John Haskell - Out of My Skin

“I’ll get him,” I said, and I started to climb the fence. I was going to be the hero, I thought, and when I got up to the top I looked back and Jane, who was also climbing the fence, was having some trouble with a foothold. She was having trouble getting the toes of her shoes to fit between the links in the fence. So I climbed back down, gave her a literal hand to put her foot on, and once she was on the fence I climbed back over and gave her a hand to get down on the other side, the Japanese garden side.

And there we were, inside the place where weddings happen, and in this sacred (or semi-sacred) place Rex was acting like a wild beast. Jane was calling out, “Rex, Rex,” desperately trying every tone of voice she thought would work, and for an overweight dog Rex moved very quickly. He ran past us, teasing us, and at one point we thought we had him calmed down, corralled in a corner, but that just made his excitement greater. That’s when he jumped into the pond. Suddenly the smooth water wasn’t smooth anymore, and the orange fish that had been swimming disappeared.

I was worried that, like muscles going back to their old familiar positions, the Steve I’d been successfully being was only temporary, only there when the proverbial sun was shining, but even in this emergency, Steve’s muscles were my muscles, and I could feel those muscles taking a new and unfamiliar direction. I could feel myself getting pissed off, and I knelt on some stones at the edge of the pond, and while Rex was splashing in the water I tried to get hold of his collar. When he paddled away across the water I wanted to jump in after him, and although I didn’t want to get my clothes wet, I thought, Fuck it, and I jumped in. The water came to about my crotch but I didn’t care because I was running, or trying to run, after Rex, trying to grab his tail, which of course I didn’t do.

“Your dog’s a little crazy,” I said.

“He’s not the only one.”

Jane was standing on a little bridge and I was standing, crotch-deep, in water.

“You’re soaking wet.”

“I’m trying to catch your crazy dog.”

“By jumping in the water?”

“What do you want me to do? Nothing?”

Rex had disappeared by this time, so I stepped out of the water. And as I did, the emotional muscles which had veered off in a different direction began to return to something more familiar. When I walked out of the pond, back to Jane, I was acting more like a regular Steve. My pant legs were heavy so I tried to wring them out.

Jane was looking at Rex, somewhere in the bamboo thicket, and we stood on the bridge and I could see she was worried. I said, “Maybe we should pretend to leave him.”

“You mean use psychology?”

“Dog psychology.”

“Okay,” she said, and then she yelled out, “All right, Rex. We’re leaving now. Rex?” We stood there, listening.

After a couple of seconds I said, “I don’t think it’s working.”

“Rex?” She was begging him almost, to be good.

“We should start really walking away,” I said.

“We can’t leave him.”

“We should act as if we’re leaving.”

So we started to walk back to the fence. On our way we passed the bench she’d wanted to sit on. It was partly shaded. I took her hand and we walked to the flat area around the bench, overlooking the pond, and I sat first. She was nervous because of Rex, and because of disturbing the peace, but I pulled her onto my legs. Since my pants were wet she sat down next to me, on the bench, and as we looked into the pond I could tell she was thinking because she said to me, “You don’t have to. .”

“What?”

But she didn’t seem to want to say anything, and I didn’t know what to say, so we didn’t speak.

In searching for Rex our emotions had run wild, like a dog’s emotions, and now, as we sat, and as the confusion settled, we could see through the havoc we’d created to a serene and beautiful paradise. Being Steve was fine. It didn’t matter about him because it wasn’t about any one person, it was about what exists between people. Or between people and animals. Rex was free to run as much as he wanted, but without anything to struggle against, eventually he calmed down, and we hardly noticed when, after a while, there he was, at our feet, happy and panting. We weren’t panting, but I think, at least temporarily, we were happy.

I went back to the Metropole, and for the rest of the day I stayed in my room. What I remember is lying on the bed, staring up at the wire mesh that formed a ceiling over my cubicle, slightly below the actual ceiling. It was like a cage, this mesh, and by focusing on it, although I knew the actual ceiling was there, all I saw was the wire mesh. I went back and forth like that, seeing the mesh and then the ceiling beyond the mesh, and then changing my focus again and making the mesh the boundary of my world. I did other things too. I slept and read and went to the bathroom down the hall. From the vending machine in the lobby I got a coffee and some snack food, but by the time it got dark I was feeling like something else.

Not too far from the Metropole was the Japanese part of town, or at least the Japanese part for tourists. There were restaurants and tea shops and I’d found a tiny shop that sold little balls of ice cream wrapped in mochi, which is made of rice. It was about nine o’clock when I walked to the shop, ate four of these mochi balls, and then started walking, through the deserted streets, back to the hotel. The streets weren’t completely deserted because, although the cut-rate stores were all closed and shuttered, people were scattered around. Most of them, I think, were homeless. Some were sleeping in or on cardboard boxes, and on the street I was walking along, I came across a man huddled on the sidewalk. He was wearing a plaid coat, and he had shoes on his feet, and he said something to me as I passed him.

I didn’t hear the words exactly, and because they didn’t seem like violent words or even aggressive words, I asked him what he’d said.

“Slim,” he said.

“Slim? You mean I’m slim?”

He was a large man, half reclining, and I could see a green bottle in his dark hand.

He didn’t respond to my clarification, and I probably should have just walked on. And I probably would have walked on, but with the hand not holding the bottle he gestured to me. His arm was extended in a half embrace, and so I stepped off the street onto the sidewalk.

“Brother,” he said.

“Brother,” I said, not knowing what it meant but thinking it meant something to him.

“Brother,” he said again. And that’s when he looked up and I could see his face. His eyes were red and he was dirty, but his look — first his gesture, now his look — seemed to be a kind of invitation.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Up?”

“How are you doing?” I said, and at that, or because of that, he slumped back down and looked at his bottle.

He seemed safe so I squatted in front of him, not too close but close enough to see, when he looked up at me again, that he looked like an American Indian. I was wondering if there was an American Indian population in Los Angeles, and then he scooted his legs up under him and sat against the accordion metal behind him.

At the top of the street there were some voices, shouting, and when I looked back at the man he was holding out his bottle, saying to me, “Drink it.”

I wasn’t keen on drinking from his bottle, and I suppose I would normally have thanked him and walked away. But what was normal wasn’t obvious anymore, and so I stepped up to the metal shutter next to him. The cement wasn’t filthy so I bent down and sat, my feet on the sidewalk, my back against the shutter. And then I took the bottle.