Pug Life

You know how a dog looks when he’s taking a dump? All hunched up, embarrassed, and vulnerable? Then when he’s finished with his business, he flings grass behind him, all proud, like nothing happened...and takes off running? Only once in my life I did that. And it was divine.

In the 70s, Boynton Beach, Florida, was a child’s paradise.

There were a couple of empty lots here and there, but we chose the streets, on account of the prickers, since we were all barefoot. We were a stubbed toed, scabby kneed lot, coolly smoking our bubble gum cigars and candy cigarettes.

On occasion, we would converge in a tree fort, pass around a pack of real cigarettes, then go home and get busted. I thought none of my friends got busted like I did, though. I got busted so hard I dressed for PE with my hunched-up back to the lockers.

The streets were our refuge...from home, from school, or both.

School was like prison, right down to the bars on the windows and cops in our halls. It was a lonely place, despite a thousand kids, and I never crossed paths with my neighborhood pals. Maybe I was assigned a special wing due to my stick legs and bucked teeth.

I tried to change my social status once, by wearing my mom’s “boots were made for walking” vinyl zip-ups to school. My mom said she thought they were too big. I said I thought they were perfect. But bus stops draw out truth, and my mom was spot on.

“Haha! Ain’t no ski slopes here!”

“If you wanna play hopscotch, you’re losing for sure!”

And then the refrain from the song.

I hid my feet under my bus seat, under every desk, and under every chair of that excruciating day. But there was no escaping the lunch line, or every other line. I was unfortunate enough to be exposed to the cheerleaders coming out of the gym. There were no insults. Somehow, cheerleaders instinctively know that whispering sideways glances are far worse for a pup, who’s taking a dump.

My dad was a distance runner in the 50s and set some high school and college records so I thought I’d redeem myself in his eyes, or at least at school. I’d try out for the track team.

When the gun went off, the black girls passed me on their long glossy legs like I was Aesop’s tortoise. In the next 7 minutes (5 minutes for them), they disappeared entirely. I watched them finish from across the track with my fuzzy ears pinned tight to my head. They were magnificent.

I tried hard to be brave when I got home. My dad hugged me and patted me and told me it would be okay. And somehow, that made it okay enough for me to wag my tail a little.

My dad was an evangelist. He was an articulate and riveting public speaker so he was the “go-to-guy” for boring churches that needed a shot in the steeple, or for conferences that couldn’t hold a teenager’s attention. He was either totally nuts, or a total genius, and the two personalities aren’t that far apart anyway.

Our family owned a school bus and a big-top tent and we hit the road every summer, just because Florida is too damned hot. Our tent was set up in a field on a farm in Orrville, Ohio. And that changed my life forever.

There were haylofts where I could fall to a glorious death if I didn’t know where to step. There were rope-swings and stinky animals, some gentle and some terrifying, but they all stunk. It was a good stink, if that makes any sense. Chores were dirty and exhausting and necessary. There were acres of winding creeks and woods and fishing holes. There were the stickiest river-banks in the world, where I dug in the clay and turned out all sorts of sun-baked crafts. I ate elderberries until my teeth turned black.

After my sisters and I got done singing for every night’s revival meeting, we’d run around in the corn field, playing tag and busting our shins on the tent stakes. Once I even fell in love. I scratched my paws and flung grass like crazy, but he never even noticed.

That farm made my old Nirvana neighborhood look like hell. So, like a sinner walking the sawdust aisle of a big-top tent, I converted, right then and there. I was meant for the forests and fields of the country.

When my dad started a little Bible school, 10 weeks long, people signed up from all over, hippies and Mennonites alike. Those kids became a family and my dad couldn’t get rid of them. A few years later, my folks bought a farm in southern Indiana. I’d like to think that my dad saw that I was pining over horse books or noticed that I had read the Laura Ingalls Wilder series a jillion times. Maybe it was the neighborhood, maybe the schools, maybe the heat. But when we moved, so did all those Bible school folks. We got the house, and they got the barn.

There were a dozen or so people on our farm, besides our own family of seven, in the summer of 1978. My sisters and I were enrolled in Crothersville school that fall. Each grade had only a few dozen kids and every single one of them was as white as our newfound snow, except for one adopted kid from Korea. And she was way whiter than me. It was total culture shock.

I was already weird to my classmates, just because I wasn’t born and raised in Crothersville. That was evident every time I opened my mouth, which was almost never, but when I did, the Kentucky twang of the local dialect was significantly lacking.

A couple of months later, the day after my birthday, the horrifying cult massacre/suicide claimed the lives of over 900 of Jim Jones’s followers in Guanya. I was as ostracized at school as a hillbilly at a garden party. I only recently put together the awful and coincidental timing of our little commune in Crothersville and the monstrous Jim Jones cult. All I knew then is that I was a leper now, so nothing had really changed. Except for one thing: true love.

His name was Chris Martin. He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, basketball hero, right out of “Hoosiers.” And he ran track. So there was only one thing to do. I tried out for the track team...again. There were no black girls, so this was going to be cake. And it was.

I broke the Crothersville High School mile record the day I tried out for the team in the seventh grade. In fact, I crushed it. I still hold that record today, 40 years later, on account of the fact that we caved to the world and went metric. The 1600 meter race will be broken over and over and over. But the mile record will always be mine, so Jim Jones could kiss my ass if he wasn’t already dead. I felt like a pretty big fish in that murky little Indiana pond.

For “Spirit Week,” at school, I got the day wrong and showed up in red, footed pajamas. It was “Dress-Up Day,” not “Pajama Day,” and we all got our pictures taken for the yearbook. I looked like a dog taking a dump in that picture. I felt like one, too, as I shuffled through the halls on my plastic feet, right past the cutest boy in the world. I looked down at the floor, my whiskers drooping, and waited for a good shaming.

”Hey Smith,” Chris said, with an outstretched hand. “Nice run at tryouts!”

I shook his hand and smiled, without showing my teeth, scratched the grass with my paws, and took off running.