Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  I went down to the rescue in Westwood and picked up our new dog. The girls working there told me he could be anywhere between four and twelve. I brought our new family member home and decided his name would be John. He was sweet and goofy and was definitely a big puppy—I figured he was probably two.

  That night, in an effort to not overthink assimilating my new brood, I put all three dogs in my bedroom, and popped an edible. I was awakened by a low rumble that rose to a roar, and then to something that sounded like there was a werewolf nearby. When I flipped the lights on, Tammy’s midsize, corpulent body had somehow wrapped itself around John’s, like a contortionist. Thank God for instinct, because I’m scared to think what I would have done had I given it any thought. I screamed “No!” and then ripped Tammy off him. Her eyes were red and she looked like she was wearing red lipstick. I tossed her toward my closet. John was a bigger dog and stronger than I thought, and I couldn’t hold him back from barreling toward her, so I dove right into the middle of them, grabbed Tammy, pushed her headfirst into my closet, and shut the door. Then I scurried to my feet in my staple sleepwear—a bra and thong—and fended off John, who was growling with his nose to the closet. Once I got him outside my room and closed the door, I sat down on my bed and thought I was going into cardiac arrest. I was gasping for breath as I tried to figure out what to do next. I was scared of both dogs at that point—I didn’t know what they were capable of after seeing Tammy basically shape-shift into an anaconda.

  When I moved my hand to my chest to try to self-soothe, I realized my bra had been torn open and one of my breasts had been set loose and was bleeding. I looked over at Chunk, who at some point during the altercation had wrapped himself inside the drapes.

  I don’t want to call Chunk a pussy, and I don’t want to call Tammy a cunt, but I want to just throw those two words out there.

  I called Molly and told her that I was living with a real-life Cujo, and even though I knew it was Tammy’s fault, I was scared to open the door and check on John.

  “I’ll come get him,” Molly said. It was 12:30 A.M., and while I waited for the coast to be clear, I texted Brandon to scan the security cameras in the morning and save whatever footage had just been captured for the next time me and my friends did mushrooms.

  * * *

  • • •

  John never made the cut, because Tammy took him to task. Chunk knew better than to fight over territory he’d conquered long ago. He knew he belonged with me, but he understood there would be random dogs coming in and out of our lives, just the way people did.

  * * *

  • • •

  Tammy was with me for three years and died shortly after the inauguration in January 2017. She felt the same way I did about Donald Trump. Molly and I were in South Africa at the time, and I got the call while Molly was out getting gifts for her brothers and sisters. She came back to the hotel room where I was sitting in a chair feeling guilty about traveling so much and not spending more time at home with Tammy.

  “You gave her a good life, Chels,” Molly said, hugging me. “No one else would have ever adopted that dog. Do you know how much shorter her life would have been if you’d been home more? And, don’t forget, she brought me Hodor.*”

  After Tammy died, I had some friends over for a small memorial service at my house, where we watched the video footage from my security cameras the night of the attack. It was the first time I had seen the crime scene, and Brandon had scored it to the theme song of Rocky. In it, you can see Tammy actually airborne after I got her off of John. The four teeth that I had campaigned for Tammy to keep ended up biting me in the tit. If I hadn’t busted my nut with my topless photo rampage years before, this video would have been released on all of my social media platforms, on a loop.

  Watching the video of Tammy alone, pacing in my closet like a large brown bear, reminded me what a force of nature she was. She was an underdog and a badass. She was a fighter, and even though I don’t spend much time looking in the rearview mirror, my biggest regret is not ever getting her ears pierced.

  * Which is what Molly renamed John. As it happens, John/Hodor wasn’t part Chow at all. Molly did his DNA testing and found out he is a purebred Leonberger. For the record, Tammy’s testing revealed she was a Keeshond/Shepherd mix with a tiny bit of Chow. So, my obsession with Chows comes from being misinformed time and time again that they are the breed I am rescuing, not from ever actually having one.

  In our next session, Dan told me about self-defining relationships—the critical relationships that are formative, that determine the person you become. The relationships that, if they were to go away, would change you. You would never recover from the loss.

  “So, everything goes back to Chet? Really?” I asked Dan. “That seems too obvious.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Like, too easy. Is it really that simple? Am I really that simple?” Although it was a relief, at the same time it seemed like another cliché. Of course, that’s how simple this has always been.

  “Well, it sounds twofold to me. It sounds like you had one injury when your brother died, which you’ve said you’ve never properly addressed, and the second trauma was the retreat of the rest of your family, your father especially. Let’s talk more about that.”

  “I don’t remember much about those first few years after Chet died, other than that I had tons of problems at school. I became ‘trouble.’ ”

  “Did you have ‘trouble’ at school before your brother died?” Dan asked me.

  “I don’t really recall, but now that we’re talking about it, how much trouble could I have gotten into before the age of nine? It’s not like I was Satan. I think it was partly because my parents were so unreliable, so I think other parents wanted to avoid them, and partly because the attention I used to get at home had disappeared, and in response to that, I tried to get attention in other ways at school—however I could—which resulted in me constantly having to stay after school and sit in detention, and then, one by one, I was ostracized by all the friends I had in elementary school. Not because of my brother’s death, but because I had turned into someone else.”

  Every once in a while I would self-analyze just to show Dan that I wasn’t a complete moron and also to surprise myself with what I’d known all along but had never said out loud.

  My sister Simone and my brother Glen became my de facto parents after Chet died—or at least they were a more reasonable version of parents. I think Roy had gone off to live in Miami or something. He smoked a lot of pot, and needed a place he could do that without my father screaming at him all the time. Shana was there, but for some reason I don’t really remember her during that time.

  But how much parenting could they have provided, really? Glen and Simone were both in college at Emory University, and anytime there was a crisis at home—of which there were many—one of them, usually Simone, had to manage it by phone from Atlanta. The crisis usually consisted of my father and me going to battle about the trouble I was in at school, my not listening to anything he or my mother told me, and my general lack of respect for anyone in a position of authority.

  I became terrible. I hated everyone and everything. Shoving any pain in my pocket, hoping that eventually it would form a hole and fall out onto the street during one of my bike rides. I remember being on those bike rides, sailing past our neighbors’ houses so fast that the tears were blowing off my face. This is what the adults should be doing, I thought, figuring out a way to handle the situation without falling apart. I would force myself up the hills around our neighborhood on my banana-seat bicycle and think, You need to get stronger. Strength is what everyone in this family is missing—I’ll probably have to start lifting weights. I was dancing farther and farther away from myself.

  I learned from Dan that being in motion was a way for me to avoid sitting still with my feelings. You can’t let anyone see you cry, so you