Driving Through Chicago with a Trunk Full of Dead Dogs

Growing up, I thought I might want to be an animal doctor someday. Not because I had any interest in veterinary medicine. I was just a fan of Dr. Dolittle, the 1967 musical with Rex Harrison. As far as I knew, all veterinarians wore top hats and sang their prescriptions and had exotic patients like a llama with an extra head coming out of its ass.

When I reached sixteen, I decided I better find out what was involved in being a veterinarian before I did something stupid, like apply to medical school or buy a white jacket. So I got a part-time job at a vet clinic on the south side of Chicago. It was one of the largest animal hospitals in the area, with a team of doctors who appeared to be living the American Dream. Or at least the American Dream when compared with ever other man, age 18-to-45, living in the south side of Chicago. My only other male role model at the time - besides my dad, of course - was the drama teacher at my high school, and he ended up getting strangled by a teenage prostitute after having sex in a forest preserve. So, y'know... my choices were kinda slim. A doctor with a Dodge Viper and girlfriend half his age seemed as good a mentor as any.

There was a large staff of physicians at the clinic, but everybody knew that the man in charge was Dr. Carl. He was huge and pasty white, like a snowman come to life, and his hands were so thick it looked like he was wearing mittens. I marveled at how such thick fingers could pick up delicate surgical instruments. Maybe it was his size, but Dr. Carl often forget that the kids who worked for him weren't quite as indestructible as he was. He'd ask us to lift things twice our own body weight, and then scoff when we complained. "Ah, you'll live," he'd always say, trivializing our discomfort.

Once, I saw him instruct a kid to pick up a large plastic bag and take it out back to the dumpster. When the poor kid realized that the bag was filled with used hypodermic needles, several of which had already punctured his soft teenage skin, Dr. Carl dismissed his tears with a wave. "Ah, you'll live," he said.

We never saw that kid again.

KEEP ON READIN', AND I'LL KEEP PRETENDING YOU'RE AS INTERESTED AS I AM IN THE GRIM DETAILS OF MY CHILDHOOD!

Thankfully, my duties never required putting myself in actual peril. I was relegated to kennel cleaning. I worked primarily in poop. I don't know what it is about dogs in captivity, but they definitely defecate more than normal dogs. The number of dogs being housed at the clinic did not match the sheer volume of excrement I had to clean in an average day. There was definitely more coming out then going in. The cages looked like Jackson Pollock paintings. On some days, I'd be so flabbergasted by what the dogs had done, I couldn't bring myself to desecrate their work with a hose. Some of it was just phenomenal. How do you get crap on a ceiling? What kind of Pilates move is necessary to pull that off?

I eventually figured out that not everybody at the clinic was wrist-deep in dog poo. There was a small minority among the part-time help who seemed to have special status. They were as young and inexperienced as I was, but for whatever reason, they'd been handpicked by Dr. Carl as his favorites. So they never got stuck with shit duty. Instead, they'd get to sit in on appointments, or discuss rare canine diseases during smoke breaks, or if they were lucky, assist Dr. Carl with his surgeries.

You did read that last sentence correctly. Am I seriously suggesting that teenage boys - most of whom were barely passing their remedial science classes in high school, and still believed that farting in public qualified as witty repartee - were allowed and even encouraged to participate in complicated medical procedures like spaying and neutering? Why yes, yes I am.

I watched them from afar, studying their behavior, trying to determine how they'd achieved such undeserved power in the social hierarchy. From what I could tell, the only way to get noticed was by demonstrating your commitment to a career in the veterinary arts. Most of the kids who worked at the clinic were not very enthusiastic. They made it abundantly clear that their interest in animals was casual, and they'd only taken the job for whipit money. If you wanted to stand out, you had to volunteer to do things that the punks and the part-timers actively avoided.

Like the death shift.

Euthanization wasn't something that any of the doctors enjoyed - even Dr. Carl, with his soulless mannequin eyes. But hundreds of strays were sent to the clinic every month, with precious few families lining up to adopt them, so it was a sad and inevitable reality. I offered to assist with their grim task, thinking that my willingness to get my hands dirty in the trenches would eventually be rewarded. Little did I realize just how bad it could be. The doctors had the easy part. They just stuck a needle into a dog's neck, pumped some blue liquid into their veins and waited for the induced cardiac arrest. My job required holding down the animal and, after its heartbeat disappeared, carrying it to a freezer in the back, where the bodies were stored until they could be delivered to a local incinerator.

On the bad days, we'd euthanize dozens of dogs. I always hoped it would get easier. I wanted to have the same emotional indifference of Dr. Carl - to prove to him that I could be detached and impervious when faced with life or death decisions - but I just didn't have it in me. It was like working at an Auschwitz summer camp. Death became the norm, and for a kid who hadn't lost so much as a pet in his sixteen years on the planet, the pressure began to take its toll. I developed a nervous tic, blinking my left eye for hours at a time. I started drinking coffee, and stopped sleeping entirely. I was like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, except less optimistic.

Months passed, and just as I felt I might be slipping into insanity, my efforts paid off. Dr. Carl called me by my real name and not his usual greeting, "Hey, Squirt." He enjoyed condescending pet names for his adolescent staff, anything to remind us of our diminutive stature. Peanut, Scooter, Monkey, Tinkerbelle, Freckles, Scrapper, La Petite Banane, and his personal favorite, Shortie. Shortie was shorthand for anybody he didn't recognize or didn't care about. If he called you Shortie, you weren't going to last at the clinic long. But when he referred to you by your actual name, it meant you were moving up the food chain.

My mood improved exponentially. I carried dead dogs on my back like Santa Claus slinging a bag of presents, drunk on eggnog and pedophilic zeal. I was so blissful and self-confident that I didn't even dread the end-of-the-month corpse pickup. When the freezer filled up, a dude in a van would drive over to pick up the bodies, and every kid unlucky enough to be on shift would have to load the lifeless, frozen dogs into the back of his van. It was depressing work, but now that I knew I was on Dr. Carl's radar, I was determined to act like a leader. And that meant making a less-than-enjoyable chore more pleasant for everybody.

Here's a fun fact: When you drop a dead dog into a freezer, it tends to assume whatever shape it had when it landed. So when you pull it out, it'll be frozen in what I liked to call action poses. Sometimes it looked like it was delivering a deadly karate chop. Sometimes it had jazz hands. Actually, I guess the more accurate term is jazz paws.

As I saw it, mortality is in the eye of the beholder. It's either something to be feared and treated with somber melancholy. Ooooor... we could help these neglected and abandoned strays leave this mortal coil with just a little dignity and joie de vivre, by letting them perform a spontaneous song-and-dance number on their way to the Great Beyond.

Funny thing, the south side teenagers I worked with weren't so amused by my musical satires. When I picked up a dog corpse and made him do a spot-on Ethel Merman impression, they just glared at me. Heaven forbid I choreograph an elaborate Fosse routine, or even a Mad Magazine-style parody of "Funny Girl."

"Don't tell me not to bark
I'm dead already
Don't tell me not to claw
My body's heavy!"

I'm well aware that comedy is subjective, but screaming "Shutup faggot" is not what I call constructive criticism.

Dr. Carl eventually took me aside and said, without saying so explicitly, that I would be assisting him in a surgery very, very soon. I was beside myself with excitement. I'd heard about surgeries from the guys who'd made it into Dr. Carl's inner circle. If they were to be believed, it was like a John Woo movie. Blood spurting everywhere, lacerated veins flopping wildly like haywire lawn sprinklers. The tension could be so intense, they said, that it was not unusual for grown men to faint.

I lay awake at night, just trying to imagine what that must be like. No wonder the surgery room was so heavily guarded. The doctors didn't want us to see them passing out, or throwing water on each other's faces as they repeatedly lost and then regained consciousness. What a spectacle that must be!

In my bones, I knew that this was my destiny. When Dr. Carl recognized my innate talents, he'd grant me more and more responsibility. And then one day I'd call him for an important surgery, and he'd wander in looking old and feeble, staring down at his big mitten hands and muttering, "I just don't have the energy anymore, Eric."

I'd flash him a reassuring smile and gently slide the forceps out of his hands. "Don't worry about it," I'd tell him. "I've got this one."

Fueled by my fantasies of becoming the youngest and least educated working veterinarian in Chicago, I was a model employee. There was nothing I wouldn't do for the clinic. Dr. Carl seemed to sense this, and when he was faced with a situation that called for blind loyalty and at least a little stupidity, he knew that there was only one person to ask.

When I came to work on a chilly winter morning, Dr. Carl summoned me into his office. "We have a problem," he said. His voice was a whisper, like he was sharing a secret that only I could be trusted to keep.

"What can I do?" I asked. It didn't matter what he wanted. I'd do anything to prove my devotion.

"The van is in the shop," he said. "We... we're going to need to borrow your car."

He didn't need to explain the rest. The death freezer was dangerously close to capacity. The door couldn't be closed without putting some elbow into it. The guy with the van who usually hauled away the dead dogs every month wouldn't be coming. It was up to me.

"I know we're asking a lot," Dr. Carl said. He forced a laugh, punching me (what he thought was) lightly on the arm. "But you're a big boy. You'll live."

"I understand," I said, my voice unwavering. "It's not a problem."

As it turned out, it was a problem. See, here's the thing about frozen dead dogs. When you take them out of a freezer, they're not exactly... what's the word I'm looking for here?... malleable. That doesn't so much matter when you're loading them into a van. But when you've got a '74 Honda Civic with very limited trunk space and an almost nonexistent back seat, well... it's complicated.

It could've been done. If we'd taken the time and been patient, we could've found a way to fit all thirty frozen corpses in the back of my car. You just had to think of it as a furry puzzle. "See, we just put that Doberman right there, and you've still got plenty of room below the passenger seat for a couple of Pugs. It's all about using the negative space."

But my teenage co-workers didn't have the patience for analytical thinking. They wanted to be finished with this minimum wage indignity. So they did what anybody would've done in a hurry. They shoved. And pushed. And forced the stiff, frozen bodies to fit into a space that basic geometry wouldn't allow. It didn't take long before we heard the snapping of limbs and the crackly pop of frozen bones shattering. The corpses surrendered to our panicky assault.

When I glanced into my back seat, I didn't see a pile of dead dogs. I saw a congealed mass of... something. Flesh and bones pointing in improbable angles. It looked like there had been an incident. Like something very, very, very bad had happened, and I was somehow responsible. If I didn't know better, I would've guessed that these poor dogs had been dropped in a giant blender and then emptied into my car.

As I drove through the south side of Chicago, I'll admit it, I was a little paranoid. I couldn't help but think, "This is gonna end badly. A cop is gonna pull me over and I'm going to jail." I'd read about serial killers who would've gotten away with their crimes were it not for a busted taillight. I checked my rearview mirror obsessively. I was convinced that I'd be busted for something innocuous.

"Do you realize your license plates are expired?" The police officer would inform me, peering into my window. "I'll need to see your license and... wait a minute, what the hell is that smell?"

"Before you jump to any conclusions, let me explain," I'd say. "Have you ever seen the film Dr. Dolittle?"

It was Dr. Dolittle who'd gotten me into this mess, wasn't it? I thought about Rex Harrison, and wondered what he would've done if he was in the same situation. Well, he'd probably sing about "looking on the bright side," and then he'd flee to a tropical island and wait for the heat to blow over.

And that's when I realized: Dr. Dolittle is an asshole.

I delivered the dead dogs, and then I drove back to the clinic and walked into Dr. Carl's office and told him I was quitting.

"Don't be such a baby," he said. "I know this job can be tough, but you'll live."

"Fuck you," I told him.

There were still days when I'd be tempted. I'd fantasize about becoming the next James Herriot, only more urban and less annoyingly British. But it'd all disappear the moment somebody got into my car and their nose would curl with disgust as they caught that first whiff of dead dog.

"What the fuck happened in here?" they'd invariably ask.

Dead dog smell doesn't ever go away, no matter how much you scrub. I don't think even Rex Harrison could write a jaunty song about that.

Hormones and Celluloid

Hollywood mogul (and future statutory rape defendant) Robert Evans once gave some sound advice to aspiring actresses. "If you're ever approached with the line, 'You ought to be in pictures, I'm a producer', tell the guy to fuck off. He's a fraud, and the pictures he wants to put you in don't play in theaters."

He's absolutely correct. I know this for a fact, because I used to be one of those "producers." I was in the movie business for a short time during the late 70s, so I know what it's like to sweet-talk starlets with hollow promises. But in my defense, I didn't fully comprehend the depravity of my profession. I mean, c'mon, I was only ten.

Though my brother and I never expressed an interest in films or filmmaking, our grandmother gave us both 8-millimeter cameras for our respective birthdays. I'm pretty sure she did it out of spite - not directed at us but our parents, who she considered "uppity" (i.e. unimpressed with her money and the intellectual authority it gave her). What better way to show her displeasure than by monopolizing her grandchildren's affection? When she failed to woo us with spätzle, boiled to a flavorless mush (like all German cuisine), she just decided to buy our love. Not surprisingly, it worked.

Every child, if given the chance, is a whore.

KEEP ON READIN'! DON'T BE THAT GUY WHO READS BLOGS FOR THE PICTURES. JUST DON'T.

Being in possession of such an expensive camera, I had an epiphany about my future. Well of course I wanted to be a movie director. I idolized George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, whose names I'd recently learned. My path was clear; I'd been put on this earth to make the film classics of tomorrow. I would create the next Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or the next Jaws. Or even better, a combination of the two. Man-eating sharks battling Nazis. I was just the visionary to bring that eye-melting spectacle to the screen.

Sadly, my dreams of cinematic glory were all-too-quickly snuffed out. My feature debut - a less overtly brawny version of The Incredible Hulk - was a disaster, due mostly to my inability to wink. I can close both eyes, just not one. The dailies were useless - I had nothing but long, lingering shots of trees or a patch of grass just to the left or right of the actors. Occasionally the cast would try to jump into frame, but I always pulled the lens away before catching any of the action.

I didn't mind giving up the directing duties to my brother. He had better instincts, and an almost superhuman control of his eyelids. I preferred acting anyway. That's where my passion lay. That and producing. I loved helping my brother storyboard his shots, and collect the perfect props, and learn obscure filmmaking terminology. Our favorite phrase was "We'll fix it in post" - a hopeful prediction, especially given that our editing facility consisted of a cement block and a razorblade.

But above all, I loved helping him pick the cast. There was a power that came with deciding which of our friends would get the meatiest roles. "You've got a nice energy," we'd say to the school bully during cattle calls. "But the camera adds ten pounds. Think you can drop some of that girth in a week? Okay, we'll see you back here in seven, and this time please remember to bring a headshot and resume. And if you can, prepare a Noel Coward monologue."

We did mostly remakes. We didn't have much luck with originals. Our first project as a filmmaking team was a low-budget sci-fi thriller called Battle Beyond the Universe, which suffered a premature death because of creative differences. I argued that the title was absurd, as there was technically nothing "beyond" the universe. My brother shot down all of my rewrite suggestions - Battle Beyond the Galaxy, Battle in a Black Hole, Battle Near That Big Celestial Body Over There - and it ended in a stalemate.

Our next big feature was an indie western called In the Old Days, which received lackluster reviews because of the anticlimactic fight scene in the third act. Mike Charter, who played the Bad Guy (you knew he was bad because he wore black and had a mustache - as far as we knew, the only prerequisites for evil), was supposed to get into a fistfight with the hero - played, in true narcissistic auteur fashion, by my brother. The final skirmish took place, as all great westerns do, in a treehouse. (Trust me, it made sense if you read the script.) And then, after receiving the fatal blow to his chin, Mike was supposed to fall off the treehouse and plummet fifteen feet to his likely death. Mike, non-method-actor that he was, declined to do his own stunts, so we recruited a life-size gorilla doll - a moldy relic from his Grandmother's attic - as his stand-in. The furry replacement didn't fool our audience, who were already jaded by the CGI magic at the multiplex, and the film bombed.

By "audience" I mean the six-to-seven neighborhood kids who arrived for the one-time screening in our basement. Though the movie was poorly received, we managed to recoup our losses with overpriced snacks.

Like the most cunningly-run Hollywood studio, we learned from our mistakes. Rather than churn out more flicks with new and untested stories, we just made our own half-assed remakes of the most popular movies of the day. The Sting. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Exorcist. The Deer Hunter. (That was not a fun day. Apparently asking your friends to play Russian roulette, even make-believe Russian roulette, is something that'll get you grounded. Who knew?) And of course, the Star Wars trilogy.

Casting was easy. Scott Saunders, with his rugged good looks and willingness to punch anybody smaller than him, was a natural as Han Solo. Mike Charter, who was just one color-coordinated sweater away from being entirely orange, was C3P0. My brother was Luke, because he had the shag and, more importantly, final cut. And I played Chewbacca, not for my hair but because I was tallest. Little did I know it'd become a haunting premonition of the inevitable hirsutism of my adulthood.

But we had no Leia. This was probably because we didn't know any girls. I mean, we knew them, we just didn't talk to them.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. With our parent's assistance, we managed to set up a meeting with a girl down the block named Suzie. She didn't have any acting experience, but she was a brunette and she was, as none of us would ever have admitted under even the most severe torture, kinda hot. Hot in a prepubescent girl kinda way. Hot as only a ten year-old boy could appreciate. Meaning, publicly with indifferent shrugs and privately with lurid fantasies involving robot slaves and blasters and her dressed in a slutty Leia bikini.

My brother and I and Mike (we figured there was strength in numbers) spent an afternoon at Suzie's house, lounging by her family pool and talking with her Mom about Suzie's imminent stardom. Actually, her Mom did most of the talking. We just nodded and stared at our feet, and Suzie did more or less the same. When we left, we were confident that we'd sealed the deal. We had devoted an entire day to swimming with her, and listening to her parents lecture us about curfews. And because we were gentlemen, we treated her the same way that we wanted to be treated: like an amputee panhandler in the subway. We avoided all eye-contact with her, and I think she respected us for it.

Weeks went by and we never got the call. Finally, her Dad phoned our Dad and delivered the boom. It was a pass. Suzie wished us well with our Star Wars project, but she regrettably would not be able to participate.

We did the movie without Leia, and remarkably, the plot still held together. Granted, we'd whittled it down to a concise six-minute segment involving Darth Vader, played by repertory cast member Andy Kalchik, getting pelted with dozens of cardboard boxes. (Yes, I'm aware that this isn't a scene from the actual movie. It was conceptual piece. You kinda had to be there.)

Months passed, and just as we'd forgotten the whole debacle, we got a call from Suzie herself. She wanted to be in one of our movies. Panicking that we might lose her yet again, my brother and I put a second-tier script into quick turnaround. I'd been working on a retelling of the Dracula legend, but hadn't gotten further than "Dracula walks into bedroom, bites sexy lady on the neck." For our purposes - and our budget (8mm film cost a lot in 1979) - it seemed like enough to greenlight the project.

We delivered the script to her and she hastily agreed. For lack of any competition, she got the female lead - which, for convenience, we'd renamed "Suzie." And in an undeserved turn of good fortune, I was cast as Dracula. Not because I was in any way suited for the role, but because I owned my own Dracula cape and vampire fangs. (It'd been an unusually fortuitous Halloween season.)

On the day of the shoot, I was a little nervous. I'd never been in such close proximity to a girl before, and I was terrified of repulsing her. To be on the safe side, I doused myself in my Dad's aftershave lotion. I even used it as hair gel, which didn't go so well. It left me with an oily Gordon Gecko look. I guess it worked for the part - the extra sleaze made my Dracula extra creepy - but it didn't exactly put Suzie at ease.

The moment of truth arrived. The camera was rolling, and I climbed onto the bed, hovering over Suzie like a creature of the night, albeit a creature of the night that was easily intimidated by the opposite sex. I leaned closer, sinking my fake fangs into her soft, tan neck. She writhed in pretend ecstasy/pain. It was a convincing performance. Too convincing. As I continued to suck the plasma from her jugular, I realized that something really, really embarrassing was happening just a few feet lower.

I had an erection.

It wasn't a typical, run-of-the-mill erection, either. It was an erection that refused to be ignored. The kind of erection that can open locked doors. An erection like a karate chop. An erection that alters your entire body chemistry. An erection that wants to evolve and grow opposable thumbs and develop its own civilization. An erection that could get you expelled from public school, or offered tenure at a Catholic school.

I don't think anybody in the film crew saw it. But Suzie felt it. How could she not? It was like I was jabbing a garden hoe into her ribs. Her face convulsed into an expression of pain and outrage. "Ouch," she yelled, loud enough for everybody in the room to hear. "What the heck is that? It hurts!"

I didn't dare move. If I slid off the bed, my lack of professionalism would be... hard to miss. But for anybody paying attention, it was pretty obvious what was happening. Though I was lying horizontally across Suzie, my lower half was clearly elevated at a higher angle. It was an affront to the laws of gravity. Something was keeping me aloft, and it didn't take a rudimentary understanding of calculus to figure out what that might be.

When she'd had quite enough of my unwelcome pecker poking, Suzie pushed me away and ran out of the room. I covered myself with a handful of pillows and hoped for the best. If my brother had any idea that I'd more or less thrown Suzie from the bed like a penile catapult, he wasn't letting on.

"I shoulda known this was gonna happen," he said, rolling his eyes. "She was flakey from the beginning."

"So true," I agreed, trying to concentrate on unsexy thoughts. "Her heart just wasn't in it."

We waited there for a few minutes, maybe half-expecting her to come back. And then my brother threw up his hands and said, "Okay, that's a wrap. Let's take five, and then I'm gonna need twenty to thirty cardboard boxes and Andy dressed like Darth Vader. We're doin' a sequel."

I smiled. My boner wasn't going anywhere, but it appeared that the movie didn't need me anymore. As the crew broke down the set and prepared for the next shoot, I just sat on the bed and enjoyed the throbbing in my pants, imagining that Suzie was still lying under me. And this time, she liked feeling my penis against her torso.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I can't watch a Dracula movie - any Dracula movie - without getting an erection.