Three to Five Years

He wanted to push him off the balcony. It didn't matter to me whether or not he did, but I encouraged him to do so. He could have made it look like an accident. Even if he got caught for irreputable manslaughter, obstruction of injustice or, at the most, the murder of an obnoxious individual, we figured, with good behavior, he'd be out of jail in three to five years. Would it be worth it? Was the sentence worth the relief?


He never did push him off that balcony.


Time and life's tortuous caress has tamed his torment. Twenty years later they never see each other. Yet they live minutes apart. Had he known that would be their fate, he may have never considered the act. But the fantasy was worth it. Similar to buying a lottery ticket knowing there is little chance of winning, but using the possiblity of winning as an excuse to mentally experience the riches.

Part of me wishes he had pushed him off that balcony. His prison stories would have been more interesting to hear about than those five years he spent working at K-Mart instead.

The Squirrel Maimer

I am living with a cold blooded murderer. She has a hairy face, and a hairy ass, and hairy feet and a hairy belly and a hairy back and can lick her own ass. She has milky brown eyes, pointy teeth, a cold wet nose and eight nipples. I am referring, of course, to my wife. I’m kidding. I don’t have a wife. But, if I did, she would have to be able to lick her own ass, and be limited to two nipples. OK, maybe three.

I’m talking about my dog, Cammie, who is twenty-eight pounds of muttish killing machine. That is, if you are a small rodent. I’ve known for a long time that she is a schooled mouser. One time, she and I caught a mouse together. She herded the mouse into a corner, batted it around a few times with paws of fury, and then paralyzed it in fear with a vicious snarl (vicious from the mouse's perspective. I thought it was kind of cute). I moved in and stepped on the incapacitated fur ball. Have you ever stepped on a mouse? It is not as fun as it looks. As soon as your foot makes contact with it and you start applying pressure, you can tell you are stepping on a living thing. It’s not like stepping on a jelly doughnut like they portray it in the movies. Then, when you feel the bones start cracking under your foot (note: you feel the bones cracking before you hear them crack because the speed of feel is faster than the speed of sound. Just like when you get hit in the head with a baseball bat, you feel the pain before you hear your skull crack. It’s a scientific fact – look it up. Jeez, this is the most violent essay I’ve ever written. I think it’s because I recently started lifting weights, and the eight molecules of testosterone I have left are raging through my body right now. It feels like they split up into two teams of four and are having a relay race. And, I am unbelievably sore from the weight lifting. I think I ruptured some of my back fat. I don’t know how ruptured back fat causes you to write violently. I’m not a doctor. Don’t let the smell of my fingers fool you. Also, I’ve been eating a lot of steak tartare.) you start to feel bad, which is what I did. So I quickly removed my pending foot of death from the cute little thing. The mouse was still alive. Cammie took over, and with a faster than feel nip, she broke its neck. She glanced up at me and called me a pussy with her eyes. I stood there in shock. How do you even aim for a mouse neck? It would have taken me at least six times to hit the mouse’s neck with one of my bites. No wonder DeVry’s School of Vampire Technology keeps rejecting me. The mouse would have been mutilated, not to mention embarrassed. Death by multiple badly aimed human bites is not a dignified way to go, even for a mouse.

Often I’ve come home from work to find a dead mouse on the floor with an invoice from Cammie for hitdog services rendered stapled to its forehead. Cammie never eats the mice she kills. She kills for sport. She will play with her prey before she kills it, smacking it around like a bushel of corrugated spoons before doling the death blow. That is what she did with the Elmo doll I gave her for Christmas a few years ago. She played with it for a while until one day I came home and found it hanging from a noose woven out of dog hair.

Recently, Cammie has moved on to big game hunting – squirrels. So far it’s only one squirrel, but she wrote “squirrels” on her resume’. Everybody lies on their resume’. Both of my dogs were in the backyard patrolling the neighborhood from behind my fence. An adventurous squirrel decided to search for nuts in the yard, which was an easily avoidable mistake since I have a sticker on my front door, right under the Solicitors Go To Hell sticker that clearly reads All Nuts On Premises Are In My Pants (which will soon be on a t-shirt).

I’m not sure what the squirrel did or said to Cammie to set her off, but before long, the squirrel was thrashing for its life under the gription of Cammie’s paws. I watched the tussle through the patio door window, while my other dog, Cailey, who is more than twice the size of Cammie and ten times the wimp, stood on the side barking, “Get him a body bag – YEEAAHHH!!!” like that jerk in Karate Kid. She tossed that squirrel around like it was an Elmo doll. Right before I sensed Cammie was going in for the kill, I stepped out on the patio and called off the dogs. I literally called off the dogs! I’ve never done that before. I felt so powerful. Cammie dropped the squirrel and came running to me. The squirrel was still alive, but hobbled. Once it got its bearings, the squirrel scampered, hobbledly scampered, into the brick wall of the house, rolled over and hid behind the hose. Eventually, it crawled, hobbledly crawled, up the brick wall, to safety, where it remained like Spidersquirrel for about five minutes. Once it determined I wasn’t joking about calling off the dogs, the squirrel hopped in a cab and got the hell out of there.

I was very proud of Cammie – protecting our homestead from evil squirrels and all. But, ever since then, she’s adopted an unconscionable arrogant attitude the likes of which I haven’t seen since George W. boasted “mission accomplished”. She walks around the house with a permanent snarl on her face, as if she’s the canine Billy Idol. Here is a picture of me trying to wipe that snarl off her face:


I was unsuccessful. In fact, she tried dressing up my hand like a squirrel and having her way with it.

One night the kids and I were watching a lion take down a wildebeest on Animal Planet. Cammie started barking at the television set. When I translated the barks, we found out she had said, “That lion is lucky that wildebeest wasn’t me. I would have kicked its ass.” On another night we were enjoying a nice steak dinner. Cammie walked by the dinner table and, again, started barking. Again, I translated the barks: “Eating steak, huh? That cow is lucky I’m not a cattle farmer. I would have kicked its ass.” Finally, we were watching Jurassic Park. Again, she started barking at the television set. Again, I translated: “That T-Rex is lucky I’m not in that movie, I would have kicked her ass.” OK, Cammie, that’s about enough. I went online and ordered the A Clockwork Orange For Dogs training video. It comes with eyelid clamps, eye drops and an eggy weggs squeeze toy. Eventually, we were able to re-condition her to be her old, lying on the couch, getting hair all over the place, barking at noises, rubbing her ass on the carpet mutt.

I haven’t seen any mice in the house or squirrels in the yard since the incident. Word must have gotten out about her. Cammie: a dog so mean, she hobbled a squirrel just to watch it limp up a brick wall.