BEN PORTER

Long Gone Dogs

1.

My dad taught me to read. We lived in a two-bedroom craftsman in South Seattle. It was white with streaks of black mold. I would play outside in our postage stamp yard overlooking a hill. At the bottom was a nightclub where people used to shoot guns and play loud music. One night, a kid stole a car in front of the club and led the police on a chase. He hit a light pole on Beacon Hill and the car caught fire. We heard him scream from across the valley. Three minutes before it stopped. Like a car horn that finally went out.

I was born ten months after my father met my mother. She took care of an old woman in a nice neighborhood and he was a carpenter who worked on the old woman’s house. They would split by the time I was two, him moving us down the street. But Dad was there all the time, drifting through our living room like the Jehovah’s Witnesses that canvassed our neighborhood. He’d eat dinner, fix the sink, argue with Mom, but always left for home about a mile up Rainier.

He’s dyslexic but would try to read me stories before he left, the young man picking carefully among words like the blackberry bushes on our hill.

At the far end of town where the gristle grass—no. The grick… the grick…

Where the grickle grass grows, I yawned.

And like that, over the hum of dying streetlamps outside, I learned to read, mouthing his words, completing his sentences. I remember drawing my finger across the lines, connecting what he meant with each mysterious sign.

Lately, I’ve been reading Ludwig Wittgenstein. I think about how, like my dad, he didn’t take reading for granted. Sentences are deceptive, poor substitutes for meaning. I think about how both men have asked me with complete sincerity, “what is the meaning of a word?”

How did I know what Dad meant by reading, saying the wrong word, switching them around? Wittgenstein thought we are tempted to answer this question by asking, “what is the meaning of a word?” But, as he pointed out, words can’t mean other words. Definitions are fatally circular. Instead, we must ask, “what is the explanation of a word?” Like the explanation of grand theft auto and car chases, the elegant setting of a roof valley on uneven top plates (something my father is very proud to do).

Wittgenstein thought we must ask, “what does the explanation of a word look like?” I wonder what he meant by “look like.” Or should I say, how does he explain “look like?” Or even better, what does “look like” look like? I think his point is that words never come by themselves. Speaking is a kind of acting. And I wonder whether writing is a kind of reading. Under the covers, listening to my father, was the beginning of all the words I’ve written, certainly the ones I am writing now.

Cooking is like this. No one writes a word without reading it (and scratching it out and trying another). And no good food is made without it first being tasted. I wonder, that first taste, is it the last step of cooking or the first bite of my meal? And when I review my sentences, am I reading or still writing?

You may ask whether I am making the meal for someone else. But all writing is for someone else. Even if it's just for you. Wittgenstein said it this way: he asked, “what is left over when I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” Solitary intentions, the use of things, what I noticed my father meant—that’s the way I say it.

The artist Robert Morris sketched blindfolded, drawing his elbow blankly across a dirty page. He didn’t even have the drawing to keep him company. And my father, with his dyslexia, was equally removed, subtracted from the fact of what he said from the fact of what he meant. Part of what I mean is this: writing is lonely but it never seems that way. At least not when you are writing. It comes later, when your fingers cool and the blindfold goes and you’ve spent three hours talking to yourself.

At that point you are your greatest confidant.

What is the meaning of this? How to explain it? But always to yourself.

Even those who read it will be gone a mile up Rainier.

2.

My mother was sixteen when she left her parents and never came back. She was a foreign exchange student in Germany. Her hosts were a small family living in the Black Forest whose children sang, whose father smoked an absurd, baroque pipe. She went to discotheques, conned GIs out of cigarettes and beer. When she got home, she found that her parents had divorced. Her father had remarried and her mother was still an alcoholic.

They sold my dog, she said.

Did you even unpack? I asked her.

She shook her head.

What did you think you were going to do?

Anything, she said. I didn’t care.

Did you have a job? I asked. A place to stay?

Fucking out, she said.

She wasn’t smoking when she said this but my memory wants her to be. Fucking out, she’d say, blue jets shot from her nose.

She tried to quit for three kids in a row. My Dad wanted her to. They’d got back together because we had to move. My mother had called the cops on strange men talking in our driveway and they came back later with guns and shot my Dad’s truck. That’s how my parents reunited: throwing things in suitcases, holding hands on the drive to my grandma’s house in Snohomish.

She did try to quit. I think she felt guilty. Once, when she was pregnant with my brother, I found butts in the garbage can in the side yard. She had recently announced she’d quit; would talk about it in the past tense.

Oh, that’s back when I used to smoke, she’d say.

So, when I found the butts, I assumed they belonged to someone else. I took them into the kitchen where my Mom was folding laundry. My Dad was walking with my sister on his toes.

I think there are people in the side yard, I said.

What do you mean? my dad said. He put my sister down to look.

Not now, I called after him.

When? he said.

And I realized I didn’t know. I searched, building possible realities.

Homeless people, I said, finally. They must be living out there—at night.

My sister got scared.

How do you know? my dad asked.

I found these in the garbage. They must be smoking them.

On yeah, he said, the urgency drained from his voice.

They were now in my mind, hobos, cooking beans in our side yard, swapping stories and smoking Marlboro Reds. I looked at Dad. He was looking at Mom.

What do you think, Lucinda? he asked her.

She was flushed and looked at my sister, cornered.

Yeah, she said. I think I’ve heard of that happening.

Really? I said, surprised, and then wondering why I was surprised. It was my story.

My sister hugged Dad’s legs.

Yeah, I read about it, Mom said. They are getting really bad. Dad shook his head.

Nothing you want to say? he said.

I felt something, the draw of a momentum I didn’t quite understand.

How are we going to keep them out? I heard myself say.

I think we will be OK, Dad said, and left the room.

My sister looked at me and I looked at the window. A minute passed.

Oof, my mother said, stretching her back and rubbing her pregnant stomach. Would you kids like a treat?

That was the first time I saw her lie. But it was also my first self-deception. I knew that she smoked. I had no evidence of hobos. As I think back, it was the first time I had feigned my own innocence, used its presumption to shield something else, something I didn’t want to think about.

Somehow, I knew it was bad if my dad found the butts.

What is the meaning of a lie? How to explain it? Thomas Aquinas said there are three parts: the falsehood of what is said, the will to tell the falsehood, and the intention to deceive.

Saying, wanting, intending. The truth about lies are in the verbs.

Remember Robert Morris? Imagine he draws a horse, or at least means to. Imagine he finishes and leaves his blindfold on.

Robert, what have you drawn?

A horse, he’d say, lifting his cigarette and Zippo.

Is he lying? I don’t think so. It’s what he knows that’s important. That’s why my story about the hobos wasn’t fiction. Not that you can’t lie while writing. I could be doing it now.

The other day I asked my wife to read a story I’d recently finished. In her notes she talked about William Golding. We’ve been thinking about him lately, my wife and I, his style. It’s stunning like a painting. Take this from chapter three of Lord of The Flies. Simon dropped the screen of leaves back in place. The slope of the bars of honey-colored sunlight decreased; they slid up the bushes, passed over the green candle-like buds, moved up toward the canopy, and darkness thickened under the trees. With the fading of the light the riotous color died and the heat and the urgency cooled away… Even as I transcribe this it’s fun to write. I can only imagine how Golding felt. But for all its beauty, something is wrong and it's the same thing my wife saw in my story.

You know how we don’t really care when Piggy dies? she said. This story is kind of like that.

I knew exactly what she meant but felt the need to protect myself from it, to squirm out of it. She meant that, in a way, I had lied. But it wasn’t the falsehood of what I said. And it wasn’t the will to tell a falsehood. It was the intent to deceive. I had written to fool my reader into thinking I felt something other than what I really felt.

Writers do this. I’ll explain. I’ll show you what I was protecting.

The love of reading; it’s natural to get religious about language. But our devotion gets in the way when writing our own. We fall in love with the timbre of a line, the sound of “where the grickle grass grows.” The skin of a page, not its internal organs. This is because intentions, like livers and kidneys, are disgusting to look at, especially if they are yours. I had not written to say something. I had written to sound like someone who has something to say.

In this way I was like a magician who had forgotten he was on the other side of the trick, who had convinced himself he was really a wizard. Style had become my fetish. The idea of a fetish is interesting. It comes from the dark history of African exploitation. When Portuguese sailors first traded with West Africans, they found they held no authority in common by which to ratify trade agreements. So, the sailors invented a ritual. After making a deal they would ask the Africans to swear on the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary. It was this act they called a fetish.

The absurdity of this says something about the sailors. For them, the surface of the ritual was enough, an indulgence in the power of romance. That the Africans didn’t know what it meant was incidental. My wife didn’t like me and Golding making her swear on the head of our stories.

This is also what my dad didn’t like. He didn’t want to swear. As I remember it all, the hobos, their tin cans, the cigarette smoke, I am embarrassed of my intentions. In what had my mother and I become partners? What in our tricks did we think could be magic?

Something else I don’t know is real: the image of my sister clinging to my father’s leg, watching me and Mom spin a yarn from thin air. Were there African children in her position, clinging to their father’s leg as he paid homage to a strange goddess?

3.

The best fiction I can think of is dangerous, the kind I’m tempted to avoid the way my brother avoids dogs. He’s 200 pounds, strong, has had a lot of fist fights. But strange dogs make him flinch and move to pick up his son.

Sam got bit when he was seven and I was twelve. We were walking from our trailer to the neighbor’s property where my mom kept a horse. It was our job to water it. We got there and set the hose up and I told Sam to go turn on the water at the neighbor’s deck. I watched as his little body crossed the field in the dew and the sun was bright. He clambered up the steps and disappeared over the lip of the deck.

I remember the sun, the sound of birds, the shudder of a screen door, the scrape of claws on wood and his scream.

I couldn’t see over the lip.

Our neighbor Owen, swearing, and the thud of boots on dog ribs and screams. I couldn’t see.

Then my brother appeared at the deck and stumbled down the steps. His wrists were limp and his hands flapped as he ran. At first a silhouette and then his face full of blood. I got to him. His nose was peeled open and a red and white cavity gaped at his cheek. Bites in his neck and hands.

He looked at me.

Am I OK?

You’re OK.

Are you sure?

Yeah. You’re OK.

It really hurts.

It hurts more than it is.

OK.

The dogs moaned as Owen kicked them on the deck.

OK. I’m going to get Mom. You are OK.

Am I OK?

You are OK. Don’t worry. I’ll get her.

I ran and heard him cry through the copse and heard the dogs moan, thought how I couldn’t see his face for the blood, for the pieces his face was.

I got to my mother.

I said, Sam got bit by the dogs.

Is it bad? she asked.

Not that bad, I said. Got knocked down. Got bit but it’s not that bad. It’s—it’s not that bad.

She left and I waited. When she got back with Sam she yelled.

You said he was OK!

I tried to speak but couldn’t. I could only look. The sun was bright.

He wasn’t OK. He needed 176 stitches and reconstructive surgery.

Anyone could tell.

Dangerous writing is not a spectacle. But, in search of danger, writers confuse the two. Though it certainly involves spectacles, a presentation of wounds, it must also find a way through them to their significance. This is the rub. A writer must expose their pain but they must also know why.

Joseph Conrad is an interesting case. He is capable of true danger, but also of fetishizing spectacle. Take his early story “The Lagoon.” Tuan is a British colonist and trader. While traveling downriver he visits a Malay man named Arsat alongside whom he has fought in trade wars. Where the Portuguese are engaged in self-deception, Tuan is straightforwardly racist. He likes Arsat because he “knew how to keep faith in council and how to fight without fear by the side of his white friend.” We are told that Tuan “liked him—not so much perhaps as a man likes his favorite dog…”

Arriving at the hut, Tuan finds Arsat’s wife sick and dying. As she struggles to breathe, Arsat tells Tuan the story of their courtship, how they had fled their country, had got his brother killed, forsaken their tribe, all to be together. The story ends with Tuan watching Arsat from his boat. Arsat stands on the beach and stares at the sun.

This story is dangerous, in part, because of the men’s relationship. They share a kind of intimacy; and it's this bond which the story works to reveal, a kind of manly pragmatism, wistful, nonplussed. Friends, masters, slaves, confidants? In the end, Conrad shows their connection is in, and not despite, a certain idea of reality, in death and loss and striving.

The question is, though, so what? If Conrad were blindfolded, what would he think he is drawing? The answer, ultimately, is in the fact of Arsat staring at the sun, a romantic vision of suffering itself. Conrad is conscious of Arsat’s predicament, even sensitive to the irony of his friendship with Tuan. And yet, Arsat is reduced to symbol; not a suffering person but an aesthetic of suffering itself.

The problem is in Conrad’s idea of what suffering is for. He thought it was beautiful, saying, “...awe, love, adoration…hate…visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves.” The terrible predicament of Arsat at the end of “The Lagoon,” is an opportunity to commune with “...the supreme law and the abiding mystery of…sublime spectacle.” Conrad falls victim to Portuguese romance. There is no craft reason for suffering. It is a “moral end in itself.”

A few weeks after my brother got bit, I woke up early to burn garbage.

Outside, the light was on the oil drum perched at the rim of our pond. It was cylindrical, perfect for gas fires. I stepped carefully down the bunk bed ladder, over my brother’s bed where he was asleep, where his special creams and bandages lay next to his bed.

Our front door was off kilter on account of our trailer falling in half, a cracked foundation. I looked at it from where I sat next to the trash in the living room and drew my boots over my pajamas. Light fell in shafts from the windows onto the crack in the floor and I wondered what would crawl out of it. I’d just found a mouse, stepping on the sticky trap I’d forgotten; its heart still beating through its fur and its eyeball stuck to the trap floor.

I went to the shed and dragged the gas canisters off the shelf. The hard liquid slapped against the metal and made it hard to carry but I got it outside. It was already hot. By the shed I could just see the cinderblocks under the trailer, the crack straining our lattice. Inside, our dining table sat over the top of the crack, where I liked to stick my toe in when I ate. It's where Mom had just told us that dad had left her, that he’d used to love her, that maybe he still did but forgot.

I got up and dragged the gas can across the gravel, arcing a trail toward the barrel. By the time I poured the gas over the garbage I was soaked by it—leaky cap, my arm drenched with the aluminum smelling liquid. I stood back. The barrel waved in the fumes and ripples of its own reflection, trailed in the pond. I looked back at the trailer, took out my box of matches.

And struck.

There is also a sense in which Conrad is right. Dangerous fiction is not linear or moralizing. And suffering is spectacular. But he is wrong to depersonalize it. Dangerous fiction trades in fear and evil, but must be vulnerable, must be alive to what is lost.

Remember Arsat staring into the sun? It’s at this moment where Conrad, despite his fetish, is simultaneously excellent. And the reason is that it avoids the spectacular. It's personal and grounded.

“I can see nothing,” Arsat says, “half aloud to himself.”

Tuan responds from his boat, “there is nothing…”

Arsat doesn’t move, just stands, “lonely in the searching sunshine…” looking “…beyond the great light of cloudless day into the darkness of a world of illusions.”

Here, both men are bound by their vision of that world and it's in our acknowledgement of its existence that our chests are torn open. What benefit does the reader have in staring into the abyss with Arsat and Tuan?

Perhaps what Joan Didion said is enough, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Chris Abani’s novel, The Secret History of Las Vegas, tells us why such stories must be dangerous. In it, there is a magical tree upon which people can hang their sorrows in bundles and so be relieved of their suffering. Afterwards, when it comes time to leave the tree, they must take a bundle with them. But not necessarily the bundle they came with. And yet, when they circle the tree and analyze each sorrow, eventually they all take back their own. Abani says, “it seemed that no matter how bad their lot was, they did not prefer anyone else’s [pain] to theirs.” When they leave their happiness fades, but they find instead “a deep joy.”

If this is right, dangerous writing shows us a profound truth: suffering is not an end. It’s a means. But as I write, I wonder.

Why did I tell my mom Sam was OK?

To protect her.

From what?

That’s a dangerous question.

4.

Two truths and a lie. My dad watched his brother beat a man to death in front of an Aerosmith concert; once, my dad hit a man so many times his nose fell off; and the brothers shared a dog named Sparky.

What is a story? Like every act of violence, it is something you do, something for which you are culpable. I come from a family of boxers and street fighters, wrestlers and prison guards. Dangerous people from whom I learned to be hurt and to hurt and how to find pleasure in both. Now I take pleasure in writing but I think it's for the same reason, the transcription of one pain to another. Once, at a wrestling tournament, I was punched in the nose. Instead of calling for time I cranked my opponent's neck until it popped. He tried to signal the referee but I took his hand and hid it beneath his squirming body.

I remember him screaming into my chest.

Stories are a movement of the body, and our descriptions of them are invisible. You can put a book in a bread box but never a story. Same with a punch. They are traces of movement, a process irreducible to their parts. But it's common for writers to be unsure of their intentions, like when, in high school, I was pushed in the back as a joke by a classmate. I turned and threw him over my head. I remember thinking that it was a joke as he dropped toward the lunch table, knowing that I had overreacted, and I wondered why.

It's true that people hurt others because they are angry or afraid. But it's also done for fun, for the rhythm of a counter, for the music of shuffling feet, for the blindfolded intimacy of groping hands on backs and faces. Despite this, and often because of it, there is shame.

I remember driving with my dad when he told me about the man with the nose. He had seen him a few years after the fight.

The guy had said, hey listen, I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it but wasn’t that all a little much?

As he told me about it, my dad's arm was stiff against the steering wheel. I could tell he didn’t want to look me in the eye.

He said he had five surgeries, five, my dad told me. That he couldn’t smell anymore.

He shook his head and he stared silent out the window.

Stupid shit, he said eventually.

The act of fighting is very often a false story, a misperception. A small injustice becomes the wrong justification, a fetish upon whose head we swear. My dad regrets the fight. Not because he picked it or threw the first punch (he didn’t). It was the opportunity he took in the act, the man’s nose used for ulterior motives. It wasn’t so much that he’d fought. It was the intention, the invisible truth of his action.

It's in this way that stories make sense of things: false stories are known for their lack of sense. My grandfather fought in Korea and came home badly shaken. He was stationed in a mental hospital. There, after taking a shower, he stared in the mirror until he saw God’s hand. It reached down from the ceiling, God placing his fingertips on his face and removing it, giving him another face, the one he has today. My grandfather insists this happened; says he saw it.

A week later he was released and went to a dance. There he met my grandmother.

I don’t have stories about what he saw in Korea, the violence he gave or received. But I know about his childhood in Spokane. That his parents were alcoholics; that his mother gave him fistfuls of nickels to watch movies all day; that when he was disobedient, she would dress him as a girl and parade him before the neighbors; that eventually he was taken from her by his religious uncle and beaten until old enough to lie about his age and go to war.

Sometimes stories have a way of making sense of other stories.

I once had a teacher who asked me what my story was about. I told him and he told me it wasn’t. I tried again and he told me I was wrong. I tried three more times until I realized my story wasn’t about anything. It was a pretense. My intention was not to say something, but to have written merely, to be the kind of person who writes.

In this way, the story I gave my wife was a way to avoid the truth. It's what writers talk about when they say they are afraid of the page. The prospect of staring at blankness until all your fears leak out is unpleasant. Unpleasant enough to choose to write about something else.

Stasis, suspension, patience—it’s all too close to death. It's a feeling of inevitability which fails to climax, not so much the violence, but the waiting for it. When I was eleven, our trailer was up a long gravel driveway. Our town had lost its logging rights and a granite mine. People started cooking meth in trailers on service roads like the one we lived on. One night, me and my mother were alone with my brother and sisters. A truck came up our driveway and started doing doughnuts in the front yard. My mother sent my siblings to her room and dialed 9-1-1. I looked outside. The headlights spun and gravel sprayed our windows, the lights illuminating the woods and my face until the truck stopped. I followed my mother into her room. I went to her closet where the gun was. I listened for the car door. I looked at the gun.

Stasis, suspension, death. The way my dad tells it, they left the man in front of the Aerosmith concert. He’d been drunk and shoved my uncle. My uncle had turned and bounced his head off the concrete. After that they went home. Another fight. The next day, at breakfast, the man’s face was in the newspaper my grandfather read. My dad looked at it. My uncle told him it wasn’t him but my dad looked at the face.

As for Sparky, that was my grandma’s dog.

5.

Every dog I’ve owned has died. Goats, too. A horse. A few cats. Long gone. My family makes fun of my attitude toward pets. But I was the oldest and responsible for burying them. I’ve just had to bury too many. Sometimes I feel the same way about friends. Trevor drove a car into a wall. Tim’s motorcycle fell off an overpass. Garret overdosed. Liam, with the long fingers, died of Marfan’s. He was a great piano player.

But, of course, everyone has this problem. I just had the kind of childhood that rewards self-protection, an inward bend. It is useful when one’s parents escape eviction by moving at midnight, or when contemplating the rotten hole gaping in your grandmother’s bathroom floor. More than anything it is these things which make me a writer.

Though they get in the way of sharing your life with a wife and kids.

Something that’s helped is religion. (That’s a different essay, one about something that happens at mass when I’m kneeling before the eucharist and feel torn very deeply indeed.)

That, and of course, books. Since the little white house I’ve read more Dr. Seuss. Got into The Boxcar Children, Sherlock Holmes, Little House on the Prairie. I wrote my first story in second grade. James Bond was contracted to retrieve gold stolen from The Queen of England. The culprit was a leprechaun who lived behind a waterfall. Bond, with the help of a speed boat, retrieved the gold and was knighted for the effort.

Ms. McKinney surprised me by reading it in front of class.

My family grew: two brothers and two sisters. I got more withdrawn, more bookish, sought worlds of stories, built relationships with pretend people. Today, Mom and Dad are the same. Remarried each other three times. Now, they are married though living separately.

One more story.

When I was twelve, my father ran away with his religious secretary, leaving his wife and children alone in the North-Cascades. We waited there, biding our time in the old growth while he bought a condo, went on vacations, thought about adopting a child for his new family. It was on a trip to Zambia, interviewing adoption prospects of the Bemba tribe, when he realized he’d made a mistake. He called it quits with the secretary; left her and returned to us, a Bemba kid in tow, fully adopted, to move back in with my mother.

I watched all this unfold and found it hard to think about. We all acted normally. My mother called the boy her son. Cleaned his bed sores and drove him to the doctor. My father and him would argue. He’d get high with my brother.

One day my dad took me on a long drive in the dark. We had since moved back to Seattle, and his sports car wound along the edge of Lake Washington.

He wanted to know if I was OK.

Do you want to tell me anything? he asked. You haven’t been talking.

I sat in the corner of the passenger seat, stuck somewhere between him and myself, and disembodied, floated outside the car, and looked in. I saw a little person with a fleshy and hot face staring at the dashboard. I didn’t know what to say. I loved him with all my heart.

We drove in silence.

“I feel—like the butler,” I said finally, grasping for a description. Like it's my job in the family just to watch, to see you guys from somewhere else.

I looked at my father and he looked at me, a tired look. He didn’t speak. Cones of light proceeded our gliding silence, unable to find the language that would bring us to conclusion.

Since then, I have found the language.