Myrtle the dog and I set out for a 4-mile walk, as we do once or twice a week, into Brooklyn, across the Pulaski Bridge. It’s New Year’s Day 2019, a surprising 60 degrees outside and nearly sunny, the weather as good as it gets in January in New York City. The Pulaski runs from 11 th Street in Long Island City, Queens, where we live and where Amazon took back its bid for a new home, over the Long Island Expressway, past the Circus Warehouse, which, if you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend, especially the flying trapeze class, over Newton Creek, a commercial tributary of the East River and one of the most polluted rivers in all of America, which they are trying to fix, and down into McGuiness Blvd. in Greenpoint, which still has a large population of Polish immigrants, all related to American Revolutionary fighter Kazimierz Pulaski, one of the fathers of the American Calvary, so it is entirely fitting his name should grace such an important conduit, even though we now travel by car, mostly, instead of on horses.
About 2/3rds of the way across the bridge is a 4-flight stairway down to Box Street, where there is a very nice, for the neighborhood, hotel called The Box House. If Myrtle and I take these stairs, we can head directly to the water and Bell Slip with its flashy new buildings that overlook the East River with a perfect view of the Manhattan skyline. This is our dream retirement option and we like to walk past it and muse how one day we may be able to afford it, if only Myrtle could get a job. This is the conundrum every city dog owner must face. Considering the price of food, walkers, sitters, toys, trainers, replacement items, living space and the vet, Myrtle is as expensive as a large luxury vehicle, including parking, license, registration, insurance and gas. All my retirement savings are going into my dog. At least Myrtle doesn’t have to go to college. She could, of course; there are classes, such as the ones at Harvard that teach your doggie to recognize words, but college is not a must. We have had long conversations about why this is not a good idea for her, mainly because a top prerequisite is that she get along with other dogs, which she usually but not always does, and secondly, because I would have to move to Boston, which is still more like a town than a city, and I love New York.
Alternatively, we can also take another route, the long, slowly sloping bridge ramp down an extra four blocks and into the center of Greenpoint with its churches and bars and grocery stores, only the latter of which would be open at this early morning hour. But Myrtle is fat, and needs the exercise, so this alternative is for another day. A 100% Am Staff Terrier, the most ferocious of the pit bulls, Myrtle is strong as an ox. She stands, all 60 lbs., low to the ground, large-headed, wide in the neck, heavy in the withers with a slight paunch, of which we must be rid. Myrtle eats just about everything from anyone and anywhere: sidewalks, garbage bags, countertops, sometimes she eats the countertop itself, plus endless treats from her walkers, the concierge, our mailman, the pizza delivery girl, and Fresh Direct. I tell people not to feed her. But she looks at you with those sad little eyes and that sweet little face and rests her huge head so trustingly, all the weight of it, in your lap or on your leg, because she still thinks she is a tiny lapdog, wrinkling up her forehead so sweetly, so fetchingly, that people, even hard-hearted ones determined to do right, determined not to give her even a nibble, must finally give in. She’s even more pudgy after the holidays, so really the stairs are the only option.
Also, there is the sound of a strange soft moaning, I realize, a prayer almost or an incantation coming from the stairs. Myrtle stops and pricks up her ears. She always hears things before I do, except for my commands. She is stone deaf then. But yes, it is a moan, slow and low, a keening almost. The bridge never moans, not like that. It creaks and boings and ker- thumps when a large car or truck drops the half inch or so over its roadway joints, as it has not been serviced in years, but moans? No never, not even in a high wind. Someone is on the staircase.
A woman, who would not like me to call her old, sits up straight in her wheelchair walker, moaning. “Please help! Please go away. Oh. Oh. Oh. I don’t want anyone to see me like this!” She rocks back and forth in her wheelchair walker seat, stuck on the landing between the first set of stairs and the second, to all appearances considering whether she should stand and throw herself off the stairs and into the street.
Myrtle goes over and sniffs her legs. No particular smell. Nothing ripe anyway. The woman does not look lost, but she does not look happy either. “Do you need help?” I ask.
“No, no,” she says, “I’m fine.” Though she is clearly not. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and looks at Myrtle. “Hi, Moo Moo!” she says. How she knows Myrtle’s pet name I do not know. Then she smiles, and I see she is missing her three front teeth and there is blood on the stumps. Did this just happen? Did she fall? Is she ok?
“This is Myrtle,” I tell her, scanning her face.
“I’m just having a bad day,” she says and starts to cry.
I note that whoever she is, she has taken care to dress carefully; two crystal earrings dangle from each ear, a black hairpiece extends into a long African bun and covers her own thinly grey, curly strands. A blue scarf wraps around her head and, over this, clings a purple and silver sequined cat’s eyes mask, from the festivities of the night. She wears a clean, black, well-made coat, which you cannot see is torn until you approach her, under that, a dress or maybe anamalgam of scarves pulled together like one. Long woolen socks and weather-appropriate rubber boots adorn her feet. There’s a whiff of alcohol on her breath. No other smells. She has recently bathed, or someone has taken the time to bathe her. “A twelve-year relationship,” she sobs, “Now it’s gone! Gone, gone, all gone.” She stares past me at the sky and then the street, but her jaw is not set. Her face is black and dignified, strong like mine, even in distress with a kind of beauty. Her irises are grey, with flecks of green and gold at the rim. “I don’t want anyone to see me like this!” She wipes her face with a scarf that she has balled up in one hand. Poor thing.
"Let me help you. Do you want to go up the stairs or... or down the stairs?”
“No, no,” she says. “God bless you. A twelve-year relationship and now –” She cannot finish the sentence.
“Well, that’s no reason to –”
“12 years,” she moans “And now look at me!”
She does not look any better for that relationship, whomever this man was. Who amongst us has not been there? Not even a priest. “Here, here,” I say, my arms awkwardly at my sides. She needs a hug, but I am not sure it would be welcome from a white “privileged” girl like me. Not that I am all that privileged. Teachers do not make much. I want to comfort her, to say no, stop, you cannot allow this, but we are in a predicament, aren’t we?
“How can it be. How can it be!” She wails. “Twelve years, all gone!” She waves her scarf, raking air.
“You know what I regret?” I say. She tilts her head up, squints her eyes as if to shield them from the brightness of the sun, but there are only clouds behind me. “What I regret most is all the time I’ve spent crying over some damned man or another. They weren’t worth it. No one’s worth it. I wish I had all those hours back!” She laughs despite herself. “Are you sure,” I ask again, “you don’t want help?”
She shakes her head, “No, no, I’m just going to...” She tries to get up and fails.
Myrtle has to go, but I can see her thinking - dogs do think - maybe this woman has food? So, she sits on the woman’s feet.
“Your dog is cute.”
“Thanks!”
“A pit bull, right?
“Yeah.” I glance at my Fitbit. The steps have stopped. I glance around for help but, no one’s on the street either. “Maybe I can help you up the stairs?” I say, though I don’t see how. I can tell she is not a small person. She is slim but at least 5’9”. I am 5 feet tall standing on a phone book, plus I have bad knees from doing the right thing, working out every day like a banshee since I was four-years-old. My friends in their 50’s and 60’s, who never worked out and are only now starting to exercise, are running pain-free marathons, lifting their own bodyweights with ease, and jumping up and down from 3-foot tabletops on one leg. I hate them. All of them.
As if weighing in, my right knee twitches. I reckon’ I can still carry her up a step or two, if necessary, though the angle would have to be perfect, no twist to the knees, and if we slip and fall we will never recover, but maybe we won’t fall, if it is both of us and besides, I can’t leave her here like this! So, I tie Myrtle to the railing with a slipknot and ask the lady to stand. She does. She makes an heroic effort. She gets up, turns around and grips her walker until the stuffed animals tied to its skinny arms shake.
I reach for her. “No, no, I’ll be alright.” She waves me away and sits back down. “I’m just gonna stay here. God Bless. God Bless.”
“You are not alright,” I tell her. “You have to go up or down. You cannot just stay here. I will go and get you help.” She stops crying, if only for a moment, while I untie Myrtle and we run over to The Box House. We have never been inside. It is like a high-end W hotel only strangely in the wrong place. They serve breakfast and brunch, and one day I am going to eat there, maybe with Myrtle if they allow it, but not today.
The girl at the front desk is unhappy to see a pit bull plopped down on her plush white carpet. She screws up her nose, but before she can protest, I tell her there’s a lady on the bridge, stuck on the stairway, an old lady in a wheelchair, who looks like she fell, who cannot go up, nor down and maybe has had a bit much to drink and she should call 911.
She looks dubious. So, I say it again. “OK,” she says, but I don’t know if she does it or not, because we cannot stay, standing in the high-class lobby like that, a tiny jogger dubiously controlling a large pit bull, and, besides, we have to rush back. If the woman leaps, I will never forgive myself.
When we return, the woman is deep in conversation, a shouting match really, with a large, young, strong looking black man, just getting out of his Toyota. I don’t know how long they’ve been conversing, but I imagine it’s since he decided to park there. “Do you need help up the stairs?” he yells up.
“I don’t know,” she yells down.
“Do you need help down the stairs?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well which way are you going, lady, down or up?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!”
Myrtle and I run past the man and up the stairs. Seeing us approach the woman, he shakes his head, shrugs his considerable shoulders and walks off. Damn! I think. He could’ve carried her!
“Yeah, he was a nice lookin’ fella, wasn’t he?” The woman smiles. “Ooooweee! One mighty fine lookin’ fella, alright.”
“He sure was. You shoulda let him help you.”
“No, no, no!” We share a laugh. She would never want a man like that to see her like this, red-eyed, crying away, a little drunk. She’ll flirt but only from a distance where she still cuts a figure.
Myrtle paces the landing. “I like your dog,” says the woman. “She makes me feel better.” Myrtle sits, ears up. Maybe now the woman will give her food? “She a she or a he?”
“She.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do a she. No she, no, only a he. She, nu uh, no. I couldn’t handle no female.” I took this to mean there had been women who had done her wrong, perhaps with her man, perhaps in other ways as only mothers can, maybe that was why she was here now. “I had a pit bull just like that.” She smiles. “A male.”
“Geez, it was awfully big wasn’t it? I mean she’s --”
“No, about that size.”
Myrtle is big. No doubt about it.
“He gave it to me. I didn’t want it. I’m really more of a cat person.” She adjusts her cat’s eyes mask. “I fell in love with that dog! I didn’t want to. Dammit, I fell in love.”
She starts to cry again, both the dog and the man gone. It’s just me and Myrtle and Brooklyn and the occasional jogger who comes off the bridge, runs down the stairs and stops for a moment, eying us, realizing everything is alright, more or less, then shrugs as if to say,“Modern families, whatever!” or “Your life, your ruin!”, and runs on. No hide nor hair of a cop, or ambulance yet. We can wait a bit more.
Myrtle’s wagging her tail. She is being polite and patient, which for a pit bull is hard. She looks up at the woman, doe-eyed. “Your dog, she makes me happy.”
I sigh. “Yeah, dogs are great,” I pat Myrtle’s head. To my mind, dogs are way better than people, though there’s no need to state the obvious, but she won’t touch Myrtle. She won’t touch me. She acts like she will never touch another living thing. Time ticks on. We make small talk. “So, where do you live?” I ask.
“I’m homeless!”
As she says it, I realize I know this. I also realize such a fate is just a string of bad luck away for everyone, especially those with families who are not so close or supportive, especially for women in such families who try to go their own way. She seems like the sort who would do that, have a plan of her own. Like Myrtle, who is a rescue doggie. Like me.
“I’m not a crack head, you unnerstand?” She volunteers this. “I hate when people call me a crackhead. I don’t do no drugs. None of that crack.”
This was not what I was thinking, but it’s now stuck in my head, like a violent scene in an old film, I should not have seen as a child. I want to ask her about her drinking, too, but stop myself. It seems cruel. Where’s she gonna go to deal with it? With any of this? Without me and Myrtle, she is alone. “Where are you staying?” I ask, moving close enough to look down on her headdress. Her hair is clean, almost crisp, her scant makeup, applied as artfully as possible for someone who has been crying all day. Her nails are trim.
“A shelter, on Clay Street.” This is only a few blocks away. She must’ve wheeled herself over the bridge ramp, walked about a third of the way to Queens, then changed her mind, discouraged perhaps by the weight of the loss of the man or her looks, too much to bear on this painfully fine day, so she tried to climb down the Box Street stairway and, to add insult to injury, found she could not go on.
Myrtle has four legs and the back two are crossing. “Look,” I say, “help is coming. Myrtle has to... well, maybe I should –"
And where are the cops? Or the ambulance. Did that girl at the hotel even bother to make an emergency call? Or is the city so hard up that 911 refuses to service this particular area of Brooklyn? Under the bridge. Under the bridge is a euphemism for a neighborhood where bad people live and where something bad is likely to happen. In suburbia, it’s “the other side of the tracks,” but in the city where the trains are underground, it’s the great grand bridges that are dividing lines, and so we say “that” neighborhood under the bridge. Under the bridge, where the displaced, rough-hewn and poverty stricken barely manage. Where trouble always starts and finishes. So, wouldn’t you want your cops to be there? Where the trouble is?
“Oh, oh, oh! I fell in love with that dog. I didn’t want to, but I did.”
I shake my dog’s leash, pull her toward the stairs.
The woman lets out a loud whoop and slaps her knee. “One time he ate a Christmas tree. A whole entire Christmas tree!”
That stops me. “Wow that’s not good!” I say, deeply concerned. Myrtle too is sad, for different reasons. I’ve seen Myrtle sniff a Christmas tree and nibble on the leaves, but she distinctly does not like them. She even pisses on trees they sell by the roadside. The owners of these tree selling businesses do not like it when a dog, no matter how cute, pisses on their trees. Their attitude is, you pee on it, you buy it, so I have to pull her away, which is no fun for either of us.
“The whole entire thing!” The woman is laughing, crying, wiping her eyes, rocking back and forth, as I try to picture an entire Christmas tree, going down. Dogs have eaten stranger, smaller things. The worst I heard of was a steak knife, swallowed whole, and requiring five hours of surgery. That dog came out ok; just don’t give him your cutlery.
“Oh, Lordy Lordy! My dog was like this!” She makes a face with her head back and tongue lolling to the side. She is crying and laughing, but she has reason. “He was flat on his back for like three days, things coming out of both ends, vomit and shit, excuse me for sayin’, but you know. I didn’t know what to do.”
“I know, I know,” I cannot help but laugh, but this does not seem funny. “I mean, Myrtle eats every—”
“I mean that dog was out. An entire Christmas tree, you unnerstand? It was like, this big.” She indicates something round about the size of a large meatball. I am thinking that is the diameter of a tree trunk, but really, how can that be? Or does she mean a really tiny, like snow globe sized, miniature tree? At which point I understand that I do not understand at all. That a Christmas tree is not, in fact a tree. A Christmas tree is a large ball of drugs. Which is, indeed, funny. Horrible but funny.
“Whoa,” I say, “Pot and chocolate, two things you never feed a dog.” It has to be pot, a Christmas tree. Crack does not have leaves. Crack is not a fir or even furry. Of course, crack could be a gift of some sort, hence a “Christmas” tree. But then it would be a Christmas present, wouldn’t it?
“I mean things, comin’ out both ends, ya know what I’m sayin’? Three days. I didn’t
know what to do!”
We are laughing like teenagers and I am thinking, whoa! I am way out of touch! I used to be streetwise, but now it’s come to this: imagining dogs swallowing Christmas trees. Thank heavens I did not finish my sentence. I would have said, “Myrtle eats everything. One time she ate a Christmas wreath.” Although that would have been very funny, in retrospect. I am that uncool now, yes. No street cred.
“You know I wasn’t always like this,” she says. This too, I know, instinctively. She is too well-mannered, too careful with her looks, a perfectionist. She would understand the wreck of my imaginary self I am, all of us become, with time and age and no matter what you do about it. I feel in this a kinship. It must kill her to be out here like this. “I’m gonna get myself fixed up. Soon as I get my teeth fixed, yeah, I’m gonna go and get a job. Alicia. She’ll have me. I’ll go back there, yeah.”
Myrtle quietly pees in a corner, making herself soft and small. “Alicia?”
“I used to write music. I’m a musician. Songs, you know. Music?”
I do. I wrote songs once. I want to ask for what instrument did she write, but having nearly proven myself a complete jackass a moment before, I don’t want to seem even less cool. If she wrote pop it was for a person, not an instrument. Even I know that. But I don’t know if she means Alicia Keys or Alicia So-Cool-I-Do-Not-Know-Who-She-Is or some unknown Alicia who never made it but tried and for all I know is still trying, like the rest of us.
“Yup, Alicia. She don’t speak to me now in a while.”
Myrtle lies by the woman’s feet. No one’s coming. The woman knows this better than anyone. I stare at my running shoes, not knowing what to say.
“He took my rent money. You know?”
“What?”
“That 12-year relationship. He took it and pocketed it, used it for I don’t know what.”
“He’s not a good man.” The ruddy bastard, probably used it for drugs, but if I say so, it will hurt me to hear her make excuses for him. It will be unbearable because this is what women waste their lives to do.
“That’s why I’m in the predicament I’m in."
“What an idiot!” I say. I can see she thinks I mean her. “No, no, how could he? Him, he’s the idiot!”
“I didn’t know for like... seven months. I got evicted. I didn’t know what to do. I got no one.” It’s the age-old transference of guilt and I will not sell her an indulgence.
“You have me. And Myrtle,” I say, but this is lame and, I know, not wholly true. She has us for now, as she would have the kindness of any stranger. That is really all anyone forced out into the world alone has. That and this city which can make or break you: like a Siren’s call, it lures one in. Spend spend, it says. Eat eat. Take take. And in the end, it consumes you. You must be strong; you must be determined; you must make friends. “Do you have any family?” I ask.
“I got no one.” But I know she must. “I have an Uncle and a niece and nephews: no, they can’t see me like this. I don’t want them to see me like this. I’m gonna get a job. I’m gonna – I have to -- If I could just get to the city. I was going to take the train and a ... a job.” She is folding and unfolding her scarf.
So, I touch her shoulder. Her coat, I realize, is made of down. So far so good. She is OK with that. Me too. No one seems to have cooties, either way, so I lean over and give her a hug. A big hug. “You’re gonna be ok,” I say. Her cheek touches my lips. Her hair is dry and stiff, but she is warm and sweet. We hold one another for a moment; I keep talking, like a college coach. Myrtle yips and barks. “We’re going to climb up those stairs and you’re going to go and get yourself fixed up, OK?”
“OK.”
“And then you’re going to call your family, OK?”
“OK.” She is standing now.
By the time I run up the stairs and manage to tie Myrtle to the bridge, before I can even help her, the woman is already halfway up the steps. I let her climb. With some difficulty, she reaches the top step, lifts her wheelchair walker up and over and pulls her things close. We hug again, a full body hug, polite contact, no hips, Myrtle pulling me one way and her walker pulling her the other.
Myrtle and I have met many people on our walks. It is impolite not to talk with the owner of a dog, whose butt your dog is sniffing. We have talked with young filmmakers and bankers, middle-aged construction workers, immigrant families from Albania, who do not speak English, but gesture they own a pit, Irish chefs, Jewish smokehouse owners, Italian ball players, assorted dog walkers, dog sitters, pipe fitters, food cart workers, aerobics instructors, thugs, beggars, college teachers, students, nurses, food delivery folks and schoolmarms, and we talk about dogs and work and politics and the neighborhood, but there is one question that never comes up.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“China.” I must look skeptical because she stops. “OK, Melanie. It’s... you can call me that.”
“I’m Laura,” I say, “And this is Myrtle. The dog.” That is how lame I am. What else is she, a buffalo?
“Myrtle? Ha, ha,ha. Myrtle?”
“Yup.”
Melanie is already yards away and moving fast. But we can hear her still. “I knew it. God Bless! I know any white girl with a pit bull, she got to be alright!” she shouts back. “God bless you and Moo Moo, both!” And she waves her scarf in the air.