“Something’s wrong” she said over the phone. She was crying. “Lula is sick………yes, can you come out as soon as possible?”…….. “ok, I’ll take her now and call you from the hospital”……. “No, it’s the only one that can see her right away, the others are too busy and can’t get her in for another two days”. …..”it’s about 40 minutes or so from here” …….”Yes, I’ll drive carefully, but please come as soon as you can, maybe you can catch an early fight?”
She drove through the tears and sobs while checking on Lula in the mirror on the back seat, who was smiling, and calm, and peaceful. Why shouldn’t she be, she was with her favorite person. Haley hung up when she got to the parking lot.
She called again after Lula was admitted and I could hear the panic in her voice. “She doesn’t look very good, her eyes are yellow and her gums are pale, she just doesn’t look good…….they’re going to run some tests and they will keep her overnight”…….”I’m just going to stay here until they can tell me more, I can’t talk right now”.
She hung up and we started packing, booked a flight and waited for the next call.
The first time Haley’s heart was broken was when she was still in school and still living in Boulder, sometimes with us, sometimes with her friends in an east end house they’d all rented downtown. In her last year of college, her first boyfriend, her first love, had left her. Confused, heartbroken, and wondering if maybe there wasn’t a better place to start again, maybe California, she thought to herself. As her plan turned into action over the course of the next few years, the day finally came and she asked me to drive with her, and all her transient worldly possessions, to San Diego, to start again. Tentatively, at first, she waded in.
The city was like fly paper for young, hip, searching, perhaps lonely, perhaps slightly broken men and women. They gathered at bars and restaurants and drank near the beach while dipping their toes back into the social water of a buzzing, lively town. It was like other places that had gone through similar phases, like Boulder in the 70’s and 80’s, LA in the 50’s, New York in the 20’s, teaming with a vibe of youthful nihilism dancing on the edge, and in the corners and the center of a bohemian lifestyle where anything could happen. Which was exactly the point.
Lula had come into Haley’s life like a load of springtime after a long gray winter. They met at a bar, where Haley worked. It was their annual ‘adopt a pet’ event and dozens of dogs and drinkers and animal lovers were brought together. Haley was working behind the bar when Lula was brought in. She was a dainty pit bull terrier mix, about 5 or 6 years old, with white sox and tail tipped and dipped in whipped cream, white freckles on her nose and deep brown eyes that cast themselves in a swoon upon my daughter’s face. Love came quickly and set itself deeply into each of the two strangers and before the event even got started, Lula had a new home, located in Haley’s heart. Haley and Lula walked the two blocks that separated work from her apartment, introduced Lula to her roommates, who were equally smitten and an instantaneous family of four was formed right on the spot.
For the next few weeks, they got to know each other, through daily walks and nightly talks and morning coffee and evening tv, and rides to the park and the store, up the block, around the corner and in every place a girl could go, that dog was sure to follow. They became a bonded pair, inseparable and for each, the other was home, ku-ku-ka-chu.
Evening drinks on the veranda, overlooking downtown San Diego, Coronado Island, the fabulous Lafayette right next door and the swelling scene that spread it’s lovely arms around their neighborhood, bathing them in golden California sunset lights. Brisk and sleepy sunrises, coffee shared on a loveseat located on a balcony to survey the panorama. Over and over, Lula would bring the parade of toys so Haley could anoint and name each of them for Lula’s reference. “Lula, bring the margarita (a stuffed toy margarita, of course)”, she would whisper. And Haley would think to herself that this was the new beginning she was looking for. “Lula, fetch”.
Lula’s ears would stand up, her brow would furrow and she would quickly peruse and identify the targeted article. Bouncing backwards, actually hating to lose eye contact with her soul mate, she would finally and as quickly as possible, turn away to find the coveted toy cocktail, return with it, proudly and loudly, dropping it at Haley’s feet. “Good-est girl”, Haley would say, “you’re the good-est girl, ever”, she would whisper, confidentially, conspiratorially, just in case the ghosts of all the other dogs in her life were listening and she did not want to offend them, or diminish them, in any way. But it was Lula who could not keep it on the down-low, with every encounter, day after day, minute by minute, giving away the secret that she loved Haley above all, and vice versa.
Lula, it was learned, had spent her youth and young adulthood in a breeding house on the outskirts of Tijuana. It sounds made up to heighten the drama, but that’s what they told Haley when she asked. ‘She probably had a number of litters’, they said, and given her size and slight build, perhaps it could be assumed that she wasn’t well cared for. The rescue of Lula was itself, a story of international intrigue as she must have crossed the border on her own and was found wandering the streets of Imperial Beach, close to starvation and she didn’t speak a lick of English. The collar and tag identified her origin, and with the reputation of that particular breeder, it didn’t take long for the finders to become keepers and turned Lula over to the rescue team.
After a few months, she was nursed back to health and finally declared ready for adoption. The brewery event was going to be her first appearance and like two souls traveling through the ether, Haley and Lula crashed into each other before they had gotten to the starting line. What were the odds? Each brought to the other, the pieces that were missing from their lives. Haley brought Lula safety and security, and of course, real love. Lula brought those same things to Haley, an apartment became a home, where the two could confide and sit in complete silence without any discomfort at all, or the opposite, like playing music as loud as the equipment allowed, dancing on the furniture, howling off the railing and looking down into the social mecca and playground of the luxurious Lafayette.
Panting and partying, above and below, the duo watched from the little balcony while the crowd at the Lafayette looked up at the stars. A toast to and from, time was ticking, and kept on licking, even as Lula must have known she was not long for this world. Strange, that “there are more things in heaven and on earth than meets our philosophy…”. She would have six months, and she was going to make every day count for both of them.
The hospital called the next morning, it was bad. We were on the plane when Haley got the call and she picked us up with tears and fears in her eyes. I doubt that she heard much of what the physician told her, only that it was bad and that we should come as soon as possible. We drove to her apartment and picked up her roommate, Cher, the same roommate who had lived with her in their apartment in Boulder after what’s-his-name had broken Haley’s heart. Cher was equally upset, and the four of us drove to the hospital where many other animal parents were strewn about in couches and on the floor, some happy, some sad, some, like us, dazed and confused and about to have a very bad day. Outside, the weather was perfect. We hadn’t slept in nearly 24 hours.
We were invited into the bluish light of the ICU part of the hospital where a dozen or so dogs were all in their own glass kennel, big enough for a dog and in our case, a family of four. Everyone of those dogs had a hose coming out of their body, or they were bandaged, or splinted, or sutured, but they were clearly there for something serious, or Sirius. Machines hummed in the background.
By comparison, Lula didn’t seem sick at all. And she smiled and jumped and wagged like a dog saved from a burning building, glad to be with her Haley, and the rest of us. We piled and stuffed ourselves into that little space and surrounded her with our bodies. Haley and Cher spoke softly to Lula as she responded in kind with licking, wiggling, and vibrating in the middle of our glass cocoon.
About ten minutes of that pose, with knees around my ears, and I was worried that I’d have to be extricated with a winch, so the committee of women helped me out and I went looking for answers.
The young veterinarian looked tired. Her bluish eyes were red around the edges, there was a stain on her coat, and she was looking down at her phone when I approached her. In the surrounding rooms and even in the hallway, there were dozens of animals and lots of uniformed staff walking from room to room, some talking to each other and others attending to animals. The place was somber and had a hint of pessimism about it that I thought had darkened the rooms of the ward, and perhaps contributed to the circles under her eyes.
The doctor took me aside and explained…….there were no real options, “perhaps a private place to spend the remaining time together”, was all she could say. Looking across the landscape of medical equipment, through the surgical windows, to the other room, I could see Lula soaking in a spot-light glow of care and love from the three women who enveloped her. All four females were interconnected, and the tears fell down like warm rain on a sunny California afternoon. I looked at the vet and something in her flinched, a slight chink in her professional demeanor and she glanced back at her phone. I assumed that this scene, or variation of it were played out in front of her many times a day, but maybe not.
We walked down stairs to a small, private room and we all spilled out on the concrete floor. When the young vet came in a few hours later she kneeled on the floor with the rest of us and as Lula went to sleep, I saw her cry, tears streaming down her face, just like the rest of us.
We drove slowly back to Haley’s apartment, we spoke as if Lula was still with us. Quiet stories and favorite moments and laughing and crying at the same time. The sun was sinking and we needed some sleep, or maybe a drink, or both and many, so after we dropped off the roommates and parked, we walked across the street to check in to the fabulous Lafayette, a hotel so over the top in decor and lighting and hyperbolic in every aspect it merely contributed to the continuum of the dreamlike state we continued to float in.
As I stood in the lobby looking at my shoes while Jill, my wife, was checking us in, a sad bulldog laying on the floor looked up at me with bulbous, unblinking eyes and slowly scanned away to a spot near the door. Jill noticed him too and wanted to make a connection, just like me. The sad dog didn’t mean to look at me, he was just moving his head and I suspect, just wanted to be left to his thoughts. He was leashed and lying at the feet of four young adults, Haley and Cher’s age, who sat almost motionless on the highly decorated couches bathed in deep purple satins with chartreus fringe and creamy yellow lights from lamps that cast dreamlike illumination across their gathering. A small, round marble table with a glass of water on it was being used by an elbow that propped up a chin of a young bearded man gazing at the walls, as if in a trance of his own.
“May I pet your dog?” I asked. He didn’t look up and I asked again, slightly annoyed. From his daze he noticed me for the first time and simply nodded. I reached down and pet the moping, droopy-eyed dog and glanced at the two young couples sitting there on the couch. All of them seemed lifeless and lost and perhaps I misinterpreted, but they seemed bothered by my attention to their dog.
“Buncha jerks”, I thought to myself as I turned on my heel. “If you only knew what we’ve just been through……” again, to myself, but I felt they should have been a little more accommodating, given our situation. “Jerks”, I concluded. I walked across the marbled tiles of black and white muted by the incandescent cascade of pink and purple lights along the walls. The hallucination continued.
That night we stayed in the confines of the fabulous Lafayette which is a collection of distractions and redirections, for those who need that sort of thing. We needed that sort of thing, and so we blended in, Haley and Cher and Mars, the last roommate, and Jill, and me. We swirled to the sounds and sights of Californians and others mixing it up in restaurants, lobbies, pools, and bars with music, and bowling and billiards and an entire social eco system all swimming and swaying in the enchanted Lafayette. We made multiple toasts to Lula and Haley and their life together, we looked like we were having a good time, beneath the burgundy fringed ceiling in our deep state of distraction. And at the end of the evening, each of us found our way to bed and tried to sleep the sleep of the normal. It was everything but, so sleep didn’t come without dreams of Lula and the lost life that would (and should, I thought) have been.
The next morning, I went to get coffee, it was early, and no one was at the pool or at the gatsby-like expresso bar, so I walked out to the porch overlooking the optically gaudy pool deck with the sun just coming over the top of the building splashing light on a canopied portico where two identical bulldogs, the same kind as the one I’d seen the day before in the luxurious lobby of the Lafayette, peaked out of the aperture made by the stylized drapes that held back the sun, like a sultan’s tent. It was the first and closest one of a dozen such curtained salons surrounding the pool, forming a dazzling array of stripes and checks and swirls each buttressing the apartments behind them and billowing in the soft morning breeze. Dreamy.
The two black and brown bulldogs rested on their paws. The were leashed to an invisible anchor just behind the curtains. My coffee was ready and when I came back to the table on the deck to watch the dogs, there were now two sets of legs, very tanned, like the legs of life-long Californians, jackknifed out of the canopy. The legs were tethered to the two dogs. A blond, athletic-looking man, and a blonder woman, sat at the end of each leash and read their phones and spoke to their dogs like children, who responded in the same way.
They were close, it seemed, as I walked toward an empty chair near the pool.
I was curious, and slightly hurt from the treatment I’d received the day before, so I walked down the stairs toward the be-draped bungalow and paused to look at the dogs and ask, “may I say hi to your dogs?”. The Californian man, who looked the part of a middle aged “B” movie actor, looked up and said, “yes, sure, that one, but not this one, he’s not very friendly”. I said, “that’s an odd coincidence, because I met another bulldog in the lobby just yesterday who looked exactly like this one, and he wasn’t that friendly either”. I don’t know why I said that, but such was my need to simply pet a dog, to make that canine connection.
“That would have been my daughter’s dogs, or dog, rather”, he said. “They just got in yesterday afternoon.”
“That must have been when I saw them”, I said, “and we were checking in at the same time, although I didn’t really talk to them “.
“Yeah, they just got in from St. George, Utah. They’d been driving all day after spending the night in an emergency hospital there, with their other dog”, he said.
“Everything ok, now?”, I asked, wincing at the sound of ‘hospital’.
“No. Her dog died. Very unexpectedly. He was a young dog, and the other half of a bonded pair, the one who you met yesterday”. He spoke in a cracking voice, I could tell he was choked up, and then his wife, who had been reading her phone during our discussion, took off her glasses and said, “she’s heartbroken, our daughter….” she trailed off. (I thought the woman looked like Haley, about 25 years into the future. Tall, athletic, blonde, married, with dogs.)
She continued, “We’ve had bulldogs all her life and this was her first dog on her own, as an adult, and since she moved away. She’s only had it six months.” And went on to say, “She and her husband were driving across the country to meet us in LA, but her dog got sick on the way. It happened so quickly…….. The dog died in her arms at the hospital yesterday. So we just jumped in our car and drove down here to meet them this morning, because she told us she couldn’t stay in St. George.”
“Yeah, I’ve been to St. George”. I said. “And I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter’s dog”. Jill had just sat down next to me in a black and white striped lounge chair with wrought iron arms upholstered in pink as I began to tell them the story of how we had come to the Lafayette, just yesterday evening, to be with our daughter and how her dog had, just yesterday, died in Ali’s arms…… “.
I’d lost my thread and let the sentence linger in the air, and there, on the deck of an over-done pool, in the breeze-way of a dazzling cabana, four total strangers quietly recognized each other’s coincidence and welled up inside. It was an unexpected release. The air was kaleidoscopic as I fought to keep the water in my eyes, other’s didn’t fare as well and both Jill and the two Californian’s let it flow.
Coincidental Comfort
Later in the day, when the pool began to fill up with tattooed and bronzed bathers from the neighborhood and the rest of the world, and the quiet reflections of the morning had turned to cacophony and cocktails, Haley joined us near the cabana where we had met the black and brown dogs and the couple from California.
It was too much coincidence to not notice, but when Haley met the Californian mother, the one who reminded me of future-Haley, they hugged, without a single word being spoken. The Californians said “I’m so sorry” in perfect unison. They asked Haley how she was doing and told her that their daughter was so distraught she wasn’t even able to come down and see their dogs.
“She’s really broken, and just wants to be left alone in her room, but maybe she’ll come down later. Maybe they could meet…..”, slightly awkwardly, future-Haley-other-mother, said. Haley didn’t reply, just nodded.
So we made small talk and we discovered there were a few other things that this spontaneously generated group of people had in common besides death, and dogs, and this emotionally drugged space. As the Californians talked about where they had driven from and where they lived, Palm Springs, tennis was mentioned. Coincidentally, both women, the older ‘Haley’, and the younger Haley, had played in college and that each had a connection to tennis in Colorado as well. As the conversation expanded, Jill joined in when the Californian woman said she and her husband had lived in Aspen for a number of years, where Jill responded by telling them that that’s where we had been married and she had spent so much of her time as a young adult through her 20s and 30s.
The Californian disclosed that she had come from Michigan, where Jill had grown up. For a moment, it seemed as if all these women thrown together by circumstance, and the two men who watched them, were connected by an emotional rope that wrapped them all tightly together for a brief moment in time, and then, like all things coincidental, it unwrapped and then disappeared with a last hand shake and hugs and finally, goodbye.
We never met the daughter, or her husband, or the remaining dog, we just waved goodbye to them from a distance. They had one black and brown dog left, who walked slowly, sadly, between them, as the doors closed behind them. I sat back down, nursed a beer in the afternoon sun while the pool party grew in numbers and noise. The world went on spinning. I watched the embroidered bodies dance and go about their day, navigating the world, being themselves and living their lives, and I thought to myself, “maybe they’re not jerks at all, maybe we’re all just trying to make our way through the tragedy and the comedy that we bump into as best we can. Maybe we’re a lot more alike than we would otherwise think, and it takes a little dog with a knowing smile, and one last wink, to make us recognize how short, and sweet life can be.
…….Thank you Lula, love you.
