JULY 2009

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So I Drew Him a Poodle
By Meg Pokrass, May 18, 2009

I had to stoop to get in because the doorway was caving. Things didn’t look any better inside there, books and papers were piled obscuring solid objects. I was not in the habit of visiting freaks, but his cat was gone and that was all he had. One day I would be sore and old and something I loved would run away and I would hope for a visitor. I told myself this, and tried not to breathe with my nose. He drew me a picture of the cat on a paper shopping bag, said he didn’t have a photo. She looked like a mutant, or as though a dog had been lodged in her spine. She was half dog and half cat, kind of like a fox, and I wondered if perhaps he couldn’t draw very well, even though everyone in the neighborhood said he was a reclusive painter. “Cute,” I said.

“No,” he said, “she’s beautiful.” He went to pour some iced chamomile tea which smelled like dog shit when he took it out of the mini-fridge. Or, maybe the refrigerator itself smelled like dog shit, and it wasn’t the tea. It could have been expensive cheese, blue or raw brie. My mom used to get fancy brie and the whole house smelled like a thing had died.

He said the chamomile herbs would calm me, that I seemed all frazzled, and that young people underestimated this herb entirely. To prove something, he broke a tea bag open and sprinkled tiny dry pieces of chamomile flowers in a mug. He told me to hold it right under my nose and sniff it as long as I liked.

Sniffing the dusty crap, my head felt plastic, like it might explode. Nobody knew what to say about my mother and her drinking, and I wanted to mention that as the calm came over me. I wished Mom was the chamomile sniffing type, but she wasn’t. Also, I knew we should re-focus on the cat.

“I’ve always wanted a fox,” I said, which felt equally important as the cat, and so suddenly.

He sighed, and I realized that he probably wished he’d not ripped a tea bag for me or invited me in. He was going to die soon, I could tell by his gray skin flaps, so I drew him a poodle.

“That was my dog, Stella,” I said. He looked at the picture and his eyes watered and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cracker.

He seemed so naive and plantlike, believing in chamomile herbs, not owning a camera, thinking I had a poodle that died. Mom and I lived in an apartment where no animals were allowed. I faced the door and decided to walk before anything worse happened, before I could tell him or he could tell me that everything was really fucked, had always been and would always be so, even a hundred years from now. Even if we found the cat.