apparently this meant it was time for Bubba to talk too, and he would, non-stop, until I hung up the phone. Nothing else would silence the cattalk. “Oh, is that your baby?” People would ask. “As if by baby you mean cat, then yes,” I would routinely respond with a sigh.
On neighborhood walks, the brothers would follow, just like dogs. I’d never had, or seen a cat do such a thing.
When Blackjack went missing, I didn’t immediately worry. Cats free to go outside sometimes go on adventures, sometimes temporarily adopt side-families. Like Fred Penner’s song reminds, it’s a temporary thing:
But the cat came back the very next day The cat came back, they thought he was a goner But the cat came back; he just couldn't stay away
After a few days and no return, my worry broke through. I scoured the neighborhood. I scoured the fields. What happened? Coyotes? Injured? Stolen? Trapped in a house under construction? Where was he?
He did not come back.
A month later Bubba went missing too.
He did not come back.
I was devastated.
The paired suddenness, the mystery, weighed heavy. But there’s not a lot of sympathy in the world for lost and departed pets, especially when navigating the stunted traditions of what it means to be a man.
Sure it’s sad, but animals aren’t humans, silly. Just get another pet. Fill the hole.
We barely give people time to bereave a death of a human family member or friend. There’s zero time away from the grindstone for a beloved animal. Pets aren’t even viewed as secondary citizens. We humans of modernity use them, consciously and unconsciously, as emotional surrogates. Status and identity symbols. Fetishized accessories. Entertainment. Profit surfaces.
A deep attachment to an animal is suspect, so you swallow the grief and move on. I silently choked on it for a long time.
A new century brought with it cheap debt and quickly rising home prices, so our first house of five years went on the market to make room for a newly constructed house double the size. All the mobility dampened my grief. Nested in our new home, we decided it was time to consider a new pet cat.
Purchasing a pet has always felt morally wrong, and waiting for a stray to show up felt too passive. We went to the animal shelter to see if we could find a cat to rescue. As we started to peruse the first a row of cages, a young black cat reached its arm out through a cage door, groping for attention and pelting our ears with meowy pleas.
“Someone wants to come home with us,” I said. And that was that.
We named him Moogie, after a very minor TV series character from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
A few years later, while my then-wife was pregnant with our son, she started to hint at wanting a dog. I was against it. My overt reasoning was practical: we were soon to be first-time parents and a dog would be an added expense and responsibility we didn’t need to add to the mix. My unconscious reasoning was the packed away guilt and shame over Mofie. I’d also been bitten by a tyrannical chihuahua when I was young, so dogs always got a side-eye.
Fate intervened.
It was after midnight when I woke my wife after returning home from a closing shift at work. I told her to come out to the garage because I had a surprise. Being very asleep and very pregnant, she was not filled with eager anticipation, but she followed me to the garage anyway. I opened the door and said, “I brought something home.”
A tan-coated dog with a red nose and white splotch on his chest was busy sniffing out the garage.
“What the hell, you brought home a pit bull?”
“I know! But this dog is special. I can tell.”
I wasn’t lying. The only reason I brought him home was an uncanny certainty that he wasn’t typical, or dangerous. He was also a stray, which I took as a good omen. Still, I was surprised by my decision just the same.
“I don’t know, Cab,” she hedged.
The dog trotted up to her, butt and tail wagging. “BUT HE’S SOOO CUTE,” she declared in a gravelly voice, bending down to give him some pets.
Earlier that night while at work as the closing manager, I was paged to come to the front of the store. A dog was wandering around inside, which is a big no no in a grocery store. Because of the store’s location, in an economically depressed area near the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers where an expansive park exists, we had transients and unhoused who camped there as regular customers. And this was in the early 2000’s, way before the unhoused population exploded. They often left their dogs out front while they shopped. Sometimes the dogs wandered in looking for their owners.
I called to the dog and he came up to me without hesitation. He looked a bit nervous and confused and had a collar, but no identifying information. He looked healthy, and I guessed he was about a year old. I gave him some pets.
“Hey buddy, where’s your people?” I asked. The dog had no answers.
I made an announcement over the intercom but no one came to claim him. I looked around out front and the parking lot for a potential owner but had no luck. The whole time the dog stayed next to me. It was nearly closing time and I had stuff to do. What was I going to do with him? I wasn’t going to abandon him, so I took him to the store director’s office and closed the door while I performed closing duties.
“Well, I guess you’re coming home with me, dude,” I said to him when I returned. I bought a bag of dog food and we walked out to my car. Parking lot security greeted me on the way and he commented on the dog.
“Taking him home?”
“Yeah, he came in the store earlier but I couldn’t find an owner.”
“Oh yeah, I saw a truck pull into the parking lot earlier and push that dog out of the cab. Then it drove away. The dog was wandering around the parking lot for quite a while.”
I was now a dog owner. We named him Buddy.
A few months later our son Aidan was born. Life was good. For a while. But as the decade rolled on, a cascade of losses piled up.
When Aidan was around two years old, we noticed he was having abnormal trouble breathing when he would catch a cold. The first couple of times we chalked it up to just a bad cold. Then there was an episode that required us to rush him to the hospital. Docs sent us home with a nebulizer and albuterol. It was only needed when he would get a respiratory infection, but even then there came a time when the treatments weren’t working. Watching your child gasp and struggle to breathe is absolutely terrifying. That time required an ambulance ride.
Docs ordered a battery of allergy tests after that. The results were not good. Aidan had a life-threatening allergy to peanuts. Dog dander was off the charts. Cat dander was extremely high. A laundry list of other foods, including dairy, were high enough to require them to be eliminated from his diet. The allergy specialist recommended we remove our pets from the house.
We tried as hard as we could to keep the house continuously clean and kept Buddy and Moogie as separate from Aidan as possible. Moogie took it in stride, but Buddy really struggled. I could see the fear build in him that he was going to be abandoned again. My heart shredded. We needed to find Buddy a new home before his behavior grew worse. I asked friends and family, people I knew would love Buddy just as much as we did. There were no immediate takers. Then one of my sisters said she would take him in. It was the best outcome of a deeply painful decision.
At the time she lived in southern California, so we’d be able to visit Buddy but not that often. The day we left him hurt to the bone. And the hurting just kept coming.
Not long after we sent Buddy to live with my sister, Moogie became ill. Very ill. I suspected poisoning. The vet said they could run tests, but it would come with a big bill. It was 2007 and we we’re starting to feel the early frost of the impending economic collapse. I made the decision to release Moogie from his misery. The vet advised that I would not be able to be present during the procedure so I should say my goodbyes before I brought Moogie in.
The next morning I sat in the vet parking lot with Moogie in my lap and gave him as much love as I could without prolonging his suffering out of selfishness. And I still feel terrible that I did not insist on staying by his side until he slipped away.
A few months after, Aidan was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, right when he turned three. My wife quit her job to care for his needs. She worked in childcare so she could still bring in income by offering childcare from home. It was less money, but we didn’t have much of a choice. Then the economy caught on fire. Then our marriage died. Then my dad died. Then we filed for bankruptcy. Then we foreclosed on the house.
It was a wildfire of grief.
The Clarity of Loss
The arc of my life lead me away from turning my fascination with the sacred into a field of study or an artistic expression of celebration and reverence. I never lost my wonder, but it was diminished to a flicker by the seductive din and demands of modernity. When the awe returned to full power, it was because of grief. Memory and the passage of time revealed to me the rapid decline of other beings. I reflected on my participation. I bore witness to many abuses, tragedies, and holocausts.
I did not turn away. I did not rationalize. I just let the pain flow through my tattered soul.
And now part of me is restored and part is changed.
I ache to abandon our madness and to return to the garden. Will you meet me there?
If art is the conveyance of emotion from artist to viewer, this was a powerful work of art. I laughed and I cried and I felt revulsion and sadness and uncanny recognition of your experience within my experience.
Tears ❤