The Haters (16 page)

“Wi-i-i-i-ind it down,” I heard her yell. “It is
too late for all that
.”

“In general I think everyone lies to themselves about why they do whatever they do,” Ash told me.

“Like what,” I said.

“I mean, people say, I love you, but what they really mean is, I'm lonely.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Either it's I'm lonely, or it's I want to fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“It's pretty much always just one of those two things.”

“Yeah.”

“For me it's always just, I get lonely, but I've found that people take it the wrong way.”

“Right.”

“What about you,” she said.

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

Outside the trumpeter was trying to teach the harmonica player the horn part to “Sweet Life” by Frank Ocean. Although actually it's by Pharrell.

“It's just loneliness for me, too.”

“Yeah?”

“But for me it's because I
can't
fuck.”

“You can't?”

“Yeah. Because my dick and I got divorced.”

“Oh.”

Her reaction was kind of hard to read. But I decided to keep going for it.

“Yeah. Four years ago, we agreed to get one of those amicable divorces. It was just that classic thing of irreconcilable differences. Between the rest of my body and my dick.”

“Is that right.”

“Yeah. It sounds sad, but it's not really that sad. It's just that all-too-familiar story, you know, of, you get older, and you become different. You and your dick at some point just realize that you're two different people than who you were. I turned thirteen, we had a talk, we realized we both wanted out, and honestly, it was just a huge relief more than anything.”

Ash smiled a little bit. But impatiently. But for some reason I couldn't stop.

“But it still hurt when, not even a year later, I found out my dick had completely moved on and found someone else. And that someone else turned out to be, get ready for this, a
dog
.”

Ash snorted, and then immediately shook her head like she was trying to take it back.

“Yeah. That was super rough. A year later I see this big Bernese Mountain Dog shambling around, and it's got a human dick, and—”

“Okay,” said Ash, cutting me off. “Now you have to tell me something real.”

19.
SOMETHING REAL

By now you're probably like, what is up with Wes and dogs. Because he talks about dogs a lot. In fact, dogs seem to be kind of his go-to thing. So what's up with that.

What's up with that is, I used to have a dog. I was eight. His name was Dad Junior. I got him when I was playing alone in the churchyard around the corner from my house. I was trying to beat my record for how many times you can bounce a superball against the upper part of a wall using only your head, which at that time was a thing I did sort of a lot. I called it “dolphin bouncing.” This is the kind of thing that at some point in middle school you become super embarrassed about and stop doing, except that it does not stop being one of the funnest things ever, and in high school you're sort of like, actually, why did I ever stop doing that.

Anyway, I was eight, and I was dolphin bouncing in the churchyard, alone, when a car pulled up nearby and a bald, stressed-out, middle-aged man got out, and he asked me if I wanted a dog, and I said yes, and he coaxed this huge, shaggy, oafish dog out of the car and told me he was a great dog, shots up to date and housetrained and everything, but they just couldn't take care of him, they thought they could, but they couldn't, so if you want him, here, and he gave me the
leash, and before I even knew what was happening I was just sitting there hugging this enormous dog around the neck and watching a car pull out of the churchyard lot and disappear around the corner.

My heart was racing. Nothing this incredible had ever happened to me before.

I knew that I had finally found my loyal best friend for life. There was no name on his collar, so on the way home I named him Wes Junior. But I ended up changing it to Dad Junior in a frenzied attempt to win over my dad. Because my dad really, really did not want Wes Junior to be our dog. I mean, my mom didn't, either. But it would have been stupid to call the dog Mom Junior. Because this dog was a dude.

In retrospect the obvious name was Both Parents Junior.

Anyway, yeah. Neither Mom nor Dad was in my camp when it came to Wes Junior. Clearly, the whole thing kind of shook them to their core.

They let me keep him. I'm still not totally sure why. I guess it was the first time I ever really took a stand against what they wanted to do. I had always been a super docile kid, parenting-wise. I ate the vegetarian food they gave me. I went to bed when they told me to go to bed. I threw zero fits about our family's complete lack of December gift-giving. I went willingly to the Dorje Ling Home of Tibetan Buddhism in Pittsburgh every couple of weeks to sit in a weird-smelling room and do two hours of chants. At no point was I like, guys, I'm really not into this childhood, it seems less fun than other childhoods, and it's making it sort of hard to relate to every other kid at my school.

(By now you're probably also like, Wes, in addition to dogs, what's up with the Buddhism thing. The Buddhism thing is, my mom got super into Buddhism when she did the Peace Corps in Nepal for three years, which is also where she met my dad. He wasn't doing the Peace Corps there. He was just randomly backpacking through Asia, which is maybe why he is not quite as much into Buddhism, less and less so over the years, to the point where last year without any kind of warning he reintroduced Christmas into our family and we had a tree and stockings and stuff, and Mom pretended to hate it but also spent an entire weekend meticulously decorating the tree and then got furious at Dad when he threw it out the day after New Year's.)

My point is, up until Dad Junior, I had been a faithful company man. So they let me keep him.

He was bigger than me and clearly pretty dumb. He didn't understand any of the basic dog commands, and his primary objective seemed to be to eat whatever was on the ground. Also,
he was one of those dogs with permanent crazy eyes. His facial expression was Total Disbelief and Alarm, a hundred percent of the time. So any major hang with this dog sooner or later was you sitting there and him chewing something he found on the ground and making a face like, “Hey! Wait a second here!!
How did this get in my mouth?!
”

But I was completely sold on this dog.

For the next two months, he was basically my only friend. I mean, there hadn't exactly been a waiting list on my social calendar, but once I got a dog, the human species really lost all importance for me. It just became all about Dad Junior. He slept on my bed and ate at my feet. I woke up hours before school so I could walk him and play with him, and I ran home from school as fast as I could to play with him again. I literally sprinted home from school. I drew maybe a thousand pictures of him. I wrestled him in the backyard and chased him around the park. I tried to learn his language and communicate in barks and growls. I let him lick my face, and then I would lick his face. You probably think that's an exaggeration. Nope. I licked a dog's face every day, multiple times. The same face he used to clean his own butt. I licked that face without batting an eye.

He couldn't learn tricks or basic obedient-dog behaviors, and in general he had way less personality than most dogs of his size. Mostly he just wanted to eat and sleep. He was in terrible shape and he got tired out way before I did. It was like being best friends with an overweight, senile person.

But I didn't care. I loved Dad Junior so much that I couldn't sleep at night.

About two months after we got Dad Junior, Mom and Dad took me out to a special dinner. It was at a Himalayan restaurant in Squirrel Hill. There were prayer flags and pictures of mountains everywhere.

“Wessie,” said Mom, her eyes kind of teary, “we have some incredible news.”

Mom was pregnant. She was pregnant for the first time in her life. It was completely unexpected, for reasons they didn't and probably couldn't explain to me. There were all kinds of medical reasons why it shouldn't have happened. But it did, and Mom and Dad were really, really happy.

I was, too. I mean, of course, deep down I had some vague worry that it would be weird. There would be me and then there would be this other kid who was Mom and Dad's
birth kid
. And I knew that the birth kid would on some level be more their kid than I was. Even if they were insisting that wasn't true. You're as much our kid as you could possibly be, they used to tell me, not realizing it probably should have been, you're as much our kid as
anyone
could possibly be.

But despite all that I was still happy. Because I knew it was making
them
really happy, and even at that age, that's what I was all about. I was a company man.

“And so, uh,” said Dad. And he buried his mouth in his beard and turned to Mom, and I knew something bad was coming.

“Wessie, my family had a big dog when I was growing up,” said Mom. “And one day he just kind of went crazy. And he attacked me and bit me on the arm.”

“Oh no,” I think I said, stupidly.

“At your mom's age, bud,” said Dad, “and just for a number of reasons, this pregnancy is going to be a very delicate thing, and then after that a
baby
is an even more delicate thing, and we know you love that dog, bud, we really do.” And he kept looking at me, and his beard kind of crumpled, and he said, “But we just don't know if we can keep him around.”