I Love Luna (41)

UNITED STATES—Today we follow the “master” with my sidekick, Baby DeVille, on a walk through Hollywood. It will be excruciatingly prolonged. He will feel obliged to air the dog, the Chihuahua-terrier, who wouldn’t budge from the couch during the recent overcast days, that provide the master with a gloomy solace, as these leaden days remind him of childhood days wreathed in the gray flannel of sullen clouds.

Now with the sun out again, DeVille instantly perked up when the leash hook was dangled.

The walk was complicated by the master’s designs to reach the store on Vine Street and get something. In slow stages he became unmoored. It all came to a head by a sports bar on Vine. It is a zone where Hollywood revelers indiscriminately toss aside barbecue short ribs and beef shank. DeVille worked on a shank for a long time. Much amused, there was a denim-clad Stetson-sporting cowboy. From his place at the counter, looking onto the street, the cowboy smiled at the master’s thwarted effort to assure Baby DeVille that he’d bag up the bone and take it home for the Chihuahua-Terrier to chaw on in peace. The dog, however, was determined to Consume every least thread of meat and suck the shank marrow dry.

The doggie bag itself humiliated him. It took precious seconds to dampen fingertips with spit and find the right end of the doggie bag to open. For a moment, it seemed this bag had been produced by purveyor of joke-shop novelties.

When the master sought to take the bone from DeVille’s clenched fangs, DeVille responded with the piranha growl developed during his residence with me, alias Luna, proud pit-bull. Yes, the little Chihuahua wanted to draw blood from the hand that tried to wrest away his shankbone. Then:

“You’ll never get that away from him,” the old cowboy cackled from under his straw Stetson.

“Yeah, I got some trim-tip for my dogs last week. It didn’t last but two seconds.”

He left a black napkin over the amber stem of the Coors. Parked up by where the newsstand used to be. He’d be back. Meanwhile master devised a plan to wrap DeVille’s leash around a parking meter. Then the master could take his place at the counter and have his Shirley Temple and keep his eye on Deville.

That wasn’t to be. To loop the leash around the meter pole entailed unhooking it from DeVille’s halter. There he was on Cahuenga. The master, so confident in DeVille’s ability to stay near him, panicked. For a split second a tourist viewed the spectacle of a dog being loosened the busy sidewalk and streams of traffic as the master, in one frenzied move, unlooped the leash from the parking meter.

After a few terrified seconds, the leash was re-hooked to his halter. The dog walk resumed and the master thanked his lucky stars.

To be continued…