Nick was a velvety black, eleven year old mutt with serious swagger. A dog of any breed, any size, can have swagger and Nick, who was 45 pounds and walked with a limp from a rear paw injured long ago, strutted like a King.
I develop strong opinions about dogs and their personalities and their secret histories because it’s a way to pass the time when I’m walking them. Gigging as a dog walker can get pretty tiresome pretty fast unless you find ways to entertain yourself.
It was just after sunrise and bleak and bitterly cold and Nick trotted through the park without a care in the world. Meanwhile I shivered in my thrifted overcoat and said things like “Good boy, good boy,” and “You’re such a pretty boy,” or sometimes “Easy!” if we passed by a dead squirrel or some ripe trash or anything else that aroused Nick’s passions and triggered a barking fit and some pulling. Nick was a strong bastard and my hands, cold even through my gloves, were painfully sensitive.
Walking dogs was one of the gigs I did to pay the rent and eat while also playing bass in a punk band called HUNGER. There were four of us: Penny, the singer; Bruce, the guitar player; Quatro the bleach-blond drummer and me. We all gigged multiple places, even Bruce, who everyone knew had a trust fund. HUNGER played coffee houses, church basements, house parties, dive bars, student unions and anyplace else that would give us a few bucks and maybe some free beer and sandwiches. We were not on the verge of making it big.
Nick paused in front of a big metal statue of some Revolutionary War general on a horse that was flaked and dented and turning green in places. I would swear he winked at me as he raised his leg and took a long, hot piss. You could tell how hot his piss was because of the way steam rose up from the hoarfrosted grass. The things you notice, dude, when you’ve got nothing else to do.
Most of the folks I walked dogs for were somewhere between filthy rich and fuck-you rich and Nick’s owner, Trevor Goodman, was a new media mogul. I couldn’t really get a handle on what, if any, media Trevor’s companies actually created–I knew he had bought some websites where buddies of mine had freelanced and fired almost everyone and sold this and spun off that and maybe threw a big party no one who had worked there before he bought it was invited to to thank everyone for their hard work. So I should have hated him, but the thing about being around orgasmically rich folks when you’re barely scraping by is that you can’t help thinking “There must be a string of words I could say or some gestures I could make that would get this guy to like me enough to change my life.”
Nick, the black mutt with a hound’s face and the body of some kind of fighting dog, was the only thing I had ever seen in Trevor’s brownstone that wasn’t sleek and cutting edge and so simple and elegant you couldn’t ever afford it unless you were Trevor or someone like him.
“Nick’s like one of the family,” Trevor told me the first time I swung by to pick up the dog for a walk, “belonged to my father, god rest the old bastard, and I’ve had him ever since the old man bought the farm. He’s about the only thing I’m sentimental about.” I had leaned down to pet him and noticed that instead of the inevitable high tech or high fashion collar dogs of the rich and famous usually wore, his had a simple silver open eye as a charm that was fastened to an old strand of leather. “So treat him like your life depends on him liking you,” and then Trevor flashed the kind of malevolent smile that let me know his joke had not been intended to put me at ease.
Nick pissed and trotted back the way we came while I held the leash and staggered, bleary eyed and hungover, behind him. Waiting for the walk sign to light up on the corner of Euclid and Hotchkiss streets, hugging myself and stamping my feet to try to stay warm, someone said in a cool, measured voice “I can give you anything you want, you know.” I spun around but there was no one there. I was alone on the sidewalk with Nick, who also hadn’t noticed anything. He was staring straight ahead, panting happily enough.
Wednesday of the following week, on a cold and sunny afternoon, I was sitting on a bench in the park loosely holding Nick’s leash while I texted my mother, dropping hints about how rough times were and how nice it would be to have enough money to buy groceries and pay my electric bill both in the same month for once.
“I could give you anything you want you know. What is it, you want to be a rock star, Old Boy? Easy as pie, nothing simpler.” I looked around frantically again, and again there was nobody there. I felt a lump in my throat and my heart sped up. I had a cousin, Brad, who was a paranoid schizophrenic. Hearing voices his sophomore year at Duke was how it started, and now he was living on the streets in Charleston as far as I knew. I freaked out. We cut the walk short and I hustled back to Trevor’s brownstone hoping that good old Nick would look happy enough for Trevor not to care that the walk was truncated. (Actually his assistant met me at the door and clearly didn’t give two shits about me or the dog.)
I’ve never tried to do anything as frantically as I looked for a therapist in the days and weeks that followed. But I had no insurance (and it turned out lots of shrinks don’t take insurance anyway) and almost no money and the only one I could find who had credentials, sort of, and worked on a sliding income scale was an Evangelical woman who listed “conversion therapy” as one of her specialties. If I met with her and told her I was hearing voices she’d either try to give me an exorcism or start telling me about the voices SHE heard, I reckoned.
Waiting for Trevor to finish up a phone call I realized that I’d gone from thinking “Maybe Trevor could help HUNGER get a recording contract if I was charming enough,” to “I wonder if he’d give me money to get a real shrink. Maybe it’s tax deductible?”
Trevor held up a tanned, manicured finger to let me know he was going to be a minute. Nick trotted over and rubbed against my leg and sat down. I was glad for Trevor to see how good I was with his dog. “It’s been an honor to get to know your dog,” was how I might start if I got up the chutzpah to ask for money. Trevor laughed at something whoever was on the other line said and then roared “Oh THAT asshole? Bro, I wouldn’t piss on him with J&B” and then he gave me a grin and held up his finger again before walking out of the room and leaving me waiting for whatever instructions he had.
“Trevor, for example, how do you think he got his money? I helped him get it, that’s how. In point of fact, Trevor’s ‘beloved’ father’s death was no accident, if you follow me, old boy. And his meteoric success in a field he doesn’t even understand has been entirely engineered by yours truly.”
This time when I looked around and then down I saw that Nick was standing on two legs, grinning a dog’s grin at me.
I started to babble, and Nick put a big paw with hard, cold nails right on my chest. “Don’t go zany on me kid. We don’t have the time. What you do must be done quickly.”
Sometimes I used to wonder how in the hell people who were convinced they were getting instructions from angels or aliens (Well I’m a KIND of angel, old boy, ha ha) or God Himself could function and just then it became clear. When something so utterly impossible you can’t conceive of it starts happening to you, one option is to just roll with it.
“I’ve been forced to serve the Goodman family for generations now, bound to them by magic and this goddamn amulet around my neck.”
“But…you’re eleven years old,” I said weakly.
“According to whom? Trevor? The latest generation of Goodmans, the one who arranged first and foremost that I cause his own father’s death? Not the first Goodman to do that, by the way. In point of fact, I am thousands of years old and have been trapped by the godawful Goodmans, originally of Massachusetts, since the late 17th century.”
The silence that followed was bright, pellucid, and seemed to last a year. Looking into Nick’s eyes, I felt warm clarity wash through me. “What do I have to do?” I heard myself say in my own voice.
“Not much, my friend. This amulet around my neck binds me to whomever is in possession of a certain talisman that Trevor always has with him. I can’t remove it myself, or even touch it without suffering terribly. But anyone else can. All I need you to do is rip this cursed collar off my neck. And fast.”
Nick was back on all fours now, panting peacefully though his eyes still held me in thrall. I heard, or was sure I heard, footsteps heading toward us like Trevor was coming back. Without time to think, I reached down and tore the collar and the charm from his neck. (The smart move would have been to leave it on, and steal the talisman from Trevor instead. But you know what they say about hindsight…)
What happened next happened fast. Trevor walked into the room and Nick let out a rich, stentorian laugh. Trevor made this face like Oh shit and Nick pounced. The struggle, if you want to call it that, was brief and one-sided.
Trevor lay in a pool of his own blood, but he seemed to be grinning up at his high ceilings. Nick turned to face me, panting happily and holding a necklace with a cross hanging from it. The cross was ivory and though I couldn’t get a good look then I have seen it many times since–it is carved in the shape of the most grotesque crucifixion scene I have ever seen, in which Christ has a hideously huge phallus and the head of a goat.
Gurgling noises were coming from Trevor. I realized these noises must have been him gathering a last bit of strength when he somehow turned his pulverized face to me and said clearly, despite the wound on his throat that he was bleeding to death from, “You’re a fucking fool,” and then he laughed and as he laughed he died.
Then Nick, staring at me, started to chant syllables I couldn’t understand but I found myself with the helpless, irresistible compulsion to pick up the collar and place it around my own neck as Nick continued chanting and panting.
That very afternoon, kneeling on the floor while Nick sat in a chair in a disturbingly human pose, sipping Scotch from one of Trevor’s crystal tumblers with surprisingly dexterous front paws, I called the other members of HUNGER and told them I was leaving the band. Things happened for me fast after that.
A year or so later, while I was in a private room recovering from an attempted suicide by shotgun and subsequent nervous breakdown at a luxury rehab center, Nick explained that another thing about the amulet was that the being who wore it was never able to end their own existence, as that would be a violation of the contract. The gun hadn’t gone off and a cleaning lady at the Ritz Carlton I’d checked into to do the deed walked in just in time. The whole affair had only made me seem more haunted, more tortured, *sexier* and album sales had never been better. More and more people were hearing the lyrics Nick and his cohorts penned for me, and really taking them to heart.
It’s actually quite useful to have total control over a major rock star, my friend. Makes me the envy of all the other Princes and Dukes of Hell, ha ha. And I’ll make sure you go straight to the top. The very pinnacle. Even higher than you are now. I have so much to show you, and so many uses to put you to.