There’s a notion that popped into my head not long ago that I can’t unpop. Life is a constellation in the night sky – an assortment of points, stars, between which we look at from a distance. We see lines connecting those points that make up the bigger picture. That bigger picture forms the story of our lives.
One of those points in my sky appeared in April of 2010…
Cocoa had been gone for about a year. I had puppy fever. Charlie and Chase were still so young, and I wanted them to grow up with a dog in their lives. I wanted them to develope that special strain of humanity that only loving a dog brings. Tiffany had seen that someone had made a post on Facebook about a dog at the Pasadena Humane Society.
His name was Osito. This was his photo on the Facebook post.
The post was frantic. Two-year-old Osito needed to be adopted. The deadline to terminate this animal had already long passed. Who knew how long Osito had?! Who knew if Osito was alive at that moment?! Maybe they finally got around to it and he was already done for.
By the time we happened upon this post it was 11:30 at night. The Humane Society was already closed. There was no way to find out if Osito was alive or dead. As I went to bed that night, I made a resolution out loud. I was going to let the chips land where they may. I’d call the Humane Society in the morning, and if by some incredible chance Osito was still alive…well then, we’d have to just go take a look.
But there was another wrinkle. We were supposed to go to Disneyland that next day with Joyce and the family. So I resolved further, “If it is meant to BE then somehow our Disneyland visit will be cancelled. Good Night GOOD NIGHT I SAY!!!”
And would you believe it we woke up to the news that Disneyland was canceled – one of Joyce’s kids had a fever. I don’t remember who but I’m guessing it was Piper.
That fever changed our lives.
I called the Humane Society as soon as they opened. Osito was still alive. But they impressed on us…he doesn’t have much time.
I piled the girls and my wife in the car. We hurried over to the Humane Society. We made our introductions with Osito in the meet and greet area. My memory is that he was more interested in sniffing the plants. He was bigger than the photo from the post led me to believe. Quite a lot bigger. But I knew he was going home with us and I wasn’t going to worry about all the rest.
While processing Osito’s release, we learned that he’d had a tough life up until that point. He was brought in with severe wounds from a vicious attack by another dog that needed surgery that previous January. After his owners took him home, they returned him a week later to give him up. Apparently, the family was losing their home and couldn’t keep him. Osito had been at the Humane Society all those months. So long that in many ways he was institutionalized. A proverbial Brooksie in Shawshank. Nobody was interested in adopting him. A Husky/Pit mix, not adoption material for most. He was past due to be put down. But even through all that, Osito was clearly a sweet, tail-wagging knucklehead.
We were told Osito was a “volunteer favorite.” And that was proven to us over and over as every worker and volunteer in the joint came in and lit up with relief and joy when they realized that we were taking him home. One volunteer even started to tear up and hugged us. Everyone was so grateful that as a gesture of thanks, the Pasadena Humane waived all adoption and processing fees. We were told that someone had made a donation for this exact circumstance and that if any pooch deserved it, it was Osito.
As we walked across the Humane Society parking lot with Osito I asked Charlie if she wanted to change his name. She didn’t miss a beat.
Frankenstein. Frankenstein Cocoa Dodge. Frankie for short.
And that is how we started our lives with Frankie. A dog who outlived the writing the wall. From the first day we brought Frankie home with us, we always said, “This dog’s life is nothing but gravy.”
But the honeymoon only lasted about a day, as I quickly realized I was in over my head with this guy. I’m just going to say it…
From the get-go, Frankie was a major pain in my ass:
Frankie was reactive to other animals. He would snap at any dog that got excited around him. Especially little dogs – who are always snappy and yippy to begin with. More than once, Frankie turned that reactive energy to me and bit me in the leg as I walked him, drawing blood.
I enrolled Frankie in the Humane Society’s Reactive Rovers class. We fuckin’ failed and had to repeat the class like a couple of flunkies.
Frankie was a howler. He was a husky/pit mix. Huskies love to howl. Our house is just down the street from a retirement home – a frequent stop for ambulances and fire engines as old people do nothing but drop in places like that. This meant a lot of sirens, multiple times a day. This meant a LOT howling for Frankie. I didn’t even fathom the chances of that one. The neighbors quickly became annoyed. Some called the police to complain.
Frankie was a diarrhea king. Regular (reasonably priced) dog food turned his asshole into nothing but an angry volcano of hot spewing liquid shit. It quickly overwhelmed the yard. It wouldn’t seep down into the ground fast enough but was too liquified to pick up. I had to buy special chemicals to try to keep it under control. I couldn’t keep up with the endless flow of nightmare that was squirting out of this animal. The vet was stumped as to how to fix it. Nothing worked. I went through a crazy trial and error run of so much diarrhea. I miraculously landed on the ONE (expensive) kind of dog food that didn’t upset Frankie’s stomach. It was a grim undertaking.
When Frankie had to go pee, he would walk right up to the edge of the grass but always just whiz on the sidewalk, his stream missing the grass by millimeters. EVERY TIME. And his stream was usually so strong that it would gush over his own front paws. He’d just…let loose and look up at me as if that was the best moment of his life as he soaked his own feet with piss, and once he finished, he would step through the massive puddle with his back feet as well. Every walk resulted yellowed piss paws.
Frankie had boundless energy. I bought a special dog leash set-up for my bike and would run him every morning. That did nothing. He’d still run around the yard, like some sort of off brand Boogie Nights Alfred Molina. He’d leap at the fence as people walked by. We finally had to mount a wire grate top to the fence to prevent his head from popping over and terrifying passers-by. Every time someone would merely walk by our yard Frankie would bite at the wire, which ultimately chipped his front teeth, completing his junkyard dog aesthetic. Frankie would run so hard and fast into the dog house that I bought for him that he destroyed it. Let me repeat, he literally reduced his first dog house, a house that was supposed to last a lifetime, to a wobbly shambles a la the Three Little Pigs.
Once, while at the beginning of a walk in the park, Frankie peed on my leg, thinking it was a tree. That elicited such an apoplectic rage in me that I turned right around, marched him back in the car, and drove home, screaming the entire way. He was utterly confused as to why. Another time after a huge poop, Frankie kicked the shit with his back leg, firing it so hard into the air that it smashed into the white door of a new BMW parked in the street. This was during a bike ride so I bolted away from that scene so fast that Frankie thought we were playing, and he ran more quickly than I could ride, pulling me wildly down the street with my feet off of the peddles because they were moving so fast.
Frankie would shed fur like no other animal I have ever known. His yard would clog up with fur. His doghouse would pile up with fur. When he was inside, the house would have fur everywhere, immediately. Our dryer’s lint catcher was perpetually full of fur. Whenever we’d scratch or pet him it would produce such an eruption of fur that your hand would feel like they were wearing mittens.
I was so desperate to get this mutt under control I finally hired a private dog trainer. This guy was a professional’s professional. He was calm, focused, and never smiled. At one point, the trainer rewarded Frankie with a dog treat. Frankie gobbled it so recklessly that he choked, resulting in a violent, simultaneous barf and fart. The trainer lost his mind at this, laughing to the point of tears and a sideache. He told me that in all his years of working with dogs he’d never seen such a maniacal display before. Sadly, the trainer stopped coming – he claimed to have moved away.
Less than a year in, I felt so overwhelmed that I didn’t think I could handle Frankie. The howling. The shit problems. The neighbors calling the cops. The smell of poop that never left our yard. My bitten legs. One night I finally broke down, crying to Tiffany, just wracked with guilt. “I don’t think I can do this. I think I made a horrible mistake!” I called up a friend who owned two acres and horses and asked him if he’d be interested in taking Frankie, warts and all. He was interested. I felt like I was going back on a promise, that I was no better than the people who abandoned Frankie, before. But I just didn’t know what to do. I was going to have to give Frankie up. There’s no way I could continue with this life.
And then Chase came home from a birthday party at Color-Me-Mine. She made this:
And that little ceramic Frankie clarified everything for me. This whole thing was so much bigger than me.
…Fuckin’ dog.
I buckled down. I stopped fighting the process, whatever the fuck it was. I focused on working with Frankie with his problems. I became a student of all of his expressions, his movements. It got to the point where I knew what Frankie was going to do before he did. I could see the simple gears underneath his thick skull working…I knew what dogs he was going to react to. I knew when to get the poop bag ready because a pile was forthcoming.
Frankie had a lifetime of love from Charlie and Chase.
Charlie would hug him, squeezing his neck until he squirmed. Chase would quietly pull a chair out into his yard and sit with him and read. Sometimes, Chase would forego a chair altogether and sit atop his new, industrial-strength “Dogloo.” Chase taught Frankie how to use a service bell to ask for treats. Once Charlie started wearing make up we would find kissy marks all over the poor dog’s head.
I know the girls have their countless memories and moments with him. I wish I knew them all.
And as the years went by, he, of course, calmed down for the most part. He hated watching people leave through the front gate, which was his vantage point from his yard, and he would bark and howl until they came back. This forced the family to resort to always using the garage to come and go. Eventually, Frankie started to relate the sound of the garage door to someone’s arrival – and he’d always perk up when he knew someone was coming home.
I think for those first few years, as I was throwing myself whole into maintaining this beast and the girls, of course, were giving him the precious love all kids give to their pets, it was actually hard for Tiffany and her parents to allow themselves to love Frankie. The loss of Cocoa was so sad for them, and I think they didn’t want to experience that pain ever again. Thus, in those early years, Frankie was MY project.
But all it took was time. Soon my in-laws were sneaking Frankie Chinese food, and Tiffany was taking daily walks with us. Frankie was a member of our family.
Frankie became my BBQ buddy, although he couldn’t cook worth shit. Early on he was a maniac whenever I fired up the grill. But over the years he transitioned to a more I’ll play it cool and then sometimes maybe pout strategy.
He was also was the world’s worst writer’s assistant, but I enjoyed typing away as he snoozed under the desk, always mindful of having some part of his body touching my feet for security. Ultimately, he’d wake up and demand I scratch him by bucking my hands away from the keyboard.
Frankie hated baths. You would have thought there was acid in the water. If a bath took too long he would start to howl about the bullshit of it all.
Frankie was included on all the Christmas Card shenanigans every year since we started, and was always a good sport.
Frankie always had an odd shape – it’s as if his body forgot to grow into itself. His shoulders bigger than his head.
His thick, meaty melon was proportioned almost in a Far-Side fashion.
All of his teeth were broken at odd angles. He had a brown patch over one eye and a smaller brown patch over his other that gave him an exaggerated eyebrow. As he grew older, that brown eyebrow faded into the rest of his white coat.
The expression on his face would never quite reveal if he was smart, or an idiot.
Frankie didn’t really carry himself like a smart animal. He was goofy and distracted and was never eagle-eyed or aware of his surroundings. The one amazing skill he had was solving dog puzzles. I had bought the hardest puzzle I could find with the hope of occupying this maniac for five whole minutes, and I found one that was shown on youtube as being very difficult for even the smartest of dogs – if a dog was good it would take five minutes. Frankie solved that fucker in 60 seconds. Not sure if it was a marketing ploy to make you think your dog is smart, but I’ve always been happy to chalk it off as a plus for Mister F.
Frankie didn’t have many canine pals. He had only three. There was a neighboring female Dalmation who he always wanted to pal around with but she hated his guts. Later, he befriended another knucklehead pit bull named Zeus, who’s youth turned the tables on Frankie. And finally, Frankie’s best pal in the whole wide world, at least in his mind – his cousin, Booty. When Frankie was younger he’d try to initiate play by doing what is called a “muzzle punch.” Every time Booty saw Frankie coming he would run for the hills.
Over the years, Frankie earned an assortment of nicknames: Captain Bacon Butt (He had a tiny brown patch on his white rump – he also had a warped-looking mickey mouse head-shaped freckle on his penis.) Boner Boy (Jesus, he got a lot of boners.) Brick Boy (He’d pull bricks out of the yard and use them as pillows. Mister F (Inspired by Arrested Development’s Mister E.) Frahnkenshtein (Young Frankenstein.) Pee Paws (Already covered.) Hobo Dog. Finally, Old Man.
Frankie would often sleep on his back, legs spread-eagle. Sometimes it was to give his gear some sun, sometimes it was just the way he was. He’d snore. He’d fart. He’d constantly offer up the muffled “Fwoof fwoof fwoof” from his doggy dreams.
When you held his big head in your hands and scratched him behind his ears he would respond with a very human sounding, “Oohhhh” as he gazed up into your eyes.
If he felt something was unfair, he’d sneeze as if to say, “Horseshit!” But he would also sneeze in your face if you were giving him affection. He seemed to think sneezing was some sort of complaint or compliment.
Being in a household of four women and only two men, Frankie definitely did help bring a little bit more of a male energy into the house – even if it had a tinge of Hobo vibe as well. He was a meat-head dude ready to hang out, lick his junk, then fall asleep and let it all hang out.
Over the years Frankie went on a small road trip or two. Typically he would claim a chair as his own the moment he walked into a hotel room. Then the girls would mercilessly tease him by trying to keep him awake.
During the pandemic we took him on a quick little jaunt to Palm Springs, where he very unintuitively walked right into the hot tub, face first. It did not relax him.
As time passed Frankie grew calmer. He completely lost his hearing, and arthritis found its way into his bones. He grew slow in getting up and although he couldn’t hear the sirens outside to howl at – he started to just howl when he wanted something – scratchies, for me to come back into a room, or whatever else was on his mind.
Occasionally even in his advancing age he would find some sort of mess to get into. Usually, it was toppling over planters and rolling around in the dirt.
After Charlie went off to college, Tiffany and I decided to let the old man come inside the house whenever he wished. We set up a bed upstairs in our bedroom and a bed in the corner of the living room, where he’d snooze in our company at whim, and then retire upstairs come bedtime. Even in his senior years, Frankie would frantically paw at his beds, nesting like a maniac. All throughout the night. On many occasions, I would wake up and whisper scream at him, “WHAAT?! WHATGODAMMIT WHAT??!!!!!!!!!” Although he couldn’t hear me, he’d just freeze after he’d notice my pained, contorted face, then lay down on his bed with a HARUMPH.
But let me refocus on something more important than yet another complaint. These past few years spent with Frankie really made me realize what a sweet, sweet boy he was.
Nothing made him happier in the world than to simply be with us. He’d always show his appreciation for delicious food by wagging his tail until the last bite was swallowed. When sleeping up in our room, one of the main reasons why he’d paw at his bed so madly was that he was moving his bed closer to either Tiffany or me. He always wanted us to be happy with him. He’d lick us all day long if we let him.
He quickly realized the kitchen was a place of food miracles and he’d dote on Tiffany’s Mom and Dad once he found out that they were easy marks for treats. And he was always gentle and generous with the girls in ways that he wasn’t even with Tiffany and me. I feel like these past few years were crucial and made us all even closer to Frankie.
A few months ago, Frankie had to have an emergency Splenectomy. They found a tumor on his spleen that was causing him to lose blood, and he needed it removed to survive in the short term. The doctors told us that he probably wouldn’t have much longer to live. Months, maybe a year at most. Our focus was just getting Charlie back from school for summer break so that she and Chase could spend more time with him for one last summer.
And so, the dog whose life was gravy thus far was now given super gravy-time.
And it was a wonderful summer of lasting hugs and Frankie howling wildly whenever I left a room and horrible farts while we were all watching television and Frankie trying his hardest to climb up those stairs with his tired bones every night for bedtime. And good food. Fuck that diet food. Diahhrea be damned.
But it finally came time for the gravy to run out.
The night of August 9th, I could see something in Frankie’s face. It was my sixth sense with him. Something wasn’t feeling right.
On August 10th, the guy made me doubt myself, as he was more alert and youthful and active than he’d been in a long time. On his evening walk, I took a picture of him and wondered to myself, “Is this my last photo of him?”
On August 11th Frankie woke up not wanting to come down the stairs. Not wanting to eat. Once at the pet hospital, we were told that the cancer had come back.
And Frankie C. Dodge, who came into this world unwanted, left it surrounded by a group of people who loved him: Tiffany’s parents, Charlie and Leo, Chase, Tiffany, and me.
Another point in the sky for me to draw a line to, giving my life story more shape.
It was insane that we had to get on a flight to Hawaii that very evening.
As the plane lifted off the tarmac I remember wondering if I’d be able to just leave my pain in LA.
Not really. Sometimes. But not really.
The night we returned, as we got off the freeway and closer to our house, the tears started to quietly roll down Tiffany’s and my cheeks- almost in sync, in the dark, without us speaking or looking at one another. It was delayed for a week, but for the first time we were returning to a house without its dog, and it washed over us stronger with every mile we got closer to home. That was a very tough night to get through.
Truth be told I didn’t want to write this. I don’t know why I was suddenly compelled to. I fully realize these poorly fashioned words are just so fucking trivial and diaphanous when held up to the blinding light of my broken heart. This is the best I can do.
I love you, Frankie. Fuck, I miss you. You made us all better people. Good boy.
