Skippy's Downfall
I was raised and nurtured (ha!) in a warm, dry desert climate. Many of the houses had entry ways leading to the front door, which were usually accessed through another decorative door or somesuch. Think Spanish villa.

Ours had a lovely wrought iron gate that allowed for detecting if there were any murderous types waiting to knife us behind the relative safety of the locked cage. It was also a safe place to taunt school bullies who had followed you home to smack you because you looked content in life (my little brother was great at filling plastic bags with piss and dropping them from the second floor on said bullies, but that’s another story).

My dad decided that the caged entryway would be a great place to keep the week’s trash leading up to trash day (in those days, there were no bins, you just left your plastic bags at the curb and they were hauled away by some Yale English major driving truck while he worked on his chef d’oeuvre.

However, in addition to lending an air of high class to our entryway, the bags seem to attract animals that would tear open the bags to get to the various chicken bones, old pork chops and sundry. Dad, who needed no excuse to get angry, was, well often more angry.

He tried to put small amounts of chicken wire over the bottom portion of the gate, which didn’t work because the “animals” would still get to it (probably by climbing over said chicken wire – duh!). The chicken wire, combined with the ripped trash bags did add to the general belief that our family often played “Dueling Banjos”.
One warm summer’s night, we awoke to ungodly wails, like Satan had joined the Scientologists and just received his donation levy for the year. I was accustomed to the weird nocturnal sounds of coyote and black bear, but this was different, more desperate and plaintive.

By the time I crept like Clement Clarke Moore to see what was the matter, my Dad and older brother were in the front entryway. Apparently, Skippy, the next door neighbor’s black Labrador made it through the bars, tore up the bags and scarfed up the remnant of Mom’s tuna/cashew/bean casserole. Upon exiting, poor Skippy learned to his dismay (I’m projecting) that he was now too large. He was stuck halfway out of the bars of the gate and my Dad and brother were trying to get him to go forward or back as humanely as possible.

This lasted, oh, about 30 seconds until Dad got so angry that he left to go to the garage. He returned with a two gallon can of axle grease, the type one uses to lube up tractors and other farm machinery. Skippy was literally coated from head to toe and eventually +Pop+ he got out and ran like he smelled a poodle in heat.

We all went to bed to the mumbled sounds of Dad’s cursing, determined to forget about it all.

It was all brought back the next day, however, when the neighbor boy, Georg, said that his mom was going to have Skippy put to sleep. Apparently, Skippy waited until he got back to the house and through the doggy door before he did that rubbing thing dogs do when they smell a nice turd or rotten egg in the grass.

Skippy went the extra mile because he did it on the carpet, and on Georg’s mom’s new tan furniture. I just mumbled a guilty, “wow!” and vowed to never tell Georg what happened.

I did tell my Dad and brother, who laughed and laughed. I like to think that in those days before cancer took my pop that he could reminisce about Skippy and an overabundance of axel grease and find a scintilla of a happy thought.

Length? Swinging death, baby, swinging death.
( BrokenCoccyx doesn't mind if you grope on, Thu 14 Jan 2010, 19:48, 1 reply)

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"we awoke to ungodly wails, like Satan had joined the Scientologists and just received his donation levy for the year"
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Sun 17 Jan 2010, 2:54, closed)