ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN ESQUIRE

LOOK BACK IN ANGER

 I could call the cops, beg them to shoot Larry, but they probably wouldn't. Larry lives right across the al­ley; I think of him as a George Romero movie prop because I have killed him so many times, and yet he lives. And barks. His bark­ing just ripped me out of a cozy dream for the second night in a row, and now I lie trembling, teeth and fists clenched. I am furious.

Last week I tried to do something about it. Larry's only a dog, so I called his owner. He said, "Hey, he's a dog, he's gonna bark. You gotta expect that. It keeps the burglars away."

He was wrong; Larry the Labrador's barking does not signify anything useful. He cries, "Wolf! Wolf. Wolf!" I've stood in my yard at noon, my work interrupted, and watched this animal yowl at passing cloud forma­tions. Squirrels blink a block away and it drives him ber­serk. If he's taken inside to be hushed up, invariably he will be let out at 5:00 a.m., at which time he will scream, "Hey! Anybody else up yet?"

I thought of calling the cops because I just tried calling Larry's owner again, but he's either not at home (it's 3:16 a.m.) or his phone's off. Anyway, it's typ­ical: I can get angrier at an animal or an object than at a person because I don't have to fear any retaliation, but also be­cause this same general unresponsiveness is itself enraging. When something arouses my ire, I fall into a familiar pattern, passivity giving way to aggressiveness. In this case, first I thought if I ignored or endured his barking, it would stop; then, when Larry showed no signs of tiring, I imagined steps I might actually take to squelch this nuisance, which prompted the unsuccessful call. Failing that, I thought of going outside and screaming at Larry, but, though I'm getting there, I'm not that worked up yet. I procrastinate by thinking of things I won't actually do but would en­joy doing, such as strapping Larry's owner to a table and filing his teeth down to the nub with a wood rasp.

Even though it's a perfectly useless pur­suit at this point, while I'm lying in bed I play I Should Have Said to the owner's breezy brush-off of a week past. Sadly, the best of several I come up with is, "Hey, I'm a man, I'm gonna file suit. You gotta expect that. It keeps obnoxious neighbors in line!" (What I really said was, "Well, thanks a lot for nothing!") I lost my knack for the Snappy Comeback years ago. I enjoyed that almost as much as its more elegant cousin, the Grand Exit Speech—the big, dramatic gesture that punctuates an angry episode. When I was younger, I found the Grand Exit Speech irresistible and prac­ticed it without moderation until I learned that nothing is more humiliating than hav­ing your carefully scripted line upstaged by the kind of unscheduled inanity that art is short of and life is long on. I remember how I quit a small-town newspaper in indignation over the new edi­tor's editorials condemning civil-rights marchers in the South for their moral carpetbagging. I worked myself into a purple huff and told him that his edi­torials made me ashamed to work there and that I could no longer write for a paper "so insidiously reactionary and bigoted!"

That said, I neatly ex­ecuted the required about-face and strode proudly away, clean, buoyant. DISSOLVE to end credits.

Or CUT TO five minutes later. As I was standing at a urinal in the men's room wondering where my next paycheck was to come from, the editor came in, bellied up to the wall beside me, and said, calmly, "Be glad to give you a recommendation if you want"

"Thanks, but no thanks!" I thundered, struggling to stay on top. But it's hard to make a devastating impres­sion when your pants are unzipped. It's clear now that persuading the editor of his error in a firm, respectful fashion would have served everybody's interests far better than my posturing. I consider that episode, and with this lofty ethical conclusion echoing in the mar­ble halls of my brain, I feel very righteous and prepare for sleep, but the moment I'm about to slip away, Larry barks. Once, a single loud cough. Or was that a laugh? He's toying with me! 

I can't stand it any longer. I jump out of bed, pull on my jeans, throw on an old corduroy coat, bolt out my back door and to my back fence, mak­ing a racket that sends him into a fit, then I scream, "Shut up, goddamnit!" I don't care if his owner hears me; in fact, I want him to. Larry is startled into silence for an instant but then he explodes.

I wait fuming, hoping he’ll have a stroke or shut up, and when he doesn't, I stride alongside his pen and growl back at him as I walk around to the front of the house, where I ring the owner's belL I'm ready to scream in this guy's face—"Are you DEAF??!! Can't you hear this goddamned DOG??!!"—but I get no answer. 

Then I notice all the mail in his box, the papers on the stoop. I find a pencil stub in my pocket and, on the back of some junk mail, I write in loopy tetters designed to suggest psy­chopathic derangement "Your dog is driv­ing me crazy!" I sign it.

It helps a little to make the complaint, but I know, really, that I've done nothing about the problem. It infuriates me that Larry's so-called master won't see this un­til he returns.

I get back into bed, shaking. It's 3:55. I feel out of control. The idea that Larry's owner is sleeping peacefully somewhere else tonight puts me in the mood to torch his digs over there. Or—it occurs to me at last—put the torch to Larry himself. A smile breaks over my parched lips. Just let him bark again! Dead meat! And who's going to know who did it?

You'd think a dog could pick up vibra­tions such as those, but no—Larry lets loose again at 4:15. My wife has been sleeping with a pillow wrapped like a helmet about her head, so she doesn't hear this, but I do. I jump up as if I'd been waiting for a signal. Now I have that third-time finality about this, the way it is when you've probed gingerly and unsuc­cessfully a couple of times for that splinter that's under your nail and finally get recon­ciled to digging in and hurting yourself to get it. This is it! I feel pushed to do some­thing more, and my feet start moving me toward some action that even at this in­stant is still not quite defined—it's as if some act that has already been accom­plished in the future is itself reaching back to the present to tug me forward to per­form it

And as I storm out my door and across the alley, I feel oddly familiar with the emo­tional route, so to speak—the old dramatic gesture—and it's like working myself up to jump off that high dive, having taken those anxious practice strolls to the end of the board, but I know I'm going off this time: I've been patient been reasonable, tried to do the right thing, and noth­ing happened and nobody cared, so at last I can cream this sucker with a clear conscience!

I stick my arms through the wire of Larry's pen while he's crazily barking at me from the far corner. I croon to him very I nicely as if I were his adoring owner and I had a treat in hand. The stupid jerk falls for this "nice doggy" stuff; he shuts up, trots over, whimpers, and licks my hand. Turns out he's just a big pup, really, and since his owner's out of town, he's lonely.

I'm not so sappy I'm willing to forgive and forget. I decide to undo the latch and open his gate just enough for him to slip through, let him go roaming, find other dogs, bark somewhere else, get lost, run over, whatever. I won't go so far as to coax Larry out of his pen—I do have my integ­rity to consider.

When anger tempts me to end a conflict with a clever or dramatic act, it’s usually because I’ve imagined a camera recording the scene for an audience that favors my point of view. The event is indeed being put on record, but the medium is no disin­terested mechanical device—it's also the highly subjective memory of the antag­onist, who may be inclined to make me a minor player in the ongoing drama of his own ordinary day. I see my unlatching the gate as a Zen-like stroke, nonviolent, inge­nious, somehow suggesting British sub­tlety and reserve. I could see, say, Robert Morley doing it and shuffling off in his slip­pers back to bed, chops jiggling minutely as he hikes his nose in satisfaction. It is superior.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have the final cut in these productions, and there's an editor in my brain who forces me to take another look from the point of view of the audience or the adversary, in which case my drama here is no British comedy at all: it's a sitcom about some really neat kids, and I'm their obnoxious, weasely neigh­bor who wears bow ties and is henpecked. I'm played by Charles Nelson Reilly.

So no sooner have I settled into bed than I imagine Larry shivering in a doorway, lost, miles from home, whimpering from hunger. I have a sudden suspicion that what I've done is sneaky, unethical. It's an anonymous death threat, a bomb in the baggage compartment. It's cowardly.

Speaking of cowardly, I remember the note with my name on it. The owner will re­turn, see that Larry is missing, and sue me on the very justifiable grounds that dogs are not responsible for their behavior.

I get up again, walk over, see with relief that Larry is too much a homebody to go out at night. I relatch his gate, then, as an act of absolution, I lift my note out of the mailbox. On my way back to his pen, I say to him, "Go to sleep now, for God's sake!"

Just before dawn, I'm still awake be­cause Larry is, too. He sounds tired, though, as worn out as I am, but I'm also oddly serene from having wrestled with the demon. We've been through a long night together, Larry and I; it was like primal therapy or something, and he forced me to perceive his fundamentally canine condition. (Call him a Seeing Eye dog of sorts.) I'm happy to be lying here resting instead of out looking for him, which I'd be doing if luck hadn't allowed me to take back my angry act and relatch that gate. I have the luxury now to consider, without suffering the consequences, how acts performed in anger are almost always regrettable, how small things lead to problems, and, above all, how contempt is bred as much by unfamiliarity as by its famous opposite. I can't quite say that dog has become this man's best friend, but now that we have a relationship, it doesn't bother me so much to hear him bark.