A Big Little Life Read online

  In the pioneer spirit that impelled each of our forefathers to sleep with a Remington rifle beside the bed and a bowie knife between his clenched teeth, I kept nearby a pair of jeans, shoes, a roll of paper towels, a spray bottle of Nature’s Miracle, and a plastic bag. Eventually, counting from the moment Trixie’s urgent panting woke me, I could be in my jeans and shoes, with my clean-up gear in hand, ready to follow her to the nearest limestone floor, in 2.23 seconds.

  If we’d had some foresight, we could have installed a fireman’s pole between the bedroom and the lower floors, enabling me to be waiting for Trixie in the limestone hallway when she reached it by the stairs.

  The night that her toilet tao was put to the ultimate test, the clock showed 3:30 a.m. when she woke us. At 3:30:02:21, I was jeaned, shoed, equipped, ready to follow her—a personal best for me.

  On this occasion, she raced all the way from the third floor to the first, to the hallway that leads to the garage, where she delivered a reedited version of her dinner kibble. I cleaned this up, stowed it in an odor-trapping OneZip bag, and took it to the trash can in the garage, leaving Trixie lying on her side in what appeared to be a state of exhaustion.

  Because sometimes the initial regurgitation was followed by a second and more minor event of the same kind, I took a quilted moving blanket from a garage cabinet and used it as a bed on the hallway floor to make our wait comfortable. Lying face-to-face with Trixie, I stroked her side and spoke softly to reassure her.

  That night on the hallway floor, as Trixie and I waited to see if she needed to purge her stomach a second time, that yearning look in her eyes, that seeming desire to speak, was stronger than I had ever seen it before. Suddenly she leaped to her feet, turned from me, and ran into the garage, where I had left the door open.

  She had been lethargic for some time because of her sickness, so her energetic exit surprised and then alarmed me. I followed her into the garage, where I saw that she had sprinted to the rack on which we hung her collars and leashes.

  She looked from the leashes to me, to the leashes, to me. I realized this food allergy, which previously had been expressed solely through vomiting, was about to have an effect at the other end of the dog. Trixie needed to poop. Now.

  Quickly, I put on her collar, put my hand through the leash loop, and she took off. As I gasped to keep pace with Trixie, she ran the length of the long garage, to the man door beside the big roll-up.

  Just beyond this door was the driveway and, to the left, a large yard graced by a double colonnade of California pepper trees, where we often played fetch with a tennis ball. Although it was nearly four o’clock in the morning, although no one but I would be aware that she violated her toilet tao, Trixie would not trot twenty feet to the pepper-tree lawn and void there. It was, after all, our property, sacred territory. Instead, she raced up the driveway, into the night, pulling me with her.

  Halfway between the garage and the driveway gate, she turned right, up another length of driveway that led to the motor court. Her toenails click-click-clicked on the quartzite paving, and my feet raised loud slapping sounds as I staggered wildly after her, hoping not to be pulled off balance. She ran across the motor court, down a set of stairs to the front entrance, through the front gate, and up a 160-foot-long wheelchair ramp paralleling the entry stairs that descended to our front door.

  This circuitous route equaled at least one and a half football fields. At the end of the breathless journey, Trixie stepped off our property, squatted on our neighbors’ front lawn, and instantly had explosive diarrhea.

  Standing in the cool night, under a fat moon, I said to her, “You are the best dog in the world. But I like our neighbors, so I still have to clean up the mess.”

  For the remaining years of her life, wheat and beef were removed from Trixie’s diet. She never had another bout of gastrointestinal distress. But I was motivated to stay fit just in case she ever again had to make a five-hundred-yard diarrhea run.

  On the day we had adopted Trixie, Mike Martin had worried that because of our compulsive neatness and our need for order, we would find our lives disrupted by a dog. Instead, Trix was so fastidious, with such a natural sense of propriety, that we had to rise to her standards.

  In the new house, Linda and Elaine shared a large office with plenty of roaming room for Trixie, who spent part of each weekday there because Linda walked her at 11:30 and 3:30.

  In addition to the toilet tao that prohibited her from pooping on our property, Trixie was discreet about other matters biological. She did not want us to look at her when she was doing either number one or number two, so we had to stare off into the distance or into the sky, as though contemplating weighty philosophical issues.

  She allowed us to bag her leavings, but while we gathered them, she often turned her back or stared off into the distance as though contemplating weighty philosophical issues. The times I caught her watching me at this task, she always appeared incredulous, as if my motives were beyond comprehension.

  One afternoon, as Trixie dozed on her dog bed, Linda and Elaine were busy at their desks. Suddenly a ripe aroma filled the room. Neither of them remarked on the smell as it dissipated. But when it bloomed again, Elaine declared, “Linda, dear, please remember, I’m a delicate flower with refined sensibilities. I’m withering here. Whatever you had for dinner last night, never eat it again if the next day is a workday.”

  “Nice try,” Linda said, “but we know which one of us lives on Metamucil.” When Elaine insisted she was innocent, Linda said, “Well, it isn’t me and it certainly isn’t Trixie.”

  At that time, Trix had been with us over seven years, and if she had ever passed gas around any of us, it had been odorless.

  Recognizing each other’s sincerity, Linda and Elaine exchanged a glance of disbelief, for a moment speechless, then turned their attention to the dog and simultaneously said, “Trixie?”

  They couldn’t have been more shocked if they had seen the Queen of England spit tobacco juice on an antique carpet.

  VII

  cnn, cci, tv, and tk

  AS FAR AS I know, I’m the only writer who has appeared often on the best-seller list but who has never done a national or even a multi-state book-publicity tour. I also have never stabbed my wife, as Norman Mailer stabbed one of his, nor have I dissed Oprah Winfrey, as Jonathan Franzen did, nor have I faked a bad-boy history and invented a colorful past as James Frey did: I am a publicist’s worst nightmare.

  I dislike most publicity, aside from radio interviews, which I enjoy because of the energy and intelligence of the folks who work in that medium. Besides, I can do six hours of early-morning radio programs with bed hair, without shaving, with sticky-bun stains on my T-shirt, and listeners will assume that I’m as scrubbed and as perfectly coiffed as Donny Osmond on his way to church.

  Cubby Greenwich, the writer who is the protagonist of my novel Relentless, has my aversion to publicity and explains it better than I can: “Protracted self-promotion drains something essential from the soul, and after one of these sessions, you need weeks to recover and to decide that one day it might be all right to like yourself again.”

  I do as much publicity as feels fair to my publishers—and as little as I can persuade them is fair. In 1998, I was new to Bantam Books, having published one novel with them and having delivered a second that awaited publication. When they asked me to do the CNN biography program Pinnacle to support the release of Seize the Night, I probably grumped a little, just so everyone would know what a humongous and debilitating imposition it was, no less traumatic than open-heart surgery, but I agreed.

  Trixie had been part of our lives less than a week when the producer, film crew, and program host for Pinnacle came to Newport Beach to spend two days with us. Already, we could not imagine life without her.

  The day before the CNN folks showed up, Gerda and I took Trixie to meet her veterinarians. She was scheduled for a full physical and, of course, for a bath and grooming to ensure that she was
properly fluffed for a national television appearance.

  We did not yet realize that our veterinarians would become such an important part of our lives. Good ones give you the confidence to entrust your furball to them, they gentle you through scary crises, and one day they help you to bear a most devastating loss. We found two fine vets in a practice near us: Bruce Whitaker and Bill Lyle.

  For almost nine years, Trixie went to their office for medical attention and also once a week to be bathed and groomed by Heidi, for whom she was always quick to present her belly in greeting. Often when we went to pick up Trixie, she was not in the holding area at the back of the facility, but roamed free with the women who worked up front at the receiving station. A couple of years later, Heidi told us that she didn’t cage our girl after a bath because by her presence she calmed other dogs that were nervous about being bathed.

  On our first visit, we were amused when the receptionist said, “Dr. Whitaker, Trixie Koontz is here for her appointment.” Trixie was now Trixie Koontz, officially a part of the family.

  A joyful dog elicits from you a long list of nicknames. For a while I occasionally called her TK, but that was soon supplanted by Furface, Short Stuff, Love Puppy, Trix, Trickster, and others.

  For the CNN interview, TK was super-fluffed, and throughout the experience, she remained properly unimpressed that she had become part of a celebrity family.

  Weeks prior to the Pinnacle interview, the producer spoke with me by telephone, walking me through the subjects they might want to discuss. Everything went smoothly until he said, “And because yours is basically a sedentary profession, we’d like to get some footage of you and Gerda engaged in colorful leisure activities.”

  I explained that aside from having taken six years of ballroom-dancing lessons, we had not done anything colorful. In fact, we strove to avoid the colorful in favor of the comfortable and the safe. We did not sky-dive, wrestle bears, charm snakes, or ride a motorcycle in tandem while wearing horned Viking helmets.

  Television thrives on color and movement, so we were at a crisis point. After much mulling, I suggested that Pinnacle accompany Gerda and me to Canine Companions for Independence, at its Oceanside campus, because the organization was such an important part of our lives and would offer the producer all the color he needed. Besides, I am always trying to get CCI publicity that will bring them more donations. The producer was baffled and could not imagine what would be visually interesting about assistance dogs and a bunch of people in wheelchairs. He agreed to go with us to Oceanside on the second morning but “just for an hour.”

  Thereafter, he wanted to return to Newport, where Gerda and I would walk on the beach for the camera and do other semicolorful things. Maybe I could climb a date palm, chase the rats out of their nest at the top of the tree, and even catch one in my teeth. I did not actually suggest the palm-rat-teeth scenario, but I’m sure that if I had, the producer would have sighed with relief and said, “Yes!”

  To that point, my experiences with the press had been mostly dismaying. In an interview in a major newspaper, a reporter had invented every quote that he put in my mouth, had written that I worked in a windowless room, when in fact it featured an eight-by-five-foot window, and made forty-six other errors of fact in an attempt to make me appear to be an even bigger fool than I am, which itself is a fool’s errand. No one can make me appear more foolish than I already am. An artist might as well try to paint a hippopotamus that is more of a hippopotamus than the real animal. Given open-minded attention by a reporter, I will be as preposterous as anyone since time immemorial, thereby saving him the need to invent idiocies to attribute to me.

  The Pinnacle team showed up on schedule, and they were a pleasant surprise. The producer and crew were friendly, considerate, professional, and they all had a sense of humor that put us at ease. Beverly Schuch, the on-camera host and interviewer, was a gracious woman who joined in the crew’s joking.

  I am publicity-shy, but Gerda is an extremely private person who might want to shoot out the limelights if you directed them at her. I was surprised that the Pinnacle folks induced her to participate so fully in the program. Years after, I enjoyed reviewing the parts of the tape in which she appeared, so lovely on a warm September day.

  Trixie, however, had none of Gerda’s hesitancy. We learned with Pinnacle that she enjoyed the limelight. She did everything asked of her—walk here, walk there, turn this way, sit, smile—as if instead of going through assistance-dog training, she had attended modeling school. She was in fact a camera hound.

  Early on the second day with Pinnacle, we traveled to the Oceanside campus of Canine Companions for Independence. Gerda’s brother, Vito, and his wife, Lynn, were in their second week at the beach house, and they agreed to accompany us to take care of Trixie if we were with the film crew just when Short Stuff’s schedule called for food or a bathroom break.

  Judi, the Oceanside campus director, gave Pinnacle a tour of the facility and encouraged them to film a session with the trainers and the current class of dogs heading toward graduation. Everyone from CNN became so enthralled with CCI that they remained not “just for an hour,” as the producer initially envisioned, but for the entire morning and the early afternoon. Later that year, they filmed a one-hour special about CCI that ran in the Christmas season.

  During our tour, we came to the kennels, in which puppies were currently housed, all of them eight to ten weeks old and soon to be handed over to the volunteers who would raise them. Judi suggested that Gerda and I go into the play yard between kennels, get on our knees, and meet the puppies, which she would release from their pens with the flip of a switch. In these two days, Gerda had been in front of a camera more than she hoped to be in a lifetime, so she backed off, leaving me to face the ferocious pack alone. When the puppies were released, most proved to be golden retrievers, the others Labradors. They raced exuberantly to me. In an instant, I was wearing a live-puppy coat.

  In the care of Vito and Lynn, Trixie watched me go into the fenced kennel and pressed to the chain-link with interest, as if saying, I used to live here, Dad. But why would you want to? The house on the hill is way better than this.

  Then the puppies exploded into the play yard and clambered over me. I laughed with delight—and Trixie at once turned her back on this display and refused to watch. Vito and Lynn tried to get her to turn to the fence once more, but she clearly disapproved of me cavorting with cute puppies.

  We took this to mean that after just a few days, she had bonded with us, and she did not want to consider that she might have to share our affections with another dog. Hour by hour, we were more certainly a family of three.

  Long before that day, Oceanside had thoughtfully set aside a large tract from which the city council intended to carve gifts of land to be granted to worthy nonprofit organizations. CCI’s Southwest Chapter had previously been quartered in the San Diego area, but had moved north to accept Oceanside’s generosity. In a moment between sessions with Pinnacle, Gerda and I asked Judi Pierson what CCI intended to do with the substantial portion of their land they had not already built on, and she described a project that intrigued us and that eventually became an important part of our future—and Trixie’s.

  After returning to Newport Beach that afternoon, we took the Pinnacle team to dinner at Zov’s Bistro in Tustin, for years our favorite restaurant. Zov didn’t have a pro-dog policy, but that day she made an exception and allowed us to bring Trixie. Our golden girl went under the table, facing out, and got up only to lap at a bowl of water.

  An hour before the end of dinner, when I glanced down at Trixie to be sure she remained content, I saw her head raised. Something interested her. A piece of chicken the size of a plum lay on the patio floor, twelve inches from her nose. Evidently another diner had tossed it to her, but she was trained to disregard anything that might distract her from the person with disabilities whom she served.

  In CCI’s large training room, food is sometimes dropped at various place
s before the day’s lesson begins. The dogs then go through their paces, learning to ignore the treats and remain focused on the needs of the trainer who is a sit-in for the wheelchair-bound person with whom the dog will eventually be paired. While in working mode, assistance dogs also must ignore other dogs, as well as cats, rabbits, birds, and anything else they might ordinarily want to chase, such as butterflies and Peter-bilts.

  On the patio, at dinner with the CNN folks, Trixie was retired, had no person with disabilities to serve, yet she remained faithful to her service-dog tradition. When we left the restaurant an hour later, she had not touched the chicken; as we departed, she stepped over the treat with more pride than regret.

  Largely because of the time constraints of a television show, the finished episode of Pinnacle got a few things wrong when my answers to some questions were trimmed and spliced. But that had nothing to do with any agenda of theirs and everything to do with my tendency to ramble.

  Near the end of the program, pressured by the producer, Gerda and I did a minute or two of swing dancing—without benefit of music, silently counting the beat—to demonstrate the result of all those years of lessons during which I had broken the spirit of more than one dance instructor. This is my favorite moment of the show, not because of our dancing but because the camera slowly zooms in on Trixie, who is watching us intently, as if she has never seen dancing before and as if she is solemnly wondering in what other peculiar rituals her new parents might engage.

  VIII

  i screw up, dog takes the rap

  GOLDEN RETRIEVERS HAVE glorious thick coats, and they shed with exuberance, especially in spring, when they create billowing clouds of fur each time they shake their bodies. Because we preferred not to live in drifts of Trixie’s cast-offs, we combed her for half an hour to forty-five minutes after her walk each morning, and another ten or fifteen minutes in the late afternoon or early evening. In addition, every floor in the house was swept at least once a day. No visitor ever saw fur on the floor or went home with more than a few golden filaments on his clothes.