“What a dick.” It was all I could think when the smell became overwhelming. I couldn’t complain. He did give me fair warning. And, I know, you know, that you’re not supposed to speak ill of The Dead, or whatever, but it’s just such a shitty thing to do if you think about it.
See, here’s what happened. He had been my best friend for like 20 years. And he had this dog. He loved that dog like nobody I’ve ever seen, and I rehome condemned dogs for a living. This was way beyond anything I ever felt for a dog. I’m all about the compassion and empathy. I’ve got that covered. But Horace had something of an obsession with this dog. And, to be honest, the dog was something of a dick, too. He bit Horace a couple of times. He bit the only woman other than me who ever set foot in his cigarette infested Little Cave. He wouldn’t let Horace pick him up. He hated his leash. And none of that mattered to Horace. He was putty in Volant Twinkle’s paws.
Yeah. That’s a weird name. And no, you couldn’t just call him Vole or Voley or even just Twinkle. You had to say the whole name. And Horace always said it in baby talk. Horace was weird, but you had to know him.
And I loved Horace, though he could often be melodramatic about the fact that I never had any time to spend with him. He didn’t understand I was working practically all the time, and I still wanted to get married and have kids, and both Horace and I knew we were never going to have that kind of relationship. And even if we wanted it, his Diabetes had fucked up his body so badly he wasn’t biologically able to… you know… do what’s necessary to produce children anymore.
So I’m running around having relationships and going over every detail on the phone with Horace, the King of Patience … like WAY too many times… and he listens and sometimes has excellent advice that I just never take. I’m notorious for staying in relationships way longer than they could possibly be going anywhere, and I spend most of my time complaining about whomever I’m dating. And Horace always recommends leaving them, and he’s right, and I don’t, so I wasted, like, shit tons of time before I finally met Axel, which I know is a stupid name, but his parents loved Guns ‘N Roses, and didn’t bother to check how Axl Rose spelled it, and that’s what he got stuck with. His Mom used to call him “Sweet Child Of Mine.” Neither he nor I can stand Guns ‘N Roses, but… there it is.
Axel wants to name our kid Jackson, after a singer he loves but I’ve never heard of, named Jackson Browne, because Brown is Axel’s last name and he thinks it would be cool, particularly because of the extra E in Axel’s name and in Jackson Browne’s name. Yeah. He’s kind of weird. Horace liked that name because he thought this song called “Rosie” by this Jackson Browne guy was sort of his anthem. Horace sent me the video once in a text, but I never have gotten around to watching it yet. Maybe I’ll get to that next week.
But, oh that’s what it was! I was telling you about Horace. Horace smoked like a fucking chimney. He didn’t deny it. I’m actually quoting him. And when we’d go out to lunch or dinner, which we did maybe 3 or 4 times a year, Horace would cover himself in enough Drakar cologne to sink The Titanic in a wasted effort to not smell like mold growing in shoes that have been left in the rain and fallen down a sewer and washed up in the ocean, floated into a river, and invaded your house when there was a flood that even Noah’s Ark wouldn’t have survived. Oh… and Horace showered only if we were going out at the end. One shower wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. You would need to cover him in like 400 pounds of lye soap and stick him under Niagara Falls for a week. I can’t help but wonder if the guys at the crematorium had to like… you know… Lysol the hell out of the room before they got him in the oven. Horace used to burn like three rain forests worth of incense before I came over, but it was like being in the middle of a forest fire with a bunch of stoners smoking cigarettes. So… yeah. He pretty much stank, and I would always put like a towel on my car seat (Horace didn’t have a car either) when we went out so the smell wouldn’t soak in. I used to wash the towels when I got home, but it didn’t really help, so I finally just threw them away. I just… I really hate the smell of cigarettes. And Horace knew it.
When we first knew each other, and he thought, mostly because I was being selfish and liked the attention, that he might have a shot at a romantic relationship with me, he kept a set of what he called his “Annie Clothes,” and he would never smoke in them. It didn’t matter. Nice try, but they hung in his closet until he came to see me, and they still smelled like cigarettes. You just can’t get rid of the smell.
When he retired because his Diabetes was getting completely out of control (he kept going into something called DKA, and he had roommates who had to call paramedics because he was going into a coma once in a while) the government finally gave him Disability, and he could only live on that if he rented the place my ex-boyfriend used to live in for half price, but that worked, because my ex-boyfriend was living with me (and that was a pain in the ass from the point of view of finding a husband, obviously) in my really nice house and taking care of the three dogs I had while I was out taking care of other dogs who were about to get euthanized, so it worked.
So, then Horace just sat around and got stoned and wrote all the time, and he had Volant Twinkle with him like 24 hours a day. They were entirely inseparable. And ol’ Voley, (Horace is dead now, so he can’t complain) would cuddle him all night long under the covers and sit in his lap while Horace wrote, and they would sit outside together, and eat together… It was really… just, you know, weird. I mean, okay, I do stuff like that with my dogs, too, but, you know, I’m a Dog Person, and he’s really not. The thought of trying to train Voley actually offended the most offensive smelling guy I’ve ever met. And Horace wasn’t easy to offend. You could call him a bleeding heart liberal communist socialist Muslim atheist asshole, and he wouldn’t notice, except to say that it was a logical impossibility to be both a Muslim and an Atheist simultaneously, but he was working on it, mostly because it would annoy people who needed to spend more time being annoyed because they really did seem to enjoy it. He wanted to let Voley be himself, like Horace wanted to be himself.
So, the point is that Horace made me promise that when he died, I would make sure Voley had a loving home. And, I really did try. I’ve placed dogs that bite. I’ve placed dogs that aren’t potty trained. I’ve placed dogs that are dog aggressive. I’ve placed just about every kind of dog you can imagine. I once placed a dog that had been used as bait for dogs that were being trained to fight. You never saw a dog so scared. It was light years beyond trauma. But I found a wonderful blind 80-year-old woman who just sat with him all the time, and they got used to each other. She died with that dog on her lap. It was his howling that alerted the neighbors who came over to tell her to make her stupid dog shut up. I just never give up, you know?
But Volant Twinkle was un-re-homeable. Nobody would take him, mostly because he would destroy everyone’s furniture, and there was no trainer on Earth who could get him to stop, and I couldn’t take him because I had three dogs, and Voley couldn’t deal with them, and he finally wound up back in the Shelter, and then… well… it happened. We aren’t going into that here. You’re smart enough to figure it out.
And Horace had said if the dog didn’t get a loving home, he would come back and haunt me by sitting on the edge of my bed and smoking 3 packs of cigarettes and 4 bowls of weed a day.
And this room fucking stinks. And so, yeah… Horace is a dick.
And… you know… I miss him.
