A Rotweiler Enters Union Square Station

Part One

The hound was a big, lumbering, clumsy eighty pounds. Waddling towards you, making every effort to disrupt your path, head bobbing and panting tongue hanging down some unnatural seeming stretch of inches, I suppose he could appear threatening. Anyway this was his habit: with friends and strangers alike, he would make an uninhibited bee line into their personal space and attempt to gently molest them with his tongue. I always admired this about him and wished that I could be similarly bold, similarly unselfconscious. I have never licked a stranger. You have never licked a stranger. It is hard to imagine any circumstance under which this will ever take place. But he licked everyone he met. Every individual he encountered and did not get to taste he considered to be an instance of personal failure and an affront to his specific but refined sense of justice.

Knowing him as I did, his innate good nature and barely present intellect (I am not being uncharitable. He was dumb. I saw him very often approach a roadside curb or step on staircase and contemplate at length what to do next before realizing at last he had to lift his paw in order to continue walking) it became impossible for me to imagine that others saw him as a threat. But with the benefit of hindsight and a certain period of remove from the events of his passing I can now see that it was probably a sensible law that said I could not bring him into the Union Square station and onto the subway. I still, to this day, have never seen an eighty pound rotweiler in a subway car- and probably for good reason. Some people might get scared. Not everyone wants to be licked.

What I still can't understand is why she told me- so explicitly, with such absolute conviction- that I could take him on the subway. I was a very recent arrival to New York City. I'd been there not more than eighteen months- two years at the most. I was unfamiliar with the bafflingly complex public transit system. You might say I avoided the subways- that I would walk a hundred blocks rather than willingly trap myself on one of those fierce subterannean death trolleys. For the longest time I could only marvel at the site of city dwellers, brazenly ambling in barely ordered lines down the concrete steps of the 4,5,6, N, R or L trains into what was almost certain destruction. The alacrity! The concerted hustle and serious intent with which these brave, bizarre folk propelled themselves to their doom. From above ground I could hear the violent grinding and skronking from below- the sound, I presumed, of bones being crushed and reconsituted into some useful city paste. Something city planners used to glue the bridges together. Good for the planners, good for the riders. Profound acts of civic minded duty no doubt. Not for me though- I wanted to live to see twenty seven. I believed that twenty seven might be my year. And in a way it was, though not in the way I was hoping.

Anyway: I didn't know the subways, but she had taken the subway to school every day. Every morning since we arrived she had ridden the 6 down to her graduate school in Tribeca and back up every evening. I bet you she never saw a dog like ours on board any of those trains. Perhaps she was too busy looking at her new boyfriend to even notice the absence of giant dogs on subway platforms. Maybe that was distracting. It's hard to say. Anyway, even after we went our seperate ways, moved out of the East Village apartment we shared together, I still had no idea how to get anywhere. Certainly I had no idea how to get the dog anywhere not achievable on foot. I had an invitation to stay with a friend in Brooklyn- but I didn't know how to get to Brooklyn. With the dog. So, grudgingly, I called her.

"Hey, how am I supposed to get to *****'s house with the dog? He said we could stay, but, I mean, I have no idea how we'll transport ourselves."

"Oh, well that's no big deal," she responded, and I had the strong sense that she was not alone. "Just take the subway. Just take him on the subway!"

"But, I mean are you sure he's allowed? I mean won't I get in trouble? I'm rather afraid of the subway in the first place..."

"Oh no," she reiterated, "It will be fine."

I detected many things in her voice: fatigue, frustration, ennui, a sense of having strained against familiar boundaries and agitants for longer than she could any longer cope with. And yet I could do nothing to relieve this tension. Despite my awareness that she no longer could stand to hear even one word from my mouth, that it was all she could do to wrap up whatever stray ends existed in her accustomed manner of gentile civility, my tone and method were intractable. I knew that if it were possible for me to somehow slightly alter my demeanor, to be less needy, less skittish, more coherent and less rattled- just once- that it would make the visceral process of our estrangement much easier for everyone involved. But I could not or would not do so.

So she said: "People do it all the time! Just take him on the subway. I promise you- it's fine."

Speaking in retrospect of course one could reasonably conjecture as to whether my taking the dog into the Union Square subway station was, in some way, a sentence for wrong doing or the wrath addled fulfillment of a terrible prophecy. Though it is hard to know if she intended it in precisely that way, to punish me, it is definately at least possible that her intentions were punative, as it was a fact that many of her angriest gestures and acts of retribution were similarly cloaked in the garb of seemingly regretted "mistakes".

Such was the case furing the time before cell phones, when I was left "inadvertently" for for a period of seven hours at a frozen road side rest stop some forty miles outside of Petersburg, Virginia during which time countless perils were encountered and narrowly averted including my near dismemberment at the gnashing teeth of roving wolverines and an attempted kidnapping by a dangerous looking group of trogladyte drifters. Had she meant to leave me that day? Or was it really the case that she thought I was asleep in the very back of the van? Upon my retrieval, her tearful apologies and overtures for forgiveness seemed to persuasively suggested the latter. But for all which this portended perhaps I should have been more...aware.

The Union Square subway station is amongst the busiest in Manhattan, a nerve jangling transit hub providing access and connections to eight major subway lines. I don't know how many people pass through there in a given day and I don't care to know. Suffice it to say that it is more than you'd want to have over for a tea party-precise numbers will only be upsetting. I probably should have detected that something was not quite right when the dog and I first descended the stairs on 14th street and were greeted with a variety of expressions from passers-by ranging from shocked, fearful, wildly bemused and utterly agog. Excited by the crowd, the dog fairly lunged in the direction of nearly everyone we passed, with a seeming particular emphasis on business men and those under ten. Straining against his leash, tongue fully and hungrily extended, he had commenced illiciting no shortage of worried glances. But cruscially no one stopped me, no one insisted I abort my mission. And I was headed for a fall. I was cruisin' for a bruisin' as it were.

In the floor space in front of the turnstiles I stopped to inspect a large table on which a man was selling cheap paperback books. For reasons I still cannot fully explain, I picked up a copy of a book with the title "101 Ways To Please Your Black Man", and began flipping through it. An odd manuever, to be certain. When I saw "black man" was I subconciously thinking of the dog? Surely, despite the fetching patch of white fur on his chest, he was the closest I'd come to 'having' a black man. Or maybe events had simply overtaken me, and I could now expect in the wake of such significant life changes concurrent evolutions in my appetites for literature and other worldly experiences. Whatever the reason, I found myself paging animatedly through this collection of detailed and vibrantly pornographic pictures and descriptions many of which in my relative state of innocence I could scarcely comprehend. I did this with a kind of fevered bewilderment- I did not know precisely what it was I was looking for, but I was determined to thoroughly search each page until I discovered it. Several of the diagrams in the book- I could not help but notice- seemed to strain credulity with regard to the capabilites of human anatomy. Notwithstanding the title, many of the acts did not look pleasurable at all. Some other things simply didn't even seem possible- upon reaching page thirty six, where two no doubt tenderly affected lovers were said to be engaging in the "Ferris Wheel Strut"- I had to turn the book sideways in order to even identify anything recognizably human on the page. Still I lingered. The inspection lasted perhaps ten or twelve minutes. The dog jerked impatiently on his leash and his wet and swaying tongue lashed a small girl being pushed in a stroller who then commenced to cry. The child's caretaker stopped briefly and regarded me with an expression of unalloyed violence and loathing and then hurried past. The proprietor of the book stand glowered nastily in my direction as if to second her opinion. The attention was unwelcome. I decided to move along.

I would have thought, it seemed sensible to me, that if there were an issue with me bringing the dog onto the subway that the woman in the token booth might as well have bothered to mention it to me. I know she saw the dog, because in a bold an unexpected display of verve, the hound, happily stimulated by the sights, sounds and smells of late rush hour, lifted his front paws high up in the air and onto the token booth, where he made lingering eye contact with the pitiless and sour MTA employee. Her reaction conveyed nothing. She looked exactly as irritated and contemptous of me had been the case before the dog revealed himself.