TWO PUGS BATTLE THE BRUNCH SQUIRREL

The squirrel keeps coming back. On the fence. He comes in the morning like clockwork. Like the frayed edges of burnt caffeine withdrawal. He comes and twitters his whiskers, whisks his tail like an egg beater into thin air, churning trouble with his beady little eyes and a no good maniacal laugh. And my pugs just lose their damn minds. Behind the glass doors they hollar and bay and cuss. Their eyes protrude further than usual: out to the edge of their snout, out where a glistening snot sprays with each snort. Even their tails uncurl and drop like punctuation digging into the dirt. Not to stop a sentence, but to start a new one. A new one that begins, “Die, motherscratcher.” Meanwhile the squirrel decides to chance it. He shimmies down the fence like a cheap dress after a dollar-menu meal. He shimmies down the fence and grabs an acorn. Then he turns towards the door, fully facing my pugs, who squeal like wrestlers circling the ring, and he just eats the acorn. Takes his time with it, too. He bites the rind. Peels it back. Tosses it to the ground like he’s at the damn Texas Roadhouse. Then he scoops out the orange meat with his bare paws. I watch him. I’ve seen him eat the zygotes of a dozen pin oaks in a single sitting. His tail never pausing, waving like surrender. My pugs devour the image of him. Their snot and saliva lay thick on the glass door like glaze on a doughnut. I can’t blame them really. I hurt for them really. So I help them out. Throw them a bone, metaphorically speaking. I sneak over to the glass door, unbolt the lock, tell them to be quiet, to stalk like a feline, and then I throw the door open, slide it like the whoosh of exoneration. And they launch from the door frame enraged. Dirt and rocks and acorn husks whirl around their pitifully small feel -- a strange anatomical design, those legs and feet of the pug-dog -- in a cartoon haze of Tasmanian Devil disaster. The squirrel rescales the fence. Doesn’t even grab his wallet and keys. He’s just up the fence and out of there. But he’ll be back. We’ll repeat this display a few more times today. Before noon. Never afternoon. He’s a brunch squirrel. A real Caucasian son-of-a-bitch. He brunches on melodrama, my dogs’ fury the double espresso churning a stout ire in his frothy-latte mouth. I don’t like the squirrel. To be honest, I just don’t like him. In the parlance of public education, he is a “bully”. In the lingo of the streets, he’s “a cockroach.” A bottom-dweller. Munching on the acorns of my back patio as well as the humiliation of my dogs. Not that they are much smarter. They can’t seem to catch on to his game. I pull them aside later. I try to reason with them. I wait until they are laid out prostrate, snoring a little, forming new eye boogers like ocular Play-Doh crafts. I say, “Listen, why do you let him get to you like that?” Their giant eyes roll in their oblong heads. I say, “You’re too good for that. You were the palace jester in the Ming Dynasty. You danced for royalty, before the yin was translated to paper, you were the gargoyle of the Imperial City.” They huff. Have you, Dear Reader, seen pugs breathe in their almost sleep state? Their ribs expand and recoil. Expand and recoil. They balloon out and then shrivel back. It’s not beautiful or peaceful. Watching pugs sleep -- or try to sleep -- is not like sneaking a peek at the domestic cat curled in on itself like a satisfied pillow. No, pugs are more like piles of heaped fabric in grandma’s sewing kit. They just mound up wherever they land, and then the breathing starts. It’s COVID-19 incarnate. It’s the failure to catch breath. They are perpetually at the end of several decades sucking three packs of butt-less Lucky Strikes a day. They are asthma and emphysema and the sympathetic guffaw of a bad joke rolled into one. So this is what I’m reasoning with here about the squirrel. I’m talking to the ass-end of a broken inhaler, and their faces wheeze fart sounds at me through flat noses. I say, “He’ll be back tomorrow, you know. He’ll climb right back up there on the fence and taunt you a second time.” (They don’t have the cultural vocabulary for a Monty Python reference. Still, the joke was for me.) And sometimes my eldest pug -- he’s fawn color, if you want to take this situation into the racial sphere -- will twist his head and feign to listen closely. But I don’t believe that’s what is happening because, even though I talk all this at him, reasoning with him like with a child who has prematurely learned that rebellion is the coolest damn thing on the planet next to Tommy Lee inhaling cigarettes through his nose, I know this pug doesn’t speak English. Really, you should hear the things I say to these animals when no one is around. I won’t even repeat them here because they sound sexist and racist and, even worse, narcissistic. I mean, they’re not. But they could be taken that way. So I won’t say anything here. Let’s just say that when the FBI releases tapes recorded of my home by my neighbor’s Amazon Alexa (our walls are thin), people will hear what I say to my pugs when no one is around, and they’ll say, “See? I knew it. I knew he was a [insert common Communist insult of the day]”. But, listen, the point is that I just talk at these dogs and I parent them like real people and they just look at me with a grand sympathy because they realize, in the pitiful way that a child who realizes their parent is actually the dependent in the relationship, they realize that, “Wait, oh shit, he gets off on the squirrel situation as much as we do. He opens the door for his own entertainment as much as ours. And now he’s trying to talk us out of our rodent-rage in an attempt to appear diplomatic and reasonable about the whole thing. Oh Dog, I have to get out of here. But, dogdamnit, the kibble is good.” So we get one another. Me and my pugs. We see the balance in this weird force here. But what they don’t know, and what I will tell you because this platform is so wickedly private, is that the joke is on them. You see, I have a deal with the squirrel. And the way I keep him coming back is that -- check this -- I just don’t clean my backyard. That’s it. I’m not lazy. I’m not a sloth. I just need assurance that the squirrel will come back. That our mornings will erupt with a wet snort of normalcy. So I leave the acorns there, piled as God intended. My yard an unwadded catch-sock for the tree’s seed. And I do it for the pugs, who explode for the squirrel, who returns because I inadvertently ask him to because I love knowing that he can give them what I never could: the whispy mania of his feathered tail tickling the wind. A mullet ran through with bone and cartilage like a hillbilly flag. And just look at their eyes bulging out to him like prayer. They never look at me like that. I can never be their entire Ming Dynasty, Dear Reader. But I try. Today and again tomorrow. I try.

- May 1, 2020