Hopeless, Helpless, Hapless part 1

Part of the humor of "The Making of The Truth About Everything" is that I can work for Jack Nicholson, chat with Presidents and claim to know the truth about everything, but in reality I have to take care of elderly dogs and people to make ends meet, not that ends have met.

My best canine clients are (and were) 16 and 1/2 year old Molly and her lifelong (gay) lover, the 17-year-old (119 in dogs years, though she seemed much older) Basset Hound Max (lest you think they're not gay, Max is short for Maxine).

Max was hopeless, helpless and hapless, as I am.

After my first wife divorced me (maybe, as I've said, if I hadn't always introduced her as "My first wife. . .") I put fliers up all over the neighborhood stating that I was looking for a place to live.

Then a while later I put up fliers advertising "Daddy-Daughter Dog Care," and then subtly announced my marriage to Patti when the fliers changed to "Family Pet Care."

All these were printed on flourescent lime green paper. I put the last posters up on every telephone pole in our mile square neighborhood one day (if you looked down any street you'd see them on pole after pole for as far as the eye could see), got a call from the city about them, then took them all down the next day. And this was pretty much the height of my marketing sophistication and success.

So dogs take after their owners, even after their pet-sitters, and so Max was hapless. About three years ago Patti and I took her on a walk when suddenly Max stopped while Molly forged ahead.

Max wouldn't move with any coaxing, until finally we noticed her long thumbnail on one paw was caught in one of the many tiny holes in the metal of a stopsign post.

Max had what must be a painful tumor on her stomach, so of course my first thought was to see if I could exploit this fact for laughs.

I videotaped from Max's POV as she looked up the concrete stairs leading outside from the basement of their house where she and Molly lived most of the time.

Max knew that when she could no longer make it up those steps, her life would be over. So she stood at the bottom, staring up the steps like Mallory looking up at the summit of Everest. Then she'd make a heroic and pathetic surge and jump-run-hop-flounder up them.

In addition to the heroic side of this, I videotaped from Max's POV, and then from the tumor's POV. The tumorcam wasn't actually mounted on her tumor. Since all mankind is the tumor killing the host body of all life on earth, I thought this might somehow tie into TTAE metaphorically.

My step-son Isaac actually takes care of the dogs far more than I do, but on the first day of this two-week job, Max fell down the stairs and hurt herself. So Molly and Max came to live with us, even though our landlords don't allow dogs.

The next morning after her fall Max couldn't get up, move, eat, drink, pee or poop.

Without mentioning names, I'll just say that while the man of the house (Max's house) is a wonderfully dedicated dogowner and he and his wife are wonderful people, I got the feeling that the wife might someday take me aside and say, "You know, there's an extra couple a Franklin's in it for you if Max, uh, has a little but permanent accident before we get back. Kapisch?"

We could probably make a lot more money becoming the Jack Kevorkian of older and less continent pets. Since we also do elder care, that was a path I didn't want to go down.

My dream has always been to get a lot of pet care clients and take all the pets to North Boulder Park with a lot of children we're also paid to take care of and then get all the elderly people we're paid to take care of to look after the children who are playing with the pets while we go to a movie and make a couple of hundred an hour.

It turns out this often doesn't work as well as one would hope.

You'd think they'd at least all move in the same general direction, but it turns out all the various species and ages go in different directions, and some of them will disappear over the horizon.