Leaning with Intent to Fall by Ethan Clark

Leaning with Intent to Fall
by Ethan Clark
ISBN: 978-1-891053-04-7
$13.46 (10% off the cover price) + postage

Excerpt from Leaning with Intent to Fall

Wild Dogs

The main thing that frightens people when I describe my neighborhood in New Orleans isn't the drug dealing, or shootings, or muggings, or even the influx of yuppies. It's usually when I mention the wild dogs that I get the slack-jawed stares.

"Wild dogs?" say Mississippians that I went to high school with when telling them about what I'm up to.

"Wild dogs?" say my middle-aged suburban relatives before quickly veering the conversation toward a more suitable subject.

"Wild dogs?" say friends from Iowa City, the small Midwestern college town where I spent several years, who actually think that having anything in your neighborhood other than frat boys and snow sounds pretty good.

But everyone is equally amazed and I find myself saying things like, "Well, yeah, sure, there are some wild dogs in our neighborhood that, sometimes, when we ride our bikes by where they hang out they, well, try to, uh … catch us. But you know, they're alright. It's a great neighborhood, really. You should come visit!"

So far the only takers have been the ones who didn't know about the wild dogs.

There used to be lots of wild dogs, roving packs of them that would knock over trash cans, and block traffic to come stand around my home, a giant Dodge Ram conversion van, barking at my own dog. This could sometimes put a damper on the coffee shop job I had. Try explaining to your boss that at five-thirty in the morning you were being held hostage by two chows and a terrier and that's why you couldn't get the shop open by six like you were supposed to. It doesn't go over so well. (Although my employer, Glenn, was a big fan of talking about how messed up my neighborhood, the Ninth Ward, was, and would often greet me in the morning with articles he'd cut out about various Ninth Ward atrocities.)

Lately, it seems that the roaming packs of delinquent canines have gone the way of the hundred-and-twenty-five dollar apartments, the resident families, and the neighborhood feel that was so prevalent even a couple of years ago when I moved here. This neighborhood is now "up and coming," with more and more white professionals every time you blink, more and more businesses, more and more cops, more and more arrests. There's a Ninth Ward website, for Christ's sake.

Perhaps the major dog-posses have just been pushed out, over the Industrial Canal, or above St. Claude Avenue. There are, however, a few stragglers. You see them in pairs, rounding corners, crossing streets like they know how walk-signals work. I once saw a couple of them sitting at a bus stop. Most of them are fairly timid, but there are two particularly frightening ones that refuse to submit to the neighborhood development, to the increase in traffic and to the crews of Animal Control agents that patrol the neighborhood doing whatever it is that they do.

These dogs, a filthy white Akita and a brown German Shepherd-ish looking one, usually hang out down on Chartres Street. If you take Chartres out of the French Quarter toward the Industrial Canal, it will lead you past blown-out warehouses, past the creepy brickyard with wooden crosses dangling from the fence, past the house inhabited by circus clowns that stinks of leaking sewage, past the compound that belongs to local folk-art mogul Dr. Bob, past the block that floods with every rain and is decorated with hand-painted sings warning, "SLOW - NO WAKE," past razor wire fences, houses falling down and houses being restored. Past all of that, a block before the tracks, you'll come to an intersection. On your right, there's the Mazant Street wharf and the river. On your left, a packing plant of some sort with a big parking lot and a stench of death so awful that it burns your nose and throat just to breathe. That's where they hang out.

They took us by surprise the first time we encountered them. My roommate, Desmond, and I were riding home leisurely after a show or something, taking our time and talking. He was in mid-sentence, saying something about how the smell of death wasn't so bad that night, when I caught a glimpse of a blur coming at us from behind. A fast, fluffy, snarling blur. A pair of blurs, actually.

"Ride!" I yelled as I realized what was happening. It took Desmond a moment to understand that I wasn't just trying to get away from the smell. That split-second hesitation had given me enough time to get about a quarter of a block ahead of him. I couldn't tell what was happening, but I could hear the dogs barking. They got very close to Desmond, but then we were over the railroad tracks and they let up. The barking continued, but I could hardly hear them over Desmond's hysterical laughter, which was soon joined by mine as well. We were still recapping the situation excitedly when we were safely inside our house.

Modern American society, with all of its conveniences, all of its ATMs, Stop n' Shops and drive-through cappuccino joints, has managed to suck most of the adventure right out of our lives, even down–and-out kids and stray dogs in New Orleans' Ninth Ward. I've always found it kind of sad that, through centuries of domestication and fascistic, forced in-breeding, all dog hunting instincts have been boiled down to little more than the urge to chase Frisbees, roll around in poop, and get really upset about the sound skateboard wheels make on pavement. Then it occurs to me that humans (Americans, I believe, in particular) have, through the installation of Stop n' Shops and whatnot, boiled our own hunter-gatherer instincts down to little more than getting really stoked when we get a good parking spot or find a really great coupon for our drive-through cappuccinos. Our lives, down to the routes we take to get places, what we eat, and what we do for fun, are more or less laid out by whatever society we exist in. There aren't really many adventures left anymore. I have yet to be convinced (despite the best efforts of SUV advertisements) that anything you have to purchase can really be considered "adventure." So people turn to drugs or shoplifting or driving SUVs or, in our broke and bored case, getting chased on road bikes down pothole-ridden Ninth Ward streets by big angry dogs that want to hurt us.

After that first frenzied chase sequence, I realized that the feeling of sheer terror had been missing from my life for some time. A couple of days later, while sitting around the house, feeling sorry for myself about whatever romantic or financial trouble I'd found myself in, I walked away from a small social gathering, grabbed my trusty pink bicycle and pedaled on over to Chartres Street. I rode a few blocks out of my way and looped around so that when the dogs took up chase I'd be headed back toward my house. The smell of death was particularly rank and was almost unbearable even before I'd reached the packing plant lot. I breathed through my mouth as I rode up slowly and looked around. There were a couple of Mack trucks with generators or something in them humming, but other than that there were no signs of life.

Oh well. Dumb idea anyway. I was just being dramatic. I should just get over whatever's bothering me. Suck it up, drive on. I'd just go home, hang out, act cheerful, try to be witty, maybe watch a movie I'd already seen like a million times -- oop -- never mind. The two shadows loped along on the side of one of the humming trucks, then they stepped out into the street light. They stopped when they saw me, just stood there, with their heads cocked, no doubt thinking: What does this guy think he's doing? Doesn't he know that there are a couple of wild dogs over here? Can't he see that we have important wild dog business to attend to?

I didn't have much time to wonder about what they'd been doing, though, before the big white one (always the leader of the pair) shot forward so suddenly that I nearly fell over backwards. The brown one followed suit and they were within about ten feet of me by the time I'd pointed my bike in the right direction and gotten myself moving. I was in too low of a gear as I headed up the incline toward the tracks and I couldn't get my right foot into its toe-clip, so the thin metal was scraping hard on the ground every time I pedaled. The white dog got so close to me that I was sure I would feel teeth latch onto my pants leg, and I was afraid I would have to kick him in the face to fend him off. My foot finally popped into the (now slightly bent) toe-clip properly and I shot over the railroad tracks. Both the dogs fell off, standing just behind the rails and barking at me, as they had the first time. Suddenly it was just me again, a kid on his bike, riding toward home. Perfectly normal.

Does everyone in New Orleans have these moments? Are wild dog attacks just par for the course of living in the Big Easy? Just like floods, giant cockroaches, 90% humidity levels, man-eating potholes and tourists? Or is it a phenomenon confined to the limits of the Ninth Ward? I'd guess that your average uptown investment banker probably doesn't get chased by any animals on his way home from the office. Even if he did he'd probably just mow them down in his SUV while bragging on his cell-phone to his mistress about the wonders of four-wheel drive. It might do average folks some good, being confronted with their own mortality in the form of a big, dirty, pissed-off pit bull. Who couldn't use that sort of life affirmation every now and then? Of course, it would probably become trendy just like fire walking and bungee jumping did, and, before you knew it, some entrepreneur would be on infomercials advertising his inspirational seminars to boost your self-esteem to the point where YOU TOO CAN HAVE THE CONFIDENCE IT TAKES TO GET CHASED THROUGH NEW ORLEANS BY ANGRY WILD DOGS!! Clubs would be erected and our run-down neighborhood would become a mecca for yuppies who can only relieve the stress and hardships of their six-figure jobs by being chased down by Genuine Wild Dogs. There'd be a big, multi-part special on 60 Minutes or 20/20 and, after the big Sports Illustrated spread hit the newsstands, our two hometown dogs would probably be replaced by lean, mean, yuppie-chasing dogs specially bred in some lab somewhere. Fuck that! Better to keep my low-budget catharsis techniques to myself.

"Let's go!" said my roommates in unison when they found out what I'd been doing. I'd broken my vow of silence under the pressure of their brilliant interrogation strategy: asking me where I'd been. The three of us set out, on our way to the neighborhood bar with free pool via a short side trip to Wild Dog Land. Encouraged by our numbers, we took a side street, which met Chartres Street right by the doggy danger zone. When the duo saw us and took up chase, though, Colin steered his monster of a delivery basket at them and, apparently sensing no fear from him, they turned tail and fled back into the shadows of the stinky packing plant. Desmond and I stopped and dismounted our bikes beside Colin, but even with us just standing there they didn't come out. They didn't even bark.

"Gee, dude," Desmond said to Colin, "that wasn't very nice."

"Yeah," I added, "I think you broke their spirit."

Colin looked guilty. "I … I didn't mean to."

"Whatever, fucker," Desmond said, riding away in disgust.

We didn't see them for a while after that. I began to think they'd been ruined when Colin called their bluff. Maybe they thought that they were no good as wild dogs and now were living out some pathetic existence down by the Industrial Canal, eking by on the water-logged carcasses of wharf-dwelling Nutria rats. This theory, however, is not how reality works. I think that someone once told me that dogs are incapable of remembering specific incidents, just people, places and things. Everything else is just controlled by their instincts. Now that I think about it, though, I realize that the same guy who told me that also told me that if you drink six shots of espresso in under three minutes then your heart will explode and kill you, so I don't know why I'm giving any of that guy's fucked up facts any validity. We were sitting on the stoop outside of our house. When we'd moved in, the steps said "Keep Off Steps" in large black letters, but now, through some skillful editing read, "Keep Off Hipsters." We were probably drinking beer or some equally idle activity when the dogs came bopping around the corner. They didn't see us at first and appeared to be searching for food outside the redneck bar across the street. Desmond thought that he would take this opportunity to befriend them, which he attempted by walking at them, hands out, Jesus-style, chanting, "Wild dogs, here wild doooogs, come on dogs" over and over in a spooky baby-talk voice. When the dogs spotted him, though, they just trotted off down the crumbling Ninth Ward sidewalk.

That, and one more sighting, made me realize that the poor critters weren't really vicious or broken, but were actually not that different from everyone else in our neighborhood. Desmond was driving me to my first day at a job I had no desire to have. I was late by the time we were passing the stinky death-lot. The smell wasn't so bad that afternoon and we spotted the dogs in the field across Mazant Street from where they normally were, lying in the grass near some playground equipment. The brown one was just lounging there, panting in the warm sunlight while the white one rolled around on its back, flailing its legs in the air doing that upside down "I've got an itch!" dance that dogs sometimes do.

"Wow," said Desmond as he slowed the car down to stare, "they aren't very scary when they're playing in the grass."

No sir, Desmond, they sure aren't. The poor bastards are just trying to get by, just like everyone. Hell, no one wants to be put on a leash. They're trying to hold their lives together in the neighborhood they call home, and they have their work cut out for them. "Progress" in the form of urban renewal and rising property values and, unfortunately, the presence of floundering white kids like myself, threaten them like it threatens a lot of the folks that have been here for a long time. While the people have skyrocketing rent to worry about, the dogs have to worry, too, about being netted and thrown in a van that says "New Orleans Animal Control" on the side. That kind of pressure would make anyone a little anti-social, wouldn't it?

[back]