Joey Unlocks the Secret to Preserving His Dog’s Immortality

PROLOGUE

We don’t have enough time.
We don’t have enough time.
I mean that in the micro - this episode needs to be contained to around 30 minutes - but in the macro as well. On Earth. With each other. We don’t have enough time.

I think about Star Trek a lot. I’ve seen every series and every movie. I grew up with Star Trek. My father took me to see The Wrath of Khan in the theater when I was 7 and I thought it was the best day of my life. I’m 48 now and so far, it looks like I was right.

Even if you’ve never watched Star Trek, you’re probably at least passingly familiar with Spock - human-Vulcan hybrid with the pointy ears and the two-in-the-pink / two-in-the-stink salute. Spock stands out as the most recurrent character in the franchise because, while the franchise spans centuries, Vulcans live a long time, much longer than humans. Spock is an anomaly among Vulcans in that he actually develops close relationships with his human colleagues, I suspect because, why develop a close relationship with something you’re going to far outlive? There’s a misconception that Vulcans are without emotion, but in fact they are so destructively emotional that they have to contain it through medication and a pious adherence to logic and compulsory sex (it’s a very horny show). In this way, Spock is the most tragic of all the characters in the series. A deeply emotional being who outlives all of his friends.

It made me think of the human equivalent to this plight - which I think is dogs. You don’t have to imagine being a lone human whose only friends are dogs to make this…logical…leap - you just have to have known and loved a dog. One dog.

This is about a dog. My dog. And the impossible task I have of ensuring his immortality.
I’m not a fool. Ah…I…well…I am a fool. But I’m also pragmatic, which helps offset my foolishness. The pragmatist in me realizes that any attempt to neutralize the mortality of a dog is a foolish venture, and so when meeting the challenge of this impossible task, I have to start with what’s actually achievable.

CHAPTER ONE: JOYFUL, JOYFUL, JOYFUL

In which the introduction of a dog to a family is remembered.

The dog in question is Marty McFly, a 26-pound black labradoodle now in his 14th year who, in his youth, was something of a luminary in the world of New York performance art, having performed in about a dozen pieces on the Neo-Futurist stage alone. Marty is the oldest of three pets. We also have Dolly Parton. She’s a rescue, so we don’t know exactly what or how old Dolly is; we assume a terrier mix of around 10. And we have Nemo, a black cat who looks like…I don’t know…just do an image search for ‘black cat,’ and you’ll get the idea. I’m horribly allergic to cats, so even after a year of having him, I feel like I’m still adjusting to Nemo, but he was our daughter’s cat, and I had to accept him into my home because…of things we’ll touch on later.

Marty was not my first choice of name for the dog.

KENDRA: You had some weird names.

This is someone who was there at the beginning.

[...and I am your wife]

To be clear…she is not your wife.

[Joey’s wife!]

I had 2 pages of names for the dog. None of them stuck.

Kendra: darkness/black dog/mechagodzilla

Marty is blacker than midnight under a skillet. When it's dark, we have to train our eyes around the room to be sure we know where he is, because he’s otherwise easily stepped on. Getting the dog was Kendra’s idea.

[Kendra’s getting the dog idea]

The female puppy in question was named Janet, at least temporarily. Breeders will give their puppies temporary names, and the dam’s ultrasound revealed a litter of 5 males, so they named them after the Jackson five:, Michael, Tito, Marlon, Jermaine and Jackie, who we would rename Marty. There was a surprise sixth puppy, a girl, so they named her Janet.

[Kendra telling story of when we got Marty]

Kendra looked at me with Marty - nee Jackie Jackson - in her lap, and she said, “I think this is our dog.” You’ll hear more from Kendra, but I want to introduce you to two more people.

BROOKE: We got Marty when i was 14 years old.

The dog wasn’t just for us, of course. We had five children when we got Marty, and the two oldest were the first to meet him.

[Brooke intro]

[Avery false start intro]

Avery’s disability sometimes interferes with his expressive language so at times you’ll hear me tying some of his thoughts together just for clarity.

[Avery intro]

I asked Brooke and Avery what they remembered about meeting their new puppy for the first time. Brooke was already home when we came in with the dog.

[Brooke telling the story of meeting marty]

Avery wasn’t home yet. Kendra had been pressuring me to get a dog for about a year, and she coached Avery to say, every time I gave him a gift, “I’d rather have a puppy.” So we framed this as an early Christmas present, gave him like a $10 gift card so he would say his rehearsed line, to which we could respond with an actual puppy.

[AVERY MEETING MARTY?]

There were three younger children who met him as well. The two youngest, Cassidy and Lucas, declined to be recorded for this episode. The middle child, Allyson, can’t be recorded, but she was the next to meet him. I had all three of the youngest in the car when the puppy was already in the house. Allyson was always the first one out of the car, and after running inside per her usual routine, she ran back out seconds later and screamed loud enough to be heard from blocks around, “WE GOT A DOG!” Allyson loved animals more than anything.

[Kendra talking about allyson’s names for marty.]

CHAPTER TWO: HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I ENVIED HIS TAIL?

[Marty doing tricks]

If the best way to get to know this dog is through the lens of the people who know him, listen to these three impressions of what they think he would sound like if he could talk. Mind you, these are three different people: Avery, Brooke, and Kendra, in that order:

Avery

Brooke

Kendra

I want you to know this dog, too. There’s a famous Hemingway quote about death and immortality: “Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.” If this is true of men, can it not also be true of dogs? I want as many people as possible to know this dog, so we’re just going to run through a list of things that define him. I can’t possibly get to everything, so I will keep this to a list of 7.

Number one: He is a terrible guard dog, because he just wants to be friends with everyone and everything.

[Brooke on Marty’s friends]

[kendra on the koi pond incident]

[kendra on Marty shaking his ass]

Marty is a lover. He is never more than 6 feet away from me. As I record this, he’s lying at my feet.

Thing number two: He’s a quiet dog. He’s never been able to get ‘speak’ down, because he generally doesn’t bark unless the phone is ringing. Here’s a recording from 9 years ago trying to do the same trick.

[Marty speak 2015]

Number 2, amended: Marty isn’t always a quiet dog.

[Snorzing.]

We call that ‘snorzing.’ It’s not snoring. He only does this when he’s sedentary and awake. He’s dead quiet when he’s actually asleep. Dead quiet, with one notable exception. In his dreams, he communes with his lupine ancestors.

[Kendra explaining the howl]

I wish I had audio of the howl, but it comes like a thief - it steals from his dreams in the dark of night while we are asleep, it wakes us with its primal yearning. It reminds us that we share our roof with a beast that commands powerful jaws and sharp teeth, that canis lupus familiaris is just one lateral taxonomic step from the icy stare of a beast that considers every other species as a potential meal.

[Brooke telling the story of Mike and the howl]

Mike couldn’t touch Marty because, as sweet as this dog is in every other regard, there are very specific circumstances during which he will snap at people. One of those circumstances is if you mess with food that he’s trying to eat. The other is touching him while he’s asleep, which can make the howling especially dangerous.

[Kendra on marty’s biting]

Number 3: He can be kind of an asshole. Marty is the only dog that has really ever bit me. I’ve had dog jaws on me a few times, but he’s the only dog that ever bit clean through my hand. And yet…he is my favorite. I respect that he has boundaries, however unnecessary they might be. I respect that he maintains those boundaries. Don’t mess with my food, don’t disturb my sleep. Word. I get it.

MOANS

Number 4: My father loved Marty. What you’re hearing is Marty when he’s getting pet. My father gave him two names: ‘Blackie’ and ‘Moaning Marty.’ The former for reasons already established; the latter because of this.

MOANS

In the estimation of my father’s 74 years, no dog measured up to Marty.

[Kendra talking about my dad and marty]

That brings us to Number 5: Marty missed his calling as a greyhound.

[Kendra talking about marty at debbie’s and the danger-oblivious dog. “Debbie and Colleen’s house…”]

I feel the need to interject here for context: Debbie and Colleen weren’t just our neighbors across the street. They were my aunt / best friend, and her wife respectively. Back to Kendra

[Marty in danger and running, part 2]

Thing Number 6: Marty humps nothing. I don’t mean that he doesn’t hump. I mean he humps children and animals from a respectful 3 feet away. He air humps, like some frat boy wannabe gigachad.

[Kendra on Marty’s humping]

Lastly, number 7: Marty is a very fastidious dog. He’s a cross breed of two water dogs, but he hates being wet. He only drinks from the far side of the bowl because he doesn’t want to make a mess. He loves a vigorous pet, but as Brooke notes, he has to shake it off, like I’m the dirty one here. I get judged by an animal that licks his own ass. This selective fastidiousness has lead to some very strange behaviors. Like…this:

[Kendra on marty’s poops]

CHAPTER THREE: BURIED IN THE GARDEN NEXT TO A RUSTED OLD MACHINE

[Marty coming home from vet]

I’m going to interject here and note that that bill did not include one of the medications, which amounted to $51.60. So Kendra was, in fact, spot on, almost to the dollar.

Health is not immortality. Health is just the slowest way to die. But it buys us time, and the art of physicians buys us health. In an effort to accomplish this task, we started with veterinarians.

I want to remind you that Marty is a labradoodle. In a September 25, 2019 article in the New York Times, the creator of the breed, Wally Conron, is quoted as saying, “I opened a Pandora box and released a Frankenstein monster.”

There is no sum you could offer for which I would trade the personality of my dog. However, I would gladly trade the avalanche of his maladies for a nickel. Actually, I’d gladly pay you several grand, because you’d be actually be saving me money.

Marty is a walking vet bill. He has had so many courses of antibiotics over the course of his life, they may as well just remain a constant in his feed. He has had more ear and foot infections than we can count. He seems to be allergic to his own hair. His skin is prone to sebaceous cysts. On top of all that, he is now at an age that can comfortably be called ‘geriatric.’ He has trouble with stairs. He has dental disease - he’s already lost a front tooth. His hair has thinned. He is covered with tumors, including a softball-sized lipoma on his groin. He occasionally falls into what we’ve come to calling his “episodes,” in which his hindquarters quiver like bony alcoholics that just went cold turkey. Marty is in his fourteenth year.

[Kendra on Marty’s episodes]

On top of all this, is the relationship he has with our other dog, Dolly Parton. We adopted Dolly because we thought Marty would like having a companion, but at best, their relationship could be described as ‘armistice.’ At worst…well, in the middle of recording, this happened:

[Marty’s leg injury]

We had the vet look at Marty’s leg. The conclusion was that Dolly had torn Marty’s ligament, and that scarring and the slipping of his patella had rendered his leg with an injury that won’t fully heal. He can put weight on it again, but his running days are definitely over. Of course, that’s not exactly a new development.

[Brooke talking about Marty’s yelp.]

And then there’s the licking and the chewing…

[Kendra on the chewing.]

The chewing became so bad at one point while recording this, that Kendra insisted Marty be kennelled for the night so he wasn’t keeping us awake. He has to be kennelled if he’s locked out of the bedroom, because if he isn’t, he poops on the floor in protest. Marty cooperates with getting kennelled in all situations except when we’re going to bed. He’s been like that since he was a puppy. Getting him to go inside on the first night went poorly.

part 1

I tried bribing him with treats…

part 2

This went on

part 3

and on…after about a half hour, I grabbed a cat tree and tried cornering him into the kennel like a lion tamer. I almost had it. But ultimately…

part 4

I slept in the guest bedroom with Marty that night. I figured at least Kendra would be able to sleep. The next night, I was a little more prepared…

night 2, part 1

It was slow work, but eventually…

night 2, part 2

…so, a win right? Right?

night 2, part 3.

The next morning when i [simultaneously, the next morning] went to retrieve marty [he’s mad at me]. Dolly, who was agitated that Marty had been locked up, chewed through the leash I used to lure him into the kennel. So…so much for that plan. As acrimonious as their relationship can be, Dolly apparently won’t let Marty be caged.

I wonder what it will be like for Dolly and Nemo if I - as I likely will - fail. I dread what the lab tests of a dog covered in tumors will reveal. I’ve never lost a pet, not really. I thought I lost a fish once. I mean, I did lose a fish, but about a decade ago I was having dinner with my father who wistfully said he lost count of the number of times he replaced my dead fish. Until that moment, I assumed that my fish had lived for three years before she died. His off-handed reminiscence resulted in me learning for the first time at 37 years old that goldfish don’t live that long.

So today, I steel myself for the likely scenario that Marty’s will be one more death in a litany of deaths, deaths that started like this:

CHAPTER FOUR: ALL HIS SWEET AND SHAGGY LIFE

My father, the one who tied Marty’s leash to a pole outside a store, a pole that Marty then yanked out of the ground dragging it up a busy street, the one who called my dog ‘Moaning Marty’...he was the first person Marty outlived. My father died in 2018.

[Kendra story about my dad in the hospital bed]

After my father was my aunt. The same aunt who lived across the street from us, to whose house Marty would sprint so he could run around in her backyard. My aunt who was also my best friend.

After my aunt was our daughter. She was 21. It was a suicide. This is why she is not a voice in this episode, and why we have her cat. I don’t want to beleaguer this death, not because it’s not important - in fact, it is all I think about - but because, as noted earlier, I’m a pragmatist, and pragmatism has no role in grief. Pragmatism would mean finding something in the ruin of trauma and anguish that can be salvaged, and the idea of finding use or purpose to her death turns my stomach. I don’t want her death to be useful.

I don’t want any of these deaths to be useful, but especially not hers.

[Brooke on Allyson’s suicide]

This chapter is about perspective. In a glib list of Marty’s maladies, I mentioned what we call his “episodes,” but I can’t impress enough how scary they are. If he wasn’t perfectly alert, I’d think he was having a grand mal seizure. What you are hearing is one of those episodes. He pants to the point of dehydration, but he won’t drink anything. He seeks us out in a plea for us to fix it, but there’s nothing we can do but offer him comfort.

The first time he had one of his episodes, we were scared. We thought he might have been in cardiac arrest. I called an emergency vet, who basically told me to call back when he died. I was inconsolable that night.

That was three months before Allyson died. Losing a child really moves the goal posts of grief, you know?

While recording this episode, a little over a year after our daughter’s death, Kendra’s father died.

I recorded this entry on the anniversary of Allyson’s death:

[audio diary]

Nine days after that was recorded, Kendra’s father died, and as it turns out, I was wrong. As much as we are paralyzed by Allyson’s death, we experienced the end of Kenneth Paul Duran’s life with all the sadness and grief that it deserved. I don’t love it, but I am glad for it, in that I don’t hate it. In these last few years, I very much understand what Maurice Sendak said about getting old: “I'm not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me and life is emptied. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. And it's like a dream life.”

My dad, Debbie, Allyson, Kendra’s dad…all of these people were alive when Marty came into our family. Now they’re gone, and he’s still here. This dog has become a concept of time for me. A walking compendium of obituaries. I could not have imagined 13 and a half years ago that Marty would have outlived so many people in the family that he joined, especially Allyson. I wonder to what extent this dog really is immortal. I wonder who’s next. I miss them so, so dearly. Some days, it’s too much - It feels like drowning. And in thinking about the futility of forevering my forever friend, I am stuck with thinking about what immortality really means.

[Brooke on Marty as a concept of time. “Marty’s timeline”]

CHAPTER FIVE: I BELIEVE IN A HEAVEN I’LL NEVER ENTER

In Star Trek, there is a test taken by Starfleet cadets known as the Kobayashi Maru. It is essentially a simulation of the trolley problem, the ethical thought experiment that asks us to consider: if acting on a dire situation results in dire consequences, and not acting also results in dire consequences, do you act or do nothing? Captain James T. Kirk becomes famous for being the only Starfleet captain to complete the Kobayashi Maru with no dire consequences by reprogramming the simulation. You might even say he, as Lieutenant Saavik frames it, cheated.

You might think this is cheating - that by winning a semantic argument, I’ve changed the rules so that I can make an impossible task possible. I have chosen to immortalize my dog in a painting.

[Jen talking about how she has immortalized her dead cat.]

This is the woman who made it happen.

[Jen Tracy introduction.]

[Jen talking about how she approaches portrait art]

[Jen reflecting on the task of capturing Marty.]

“Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.” James Anthony Rizzolo. Deborah Ellen Greh. Allyson Joy Souder. Kenneth Paul Duran. Marty McFly.

[Kendra on the imminent loss of her dog, and a heaven for all dogdom]

[Avery on the imminent loss of his dog.]

[Brooke on the imminent loss of her dog]

So…we got Marty’s lab tests back from the vet.

[Marty’s lab test results]

So far, through effort or circumstance, it seems I have succeeded. My dog is immortal, and I have yet to be presented with evidence to the contrary.

But, of course, I am a fool. And I am a pragmatist. Kendra is a pragmatist, and very much not a fool. She believes Marty will die, and she’s probably correct. She also knows that we will not want to replace him. So she took a unilateral action to ensure that we wouldn’t have to make that decision.

[Kendra on the imminent arrival of Tuco Salamanca.]

[Joey making Marty’s bed, singing “If Mama Was Married,” crossfade into Sondheim recording from Gypsy.]

If you love a dog

If you have ever loved a dog

I want you to stand up

Wherever you are

Whether you’re in line at the post office

Crammed into a crowded subway car

Listening to this podcast in subterfuge while sitting in a classroom when you’re supposed to be listening to a lecture.

If you’re hang gliding, land.

If you lack feet or the ability to use them, simply bring yourself to attention.

If you’re driving, pull over,

Or better yet, hang your head out the window and let the wind flap your ears against your head

Like little meat flags.

Wherever you are…

Train your eyes to the sky

Hold your heart in your two hands and say your dog’s name.

Say it!

Say it loud!

Shout it!

Shout it to the reverberate hills,

The way a dog’s name was meant to be announced to the world.

Say their name!

And now feel in the heart that you hold in your hands

The pull to commune with dogs,

With others who love dogs.

Raise your nose to the air and draw deep.

Smell the world

And greet all of dog’s green earth.

For yourself, for your family, your loves,

Your dog

And for all dogdom.

Feel the hair on the back of your neck.

Feel your need for communion

For companionship

For a best friend

And call to that friend

Knowing that your friend will come

The way no other friend would.

Do not rely on the inadequacies of language,

So clumsy with its ambiguity.

Use your most honest self.

Feel that howl stirring inside of you.

Let it out the way a cracked dam gives way to a trickle,

Quiet and low

Then rising, rising, rising, until it breaks into that perfect, warbling melody,

That beautiful, barbaric torrent of self.

Your hands.

Your heart.

Your dog.

This is about a dog.

One dog.

Too friendly for his own self-preservation.

Too smart for his own good.

A best friend who managed to outlive two fathers and another best friend and a daughter.

Memento Mori.

Take him for a walk,

This dog…

…any dog…

…your dog…

Take him for a walk.

A dog

Is a concept of time.

And we don’t have enough time.

We don’t have eno-