Teddy and Me: Confessions of a Service Human Read online

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  For Janet Who Brought Him Into My Life

  Let’s go fishing!

  1.

  A neighbor recently said to me that he judges a man by how he treats dogs. I said, “Oh, I agree with that.” In fact, I think it was a famous writer who wrote that in those places where we go after we pass, when we get there our pets are the masters and we’re the pets. How we treated our pets is how they treat us in those two places. I kind of like that. Now, that’s not the reason that I treat my pets so well, but nevertheless, it’s nice to hedge your bets.

  Well, my neighbor and I were also talking about the famous Teddy story, of when he tried to rescue an ocean swimmer. Oh, yes. Now, Teddy is a little guy—he’s only eleven pounds. He doesn’t know how big he is or how small he is. Little dogs are like that. Being a purebred poodle, he is still in great shape—really great shape. About a year ago, he disappeared, and I thought he had drowned. You see, I live next to San Francisco Bay, in a small house right on the breakwater. I usually watch Teddy like a hawk. One day I looked around and yelled for him, but he was gone. He was nowhere to be found.

  I panicked and thought that he had accidentally jumped in the water or had fallen in and drowned. I went up and down my street asking all my neighbors, “Have you seen Teddy?”

  Everyone said they hadn’t seen him. My heart dropped. I thought, my God, what do I do now? I took my eye off him for a minute and he’s gone, I don’t know how I’m going to live with this one. Soon enough a man, another neighbor who swims in the bay, came walking down the street in his bathing suit. He had been swimming off my breakwater that morning.

  A middle-aged man, and strong, he said to me, “My God, that dog of yours is some wild animal.”

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  He said, “I thought that dog was a poof dog. He is so macho.”

  I repeated, “What do you mean?”

  He said, “Didn’t you hear what happened?”

  I said, “No.”

  He said, “Well, I swim by your breakwater every morning. Teddy was out there and he jumped in the water and he swam out to me. He put his face right next to mine, looked me right in the eye, as if to say, “Are you okay?” And then he swam back to the breakwater at an angle. As I continued to swim, he would jump in the water every ten or fifteen feet, swim out to me, swim up to my face and check me out to make sure I was okay. Then he would swim back to the breakwater, run down the rocks on the breakwater some, and continue onward down for about a quarter mile, where it ended.”

  I said, “Oh my God, well, I don’t know where the dog is.” I went to the back of the house, which actually sits on the bay, and lo and behold, here comes little old Teddy Trueheart, covered with seaweed, full of mud, running down the seawall looking up at me and with his eyes, “I’m sorry, Dad, I just had to do it. It’s in my blood.” That’s the famous Teddy story, probably the best one, and it’s 100 percent true.

  I told my neighbor that story the other day when he was telling me about how he judges a man by how he treats dogs.

  I said, “You do know that Muslims hate dogs, don’t you?”

  He said, “What?”

  I said, “You don’t remember that famous story when the Somalis were brought into Minneapolis as refugees? Many of them became cabdrivers? About ten years ago? When they wouldn’t even take a blind person in their cab, saying, ‘Dogs are filthy, get out of my cab.’ You don’t remember that?”

  His face dropped with horror, this dog-loving friend of mine.

  I guess you can say you can judge a person by how they treat dogs.

  2.

  WELL, Teddy is my best friend, there’s no question about it. Everything I do, he does. I don’t have to spell it out. Anyone who owns a dog knows how attached they become to your every habit, from the bathroom to the car. Let’s leave it at that. Now, we can say that dog is man’s best friend, and he is, but let’s not forget that dogs are not human beings. Some would say that they are better than human beings. In some ways I guess you could say that, but humans are different from dogs or any other animal.

  I guess I have to repeat that because we’ve forgotten what a human being really is.

  I remember, for example, when I was a boy, maybe ten or eleven or twelve, and I had a best friend. We will call him Steven. And waking up on Saturday mornings hasn’t felt like that—the days of boyhood—since. The whole day waited for us. Usually it consisted of getting on our bicycles and going on a very long ride. There used to be a bicycle path where I grew up in Queens, New York. They said it was Vanderbilt’s private roadway for his racing car. I don’t know whether that was true or not, but it was an amazing place to take a bike ride. We’d start out in mid-Queens where I lived, sort of in the Jamaica area, actually near Donald Trump’s house, just on the other side of Union Turnpike—the main roadway that separates the houses of the lower-middle from the upper-middle classes—and we’d bicycle all day long, way, way out. Sometimes we’d be gone all day, talking, playing, kidding, laughing.

  Now how can you compare that with the companionship of an animal, even a highly intelligent, intuitive dog? I ask this not to diminish my relationship with Teddy or any of my other dogs, which have all been special, but to keep things in perspective. Man is unique, special in all kinds of ways, some of which are even negative. Still, having said that, there is no more consistently loyal friend than a dog. See, I don’t know that friend Steven anymore. We were friends as boys, and then as adolescents we were still friends. But, as we became men, we went our own ways. We found out we were very different and had nothing in common.

  The same can’t be said for a relationship with a dog. In this sense, for the eleven or twelve years I’ve been with Teddy so far, it’s been a very consistent relationship. He’s always been my friend and he’s always been there for me. That will never change. This, of course, leads to the inevitable question of eternity, which I do not think is a question I can address at this time.

  3.

  I BELIEVE IN GOD, but when I’m driving, Teddy is my copilot. He reflects my attitudes and instincts and sometimes guides them. You see, most of the time we live outside the city so he has a little grassy lawn to run on and a grassy hill to play on. When we’re in the little cottage on the bay he likes the gulls and cormorants, the seals, and other sea creatures right off our back deck. On days he’s not feeling well, as his service human, I hold him in my arms and point out the “birdies,” as we call them, diving for fish or the occasional moldy bagel I throw into the bay.

  He sits by my side watching each and every radio show. In fact, I’ll bet he knows more about politics than any dog in the world, even the Obamas’ dog. After awhile he gets bored so, for fun, he nips at the engineer’s sneakers when he comes over to tweak my equipment. At least once a week, I drive him over the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco. We head to my high-rise apartment downtown. I refer to the building’s elevator as the “Tedevator” because his eyes widen with anticipation at the thought of this marvelous, gravity-defying machine that whisks us up to t
he twentieth floor, where he can stare down at the bay, boats, and people.

  But I’m getting ahead of my story about being the most grateful service human in America. The minute we get over the bridge, Teddy stands up and starts gaping at all the people in the streets. He loves when I have to stop at a traffic light on Lombard Street so he can see the flow of humans, the stores, the restaurants, even the cars next to us. I know he’s starved for stimulation. Those gulls and seals have their limits. Anyway, when we hit the garage in the building, he’s first out to the Tedevator!

  Give me a break Dad, things aren’t that bad!

  Dad, put that book down and lets’ go for a walk!

  4.

  I’M not a particularly religious man. I was raised in an atheistic household. My father was an atheist from Russia and my mother was a kind of very faithful believer. Not religious, per se, but she really knew God existed. She did things that made me know that. The way she dealt with the tragedy of my silent brother taught me many things. The way my father dealt with it was another. The way I deal with it is another. I learned to be an entertainer because of my mother’s sadness and tragedy.

  My mother was deeply saddened by what happened to my brother. And she couldn’t fathom what happened—she didn’t know why. She had a healthy daughter, then a healthy son, me, then she had another boy who looked perfectly fine—blonde hair, blue eyes, perfectly fine. And then in a short period of time, they found out he was not normal—couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak. He was basically a vegetable, so they thought. Well, it wrecked the whole family. My mother would cry endlessly in the apartment. No one knew this. What does a little boy do when a mother is crying? He tries to make her happy. So I would entertain her. I would do stupid things. I became an entertainer for my mother. I would imitate people. I’d put on faces. I would make sounds and noises and I’d wipe the tears away. She’d stop crying. She would smile.

  Even my closest family members didn’t know this story. I learned to talk to silent audiences and to entertain because of the tragedy with my brother. You say, “Ah, what’s the big deal? People die every day. Stop talkin’ about it so much.” All right. Just telling you how one man’s soul operates.

  So it affected me in that I learned to entertain my mother. As a result, I can go from the maudlin to the enraged man in one second. In one second I can turn from a kind of maudlin, sad guy into an enraged bull—in one second. It all rages inside my soul and in that sense I’m very much alive, top to bottom.

  But I also learned how to talk to audiences and animals because of my silent brother. They said, “Don’t talk to him.” He was sitting in a highchair, strapped in there. He was blind, he was deaf, and he couldn’t speak. And when no one was looking, I would sneak into the kitchen to talk to him. I want you to see how primitive the world was in the 1940s in the doctors’ profession. So they told me, the healthy brother, “Don’t go in there—don’t talk to your brother. You’ll bother him.” I said, “What do you mean? How can I bother him if he can’t hear me?” So I would talk to him anyway because I loved him. I just loved him so much. And I would whistle to him because I didn’t think he could understand words. And he would smile when I whistled to him. So I thought, wait a minute, if he can understand the whistle, he knows his brother’s here. And then I hear the voice: “Michael? Michael, what are you doing in there? Are you bothering Jerome? Come on, get out of there.”

  Then he was left alone to die in a snake pit of a state-run hospital. The doctors decided that, for the sake of the healthy children, they’re going to give him away to a home. I want you to think about the profound impact on the “healthy children,” that we were responsible for sending him to hell.

  So the day he was taken away is forever branded in my mind. It’s important to remember I was born in the 1940s. There was no television. It was the age of radio. The whole thing’s set around radio. See, it’s why I’m so able on the radio. I grew up in the age of radio. That’s why I am who I am on the radio. That’s why I do things no one else dares do on the radio, because I am radio. I come from the age of radio. I’m pre-television.

  The day came that they had to give him away to a state home. It was a horrible place on Staten Island. A snake pit that, years later, was shown to be a horrible, decrepit place. You think the VA hospitals are bad? They took this little, five-year-old helpless boy and, because the doctors were such quacks in those days, they took him away in the streets.

  Now, in those days, everyone knew everyone. I lived in a tenement in the Bronx. Six, eight stories—I don’t know what it was. Everybody knew everybody. It was like a Satyajit Ray movie. If you’ve ever watched Indian movies about India, Calcutta, the teeming masses, well, that’s my childhood. So those are the days when, if you watch retro movies, you see women sitting outside in front of the building in chairs. The children are playing in the streets. In the summer they’d open up the fire hydrants so the kids could run in the cold water to cool off. That was our swimming pool—it was the gutter and the water. It felt good to me. I enjoyed it. It was cold—and fresh. And the women would protect you from any, you know, potential harm. They all sat on folding chairs next to the buildings and watched the children. But there was little potential danger there because nobody would speed down the street. There were no guns going off, and the perverts would be thrown off the top of a building if they were caught. If there was even a hint of a perv in a neighborhood, the men would find him and they would either beat him up or throw him off a building. So we had a very, very good childhood in that sense.

  So everyone knew everyone. And the day comes. They hear that they’re giving away the boy. Everybody is in the street. Everybody is in the street. There’s crying. There’s sadness. And the whole neighborhood sees this going on. My little brother is taken away. Two men in white. And that was the beginning of something and it was also the end of something.

  What am I supposed to believe? That God made a mistake? It was just a mistake in the hospital? Somebody made a mistake somewhere and they did this to him? Or it was a neurological defect that created my brother and there was no reason for him? Well, I actually think he was created like that for me. I believe that my brother was created that way for me to be as articulate as I am and as impassioned as I am. And in that sense, I’m very guilty. I have to live for two people. I’ve told you that before. Otherwise, there’s no explanation for me to be alive this long—not with my genetic inheritance, not with the stress level I’ve lived with. I should’ve been dead a long time ago. I think that Jerry had to suffer for me to live the way I am. Would you believe this? And that’s the sad story of how I learned to communicate with audiences and animals from my silent brother.

  5.

  HERE’S a bedtime story I wrote and read to Ted some rainy nights when the thunder scares him…

  In the forest, there lived some bears, but they were a lost tribe of little bears—very little bears. Whenever someone passed by they hid and so no one had ever seen them.

  In the village, there were hunting dogs, big hunting dogs that hated bears. They were called poodles. Everyone thought they were cute because they smiled as poodles do. But they were bred to hunt, not to smile.

  In this village there was a kindly old man who loved both dogs and bears. He cried every time the hunters came home with a bear, so he decided to help both bears and dogs. First he found the smallest of the poodles. Then he secretly married the little poodle to another little poodle, and they had seven small baby poodles.

  Then he went back into the forest and found an abandoned baby bear that was left behind after his mama was taken by the hunters. He took the baby bear home and introduced her to the small baby poodles. They all played together in Mr. Kindly’s cottage.

  Then one day, the old man thought, “What’s going to happen to them when I’m gone? Who will take care of them?” Mr. Kindly decided he would keep choosing from the smallest of these little bears and the smallest of these dogs and help them have babies.<
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  Years later, when Mr. Kindly was gone, and his small cottage sat abandoned in the deep forest, a group of schoolchildren on a field trip stumbled upon it. They slowly tiptoed in. As they looked around, they found torn and yellowed scraps of pictures showing the kindly old man surrounded by little dogs and little bears, all cozy together around a warm fire in the hearth.

  The children’s teacher wondered where all those cute furry animals came from, and where they went.

  Deep in the forest there was a huge, huge tree whose trunk was wider than an elephant. It was more than two hundred years old. In this tree was a little door carved near the foot of the trunk. This door led to a cave, which spread out forever and a mile, and only God in heaven could see where this endless cave led.

  Somewhere beyond this tree, there is a world where tiny bears and tiny poodles sit together sipping on honeyed leaves no human has ever seen, that give all the nutrition needed for kindly bears and kindly dogs to live forever and a day.

  THE END.

  6.

  TIPPY

  I’ve had dogs all my life. My first dog was Tippy, a part chow with purple blotches on his tongue. He was a pretty rough customer. In fact, I have scars to the bone on my left leg reminding me of Tippy. When he was a small puppy and I was a small boy, I was teasing him a bit on a hot August day in the Catskill Mountains in New York. You see, I took a bone that was given to him and I ground it into the dirt with my left foot as I looked at him mischievously. Well, he didn’t like it, so he leapt at my foot and sank his teeth in, right down to my bone. Well, after that they rushed me to the hospital and stitched me up. I thought it was quite an experience. I actually enjoyed the whole deal. I didn’t feel any pain. Then they called my father, who was at work in New York City, and they told him what happened. He closed up his store and he got in his car and drove the two and a half hours up to the mountains. And being the Solomonic father that he was, he asked me in great detail what had happened. You see, all the men had said they should put the dog to sleep. Everyone was saying, “That dog’s no good. He’s gotta be put to sleep.” But my father, as I said, being quite judicial, asked me exactly what happened. So I said, “Well, Dad, I can’t lie.” I told him about grinding the bone into the dirt. Well, at that moment, Tippy’s life was no longer in jeopardy. And that’s the best story I remember about Tippy.