UNITED STATES—The dogs are territorial. I wasn’t born knowing that. My daughter tutored me on the matter when I got home at the end of a late-summer’s night dream, with little more on my mind than to chill and receive some form of basic nourishment. Like dill pickles and peanut butter. Not the blistering rebuke that the dogs feeding plates must be placed in different parts of the house, instead of together.
I had returned home after filming – it was a good day’s work, that’s what I remember – and my list of needs was honed down to the bare minimum: sit down on the couch and take it easy. But easy wasn’t on the menu that night a week ago (it seems an eon ago). My ears were met by the shrill, heartbreaking bark of DeVille, the Chihuahua terrier. As Lupe, the pit bull Labrador was clenching the back of DeVille’s spine between her very strong incisors. It was a journey from comfort to trauma in a matter of seconds. I really was not ready for this. And you, my appreciated reader, will not rebuke me for being thrust somewhat unwillingly into this immediate-response reaction; but that was what was called for.
I jumped from the couch, and my daughter grabbed Lupe’s chain and I swifted baby DeVille out of the danger zone. As I say, internet had quickly taught me a bit too much about the instincts of a pit bull: trained since the early 1800’s to crush another dog’s skull between its jaws. Ah, poor Lupe, I ponder often, cruel, cruel destiny of breeding. Yet it lurks in the wings. It’s ever there. It lurks in the wings that you can come home any old night and dear DeVille will have X’s for eyes and his neck askew. It’s a haunting image that pursues me, and that night when I got home for a little chillaxing, my guard was down, and I was rudely awakened from the presumption that Lupe’s blood sport days were well behind her.
This in the human condition, to be vulnerable at any time, any place, anywhere, to the unexpected, the preposterous, the savagely violent, and being offered the opportunity to step right in and do our heroic part to prevent savagely tortuous end for a beloved household dog, and Lupe is no less beloved than the Chihuahua Terrier with the soulful eyes. Just she came later, and she requires me to keep on my toes.
What is wrong with Lupe? Remember she was a rescue of a rescuer who found her wandering around Echo Park Lake, and yet the rescuer sought to be free of her puppy voltage. Indeed. There’ve been manby the theory about what makes Lupe tick. One of the best is that she misses you, she doesn’t want to see you leave her home–a bungalow where she’s been much of the last two years. One visitor has theorized that she leaps up with those long, legs white tipped paws and reaches out with those long auburn legs because she doesn’t want to see you go.
That’s all find and dandy, except when the exuberant affected is directed at a person who had been opened up on numerous occasions by surgeons and screwed back together. Then Lupe’s forceful forepaw reaching the thorax can most painful. By proxy even. Excruciatingly so.
To be continued…
