So, here we were, almost twenty-five years later, both of us going through changes. I had finally decided to apply to a masters writing program after decades of dissembling. Brigid had always told me to write; not ‘if I really wanted to’, not ‘because I had the gift’, and not ‘when I stopped fucking around.’ No conditional baloney, no argument. She was one of those very persuasive, full-of-shit people who, despite their utter lack of grace, could bend you to their will. Without her persistence, my literary inkling would have winked out long ago.

I sat by her bedside on the room’s sole piece of movable furniture, a wooden folding chair, the chair where her Bangladeshi home health aide sat, except when she prayed by the front door. In addition to my offerings, I brought along a couple of the short essays I had banged out as an application portfolio, including an anecdote recently published in The New York Times Metropolitan Diary section about shopping for styrofoam with a nickel stuck to my forehead. I read it aloud to her. “Oh, V,” she said, “That’s fuckin’ brilliant.” I chuckled with pride and disbelief.

“So, Bridge, do you have that recommendation?”

“Yeah, it’s in my black notebook,” she said.

“All your notebooks are black.”

“Here,” she said, pulling a folded piece of paper from a black notebook. Her longhand was a fine cursive, every third word illegible.

“I may have to transcribe it onto my computer and get it notarized,” I said.

“You and your fancy-pants machines.”

to whom

it’s like a dream come true that V. – Robert V. Hansmann – has made up his mind to write. as a poet and playwright i’ve been after him for years and as a smart shy man, he’d just smile …

and now that he has taken the giant step, the world is a better place. thank you for your kindness for reading this and thank you for V., he’ll make you proud.

as ever

                                    brigid m———–

I slipped the thing into my inside jacket pocket.

Brigid was an Irish Stoic: you knew better than to ask what was wrong. For nine months, she had been triangulating between St. Vincent’s Hospital, the Village Nursing Home, and her walk-up on Bleecker Street. She waved away all concerns about a diagnosis, but process of elimination indicated Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. About once every two months, she’d recover from pneumonia or something equally grave, get out of bed, pull on her clothes, head downstairs, and wind up in the hospital the next day. Her health had stabilized in recent weeks, which was why she was back on Bleecker Street.

In 1985, when we met, I was a pup of thirty-five and she was my age now, fifty-eight. Brigid was there at my second AA meeting. Not drinking was new to me: the whole idea ridiculous, appealing, and terrifying. In a room full of stiffs in suits, she blazed like a comet of anarchy trailing great clouds of profanity. Cocksucker this: motherfucker that. And when I discovered she had run away and joined the circus at age forty, I adored her absolutely. She left her elementary school-age daughter with her mother in the Bronx and followed a one-ring operation around the Midwest for eighteen months.

She liked me, it seemed. I could make her laugh. I teased her about her preposterous opinions, while her no-bullshit compassion blew an enormous hole in my middle-class depressive’s complacency. She insisted I not take myself too seriously. “Booze. Now that’s fuckin’ serious.” Her love of beauty, acute sense of personal injustice, and heedless vulgarity could erupt into great, baroque rants. I would hear her out, every last cockamamie riff. And, man, could we dish.

She had the dazzling capacity to juggle as many as four trains of thought at the same time. A simple conversation might devolve into a breathtaking scramble up one side of the space/time continuum and down the other. You could find yourself entangled in an elaborate discussion of James Joyce (she called him ‘Jimmy’), Asian women’s alleged propensity for bossiness, and coleslaw, ingredients of.

Her passion for experience, to go and see and hear and read and do, was a quality I envied. I envied her contradictions and her chutzpah. One winter we took a trip to Rome and she initiated a willy-nilly treasure hunt to see all the Caravaggios in the city. We tracked them down – every last incandescent altarpiece and every sassy, naked man hiding out in a long row of sleepy women in gilded frames.

More than anything, Brigid loved words. She filled notebook after notebook with, I don’t know, notes. Notes, quotes, resentments, epiphanies, dialogue, scribbles. Fairly soon after that first meeting, she would let you know she was a poet of ‘The Beat Gen.’ One of her poems, ‘Daisy,’ is occasionally included in Beat anthologies. It’s a lovely little thing; probably included more on account of her gender than anything else, for you can count the women Beats on one hand. In addition to poetry, she wrote stage plays. She always had some project underway.

Brigid’s door always stood slightly ajar. This gesture expressed either her bohemian nonchalance or the fact that, if it closed, the door would seal with such powerful molecular adhesion that to gain entry would require firemen with crowbars and possibly acetylene. I pushed and it gave way a little, smacking into something soft. I tucked my head in and saw a woman sitting on the floor wrapped in green fabric. She looked up at me. “I’m so sorry,” I mumbled and squeezed by.

At the distant end of a dim series of chambers, a television cast wan shadows. I approached. Brigid reclined upon her bed, a tatty odalisque in faded leopard print pajamas and a housecoat the lurid sheen of motor oil on a puddle. Her gray hair, clinging desperately to an ancient blond tint, was in pin curls. “How’re you feeling?” I asked.

“How the fuck do ya think I’m feeling?”

“There was an impediment in the corridor.”

“She’s Muslim.”

“Of course.”

She raised the remote, muted the TV, and fixed her fierce, black eyes on me.

“So. Did you bring the money?” she said.

“One of these days, Bridge, I expect a freebie.”

“Fuck you, V.”

“But look! I brought chocolate and nylons.”

I handed her an envelope with eight twenties, then took a license-plate-sized Hershey’s chocolate bar and a couple bottles of San Pellegrino from my bag and carried them to the kitchen. Her refrigerator had only two shelves, both full. In the time it took me to find space for the water, she’d misplaced the money. After much whooping and digging and rolling from side to side, the bills were found.

“So, you keep all your money under the mattress?”

“Oh, go fuck yourself. I knew where it was.”

This was mid-winter 2009 and I’d come to pick up a recommendation for graduate school. The document was ready, so I had been summoned. As an afterthought, Brigid had asked me to bring some cash. “Ya know, just some ‘walking around’ money, V.” Ever since she emigrated to the Village as a teenager from ‘the Holy Land of the Bronx’, she had had an extremely relaxed relationship with personal finance and now that she was more or less confined to her Bleecker Street apartment, she had become dependent on the kindness of friends.

I find ‘gratitude’ an exasperatingly convoluted concept. Its expression walks the fine edge between honesty and hypocrisy, too often tumbling off into cliché, trailing clouds of ulterior motives. The present human population does not possess the requisite humility for genuine gratitude. What passes today for gratitude is at best, a negotiation technique, a feint, and at worst, a falsehood. Gratitude frames its meaning in language that has evolved to mimic and hinder understanding, to have it both ways. All too often gratitude will hide a bad motive beneath a good one.

The phrase “Thank you” can convey both kindness and insincerity with the same neutrality. It encodes dishonesty. On the occasions that a ‘thank you’ greases a social transaction, it does so with a mercenary subtext. “Thank you” is currency for counterfeit emotional commerce. Sentimentalized, denatured, and commodified virtue nowadays passes for manners.

If one needs express appreciation, a descriptive sentence would be more accurate. For example: “The piece of gum you gave me calmed me down, at least I think it did.” This gives the recipient a both reasonably accurate assessment of his or her behavior and a report on its effect on the speaker: cause and effect. Still, there’s plenty of room for utter bullshit.

This brings me to the haunting Thank-You Note. There may be no other childhood formality more painful to recall. During the period between Christmas and New Year’s, I would be confined to my room until I could grunt out a snarky turdlette to Aunt Mary and Uncle George praising the utility of their unwearable sweater.

I write Thank-You notes all the time. I tell myself it’s because everybody loves to get mail, but in reality, I am a duplicitous son-of-a-bitch who can never have enough sweaters.

There has been a turd under my therapist’s recliner for a month. Every time she leans back, there it is. This turd is the product of her teacup Yorkie, Sueño. I cannot take my eyes off it. Of course I do, but it doesn’t take much for my attention to drift away from her benign countenance and the matters at hand and drop to the silhouetted deposit below. What the fuck!? Should I confront this distraction? What does it mean? And how do I know it’s a turd?

It is a turd because I stepped on one a while ago and have had a mystical bond with Sueño’s knuckle-sized offerings ever since. I would know one anywhere. Dolores, my therapist, insists that her clientele remove their shoes upon entering. This has been the ritual since I began seeing her. When my right foot bore down on the canine waste unit, it rebounded as if repelled magnetically. The advantage of shoelessness is heightened sensitivity. The downside is increased vulnerability to dogshit. I glanced down. What I saw was unmistakably a turd, just lying there slightly smooshed, like an unwrapped caramel. A bum’s rush of associations hurtled into my brain. I tied my sneakers and left, muttering, “Jesus Christ, Dolores. Jesus Fucking Christ.” all the way to the elevator.

We go way back, Dolores and me. This is the fifth, no, sixth, of her ‘offices’ I’ve sat in. She works out of her apartment and they have all been filled with drama, but only this last one has had dogs. Dolores derives pleasure and comfort from Sueño, as she did from his predecessor, Skipper. The attention she lavishes upon this creature makes her happy, but Sueño wants more. I believe the dog is using flattery to ensure the reliability of his food source.

After acknowledging their essential sweetness of temperament, I have to say I don’t like dogs. They are needy, sloppy creatures prone to misinterpret all human activity and then hysterically overreact. I don’t like to be licked or nuzzled or jumped on and I hate being barked at. Don’t cram your nose into my crotch. “Pick on someone your own size, asshole,” I want to say, “Take your stupid saliva somewhere else.”

If I confront her on this rogue turd, I will be asked how it makes me feel. Piece of shit = feelings. Does the dogshit rip the scab off some childhood trauma? Is there something about the therapist/puppy relationship that threatens me? So far, I have chosen to not deal the ‘elephant’ in the living room. If there’s an elephant in the living room and only I see it, am I still crazy? Am I the only crazy one?

What I have come to appreciate about Dolores is that she lets her life intrude into her practice. Her refusal to maintain customary therapeutic boundaries often places me in a position where intimacy cannot be avoided. Scary. I can react in the moment to an uncomfortable situation, either confronting her directly or leap-frogging the confrontation and landing on shards of confusion. Or I can withhold. In any event, I act. The hour we share is always surprising and over the years I have untangled skeins and skeins of bullshit.

When Dolores’ door is closed and we are in session, if Sueño is on the other side, he will leap, splaying himself against the door until she opens it. Then the dog flies onto her lap, which, because of her recumbent position, consists of her entire body. I pretend Dolores is paying full attention to me. I could challenge her on this, claim it reminds of my upbringing. That would be the thing to do. Where would the little dog go? The bathroom? A smallish crate? Hell, this is my hour, my therapeutic forty-five-minute hour. If I banish the dog, or just state my case firmly, the repercussions are bound to bring on a jumble of conflicting ideas and emotions. I can’t let the little dog get under my skin. But he has left me a secret talisman, a seductive distraction for my eyes only.

I resent that some people see animals, dogs mostly, through a sentimental anthropomorphic lens. They fool themselves, those poor folks. I imagine they think they are getting their needs met. They can’t or won’t risk any kind of peer engagement. I want love I can articulate, accept, and reciprocate and I want it from human beings. At best, pet people seem to require a fluffy buffer.

Dogs are furniture. I grew up with a dog and, when my kids were young, we had one. They were both English Bulldogs. I loved Babyface and I loved Mercy. Those dogs shat in the backyard, farted under the breakfast table, and occasionally submitted demented antics for our approval. They were beloved, but mostly ignored.

I have a good shrink. Her generosity is without peer. Dealing with the dog gives me the opportunity to ask for respect, to take up space, to find my way. But, man, is she weird.

We lived in a large house of abundant womanhood, three females and a male: my wife, Trudi; our young daughter, Claire; our English bulldog, Mercy; and me. One summer, a fiesta of fecundity, the dog and the wife were discovered to be simultaneously pregnant. Mercy gave birth six months before Trudi was to come to term. As a consequence, much of the heavy lifting associated with canine midwifery and puppy nurture fell to me – the midnight and the 4am feedings and all Mercy haulage. I was a doggie doula.

Mercy was a sexy bulldog. She had a well-proportioned figure for an animal with such big shoulders and head and little legs, svelte in comparison to the hulking, pumpkin-headed males. Her large, damp, brown eyes were set wide in a blunt and wrinkly cranium. So enormous was her mouth that she could yawn and inhale the entire world. The wet drapery of her lips sent slobber flying like shrapnel when she shook her head. Her coat was short and pale with patches of a less pale beige. Where the skin of her face was exposed, it shone ebony and moist, except for her nose, which resembled a heavily calloused, black wall-socket or a burnt marshmallow punctured twice by a pencil. The dog reference book gave bulldogs an ‘A’ as guard dogs but flunked them as watchdogs, saying, in effect, “you had to wake them up and point them at the intruder.” Mercy was best at sleeping and farting. Still, she had a merry gaze and the sweetest temperament.

Breeding Mercy seemed like a good idea. Puppies, aw. We schlepped her back to the breeder for a weekend tryst with a handsome brute named Mister Orie. They parted without a backward glance and, two months later, Mercy was delivered of nine puppies. The vet was astonished. Customarily, bulldogs bear litters of four, and very gingerly, due to their extreme mutancy. Something about a y-shaped uterus and perilous ungainliness. The last two of her pups didn’t survive the first day.

To accommodate her brood, I constructed what canine manuals called a ‘whelping box.’ A four-foot by four-foot open crate with ten-inch sides, it would provide a home to the tiny, helpless critters. Possessing no innate carpentry skills, but endowed with a hare-brained faith in printed instructions, I set out to build my dog a nursery. I had the plywood cut, then assembled the whelping box on the driveway with a hammer and too many nails. I used ¾ inch plywood, instead of equally durable 3/8 inch. It weighed a goddamn ton, where it should have weighed a half a goddamn ton. I heaved the thing up the flagstone steps and into a downstairs room in the studio next to our big yellow house.

These brand new creatures were utterly enchanting. Blind and featureless at first, like seven balled-up pairs of warm, cashmere socks, they didn’t do much except eat and shit. Still, they could stop your breath just by twitching. Mercy was forbidden to remain in the whelping box after mealtime because of her clumsiness. “Bulldog young can be inadvertently crushed if left unattended, so it is incumbent upon caregivers to monitor feeding times closely. It is wise to remove the mother between feedings.” The newborn pups required Mercy’s battery of teats every four hours. This was practical information that one reads and registers, but cannot fully comprehend until the time comes – then comes again all too soon.

Mercy had to be roused from her slumber, coaxed outside, and then into the studio and hoisted like so much dead weight into the formidable whelping chamber, where she would lie inert while seven little parasites affixed themselves to her undercarriage. After drainage, removing her from the whelping box harkened back to stump removal in olden days, when teams of oxen exerted great and mindless strength until the earth groaned and released its captive stump. That accomplished, it was time for us (me) to try to catch forty winks, before the ungodly procedure began again.

The puppies’ room was monkishly small: in olden days it could fit a twin bed, a chest of drawers, and a very slight person. Even empty of furniture, there was not a lot of maneuverability with the whelping box claiming pride of place. The animals needed a toasty, draft-free environment in order to thrive. Mercy was not available to generate warmth, so an alternate had to be found. Though it was summer, I rigged a cheap photographer’s spotlight with a potent bulb and the room incandesced. PuppyLand became the epicenter for transcendent sweetness and a powerful and complex aroma.

The first Sunday postpartum, Mercy’s abdominal stitches gave way, resulting in several exciting hours of Family Bonding Time and Hyperawareness Theater. The four of us bundled into the old Oldsmobile and headed off in the direction of the only open animal emergency room, located in the opposite corner of the county. My wife drove with Claire in the front seat, while I held Mercy on my lap in the back, trying to keep her insides inside. “Oh, our dog is leaking.” was our doleful cry. We accepted our mission and it was accomplished. Mercy was resewn and domestic equilibrium restored.

The little beasts grew so fast. In a matter of days, they were gobbling up a slurry of pulverized kibble and water as well as mother’s milk. One Cuisinart blade was terminally blunted in the kibble grinding process and another grievously dulled. Poor Mercy became understandably reluctant to submit to the ravening mouths of her progeny. Tiny pointy teeth mauled the tender skin of her belly. Finally, the hungry creatures were weaned and she could withdraw, leaving the drama of her maternal trials behind.

The puppies all had different markings and each received a well-considered name – Gracie was funny, Red was named for a Fraggle (a specialized Muppet of the day), Whitey was snow white with a pink nose, Timothy fit his name for reasons obvious only to Claire, Dudley was the runt (but only at the beginning), Emma was girlie, and Finny had five brown patches (hence, a five spot, a five-dollar bill, a fin). A litter of doggies romping on the green, green grass may be the closest to honest joy I have ever experienced. Their sparking energy and the bounding pleasure that they took in their puppyhood remains an adhesive reverie for me.

The pups, source of so much enjoyment for all of us, soon posed a serious quandary. They needed homes. The daunting prospect of finding families for all that adorableness cast a pall over the late summer. We hadn’t really thought it through. We hadn’t anticipated that Mercy would be so extravagantly fertile or that there might be other, more important, things on our minds. A litter of three, four tops, that’s what we imagined. Not seven. After much discussion, we decided to give up the youngsters to Mercy’s breeder as she was in the finding-homes-for-puppies business. That was a sorrowful trip, but a clean break.

Then, two weeks after Halloween, our Katherine was born.