Tales of the Dog, Part One: Meet the Dog

     I decided to write about Roy several months after having met him. Roy Dickson, Entrepreneur. I’d seen his business card. It was given to me by the redneck who lived across the street from me and my collegiate roommates. Our neighbor snorted cocaine. Roy sold it. My roommates and I smoked marijuana. Roy sold that too. 

     “What kind of stuff you write?” The man whom I would later call “Dog,” but refer to as “the Dog,” asked me one hazy afternoon. He rolled a joint on my recently published profile of a fifty year-old, female bounty hunter, and saw my name underneath the scattered marijuana. 

I hadn’t started grad school yet and the barely paying freelance work I had been doing wasn’t very creative, but I showed my writing to him anyway: marketing brochures, operations manuals, and a couple of columns from my stint as a fake journalist. 

     “You get paid for this?” He made no attempt to hide his incredulity. 

     “Uh, yeah.” Of course, I was indignant. 

     He flipped through my portfolio laughing at my attempts at Op/Ed buffoonery. “Some of this shit is funny.” 

     I chuckled as I passed the second joint I ever smoked with Roy back to him. “I’d like to write about you.” 

     “Yeah? What you going to write about me?” 

     “I don’t know yet. I may not even be cool enough to write about you.” 

     He was holding in the smoke from the hit off the joint he had just taken. He was unusually baritone as he delayed exhaling and informed me, “Don’t worry. You ain’t.” He filled the space between us with smoke and laughter. Though we were probably too high to know at the time, we would do that often over the next few years. 

                                                                  * * * * 

     “Ol’ Roy’s been through some shit.” Leaning against the open tailgate of his truck, my neighbor, Redneck Rich, extended a bottle of Bud Light in my direction. 

     I politely waved off his offer and pressed him for more information on the Dog. Rich had known Roy for most of their lives. Roy was becoming a regular visitor to our house, and not always in a feloniously professional capacity. Since he lived across the street, Redneck Rich was a regular attendee to our weekend’s of barbecues and beer drinking. 

     “Hell, I’s the first one to call him Dog.” 

     “Yeah? Why’s that?” I thought it was because Roy greeted his friends with, “What up, Dog?” I was wrong. 

     “The guy is fiercely loyal.” Rich pulled a sip from his longneck, never taking his eyes from mine. He was making sure I understood the seriousness with which his statement had been made. I furrowed my brow to let him know I was along for the ride. 

     “Like how?” 

     “If the kid is your friend, he’s got your back. He’s stood up for me against dudes that were bigger than you. (I’m about 6’ 3”, 220lbs.) And if he tells you he’s gonna do something, it’ll be done. No matter what.” 

     As my neighbor relayed them to me, specific acts of the Dog’s loyalty sounded more like acts of retribution to me. He’d helped Rich stomp an ex of his baby sister; he’d stolen a house full of furniture back from some woman’s “asshole husband”; he’d withheld a “well-deserved ass-kicking” from a friend who’d robbed him…Throughout the afternoon’s narratives by Redneck Rich on Roy’s character, there did seem to be a subversive morality. In tales that were often surrounding drugs, assault, or theft, Roy consistently defended the weak and believed wholeheartedly in the bond of trust between friends. It was when the weak had been taken advantage of, or a trust had been violated, that the Dog became a “soldier.” 

     “I’m just a soldier in the wrong man’s army.” Roy later told me after showing me the “soldier” tattooed across his abdomen in gothic font like a member of Tupac Shakur’s East L.A. set. 

     “I don’t think you’re that simple, Dog,” I told him, “That’s why I’m trying to figure you out and write about you. There’s more to you than gold teeth, tattoos and a checkered past.” 

     “Yeah? Well, I ain’t trying to figure out nothing.” 

     Roy was loyal. Redneck Rich had planted and affirmed that description. He had a sense of ethics. I’d arrived at that conclusion on my own. The Dog’s dogma just didn’t conform to the more suburban senses of most Americans. Roy was a drug dealer, a convicted felon without a proper high school education and yet, for some odd reason, I’d be okay if he dated my little sister. That odd reason, I was only just discovering, was because the Dog was honest. 

                                                                            * * * * 

     “So, if you write about me, what’re you going to say?” Roy continued breaking up the compact bud of marijuana on the coffee table and after determining its preparedness for smoking, packed it into a heavy, glass pipe. A moment’s silence was broken by the spark of a lighter he touched to the bowl. 

     It was good pot. Heh, it was very good pot, and Roy and I had been smoking for well over an hour. I’d called him earlier in the day–not in the morning, or even before 2:00 in the afternoon. He kept appropriately odd hours for a drug dealer, so I figured on calling up the Dog sometime between The Jerry Springer Show and Oprah!. My timing was impeccable. Our phone call was characteristically terse. 

     “Yo.” 

     “What up, Dog?” Roy’s usual greeting came from me, now. 

     “Nothing. What’s up with you?” 

     “Chilling. Come over. Bring my sister.” 

     “All right. I’ll be there in a minute.” 

     For the uninitiated, one must be rather surreptitious in one’s choice of euphemisms when speaking of illegal narcotics over the phone. The Dog will tell you he personally doesn’t “give a shit about all them stupid codes people be using.” But, I find the invention and elocution of alternate phrases and metaphors for drugs to be one of the more fun aspects of the culture.  Soon after I’d met the Dog, the circle of pot smokers that I had been associating with referred to marijuana as “a sibling” or, dependent upon possession and quantity, “your siblings.” 

     Given the fact that Roy often had varying qualities of marijuana for sale, offering the pot smoker a choice for their high, it had become necessary to delineate the sibling euphemism even further. Regular, cheap pot–regs, schwag, reggie, etc.– was called “your brother.” Good pot was called: kind, K.B., larry, etc. and referred to as “your sister.” Precise quantities were never discussed over the phone. 

     More likely than not, Roy would have how much you, and anybody else with you, might want on his person. If he didn’t, he’d go get it. Our mutual friend, regular customer of Roy’s and local bartender, Dylan, told me that’s why he called Roy “the Dog.” My own reasons differed. 

     So, the Dog showed up at my place just after Judge Joe Brown and brought my sister. She was looking a pleasant, frosty green and smelled like a hidden Jamaican valley on a late summer day.

      After my first hit from Roy’s pipe, the world was a whole lot rounder, slightly greener, and a little bit funnier. We smoked our first bowl and numbed our minds further with Playstation 2’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. At this point in our personal history, we’d known each other for close to a year. 

     On this smoke-filled day, the irony of tattooed, gold-teethed, Fubu-wearing, drug dealing, juvy-time-served Roy playing a video game where one imagines one’s self as a drug-dealing, gun-toting, hooker-killing, prison times-erved street hood struck me as particularly humorous and I shared the source of my laughter with him. 

     “That’s some fucked up shit, ain’t it?” The Dog shook his head. For just a brief moment, I could see the twenty-something kid who’d grown up either on the street or in some state institution.

      The walking hard luck cliché cut straight out of a John Singleton movie, who, despite this life, was still just a twentysomething kid chuckled. The PS2’s controller hung limply from his soft-looking hands, “I’m just like the dude in this game. Besides all that obvious, fucked-up criminal shit. I’m just like him.” His eyes hardened up turning from blue to gray as he mulled over what he’d just said. He was not that aforementioned kid anymore. I’m not real sure how old he was at that moment. 

     The mood turned a little serious, but I was curious to see where he was taking his self-actualization. “How so, Dog?” I pressed. 

     “When a kid turns on this game and starts playing, this guy ain’t got a choice. He’s a criminal. No matter who turns the game on, no matter where they are in the world, this motherfucker,” he nodded his head toward the TV screen where he had just controlled our digital gangster to carjack a Ferrari, “he’s gone always be a criminal.” 

     I took what I figure to be his polemic bait. Roy’s not real educated but will read anything he gets handed. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade and got out of jail after he finished his G.E.D. After he was arrested for Breaking and Entering–he was caught breaking into someone’s house.–the Dog served eight months in Orange County Florida’s Correctional Facility.  Though he was only sixteen at the time, he was charged as an adult. 

     Genetics made Roy an “habitual offender” from birth. His crystal meth-addicted mother probably figured Roy would end up in jail. She wasn’t even around long enough to see him celebrate his second birthday. She had put a bullet through her chest two decades before Roy could catch a ride home with his Alcoholics Anonymous counselor from Orlando’s less scenic community of 33rd Street correctional facilities. The Dog doesn’t speak of her very often except to say, “She’s dead now.” 

Fortunately for Roy, but not by suburban standards or by any stretch of even the most sympathetic, bleeding heart liberal’s imagination, his dad eventually cleaned up his act. The Dog told me, “Prison helped straighten him out made him see things differently.” 

     This microscopic move away from the chemically-hazed underground back onto the grid by his father did not go unnoticed by the Dog, and he doesn’t blame his lifestyle entirely on his uninvolved parents. In his own words, his mom, “is buried somewhere,” and his dad, “is trying. We both are,” working to make Roy’s future a little more Middle-American than his past. This is not to say that Roy was striving for the American Dream of a house replete with picket fence, two-car garage, a doting wife and 2.3 children to complement the capitalist ideal of a five-figured career. No, the Dog’s vision of the American Dream was less-inspired by Norman Rockwell and more a result of a New Jack City perspective on the world around him. 

     Like Nino Brown, Roy was trying to make as much money as he could in this lifetime. “That’s all anybody is trying to do–look out for theyselves. You got to be out trying to get yours because there’s a billion motherfuckers out there trying to take it from you.” It’s from this philosophical standpoint that Roy begins to unwind his own moral ethics. 

     “So, it’s a dog eat dog world then?” I asked after trying out my New Jack metaphor on him. 

     “Hell yeah.” 

     “What about your friends?” I avoided the obvious allusion to family. Even as stoned as I was, it seemed apparent that those kinds of altruisms didn’t apply in the Dog’s case. 

     “Shit. Just cause you like somebody don’t mean you got to trust’em explicitly. Anybody–I don’t care who they are or say they are–if forced to choose between they own life and somebody else’s, that somebody else is fucked.”  

     At this point in my evolving understanding of the Dog’s character, I could only assume that he thought this way because his own mom opted for death over raising her own son. Drugs can be a horrible thing, to paraphrase Rick James, but when the underbelly of capitalism is the only world you know, they can also be your only way out from underneath the onus of poverty. I can’t help but wonder how many of America’s allegedly best and brightest, who are Roy’s age, would be able to rebound from a childhood characterized by neglect and death as successfully as he has. But wait, the guy’s a drug dealer! He’s not risen above his station to become a productive, contributing member of society. He’s a contributor to and facilitator of this country’s downward spiraling morality. 

     Fuck that and fuck you “society” for making me think that way. The Dog would make Nietzsche proud. If he ever read Nietzsche–he prefers fantasy novels and computer hardware technical brochures–Roy would learn that style is what the crazed, syphilitic German philosopher touted as the only praiseworthy and attainable manifestation of humanity’s search for universal truth. Nietzsche would probably draw the same conclusion about the Dog that I have. Roy is Nietzsche’s prototype. 

     “I don’t know about all that shit. I’m just trying to get mine.” Throughout my exposition on Nietzsche and how he, Roy, was the iconic human described in Nietzschean philosophy, he’d been shooting rival gangsters on the streets of digital San Andreas. He dropped the controller to pick up my cat who had meandered into our frivolity. The Persian purred loudly as the Dog scratched his head. 

     My rant, paraphrased for the purposes of this narrative, hung heavy in the air like our pot smoke had earlier in the day. Having determined neither one of us was high enough for his comfort level, Roy left my cat in his lap and started to break up some more pot to smoke. The afternoon had oozed into early evening as I verbally wrote my characterization of him–in his company. As the day had waned and our conversations evolved, my writer’s notebook had inconspicuously appeared in my hand. I had given myself a hard-on with my connection between the Dog’s lifestyle and Nietzsche’s views of the individual. The money shot was going to come when Roy agreed with my description of himself. Well, running with the porno metaphor, I didn’t get my money’s worth and came away from my theorizing with a case of literary blue balls. The Dog wasn’t buying my Nietzschean slant on his life story one iota. 

     “See, that’s what I’m talking about,” he pointed at my notes and looked me in the eye, so he knew I was listening, “Doesn’t matter who I am, or where I came from. Doesn’t matter how I get what I get. I ain’t hurting nobody. I ain’t forcing nobody to do anything they don’t want, but even all that shit don’t matter.” The cat stepped from his lap as Roy took a break from his relaxed rant to hit the pipe and passed it to me. “People are going to think how they think. Why should I get so hung up on what people who ain’t got no idea on what my life is like, or how I grew up? They’re making their judgments thinking that everyone grew up the same way– the way they did. And when they see some motherfucker like me they can’t understand how I can look the way I look and live the way I live cuz they ain’t got no fucking idea as to how I came into this world.” 

     Roy stood as he delivered his spontaneous soliloquy. His voice barely raised above a conversational level throughout his diatribe. His arm’s were open exposing the blue-green tattoo of Earth with the phrase “The World is Ours” cursived over the western hemisphere. His bottom row of gold teeth was barely visible in his broad grin. He reeked of irony and satire. The pipe had frozen halfway to my lips. Somewhere between Nietzsche’s death and Roy’s almost comically ironic self-actualization, night had fallen outside and I’d just realized I didn’t have the slightest notion as to where in my house the afternoon had slipped away to. I looked between the cushions of the couch for something that would make me cool enough to be in the room with this guy. Without even knowing it, he’d proved my literary vision of himself. 

     “You gonna hit that or what?” Slapping back down into the scraped leather of my couch, Roy pointed to the motionless glass pipe in my hands. 

     I needed to get back to the rounder, funnier place the Dog and I had started the afternoon in. The goofy place where all stoned people hung out and ate cookies and Doritos. The place we had been before I had started to chew up and digest Roy’s character so that I could throw it up on paper later. He’d caught me with my mouth full, and large chunks of my raw literary vision of him were hanging from my teeth. Characterization–hell, writing–should be less barbaric than I was making it. I was embarrassed and hit the bowl hard–twice. 

     “But you’re not immoral, Dog. You’re polite, well-groomed…” smoke rolled from my mouth. 

     “What’s all that got to do with anything?” 

     “Well, bad things are supposed to happen to bad people. But, by ‘normal’” (I made obligatory air quotes.) standards, bad things happened to you and that’s why you do bad things now–i.e. sell drugs. With you, unlike with Nino Brown, you didn’t go bad and start doing bad things. You were bad, went good and now do bad things because it’s all you know. It’s all you’ve had access to!” Being stoned had reduced my vocabulary to Cleaver-esque levels of description. 

“You still ain’t saying nothing don’t nobody don’t know already!” He’d taken the pipe from my hand, realizing that either I was too stoned or he was not enough. 

     “Dog, you sell drugs and occasionally help fence stolen merchandise. On the celestial scale of sins, those aren’t really that bad. In fact, one could argue that those are more crimes against the laws of humanity than they are broken Laws of Nature. I’ve met plenty of people who would attest to your loyalty as a friend. Hell, that’s why I call you the Dog, those oppositions make you defendable as that ‘product of the system’ Right-wing America says doesn’t exist! You’re the antithesis to ‘bootstraps mentality’ while simultaneously representing the ultimate realization of capitalism! You’re Nietzsche’s wet, fucking dream, man!” I was standing and speaking at a volume I imagined Roy had probably reserved for break room beat downs at one time in his youth. I’d practiced this definition of Roy on Redneck Rich in the recent past. 

     “Sit down, motherfucker. Getting all excited and shit. Smoking weed’s supposed to mellow you out. 

     Here,” he extended the warm pipe, “hit this.” 

     Poofing back into the couch, I started to realize just how stoned I was. In three heartbeats and a breath, I stood up with purpose, “I got to get some of this shit down.” I moved through a haze of metaphor and marijuana toward the hallway, my bedroom and my computer, “I can’t be that stoned. Some of this has got to work.” 

It had been lifetimes since I shot from the Dog’s company to begin writing something to go underneath the cool title I’d typed months ago. 

     My subject stood in the doorframe of my room, “What’re you going to write about?” 

I’d known Roy for almost a full year and was still wrestling him to paper. “I don’t know. I was thinking about the time your buddy Rodney robbed you of your safe in broad daylight by throwing it out your bedroom window. Or the time he told those two dudes to rob you at gunpoint. Or the time you were going to beat up that other dude, but then he was turning himself in to the cops for something else. Or the time…” He interrupted my rundown of stories he’d shared over our friendship. 

     “You know all that shit, but you don’t know what to write? You must not be that good,” and he strolled back to the living room and the PS2 laughing to himself at me. 

     Nietzsche was so right.