Arlen

Around 1982 or 1983, we lived next door to my Uncle Arlen in a town called Sharon, Oklahoma. We lived in trailer houses next door to each other.
Arlen had a wife, Connie. Connie would be become the template, in my mind, for what a "biker chick" looks like: dark hair, thin, denim, Harley shirt, not particularly attractive, and rather smelly.
She had two boys, Les and Troy, who were a pair of half-wit hellraisers. They were older than me so I would do the things they told me to: like dip tobacco and swear. (I kicked the former and escalated the latter.)

It was at Arlen's house that I would listen to a stack of five or so LPs that he listened to almost exclusively: Queen's "The Game", Joan Jett's "I Love Rock'n'Roll", whatever Blondie record had "Heart of Glass", and a couple of others.

I don't remember much else about the early years of Arlen exposure except for the time my mom left my little brother and I in a pick-up truck while she ran inside to get something. One of us kicked it into neutral and the truck rolled down a hill and through a fence.
And that was that.............

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I was 16 or so when we got a call late at night. My mother talked on the phone but I didn't really listen. Eventually, she got my attention and wrote a note that said "go to your sister's house and call the Buffalo Police Department; tell them to go to Arlen Stephens' house immediately".

First, that's Buffalo, Oklahoma. My birthplace.

Secondly, it is a town small enough that saying "go to so-and-so's house" is not a tall order; especially if "so-and-so" has had any number of legal problems.

I did what I was asked. I returned and mom explained that she he was now off of the line but had left his phone off of the hook.
Connie had left...again. She had run of with another truck driver, as these things go in rural Oklahoma. Arlen had gotten VERY fucked up and called my mother to say that he had wrecked the house, punched through walls, tore down a ceiling fan, and such...and he was bleeding terribly. He had been describing the blood loss to my mother on the phone. He wasn't interested in doing anything about it and it was about a 2.5 hour drive from where we lived.
I don't remember how it was all relayed to us but the police found a passed-out Arlen. He had trashed the house but there was very little blood. He had banged himself up doing the damages but was OK. I think they went ahead took him in.

It was decided that this constituted a "rough time" for Uncle Arlen and that we should likely go check on him. My mother and I drove to Buffalo, Oklahoma, which is in the panhandle area. That area is very desolate and is a pretty boring drive, for sure. You are often told before that trip to use the bathroom before you get to where you are going since there are no bushes along the way...

Troy was living with Arlen. This came as a bit of a surprise as Connie was gone and he wasn't Arlen's kid. However, Arlen was as close to a father as Troy had ever had. I counted this as a positive.
The house did look a little rough. He had bent the blades of the ceiling fan down but not off. (I couldn't resist- as soon as I had the room to myself I turned it on.)
There were holes in the wall, as reported.
Troy explained a bit but it wasn't anything that we didn't know from the police and Arlen's phone call.

Arlen was/is "the baby" of six brothers and two sisters. I couldn't mislead you more by calling him that (which is what my mother referred to him as) as Arlen is over six foot tall and a very thick fellow. He had these big, Meg Foster eyes and a fierce look that suggested that you should never piss him off.
As a child, he got into a fight with another brother and suffered a hip injury that he never sought any sort of medical attention for. This led to him walking in a way that everyone knew to be very painful. It was pretty sad to see. Yet, all I ever heard was that we should never bring it up.

I went riding around with Arlen while were visiting with him. We hardly knew each other but he suggested that we go fishing. It was a good time but he made me listen to Kiss's "Lick It Up", over and over again. I hate Kiss and I especially hate that terrible record.)
I was feeling pretty good about this binding experience. He talked a bit about Connie leaving and he seemed to be pretty smart about it, knowing it was for the better to have her gone.

That night I was kept up until midnight or later as Arlen was watching Jeff Foxworthy. (I rank him somewhere with Kiss.......)
And Arlen drank. A lot. Steadily.
Arlen was also rather infamous for having a serious appetite for buttermilk. He mentioned that he was going to drive up to the store to get some so I stepped in and pointed out the rather obvious, intoxicated state he was enjoying. Plus, given the events of the prior evenings, the police were probably keeping an eye out for him. Much to my surprise, he agreed.
I didn't have a license, only a learner's permit.

The store was only a few blocks away so the drive was short. We went in and he grabbed two half gallons of buttermilk and walked right into two or three teenagers, one of which was wearing one of those goofy-ass jester's hat. Arlen stopped- focused, processed...and said "Boy, you need two of those hats: one to shit in and one to cover it up with."
The kids froze. Luckily, Arlen cracked a grin and walked off.

I almost expected it but Arlen asked for me to drive him around for a while. This meant more "Lick It Up" and more talking about Connie. I didn't have much of a response to either category of conversation but I could listen and stare into the long, dark, Oklahoma oblivion with nothing but that yellow line streaming out of the darkness and into the windshield.
(My god I hate that fucking song.)

I was a cautious driver, meaning I was driving rather SLOWLY- or right at the speed limit. This would not do.
Arlen commandeered the driver's position in the middle of nowhere. There was little discussion and even less time to protest the exchange.
Before I knew it we were speeding at about 90mph through the darkness, on narrow, two-lane roads. I was trying to discreetly buckle my safety belt- and it wouldn't click.
As we sped across a long bridge over a typically shallow Oklahoma river, I looked at the guard rail rolling past me like dirty, damaged, steel ribbon- where so many had ran into it, some going over and through the barrier. I saw roadside crosses and faded bouquets of flowers...and I thought about how that this would likely be the sight of my death. Perhaps they'd rename a mile marker after me? Or a new drunk-driving law? My last piece of press would be a write-up in a small newspaper about how my drunken uncle had driven us both into oblivion. The town of my birth would be the town of my death. How tragically perfect.

Arlen slowed the truck near a roadside stop and began looking at the long line of trucks idling as the drivers slept. He turned into the lot and studied them. Then, he announced, that he believed that he had spotted the truck of the guy Connie had run off with.
He stopped, got out, and began banging on the side of the cab.
My father was/is a trucker and many of my uncles are truckers. I know the culture enough to know that MOST of them carry guns. If I saw a drunken brut like Arlen pounding, threatening to come in, I know that I would likely have a weapon drawn.
The door never opened and Arlen gave up.

UNTIL- he saw another truck that he thought was the one. It was something out of a terribly unfunny movie. I knew that he was playing Russian Roulette with this so I finally said something like "I don't think that's the guy and the guy in there just flashed a gun".
He wasn't so drunk as to NOT understand what that meant.

He let me drive back. Perhaps the experience sobered him a bit, even if I was bullshitting him.

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Arlen's luck has fluctuated over the years. He did OK for a while, then got into some drug problems. He went to jail for a while. He got out. His hip is still bad- crippled at this point.

Even though my mother and father have been divorced for many years now, dad still likes Arlen and many other of my mother's brothers. Dad told me recently that Arlen came by a few months ago to say "hi"...and to borrow twenty bucks.

He hasn't heard from Arlen since and, given his state when they visited, he voiced concern that he may not ever see him again.

In Spain

I am currently in Spain and bloggin' it up over here: http://spanichmission.blogspot.com/

Thanks. If you see me, ya' know, in Spain...say "hi".

Some (Actual) Childhood Scars

(First draft. Will correct the usual spelling and grammar errors when I get the time.)

These are just some of my favorites........

Forehead- knife wound. Age 6
I was playing in the front yard with one of the notorious "Taylor kids". The Taylors were one of your typically redneck families that were extremely fertile and more-than-happy to populate the earth with their legions of idiot children.
Jason Taylor was a bit older than me; maybe a year or two older. We got into a fight which was rather common. It played out rather odd: I kicked his ass, he marched into his house, came back out with a large knife, and threw it from about twenty feet away.
I recall the impact knocking me to the ground. When I sat up, the warm rush of blood filled my eyes and covered my face. I blacked-out after that.
I came back to the realm of the conscious just in time to see my mother's reaction as the neighborhood kids had carried me to the front door of our house. She, of course, screamed...and out I went...again.
I came back briefly in the back of our 1980 Chevy Nova, just outside of the emergency room. It was then that I realized that I was still clutching a plastic PVC pipe/tubing. I was told that, somewhere in the mess, I had beat the mortal shit out of Jason Taylor with this pipe before dropping like a stone. I wouldn't let it go, they said.
And, my last memory of this incident was getting the anisthetic shots in the head to prepare me for sewing up. The doctor said it was "magic medicine" before injecting fire into my brain. That shit burned. After that I was rather relaxed as he sewed me up. I clearly remember the "crunch" of the needle piercing my flesh over and over again.
(If this wasn't grotesque enough, a couple of weeks later my mother decided that she would take it upon herself to remove the stitches herself. She did but it was a tad early for this as the wound was still slightly open. We went to a family reunion at Fort Supply Lake and I ended up running right into a wasp's nest in some weeds. They proceeded to sting the shit out of me, concentrating on the stab wound. Whew.)

Top of scalp- glass "shower". Age 7
This one was odd: I was playing in the cab of a junked truck; the engine and bed was missing and there were no tires. I was next to an overpass and, as I played in it, acting like I was driving, a passer-byer threw a beer bottle that smashed the windshield of my large toy, showering me with debris from both the windshield and the bottle. I had a lot of smaller cuts but the one huge gash on the top of my head turned me into a bloody mess.
It's a really thick, odd scar that is buried in my bushel of hair

Right knee- large, rusty nail gash. Age 8.
I was riding my bike in Bill Still's trailer park in Ninnekah, Oklahoma. (None of you lame-ass, east-end, hardcore-turned-emo-turned-country guys are permitted to steal that line.) Kids do the damndest things but poor, redneck kids do the dumbest and crziest things: I had stacked piles and piles of old lumber to jump my bike over. I would make a jump, then up the anty- pile it higher and higher. I even had some beat up old caution cones for theatrics...
And, of course, it got ridiculous. Too big, too much, too tall. I wiped out on a jump and landed in a pile of lumber, full of rusty nails. It's a minor miracle that I ONLY suffered the huge goddamn gash on my knee that I received that day.
I limped inside and was greeted by our babysitter at the time, an ancient, evil bitch-beast named Doris. She was scared that my father would be upset with her and told me to hide the wound.
It may sound crazy but she was a pretty abusive lady and I was scared of her...so I did what she said. This meant no tetnis, no stitches, and many, many weeks of agony. Somehow it healed.
It's far and away the largest scar I own.


Left, inside-elbow- dog-bite. Age 10
I believe I have written about this before so I shall make it as short as possible...
My father was taking me to meet the new sponsor for his race car. I believe my instructions were simple for that evening: DON'T FUCK UP.
We met Tom at his garage and they began their usual dialogue about cars that guaranteed hours of boredom for me.
I began to explore. It was an auto repair shop so there wasn't much to see except maybe a Snap-On bikini calendar and...that's about it.
Dad called me over to meet Tom's dog. She was a rottweiler and had a young pup. The dog knew dad pretty well and was friendly to him. He called me over to pet her and, with a very quick snap, she grabbed my arm with a huge bite.
She let go pretty quickly and I fell back a bit- noticing the two gaping holes in my arm, the streams of blood, and...uugghh...two sagging knobs of fat that had been pulled out of my arm upon the dog's release.
About as quickly as the dog released me, I grabbed the nearest weapon I could find: a large pipe wrench. I gave the dog one solid WHACK over the head and she went out like a light.
It was a chorus of screams: I screamed at my massacred arm, Tom screamed at a pending lawsuit and his dog that was likely DEAD from a fatal beating with a blunt object, and dad yelled (not much of a screamer, the old man)...as he knew that the sponsorship was OVER.
I don't remember much of the in-between but the dog recovered. I recovered. It was all pretty uncomfortable but I recall Tom (always drunk) looking at my arm and trying to tell me that the large holes in my arm was no big deal.
It was a quiet drive home...but dad began to laugh about it at some point. It was all pretty unbelievable.
This was 1988 and he bought me Michael Jackson's "Bad" as an apology. (He felt bad.)

Left hand- rusty knife, age 10.
I was playing at a babysitter's house outside of Cement, Oklahoma. I remember the incident quite well: Dwight Yoakam's version of "Little Sister" was on the radio as the babysitter, a large woman named Ella (or "The Big E" as my father called her), sang along.
Boredom makes a boy do crazy things. I found a rusty knife and a platic toy boat. I decided to dismantle the toy with the knife. I raised the knife to break through the thick platic only to have the rusty blade slide through my fingers upon impact. Again, I was treated to a ton of blood and the stuffin's from my chubby fingers made me instantly sick as I watched it dangle from my hand- shaking and dripping red.
Ella bandaged it up and thought it was no big deal. This was one of those phases where my mother had blown back into our lives and she came to pick me up. Upon discovering the wound she saw it was pretty bad.
We went to the ER and I got the usual treatment(got a tetnis this time) and discovered that I had severed the tendon and would require surgery.
I had the surgery and it reduced my pinky finger to a worthless shrimp of a member; it doesn't bend very much and won't straighten. It is mostly scar tissue and it doesn't get much blood so it gets very cold very easily.
I always blame this finger on my terribly sloppy guitar playing.
"I coulda' been a guitar genius but, ya' know, I got this gimp finger..."

OK. I am going to stop. This has gotten really long.

A Few Brushes With Death

Just a few:

I don't remember how old I was but I couldn't have been older than six.
We were swimming in a motel pool that was on the same block as our house in Woodward, Oklahoma.
My mother worked at a Bell Gas Station next door to it. There was a brand new McDonalds at the end of the street. Suburbs to the back. It was all oh so very honky.

Wait...I've already lied: I was "swimming" but I couldn't swim. I just played around in the water. I don't recall having a fear of deep water but I stayed away from it- not being able to swim and all.
My mother couldn't swim. My father couldn't either. (Still can't, as far as I know.) However, this was the day that my mother decided that I should learn.
She took me out to the deep end and and let me go- and down I went. I recall letting all of the air out of my body, falling to the bottom, and I took in a large amount of water just as someone grabbed me to pull me out. I remember inhaling and coughing underwater. I remember the halt to bodily functions as I filled with water.

I was laid out on the concrete as I hacked, coughed, and spit up the burning, chlorinated water. I laid there for a very long time, face up, taking all the air that the world would lend me.
After that I was deathly afraid of deep water.
(I do recall getting back into the shallow end of the pool.)

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I was seventeen and on day three of no sleep.

I was moving into my first home outside of...well, home. I was moving into a trailer house that was owned by the company that I worked for.
I was a flag truck driver; that's the guy that drives the truck with flashing lights and flags that warns you that a wide load is coming down the road. (Yeah, THAT asshole.)
It was pretty stressful. A flag truck driver has to radio in any obstructions, change positions from front to back when coming up and/or going down hills...and on and on.
Plus, I was still fairly new to driving.

I borrowed the flag truck to move. In the excitement of it all, and on top of working every day through the move, I hadn't slept.
I was finishing up around 10pm with my final load.

I dozed off, crossed the lane of oncoming lane, descended the embankment, and smashed head-on into a concrete barrier that moved the front axle to somewhere near the transmission. The impact also sent my face into the steering wheel, then to the dash, before ending with a final pop against the windshield. I should add that I wasn't wearing my safety belt.

Needless to say, the rest remains a bit of a blur.
I remember stumbling around in the night, bleeding like a stuck pig from a split in my head.
A minivan stopped and I was asked if I needed help. I began to shout a line of obscenities- something like "I wrecked the motherfucker. I fucking wrecked the motherfucking company truck."
They talked me into their vehicle for a ride back into town. They were a nice family with two nice children who had to share a bench seat with me: a bloody, gory, insane looking motherfucker who was likely panting, wheezing, and introducing them to that particularly colorful adjective that I kept yelling all through the night.

They dropped me off at my boss' house and I can't imagine what he saw when he opened the door. He thought that I had been beaten up by a gang.
I told him that I ditched the truck. I doubt that I was collected enough to give much of the story but I was still under the delusional assumption that the truck was just in a ditch- not TOTALED.
He went with a tow-truck and brought it back. It was completely trashed.

I felt terrible. It's a guilt I still feel to this day. My boss was my ex-brother-in-law, someone I liked and respected very much. It was a small business and I knew that I had really fucked it up.
However, it WAS a pivotal incident that led to me leaving Oklahoma. Bittersweet.

(Years later I went to visit and discovered that his own little brother had totaled TWO vehicles after I left. This alleviated a bit of guilt- but not much.)

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Lucky Pineapple was practicing in a small basement in Clarksville, Indiana. We had endured heavy rains for most of that evening but, as usual, were in our own little world(s) and not thinking about flooding.

It started with a few veins of water shooting across the floor. We moved things that were moisture sensitive but the water just kept coming. Eventually it became apparent that we were going to have to move everything out of the basement.

The house was built with it's back to a large embankment that went down into a small creek. The rear wall of the the basement was exposed.
Now, a more observant bunch would have been alarmed by the rising level of water that was indicated by the beads of water soaking through the mortar. However, we had a lot on our little minds and didn't take much notice.
My brother and I made the decision that we were going to go ahead and just move out. The only reason we stayed in that place was because we could play music without complaints. So, we began to load up everything to move completely during the night.

I was wading around in knee-high water and gathering whatever I could. I pretty much just got tired of doing it so I decided that what was lost was lost.
I walked up the steps, soaking wet. I got to the top and stopped to talk to Heather which was interrupted by an apocalyptic BOOM, followed by a hot wind that blew me onto the kitchen floor. I was knocked flat and remember seeing nothing but the curtains being blown in a fury above me.
I screamed for everybody to get out of the house as I was fairly certain that something was destroying the place: lightning, terrorists, Zeus...powers beyond our control. A very quick and foggy thought computed that I was going to have the house cave-in on me and that would be that. Good night.

Well, it was still standing after the crashing and booming stopped. I was still alive and the house was still standing. I looked around and saw that the waist-high water was at the top of the stairs.
The exposed wall had given away as the rain water built up against it. It basically exploded, launching cinderblocks to the other side of the basement and allowing a tidal wave of floodwater into the basement.
If I had waited one more minute I would have been in the middle of it, surely dead in an instant.

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A somewhat light case.........

Yesterday's winds were really giving Old Louisville a good what-for when I thought to myself "I wish I had my camera with me."
I was in the car, on the phone with my father, describing all of the carnage. I was watching wooden signs being blown into pieces, roof shingles flying around, and most importantly: telephone poles swaying in the wind.

The pole directly in front of me began to break towards me. I had parked the car farther up, nearer to this particular pole for whatever stupid goddamn reason. (Meaning that I would have been just fine in my normal parking place.)
I yelled a few "OH SHIT"'s into the phone at my poor father, started the car and kicked it into reverse in a hurry. As it fell it revealed that I was enjoying a little more clearance between me and the length of the pole- more than I initially thought, anyways.
That didn't matter much when it hit the ground with the transformer exploding in a fit of blue fire and sparks and the power lines whipping around like a crazed octopus. The whole mess bounced a few times as the tension of the power lines were being stressed and then relieved as other poles fell. It was an awesome display of fire, electricity, and chaos.
It could have also been a display of how the human bladder can relieve itself under particularly stressful or frightening situations. But I held it together.

I did spend yesterday evening a little shell-shocked though.

Strange Beast

This morning, in the shower, I found myself staring into nothing for way too long.
I pictured this from the outside and thought about how sort of frightening it would be to see someone in such a blank trance for so long; a spectator could interpret this as troublesome. I suppose when you add nudity and steam to most any situation we tend to trespass into the disagreeable by many people's interpretations...even if one is able to excuse the blank-eyed, zombie stare at the white tiles.

Then, I began to wonder if any other animals in the natural order would stand and daydream in such a fashion: thinking of nothing of immediate importance but always hinged to the dark knowledge of the unsavory obligations of a work day and an inevitable death.

I suppose this is all part of God's plan.

Selah.

icensnow

The trees outside are crippled from their outer-shells of icy crystal. They are encased and defeated.

When I see it I am reminded of a particular winter at my stepfather’s house in Purdy, Oklahoma. His name was Craig West and he was a drug dealer and consumer. He gave it all up to marry my mother but he didn’t waste too much time getting back into it.
I will say that it was a different world to have such a creature introduced into our little lives. My little brother and I liked him, I guess- it's hard to recall- but I know there was always an extreme caution in dealing with him.
(I have written about Craig before, somewhere, so forgive me if I repeat myself on some items.)
One of my clearest memories of Craig's World was that, living out in the country, we would have to burn trash in a 55 gallon barrel. This was one of my chores and I liked it. I remember dumping trash into the barrel and my little brother and I spotting used syringes. We actually took one out and pushed on it to expel the remaining fluid. That's pretty terrible.
I also remember that we couldn't get any cold medication in town because all of the pharmacies in the small town of Lindsay, Oklahoma, had banned Craig as it was well-known that he would make meth out of any variety of cold medication. (He was rather clever in this area: he could take little nose inhalers and would make a single-serve dose of meth in the little inhaler. You know? For on-the-go meth addicts...and I assume that they all are.)

I used to love going out to visit Mom and Craig as he had built a little house in the country where we raised ducks, chickens, geese, and other such feathered nonsense. I shot guns, I camped, I had an ugly little dog that I named “Whiskey”, and it was there that I felt like I could do what a boy of ten or so should do- run around in fields, play in creeks, catch lizards, frogs, and such…it was all a good time.
I am reminded of Craig on these icy days because I have a very clear recollection of seeing walking outside one morning after a similar ice storm as the one we just suffered. The trees and earth were covered in ice; THICK ice. He walked out onto the patio with his cup of coffee and looked at that frigid world that surrounded us. He looked like something out of a cigarette ad: this tall, lanky character adorned in denim with his longer hair on his shoulders was lit by the sunrise. (He looked like a jaundiced Kelsey Grammer.) I watched as he slowly paced, looking at his feet, the sky, the trees.
Then, one unsuspecting step sent his foot flying out from under him in a fast slip that laid him out in a nearly perfect ninety-degree angle before gravity finished the move by landing his ass and back on the slab of icy dirt. The pain registered on his face. I think I felt the impact inside the house.
I couldn’t help it. I exploded with laughter, failing to catch even a bit of it with my hand that was over my mouth. I cried with laughter. He was still on the ground in a fit of shock and pain and I laughed like a brain-damaged idiot. I couldn’t help it. I laughed and laughed. I couldn’t help it.
I did feel guilt and concern though. It bubbled to the surface after the comedy subsided. I said to my mother “We should probably go see if he is O.K” and I began to go to the door.
My mother calmly, coolly, yet firmly put an arm out and halted my progress.
“Don’t. He’ll just say that you pushed him.”
It was the way she said it that immediately convinced me that she truly believed that. I guess she knew him better than I did.

My blood is too thin for winter. I am especially inept at dealing with a winter such as the one we have endured in the past few weeks.
Cold cold cold. If hell is hot then I figure it gets cold further on down……that’s where my hell is.
I remember tunneling in a deep snowdrift in Woodward, Oklahoma when I was five or so. I wore a big winter coat that I had seen photos of Michael Jackson wearing. I don’t think that had anything to do with me ending up with one though…
No one really thinks of Oklahoma as having brutal winters but they were cold enough for me. Perhaps in that particular area, “the panhandle”, it is colder- it’s hard for me to tell as that’s where I spent the early years of my life before going more south-central. Maybe it was the flat, prairie-ish terrain that made me think of it as being so inhumanely cold- that cold wind blowing snow into walls and mountains of icy hell- I suppose I was so young that, to me, there was nothing colder.

Mad Dogs and Mad Dads

My little brother and I were given a dog named Suzie when I was six or seven. Suzie turned out to be one of the dumbest beasts to ever grace this earth.
She was a cocker spaniel: a breed that is rumored to be smart, obedient, beautiful, and other mythical traits that cause typically sensible people to obtain one. (In the departments of "much ado about nothing" and "false promises", one may do him or herself the good duty of ranking cocker spaniels somewhere between "Florida" and "religion.")

Time has blurred the scene a bit but I believe that my mother intentionally bred Suzie with a poodle for the end result of "cockapoos". This act of selective breeding saw these two beasts- two of the most atrocious creatures to ever crawl out from the mysterious bowels of creation- spawn a brood of byproducts that were dumber and more worthless than their predecessors. Those poor things...
If one would dispel rational thought for just a moment, the reader might be surprised to learn that the idea was to sell these puppies to unsuspecting suckers.
And we did; we sold all but one- a runt which we named "Buttons".

Time revealed Buttons to be not only a runt but an epileptic runt at that. He had a very set ritual with his seizures. He would start barking and howling before making his vocal laps through the house at light speed. Our house was laid out to where he could run a circle starting at the front living room, then to the kitchen, down the hall, through one bedroom, and back into the living room. At the end of a few laps, he had usually accumulated a healthy amount of foam in his mouth that would be expelled right in the middle of the living room floor in a grand finale that would make many squirm and a tragic few cheer.
My father thought it was the funniest thing in the world to shout "MAD DOG!!! MAD DOG!!!" as the dog made his fitful rounds during a seizure. Of course, this joke rubbed off quite effectively onto a four and six year-old.
In hindsight I guess it was probably his way of shedding some light on a dark situation. We loved that dog but I doubt that any sort of treatment or medication for Buttons' affliction was accessible to us if it existed at all.

One day my brother and I were playing in the living room. Buttons started to rev up for a seizure as indicated by a very distinct brand of barking and howling that preceded the spell.
In very little time he was making laps through the house...howling and foaming...as my mother calmly prepared to clean up the mess when it was all over. (It wasn't much...it was just gross.)
My brother and I climbed onto the couch, adorned in white t-shirts and briefs, jumping and screaming our cheer wildly: "MAD DOG!!! MAD DOG!!!"
Our shouts were challenged only by the volume of Buttons' barking, howling fits.

As timing would have it, our elderly landlord showed up to see us. He was a very classic gentleman, who insisted on coming to the house to collect rent at the same time every month.
He had just made it to the door when we began our yelling and screaming to the mad gallop of a medium-sized, possessed cockapoo bolting through the house, barking and howling in fear and confusion.
At a glance, I am sure that our house looked like a mental asylum...with the added bonus of a rabid dog.
That was the last time he ever came to our door for as long as we lived in that house. We watched as the old man SPRINTED as fast as 70 year-old legs would carry him to his pick-up. Quite a feat.
After that we had to mail rent every month.

Time has waved its magic wand again as I don't remember what happened to Buttons. I think he was discreetly removed from our lives when we moved some place new; which happened very often back in those days.
Suzie disappeared into the years as well.

Goddamn that dog was stupid, yet, very healthy. Looking around (and occasionally in the mirror) I see that to be nature's cruelest, ongoing joke...