Ever by My Side (5 page)

We will never know whether this particular stripper was lost in the moment, oblivious to the lack of percussion during her grand finale, or whether the man on the lights believed she had made some special arrangement with the stand-in drummer. For whatever reason, my father, bless his soul, fell fast asleep, the lights stayed firmly focused on their target, and by the time the cheering audience had roused him back to consciousness, it was too late.

“They fired me on the spot,” he said. “Insisted I leave immediately.”

I could have requested psychiatric counseling over the news of this unfathomable form of entertainment, but I maintained a blank stare and pulled out the classic banality, “Is that it?”

Dad felt the need to clarify. You see, he hadn’t been playing this story for laughs or in some naive attempt at male bonding long before I had much in the way of testosterone. He simply wanted to justify the skepticism I had witnessed in my mother. He wanted me to feel his humiliation through this low point, to justify her apparent apprehension to his claim of finding a career, and to better understand her reticence over our adding four more legs to the family. Throughout my life, one of the fundamental tenets of my father’s style of parenting has always been to try to help me get it right, by pointing out where he had got it wrong.

“What I’m trying to say is it doesn’t matter if you are a brain surgeon or a garbage collector. I just hope you will try your best. Fulfill your potential. That’s all I will ever ask. Just try.”

I smiled. There was always something so warm and comforting in this philosophy, because it felt forgiving yet attainable. Trying demanded effort without the pressure of expectation. So long as the intent was absolute, despite the results, there would be absolution.

I dutifully nodded my understanding and said, “So does this mean we’re getting a puppy?”

In the end though, after all my begging and pleading, it came down to a factor I had never even considered—our neighborhood.

We lived on the outskirts of a wealthy city but on the wrong side of the tracks, in a suburb dominated by government-subsidized housing. I’m not saying I was from the projects exactly, but our house was flanked by some pretty mean streets, home to dispirited unemployed miscreants looking for trouble.

Early on, the word
prowler
was introduced into my vocabulary. Apparently there had been a series of break-ins at nearby homes. (My parents failed to inform me that our house was actually broken into twice—what on earth were they after? My father’s beloved lava lamp?) I was led to understand that “the Prowler” was a shadowy figure who wandered our neighborhood late at night, biding his time, poised to make his next heist really count.

Domestic alarm systems were in their infancy and Britain has no Second Amendment in its Bill of Rights, so the possibility of a four-legged security system began to get some serious airtime during dinner conversation.

“I’m just saying that a dog might be the perfect solution,” said my father. “There’s plenty of room in the backyard. I’d be the one taking care of it and all he needs is a big, booming bark and no one will think to come near the house.”

I jabbed another bland wad of lettuce into my British “salad dressing,” i.e., runny mayonnaise, and stuffed it in my mouth, chewing over my father’s suggestion. Several points jumped out at me. First of all he said “he,” a male dog, and all I really knew was
Cleo, his mother’s female Dalmatian. Would a male dog be different, less sociable, less playful, more domineering? And if he had to have a loud bark, what kind of dog would that be? I couldn’t remember Cleo barking once, not even during our games of fetch. Did my dad already have a certain breed in mind? Did he really want to keep everyone who wasn’t in our family at bay? And what about my friends from across the street?

It would be some time before I understood the term
whipped
, but the expression on my mother’s face almost dared him to go ahead, to get a dog and brace for the consequences. My mother rarely needed to use words; her sparkling green eyes said all that needed to be said.

So her surprise was no less than mine and my sister’s when my father turned up with a great big boisterous teddy bear of a German shepherd puppy. Whereas our surprise turned into jubilation, my mother’s was quickly surpassed by anger and condemnation. Forty years later I would discover that the puppy was obtained as part of a conspiracy between my dad and his mother, the two of them pretending to go off for a Sunday drive and secretly visiting a dog breeder. My mother was never consulted because after all our combined attempts to achieve a concession, she continued to refuse, even after Dad had played the canine security card. To this day he still believes she has never quite forgiven him.

Of course I was blind to all this matrimonial turbulence, breathless at finally having a dog that would actually live in and stay in our house. And what a dog he was, so different from Cleo, black and tan with oversized ears, snout and, most striking of all, paws. His paws were massive, as though he had been born with the wrong feet, each one several sizes too big.

“What are we going to call him?” asked my father, reining us in when our petting became too exuberant, when the puppy became mouthy in his own defense.

This seemed like an easy question. For as long as I could remember, I was allowed to watch a children’s television show on the BBC called
Blue Peter
. The show started in 1958 and is still running to this day, and it regularly featured the presenter’s pets. At the time, each of the two male presenters had a German shepherd, one a female called Petra and the other a male called Patch. These were the only other German shepherds I had ever seen, so it seemed perfectly logical that all male dogs of this particular breed be named Patch.

“Patch it is,” said my father, glancing over at my mother, hoping our elation might go some way to melting her icy reception. He was in the wrong and he knew it and having his son name the dog was the clincher. The naming of an animal is like an engagement ring, a betrothal. Once it has been offered and accepted, it’s virtually impossible to take it back. My father had much work to do to mend the rift with my mother, but he truly believed he could turn her around, bring out the dog lover hidden deep inside her, and make her realize his sin was not selfish but motivated by a desire to invigorate and complete his family.

As Patch matured, his wooden-puppet puppy moves smoothed out, coordination, strength, and stamina setting in as he began transforming into a lean and muscular machine. During this time, his floppy ears finally decided to perk up, though the changeover was staggered, one ear up, one ear down for a while, giving him a goofy, slightly perplexed expression as my father worried whether or not he had been sold a lemon. When Patch finally had a pair of pricked ears, he was handsome, classically and beautifully marked and destined to be a big dog, a dog who would always garner respect and the label “formidable.”

Early on it became clear that Dad and I were far more invested and interested in Patch than my sister or, obviously, my mother. Fiona was only a few years old at the time and she quickly discovered that this cute and cuddly fur ball called a dog was actually headstrong, independent, and inquisitive. Dolls and stuffed animals were a whole lot easier to play with—they were indifferent to dress up, they never lost the plot, and they stayed where you put them. And her tendency to scream when she ran around didn’t help matters. What might have been a useful learning experience for Patch, accepting the unpredictable and shrill sounds of a child at play as another normal, nonthreatening stimulus, frequently turned into a chase in which he barreled into her and knocked her down. Looking back, my father realizes he missed a teaching opportunity for both dog and daughter. Consequently Fiona and Patch maintained a relationship that was more civil than genial. More forced roommates than family, they coexisted rather than engaged with one another.

My mother, on the other hand, had a cold facade to maintain. She had never wanted a dog and on some level having Patch around was always a reminder of a moment of weakness in her marriage, a sort of permanent scar left after a brief rift where trust and communication went by the wayside. Unfortunately for her, there were times when I could tell she actually enjoyed the dog’s company. Patch would jump up on the sofa next to her, pad around, and lie down, his head on her lap, chocolate eyes meeting hers, daring her to resist his charm, daring her not to pat his head or stroke his velvety ears, and though she made a fuss, shouting, “Duncan, get this dog of yours off of me,” she would succumb, passing a hand over his head or his bushy tail before he disappeared.

From time to time, when she thought no one was looking, I might catch her talking to Patch, engaging him in puppy banter
and play, stopping abruptly and pretending to do something else if she discovered I was there. Her only concession to his merit in our household was her approval of the heightened security he provided by nothing more than his presence.

This apparent division of the sexes in our appreciation of dogs seemed to be written in our genes and, on the surface, gender-linked. I had been given my father’s dog-loving DNA—fascinated by these four-legged creatures, drawn to them, thankful to have them around and part of my life. My sister, on the other hand, seemed to have received my mother’s dog-aversive genes in her DNA—a take-it-or-leave-it attitude of “Share my space but don’t get in my way or cramp my style.”

Despite my personal desire for this dog to be “mine,” it didn’t take very long for me to realize that my relationship with Patch was not, and never would be, the same as his relationship with my father. When I watched the two of them together, Patch seemed more excited, more responsive and satisfied than he ever did around me. It was like the two of them were a couple of teenage girls who had shared their first sleepover—all inside jokes, secret signs, and an exclusive language only they understood.

At first, their rapport and the way Patch chose Dad over the kid whose crocodile tears helped secure his future with our family felt like a betrayal, like I was the friend who got him the introduction and now I was the one getting dumped.

“Why can’t I hold the leash? How come Patch drops the ball at your feet and not mine?”

Briefly, this feeling of being used made me angry at my dad, but it was quickly replaced with another predictable vice—jealousy. Maybe, when I first suggested getting a dog, I should have clarified how this dog was supposed to be mine. He was meant to sleep at the bottom of my bed. He was going to learn my
tricks, appear from nowhere when I called his name or whistled my special signal (assuming I eventually learned how to whistle). I would be the envy of friends, family, and strangers who marveled at our relationship, our silent bond and all the adventures we were having. Surely, it was only a matter of time before Patch caught his first bank robber or rescued me from a pack of wild hogs.

Fortunately, whimsy surrendered to reality. When five minutes and a handful of milk bones did not succeed in teaching Patch how to respond appropriately to my cocked-thumb-and-forefinger pistol and play dead, I began to see how much time and effort went into having a dog as a companion. My dad was the one who fed Patch first thing every morning, the one taking him for long walks, the one teaching him basic training skills. As far as I could tell, the two of them weren’t secretly saving lives or solving mysteries and Patch hadn’t learned to sing, let alone play dead, so I could forgive them their camaraderie, as long as I could still take the reigns when my schoolwork lightened up and the time was right for me. In the interim, I learned to accept the fact that my father had acquired a new shadow, no longer black but black and tan, and shaped like a dog.

One time, when Patch was still a puppy, I interrupted the end of a training session in the backyard. Dad waved me over as he was offering praise for a job well done and instead of the usual arbitrary belly rubbing, scratching, patting frenzy that normally ensued, he gently and methodically stroked specific areas of Patch’s fur as the dog sat before him.