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Of dogs and drink, and bones and mothers

Tales of an aging satirist with poor impulse control

Tony Phillips

September 11, 2006

San Diego--I have a right hand, I have a brain and I have a dog. All three of them perform their proper functions more or less normally most of the time, but not all the time. I also have a mother. She never fails. Take last week, please.

I’ll skip the details of what brought me to the point of meltdown. Suffice it to say, I was pretty irate and for good reason, though perhaps not good enough for me to just up and splatter my hand. But that’s what I did, and though my hand hurt instantly, it didn’t hurt half as badly as the hurt inside that had driven me to bust it up in the first place. So I went off to see the psychiatrist.

That’s the right thing to do, by the way, if you’re not the most stable of guys and you just busted your hand. It’s particularly appropriate if you feel yourself likely to do more harm out of sheer desperation and a sense of cosmic injustice.

Dr. There-there-now took pity on me. He listened to me, he reflected upon things with me, and he told me to go and sin no more, asking only if I had any plans to get out of my funk. I told him I thought I might call my mother and go stay with her for a few days until it passed.

He told me that was a good idea and asked if I wanted any Valium. I declined. He shook my broken hand vigorously (I’m not making that up.) and I squelched my desire to cry out like a stuck hog. I’m glad he’s not an orthopedist.

Mother came and picked me up to take me to her house. Not knowing how long I would be gone I took along Steve, my Chihuahua. En route to Mother’s house I decided to let her take me to the emergency room to get my hand treated. We got there at 10:12 p.m. We left at 1:20 a.m., me with a half cast on my hand and forearm and a dose of pain killer in my belly.

I don’t know what kind of painkiller it was, but my body didn’t like it. Four hours later I woke up in a cold sweat, my heart racing, my head clouded, my balance shot and sobbing inconsolably. Poor Mother. She didn’t sleep all night.

The next day I begged off of everything else I was supposed to do and Mother and I stayed around her house all day. At around 6:00 that evening I was napping in her recliner when she woke me and said, “Tony, Steve is running around in circles.”

Now Steve is an active dog. He’s only 10-months-old and at just six pounds he has the metabolism of an insect. I looked down at him, and sure enough, he was pacing insistently. I figured he just needed to go outside and play, so I let him out in the backyard.

That wasn’t a smart thing to do.

As soon as he got outdoors, he shot off like a bullet and started tracing patterns in the ground and leaping and snapping at objects in the air that didn’t exist. It took me some time to corner him against the fence, but I did. When I brought him back in the house, he continued, literally, bouncing off the walls, contorting his mouth and chasing invisible entities.

“Mother,” I said, “the dog is hallucinating.”

“What?” she said.

“He’s on a bad trip.” (continued)

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