Liars and Saints

Some of Salvy's first toys were: Chicken-Man, Fishy, and the Kong ball. Chicken-Man, a rubber pirate-chicken, very quickly lost his head and his leg. He had an eye patch. Who thought of this? Fishy was a squeaky fish; the Kong ball squeaked, as well, and it was wrapped in a blue cloth with long, flowing tails. Pets have play needs that differ from an adult human's play needs. A dog wants texture; he wants his chicken to have weird, tumor-like growths under the furry surface; these growths create something interesting for his teeth. He wants multiple squeals, at multiple pitches. He wants diverse gradients of thickness; he wants part of his chicken-surrogate to be stuffed with crinkly paper, because the crinkly paper does something odd for him that a squeaky plastic bladder can't do. Why must the toys have chicken faces, fish faces, Santa faces? Can a dog recognize these characters? I think not. I suspect that twist is mainly for the human owners. Salvy spent a gre...

Why is this song such a tour de force? It's a grand statement of Sondheim's Credo of Ambivalence. Amy is a self-loathing mess. She is like the Woody Allen joke: "I'd never join a club that wanted to have me as a member." She won't marry--but she also won't tell her husband-to-be. ("Clear the hall....and don't tell Paul....but I'm not getting married today.") Sondheim writes with such compassion for this oddball. (I was trying to write earlier today about a nutty colleague, and it wasn't working, because I wasn't summoning the insight that Sondheim seems to have always at his fingertips.) And then there are all the details. "Take back the cake, burn the shoes, and boil the rice." "I telephoned my analyst about it, and he said to see him Monday but, by Monday, I'll be floating in the Hudson with the other garbage..." "Thank you, all! Now it's back to the showers." "Look: perhaps I'll co...

"Falsettos" creates a fantasy land; you walk through a mirror, as if following Alice. In "Falsettos," everything is in almost constant flux; you're in an uncomfortable liminal state, always. (Finn may have borrowed from Sondheim. Famously, the "I Want" song is meant to go toward the start of the show. But Sondheim *ended* one of his shows with the big "I Want" song; I'm thinking of "Being Alive," in "Company." Also, "Into the Woods"--which seems, in many ways, more conventional than "Company"--ends with its own similar twist. After all scores seem to have been settled, Cinderella steps downstage and says, "I wish..."--anxiously--and then the curtain drops.) "Falsettos" is a cascade of wants, big and small; Marvin wants to fuck Whizzer while retaining his hetero marriage; Mendel wants to fuck Trina while retaining his license to practice psychiatry; Jason wants Whizzer as a third ...

I really did feel excited and proud when Salvy would poop. He'd do frantic circles--wherever he was standing--and then out would pop those tiny, well-sculpted dumplings. They'd start hard and get progressively softer, and they were oddly warm through the poop bag. Like all other things, poop bags had found a way to become high-class and pricy in Park Slope; they were made scented and with long, long necks, so that the actual poop would dangle far from your fingers and far from your nose. (No one tells you this when you're puppy-shopping.) On occasion, Salvy's stomach would mandate shocking indoor poops--and these were often liquid and part of a rapid-fire series, and at least once they were bloody. On a particularly horrifying night, waste seemed to exit simultaneously from both Salvy's mouth and his butt; partly-digested kibble mingled with a brown, marshy stew; little islands of cleanliness, spaced far apart, were all that remained of the kitchen floor. Salv...

Why did Salvy puke? Who could say? One discovery: He didn't take well to off-brand kibble. You had to wean him, slowly, off his fancy kibble, or else: More puke. Fatty substances--leftovers, e.g., from Sunday sauce--would also yield puking. Tandoori chicken. Excessive cheese. He would pick up weird bacteria in the public doggy pond--allegedly--and then: puke. You never knew. And then the humping. Salvy had exuberant fits of sexuality. He would hammer away at a girl dog, but also, he'd make himself available to the humping ministrations of others. Sometimes, the girl would seem to hump *him*. And he'd hump Marc--unapologetically, tirelessly. He'd launch himself onto two legs and hump, hump, hump. Marc would become shy. Salvy never humped me, and this was a source of hurt feelings, on my end, though Marc tried to pretend the lack of interest resulted from my superior boundary-setting habits. He said this, and an awkward silence ensued. One old bitch down the road--...

If you neutered too early, you would damage the lab's hips; if you neutered too late, you would risk a litter of additional Salvies all over Park Slope. "Do they miss their parents?" we asked at Endless Mountain, the manor where Salvy was born. "No!" said the breeder, confidently. "They really don't! Not at all!" And I wondered how any human could *know* this, with certainty; was it possible that Salvy's nighttime whining meant that he was pining for some half-buried memory of his mother? There's a good deal of pseudo-science in the world of puppies. "Don't use a retractable leash, because the puppy learns to tug," said some experts. "Retract! Retract!" said others. (I'm hostile toward the first group, as if they all walk around with perfectly-behaved puppies who never, never tug. Puppies who act like docile Mary, in "Little House on the Prairie," all the time. Those puppies can go fuck themselves. ...

Marc's anti-bite method was unique; he would let his voice drop three octaves, and he'd wag a finger in front of Salvy and say, "No bite, no bite." Then he would say, "Lick! Lick!" Salvy would stare and stare, impassive. "Lick!" said Marc, then he grabbed Salvy's face and licked it in a doglike way. The implication: Salvy was to conclude that the weird tickle on his forehead was produced by a tongue, was to make a link between a human tongue and his own tongue, was to discover that he could create, for others, the tickling sensation via his own tongue, and was, lastly, to infer that this tickling sensation was widely-desired, or at least desired by Marc. Salvy continued to bite. Marc continued to say, "No bite! No bite!" *** God is in the details. Notice everything happening in "The Meyerowitz Stories." A cold, faceless doctor instructs various grieving family members to say several things at the sickbed: "I love ...

Drama surrounded "A Dog's Purpose." Weeks before its release, Marc and Dan began counting down the days; various viewing scenarios and ideas for guest lists were entertained. Marc suggested, half-jokingly, that a midnight screening on the date of the opening would be appropriate. But disaster struck four days before the release date. PETA--or some similar organization--released footage that appeared to suggest that dogs had been abused on-set. You saw a dog seemingly half-drowning, and there was a gruff male voice saying, "Keep him in the water! Keep him in!" Or something like that. A boycott was demanded. How could a dog-lover support such a film? Dennis Quaid became involved. Allegations flew back and forth. It emerged that PETA--or a PETA-ish organization--had doctored footage to make the dog look as if he were suffering, when in fact he was not suffering. Or at least Marc and Dan accepted this version of the story. (All of this was like the Kimye/Taylor feu...

Marc took to professing love for Salvy. He began making nighttime speeches; he would hold Salvy and say, "You're just the dog I always wanted. You are exactly the puppy for me." He began calling Salvy "our baby," and he'd ask, "How is our BAY-by?" over and over again. He also--and this continues to this day--would respond to each and every "daily update" text from the dog-walker. This text was invariably a version of the following: "Salvy had a great walk! He peed and pooped!" Marc would write back: "Good boy!" or "Hi, Baby!" or "Awww! Hi, Salvy!" Whenever a stranger would approach and start to talk about Salvy, Marc would say, "He's a very happy boy," with authority, and with an aura of "freshness," as if he were just now drawing the conclusion. Marc also advanced the theory that Salvy was *unusually* happy, though Dan privately wondered if maybe all puppies are unusually ha...