"Everybody's head is in the noose."
A few months ago, I got an anonymous comment on Tumblr telling me that a response to someone's question on "how to go down on women" had really turned them on and lead to them daydreaming about me semi-often. Savahna, a girl who I had tried being friends with a few times in the past, only to wind up ignored and blatantly ditched time and time again before giving up on her, had also sent me a message telling me she had some responsibility for discovering Chance. I had forgotten she existed until the one non-anonymous message she sent me and decided to tell her something like, "I really wish we had made out at least once before you stopped talking to me." She responded with, "So I guess you know it was me who sent you that message, then?" She fessed up to sending me it and we briefly talked about how and why she stopped talking to me. I took a screen shot of it because it was cool to see such a babe say she wanted me at one point. When you're pathetic like me, you gotta take what you can get, and in my case it's more often than not words on my laptop's screen that will never cross over into reality. She said we should hang out sometime and even though I knew it wasn't likely to happen, I went with it on the off-chance that it would. I never had a reason to have a problem with Savahna, after all; it's not her fault that I'm not someone she wants to hang out with and I knew she was a worthwhile person from the few times we actually had hung out.
One evening, while Tia and I were shopping at Salvation Army, we ran into her. She looked incredible and actually went out of her way to stop and chat, which I took advantage of while keeping what I felt was a distance I created with my abrasive sense of humor and the way I counter ever compliment with something horrible and crude or veil things I'm saying in an ambiguous pseudo-sarcasm. She was with some friends and they gave us a ride home. A week went by and then another and aside from a few texts here and there and empty references to eventually hanging out, we never did and she always had an excuse for not being able to, the most popular being that she was now living with her boyfriend, Les. I noticed one day that we were no longer friends on Facebook, which was fine, but I messaged her anyway saying, "I wish you hung out with me at least once before deleting me from Facebook," because it was such a hilarious replay of every other attempt at some sort of friendship with Savahna. How quickly it was over just made me laugh, even though it was just as disappointing as every other time. Eventually, you can only chuckle to yourself at how futile attempts at human connections are. She claimed she hadn't deleted me and that it, "must have been Les," adding that he probably did it to get back at her for deleting someone on his friends list. I felt embarrassed by myself for even talking to someone so still in high school for a second, but still bothered texting her later and saying, "Ya know, it's okay if you deleted me. Just be honest about it." She maintained that she didn't and even said I could add her back.
In a hysterical turn of events, at the same exact time, I received a message from her boy friend saying,
"You are going to do me a favor. Stop contacting my girlfriend. She deleted you because I asked. Because I don't like you. Nuff said."
I responded simply by saying, "This is pathetic. Grow up, little boy." But not before I asked Savahna if I could call her. She said I couldn't because she was sitting right next to her boyfriend. So at the same time that he was typing to me a message without her knowledge, she was texting me without his. She told me he was lying and to ignore him. But after a few minutes of her finally coming out and saying outright that she wouldn't/couldn't hang out with me because of her boyfriend, saying stupid shit about how, "relationships are about compromise," I did, anyway. He said back,
"Ok Dave, no need to get upset, I wasn't being rude. I'm asking you as a man to respect another mans relationship, you reacting like this is no surprise. Pathetic is your self-hating attitude and fetish of little girls, mine included. Find your own. Grow up and talk to some one your own age, grown man."
I didn't really understand most of it, but I was really frustrated, regardless of how little respect I had for Savahna at that point for her own complicity in a controlling, patriarchal relationship, so I said,
"I'm not upset. You can ask Savahna, who I was talking to the entire time while you sent this to me: I thought this was funny. I'm asking you, as a man, to grow a pair and overcome your personal insecurities and total lack of trust in your partner far enough to let her make her own decisions, instead of being the type of pussy-ass boyfriend who makes their partner feel afraid to hang out with people their boyfriend happens to not like for no good reason. Age is irrelevant. What matters most is mentality and maturity, and you two have a 10th-grade level of them. I win, anyway. Because I know the things that Savahna has said to me. ;)"
In January, I finally finished Pigeon Life: A Discomfort Guide to Hitchhiking and Recreational Homelessness, a zine I had been working on for about a year at that point. Around the same time, Kara and I completed an alphabetized guide to what is vegan and not in fast food and diner chains across the country called Fast Food Vegan. In under three weeks, we had accumulated almost $200 from sales. It was so exciting to see such a demand for two zines that I think are really awesome and important. I know it might seem insignificant, but I'd like to believe that I can make little changes in the world and ignite individual revolutions within people through these two zines, showing in one that veganism does not mean starvation and loss of convenience and through the other that there are fun and practical alternatives to the way we're raised to operate within this system. The feedback has all been positive, too. Since then, a woman we met in Portland named Sage who runs a zine distro called Sweet Candy ordered nine copies of Pigeon Life for distribution. She's also carrying Kara's baking zines.
Chance hadn't gotten any better with the ear-scratching and had even begun to bite his paws a lot, even sometimes chewing on his back foot like a chicken wing. We tried to stop him as often as we could, but we'd still wake up to him destroying himself while unattended. I went out and found the most organic, gluten- and soy-free, holistic dog food I could and started spending $23 a bag. Preparing for the summer, I was hoping Kara's parents could take Chance in as their own, if only for a temporary period until I found a place of my own or with Tia or something. We took him on a second field trip to their house and he loved being outside in the nature. We also introduced him to the wonders of tennis balls. He sprinted away from us through trees like a doe at one point, but he would never run away from us. The time had finally come for us to try and introduce him to Boo, Kara's bunny, and see if they could get along. It was really the final test and deciding factor, since Kara's father already loved Chance to death and Chance already loved him to death back. When we first brought him into the bedroom, Boo was in her cage and didn't even realize he was in there. Then they came face to face and almost touched noses before she lunged at him a little and made him jump. I held him as tightly as I could and we tried to get them to meet again. They touched noses and everything seemed okay, but this time Boo jumped and got scared, hiding behind some boxes a few feet away for a couple minutes.
She was brought back outside to her litter box and just as Kara was trying to go out there, Chance squeezed past her and tried to bite Boo. Kara screamed louder than I'd ever heard before and I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Luckily, her father came out of the other room, grabbed Boo Bunny in his arms, and we got Chance away. I don't think he was trying to hurt her, since she only had some missing hair on one of her ears and no open wounds or injuries, but it was official that they wouldn't be taking Chance in after that. Kara cried and cried and Boo was walking a little funny on one of her paws. Rabbits have sensitive hearts, so even though she was acting pretty normal while hiding under the bed, I was afraid she'd have a delayed heart attack and die or something. I felt so horrible. Of course, she was okay and by the end of the day long after Chance and I had gone back home, she was back to bunning, which is when a rabbit lays flat and stretched out, meaning they feel they are in no potential threat of having to run away from something. Neither of us could stop imagining the could-have-happeneds, though.
At that point, I had no idea what to do with Chance. I knew I was going to be gone for three weeks during March and we all had to be out of the house by April. I begged and pleaded to my grandmother to let me take the dog with me to her house, but she would not budge on the issue. She couldn't give me a reason why, just that I couldn't. Because it wasn't anyone else's problem, everyone tried to tell me to just get rid of him, as if he weren't a family member of mine, a best friend, or a living being that I had adopted and vowed to protect and take care of. I was too attached already and so was he. I hadn't chosen him as much as he had chosen me. I wasn't ready at all to take care of another life, but my responsibility over him came to me anyway. As far as I was concerned, I didn't have the heart or the lack of conscience to reject that responsibility. He was already so anxious all the time and we had eventually concluded that his scratching and biting was the result of animal stress. I didn't want him to feel any more abandoned that he probably already did. But there were no options whatsoever. By the end of April, none of us would really have anywhere to go. My only option was my grandmother's; Tia's only option was her older sister's, sharing a room with her mother on a floor; Chance's only option was our next door neighbors, who had been begging to take him since they met him. I was more concerned with what would happen to him than to me, but I had no time to even focus on any of these issues. I was set to leave for Chicago on train for a zine festival we had already invested tons of money into by the end of the first week of March. I was so stressed, I just wanted to lift the floorboards and hide under them with the roaches and squirrels. I hated that Yvonne took Chance in the first place without intending on taking care of him; I hated my grandmother and the rest of my non-existent family for not being reliable in a time of need most of my peers and friends would never have to deal with; I hated myself for letting my relationship with Chance get as far as it did; I was really beginning to hate my life in general.
Meanwhile, our landlady, the fucking bitch, was downstairs on the first floor, fixing up the place to rent out to new tenants, ones she likely hoped would be less picky than us and less privy to their rights as tenants than we were. One day, as I was walking out with Chance, she stood in the downstairs window and glared at me. We had a furious staring contest for about a minute before Chance pulled me away from it. By the time I was coming back up the porch, she rushed out and stood in the doorway with one hand on her hip and a shit-eating grin on her face, happily asking in her broken English, "So you move now?" I looked at her and coldly said, "Don't talk to me." She repeated gleefully that I had to move and I said, "FUCK OFF. Don't fucking talk to me." She acted outraged and immediately called Yvonne to tell on me like a little kid snitching. Two hours later, a cop was at our door for me. I didn't deny anything because I knew there was nothing illegal about telling someone to fuck off. He wrote down my name and told me that it was, "no way to talk to someone, especially my landlord." I said back to him, "Well, in all fairness, you haven't had to live with her." It was unbelievable. Code still hadn't come back to reinforce their threats and follow up on their last grim review of the building, so she had found new tenants for downstairs by mid-March and was already planning on getting new people into the upstairs once we were gone. I hated knowing she was still being allowed to give out shelter to people in this shit-hole and exploit their desperation and ignorance.
But, as usual, I was out of control of my own living situation and horrible people would continue to prosper inconsequentially. I told my grandmother I would absolutely not be coming to her house unless she accepted Chance, too, and she stuck with her decision. I started thinking about squatting abandoned houses and keeping Chance by my side the entire time, but my conscience knew that that wasn't any better a decision than getting rid of him. I had no idea what to do.