ONE MORE LAUGH FROM THE IRREPRESSIBLE ESSAYIST
Cover of a great book (Author photo)
In a recent story on another platform on which I frequently blog, Medium writer Salsam spoke of having loved reading Molly Ivins as a teenager — and set me to reminiscing.
We could use Molly Ivins today. The unstoppable newspaper columnist, author, humorist and political commentator, who died in 2007 at 62, would be skewering our current politicians with gusto. She was one of the best. An Ivins story would always leave you wiser, and often leave you laughing.
My personal Molly Ivins story began one afternoon when I heard my husband Bud guffawing across the hall. We had, at the time, separate writing studios in the attic space of our San Francisco Victorian. I was working on some freelance projects; he’d been working on an anthology.
After he quit laughing and hung up the phone, Bud bounded over to my desk and swatted its corner with a gleeful, “That’s it! I just talked with Molly and the book is a go.”
He had been collecting permissions for a narrowly-defined anthology of stories told by famous writers about their own dogs after the dog had died. Bud was nothing if not focused. Inspired by the response he’d had to a story of his own beloved poodle, Scoop, published shortly after he’d had to put him down, Bud had spent several years searching for similar stories (or, as it turned out, poems) written and published by other grieving literary lights.
By this early afternoon in 1993 he had collected works by James Thurber, Eugene O’Neill, John Cheever, Lord Byron, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . an impressive list that would eventually run to more than forty stories and poems on 200+ pages. They are moving, sad, thoughtful, light-hearted, reflective.
But he really wanted one hilarious piece that Molly Ivins had published — I forget where, and can’t seem to find the original — titled “What’s in a Name?”
Ivins’ story begins with a line explaining that her dog “finally croaked on December 9 after fourteen-and-a-half years of marplotting through life.” (I’ll save you a Google. Marplot means “one who frustrates or ruins a plan or undertaking by meddling.”) An ‘official office dog of the Texas Observer’ in the 1970s, Ivins reported that her canine friend’s “great talent — (was) a genius for fouling things up.”
The name is integral to the story. “I was going to name her something lovely, like Athena,” Ivins writes, “but reality intervened. She was the only dog I ever saw that could trip on the pattern in the linoleum, so we called her S**tface (it’s spelled out in the story, but I don’t want to get in trouble here) for a while, and then it got to be S**t for short, and then it was too late.” It’s easy to see why “What’s in a Name” needed to be in an anthology with the likes of Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’
“When I took S**t to New York in 1976,” Ivins writes, “many people told me it was cruel to keep a ranch-raised dog in a big city. Of course she adored New York — so much garbage to get into, so many other dogs to meet, so little exercise. In a city full of Tsing-Luck poos and Shar-peis, people would look at S**t and say, ‘Oh, what breed is that one?’
“‘Purebred Texas blackhound,’ I always said, and they would nod knowingly and say they’d heard those Texas blackhounds were splendid dogs.”
But one day, having miraculously found a parking place right in front of her Upper West Side building, Ivins let S**t out of the car off-leash to go the several steps to their door. Unfortunately a bicyclist passed by at that precise moment, a man with a baby strapped into a small seat in back, and the Texas/New York dog took off barking.
“Clearly an emergency,” the story continues, “so I let loose, ‘S**T! S**T!’ This caused several neighborhood children to appear out of nowhere and to begin chanting in chorus while pointing at me, ‘She said a dirty word, she said a dirty word.’ The guy on the bike, justifiably upset about having been attacked by this beast, got off in the middle of the street and wheeled around yelling, ‘I’ll have the law on you, lady. Letting your dog run loose without a leash is illegal in this city. That animal is a menace. I’m calling the cops.’
“In the meantime, a woman with an unrelated grievance over the parking space I had just occupied came marching down the block, arms akimbo, saying ‘You have some nerve, you went right ahead and took that parking place, you saw us waiting there, but you went right ahead and took it, I can’t believe your nerve, we were there first but you took that place . . .’ The kids kept chanting, the biker kept screaming, the lady kept bitching, S**t started running around everybody in circles, traffic came to a halt, then backed up through the red light, then two red lights, people got out of their cars to see what was going on, other people farther back started honking. S**t was delirious with the excitement of it all, the cops came, she attacked the cops, by this time traffic was backed up all the way up Amsterdam and down Columbus.
“I loved S**t, but she was quite wearing.”
Eventually, the Texas blackhound came to an untimely, if predictable end.
“She went out with the style we had come to expect from her — hit by a car, but no mere dead dog by the side of the road. Nope. Biggest mess you ever saw and it had to be cleaned up by (Ivins’ friend Kaye) Northcott and myself. We got most of her remains into Kaye’s plastic laundry basket and took her to the pound, the two of us a pair of poorly matched pallbearers.
“The people at the pound were kind, but said they had to fill out a form. They needed my name. My address. And I waited one last time for the question I had answered a thousand times from bemused strangers, enraged neighbors, at kennels, veterinarians’ offices, dog pounds and police stations. ‘What is the dog’s name?’
“I had S**t for almost fifteen years. It seemed longer.”