REX IN THE CITY, Part I: Adopting a Troubled Dog On Impulse

Two city people living in a 300sf apartment rescue a bird dog on impulse. (The first installment of my debut column in BARK magazine!)

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A BRIEF INTRO TO THE REX AND THE CITY SERIES:

When I first adopted my dog Wallace in 1997, there was a popular column by Candace Bushnell running in the great snarky society newspaper The New York Observer; and the column was called, of course, "Sex and the City."  I loved that column, which chronicled the exploits of female social strivers in New York City society, and I especially loved Candace's tone.  She captured a common but often unconfessed component of living in New York City--a tone and quality of striving, of yearning, of feeling like a have-not in a city of haves. This can be a maddening, painful state of mind to keep oneself in, but it can also be rather poignantly amusing, if one is able to lift one's view beyond the small self and see life from a larger perspective.  Sometimes we just HAVE to laugh at ourselves, right? Otherwise we'd weep...

So when the editors at BARK magazine invited me to write a dog-in-the-city-themed column for their relatively new publication back in 2000, I decided to title the column "Rex in the City" as an homage to Ms. Bushnell and to The New York Observer and to lovers of snark in general. This column was basically a love letter to dogs and New York and the people who love dogs anywhere in the world. It chronicled the various trials and tribulations--and triumphs-- of adopting a formerly abused bird dog, on impulse, and raising him in a 300-square-foot apartment in New York City. It also chronicled my relationship with my then-partner, Ed, and all the ways we grew together as a couple as we united in the aspirations to rehabilitate and take good care of our beloved but troubled dog. It was initially intended to be a six-part series, I think, but "Rex in the City" (or, as it was sometimes appeared in Bark, "Rex and the City") was so popular with readers it ended up running for several years.  It also became a book--my memoir REX AND THE CITY was published by Random House in 2006.  Had I known this column was going to someday become a published memoir, I would have not chosen to call my dog "Rex" in the column.  Nor would I have called Ed "Ted." These puns and slight name changes ultimately caused confusion for a lot of readers--which is why I am still constantly stating the my dog's name was Wallace.  Not "Rex." The name "Rex" was a pun, a kind of inside joke for readers of Candace Bushnell's columns.  Beware of inside jokes.... :)

One more disclaimer: This column appeared in Bark from @ 2000 - 2008, and it was written about time period of my life from the late 1990s. I was fresh out of graduate school back then, and an aspiring writer, and a relatively new arrival in New York City. I was also, back then, still of the mindset -- courtesy of years of patriarchal and capitalistic indoctrination -- that having a ton of money and finding "the perfect man" and the "perfect apartment" and "making it big" were the main--indeed, the only--components of human existence that would bring me satisfaction.  (It has taken me years of meditation and soul-searching and vision quests and plant medicine and Vajrayana Buddism to unravel all that insidious indocrination). But, as I mentioned above, there is something wonderfully comic and also poignant about looking back at our younger, less skillful selves. In this series—and in the book—I was constantly highlighting my then-shallowness and trying to point out how decisions based on shallow needs don’t always pan out the way one intends 🙂

I still think sometimes that this vague, chronic dissatisfaction and quality of striving is also a component of being a writer, an artist.  Artists, by nature, are dissatified with this world, because we believe in beauty, and we see so much beauty beyond the veils, and we don't understand why everyone doesn’t devote their lives to beauty. So we writers are constantly trying to writing our way back to beauty. 

The good news is, New York is also full of satisfactory things. And so is a life with dogs.    

And now, on to the actual column. BARK, being a print magazine at the time, did not make much of their print content available online, which is why I am sharing it here. Thanks, as ever, for taking the time to read these posts. I appreciate your generosity and kindness.

PS- From now on, I will be posting the columns in their original chronological order. For me, that's a triumph :) 

PPS - All of the earlier "Rex and the City" illustrations (the unflattering but nicely done, slightly Cubist illos) are by #susansynarski

AND NOW, FINALLY, ON TO THE ACTUAL PIECE!

Warmly,

Lee

“Rex in the City, Part I,” appeared in the print Volume 14 of Bark magazine, SPRING 2001. Copyright © Lee Harrington (writing as Lee Forgotson). Additional pages © Bark magazine.

REX AND THE CITY, PART I: A young unmarried couple visits the animal shelter just to look at dogs. But a certain dog named Rex has other intentions.

BY LEE FORGOTSON

ON THIS PARTICULAR SUMMER SATURDAY, on this last day of life as I knew it without a dog, my first thought was: what to wear. I had planned to wear a pink linen dress, with a matching pink hat, but when I pulled said dress out of the closet I saw that there was a big stain on its backside.Gum or something. From sitting on the subway, no doubt. One of the great risks you take, in New York City, is sitting down. 

"Find something else to wear," Ted said. "And hurry. We're supposed to be at Chip's by noon."

Ted (not his real name) was the live-in boyfriend. Chip (not his real name) was our friend from Long Island who had been promising for months to take us up to Lloyd Neck Country Club, one of the most exclusive clubs in the area, to which he belonged. And finally, today, we were going!

But what to wear? Most New York girls in such crises will produce the old standby: the little black dress. I paired mine with a Wonderbra and platform shoes.

"Okay, let's go,” I said to Ted. We lived together for the same reasons most couples cohabitated in New York City: because it saved us money and we got instant sex. Marriage, I suppose, was a p-p-possibility, if only another M-word could enter the equation on my behalf: maturity.

"You can't wear that,” Ted announced.

"Why not?" I countered.

"You can't wear black to Lloyd Neck."

 "I can."

"I'm telling you, you can't. Just put on a polo shirt and those white shorts."

"I don't want to look dowdy," I said. I was 27 and already terrified of such things.

"Who's going to care?"

"I'll care." Deep down, I knew that Ted was right. But something in me that day didn't want him to know I knew he was right. We had that sort of dynamic. "Besides, this is the only thing I have."

"You have a whole closet full of clothes."

"This is the only thing that fits." My voice rose a little at the end, and cracked, and Ted must have sensed that I was headed beyond reason, so black dress it was.

But when we got to Chip's, he, Chip, took one look at my get-up and said we wouldn't be going to the club. "I know of a great place in Bayville. It's a clam shack right on the beach."

On the way there, I stared out the window and sulked. We passed mansion after fabulous mansion, with stately oak trees and fine green lawns. It seemed that most of the wealth of the world could be found on this slender, riotous island (one can't help but make Gatsby references in these parts) and the fact that I was so close to and yet so far from it made me sulk. I had done it all wrong. And I cursed myself for not heeding the #1 rule of WASPdom: no cleavage. No black.

Later, Ted said I was being paranoid. That Chip simply didn't feel like going to the club that day. "He's like that. He changes his mind constantly." This wasn’t an insult. We both loved Chip.

Lunch, however, was a disappointment. The crabs tasted as if they had been soaked in formaldehyde, and above our heads was a giant banner that said WET T-SHIRT CONTEST THURSDAY NIGHTS. Ted and Chip talked animatedly about old friends from college, but I wasn't listening. I was too busy staring in horror at the sad, haggard-looking woman drinking margaritas by herself at the bar. She was smoking Kools and wearing black. 

It's strange how the small, petty moments can be the ones that change your life. It was because of that woman, and because of my convictions that my life was closer to hers than it was to, say, Daisy Buchanan's, that I decided, on the way back to the city, that Ted and I should stop at the animal shelter and look at just look at-dogs. "We drove all the way out here," I reasoned. "We might as well do something productive with this day." 

Dogs were something Ted and I had talked about haphazardly, in those moments when we got along so well we could giddily envision a future together. In our two years together, we'd also talked about travelling, and moving to a bigger apartment and getting a new computer, a new mattress, new careers, new lives, but so far none of those things had materialized. And so suddenly, there in that hot car, I decided I was tired of being an all-talk-no-action kind of person. I wanted to call myself on something. And call Ted on it, too. 

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