Mighty Bitch

Moving back to New York was big enough to shake loose my Colorado boyfriend, just like moving out west shook up my New York ex. Me and my dog Ted didn't have easy escapes like my men, so we did what every woman with a family does: we made do. To help Teddy adapt to Brooklyn, I enrolled us into a basic obedience class to make our walks through Prospect Park (and around the neighborhood) safer. He never got used to the big inflatable rat union workers put up in protest on street corners, or the way subway grating vibrates above ground, whenever a train passes by underneath.

My main concern was his safety. After our first lesson, the dog trainer confirmed for me what I already knew. Open runs in Prospect Park are full of the biggest urban danger for every dog walker: bad owners and their pets. I'd seen a guy wrapped in padded clothing teach his German Shepherd to attack him every morning in the park during off-leash hours, which meant we had a serious timeline in place for the most challenging human environment on earth. It was what my new dog-training friend told me, too: if we walked our dogs every morning and evening in the park, it was only a matter of time before our pets would need stitches after an attack.

Fuck that! Ted had survived an e-coli/ebola infection from swimming in a lake in Denver's public park, and that was after he fully recovered from a car accident. It was enough to get me to commit to the classes, even though I was still interviewing in the city for work, rapidly losing weight after my ex left me with the high rent to pay. Mama always comes last. When my friend saw Ted snapping at treats with wolf-like gusto, she was delighted. Oh, so he "responds" to food! That's good! Some animals don't :( Ted was her first Malamute.

We quickly got bored with the easy exercises, which did not go unnoticed in class. The trainer realized Teddy was deciding which orders he would obey, based on his moods and the amount of cooked chicken with brown rice left in my pocket. It totally waylaid her. He was picking and choosing which commands to follow! On purpose!! Right. Welcome to snow dogs. After that, Ted would run through her little obstacle courses, standing by the side of the cones to razz his competition. Every time another dog tried to weave through the cones, he'd smile and "Woo!Woo!" loudly, laughing at them nervously shying away from him. 

She kicked us out of the class for disturbing the other animals, which Ted took as a sign, pulling me towards the cold outside and the school doors. One animal was so badly inbred that the instructor had a special corner of the gym coned off just for the doddering old couple who diapered it and picked it up for staircases, because it didn't "do stairs". She said to me that she told them to put the animal down, but they'd already "bonded" with it. Oy vey...

A rather colorful gay couple had chosen the name "Noodles" for their surrogate child (this was before legalized gay marriage), which made the calling-out exercises a lesson in restraint for the entire class, as the masculine-looking female yelled at the top of her lungs in a sing-song voice (for an unnecessary "park-like" simulation): "NOOOOOODLESSSS! COOOOOME!" The short butch woman proudly recounted her training sessions in the park for us during class because she told us, "we're gonna win first prize!" There're fucking prizes?! After that, her and her long-haired femme made no secret that they saw me and Ted as their top competition in the small class. I was just trying to stay alive through the slow starvation of poverty while blocking Ted from swallowing my arm up to the elbow.

By coincidence, my father and stepmother were visiting during our last class. The teacher played graduation music for our walk down the saftey-cone aisle one more time, as I wisely skipped the cap and gown pictures that would only be Ted fodder turned to diarrhea later on. Because of our, uh, lack of commitment to the process, we got second place without even trying. Honestly, I'd never seen two happier lesbians in all my life, smiling proudly as they took the #1 blue ribbon home. It was for kinda hard for us to be angry at them. After all, the biggest bitch in class won.

Scouts Honor

My dad was the Scoutmaster for my bro's Boy Scout troop growing up, and it was awesome. We did really fun things like canoeing, wilderness hiking, and history tours that became treasure hunts to find the most building markers in Philadelphia at nighttime, which kind of felt like that t.v. show "Sleepy Hollow". I learned about camping (always pack extra white socks for makeshift bandages, and triple-wrap matchbooks in foil and plastic for waterproofing), orienteering (moss almost always grows on the north side of a tree, but always carry a working compass anyway), reading trails and the landscape, but I mostly knew that anyway. I was the best scout my dad ever had, until I joined "The Brownies" and then "The Girl Scouts".

Then, the pace slowed to a crawl, and there were no boys around. At all. There were absolutely no menfolk or boys around anymore; just a really "butch" troop leader who'd adopted two kids with "her" "husband", which was jarring to me outside of a girls-only softball practice that I did not attend outside of school hours. Ya dig? Country queers were deeply closeted back in the day, but we knew who was who anyway because we knew "gay", even as very young children. For instance, at Chestnut Grove elementary school in New City, his name was Patrick, and he was (is) a very nice, quiet, devoutly Catholic Irish-American boy with a blue pen type of birthmark. In junior high, his name was "Bryon", and he did funny things like foil bullies from pulling on his pants for wedgies and compose sonnets on the fly while pursuing an acting career in the city that he continued for years.

In high school, "the gay kid" was Pete and he's an awesome painter, albeit with a lifelong appreciation of goth music and/or the lifestyle, but I digress. We're talking about lesbians. In our school, her name was Gina, and she was famously found in bed with her "best friend"—a petite, highly-freckled Irish-American girl one grade behind her—by her mom the summer before we all left for college. Unlike the average suburban "sports dyke" though, Gina was (and is) the real deal: an all-star athlete who attended college on a basketball scholarship, not that it ended there. She played almost every sport that we had a team for, like volleyball, track and field, baseball, swimming, etc. So, we knew "gay" and we knew the real deal, too, not just the awkward "closet case" lurking around doing vaguely "faggy" stuff. We were "out" with each other about who were were, because we were all we had back then as a generation.

Still, the crazy dykes in my troop surpassed even my sophisticated New York understanding of gay culture. They were fucking horrible. They were cliquish to the extreme and insane, and instead of feeling ashamed about it, they reveled in their loud queerness like the assholes they were. My mom loved it. Unlike, say, dancing or art, she could excel in this. My mom remains one of the bitchiest gossips I have ever met in my life, and she's also kind of an "art fag", too. She loved the little cliques she could giggle with like a kid, over weird shit like different colored strings that were made into bad crafts no one really likes. That's a fucking badge for chicks in this troop?! The good sportsmanship of my father and my brothers had wrecked me on this gay girl experience, and nothing less as a scout would do.

I made it through Brownies easily because I really liked the illustrations that came with the handbook for me to read, plus my friends were part of that troop, but once the local "closet case" took over, she upped up the manic energy a few gay cheerleader notches, and I couldn't take it anymore. My mom immediately bonded and then sided with the gay girls and their dykey troop leader with the crew cut, to laugh about me behind my back and make fun of me, which is what she did at home with her sisters anyway, so why did I need to earn a badge in it? I really didn't. Plus, did I mention there were no boys? Like, no men at all, and that's hell for a straight girl, man-ladies. Turns out that hell for a totally heterosexual woman is a bunch of bitchy, bipolar, deeply closeted queers in a homocentric Girl Scout troop in the 'burbs, with no room for escape. Buckle up, boys. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.