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2 | (continued) That quaint virtue saved me an untold amount of trouble, since I stored many of my less-weatherproof possessions in that building until the day I was evicted, on the first of February, nine months later. These were books and camera equipment mainly, along with some decent clothing which I knew I’d need for my next photographic assignment, due later that summer. As you’ve no doubt deduced by now, my photographic career had dwindled to the point where I had exactly one client left—who is still there to this day, still faithful, still insufferably slow in coming up with cash. As I write, they owe me $2,280, the bulk of which was invoiced nine weeks ago. This just in: the check just arrived, 78 days after the first invoice was submitted, and only after a long round of phone calls to determine the precise location of the bottleneck—the check requisition was literally buried under a pile of paperwork on the desk of a reputedly overworked middle-manager.
One improbable incident of what we shall call Loft Life stands out in my memory as a beacon of enlightenment, in which the essential character of that summer was concisely encapsulated. It happens that whenever I have to pinch off a loaf, as they say, I’ve tended, in recent years, to receive a dangerously short warning. Such was the case one fine sunny afternoon, as I earnestly applied to Wife through the sliding door on the back deck for access to the john. Nope. Sorry. Boss was in the tub.
But there had to be a denouement. It’s often said that a dog lives in a world of odours, and for some dogs, apparently, few odours are quite as enticing as that of a fresh and surprisingly healthy, considering my irregular diet, human turd. The truth of this claim was confirmed, that evening, when their aging mongrel bitch showed her ancient canine ways and bit open both outer and inner bags as they lay beside the highway awaiting pick-up. When I became fully aware that the worst had happened, it seemed to raise my worldly wisdom an audible notch, since it correlated so startlingly with three hitherto disparate and vaguely incredible reports from far afield: hungry street children in Iran, decades ago, culling horse-plops, searching for undigested oats; Amundsen and Scott, in their characteristic ways, dealing with the same tendency among their sled-dogs: Amundsen, delighted, encouraged his; Scott, horrified, ordered his to be shot. Sic transit gloria faeces. When I first saw these dogs, it seemed to me that the male was unusually sluggish in his movements, hard to wake, hard to get active—not so much old, as actually depressed. I mentioned this to Boss, and he confirmed that this was in fact the case. Some years before, the poor creature had a mate, with whom he went everywhere—across the field, into the woods, down to the river, across the highway to other houses in the village, always on the run. They were only happy in each other’s company, and inseparable. Then one day the bitch was crossing the highway at the wrong moment and was killed by a car, an unavoidable accident, but devastating to the male. Boss said they could do nothing for him; other dogs he ignored—he wanted his old sweetheart back, or life would have no meaning. |
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Knowing the blessed event was certain to arrive before he was through—the labor pains were already acute—I repaired to the loft and constructed an emergency commode out of a hastily turned-down plastic bag, set up on the floor beside my tent. The main business completed, I tied up the foul little package and, with a haste that belied my ache of isolation, secreted it in one of the full garbage bags in the wooden bin beside the house. Hoping that was the end of the sad affair, I returned to whatever I’d been doing when the first contraction had struck.|
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