Poop Coiling Into a Tight Spiral Biscuit
Eldora, Colorado
1990
Rummy panted heavily, his tongue hanging out his mouth like a half-eaten salmon filet.
“You need a drink, boy?” I asked him.
He wagged his tail excitedly. Little guy didn’t understand a word I was saying – he could barely form a full sentence himself – but he loved it when I talked to him in that tone. That tone meant treats, car rides with open windows, long walks in the woods.
I stood up from the large rock I’d sat on, snubbed out my smoke on the dirt path, and stuffed the butt back in my half-empty pack of Marbs. I didn’t litter as a rule, but I especially wouldn’t clutter up this pristine piece of planet. Stretching, I gazed out at the immense valley a few thousand feet below. The top of the mountain directly behind my cabin provided a breathtaking view – the Continental Divide’s snowcaps to my left, Barker Reservoir’s shimmering waters to my right – and if I stretched my eyeballs to full eyeballity, I could just make out Boulder, twenty miles down the canyon. This was my mountain, mine alone. I discovered the path buried on the other side of Middle Boulder Creek, and in the many times Rummy and I hiked to the top of my mountain, we’d never passed a single soul.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” I said, then flicked my hand forward, “go get yourself a drink, dude.”
He waited until I took one step down the path, then bolted off, leading the way. He knew the routine. The path wound around the mountain’s summit, rolling through the woods and crossing over to the other side before looping back. A few hundred yards away was a freshwater pond, created each spring by winter runoff from even higher mountains. By the time I reached it, Rummy was already submerged up to his neck, the freezing water cooling his little Benji body as he gulped in huge mouthfuls. After he drank what seemed like a third of the pond, I found a good stick, and for the next ten minutes, I hurled it into the water. Rummy splashed after it, brought it back, and begged for another launch. I threw it further and further, and Rummy went after it with the idiotic enthusiasm of an aging businessman chasing a stripper from stage to stage, convinced she wants more than just his money.
“Alright, alright, that’s enough, boy,” I said after the fiftieth toss.
Rummy cocked his head, wondering why the hell I was stopping the game right when it was getting so awesome. Who the fuck stops playing fetch when they could play more fetch? To punish me for ending the party, he sidled up to me and shook his little body as hard as he could, showering me with freezing mountaintop water.
“Thanks, dick.”
He tore off before I could react further, guiding us further along the path. He knew it would loop back around the mountain and bring us right back to the summit on our side of the mountaintop. He also knew I liked taking the full tour, catching the backside scenery, as well. There was something back there that made me look forward to winter for the first time in my life.
Following my dog around a final bend on the path, the Eldora ski area floated into view. How cool. Until I’d climbed this mountain the first time, I didn’t even know Eldora had a ski area. But there it was, in all its summertime stillness. A ski resort feels completely different in summer than in winter, long swaths of soft green fields cutting lightly through the deeper green of summer pines. Mountain flowers bloomed on the slopes, dotting the ski runs with whites and blues, purple columbines, yellow dandelions. Everything seemed so soft, feminine even, when contrasted against the banzai warfare skiers and boarders waged against the mountain in winter. Eldora was particularly deserted in summertime, probably quieter than any other Colorado resort. There was no town to sustain the ski area, no hotels or condos, no reason for anyone to be at the resort if they weren’t skiing. It was one of Colorado’s smaller ski areas, but to my Minnesota eyes, it still looked enormous. I couldn’t believe I had an actual Rocky Mountain ski resort practically in my back yard.
To keep Rummy happy, I kept moving until we eventually looped back around to “my” rock on “my” mountain. It was Paul Mountain’s Mountain, Mount Mountain. A little redundant, but screw it, I dominated this part of the world. I’d call it whatever the fuck I pleased. I sat on my rock and watched the wind roll across the distant mountainsides, the aspens bowing in unison to the superior force of Wind. I could have stayed there all day, smoking, wandering, studying my wonderfully deserted planet, but Lonnie was cooking up a late breakfast back at the cabin. And once we finished eating, she and I had a huge decision to make.
After an easy hour of downhill hiking and a ten-minute stroll through the woods along the creek, I pushed open our cabin’s screen door. Lonnie stood at the stove, her back to me. She’d tied an apron decorated with log cabins around her waist, presumably to keep her gigantic knockers from escaping into the frying pan. Lonnie looked perfectly in place in our little mountain cabin, almost part of the landscape itself. Her pretty blonde hair had grown longer since our Boulder days, now flowing halfway down her back in wandering, wavy curls. I liked it better that way. She was gorgeous when I’d met her almost a year before, but the two of us falling in love seemed to bring her beauty to fruition.
“Jesus, I thought you guys got lost up there,” Lonnie said as Rummy blasted over to her.
The house smelled fantastic. It was August, way too soon to fire up the wood stove, so Lonnie simmered my trout catch from the previous morning on our gas stovetop. She’d prepped the fish in my favorite lemon and cornmeal batter, the scent scurrying up my nostrils to wake my appetite.
“Just taking my time,” I said, “too beautiful a day to hurry.”
“I know. I wish classes weren’t starting up again so soon. I want to stay up here all day every day.”
Our fish was ready before long. Lonnie brought it out to our deck and served it with basted eggs, a hash brown scramble, orange juice and coffee. Damn, the girl could cook, which was wildly attractive. It wasn’t as hot as watching her do my laundry, of course, but it was still pretty sexy. We ate slowly on our deck, the summer breeze gently pressing the pines, loosening their scent. Neither of us spoke while we ate, but I knew we were both thinking the same thing.
I finished up my breakfast, stretched out in my ridiculously comfortable reading/smoking/drinking/napping hammock, and lit up my dessert.
“So,” I said.
“So,” Lonnie repeated, smiling at me.
“You ready to add to this little slice of perfection we’ve created?”
Her smile grew into a laugh, and she nodded quickly. “I’m so excited!”
“Me too.”
“Then let’s get going!”
Fifteen minutes later, Rummy, Lonnie and I were in her Skyhawk, rolling through Eldora. We passed one person walking her dog. We waved. The woman waved back. Rummy barked once at her dog. Her dog barked once at Rummy. Just another frenzied day on the bustling streets of Eldora, Colorado.
“Are you sure you’re ready for such a big commitment?” Lonnie asked when we exited the canyon and drove into Boulder.
“I think I can handle it. I’ve already been doing it for almost a year.”
“True, but it’s a little different when it’s your own.”
I smiled at her. “Let’s be honest, Lon, Rummy’s mine.”
“He is not!” She punched me lightly in the arm. “He’s my little man.”
I shrugged. “Try telling him that. Dude adores me.”
“He loves me, too.” She rolled down her window for fresh air, Boulder’s summertime temp at least fifteen degrees warmer than our 8,700-foot-high home in Eldora. “Do you have a name in mind yet?” she asked.
“Nah, gotta meet the little guy or girl first.”
“I want a girl.”
“It’s not your decision to make.”
“Yeah, but I still want a girl.” Lonnie stared out her window for a few seconds, then asked, “Do you think you’ll be ready for human babies after this?”
“Nope.”
“I was hoping this was practice for bigger things.”
“Nope.”
She pouted. “I only want two.”
“Two kids to ruin one life: mine.” I glanced over at her hopeful face. “Let’s just stick to the plan, Lon.”
Sticking to the plan, I pulled into the Boulder Humane Society parking lot and found a place in the shade so Rummy wouldn’t overheat. We cracked the windows for our little guy and headed toward the building to find him a friend.
The Humane Society is the happiest and saddest place in the world. The instant we pushed open the door, the roar of animal life filled my soul. Squawking birds, yowling cats, and barking dogs fought to be heard, like a band tuning up before a big concert. The reality that only one of them would be leaving with me, however, soon dampened that initial blast of positivity. Walking away from a hundred animals, leaving it up to someone else to free them from their cages, is heart wrenching. I wanted to take them all, set them loose in a field, then wait for them to overpopulate and dominate the planet. A world of puppies and kittens was a world I could handle, a furry world of unlimited play, long afternoon naps, and big piles of poop.
I’d wanted a dog of my own for as long as I could remember. Some people with horrible fathers want children, hoping to prove to themselves, their dad, or God that there’s a better way to raise kids. In the same way, I wanted a dog. My dad loved our family dog way more than he loved any of his children, but he was still cruel and militant and physically abusive with her. Several times, I watched him kick her in the stomach and throw her down our stairs, drag her through the house by her neck and hurl her out the back door. Even those my dad loved best took it on the chin from time to time, which I kind of had to respect. At least his violence was universal, if not always equally distributed.
“Let’s go find the puppies!” Lonnie said loudly, raising her voice over the symphony of two hundred caged animals. She grabbed my hand and tried to yank me past the kennels, but I resisted.
“Maybe we should get an older guy.” I stopped in front of a cage. Back in the corner of the kennel, a quiet, graying dog lay curled up near his bowl. Without lifting his head, he stared at me, his eyes resigned, knowing I wouldn’t save him. Someone had raised him and then abandoned him when he got older, left him out on display like an old whore in a brothel filled with cheerleaders, no chance of being chosen. It was the saddest thing in a universe overflowing with sad things. I wanted to crawl into his cage, let him cry in my lap, then slip him a few hundred bucks and tell him he could and should spend it all on booze.
“Don’t stop,” Lonnie said, pulling me away from the old dog. “If you stop, you’ll want to take every dog in this place. I know you, Paul. You’re a softie when it comes to animals. We’re here to get you a puppy.”
She was right, of course, so I pressed on and tried to forget, doing my best to avoid further eye contact with any of the other dogs. It was hard, though. I could feel their desperation, heard the urgency in their barks. Get me outta here, man! They MURDER us in here! Putting us “to sleep” is a fucking euphemism, dude!
At the end of the cages – they make you walk through the kennels to get to the puppies, counting on hearts as pliable as mine – we finally reached the puppy rooms. All sadness immediately fled. The Humane Society had three current litters: one group of boxers, a maniac batch of yellow labs, and a pack of German shepherd / black lab mixed pups. I walked right over to the mixed dogs, knowing a couple different bloodlines calmed the wilder side of puppies. We’d raised Rummy through his madness year, kept my shoes and socks locked in closets, no clothes on the floor, no food on the counter. When I went for a middle-of-the-night whiz, I had to keep my eyes peeled for the land mines Rummy occasionally scattered in the early days. Nothing worse than dog shit between the toes at 3:00 a.m. I didn’t want to go through another puppy year like that, so a calmer mixed breed suited me.
Lonnie and I stood outside the German Shepherd / black lab room – Shepradors – and watched seven furry clumps roll all over each other. Some crawled on top of the pile of bodies before falling off, while others pushed each other playfully with their soft paws, all of them struggling against puppy narcolepsy to keep their eyes open .
“Oh my god, that is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen!” Lonnie said, her hands over her mouth. I glanced at her, and sure enough, she was crying. Good lord, Lonnie could cry at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, finding the beads just so…so…beady.
“Your face is leaking, Lon.”
“I know,” she said, sniffling, wiping her eyes. “I can’t help it. Those little guys are just too adorable. Let’s take them in the yard and find you a new best friend.”
Ten minutes later, Lonnie and I were out in the Humane Society’s play yard with seven little maniacs. Actually, there were only six maniacs. The seventh was extremely calm, strangely so for a pup, and that particular one came right over to me when I stretched out on the ground. The tiny dog sat a foot away and stared at me, its mostly black face beautiful and inquisitive.
“I think she likes you,” Lonnie said.
“How do you know it’s a she?”
“A woman knows.” Lonnie reached out, picked up the little pup, and checked the undercarriage. “Yep, it’s a she.”
She set the puppy back on the ground, and the little girl didn’t run back to her brothers and sisters. Instead, she wobbled even closer to me, made her way right up to where I lay stretched out in the grass, and gave my face a good long smellin’. After several seconds, I must have passed the sniff test, because she sat down six inches away and stared into my eyes. I reached out and rubbed her puppy-soft black head, tickled the tan swath down her nose, and smoothed the little splatters of tan above her eyebrows. I scratched her right behind her floppy, color-flecked ears, and she rolled her head playfully under my fingers. When I pulled my hand away, she didn’t demand more attention. She simply stayed seated and watched me. Other puppies from the pack came over, crawled over her, crawled over me, played with each other, and tried to pull my patient pup away. She’d play along as much as necessary, but when her siblings bounced away, she remained.
I tilted my head to the right and the little puppy tilted hers to the left, mirroring me. I reversed the tilt, and the puppy played along.
Lonnie laughed and clapped her hands. “I don’t think you get to make the decision, Pablo. I think this little girl picked you.”
“Is that right?” I asked the pup. “You want to come home with me?”
“Yes!” Lonnie answered for her.
I laughed. “You sure this is the one, Lon?”
“Yes!”
I nodded. “Me, too.”
After a half-hour of filling out a strangely personal adoption form that asked about everything from my income to my smoking habits to whether I took my LSD intravenously or anally, I carried the new family addition out to Lonnie’s car.
“I’ll sit in back with the dogs,” I told Lonnie, “see how they do together.”
Rummy was always thrilled to see us, whether we’d been gone ten minutes or ten hours, but when I slipped into the back seat with the carrier, he knew something was off. Mom and Dad rode up front together, no one in back. A second after seeing the carrier, Rummy’s nose caught the puppy’s scent, and he grew agitated. I opened the lid, Rummy stuffed his head in, then stepped back in shock. His tail sprang into action, whapping the seats, and he moaned and groaned with concern. I checked in on our pup, and for the first time, she looked uncomfortable.
“She’ll get used to Rummy, it’ll just take a little time,” Lonnie said. “Besides, she’ll probably outgrow him in about two months.” Lonnie reached into the backseat, grabbed Rummy’s collar, and gave it a soft yank. “Come on up here, buddy, sit with your mom.”
He did, but he turned around in the front seat and stared at the new puppy the entire drive through Boulder. I lifted her out of the carrier and held her close, letting her know she was safe, and before long, puppy yawns turned into puppy slumber.
“So now that you’ve met her, what’s her name?” Lonnie asked as we drove out of Boulder and headed up the canyon.
“I’m toying with Brutus.”
“Right.”
“How ‘bout Thunder?”
“She’s a girl, Paul.”
“That’s true.” I rubbed my chin. “Fallopian?”
“Be serious.”
I laughed and scratched my new little girl behind her color spattered ears. She rolled her head, pawed the air, but didn’t open her eyes.
“I think I’ll name her Eve, actually.”
“Eve?”
“Yep, as in Adam-and.”
Lonnie studied me in the rearview mirror, scanning for sarcasm. “Why Eve?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, pretty name, first female, innocence and all that.”
“What about the whole apple thing, going against God’s will and cursing the world with original sin?”
I laughed. “All the better! Eve it is.” I reached down and pet my pup’s head, still not waking her. “What do you think, little girl? You want to go against God’s will and curse the world?”
She groaned, pressed her small paw into my palm, and licked her nose. I took that as a yes.
Lonnie stretched her hand into the back seat and scratched our new puppy. “I kind of like it, too, now that I think about it. Suits her. She can be my little Evie-girl. I can teach her how to cook and do her makeup, make her some cute little dresses.”
A half hour later, I carried little Evie – she’d already had her name elongated – down our walkway. Rummy bounced up and down, dying to wrestle with his new playmate, but I thought it best to go slow with the introduction. I walked Evie into the yard for her very first poop and pee at her new home. She did a great job at both, her poop coiling into a tight spiral biscuit, her pee flowing like Middle Boulder Creek. I was so proud.
The four of us spent the night on our living room floor, drinking, rolling around, hurrying Evie onto the newspaper we’d spread out in the kitchen whenever she started to leak. Rummy learned quickly that he wasn’t allowed to roughhouse with her too much, and when he mellowed out, little Evie-girl started approaching him cautiously, sniffing his face, introducing herself. It was the cutest damn thing I’d ever seen. Lonnie cried many, many times, a tear here, tear there, sob here, blubbering there. The beer didn’t help her emotional rollercoaster, either. I did not and never would understand such depth of feeling. Women have an experiential advantage over men, feeling this life invade them, torment them, uplift them, clean them out and resurrect them. As if that wasn’t enough, the lucky bastards could have multiple orgasms, too.
Night fell, and shortly after, a crescent moon rose slowly over the Eldora valley mountains. The forest symphony warmed up their instruments, the crickets tuning their wings, the night insects vibrating their organs. Squirrels slipped cautiously through the woods and delicately shuffled leaves, fearing night predators. A soft summer breeze oozed through our open windows, quickly growing chilly at 8,700 feet. We latched the windows closed long before midnight and switched from forest songs to rock ‘n’ roll records. Eventually, we had to fuck, because no nineteen and twenty-two-year-old can drink that much beer without reverting to sex, so we arranged our couch cushions on the floor, turned out the lights, and fucked slow and passionate in the moonlight. The dogs snored while Lonnie came, and I studied her as she straddled me, her back arched, hips thrust forward, palms flat on my chest. The moonlight grazed her body with thin strokes of lunar paint, accentuating her beautiful breasts, her neck, her thighs. After she came a second time, we fell asleep folded together like origami animals, and in the night, our dogs snuck onto our makeshift bed. The four of us slept soundly under the heavy influence of contentment, the most effective sleeping pill the world has ever known.
