Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  The first few days the dogs were home, Bert was picking up what I was throwing down, but then things started to shift. In the span of one week, he turned on Brandon, then Tanner, and then me. The only one he chose to have a relationship with was Big Mama.

  He’d follow Mama around from room to room every day. If any of us even walked by him, he’d shudder as if we had all taken turns beating him the night before. I couldn’t get anywhere near Bert unless I had fifteen minutes to kill, because it was a multipronged process to gain access. First, he would hear me coming and attempt to run away. I use the word “run” for lack of a better term to describe Bert in motion. Bert’s movements are more labored, and unexpected—like an elephant starting to run and then giving up. Once he capitulated he’d sit down—with his back to me—and I’d have to make my way very gingerly to the front of his body, using a very soft voice, and then wait patiently for an opening. If he made his version of eye contact—essentially side-eye, head down—I would carefully move my hand underneath his chin and rub his chest for a beat, then I’d work my way around his neck to get to his ears and head. Once I got to his ears, he’d finally give in, and then he would allow me to do almost anything to his body. But if there was no gentle prelude and he saw my hand approach his head to pet him, he’d haul ass in the other direction in search of Mama.

  “Jew have to go slow,” Mama would tell me over and over again when Bert ran into her arms with his tail wagging and his tongue out. The minute Bert heard Mama arrive at my house each morning, he’d run out my bedroom door, down the steps, and into Mama’s arms, where they would literally rub noses for five to ten minutes. It was torture watching the two of them together right under my own roof, and Mama never missed an opportunity to throw it in my face.

  “Look,” she’d say, smiling, as she walked away from the kitchen and into the living room, swinging her hips with Bert two steps behind, swinging his. “Papa go everywhere Mama go.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “I can’t believe you have to tie your dogs to your bed. That is so pathetic,” my friend Allison said one Sunday night over family dinner at her parents’ house. She was referring to an Instagram story I had posted the night before of Bert and Bernice in my bed—with their leashes on.

  “I don’t tie my dogs to my bed,” I told the rest of the Azoffs sitting around the dining room table. “Sometimes, with his mood swings, Bert doesn’t know what he wants, so I’ll coax him up the doggy steps into my bed.”

  “Coax how?” Allison asked, leading me like a witness.

  “With a handgun,” I declared, flatly, to everyone at the dinner table. “I bring my dogs to bed at gunpoint.”

  “You may as well. She uses a leash to get them into her bed,” she broadcasted, laughing.

  “Repetition, asshole,” I told Allison, trying to maintain some dignity. “That’s what they teach you in every parenting class.”

  “You’re going to be teaching a parenting class if you don’t go back to fucking work soon,” Irving said, homemade fried rice flying out of his mouth. The rice was made by their trusty chef, Craig. Craig is not Chinese.

  Irving is my manager, but really he is a big-deal music manager who has no interest in anything I do—unless the payment exceeds one million dollars. Allison is Irving’s daughter, and although we are not related by blood, we are sissies and we love each other big-time.

  No one in the Azoff family really approved of my foray into politics after the election. They thought I was too strident and too amped up about Donald Trump. They thought I was being histrionic. Irving liked to remind me, and anyone else who would listen, that I wasn’t making any money zigzagging across the country, speaking at colleges and campaigning for candidates.

  “I’m sorry I care about the country I live in,” I said, mistaking my chopsticks for my vape pen, and trying to take a hit off one.

  “She needs to go back to stand-up,” Irving’s wife, Shelli, chimed in between bites of spareribs, not looking up.

  “Well, I’d rather be hysterical and wrong than be right and wake up to Hitler standing at my door,” I declared.

  “Oh, Sissy,” Allison said as she passed her vape across the table. “Take another hit of this.”

  * * *

  • • •

  If Chunk read The New York Times every morning, and Tammy read the New York Post, Bert and Bernice are reading The Sun.

  I like dogs that can make the distinction between television and reality. Dogs that are excited by other dogs in dog-food commercials are, in my opinion, slow on the uptake. Chunk would never lose his cool and bark at the television. Chunk was barely interested in reality; he certainly didn’t have time for fantasy.

  Bert is constantly confused by the same things he has done moments before. His memory is so short-term that when I’m gone for a few hours, I have to reintroduce myself every time I come home. The dirty looks he throws my way when I try to gain re-entry into his world are so full of disdain that sometimes I don’t even have the stomach for it.

  At one point, things got so bad that I considered moving out and getting a small apartment so that Bert could have more time to adjust to his new surroundings without me there.

  Bernice is a little more coquettish. When Bernice comes up the stairs to my bedroom, she is quick and agile, and it’s almost like she’s taunting Bert—showing him what it’s like to be quick on your feet. She will come upstairs, but when I reach out my hand to pet her, she’ll run away maniacally, as if I’m holding an ax.

  When Bert comes up the stairs of his own accord—which he eventually does even if I don’t guide him—it is slow and deliberate, like a sloth, taking one giant step every thirty seconds. It can take weeks. This happens when the house is dark and he has given up any hope of Mama returning home for the night. I am his second choice, and after months of getting used to this, I take whatever I can get.

  It can take a laborious forty-eight hours to get Bert out of his funk after Mama leaves on a Friday. It’s what I imagine it must be like to lay bricks. He won’t look at me—as if he blames me for her leaving—and if I get underneath the dining room table with him, where he hides, he will turn his head away from me and eventually reconfigure his body so his ass is in my face. He is a moody, moody fuck.

  When I realized one day that I could trick Bert into coming out from under the dining room table by turning off the lights and speaking in Mama’s accent, I started speaking in a Mexican accent for entire weekends.

  Mama was the one who fed them and took them outside every day and went over their training exercises and played ball with them. I was sometimes home just two days a week, so in their eyes, she was their real mother and I was just some slutty au pair who came by every couple of weeks to babysit.

  “Ber-r-r-t, Ber-r-r-t,” I said, in my best impersonation of Mama, demonstrating for Allison the challenges I faced as a single parent.

  “He resents me for being away all the time,” I told her.

  “Or he just doesn’t remember you.”

  “Well, then he’s pretty dumb.”

  “Don’t say that,” Allison said.

  “Oh, please. He’s a dog; he can’t understand me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know it, because of that expression on his face,” I said. “He’s dumb. Talk about old injuries. Every day is like Groundhog Day. It’s like he’s permanently concussed.”

  “Well, I’m just telling you, words have meaning,” Allison said.

  “Well, then in five minutes, I’ll tell him he’s smart. He won’t even remember this conversation.”

  Those weren’t the only challenges the new dogs posed. It was impossible to get any lingerie on Bert’s body. Weeks of making inroads, of sleeping in bed with him, of taking him on walks and in car rides—all of it would fly out the window the minute I tried