The Yellow Dog

by Seth Cipriano



Last week I pissed off my girlfriend and went to look for a yellow dog because I had nothing better to do. At least I didn't plan to go looking for the dog, but it was better than punching more holes in my broken bedroom door. Maybe the door should have been a sign were I not so foolish and had I not been so upset that I actually contemplated running away from my life, as though that would be the solution to misery. Instead of trying to fix what was broken at my house I went out and sat on a cement block near a playground.

It was really cold out that day, but at least the sun was out. My fingers were freezing, the icy air cut right through my two layers of jacket/hoodie, but the sun was out, at least.

Every time we had an argument she would get pissed and leave. I never knew where the hell she went, she would just go. I probably should have followed her, or maybe tried to say something profound to stop her, I mean after all, what good is being an English major if you can't sound like a pompous smarty pants? But I never did that. I just stayed in my bedroom thinking how silly it is to fight with someone about trivial things and then wondering, maybe if there was something wrong with me. Maybe I should be crying, or at least bothered by the argument. I was never disturbed, not even a little. Except on that day.

There was an old man in the park. I wanted to go up to him and ask him what the fuck he was doing in a playground giving me a dirty look. Me. I belonged there. Or at least I believed that at the time. Perhaps I looked stranger than I felt, with my long shaggy hair and thick beard. The argument had put me in that kind of mood, and I felt every stare in my direction was some sort of an insult, so, I stood there with my hands in my pockets on the other side of a fence and stared at the old man until he looked regretful and began pacing around with his eyes on the ground. Then I returned to my frozen cement block of a seat and wondered if that old man was really in the playground.

A friend of mine, a fellow writer would always relate to me incidents where he would find himself in a public place with no one around except one other person, and he told me that he wasn't always sure that person was real. I turned back around to make sure the old man was still there. He was. Then I thought he looked an awful lot like my dead grandfather. I was beginning to forget why I had been angry in the first place. How could I have been angry when I had just chosen to be homeless and was sitting in a playground exchanging dirty looks with my dead grandfather? What did it all mean? I looked again, the old man was sitting down on a bench with his back to me.

Then a car pulled up and a woman with frizzy red hair and a slight Italian accent stuck her head out of her car and asked, " Have-a you seen a yellow dog?"

I stared at her blankly, wondering how best to respond to her ridiculous question, then I realized I was taking too long and she was giving me a strange look and about to drive away, when I blurted, "A what?"

"A dog. Yellow. He's-a big."

"No. No I don't think I've ever seen a yellow dog."

"Thank you."

A yellow dog? Really? This is the neighborhood I live in, one where people don't know there's no such thing as a yellow dog? I paused on this, maybe I was wrong. Maybe those Labrador dogs were yellow. Certainly not the same yellow as the yellow in a box of crayons, the same yellow I used as a child to color my poorly drawn suns. I looked around again to see if anyone had heard me chuckling to myself, not that I cared if they thought I was crazy, I just liked to be aware when people were thinking that. I noticed the old man was gone. I decided that was my cue to leave. I didn't know where I was going but I got up and started walking further away from my house.

At the end of the block when I had to make a decision, turn left or turn right, I decided I should go look for this "yellow dog." So I turned right thinking a trip down to Cook Field would do me good. It was far from my house and I would have a much easier time finding nothing to do there than in that small park by my house.

The only plan I had in mind at the moment was to waste as much time as possible. I wanted my mother and my girlfriend to panic. I wanted them to feel my absence. It was time they understood that I didn't need them, not that I didn't want my mother's help or my girlfriend's love, I just felt like being a prick. Every once in awhile it's good to be a prick, especially when trying to prove a point.

It all began in the supermarket. Erica, my girlfriend and housemate, was feeling neglected. This was no new occurrence. The conversation always went the same way when we would go food shopping during the day. But really, I couldn't help it. I trained my body for hours every day. I was what you could call, "in shape." And I take a certain pride in the fact that I don't lift weights like all the other morons who pay money to work out in a dank smelly gym. I do parkour. It takes skill, it takes grace, and more practice than I have time to put in. Compared with the true masters of this sport my little displays of gymnastics are a joke. But this doesn't discourage me, because I like running and climbing and jumping. Erica says I look like a monkey when I'm training, and I tell her, "thanks, so do you when you're standing."

We went to the supermarket to meet with my mother so she could buy us dinner for the week. This was our way of economizing, also known as mooching. The point I was getting to before, was that I don't spend so much of my time training my body to be in tip-top shape, so I can walk around like I have a limp. I wonder if they even know they do it. But everyone in the supermarket walks, or I should say, staggers around as if they were battling polio. Perhaps I shouldn't make that assumption. I never met anyone with polio, but I would imagine if one tried to walk they would look something like the people in the supermarket.

I begin by doing a lazy vault over a handrail landing with a one-two step and executing a quick dash around and then between two shopping carts. I follow that up by walking calmly into an aisle I have no need to be in, and I stand there waiting an extra thirty seconds for Erica to catch up.

By that time everyone in the area is staring at me. I look back at them with confidence, feeling certain that my display has just made me the alpha male of Stop and Shop supermarket. Although it is not likely that anyone had time to appreciate.

"Come on, knock it off," Erica said giving me a roll of her eyes slightly blushing with embarrassment.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because Angelo. I ask you every time we come here if you can just act normal for once. Just walk like a normal human being. When we're in public."

"Oh. Okay," I summoned the dumbest face I could and began to walk slow, acting as if I had no sense of balance. I tripped myself and tumbled into a display knocking two boxes of cookies onto the floor. Then I bent over while swaying from side to side, "This place sure is dangerous! Look here! Look at these boxes I've tripped on. How can anyone get around in here, I mean, what with all this adequate lighting and level floors that run in straight lines. They ought to put arrows on these floors."

When I stopped my rambling Erica was standing there with her hands on her hips giving me her angry face.

"When you're done fooling around maybe we could find your mom."

I took out my cell phone and began speed walking straight into the most coagulated area in the supermarket, slipping in, sidestepping, pausing dramatically, leaping across and cutting in front of all the cripples as they leaned morosely on their shopping carts. Sooner than I expected Erica was lost in the traffic behind me.

When she did catch up with me I was with my mother who was paying me less attention than usual. Erica stood far away from me and started from that moment to walk slower than usual, dragging her feet. There it was. I knew that walk all too well. That was her "I'm pissed off at him but am going to deal with it, swallow it, choke on it for a moment and then wait till my mood bothers him enough that he'll do something to fix it." Fix her mood! People! How can anyone ever be to blame for another's mood? But this walk of Erica's was the single most irritating thing that she could do. It probably came from my dislike of slow things-- people, cars, lines etc. Eventually we made our way into the cereal aisle.

"What do you want?"

She mumbled something I couldn't hear. I asked again turning towards her and staring at her this time.

"Nothing. I don't want anything."

"What the fuck? Last night you spent thirty minutes complaining to me that we have nothing to eat in the house no food, nothing good to drink and here we are and you want nothing?"

"It's fine I'll just make do with whatever."

"So you remember this when we're home and it's two in the morning and you're complaining. 'Cause I'm not going to listen or care."

"That's fine."

"Here," I said reaching into my pocket, "take the keys and your fucking, 'fine's' and go sit in the car and talk to yourself about being 'fine'. I'm going to go buy some food."

Her eyes began to tear and some color came back into her face.

"Why? What's your problem?"

"Me? I don't want to be around this," I moved my hand up and down in her direction.

"Whatever, Angelo."

"Whatever yourself. You and you silly words that go nowhere."

She went to the car and I grabbed a box of Cookie Crisp's and took it to my mother-- who was already on line?

"Can you wait to get on line? I have some more things I need to buy."

"Go get them now. I have to get home Angelo."

"I can't get everything I need in less than a minute. I kind of wanted to look down some aisles and see what looks good."

"Well just get what you need for now I don't have time."

Recently Erica had put it in my head that my mother didn't like buying food for both of us. At the time I had thought this a silly thing, something with no substance, no proof. But here it seemed to be the reason why she wouldn't tell me specifically why she had to go.
I dropped the box of cereal on the floor and threw my hands up.

"Fuck it. Forget the food I don't need anything. You just buy stuff for yourself I'll take care of me."

When I got to the car Erica was sitting there silent. My mother was calling my phone and I picked up as I was starting the ignition to tell her off. I hung up the phone on her before she could say anything back. And like that I drove as fast as I could back to the house. I thought how silly everything I was doing seemed as I drove home. Yelling at a parent, chastising my girlfriend, driving like a maniac, this was movie stuff. Inside I was laughing, but I made sure that my face was a grimace so that Erica knew I was angry. But what is angry anyway? It's not real. All these things we do when we're angry are just things that we learned from watching other monkeys. We don't really grow up ever, instead of throwing tantrums we become Oscar-worthy actors and actresses.

Erica was playing the role of a sad girl, who had been hurt because her lover, the man she would give her life for had just acted as though he didn't care, but deep down inside of her soul she knew that he really loved her more than anything and that's why she was pathetically sad, with some resolve. Her resolve was to stay with him through everything. It was beautiful, such actors we had become. Am I an actor because I can think about this while "being furious"? The weaving in and out of traffic, speeding around elderly drivers, cutting onto the wrong side of the road to scare myself and my passenger and to let the world know I'm insane-- where does it all lead?

Down the street, it was getting colder and there was no sign of the yellow dog. A bald headed man was walking next to me. For a moment I wondered if he was really a man. Perhaps I had become such a good actor that I could create men. He was just a part of the scene and I bought his existence because it was helping to piss me off, to make me more real. He bothered me because I hated walking next to people in the same direction on a big street. I thought, "come on, here we are in a big suburb with all these little out of the way streets and the one I choose to walk down is occupied with a bumbling idiot walking the same direction that I need to go?"

Then a man stepped out of a truck ahead of us. Great, now it's a fucking party. The man was wearing flannel and he turned to the bald guy and asked,

"Any luck?"

"No, nothing. My wife's driving around looking for him and I just checked down by Cook Field."

"He'll turn up," said the man in flannel as he slammed his pick-up truck's door.

"We figure either someone found and doesn't know what to do with him, or..."

I knew what the "or" meant. I acted as though I had no idea what they were talking about, kept walking right past them. My course needed to be changed if I was to find this dog. They had already looked where I intended to go.

When we got to my house Erica was inside before I was even out of the car. She was pissed. I could tell she was getting ready to leave, to go on one of her mysterious excursions. When she left the house, it was quiet. I didn't know what to do. I had so much homework but couldn't settle my mind to do any of it, so I started to get angrier at my inability to control myself. For someone who is so good at noticing how silly anger is, I was pretty terrible at controlling it. Before I could begin to wonder again about anger and emotions and if any of them are real, my mother walked into my apartment. Maybe it was her voice, or the way she looked at me or something she said, or maybe it was nothing she said, nothing she did, but I flipped out and don't really remember anything she said. I gave her a mighty speech about how terrible society was. I told her that in college we read books and we learn stuff. I had read so many books that I knew about the world and the people in it. I told her that the life she lived was a joke, her entire life would amount to nothing because she was going to die having spent all her life working for money. Money! A thing that we could never really own anyway. But since she cared so much about money I threw a wad of one hundred dollar bills at her. I told her to take the fucking money because I didn't need it. She was crying, I remember that much. Sadness, I thought about it as I saw her eyes turning more and more red, especially when her tears trickled down her cheeks-- and I wondered why I didn't get sad like that. Maybe people in college don't cry. Maybe I've read so many books that my own life seems like a terribly written short story. Or perhaps I am the one who can't see the living story. I am a character in a story or maybe even a novel, I wouldn't know.

Just before I decided to leave I was overcome with strange idea's. I wondered how far I could push this. If I was just a character--a character who because he was aware of himself as a character didn't feel anything because he knew that everything he felt was not real then--I could slap my mother. I could slap her in the face and call her a blubbering idiot. This is how she appeared to me. Since I didn't care about other people's feelings because I didn't believe anger or sadness to be real, then I could slap her. I started to walk away from her thinking this all was crazy. Then she grabbed my arm and said something. I couldn't hear her because I was thinking about slapping her. I turned around and raised my hand, bared my teeth and took a step towards her. She backed away and stopped crying. She looked shocked and suddenly I felt bad, so I left.

Parkour is movement. Climbing, running, jumping, spinning, flipping. The first thing you learn in parkour is how to roll, the reason: so you can not break your bones when you jump from the height of one or two stories. That was the first thing I learned, how to jump from really high places without breaking bones. Then you learn vaults, that's moving over obstacles using only your hands and a jump. Eventually you learn to vault things that are about as high as your shoulders. One jump and a hand, no feet, no climbing, just fast movement over something.

I didn't feel like doing parkour that day. It was just a day to walk around and look for this yellow dog. It had been some time since I left the house. The sun was setting. The sun is always setting in winter, it seems.

Walking around the Seminary I lost it. Surrounded by trees and crosses and stained glass windows and just big open fields, I started talking to myself.

"What would his name be? This yellow dog. What should I call him when I see him? Hey birds, check me out I'm even okay using the word yellow dog now, I don't put any emphasis on it. What do you think about all of this? Am I insane or is sanity driving the world mad?"

I stopped and knelt in the grass and stared at the geese. They looked at me for a moment and then returned to pecking the ground.

"Isn't it a little late to be here? Don't you guys migrate or something? Can you help me find this dog? I had a dog once. She was a person trapped in a dog's body, Clara. We grew up together, I cried over her for longer than I ever did when a family member died."

I walked closer to the group of geese and one said, "quack," or "honk" or "whatever" and they all flew away.

I kept walking through the Seminary. I wondered why I never ran into any priest's in training. I thought that's what they did at this Seminary, trained priests. How do you a train a priest? Is it the same way with dogs? Can dogs be priests? I would say so, I think we'd all be better off with howling in a church service than the lot of trash they fill the pews with.

This was getting old fast. I had solved nothing. All I had done was create physical distance between me and my problems. And damn it! Parkour. It seemed to be a part of me, whether I was in the supermarket or in my mind, or in my house in an argument. All I could do, was run from things, over more things. I sure could create distance between myself and everything. Maybe this yellow dog felt the same way I did, maybe that's why he left. A name! He must have a name! Why not my own name? Angelo is as good a name for a dog as it is for a man. Actually I think my name sounds better when it belongs to a dog. The day of Angelos' had past. My grandfather had this name back when being Italian meant something. But no more of those old days, no more bootlegging, no longer was Yonkers an upstate suburb, no more Mom and Pop grocers, no more carpenters, no more wells. My grandfather was dead, Yonkers was an urban suburb, kids don't even know what a bootlegger is, Mom and Pop's died and their kids sold the store to some Arabs; who needs carpenters when you have Home Depot and Lowes? The well in my backyard is now used to deposit trash into the earth.

I went home before the sunset. I realized that I couldn't go off and live in the woods like Thoreau because I would end up like McCandless. And I didn't want to be a character in someone else's novel or story. I wanted to find the story that was my life. My girlfriend was back at home, waiting for my apology, waiting for my true love to be expressed, because she knew. She never read books like I did, never went to college but she knew my insides. I guess that's why she overlooks the yellow dog.


Seth Cipriano is currently an undergraduate student at The City College of New York, majoring in creative writing. He has published a non-fiction article in The Campus newspaper at City College. This is his first published fiction work.