I used to sing to BBB, give him extra spoonfuls of peanut butter, bathe him in Donna’s tub, give him full body rubdowns, read him happy books, and I even made him a dapper coat. Donna bought him all sorts of toys and gourmet doggie food and Phillies dishes, but nothing seemed to cheer him up. I just couldn’t figure out what would make BBB happy.
Then I saw these two goth kids making out hard-core in the A-building stairwell of our high school—they looked so happy and in love when they paused the spit-swapping and let me pass through, and for some reason right then and there I knew I needed to get Bobby Big Boy a girlfriend.
When I thought about the size and weight of BBB’s perfect companion, Ms. Jenny came to mind, so I took B Thrice to the baseball diamond at five o’clock and introduced him to Private Jackson and Ms. Jenny.
We arrived when Ms. Jenny was already off the leash and doing laps, so she didn’t notice us at first.
“Who’s this?” Private Jackson asked, saying nothing about all the haikus I had sent him, which bummed me out a little.
“This is Bobby Big Boy.”
Private Jackson bent down and patted BBB on the head. “Where did you get him?”
“I found him on the street in a shoe box,” I said, wondering whether PJ had not received and read any of the haikus I had sent him about BBB.
“You rescued him,” PJ said.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s good karma.”
That’s when Ms. Jenny saw Bobby Big Boy and Cupid’s arrow stuck. She came tearing ass off the baseball field and began sniffing BBB’s butt. I had him on the leash, so he started crying.
“Let him off the leash,” PJ said.
“What if they fight?”
“They won’t. Ms. Jenny’s a lover.”
So I let BBB off the leash and the two little dogs began to wrestle and run around in circles and roll all about for at least a half hour as PJ and I just watched and smiled.
“This is the happiest I’ve seen B Thrice since I picked him up off the streets,” I told Private Jackson.
“I think Ms. Jenny is in love,” PJ said to me.
And then we both agreed that for the sake of our dogs’ happiness, we would meet at the field at least once a week, for doggie playtime.
But when it was time to say goodbye, I couldn’t help asking whether PJ liked the doggie haikus I had been sending him.
“Ms. Jenny will be looking forward to seeing Bobby Big Boy again,” PJ said. He leashed Ms. Jenny and walked away.
I was pretty proud of BBB for not trying to hump Ms. Jenny on the first date, so I chalked the experience up as a victory, and left it at that.
We started visiting the baseball diamond pretty regularly, and after a few weeks or so we were walking Ms. Jenny and PJ back to their house, and then one day we went inside for tea, and I saw that Private Jackson had been hanging up my haikus on his living-room walls, and that he had completely covered one of four walls with my haikus!
“Why do you put my haikus up on the wall?” I asked him.
“Do you like green tea?” he replied.
“Yes,” I said, even though I had never before even had green tea, and then we drank tea together silently, while BBB and Ms. Jenny took a nap, spooning on the rug under a glass coffee table.
A bit later on—after many house visits—Private Jackson started allowing me to read through his haiku notebooks, which impressed me very much, because he writes beautiful poetry.
Here’s Private Jackson’s best haiku, as far as I’m concerned:
TOGETHER PLAYING
GRAY AND WHITE-BROWN DOGS OF OURS
WE WATCH QUIETLY
Simple and true. Like a frickin’ snapshot. Jackson wrote that one for me and gave it to me on this really nice piece of paper for my birthday last year. I carry that haiku around in my backpack and I read it whenever I am feeling really down. I have it memorized, of course, but I like looking at Private Jackson’s handwriting, because it is so meticulous—like a little kid’s. It’s as if he was trying so hard to remember how to spell each syllable, or maybe like he was giving each syllable so much importance, that every single letter had to wait an extra second to be born and is therefore spaced just a little too far apart. You’ve never seen anything like it, and his kick-ass handwriting makes the haiku even better.
To this day, if I ask Jackson any questions about his past or his family or anything like that he’ll usually say some Zen bullcrap like “There is no past,” or “I am here in the present,” or “Like our dogs playing in the grass, I am.” It used to piss me off a lot, before I got used to the Zen hooey. But now, I sorta like it. True.
And that’s all I ever do with Private Jackson—run the dogs, drink tea, and read his haikus. I still write him haikus, only I hand deliver the poems to save money, because postage adds up and I’m living in Hello Yellow as of late.
Something cool: I’ve covered three and a half of his living room walls with doggie haikus. I’m going to cover all four before junior year ends. Word.