Sharing History, With Rufus

RUFUS DIED LAST WEEK.  She had been my dog for many years, though she had been living with other people since 1976. She and I had spent some good years together and some bad years, and there were times enough when we had felt like each other’s only friend. Naturally, her passing called up these times, and I wondered again for the thousandth time at the decency of fate which allows us to receive comfort from so many of our fellow-creatures.

The first time I saw Rufus was in 1967 when she was just a puppy. She was actually just a dark waggle on the end of a leash in the hands of my friend Jerry. He and his new girlfriend, Dolores, were walking Rufus, their new pal, around the quad at Wake Forest. I don’t remember how they acquired Rufus but it had something to do with getting stoned. Back in the late Sixties, a lot of people acquired pets when they would get stoned. Prior to ownership there would be a melting kind of understanding, a deep perception into the soul of an animal, a sudden flash of mutual destinies, and in this manner, a lot of little dogs and cats changed hands. As a matter of fact, many marriages between human beings occurred in much the same way, such oftentimes being the powerful romanticism of drugs.

Here was Rufus, though, and I’ll never forget her. Her alert triangular ears were perched upon her large handsome head, which in turn was connected to her small corgi body. With her anomalous features Rufus never had any trouble getting laughs. “That is the weirdest looking dog I’ve ever seen,” said a friend of mine from California when I first introduced him to Rufus. My friend Jean Morrison said, “You know, your dog is quite hilarious to look at, and she’s obviously a very nice dog too.” You see, her legs were so short and her body so long that when she got excited, which was a lot of the time, her whole body would wag, and not just her tail — which, by the way, in her younger years, was like a black plume tipped in white, always held upright, always waving. She also had large mournful eyes, and these eyes were the second thing you noticed about her.

Jerry and Dolores had just met each other, two very stoned and angry people — and now they had a dog. For Rufus it proved to be an unfortunate entanglement. Emotionally, these two adults had no business being together. They didn’t respect each other very much, though they enjoyed getting stoned together. Jerry was a skinny working-class kid from Michigan, trying desperately to play ball in the minor leagues of intellectualism, while Sharon was a big, friendly Georgia yahoo whose main pleasure in life, other than getting stoned, was looking at pictures in magazines. Later on, when they were no longer together, Jerry would characterize Dolores as dumb and treacherous and she would remember him as mean and ineffective.

For Rufus this coupling of human animals who were in charge of her life was a disaster. They fed her all right, but on those hot Winston-Salem nights in their little hot box of a rented room, low in spirit and out of grass, driven almost beserk by the barking of their puppy (an inveterate barker then) they would stuff Rufus in a suitcase and throw the suitcase against the wall. Poor Rufus — like most primitive creatures she could never, without the help of a scientist, figure out cause and effect. And so the next night she would bark again, unable to connect her bark with the punishment which so inevitably followed. She wanted to protect them from intruders and never figured out that she was the intruder.

I doubt that in their lives Jerry or Dolores would ever do anything else quite as terrible as this throwing of Rufus against the wall.

At the time, however, they seemed mostly like everybody else, wandering around here and there, dropping out of school, protesting the war, getting stoned, growing up. (It wasn’t until years later that I heard about what they had done to Rufus.) And yet one must remember that as young people they were fairly defenseless themselves — living in a society that no longer had any respect for their lives. Their treatment of Rufus must have seemed to them something like a necessary solution to a problem and not the terrible act that it was. It’s only when we’re older and more at ease to decipher the hieroglyphics of right and wrong that we come to see cruelty for what it is.

A YEAR LATER Rufus and I began to share a house together when Jerry and Dolores moved into the other side of a place I was renting seven miles outside of Chapel Hill. The years spent in that house were Rufus’s heydays. We lived on a huge piece of land in front of a pond with ten miles of woods behind the house. Rufus, true to her corgi instincts, would hunt in the fields around the place, looking for anything that moved, though mostly, I think, she hoped for rabbits. Her way of hunting was odd and lovely: she would run through the high grass and leap suddenly straight up into the air, higher than the grass, glancing all about her for distant movement. It was strange seeing her jump not unlike a kangaroo across the field. She began to be called Roo at this time, though I don’t remember if it was because of her bobbing up and down when she hunted.

Townley, a big and terribly stupid Doberman, lived across the way and he managed to impregnate Rufus a couple of times. He also tried to kill all the male dogs in the neighborhood who had somewhat the same idea. Rufus must have had sweet blood, however, for her puppies by Townley all turned out to be friendly animals. Abigail, who died last year, was from her first litter, and I saw her around for a decade. She was three times the size of her mother. None of Rufus’s puppies, it seems, inherited their father’s disposition. As to their intelligence, well, nobody ever claimed that Rufus was an intellectual. Townley, that feeble-brained miscreant, was shot to death in 1970 as he attacked a bitch who was tied to a post and not in heat.

These were pretty nice days for everybody. I was in love and getting married. Old Jim Snipes was alive then, a black dairy farmer from up the road, and he would come over for hours at a time, telling old stories about Carrboro which we could only partially understand, so rich was his dialect. The University was a large umbrella which protected the likes of us from the glare of war. Dope was plentiful — the price of too much smoking hadn’t yet become an obvious fact. One cold winter morning I heard that Janis Joplin was dead — she ended up dying just like every straight person said she would. A friend was mugged on the streets of New York, and that was bad. Nixon and television were doing all they could to destroy the dignity of life in the country, but, as I said, dope was plentiful so it all looked a little cartoonish to me. One day I wrote an article for a local radical newspaper celebrating the Beatles’ Abbey Road, and the next week my article was answered by an article which described me and anybody else who liked the Beatles as “capitalist pigs.” Times just didn’t seem very tough then. If a middle-class person didn’t want to die in Vietnam, he could get a scholarship and a degree which in a few years wouldn’t get you a job in a junior college.

The odd thing was that it was a time of great clarity for me and my friends. It’s not that the times were so clear or that what we were doing made a lot of sense, it was more that we were in touch with certain elemental moods and humors which would to a large extent disappear a few years later when we became bound up in second-rate marriages and started worrying about dollars. In other words, we were to lose for long periods of time the sense that existence was charming. I could apologize forever about the lack of accomplishment during those years, the degrees half-completed, etcetera, but so much that has followed has seemed overbusy and humorless and free of the dignity of real choice, heart-pulsing choice, that any apology would have to take the form of a slightly bitter acknowledgement that life does indeed get tougher, unless you’re a fool. Well, then praise be those foolish times of our life.

Watching Rufus, I must admit, was one of the primary activities of those years, and an extraordinary activity it was. I know it’s not true but it seems like I must have spent a year of afternoons watching Rufus tend her puppies and go about her business — watching her growl, bark, steal the cats’ food, and prance off in front of us on our walks, her plumed tail waving too majestically, her furry chaps sashaying across the cornfields. Raised in the suburbs of New York I had never seen these facts of life and death close up, all this licking and grumbling, this hot sucking, these winter frolics. I tell you, nothing has ever seemed so right as those afternoons with Rufus. The wet membranes of birth, the occasional puppy corpse.

The fact is, however, that while I watched Rufus during those years I was also choosing sides. Perhaps I was there for all the wrong reasons (laziness, lack of ambition, an undeveloped sense of self), but it doesn’t matter now — I mean, there was such pleasure in peering over the edge of her box while she messed with her puppies, or tried to get loose from them, or turned over, or moaned so deeply from within the small barrel of her chest. In a recent Randy Newman song, “The Blues,” one of the singer’s personae recalls how one day in his childhood, full of sorrow, he went into his room and found that a piano “lay in wait for him.” Well, Rufus lay in wait for me. She was the best way to pass time. And how much, I wonder, did I end up betraying those afternoons? That way of passing time?

Watching Rufus put me in the habit of watching simple things. Perhaps this was her greatest gift to me. Eventually I was to become a photographer and would learn by looking through a lens that there are only simple things to look at, that is, what the self can simply see; but in 1969 I still believed that the exciting things of this world were external, and that by virtue of fame or power one could achieve this excitement. In a way, then, watching Rufus was a kind of apprenticeship to that idea of reality which, as an artist, would become my only idea of reality: that unless we insist upon the universal significance of our own private lives (its pleasures and sorrows), we are doomed to remain subject to the laws of boredom and categorization by which politicians and tv anchormen keep us enthralled. I would rather photograph any dog on the street, scratching himself, than Ronald Reagan — for with the dog, I don’t know what kind of photograph I’ll get, but with Reagan I do.

Eventually Jerry and Dolores moved into town, where there were more opportunities for a marriage to end. They left Rufus with me, along with a beautiful white cat named Kathy who was soon run over by a garbage truck while she slept. For them Rufus was too intricately connected to the eternally unfinished business of their lives. Who forgot to feed the dog? Who forgot to let her out? Whose turn was it to go to Franklin Street and give puppies away? Anyway, I loved her and they didn’t, and they knew that too.

WHEN JERRY AND DOLORES moved out, two older graduate students moved in next door, Phil and Victoria. Phil was in Public Health and would play around for five years with a thesis which never got written. Victoria was finishing up a degree in psychology and she used the word “cosmic” a lot when describing human relationships. I liked them both until I found out that Phil didn’t like Rufus — actually he didn’t like much of anything that walked; he couldn’t even abide himself for any length of time. When Rufus would bark at a cloud which covered the moon (what was she barking at?) Phil would scream, high-pitched and snarling, “Shut-up, Rufus!” his voice shattering whatever stillness the night had promised. Like most dog-despising people, he never tried to figure out his anger — what part sprang from the malicious behavior of dogs, what part from his own phobic self. He had no grasp on the situation. He talked as easily about the miserableness of dogs as other people talked about the mediocrity of winter tomatoes. And of course he was so bound up in his attitudes that he never realized that other attitudes were possible. “Didn’t you want to shoot that dog last night?” he would say in the morning. “What dog?” you would ask. “The one that howled all night.” “Oh yeah, that dog.” More than likely he’d be referring to a dog that had barked three times around midnight.

One morning I woke up to find that Phil had wrapped a puppy’s entire muzzle in masking tape to prevent her from yipping. To his credit he looked awfully shame-faced when I asked him about it.

Needless to say, Rufus began to sleep in the house at night, where she seemed to abide by some notion of inside-the-house, non-barking conduct.

BECAUSE VICTORIA AS A PSYCHOLOGIST specialized in the cosmic evaluation of reality, she developed a coterie of young men who were delicately attuned to their own vibrations. Unlike Nabokov, they didn’t find that the word “cosmic” was always in danger of losing its “s.” For the most part these young men were the sons of well-to-do Chapel Hillians, professors and doctors. They were a very unenchanted bunch, low on illusions, and sour to the whole idea of any academic achievement, since, as they knew, the universities were filled with unimpressive people, that is, their parents and their parents’ friends. From an early age many of them had been in analysis. They represented themselves as a bunch of crazy guys, but really they were spoiled. Because they were well-off, they had the leisure to take lots of drugs and to hound their own souls with their disappointment in parents and society. It was simply possible for them to prolong their childhood, and they did. Ten years later they would be okay, they would be fine — chemists, lawyers, tele-communications experts, businessmen.

Rufus was their pet, Victoria was mother, counselor, and cook. They found something cosmic in Rufus to which I was never privy. It was odd hearing them go on about her various incarnations. One of them, a lanky lad who had the honor in this crew of actually having been in institutions, swore that he and Rufus had robbed banks back in Atlantis. And once late at night I heard a loud knocking at my back door and one of these young men, standing in the moonlight very stoned, asked me politely if he could introduce a friend of his to Rufus. I roused Rufus from her puppies — four sucking and squirming and squeaking little brown creatures — and brought her to the door where the introductions were made. “Oh, wow, Rufus, how are you?” said the young man. “This is my friend Willy, man, and he’s from St. Paul. Hey, man, look at her eyes. You’re telling me that’s a dog? Hey Rufus, how you doing? Look at her eyes, man. Rufus, you’re far-out.”

Living next to Phil and Victoria, Rufus was caught between the devil and the deep blue sky. 

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