MOON DOGG

1 - DEAD DOGG

A long time ago, when the world was new, Coyote stole an old woman's pinole and then flew into the sky. And Coyote spilled all the white pinole across the big sky. And the chief flew after him, and when he caught Coyote, the Chief flung him to the moon. So now, on a bright moonlit night like that one, the desert coyotes look up at the sky and they wail for their brother in the moon. And when we look up at night, like now, we can still see the pinole scattered all across our sky.

Local legend of the Tohono Ood'ham people

July 31

Jimbo Hanes stares down at me like I'm some bug in a science project. "You got henhouse ways about you, Jerome—You 'aint no better than me."

Jimbo likes to talk all folksy like that. He's a big man, and in good shape for his sixty years. His boots, combat fatigues, and camouflage-colored flak vest look pretty cool, actually. His black Stetson gives him a kind of desperado look.

Jimbo's killing me, but I'm enjoying the initial stages of my death. 

It's a rush, all right—the Krokodil hits the brain quickly. The intense pleasure surge is pretty hard to describe: warm flushes of touch-feely exuberance, of empathy for me, for you, for the planet.

I'm a semi-famous documentary filmmaker, but right now I'm sprawled on the sand, dying. I look up at the moon, and it's pulsing, ringing like a kid's cell phone in a dark room.

He edges nearer, all chummy, like we're back in junior high school again. "So c'mon, fess up, how'd you make that damned two-headed alien baby? Paper maiche?"

The first thing you notice when you're up close with Jimbo is his wanderer— a lazy right eye, amblyopic, that drifts aimlessly in its socket.

It'll give you nightmares. But I'm beyond that.

"The alien baby was fake?" Ed looks stunned. He's whippet-thin, with a pale, flat face, and he tries to mask his disappointment with a macho hitch of his gun belt. Ed tries to dress like his boss, Jimbo, but he looks more like a naive little brother. 

"Shit, there's no Easter Bunny, either, Ed," Dorian scoffs, a guy with button-holes for eyes and two grossly disfigured front teeth, having been a thumb-sucker until well in his teens. We started calling him Bucky in seventh grade, and the handle stuck, warped his mind for good.

I'm allergic to the Krokodil, and that's why I'm dying. My skin is warm now. My mouth is dry. I have a heavy feeling in my limbs, but I get up off my knees and shuffle a few feet in the sand. I am seeing movement trails, veiled outlines and impossible shapes that are, I guess, appropriate for someone hallucinating like this.

"Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional," I say, but it sounds like "m-m-mmmm-mmm-m-mmm" through the duct tape around my mouth. My tormentors cackle, anyway, happy I'm being a good sport about everything.

I'm drowsy, but I'm also euphoric—because I'm dying? That doesn't make sense. I see how dangerous this drug is. My pulse is slowing down. I look up at that panting orb in the sky, and I raise a finger and thumb like a cocked gun.

"Watch out, he's locked and loaded," one of them hoots, and I shoot down the moon for my Dwarf Planet—That's my wife, Teresa, who's eight-months pregnant with the child I'll never see.

I take another step ... and stagger into some barrel cactus.

"That must tingle," Bucky snickers.

I get up from the header into the cactus with my new 'accessories'—little pins sticking out of my arms, neck, face—a 'Hellraiser' demon. I am amazed at how visible things can be in the desert at night when there's a full moon, how high-density vivid the saguaro cactus seem. My breathing is slowing. My brain isn't getting oxygen.

'I can't die yet— I haven't shown the kids how to compost!' 

I look up at the mountains, standing straight and clear in the full-moon evening, and the white dome of the observatory shines like a magic pebble.

"His immune system is all shot to hell," Jimbo drawls in his peculiar-Texan-Alabaman way, "Dogg's been like that since he was a kid."

    I drop to my knees atthe foot of a huge saguaro, its arms serenely out-stretched, as if welcoming meto its matronly bosom. I look back up at the observatory; they've got thirty different kinds of telescopes up there, scanning our celestial heavens. Its lights are dazzlingly bright, and I think of Manfred Mann:

'Blinded by the light, wrapped up like a douche, another rover in the night'...

I am dying without knowing what 'wrapped up like a douche' means.

"You'll tell now, won't you?" Jimbo wants to know how I made a two-headed UFO baby for one of my films.

"A pine box is fine," I say, "thank you for asking."

Of course, they don't hear. They're not going to learn anything with my mouth bound up like a trussed sow.

"He's gonna die, you know," Ed says—like this is the first time they've thought of it.

The stuff these guys make nowadays are powerful respiratory suppressants. Breathing just stops altogether. The heart can keep beating, but within a few minutes, the brain will die with no oxygen in the blood.

It's my wife I want the most at this moment, my Dwarf Planet. She has this problem, this penchant for understanding me. And for forgiving. If she was here, holding my hand, I would say something meaningless like, 'The calliope crashed to the ground'—because we don't have any great soliloquies at our death.

Instead, my last word is: "Gimp" ... And so I pass on with the cocky little secret of the two-headed UFO baby.

I look at the moon again; how sad it must be to live out there all alone ... But then Jimbo's wanderer eclipses the moon—that dead fish eye, drifting in its socket, untethered, never relaying to his brain the images it sees.

The eye contemplates me, probes for those 'henhouse ways' of mine. He wants confirmation that he's done the right thing...

... But I'm no longer there.

With a silent scream, I've started my journey.