2013-03-23 - 10:42 a.m.
The man who liked to eat the dog
Some people prefer lamb. Others prefer beef. Richard Rubens the third had developed a taste for dog meat. Now the problem with this is obvious. Who in Sam�s H is going to get away with eating dog meat in an era where people dress their dogs up to look like precious toddlers, getting painstaking photos with the light just right and all that? For Mr. Rubens, the whole quest for dog meat became a bit of a, how we say, a �illegal operation� and he developed a bit of a fetish for not getting caught. It was like being back in high school again, which in a way he was, because he taught it.
He lived in the small town of King City, CA, nestled between the Santa Lucia Mountains to the west and the Gabilan Mountains to the east. King City was famous for two things: The Starbucks,used as piss stop for the yuppies and hipsters, located halfway between S.F. and L.A. on the 101, and as the crux of gangbanger conflict. Most people in the city banged. What mattered was who you banged for. There was the Sureno�s and the Nortenos or the blue team and the red team respectfully. King City was a Sureno stronghold and Greenfield�10 miles to the north�was a Norteno bastion. The city had gone to shit when the gangs moved in, starting in about 2001. It was right around the time of 9/11, because he remembered thinking the whole world was going to dog shit. The Arab�s wanted to slit his throat and the Mexican migrant workers moving into his town�his town, the town he had grown up in, he had the sudden distinct feeling that nobody cared if he lived or died. And this was a regretful state to find himself in: a real pickle, you know, in which no amount or type of psychotropic drugs could be used to extricate him from the acidic mess of his hermetic jar.
I mean, he could move to another city. But he had tenure. Tenure was like marriage. Yeah, you sort of want to try a new school and move on and get that brief pop of excitement going, but in the end, it�s a hell of a lot of work mixed in with a fair amount of toll-taking, speed-up the balding process anxiety and sometimes, it�s just easier to sit there in your little henhouse, on the eggs you�ve laid, no matter how dead or deformed you think those eggs are or might be.
So you have to understand all of this before you know that I eat dog, because in the grand scheme of all the bad things that can happen to us: car crashes, getting caught in the cross-fire of gangs, herpes zoster, reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, etc. eating a little dog every now and then is a fairly banal, back of the newspaper event�as can be the taste of the dog meat itself lest you forget to add some heat in the form of horseradish or Tapatio.
The first time I had dog, it was unwittingly� out of the back of a food cart� before food carts were posh, held cache, or were for that matter even fucking �inspected.� The cart where I unwittingly got my first taste for dog was called �The Roach Coach.� I never allowed for the thought to bother me, because if Richard Rubens the third is one thing, he is not afraid, besides the power of the mind for pleasant delusion is infinite, so I suspended my disbelief and took the preferred fiction of believing the name �The Roach Coach� came from the somewhat bedraggled looking owners having a penchant for Bob �One Love� Marley and not because of some nasty chitinous exoskeleton arthropod problem.
I was walking around the city one day after school around 4pm in middle March, when the winds come and the light is intensifying and hope is returning that takes a visceral form of a spring in the step. Going about my daily business of looking for coins that careless students drop throughout the day�I find upwards of $350 a year in change alone from such eyes-to-the-ground-trying-to-avoid-the-unpleasantries-of-the gumsmacks-excursions�I looked up and I saw a stray dog the students had affectionately dubbed �Pepper�, I was famished from a busy day at school, having forgotten to eat and I was astonished to find myself looking at the delicious, rippling muscles just beneath the thin skin of this Chihuaua/Terrier Mix and to find myself salivating wildly and feeling a sudden burst of energy that I have not felt in years. It was like watching your favorite program in color on a large screen when you had been watching it on a small black and white screen your whole life. This dog looked anew. I felt younger, more alive, yet ashamed at the devious, transgressive nature of my thoughts. It would be so easy to trap this hapless, dumb, tongue waggingly-stupid dog and take it home and fry it up, perhaps saut� it with some olive oil and sprigs of rosemary and a squeeze of lemon. Before I ate my first forkful of dog I�d need to invent a euphemism like cow to beef or pig to ham, just to psychically distance myself from my own horrid act. So I settled to refer to eating dog as �eating grok.� Dog for me became �grok.� As in �Tonight I am resolved to go home and fry me up some grok.� With my psychically distancing euphemism, tt was easy to forget that I was actually eating dog. Kind of like attacking villages by using drones and a game consol�no fuss, no muss, you know? How many California Laws could I violate in one evening? California, that wildly western, wildly exploitative state of smoke and mirrors and over the top regulations employed to give the entity a veneer of legality to what was essentially rogue in nature. And here I would be helping this ungrateful rogue state, taking stray dogs off the street, saving the city money and feeding my belly with a nutritious protein source that might even save the caged chickens from suffering and the aquifers from a little depletion�that is who Richard Rubens the third is a man who cares, because he is a man who stares�the issue in the face and then computes an answer.
Pepper, the Chihuahua/ Terrier Mix was the first one I had. I had seen Pepper hanging around the school for months, looking forlorn, alternating between states of skinny and more well-fed. He was like the dog symbol of Ecclesiastes: There is a time for this and there is a time for that. I started to lure Pepper into my room (Room 131 of Building 4G) with snippets of Kibbles and Bits, each food morsel designed to be an excerpt of better things to come. Of course for Pepper, nothing good was to come of this. The third time that Pepper came into my room, I actually started to love him just a little bit, I felt under his skin, right behind his head, where the skin was soft and delicate, I felt a chip, a little hard nugget, a calcified mass of human intervention. In my mind I had two conflicting thoughts: this dog is chipped, meaning somebody else once loved this dog and maybe he came under a Christmas Tree with a little red bow tied around his neck and made some child very momentarily happy. But the rip current cancelling this pleasant Yule-tidish thought out was �I wonder if I shouldn�t eat the neck meat around the chip when I de-skin the dog because maybe the metal from the chip has slowly leeched into the tissue surrounding the chip and the increased metallic concentration in that skin could make me crazy if ingested�you know mercurial, like the milleners and the Mad Hatters and all that?
