UNITED STATES—Lupe, the capricious pit bull Labrador, has lowered the bar for a funny. If not convulsed, a knowing smile can now be elicited by the antics of 800-pound Marmaduke. What was once mildly amusing comic strip is now a peephole into the relations of humans and domesticated beasts. The kid saying, “I shouldn’t go near Marmaduke after eating a peanut butter sandwich” has its message. The panel shows the Scooby-Doo-esque cartoon Great Dane, vigorously licking the child’s freckled face.
In the case of Leapin’ Lupe, she has a companion. Little DeVille the Chihuahua terrier who first got invited into our home, and became a member of the family. Today I pulled out some foil-wrapped turkey from the fridge, after being out of town, it was for DeVille, but Lupe’s ultra-sensitive sniffer brought her loping and panting into the kitchen.
Dogs love unconditionally (except when begging) and that’s where dog mastery comes in. Those helpful people, with their tips and their well-meaning advice, often provoke a scorching rage in me. A good example is when the dog takes advantage of my penchant for daydreaming during dog walks and gets her fangs around a chicken bone, the kind which gets discarded on the streets with irksome regularity. And the danger on the street is you get a well-meaning stranger staring and scolding that the dog should not have that chicken bone. And the dog will come to an ugly and painful end.
And, now I the hapless and shamed dog walker am struggling to pry the dried greasy chicken bone from Lupe’s tenacious jaws and throw it far as I can over the hedged wall of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and into their parking lot. “I am an artist, clocked as an irresponsible dog abuser.” Certainly, when Baby DeVille gets the better of me and already has a burger patty scavenged from Vine Street, run over by a million cars, it behooves me not to wrench it from its jaws, but to defer to the uncanny knowledge and instinct of dogs, than to risk the wrath of baby DeVille.
He has developed a savage piranha hiss baring his teeth, after many spats with Lupe over the long summer she was left to me and I took her to an obedience class. I stayed while she was expelled, and learned a few things. Lupe truly left me with stress syndrome, not being able to simply open the door or let my guard down when entering the gate.
Again, she kept breaking down the triviality of the material world. It was a hot August when I left the bedroom window open and she leapt right through the window screen, indoors, and to this day it remains. A reminder of those funny, disturbing puppy days. All the emblems of her vivacious of destruction are still there: the gaping hole in the window screen, the chomped corner of the Simon-and-Schuster bilingual dictionary, the Brando photo, they’re still there. And where she cut through fifty pages of a book, her saliva acted as a glue that required separating each page from the next.
To be continued…
