1. Rehome Your Dog

 

1. Rehome Your Dog

The turnaround circle is paved whilst the football field parking lot is still gravel, another reason to park up at the end, less dust.  That was why Glynda was resting in the passenger side of the campervan when she woke up hearing the dogs.

Through the windscreen a bloke was running angrily to her right, still holding on to his hat, the walking path by the bay inlet in Berkeley, California.   Glynda’s shoulders stiffened.  Was there going to be a row?

“He’s had surgery, there’s a reason he’s on a leash!” a woman’s panicked voice cried out.  Her dog was leaping forward to defend itself from two unleashed larger dogs, one a pale labrador, the other a black poodle, who were barking and jumping at it from both sides.  Glynda rolled the window down.  “Hey!” she said.

Then the owner came running in, trying to gather both jumping animals at once, the lab stopping immediately of course, but the aggressive male pulling away and re-engaging with a crazy ROW-ROW-ROW!  “Stop!”  Glynda commanded involuntarily.

Glynda flinched as the man snapped the leash onto the dog’s collar and tugged it to him, smacking the labrador’s soft flanks again and again with his open palm.  You don’t have to be hit often, she thought, for it to make a big difference in your life.  Once is enough.  “Please, sir!  Don’t beat your dog!” Glynda sobbed.  The golden labrador cowered at the man’s feet, unwitting of its transgressions.

Now he grabbed the black poodle and pulled it up roughly by the collar while he fumbled to find right ends, losing his hat as he did so, which allowed Glynda to see the hot pink face of the enemy, twisted with fury, an older man than she had expected, nearly bald, with a wispy white beard.   “Please, Sir,” she called out, “Rehome Your Dog.”  She saw look at her in surprise as he finally began tugging his dogs away.  “Mind your own business,” he growled at Glynda, pulling them back into the wild.

Without realizing it she had thrust her shoulders all the way through the side window of the camper.  “Rehome Your Dog!”  she insisted.  She hoped it wasn’t already too late.  Now the male pawed two steps toward her, raising hands wrapped with leather.  Fuck you.

It upset Glynda the whole rest of the day, made her want to leave for Santa Barbara right now.  Only, no gas.  She still had some SNAP on her card, but the campervan sucked petrol.  At Trader Joes she bought four more cartons of eggs, that gave her eight, about four gallons.   The Egg Lady, they called her.  $3 a Dozen.  She liked to think of it as a job.  Losing seventy-nine pence with each transaction whilst despoiling the planet, just to put it in the proper perspective.

She got out and walked around her blue and white campervan, fondly wiping away a smudge from Sara’s shoulder.   She liked that the old model RV had been named a SERENADER, she felt in a way over the past two years the homey little vehicle had helped her bring her voice to the world too.   She’d driven Sara down from Portland during the pandemic, when gas had suddenly become a lot less expensive and people kept their proper distance, settled into their proper places.   Here in Berkeley neighbors had been standing on both sides of their barricaded streets singing songs to each other.

When she got back home from Trader Joe’s and getting gas it was half six, with the light of the late sun starkly shadowing the tall dry grass and bushes that bordered the practice fields.  Defiantly she pulled the campervan into the same space she had occupied that morning, standing tall with her foot in the cab, scanning the vacant land for any signs of movement, the precise spot where she had seen him disappear.

After a while she unfolded the campervan kitchen and carefully cracked three of the eggs she had left for a bit of dirty rice, chopping up some scallions as well, cooking over a built-in propane burner Glynda had herself devised.  While she ate she opened her note book and tried to channel her anger constructively.  The words had been burning and buzzing in her mind all afternoon and she wrote them down quickly in pencil, just the first line anything like lyrics yet:

“Rehome. Your. Dog.!” The chorus for the new song.  “Hope. It hasn’t.  Al-read-y. Been too long!”

I watched a man beat his dog with a strap.  He was mad about losing his hat.  Bitch has to learn, he said.   Who let those pups run wild? I plead.  Does it make you feel free-er to thus punish real freedom.

Glynda paused for a moment and then crossed out “thus”.  The hat part was a hook you could hang something on.  There was a lesson in it, it could be a real protest song, like a Natalie Merchant.  How would the dog have felt?  Or the bloke what wore the hat for that matter. 

“Leaving means the absence of restriction, so you speak of no rules at all.” She traced out in pencil.  “Soft yellow fur//INNOCENCE”, which really seemed almost like a breakthrough.  She could always tell when she was beginning to become upset.

On Tuesday she was in one of the athletic field spaces and she saw him again in the sideview of the campervan, emerging with the two dogs from the bushes and dry dead fennel that lined the shoreline park access road and retracing the route of the earlier day.   Would he recognize the Serenader?  It was facing the opposite direction.  At least he wasn’t flipping her off this time.  Glynda flexed her hands on the wheel of the van, as though admiring the rings that adorned all her fingers, forming the signs but keeping them low, holding fire.  The dogs, big ones—she was amazed at how wild he let them go, running everywhere with alarming speed, constantly snarling and nipping at each other at the feet of their owner, who ignored them.  He stopped and raised his hands to his head and a huff of smoke appeared.  Didn’t he realize how dangerous that was?  Obviously a narcissist.

By Friday she was certain.   His clothing, while not filthy, never varied, dark pants, a blue T-shirt.  His ten-thirty “constitutional” always included a stop at the Port-o-Lets at the southeastern corner of the football field, always the furthest to the left.  Glynda was pleased; she favored the greater security of the stall closer to the frontage road.  During this seven to ten minute interlude, she noted, the dogs remained docilely in position on the outside pavement, secured to their owner by the leather leashes, which prevented the plastic door of the toilet from latching.  True cruelty to animals, she thought, wrinkling her nose, would be forcing the beasts to share the grotty enclosure.  She watched as he filled a plastic bowl that had been left next to the water fountain.

Later Glynda went that way on her regular afternoon walk, taking a sip from the fountain and looking meditatively across the gray waters of the bay inlet.   The tide was high and still and four or five brown pelicans were swerving across the sky and splashing down to catch fish.  Just below her a fisherman cast his line into the sea.  It was still possible to imagine a better world, Glynda thought, to ignore the slab of discarded concrete the man stood on, to unsee the mile-long rectangle of landfill that faced her, now Caesar Chavez Park, but for decades, she knew, Berkeley’s city dump. 

She went past the place where the man and his dogs always came out of the bleak wilderness.  South of the racetrack and the Tom Bates athletic facility an unimproved strip of landfill sits between Interstate 80 and the bay that gets run by the East Bay Regional Parks.   There’s nothing much but a tangle of bramble and native weeds, though more than once Glynda had seen the Berkeley Turkeys feeding there.   She hoped the man had not allowed his dogs to chase the turkeys.  There’s a tall dusty blue eucalyptus on the freeway side, a scattering of smaller trees, and, near the bay side, a thick willow tree that had produced a glorious cascading dome of chartreuse growth Glynda admired each day as she passed.  

She went all the way down to the sign that told the reason it’s called Sylvia Mclaughlin Regional Park.   It was really quite a heroic story and made Glynda think about Mum.  You should have seen the evil plans those men had to completely fill in San Francisco Bay back in the 1950s!  Until the women, led by Sylvia, put their collective foot down.   It’s thanks to those ladies that we have a Bay Commission today!

(Ab) Bay Comm -i(A)- sion (Ab) (G)To – day! 

Glynda smiled as the words sprang out at her.  That’s if you wanted it to sound ironic.  She might try it out at the Live Mike, where no one would be listening anyway.  “Ode to Sylvia.”  Live Mikes were on Wednesdays at the Missouri Lounge, which had finally reopened.  San Pablo, a couple blocks south of Dwight.

Who said she had no friends.  Actually Glynda had indeed acquired several here—for some reason she found the atmosphere of Berkeley much less restrictive than in Portland.  Less moralistic, if that makes any sense, I know it doesn’t.  Of course most of them were unaware that she/her lived in their car.

She sighed.  By now she had walked all along Marina Way where everyone else’s vans and RVs were parked, reminding her once again of her status as a car-lady.  This gypsy life had been a creative period –now, at thirty-four, she thought about finding a roommate, getting a job, web-site estimation was what she had done.   Though that too was so regressive.

All the same, do you ever have that feeling that you’re where you are for exactly that reason.  You’re lucky if you do, Glynda knew.  In her case growing up in New Jersey when father emigrated after the war.  She’d been right there when all that stuff happened.  Occupy Wall Street.  She spent three months with those people.  It was why she’d ended up in Portland.

She went along the edge of the Marina, looking at the boats and thinking again about how living in one wasn’t too different from a campervan, except you always had that docking fee.   All the people she knew that lived on boats were mental, claustrophobic.  Had Glynda gone batty that way as well?   It was one reason she always took a long walkabout each day.  She went toward the restaurant that was having its happy hour and turned left to look out at the old Berkeley pier, thinking more about the songs.

“They don’t even call them ‘Albums’ any more, do they?” she had said to Molly late one night at the Miz.  Wednesdays from 8 to 11 the Missouri Lounge put on Live Mike, where everyone would raise a token glass to the resurrection of creative expression.  “Good old Mike!”  Glynda always burst out when she was drunk enough.  That was before it was much more than the concept of a plan.  The Berkeley Cycle.  “Mostly songs you guys have already heard, some other stuff I’ve been working on.”

A Few Facts about the Comet,   (It’s leaving our system, it’s backing away from us quick.  It may have seen too much.)  Glynda had looked into the western sky every night until she almost thought she could see it, which was poetically nearly as good.  “It will happen just after sunset, if you’re ever up that late.”    She thought the lyrics should be wistful rather than apocalyptic. 

She still could make out the marker stars, Antares blinking red on her left, Arcturus, hard R, lover on the right, athough the comet’s ellipse of visibility had lapsed.  You will utter neither ellipse nor lapse, she lisped longingly.  Arpeggios of stars.  Constellations of chords.  Got it?  Part of the problem was that she wanted it to fit in with the other songs on the New Release, which she had tentatively titled “Bitter and Sarcastic—Glynda Stemple Vents”.   “Rehome your Dog, Jerkoff.  The Laws are for Everybody!”  Okay, now, calm down…

What you saw from here was a lot of the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, but parts of San Francisco were beginning to sparkle behind it.  She walked up and put her forehead against the fence.   A few years ago they told her, you could walk out most of a mile on this pier.   The signs said the trains and roads went out more than three miles where people and cars would catch ferries to the City.  In the 1920s there had been a plan to put the SF airport right there in the middle of the bay, on Treasure Island.  What would Sylvia Mclaughlin have thought about that?  Questions for Sylvia?

Glynda turned away from her thoughts and headed back home, stopping to pay grudging respect to the queer concrete statue of a warrior astride a mythic animal that stood behind her at the end of the road.  You know that story, of course, it’s so Berkeley—an eccentric sculptor proactively “donated” the massive piece to the City, and initiated a subsequent city-wide vote to leave it in place, despite its unique weirdness and belligerent theme.   “Rehome Your Dog,” Glynda advised the thoughtless warrior, who aimed a stone arrow skyward, legs clasping the grotesque beast.  Jerkoff.  

Song for the Pier.  You always seemed so exciting.  An easy three mile long.  I fished the swirl through your pylons, I loved your distance from shore.  You were a great place to catch a shark.  Or the Ferry to Babylon.   Was that getting too personal?    Glynda wondered.  And now, I suppose, you just slowly fall apart.  How long will that take?   Kind of the danger with metaphors.  Behind the fence the fifty foot wide walkway remains unbroken for hundreds of yards to this day, massive redwood planks that once supported railway cars.  Sometimes the problem was with putting too much material into the songs, not too little, you know.

Only she really was so dreadfully poor.   Well, it was self-inflicted, there was always Mum, but stuck living in a vehicle she could scarcely afford to drive.  Its Oregon plates marking it for moving.  For a while Norie had let her park in the alleyway behind their house until someone decided that was an encroachment, maybe they just didn’t like her bloody singing, she joked, but it hurt.   These days her address was the open lot behind Tom Bates field, the closest thing you could imagine to being run completely out of town.

Indeed she was seriously considering a retitle:  Glynda Stemple, So Done with Berkeley.”  Somewhere she would come up with the money to relocate for the winter.  Capitola, or maybe even Santa Barbara.  Because it was already October, and with the election coming, it was going to get cold at night. 

Glynda gave up and called Mum.   “Hi, it’s me.  Can I have a thousand dollars to move to Santa Barbara?”    Are you still selling eggs?  No Mum, it was a joke to make you worry.  Well, they’re not going to want to listen to songs about Berkeley in Santa Barbara are they?   No, she admitted, probably not.  She might go back, after the album was done.  Have you seen that person with the dogs again?

Almost every day.   On Halloween Glynda happened to be at the Berkeley Public Library where she was researching Sylvia McLaughlin.  “Did you hear about the shellmound at Spengers?” Jason, the bearded librarian asked Glynda.   “Ohlone people are protesting the condos there.”  He pulled a folded flyer from a nearby bulletin board.  “It’s obscene.”

“How are you otherwise?  Aren’t you worried about the election?  How’s Jason?” Mum inquired.  “I know!” Glynda said.  “All anybody can do is talk about Trump.  It’s like a cancer, even here.”

“How are you and Jason getting along?”  “Super,” she said, “we’re going to the rally together Saturday.  He might come visit me in Santa Barbara.”

“Why do you want to move there?  I mean, you’ll forgive me if I say it sounds like you’re running away from things again, Glynda.”  Oh I will, will I?   Mother, it’s not so much wanting to leave as being driven out.  But if you can give me the thousand that will help a lot.