Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

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  • • •

  The subject of buying a family plot came up. My dad wanted to buy other plots next to my brother so that he and my mother could be buried next to him. I remember my parents talking to our rabbi about having an open casket even though my brother’s body had been badly damaged and…something about his chest and forehead being caved in, and Jews didn’t typically have open-casket funerals, but my mother was demanding it.

  “He’s my son, and I want to say goodbye to him,” she told the rabbi. I remember these words exactly because I had never seen my mom demand anything from anyone. My father looked at my mother when she said that, and I remember thinking he had never seen her demand anything either. For the first time in my life, in that moment, my mother was more in control than my father.

  The rabbi was telling my father that in order to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, my mother would have to convert to Judaism. Wait, what? I thought my mom was Jewish—mostly because no one ever told me she wasn’t. During all of my brothers’ and sisters’ bar and bat mitzvahs, my mother would go up on the bimah and speak Hebrew just like all the other Jewish mothers did during everyone else’s bar and bat mitzvahs. She even went with my father and me to temple some Friday nights.

  Apparently, my mother was Mormon, and when she came over from Germany to marry my father, she agreed to raise their children Jewish. I had never heard the word “Mormon” before. I always thought that when my dad called my mom a “shiksa,” he was talking about her being German. I didn’t know that “shiksa” meant a non-Jew. Didn’t your mother have to be Jewish in order for you to be Jewish? Was I not Jewish either? More great news.

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  • • •

  There was a funeral, and all I remember were my brothers Glen and Roy taking turns holding me in their laps as we all sat and cried throughout the service. I remember thinking, Why say such a thing if you didn’t mean it? Why not be extra careful when you’re on a fucking mountain peak if you promised your littlest sister that you would spend the rest of the summer tipping her over in a sailboat? Why would you break that promise to her? I was livid.

  I remember my German grandfather, Vati, coming over and saying to Roy: “You’re the oldest now. You need to take care of your brothers and sisters.” I remember thinking, Roy isn’t the oldest. There is no oldest anymore. We are a pot without a lid.

  They’d had to pump Chet’s body with embalming fluid so that his face could be viewed. He looked dead and bloated. The funeral ended, and I guess at some point we went back to Martha’s Vineyard to finish out our summer? I don’t remember.

  The day after the funeral must have been around the time that I stopped crying in front of people. If everyone in my family was going to fall apart—and the only person who held our shit together just let himself go off and die after he promised me that he would come back after his trip—then I would have to be strong on my own.

  From that day onward, if I saw my mother crying or heard my parents groaning in anguish in their bedroom in the early hours of the morning, I would leave the house and get on my bike. I would ride my bike for hours and cry, but I would not allow myself to cry in front of anyone else or show any weakness. I would not talk about my brother to my family. If his name came up, I left the room and went for a bike ride. I would ride and ride and cry and cry and then walk back in the front door numb, hoping no one was there. No one being home was better than anyone being home.

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  • • •

  At some point on the Vineyard that summer, my mother was standing on the deck looking at the water saying she was just waiting for a dream or a sign that Chet was okay—something from God. She wanted Chet to tell her he was safe and in heaven. She was trying to recruit me. That’s how it felt when she tried to talk to me about Chet. It felt like she was trying to trick me into crying. I walked away from her and told her that there was no God and there was no heaven and out of everyone in the world she should know that by now.

  My mother was in pain, and I chose to stab her again. I couldn’t understand anyone else’s pain—I couldn’t even understand my own. I was confused, and I was mad. I remember thinking, If Chet ever comes back, I’m not just going to go back to the way things were before. No, I was going to punish him for what he did.

  I remember asking my dad—who would sit for hours on the deck staring at the bay—if he would take me swimming.

  My dad taught me how to swim when I was two or three. Whenever he was on the Vineyard—he commuted back and forth to New Jersey in the summer for nonexistent “used-car business”—he would carry me down from the house to the bay and hold me in his arms as he walked us into the water, and then I would swim with him on his back and climb on top of his shoulders and dive over the top of his head. I’d swim back to him holding my breath underwater, until I was right back in his arms. I loved swimming with my dad. After that, he would carry me up the path back to our house and tell me that I was stronger than anyone else he knew and that I’d probably end up competing in the Olympics.

  My father didn’t respond the first time, so I asked him a second time.

  “We’re not going in the water,” he growled. “How can I go in the water, when my boy is dead?” His face was always contorted back then. Wretched. It hurt to look at both my parents.

  I knew it was a risk to defy my father, but I was desperate for him to snap out of it. There was absolutely no light in him, and it was sucking the life out of what was left of the rest of us.

  If I could just get him into the water, I knew he would relax a little or find a little ray of sunshine, or at least I could hold on to his back and then trick him into a hug. I just wanted him to breathe—I wanted to breathe too. The water was safe, because if I started crying I could just dunk my head and shake it off. If anyone could get him to experience some joy, it would be me.

  I turned away from him and defiantly walked down the steps and across the lawn to the path that led down to the water. I never looked back, because I was scared shitless about how he would react to seeing me swim alone. The only rule I had growing up was never to swim alone.

  I thought about getting spanked in the water and how funny that would be for both of us, him trying to catch me in the water to spank me. We’d both end up laughing so hard, I’d inevitably pee, and then I’d know my dad was mine. I could always get everyone in my family to laugh. I would just pee in my pants. That got everyone, every time.

  When I got down to the water I nervously swam out about twenty yards. When I mustered up the courage, with every kind of fear pulsating through my body for having defied him, I looked back and saw he had gone inside.

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  • • •

  I haven’t had a bowl of cereal since that night in the kitchen with my brother. My brothers and sisters continued eating cereal all the time growing up. I didn’t understand that—how they could do something that Chet loved so much, knowing what we knew. I didn’t understand it because I was only able to draw from my own experience and didn’t have the faculties to grasp that their relationships to cereal weren’t as linked to Chet as mine was. That not everyone has your history or your past. That my brothers and sisters had their own memories of Chet, which didn’t involve cereal, or even me. That each person has their own individual memory of the way things happened, and that you can waste so much time being angry at cereal.

  I only ate eggs after Chet died. I’ve spent the past thirty-three years looking at cereal with disdain. Cereal was for children. Cereal was for nine-year-olds before they got their hearts broken. Cereal was off-limits.

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  • • •

  One day, when I was around fifteen, I went foraging through the attic and found the pictures of my brother, head caved in, crumpled among rocks. I saw the pictures most parents would have made a better effort of hiding. His head, his chest, everything was
crushed. Blood splattered the rocks above him. His limp body with his torn flannel shirt and jean shorts.

  The mountain rangers and paramedics said he would have died instantly. Lucky for him, I thought, looking at those photos. The rest of our pain was taking forever.

  There are many things dogs can do to make you feel like a better human being—like run toward you. For the record, I’m not one of those people who cares more about animals than humans, but I am someone who knows that loving a dog makes you a kinder and fuller person.

  I don’t have such luck with babies—and the feeling is mutual—so when I realized dogs were receptive to me, I returned the favor. My obsession with Chow Chow mixes came alive only when I rescued Chunk and was told he was a Chow mix. After six years, I decided it was time for Chunk to have a sibling. If Chunk was my firstborn, then Tammy was the stepdaughter that I loved almost more than my own blood. Tammy was a tramp, and that’s what I respected about her the most.

  The minute I saw her, I knew she was my dog. First, she was a Chow mix and she had the purple tongue to prove it. Second, everything about her screamed Guadalajara. She looked like she had survived more than one street fight, and possibly one with an animal that wasn’t a dog. She had one dead ear, alopecia on her ass, a very scantily clad tail, and a gait that hinted she had withstood hip-replacement surgery. Tammy was essentially a build-a-bear, and I knew that with some maternal attention from my cleaning ladies and some serious nutrition, I could turn that gait into a swagger. She was exactly the type of dog who could pull off an ear piercing.

  We rescued Tammy from a facility in Long Beach—where, for the record, my cousin Molly said the following: “You can’t get that dog. She’s the ugliest one here.”

  I didn’t think she was ugly. I thought she gave new meaning to the term “underdog.” There was nothing ugly about her—scrappy, maybe, like she could have been carrying a pocketknife. She needed me, and whatever her name would turn out to be, I knew I needed her right back.

  Even though Molly is twelve years younger than I am, she’s smarter and more capable than I’ll ever be, but in this particular instance I knew I had the ability to see what would be overlooked by most everyone else. That’s the great thing about Molly: she knows I’m right about the things that get me in the gut. If I want to give a stranger $10,000 and she thinks they’re going to spend it on crack—just because I met that person in a crack den—I will defer to Molly. She’ll say something along the lines of, “Let’s sleep on that, and if you still feel that way in the morning, then we’ll do it and you’ll have my full support.”

  That means no.

  In this instance, Molly knew I meant business. I was rescuing Tammy and was going to give her what she needed—some real-life pampering. Someone to show her she was special. After all, when I get dogs, they aren’t just being rescued by me, they are getting the love and attention of my cleaning ladies, my assistants, my dog walker, and everyone else who either works at my house or meanders through it on a regular basis.

  Older dogs are special because they have had more rejection. Their hope is gone and, even though no one seems to know exactly how old any rescue dog is, when you adopt an older dog you are cramming their last years with love and giving them the security that comes with knowing they have a home. I have always believed you can erase bad memories with twice as many good ones. Maybe “erase” isn’t the right word. Maybe “dim” is a better word.

  After the people at the rescue center cleaned up Tammy, the two women handling her adoption told me that she could be a really beat-up four-year-old or she could be twelve, and that I should ask my vet for clarification when she had her first checkup. When the rescue presented Tammy to us, they had placed a little pink bow in each ear—the full-bodied ear and the limp one. She looked like a harlot. Once we got her in the car on our way home, we removed those embarrassing gender labels from her ears and got down to business.

  “I feel like we have two names to choose from,” I told Molly on our way back to my house. “Bernice or Tammy.”

  “Or Destiny,” Molly said, with the dog sitting on her lap looking at the 405 freeway in awe. “Destiny is totally underused.”

  The first night I had Tammy home I had some people over for dinner. I picked her up and placed her in my lap, facing me, leaving both of her curiously stiff front paws positioned around each of my hips. Mary craned her head over the dinner table, amazed, and said, “Is she hugging you? I’ve never seen a dog do that.”

  “Chelsea’s making her,” Molly told Mary. I wasn’t making Tammy do anything. I was showing her the seating options available to her, and one option was on my lap, facing me. Chunk would never sit on my lap—a) he was just too big, and b) he valued his personal space. I had finally found someone who didn’t.

  Tammy’s teeth looked like she was from London, so when Tanner took her to her first vet appointment for a once-over, the nurse called and told me she may need to have all her teeth removed.

  “Why would that be necessary?” I asked.

  “Because they could all be infected,” she informed me.

  “Well, isn’t there a way to tell which ones are infected first—before removing them all?”

  “We won’t really know until we put her under and take a look.”

  “How will she eat with no teeth?”

  “Well, we won’t take out any teeth that aren’t infected,” she assured me.

  I was confused by this exchange. It felt like I was talking to a real live animal on the phone. “I don’t want any teeth that aren’t infected to be removed. Is that clear? Otherwise, I can just take her to my own dentist on Monday.”

  Poor Tammy. I wasn’t about to let her move to Bel-Air with no teeth.

  Before the dog nurse hung up, I asked if they had been able to decipher Tammy’s age from her teeth’s state of affairs.

  “She could be anywhere from four or five…to twelve. It’s hard to say.”

  Is it written somewhere in the Journal of Medicine for Dogs to just say that all rescue dogs are between the ages of four and twelve? How can it be that a swab of saliva can determine a dog’s genetic heritage yet there isn’t a more precise way to determine the age of a dog at this juncture in modern society?

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  • • •

  Tammy would allow me to do almost anything to her body, and I needed her to know that she was going to get so tackled with love that her past would become a distant memory replaced by doggy massages, acupuncture, and baton twirling. She would let out a low rumble growl and I would go in closer, waiting for her to bite my face off, but she never once bit me. She bit my sister Shana once, but we all agreed that it was warranted. Tammy knew I was her captor and that it was in her best interest to just lean in and accept my devotion. Once I was done showering her with affection, she’d give me a final look to confirm that I was done molesting her, then scurry off the bed and down her doggy steps into the doggy bed that she’d usurped from Chunk. Once comfortably inside her new bed, she’d let out a groan that implied, Thank God that’s over.

  I couldn’t keep my hands off her. I’d put her in a seatbelt in my lap on the way to work, when I knew she’d be much happier sitting in the backseat with her limbs free and one dead ear out the window. I can be an effusive lover, and after our initial trial period together, she just learned to deal with my advances.

  She was just big enough for it to be imprudent to pick her up, but that didn’t stop me either. She would immediately stiffen up, with her legs outstretched as if she were standing—making her look stuffed. She was a taxidermist’s dream.

  Chunk was slim, but I’m not sure how to describe Tammy’s body. It seemed possible that some of her organs had shifted during one of her bar fights and then solidified. Her bald spots filled out within weeks, and her ratlike tail became full-bodied within her first month at home. She looked like an ad for nutri
tion.

  She even started following me onstage during the interview segment of my Netflix show and would sometimes prop herself up on the little table between the guest and me. She didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about her; she just wanted to make sure we were in the same room, nothing more, nothing less. She would have been fine if I never pampered or pet her, but like most rescue dogs, if I walked out of the room, she’d follow me. If I walked into a bathroom, she would open the door with her nose and stare at me until I was done. Chunk did the same thing in a more needy way. He’d open the bathroom door, or if we were at work, he’d slide headfirst under the bathroom stall and then avoid eye contact. Tammy would do these things, but with confidence. Where Chunk was refined, Tammy was street. She’d sit down in front of the toilet, face-to-face, as if to say: Bitch, you need me more than I need you. I’m just keeping an eye on things. Tammy was more like a security guard.

  She wasn’t quite as spry as Chunk, so I didn’t bring her on trips with me because she couldn’t hop on and off planes and helicopters, but she was mentally fit, so there was backlash. That’s what led me to get a third dog; I thought another dog would help distract Tammy from the fact that Chunk and I were traveling around the world. I didn’t want her to feel excluded, since she was smart enough to hold a grudge.

  My friend Kate—who loves animals more than people—texted me a picture of a dog that was at a rescue in Westwood, with a message that read, “This guy needs a home and he’s part Chow Chow.” This is what people do when they want me to rescue dogs; they tell me they are part Chow.