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Good Dogs Don’t Die Gene Lass For Cindy I
woke up one morning when I was about 4 and looked under my bed. My dog Daisy wasn’t
there. She always slept under my bed and the first thing I would do every morning is look
down and see Daisy. But for the first time, she wasn’t there. I looked all over my
room. She was gone.
I went to my parents’ room, just to the right of my room. They were still
in bed. My mom woke up as I came in. “Mom, where’s
Daisy? I can’t find her.” Mom’s face got
very sad. “Oh sweetie, I’m sorry. Last night while you were asleep your dad
let her outside. She saw another dog across the street and she was hit by a car. Daisy
died.”
I looked at my dad, who nodded. “I bundled her up in a blanket and your mom
called the vet while I drove her over there. He was waiting out front for her, but there
was nothing he could do. She died. I’m sorry.” I
couldn’t believe it. It had to be a trick. But she was nowhere in the house or in
the yard. She was gone. The whole house seemed empty. She would follow me everywhere, all
day long. She even went with me to the bathroom. My mind couldn’t grasp it.
I knew from TV that when people died they had bodies, and funerals, and graves that
could be visited, and I expected the same was true with dogs. My parents said she had a
grave, and we could go to it, but we never did. I expect she was cremated, which is
usually the case with dogs, and that my parents thought I would forget all about it because
I was little, but I never did. Instead, I cried, partially because I missed her, but partially
out of terror, because I was afraid I would disappear. In
the corner of our kitchen was a picture of baby me on the knee of someone I was told was
“Uncle Frank.” This was one of my grandfather’s two brothers, and I was
told he loved me very much, but he had died of cancer not long after I was born. I didn’t
remember ever meeting him, and aside from that picture had no evidence he ever existed.
Similarly, my grandmother, who died of cancer right before I was born was, as far as I
could tell, gone without a trace.
So, for me, dying meant you disappeared. I knew that everyone and everything died
eventually, which meant I, too, would one day disappear, and that scared the hell out of
me.
A few years later, the movies gave me further evidence of this. In “Star Wars”,
Darth Vader killed Obi-Wan Kenobi, causing Obi-Wan to disappear. In “Halloween”,
Michael Myers was pushed out of a window and presumably killed, leaving only an imprint
in the ground. And in “Return of the Jedi,” Yoda died, disappearing just like
his pupil Obi-Wan did earlier. By that time I was old
enough to know that dying wasn’t disappearing, and I had seen death around me, but
it was still meaningless. When my goldfish died, his body was floating in his little bowl,
so I flushed it down the toilet, which made it disappear. I did the same thing with each
fish after that, sending them to wherever dead fish and toilet paper went. The same thing
happened with bugs I killed, or dead birds in the yard, or dead animals on the side of
the road. They might be there today, or even tomorrow, but eventually they were gone and
the status quo of a clean sidewalk, road, or lawn returned. From
that perspective, death didn’t particularly bother me. It wasn’t a state of
being, it was more like a description of space. You’re inside or outside. Up or down.
Alive or dead. If you’re dead, you’re not moving, not breathing, and I can’t
see you anymore, or won’t see you for long. That
was where my mind was in 10th grade, when I killed Dave Egbert. I
had known Egbert since grade school, around 5th grade. He was shorter than me,
but part of a group of kids who gave me a hard time. Some of them were bigger than me,
some smaller, and there were about 5 of them. The big ones could beat my ass
individually, which they had been doing since kindergarten or first grade. The smaller
ones would mock me, or come at me together to overpower me for a light pummeling, or, in
winter, to give me a face wash by rubbing my face in a pile of ice or snow, or to shove
snow down the back of my shirt, or to give me a nice classic grundy. Thanks to them, for
years I always had several pairs of underwear that had been stretched so far in back that
they sagged, and it was rare that I went a week during the school year when I wasn’t
healing from a fat flip, a black eye, a bloody nose, or a number of bruises. I
was easy prey for Egbert and that group of assholes, thanks to my name, and for that I
laid blame on both my parents and my grade school teachers. My
parents named me Galen, after my father, and his father before him. It’s a classic
name, though not a common one. It means “calm” in Greek, and there was a famous
doctor named Galen in ancient times, which was fitting since my grandfather was also a
doctor. But kids will pick on any name that’s unusual, and Galen is unusual, so they
latched on to it.
My parents can’t be blamed for our last name, Gustad, but my teachers –
all of them up through high school, were to blame for how they pronounced it. Gustad is
easy to pronounce – GUStad, with “Gus” like “muss” or “fuss”
and “tad” like “mad”, “bad,” “sad.” Like
I said, pretty fucking easy. However, being a teacher is no guarantee that someone is intelligent.
Quite the opposite, really. If there’s a way to fuck something up, a teacher will
find it, and they have a knack for making easy things complicated. So every year, the first
week of school, even though the teacher had already met me and my parents at orientation
and been told how to pronounce my first and last name, and they dutifully took notes, they
would ignore those notes, and what they had been told, and say my name as, “GOOStad.
Galen GOOStad, are you here?” I’d say my name
currently, and say, “Here,” but starting with first grade, idiots in class
would start giggling and saying “Goose! Goosestad! Goose!” This would be followed
later on with also saying I walked like a goose, and when I had bronchitis my coughing
was honking like a goose, and if I did something wrong it was because I was a silly goose.
Then think of the joy of having indoor recess when it rained or snowed. Sometimes we’d
play “Duck Duck Goose”. By default, I was always the goose, at least when it
was a boy doing the counting. Girls didn’t take part in the teasing and other bullshit.
Always the guys, usually the same guys, but no one telling them not to, no one speaking
up on my behalf, no kids, no teachers, no one. I was fucked. By
fifth grade the kids figured out that Galen sounded like “gay”, which gave
them more to work with. Now I was “the gay goose”, which they thought was a
riot. I had enough, I tried laughing it off, I tried fighting back, and sometimes I did
okay, but mostly I got beatings again, if not that day, then on another day when I’d
be ambushed with greater numbers, or maybe there would be an unfortunate incident in gym
class where I’d take a ball to the face in dodgeball, or a kick to the nuts or shins
in soccer.
Hormones kicked in in 7th and 8th grade, and with them, zits
and greasy hair, plus allergies and sinus infections, which made me a pimply, greasy, awkward,
uncoordinated mess right when I started liking girls. High school didn’t make things
any better. Then I started to smell, with my arm pits sweating and stinking no
matter what deodorant I tried, even when I put deodorant on three times a day. One day,
Mark Calfi, one of my old tormentors from grade school, came up behind me, ruffled my hair
with his hand, wiped his hand on his shirt and said, “What do you have there, goose
grease?”
The other
idiots were with him and they all laughed. I took a swing at Calfi, aiming for his mouth.
He dodged, the other kids stepped back and started to chant, and I was pulled from behind
and slammed into a locker by Mr. Hofstedder, the giant gym teacher I thought of as Lurch.
He didn’t know or care that Calfi had started it, he just saw me swing on him, and
that got me a detention.
The next day, I was in Algebra class, Dave Egbert was sitting in front of me. Right
after glass started, when Ms. Whalen was doing her thing at the front of the class, he
started chanting, just loud enough for me to hear and no one else.
“Goooossssse. Gooossssee.
Gay. Gay Goossseee!”
“Shut up!” I hissed.
He said it again. I kicked the back of his chair.
“Mr. Gustad!” Ms.
Whalen said. “What’s your problem?” “He’s
whispering stuff at me!”
“I am not!”
“He’s not!” Frank Adams, one of Egbert’s friends, sitting
a few seats away, said.
“Galen, if you do that again, you’re getting a detention!” Whalen
said.
As soon as she turned around to write an equation on the board, he started again. “Gay
Goossse!”
I tried to ignore him. Adams looked back at me and sneered. He knew they had me.
As usual. Egbert continued. I tried to ignore him. I couldn’t block him out. I could
feel my face burning in rage and frustration. Fifteen minutes before
the end of class, the fire alarm went off. Ms. Whalen turned around.
“All right class, this is a fire drill. I’ll head to the door and you can follow
me out in an orderly manner.”
The class stood. Egbert and I were in the furthest row from the door, by the windows.
He hadn’t gotten up yet. When he did, I positioned myself behind him. When Whalen
was out the door and all the kids were facing that way, on their way out, I put my hands
on either side of Dave’s neck and squeezed. He
made a noise like a stifled hiccup and put his hands on top of my hands, but he couldn’t
pull my hands away. Kids kept filing out the door, oblivious. The fire alarm kept going
off. All anyone else could hear was the alarm and hundreds of footsteps in the halls. After
a bit Dave’s knees got week and he started to slump to the floor. I changed my grip
and got in front of him, looking at his face as it turned red. His eyes were rolling back
in his head. His hands were still trying to grip mine or bat them away. I took no notice.
Foam started to come out between his lips.
I remember staring very intently at him, trying to almost stare into his mind, get
into his head. I loved seeing his face like that. It was the most beautiful face, the most
beautiful thing I had ever seen. My hands felt powerful, like they were spring loaded traps,
like they’d never get tired. I leaned into my work, pressing down from my shoulders,
finally feeling like I was having the upper hand, like I was a winner. I
heard another noise, a pop that reminded me of when my mother asked me to help her debone
a chicken for dinner. She had boiled it for broth, and I was rendering the pieces. I
grabbed a thigh and when I pulled the leg out of it it made a popping sound just like Dave’s
neck, or his throat, or whatever was giving way at that moment. I
could feel Dave’s pulse beneath my hands, especially in my right hand, right at the
base of my fingers. It pounded so hard I thought it would break through the skin, then
weaker and weaker until I could barely feel it. By then he was limp on the floor and his
hands didn’t bat at me anymore. I kept on squeezing, my shoulders getting tired.
My face felt funny, tired. I realized I had been smiling the whole time. Dave was dead. He
didn’t disappear like Obi-Wan, or Yoda, or Daisy. He was still there, lying on the
floor, and I was crouched over him. I stood and continued staring at him, vaguely aware
that Dave had pissed himself right through his soccer shorts and gotten some on me.
He shit himself, too. I thought of that as a bonus. I wasn’t sad that he was dead.
I didn’t feel guilty. He had it coming. They all had it coming. All those assholes,
I knew I wouldn’t get the others, but I got Dave. I spat on his face,
kicked him in the side, then sat down. I was tired. I waited for the class to come
back from the fire drill, then decided to just walk to the office instead. I didn’t
want to hear the girls scream, or worse yet, to have Ms. Whalen go into hysterics. They
were all so loud, all so stupid. I didn’t want to put up with his stupid friends
either. So I went to the office, sat down, and said, “I just killed Dave Egbert.
You should call the police.”
I don’t remember much of the trial. There wasn’t much of them. I pleaded
guilty. I didn’t ask for a lawyer, I didn’t want to see my parents, though
I did. Fuck that. I tried to act catatonic. I was just done. I didn’t want to say
anything to anyone. I just wanted to get to the sentencing and be put away. I remember
asking everyone if I could get the death penalty. The lawyer they made me have didn’t
understand the question. He said, “You’re a minor and it’s your first
offense. You won’t get the death penalty. They won’t execute a minor.”
I said, “I want to be tried as an adult. I want the death penalty. I don’t
want to plea bargain or any of that. I just want to be done. Tell them to execute me.”
My lawyer, and my parents, took that as an indication that I was depressed and not
in my right state of mind. It was used in my defense. I hoped for life, then. I got 30
years to life. I got my GED inside, started taking other classes. A lot of the guys
inside study law so they can get out. I don’t want to get out. I just want to be
done. The state wouldn’t execute me, but maybe someone with a shiv will. I’ve
already disappeared from the outside world. If I’m killed then I’ll disappear
from the inside, too.
A Sad and Frightening Tale by Gene Lass
My dad worked
in the restaurant and food supply business his entire
career, providing things like produce, frozen goods, spices, soup bases, and equipment
to schools, hospitals, and restaurants all over Kansas City. He knew all the chefs and
cooks, the kitchen managers, and the restaurant owners, and he knew where you wanted to
eat, and where you never wanted to go. As Anthony Bourdain would reveal to the world in
“Kitchen Confidential” decades later, the business is full of secrets and drama.
One night when I was in 8th grade, there was a story on our local news
that hit close to home. Missing man Daniel Latti had been found dead in the trunk of his
car near a hotel in East St. Louis. It’s already unusual to be found dead in one’s
own trunk. What was more unusual was, his car was parked with the trunk backed up against
a tree. He also had a small caliber gunshot wound to his head. Police ruled the death a
suicide, though they never explained why he would have backed the car against a tree, why
he shot himself while in the trunk, or how he could have climbed into the trunk to shoot
himself with the car backed into a tree.
Dad knew a few things. One, Latti was in deep debt. He had invested in a restaurant
and catering business, and as is usually the case in the restaurant industry, it was failing.
To stay afloat, he had borrowed money from the wrong people. No one knew specifically
whom he owed money to, but there were plenty of bad options.
The other thing Dad learned was a detail they didn’t include in the news stories:
When Latti was found, his pockets were turned inside-out, a mafia sign that he owned money.
Mafia involvement answered the rest of the questions about his death, from the trunk
to the ruling of death by suicide. Chicago, New York, and Washington weren’t the
only places where such things could be bought or arranged.
The news of Latti’s death faded and life returned to normal. Then two years
later, there was news that shook my school. Latti’s son John was found dead from
an apparent suicide. This also made local news, as it always does when a teen is found
dead. He was in middle school, 8th grade. I was a year older, a freshman and
didn’t know him, but we lived in a small suburb, so I knew people who knew him. It
was believed that he killed himself because he missed his father and wanted to be
with him. Students throughout the
school district were advised that if we had a hard time dealing with this, we should talk
to our parents, as well as school administration, who would be able to help. It’s
always a concern that teens will copycat each other when it comes to suicide, and at the
time this was a particular concern because of the purported effects of hidden and explicit
messages in heavy metal music driving kids to kill themselves. I
was pretty blasé’ about the whole thing. As I said, I didn’t know John, and
didn’t see why his death would make me think I should kill myself, nor did I think
I should want to kill myself because of a song. Not that I wasn’t suicidal. I was
and had been for several years at that point, I just thought it made a lot more sense to
want to kill yourself because the world was a fucking shithole, and that it also was a
person’s own business if they wanted to do it. So, after a few days of buzz around
the school of what happened, things again went back to normal. Senior year I ended
up getting involved in A/V Club, mainly because it got me out of homeroom, and so
I could hang out with my girlfriend, who joined the club with me. There, I met Mrs. Latti,
a very nice lady. Dad would sometimes send me to school with things for her kitchen like
spices, soup base, and olive oil, because he knew she was having a hard time making ends
meet. She was still raising two kids, now on one income, and Daniel had left her with nothing
but the house and its mortgage. Mrs. Latti was typically very upbeat, but sometimes she
would listen to the song, “The Living Years” by Mike and the Mechanics over
and over again in her office with the door partially closed and not say anything all morning.
It was very sad.
Later that year, something very weird happened. I
had gotten involved in Drama Club, and as part of that took part in the state one-act play
competition, this time as part of the crew instead of the cast, because it seemed like
more fun. Our play was the classic “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,”
and we actually did really well, winning all the competitions, until we found
ourselves in Stevens Point, WI, at the finals, where we again won. That got us really nothing
but bragging rights, but it was cool to win.
The night before the finals, we were staying at the Holiday Inn Holidome in downtown
Kansas City. I was assigned to be one of the room leaders, meaning I was in charge of myself
and the other 2 guys from our school staying in the same room. It was still before curfew,
so we scouted around and ended up hanging out with more of the cast and crew in another
room. Freshman Rob Mitford, who was playing Linus, was sitting on the floor playing with
a Ouija board with Scott, one of the freshmen on the crew. One of my classmates, Shannon
Henreid, who was playing Sally, was standing in the corner of the room, watching, and I
was in the opposite corner. On the floor, the guys
using the Ouija board contacted a spirit. It said it was male. “What’s your name?” Rob asked The planchette moved over the letters J O H N. From her spot in the corner, Shannon suddenly
looked less bored. “How old were you
when you died?” Scott asked The planchette moved over
1, then 4. “Wow, that’s
like our age!” Scott said. Shannon quit leaning against
the wall and stared intently at the kids, but didn’t say anything. “Who
were you close to in life?” Rob asked. The
planchette spelled out F A T H E R. Shannon
kept staring, not blinking. “How did
you die?” Scott asked. It spelled out
W I R E.
Rob and Scott looked at each other in confusion. Shannon, now breathing heavily
said, “That’s it, I’m out of here!” and bolted from the room. I
followed her to the atrium area, where she was leaning over the railing, looking at the
pool area below. “Hey,”
I said, coming up next to her. “What’s wrong?”
Before the one-act competition, I knew Shannon from French class, and from chamber
choir. She sang alto and I sang bass. She was cute but not girly. She never wore makeup,
and was plagued with chronically bad skin. I sometimes considered asking her out,
but she seemed to have a sense for when I was thinking about it, deftly heading me off
by talking to someone else, or leaving. She looked at me and laughed
gently. “You don’t have to save me, Jean.” She pronounced my name
Zhawn, what I was called in French class. I
rolled my eyes at her. “I know.” Our interactions
were normally limited to rolling our eyes at whatever was happening, wherever we were.
I stayed where I was and said softly, “So what’s wrong.” She shook her head, accepting that I was
staying. “Those kids were too
young to know John Latti. They would have been in grade school when he died and didn’t
even go to the same school. I was his best friend!” She looked up and paused. Her eyes got wet. The
tears were there, but she held them back. When she spoke again, the words came in a rush.
“Everyone thinks he killed himself because they said on the news that he hanged himself.
I never thought he did. I always thought it was a mistake.” She looked me
in the eye, speaking carefully. “He didn’t
use a rope. They never said it on the news, but I went there after he died, and his mom
told me. It was a wire loop. I saw it before, when I was down there with him. There was
a box on the floor and a wire loop hanging there from a support beam. It was dark in the
basement. John’s mom sent him down to get something.” Shannon paused again, her face contorting. “I
think he tripped on the box and got his neck caught in the wire. That’s where his
mom found him, dead. They said it was quick. He wasn’t depressed or suicidal! He
missed his dad, but he didn’t kill himself to be with him. John told me himself,
as hard as life became, he knew his dad wanted him to live. Those kids wouldn’t know
about the wire, or any of that. She looked at me again,
the tears coming now. “He was my best friend!” She sniffed, then laughed. “We
used to play that we would get married one day. I thought I should tell him, once I figured
out I liked girls, that we weren’t going to get married, so he could make other plans.
I told him before I even told my parents. They still don’t know.” She laughed again and smiled.
“He just rolled with it. He said he still wanted to take me to prom one day. Guess
that’s not happening.” She
pulled a tissue out of her pocket and wiped her nose.
“After that, I was able to tell him everything. He knew how hard it was to be the
good kid of the family. We were both the oldest kids. John figured after his dad died that
he’d have to be the man of the family and help his mom with the other kids. Another
reason he wouldn’t want to die.” Hearing
this from Shannon made me love her a little. I’ve
always been drawn to intelligence and pain. There were plenty of blonde, big-haired girls
in chorus and drama club, girls with perfect makeup and better grades than me. I had no
interest in them. They might as well have been made of plastic. I wanted the ones with
hearts, stories, and preferably some guts. At that moment, even with her acne and lack
of makeup, Shannon was the coolest girl I knew. The tears dried on her cheeks and she sniffed
again. “In my family, Pat has always been the bad kid, even though he’s not
bad, he just doesn’t get straight A’s without trying the way I do.” She uttered
a curt laugh. “I get the A’s, but I have no idea what I’m going to do with
myself. No plan at all.” She looked down, then looked
at me again. “One day last year, before school, I went down to breakfast high on
acid, with another piercing in my ear.” She pointed at a small gold stud in her left
ear, the size of a pencil point. “I wanted to know if my parents would notice, if
they saw me at all. They didn’t. I smoke a pack of cigarettes a week, and they don’t
notice that either. For them I’m invisible and Pat can’t do anything good enough.
I could kill someone in the living room right in front of them and somehow, they’d
blame it on him. John saw that the first time he came over, in 4th grade. He
could tell. He knew me better than anyone, and I knew him. There’s no way he wanted
to die.” We were quiet then. I wanted
to hug Shannon, thought about it. Standing less than a foot away, I could feel her breath,
smell cigarette smoke lingering on her jean jacket, but I didn’t try to touch her.
I thought it was enough to be there with her and let her tell her story. I’ve always thought that in his way,
through the Ouija board, John was saying goodbye to Shannon. I hope she thought that,
too.
Gene Lass has professionally written, edited, co-written, or contributed to more
than a dozen books, and has published nine books of poetry and two collections of short
fiction. His most recent book of poetry, American, was one of the Amazon
Top 100 Books of American Poetry. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Every
Day Poems, The Albatross, KSquare, Electric
Velocipede, Schlock!, Coffin Bell Journal, and Black
Petals. His short story, “Fence Sitter,” was nominated for Best of the Web
in 2020.
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