I placed an ad on a popular classifieds Web site under the title “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” The ad offered to clean, go to the laundromat, organize your bullshit, walk your dog. This was in the personals section, specifically for men seeking men. I was twenty-five but easily passed for younger—my scrawny frame underdeveloped, my cheeks still hairless—so I advertised nineteen. I remember it was autumn, and I remember feeling plagued by an unbearable need for both intimacy and estrangement, for the queerness of touch. Mostly, I placed that ad because I was broke and had been for just about every day of my adult life.
I got a lot of responses, enough to waste the afternoon, idly mesmerized by my cascading in-box. Most simply demanded pics, in all caps: WHY NO PICS? One respondent stood out; his tone was restrained, easy. He required someone to run errands and walk his dog. I feel like I get you, he wrote. He was silver-haired, white, early fifties, well preserved—that one guy from “Mad Men” comes to mind now. A wealthy narcissist; it wasn’t that he got me so much as that there was no one he didn’t feel he had.
Here’s what I remember of the dog: she spent all day in a crate, even though Mad Man worked from home. She was untrained, destructive. At the sound of my entrance, she freaked, and then at the sight of me she freaked harder, paddling her front paws furiously against the mesh metal door, which made the unlocking only more difficult and extended her agony. She never barked, because she couldn’t, she had been bred not to bark, but barks lived inside her, I read them in her face, in the way she opened her mouth and pulsed her vocal cords. A light reddish-brown, achingly handsome—she looked healthy, expensive. A basenji. I remember her black eyes, deceptively kind and questioning, and how the skin of her forehead wrinkled to a peak in the middle as she pulled her brows down at the sides. At home, this was her most constant look, one of silent imploring, but when we were alone together a shadow would pass, and her features would harden into rage. She often tried to bite me.
At first, I was appalled at her over-crating, and unsurprised at her neuroses, but after some weeks my compassion waned. One day, Mad Man sent me around the corner with six hundred dollars in cash to buy a leather jacket. For the dog. He lived in the West Village, so the request was neither improbable nor impossible. My rent was four-fifty. I had a bed in a living room in an unhip part of Brooklyn—not the entire room to myself, mind, but a bed stuck in a corner of the communal living room, behind a screen. I walked to that doggy clothier in a fury that transferred from Mad Man to the dog herself. I found myself fantasizing about somehow destroying the dog and walking away with the cash. I ought to have felt solidarity, stuck as we were at the bottom, Mad Man master to us both. Instead, I felt jealous of her tiny perfect jacket.
I quit and considered getting a legit job. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop as my friends joked that I should put down on my résumé, under past work, “Being a little bitch.” All the sunlight came through the kitchen, so we packed around the table, some up on the counter, drinking shit wine. My friends, these tough women and queers, were all too sharp and creative for their jobs. It seemed as though all the people I had ever known, everyone I was coming up with then, were somehow bending their will to a Mad Man, for the money. We packed into that kitchen to help one another get through the bends—with dark humor, with shouted advice. We bitched about everything. The trick was not to fall into shame, or, worse, quietude. If I’m nostalgic, it’s not because I was happy in those precarious years but because I was deeply moved by our resourcefulness. No rich parents lurked in the background; we kept one another afloat. We drank ourselves messy, and when one spiralled downward the rest chased after, to help, to mock and make light, to tease that person back to the surface. Always, we waited for money to appear, as if it might pour in on a beam of sunshine. We waited, and, in our waiting, we were loud.
My hunch is that Mad Man gave the dog up. Either that or he finally broke her. Anyway, she’s old now, or else she’s dead. But I have this fantasy that she’s still chewing up the living room, still slamming against the limits of that cage, only now she’s vocalized, yapping and howling, and it’s a kind of music, and the whole neighborhood can hear her frustration, and understand. And the song is a lament, something camp and bluesy, about how there ain’t no shame in being a bitch, but, Lord, be a bitch that barks. ♦
