The Stardust Lounge (12 page)

“See, you were right. You protected while you educated.”

“That was
before”
I'd countered. “Think of our lives as
before
and
after.
Before was good. After is hell.”

“It's hell because it's turned unfair,” Ed answered. “Kids like Steve have come to understand themselves as capable, independent thinkers by the time they reach their teens. Despite their problems with impulse control, even problems with conventional learning, they believe in their abilities to solve their own problems because— Steve's an example—they've been allowed to. Or because—like his street friends—they've had to.

“After a childhood of being allowed to make his own decisions—after your encouraging him to explore his passions and play them out, even when they were a bit dangerous, even when they involved risk—
now
you're telling him no. That's all over. Now he's got to do what you say, what his teachers say, what the cops say, no questions asked.”

“But the stakes are so much higher! He got himself into gangs and guns. And he's still just a kid. He's failing school…”

“Okay, okay. Listen. What do you want right now for
you
and Stephen?”

“I want us to be able to talk without screaming at each other, without his running away all the time. Breaking all the doors. He really has a thing about doors.”

“Try joining him.”

“Huh?”

“You've got a thing about doors yourself.”

“What?”

“Come on. You've got a bit of an attitude yourself, Digges. I bet you've kicked a few doors yourself.” Eduardo laughed.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Too long. Look, this strict controlling parent thing you've been attempting is all wrong for you. Your heart's not in it. It's not what you do best as far as your parenting goes. Steve knows it. He thinks you're being phony.”

“He's right.”

“Let go of it, then. Join Steve. Join him in his anger at life. Join
him
when his teachers call him on the carpet for being late to school. Don't
educate
about what he should have done. Let him figure it out.

“And don't try to
protect
him from the consequences. Get out of his way. Hug him when the cops bring him home, hug him, and then shut up. Listen to what he's got to say. He
has
remorse, but when you jump in with questions and accusations, he turns it against you. Let him own it.”

“But he can't be on the phone all night,” I argued another day in a session with both Ed and with Stephen.

“If Stephen thinks he can be on the phone all night
and still get up for school,
and
pay his own phone bill, it's fair to say he should be able to do so,” Ed had countered. “Right, Steve? Isn't that fair?”

“Sure,” said Stephen.

“But what if he
can't
get up for school? Or pay the bill?” I said.

“Well,” Ed considered. “What would happen to you, for instance, if you couldn't get up for work or pay your phone bills?”

“I'd lose my job,” I said. “And they'd turn my phone off.”

“Right.”

“But school is different,” I said.

“Well, not really. I mean for a kid, school is like a job. If Steve misses school, he gets fired, sort of. Then he can either try again or drop out for a while, then go back. Or maybe he won't ever go back. Right, Steve?”

“Right!”

“And were he to flunk out of school, it would be unfair of him to expect you to support him. Nope,” Ed spoke casually, “that would be unfair, and we've agreed, haven't we Steve, that it's important to be fair. No, it wouldn't be fair for you to support Steve, any more than it would be fair for him to have to support you if you lost your job. Steve wants to be independent, right, Steve?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You want to be able to do what you want, when you want to. Right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good man. Of course. We all do. We all want to be independent.
So Steve would need to find his own place to live, get a job to support himself. In fact, look here, Steve. I saved the want-ads section of the paper for you. And here is a list of apartments.”

Ed opened the paper and began reading descriptions of apartments aloud. “Here's one: ‘one bedroom apartment in North Amherst.’ Whoops,” he interrupted himself. “If you live in North Amherst you'd need a car … can you get a car?”

“My license is suspended.”

“Who needs a license? Weren't you by yourself when you were driving Ray's car the other night? You know, the night they picked you up …”

“Ya, but…”

“But you got caught, huh. Well. Maybe you couldn't depend on Ray's car every day. Or if you got caught again driving alone—what'd they say?”

“They said if it happened again, I go to juvie …”

“Bummer,” Ed replied. “Geez! Those Amherst cops are rough. Wait! Here's one. It says, Apartment on bus route …’ “

The concept of fairness is the method by which Stephen and I decided to adopt Buster the bulldog.

“I think he's going to need a lot of care,” I'd said when I hung up the phone with the woman in New Hampshire.

“Like what?” Stephen asked.

“Well, she said medicate him every morning at seven. And he takes some other kind of medicine on his food, so he has to eat then, too. And we can't just feed him and not the other dogs. G.Q. and Rufus will have to eat then. Some mornings I've already left for Tufts by seven.”

“We could take turns,” Stephen suggested.

“But that's early for you. It's hard for you to get up and off to school. I'm not sure it would be fair to ask you to do that.”

“They're probably going to kill him if we don't take him.”

“True.”

“And I'll be away now and then … I have some readings next term. One's in California. What if he's having seizures?”

“I could take care of him. Mom, listen. Let's do a trial. Let's say we'll try it with this dog. Two months. Let's say a two-month trial. In that time we'll learn what to do. We'll teach each other. If it's just too hard, we'll find him another home. I'm willing to try if you are.”

“It's crazy,” I said.

“Kinda.”

“A third dog?”

“I know!”

“With epilepsy.”

“Fits!”

“Fits, as in
Hey, kid, you're a step ahead of a fit!”

“Named Buster.”

“Who likes to play with balls.”

“Get the ball, Buster!”

“Get it? Get the ball-buster!”

It's a cool, drizzly fall day and the 7-Eleven is busy as a car pulls up, the driver scanning the parking lot where I wait, a brindle bulldog hanging eagerly out the window. I wave and the woman stops her car and nearly runs to the passenger side. She leads Buster on a leash toward me.

“Are you Deborah?” she asks, thrusting the leash in my hand.

“This is Buster. Say hello, Buster! Now you hold him while I get his meds.”

I kneel in front of the dog, his beautiful bulldog's face—not quite as flat as G.Q.'s—thrust into mine. He is
also somewhat taller, a lighter golden brindle, more sleek, as if he might be part boxer. We smell each other. He licks my face as I hug him.

“Buster,” I say. “Hello, Buster.”

“Here.” The woman hands me a plastic bag full of meds. “The instructions are on the bottles. A Valium in the morning at seven, and one at seven in the evening. Feed him twice a day at those times and put a capful of the potassium bromide on his food.”

“Do you have his records? His shots and stuff?”

“I'll send them. Okay? I forgot them.”

The woman bends briefly to pet Buster on the head. “ ‘Bye, Buster,” she says. “She'll take good care of you.”

Some years later, the morning following his death, while I'm digging Buster's grave, digging a deep, fine hole back near the woods in which I set down pictures of us, Buster's basketball, and a couple of Valium for the afterlife, not without popping a few myself, I'll remember the day I met Buster the bulldog at a 7-Eleven in New Hampshire, and fell in love.

As I struggle against tree roots, the mossy black soil, I'm thinking how from the day I brought him home to Amherst Stephen and I came to love this dog.

We loved him ridiculously, without self-consciousness, as did the other dogs and cats of our household. Our cats came to greet Buster as they greeted us, rubbing against him and purring. They curled up next to him on my bed. After a while Rufus and G.Q. allowed such greetings and sleeping arrangements since Buster had shown them the way.

“He's our Vergil,” Stephen once said.

During his seizures we learned to hold him while he frothed at the mouth, lost control of his bladder and his bowels. And then, covered in slobber, urine, and feces, we helped him to his feet as he recovered, praising him, offering him meds in a hot dog, the water he so badly needed after an episode, washing him down with warm towels before we washed ourselves.

Often Buster would begin a cluster of seizures during the night. I'd be awakened as the bed in which both of us slept began to vibrate, Buster rigid, rising toward something, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if someone were calling his name, or he envisioned a ball being held up just out of his grasp. Then he would fall into a seizure, flailing, arcing his back as he rolled and wheezed and panted.

Stephen, who at 5:00 A.M. might well be in the shower or cutting his hair, would hear the commotion and know to run down to the kitchen to get the Valium. Then, as I lifted the dog to the floor to clean him up, Stephen stripped the bed and changed the sheets.

Once Buster wandered through our gate and was lost for an afternoon. Banking on the basset hound Rufus's strong sense of scent, we instructed him, “Find Buster, Rufus!” and Rufus had pulled us with authority on leash through the backyards of Amherst, but, as it turned out, in the opposite direction.

Buster had wandered down to the retirement home a few blocks from us. There he was befriended by the residents and the nursing staff, who let him wander about the halls while they called the police.

“I'm so relieved he's safe,” I said to the nurse leading
me to the dayroom where Buster sat eating potato chips fed to him by a man in a wheelchair.

“He has epilepsy” I told her.

“Well, honey don't worry” the nurse responded as she knelt to pet Buster. “He's come to the right place.”

If Eduardo instilled in us the idea of fairness, then Buster gave us the opportunity to practice through our shared responsibility of his care. His condition demanded discipline—we
must
get him fed and medicated by seven or by mid-morning he would be seizing.

And when seizing, he couldn't be left alone. Someone needed to be with him. Often the local vet kept an eye on him the days I drove into the university. Like the retirement home staff, the clinic allowed Buster the run of the office. After school it would be Stephen's job, rain or shine, to go to the vet's and walk Buster home, have him fed and medicated as well as feeding Rufus, and G.Q., and the cats, by the time I walked in the door at seven.

Because a ride in the car calmed a seizing Buster, I sometimes took him in to Medford with me, stopping at rest areas to let him pee, wandering around the area a bit with him so he could stretch his legs and explore, then loading him back in the car. Were this the case, I needed to leave an hour or so earlier than usual. His needs insisted that we plan our days; at the same time we must be willing to depart from our plans.

Maybe Stephen promised friends he'd hang out after school. Maybe I was tired and could have used an extra hour's sleep. Or maybe I was working on a poem. Things must be put aside in deference to Buster. Because he was
so lovable, earnest, and good-natured, Stephen and I worked willingly together for his best interests.

We learned that Buster might seize if things were stressful. Stephen's loud rap made Buster twitchy a sign we learned might bring on a seizure. Shouting drove him trembling into a corner.

We adjusted the music and our tempers. If Stephen and I disagreed about something, we kept our voices calm, or stepped outside to figure it out.

In our efforts to care for Buster, we needed to keep in touch with the other's schedule. The fall Buster came to live with us Stephen convinced me that beepers for both of us were a good idea.

I didn't like the idea of beepers. Unless one was a doctor, beepers seemed to suggest illicit activities. Stephen's friends at the Park School had used beepers for such purposes. And I knew that teachers at the high school frowned on them.

But in those first months when we were learning to care for Buster, Stephen convinced me. And so we purchased a pair of beepers, opened an account, invented codes for each other, and used them to communicate.

Each time Stephen's beeper was confiscated at school, I called, to the surprise of the counselors, to say that Stephen owned the beeper with my permission, that he needed it to communicate with me regarding our epileptic bulldog, and may he please have it back?

And Stephen learned not to flaunt the instrument, or allow friends to call him at school. “They could take it away for good,” he said one night. “And then how would I know if Buster needed me?”

Through Ed's intervention and our love for G.Q., Rufus, Mugs and her kittens, and now Buster, we began to create a home, a family of humans and other beings caring for each other. There turned out to be no one Stephen trusted more with Buster than me, and vice versa. I might not always trust Stephen with my car, trust his efforts in school, that he would, as he'd promised, clean out the gutters, shovel the driveway, or rake the leaves.