DOGSUCKER: THE WRITTEN ORAL by Lawrence Lenhart

Bullfucker (continued): forte

Either way, she fucked the bull. Not even she would deny it. As evidence, see her chimera son the Minotaur, half-man half-bull. Her husband Minos consulted with the oracles, and the Minotaur was incarcerated in Daedalus’ Labyrinth. And what would you do if you were Minos? If your wife – called Pasiphaë – lusted after a snow-white bull, copulated with it, birthed a monster, and brought shame upon your already tragic – like the Kennedys, but Greek – family line?

Or rather, the bull fucked her. Pasiphaë recruited the famed Athenian artificer Daedalus to trick the sexualized bull into mating with her. Daedalus cleverly constructed a hollow heifer with a hide façade. In Rebecca Armstrong’s Cretan Women, an outraged Minos regards the invention as a pimpish contraption rather than a product of carpentry.

As with Icarus’s wings, there are no historical blueprints for the invention, but if you really think about it – in explicit detail as I have – the design can be inferred from just about any illustration in bovine animal husbandry. The thing about a pimped-out proxy bull is that within the hollow body of the wooden heifer, Pasiphaë is on all fours herself, her violet himation and loincloth pulled up and over her hips, her vagina hovering near a carefully whittled hole through which the bull’s penis may poke. The diameter of an erect bull penis is seven centimeters while the diameter of the average female vagina is around two centimeters. You’ll have to excuse my fascination with the literality of myth.

Why, Daedalus? Why enable her infamous adultery? While Armstrong offers several explanations, I prefer her notion that Daedalus had an “amoral, detached fascination with the solving of technical problems.”

And this bull – object of lust, fucker of cavities in wooden heifers, impregnator of Cretan Queen Pasiphaë, father of the concealed Minotaur – from whence did it come? Minos prayed to Poseidon for a symbol to make apparent his right to claim the throne of Crete. Poseidon obliged, favored Minos with the snowy bull that manifested in the breakers of some Mediterranean beach. O, Minos: careful what you wish for.

Dogsucker (continued): forte

By Christmas 1998, I was convinced that my sophisticated pleas would finally yield a dog – a small hypoallergenic terrier – please please can we please? I made my parents feel blameworthy for isolating me; not only was I siblingless, but also woefully enrolled at a small and distant parochial school, Queen of Angels. I was certain that on that Christmas morning, I would awake to adorable yipping, a puppy trembling in shallow backyard snow, that I would point at it and ask my parents if it was mine, and when they said yes, I would spontaneously name it and call it inside. Instead, though, I received a slap-in-the-face virtual pet Tamagotchi.

Tamagotchi is a small egg-shaped keychain computer, a species of digital pet created in Japan in 1996 for parents in small city apartments, or those with shithead kids who had not been able to sustain the illusion that they could take on the responsibilities of pet ownership in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Tamagotchi pet owners are required to feed, interact, and discipline their pets to encourage them into the next stage of development, a Piagetian precursor to Pokémon. To achieve this, there were three rubber buttons below the screen display.

There was a hazy satisfaction associated with Tamagotchi play, but I craved the real thing. I craved the analog pet – fur and skin and ligament and bone, hot breath, bad breath, pink tongue, claws on ceramic, tail like a joystick, goop in the corners of the eyes, unpredictable fits of energy, catatonic until sparrow lands on window sill or until jay bustles in chimney flue or rabbits nibble at backyard rosebushes, whatever other sudden alarms turn a ball of fur into a kamikaze pinball.

When Tamagotchi’s 1.5-volt alkaline battery cells were toast come March/come April, I didn’t ask for replacements. I put the egg to rest in a drawer with other childhood distractions.

Bullfucker (continued): madness

Poseidon gifted the snowy bull to Minos, and the bull acted as a symbol that Minos should inherit the Cretan throne. With his electoral talisman, Minos swiftly became King Minos. Rather than sacrifice the bull back to Poseidon, though, as Minos knew he ought do, Minos in his supreme megalomania had become so attached to the bull – this arbiter of his royalty – that he instead sacrificed one hundred ordinary cows. Poseidon, a megalomaniac himself, was understandably insulted by the offering.

It’s like when your dad lets you take the Blue Corvette to Norwin High School Senior Prom. He says, “Go ahead. I’ll take the old Camry for the night.” What a great dad. And you take a high school sweetheart to the confluence of the three rivers: the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. You take pictures in the car, beside the car, on the car. You’re even wearing an electron blue vest to match the 50th anniversary paint job. And even though your high school does not designate a king and queen at the end of the night (they think it promotes the very social hierarchy they’ve been trying for four years to defeat), the car has boosted your ego enough that you are the de facto king. And when prom is over, and you’ve accelerated the Corvette into the triple digits on desolate parkway stretches from Pittsburgh to suburban Irwin (don’t tell Dad, though), eventually parking it in your driveway late at night or early in the morning, and the next day, you are hung over, and your dad asks how the night was, how the Corvette was, and you give a thumbs up, and when he asks for the keys back, you tell him, “No, Dad. Why don’t you keep the Camry?”

Here’s where myth multiplies.

An irate Poseidon punishes Minos. At least this is what is emphasized in the Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogue VI (‘Bucolic VI’). The punishment: Minos can keep the snow-white bull, the only caveat being that his old lady, Pasiphaë, will be afflicted with an intense lovesickness for the bull. She will be forlorn, out of sorts, until she copulates with it.

Enough of the conflict between Poseidon and Minos, though. Let us consider Pasiphaë. Pasiphaë is the object of Virgil’s sincere and constant sympathy. Virgil recognizes Poseidon as bully and Minos as culprit, how their egomania victimizes Pasiphaë (a, uirgo infelix), and she has no choice but to climb the foothills – of Mount Ida, was it? – as if she is a herdsman. She is in want of the bull. An ensemble translation of Eclogue VI would catalogue her torment thusly: Poseidon induces Pasiphaë’s mania. (A, uirgo infelix.) Pasiphaë looks for the bull’s tracks, follows the hoof prints up and down hillocks, becoming a feral wife – no, amatorfauna. She solicits the Nymphs to close off the groves in order to keep the bull near. She drives heifers to stable. Away with competition! And when Pasiphaë (a, uirgo infelix) finds him, his snowy hide reclining amongst hyacinths, she climbs into Daedalus’ contraption, and when she is finally, finally his inamorata, finally, finally mounted, bull-fucked, sated, the poet Virgil asks Pasiphaë: “A! uirgo infelix quae te dementia cepit?” ‘Ah! Poor maiden, where have your wits flown?’

By emphasizing the ‘madness,’ Virgil’s attitude towards Pasiphaë’s turpis concubitus, or ‘shameful union,’ is similar to that of Sigmund Freud. In Freud’s 1905 essay, “Sexual Aberrations,” one of the conditions in which an individual may engage in bestial relations – aside from cowardice or impotence – is “an urgent instinct (one which will not allow of postponement)” and only if the individual “cannot at [that] moment get possession of any more appropriate object.” While Freud’s psychology is pursuant of etiology, Virgil’s poetry is a pledge of compassion to his subject. Both, though, are aware of the urgent instinct.

Poseidon afflicts Pasiphaë with this instinct – almost as if by an osmotic spritz of a love potion, some progesterone-infused lustral water – and Pasiphaë becomes the unwitting offender of not just adultery, but zoophilia as well. Armstrong dubs it an “isolating transgression.”

Dogsucker (continued)

On Christmas Eve, just eight days before the new millennium, we picked up a small Yorkshire Terrier. You’ve likely seen this breed in Victorian paintings wearing a red bow, looking prim. (You should know: Grizz was bowless, macho.) That night, Grizz stayed in the Pet Taxi on my dresser, eye-level with my bed. Even though I wasn’t supposed to take him out until morning, I opened the cage every so often and cradled him. Most of the night, we blinked at each other, his eyes two orange flecks of tapetum lucidum, little round flames of tissue coated in the oil of his tears.

Grizz and I were inseparable that spring. When I got home from Queen of Angels, I sprinted from the bus stop to my room, changed out of my knit vest and khakis – if I didn’t, they’d call me Preppy Pussy – and put on something public-school-looking. I soaked my gelled hair under the sink’s gush, leashed Grizz, and took backyard shortcuts to the public school bus stop. Grizz was a good walker. He had a tendency to venture ahead, but there was always some slack in the leash. He wasn’t the kind of territorial scatterbrain who would sniff and leglift at every fence and mailbox post on the street. We stomped over fresh-mowed lawns riddled with crabgrass and clover and dandelions, past Japanese maple trees and hollyhocks, relished our suburban azimuth to the bus stop intersection.

Even though I went to a private school, there was nothing more impossibly private than the 36-foot public school bus with its closed or half-closed windows muffling cacophony, depicting unfamiliar sneering faces, scalps pinwheeled against the glass, the variety of acne pocks and four-eyed, black-teed, polo-collared, boyfriend/girlfriend manacled hand-holders, limbs slung over seat backs, back-seat tyrants, homework headstarters, headphone headbobbers, last-second seatshufflers. I knew nothing of this variety at Queen of Angels.

I stood in the Garasy’s driveway, flanked by mailbox and Grizz, and for a few seconds, just before the driver engaged the door’s lever, everyone on the bus looked down at me, like Who the fuck? They rarely tried to interact with me except for the one time when the eighth grader Rushner, who wore black contacts with white x pupils, spat out of his window, me as his intended target. Instead, the spit landed on the concrete, and I had to yank Grizz away so that he didn’t lap it up.

From the bus stop, I’d go with my friends to a driveway, shoot basketball, and between the buoyant smack of rubber off cement – a sound that still frustrates me to this day because it obscured invaluable lexicon for an oblivious boy who went to tiny Q of A – words like fellatio were uttered and its crude synonyms such as blow job, BJ, head, dome, suck off, deep-throat, pole smoke.

Dogsucker (continued): epo¯numos

For the first twelve years of my life, they called me Larry. And then, one day, they started calling me Dogsucker.

Years later, friends would introduce me to their friends as “This is Larry,” followed by the brief intriguing epithet. The onus was then on me to reverse-engineer the epithet, to make the story more comprehensible to the skeptic. I’d wait for a reaction – shock, sympathy, confusion, outrage – and craft a congruous response. If he or she had the time, I’d tell the whole story.

Here’s how it happened: Rushner, an oafish eighth-grader with these kind-of demon contacts, got off the bus prematurely; his assigned stop was on Charles Drive, not Christine. He asked me, “Can I help you walk your dog?” I nodded. I didn’t need the help. The generosity was absurd. It was just some naïve notion I had that maybe Rushner had a soft spot for dogs like I did. That maybe Rushner was one of those shithead kids whose parents thought couldn’t handle the responsibilities of dog ownership. Did he too once get stuck with Tamagotchi? I gave Rushner the leash forthwith.

And he took off.

Even though he was fairly obese, Rushner had to have been running twice as fast as Grizz. At first, it looked like exercise. I laughed nervously. With some distance, though, it looked like theft. Then, when Grizz could no longer keep up, when there was no slack in the leash at all and my dog was somersaulting through the air, yelping, each yelp coinciding with his six-pound body bouncing off the asphalt like a furry deflated basketball, draggled past each lot – then, it seemed like torture.

Years later, Rushner shot himself in the stomach by accident. Years later, he was placed in a juvenile facility. Years later, he set a barn on fire. Years later, he shot his mother with a semi-automatic paintball gun in the parking lot of Giant Eagle. Years later, he turned into a Juggalo and publicly freestyled to Insane Clown Posse. I realize these are unfair details to include, and I am making him impossibly unsympathetic, but this is my first attempt at making a record of why they called me Dogsucker, and I am not at all at ease. I succumb to mythologizing Rushner because his story is inextricable with mine.

I was the first to catch up with Rushner and Grizz. My friends trotted closely behind. Grizz was lying on his side, not making a sound, bones possibly fractured. His rib cage went up and down, his diaphragm seeming to deflate more than it could inflate. His torso looked like it would explode or collapse entirely from the exhaustion. I didn’t know what to say to Rushner, except “What the fuck!” and I was crying, though tearless, because I was panicking: the leash was still in Rushner’s hand.

He smirked, and when I reached for the leash, he grabbed me by the throat and pushed me backward by my trachea like a WWE stunt he had seen on television. We were in the Tursey’s yard, but it felt like we were standing on a precipice, on a cliff.

Thom told Rushner to give me the leash. Rushner didn’t even have to shake his head for me to know it was not going to be that easy. I could tell he was scheming because of the way his eyes were slit, concealing the villainous x contacts. He said, “Larry has to suck its dick first.” Thom snorted, but when he understood Rushner’s seriousness, he gasped. He realized what was at stake.

I looked at Rushner, kind of winced. I couldn’t apprehend the underlying motivation. “Just give it to me,” I said simply, hand extended for the leash.

Rushner strode backwards, dragging my already exhausted dog across the lawn, again towards the street. Grizz didn’t even try to stand. “I’ll keep going,” Rushner forewarned.

There’s a moment in Silence of the Lambs when Buffalo Bill bellows to his hostage in the well, “Don’t you hurt my dog!” The hostage, Catherine, clutches at the little Bichon Frise. “Don’t you make me hurt your dog!” The reversibility of power can inspire courage.

I tried to tackle Rushner, tried to intercept the leash from his sausage fingers, but he pinched my trachea, and it felt immediately bruised. “Suck it,” he said, inadvertently reciting Steve Austin’s slogan from D-Generation X WWE wrestling.

I looked at my friends. No guidance. I looked at Grizz, realized we were both hostages like on the first night with the Pet Taxi on the dresser when I wanted to take him out of the cage, and he wanted to be taken out. Recording this now, I remember how badly I had wanted a dog, how I thought there was no depth to the bargaining with my parents, how many times I must have said, If you get me a dog, I’ll . . . I stood inside of that ellipsis, felt the grisly floor of my desperation, and reified myself as the guarantor of my dog’s survival.

Without more protest, I scooped up my dog and felt his ribs expanding in my hands. Grizz could not catch his breath. I looked at him, just held him at eye-level for a few seconds before I lifted him a little higher. I searched Rushner’s eyes for relent. There was none. I opened my mouth, and I put the small shaft of tissue inside. It felt like a small cigar, a fur cigarillo. After a few seconds, I felt the leash drop to the grass. Rushner let go in order to hunch into laughter.

He said, “I can’t believe you just sucked your dog’s dick. You fuggin’ faggity ass.”

And I wasn’t sure why he couldn’t believe it because he was the one who had commanded it. Demanded it. I started speed walking toward my house, heard Rushner’s uncontrollable laughter at my back. I ignored my friends’ petitions. In the closed garage, I sat with Grizz in my dad’s Corvette, waiting for our parasympathetic nervous systems to engage. The phone rang, but I stayed silent, stuporous as I brushed the fur of Grizz’s nape.

Dogsucker (continued)

In the University of Arizona library, with six tabs open on my browser, ranging from a documentary on zoophilia (Zoo, 2007) to Google Images of gargoyle chimeras to zoomed-and-pixelated cattle cocks on Oklahoma State University’s agricultural website, I become suddenly self-conscious as an undergraduate sits beside me. He has Greek letters stitched to his hoodie. I should know all the letters by now, but I don’t. I minimize my browser window, only to reveal a Word document with the inconvenient header ‘Dogsucker’ (left) and ‘Lenhart’ (right). I am trying to avoid becoming the subject of fraternity and sorority rumormongers, cruel contemporary Greek mythologers. I hastily save, realize my record is still classified, unfit for public, meant to be composed in private study carrels only.

Bullfucker (continued): badness

Too bad for Pasiphaë, though, that Virgil’s bucolic and sympathetic poem – an apologia for her madness – is not the only existing narrative of her tryst with the bull. Nor is it the most prominent. In Thomas Heywood’s translation of Ars Amatoria (‘Art of Love’), Roman poet Ovid writes: “Pasiphae fieri gaudebat adultera tauri” (‘Pasiphaë took pleasure in becoming an adulteress with a bull’), and her reputation is forever tarnished. Unlike Virgil’s mild Eclogues, Ovid’s account of Pasiphaë appears in the sensational instructional relationship guide for men and women, including such trite and universal wisdom as “don’t forget her birthday” and “never ask her age,” these gender roles pronounced even in the second year anno domini. However, Ovid’s more complicated misogynistic defamation of Pasiphaë, which warns that women are more lustful than men and should be held accountable for their lustful actions, lays the groundwork for the double standard of the harlot. Ovid’s warning to Minos is vicariously extended to all Roman men. It emphasizes the voluntariness of her action and does not forgive her as Virgil’s Eclogue VI does.

This ancient slut shaming reduces the episode to a pastoral booty call. While the snowy white bull was called an iuuencus (young bull) in Virgil’s account, it is instead called a Taurus (adult bull) in Ovid’s. Subtle choices in diction provoke the sensationalist imagination.

For most people hearing the story who had never met Grizz, there was an assumption that he was a big dog – a Labrador, a St. Bernard, a Great Dane, thereby maximizing the grotesqueness. They were later surprised that he was, in fact, a six-pound Yorkshire terrier, which somehow made the event more defensible and less erotic. And too, the fact that Grizz was not erect – no pink lipstick – was redemptive.

The recurring anaphora from Eclogues (‘Ah! Poor maiden’) is displaced in Heywood’s translation of Ars Amatoria. Instead, there is a scathing indictment of Pasiphaë’s actions, an unjust mockery:

If Minos please thee, no adulterer seeke thee,

Or if thy husband Minos do not like thee,

But thy lascivious thoughts are still increast,

Deceive him with a man, not with a beast.

Armstrong points out Ovid’s is the “all too observant eye of the social critic” as he brings attention to her “adulterous breath” as she “plays harlot with a bull.” If, in Ovid’s estimation, Pasiphaë acted out of voluntary lust, not as the subservient subject of Poseidon’s vengeance against Minos, then it opens the door to the irreversible stigma of paraphilia.

While paraphilic acts may include pervasive “spanking, whipping, cutting, binding, or strangulating,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, also specifies anomalous sexual interest in “children, corpses, or amputees . . . as well as intense or preferential interest in nonhuman animals, such as horses or dogs, or in inanimate objects, such as shoes or articles made of rubber.”

Once, in Tijuana, not far from the red light district, hubbub of Mexican vice, four kilometers away from Paseo de los Héroes, where I was to meet a friend for mezcal, I asked the cab driver if there was really such a thing as a Tijuana Donkey Show. He made a dramatic U-turn. His wheels were turning. He had a specific destination in mind. I had to explain to him, “I don’t want to go. I just want to know if there was such a thing.” He made a less dramatic U-turn back toward the original destination and said with a sigh, “No. Actually, no.” I still wonder what would have happened had we not boomeranged back, had I ditched my friend for the company at the inevitable brothel. Who was this girl onto whom the driver was prepared to project the donkey myth, this fabricated exhibit of the Latina Pasiphaë?

The fallout, resulting from Pasiphaë’s besmirched reputation: Minos becomes “justifiably” bitter with his wife; he bastardizes her “sire,” the Minotaur, jailing him in the impassable labyrinth; Pasiphaë’s daughter, Ariadne, in Ovid’s Heroides, is shamed by her mother’s perversion. And Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios, goes out like a flame.

Dogsucker (continued)

The shorter version of my story is: In seventh grade, Larry sucked his dog’s dick. This is the version of the story that spread in the public middle schools – maybe because stories had to be economical in hallways between classes. Maybe because that’s all there really was to it. Why preamble? Why justify such an inglorious action?

For weeks and weeks, my name underwent a metamorphosis – from Larry to Dogsucker. It sounded like an ill-advised superhero name. The compound nickname was whispered in the hallways of Middle School East and Middle School West. I had a sudden appreciation for the privacy of Queen of Angels, of a class of forty-some peers who knew nothing about my bus stop transgression, all thankfully oblivious to my humility. Years before, Alaina and Alexis had inoculated me in the parking lot playground of Sacred Heart Church during Queen of Angels recesses. They played doctor, administering cootie shots en masse to boys, arbiters of who was or wasn’t passable. The boys without immunization became temporary social pariahs. My skin horripilated as I was circle-circle-dot-dotted.

I was not entirely severed from the public middle school, though. I had a public school girlfriend at the time named Pearl. In order to get to Pearl’s house, I had to walk back roads – shortcuts and accidental longcuts. I jog the route now – Christmas morning, twelve years later – with a pedometer. It measures 2.4 miles each way. It was always worth the trek because, when her father wasn’t home, she let me kiss her with tongue.

When he was home, though, we played soccer in the alley, never taking advantage of breakaways despite many opportunities; instead, we liked to keep the footwork tight, at a close radius, so that when she defended, our helixing hips felt like public school dances replete with grinding. There were a few blind spots beside the carport or by the neighbor’s fence where we could escape for a few minutes without the paternal sentry of Oak Ave’s alley.

In these blind spots, she would sometimes let me see her thong if I successfully begged for it. I would claim coyly that I just wanted to see the color, and she said it was turquoise, and I said, “But let me see,” and she showed me, and I said something pedantic, Bob Rossian-like, “That’s not turquoise, that’s teal,” and then she’d begrudgingly show me again, and we had a debate about color all for an excuse to look down into her shorts for longer. Once, I was brave enough to reach into that shadow, to touch the mesh of her thong, even let my index finger slip between the elastic and stubble of her pelvis. There was a quiet click when the thong snapped back against the skin. I suspected she would let me put my fingers inside of her eventually. I was like Doubting Thomas, needing to touch the hole to believe its existence. Until then, I had patient hormone-stricken thoughts about her.

Of course, though, Pearl eventually heard the story too. Our foreplay discontinued. One week, I was playing the panty palette game with her; the next, she refused to let me even kiss her. “Not for a couple weeks,” she said. She had some elaborate theory about dog penises and germs, and she wanted to make sure I had brushed it all out of my mouth. I washed my mouth with Listerine hourly after school for weeks. Even now, when I use mouthwash, I think of Grizz, imagine I’m spitting out late generations of his germ. Before Pearl’s prohibition had passed, though, she had been unfairly integrated into the myth (somebody had unsurprisingly added that she liked to watch me suck my dog’s dick), and she didn’t want to see me ever again.

After Pearl broke up with me, I inspected her wallet-sized soccer picture, read the irony across her shirt: Norwin Pride. I had already started subtly supporting my parents when they casually considered moving. They claimed they didn’t want to uproot me, but I wanted nothing more than to move outside of the mythic borders. I knew that in the case of Dogsucker, displacement was the quickest evasion. The true antidote, though, was stowed in the genome of the myth.

In preparing to enter public high school, I considered taking Rushner to court, but in my youth, I couldn’t decipher the myriad laws as they might relate to my case – of rape, assault, and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. If the complainant was given the choice, for instance – to suck or not to suck – and he went for it (albeit to save a beloved pet), then it isn’t exactly involuntary. Would the judge be a Virgil or an Ovid? Shout A! Uirgo at my prosecution or hide the gavel for fear I’d deep-throat it? Not to mention, there is the troublesome Title 18, Section 3129 from the Statutes of Pennsylvania, which states a person who engages in any form of sexual intercourse with an animal commits a misdemeanor of the second degree.

Is it rape when your aggressor is giving you the option between a) taking indirect responsibility for the murder of a living thing, a best-ever present, – or – b) taking a penis in your mouth? Do conditions turn rape consensual? Or, is the question about rape moot because the penis belongs to a dog, and bestiality is the primary infraction? Did the fact of both parties being minors blur all legal consequence?

In my last months of Catholic school education, we read selections from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. I had been looking forward to reading it because I had carefully selected Thomas as my patron saint and adopted his name in the Sacrament of Confirmation. In his reply to objection number four, Aquinas states that the “gravity of a sin depends more on the abuse of a thing than on the omission of the right use . . . the most grievous is the sin of bestiality, because the due species is not observed.” In my last confession at Queen of Angels, I told Monsignor about how I masturbated, swore, lied to my parents, lusted after Veronica (in church no less), lusted after Dani too, how I looked down her shirt when she leaned, and I told Monsignor there was something I wasn’t ready to confess, so could I instead just confess to my withholding? Monsignor was not happy, called the confession incomplete, quoted a biblical verse about cowardice, but doled his penance anyway.

The summer before high school, my public school friends told me not to be nervous about the transition, that everyone already knew me. They didn’t understand that in the two years since the act, the story had evolved like untamed kudzu, that it was a creation story, and my anxiety was that I wasn’t even present for my own genesis – the automythographer utterly absent. My pending 1600 high school peers only knew the myth of me. I had infamy and celebrity. I had enigma. I would if I could have retreated into anonymity, obscurity, but instead I was screwed by malignant myth. I was prudent in the last weeks of summer, refused to sing along while my friends played Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” (“I want to fuck you like an animal”) and Bloodhoundgang’s “Bad Touch” (“You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals / so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”). Good fun turned bad. I tried to convince my parents to send me to Pittsburgh Central Catholic High School, a long but worthwhile commute-cum-retreat.

During my first “A Lunch” at public Norwin High School, in a cafeteria with 650 others, a generic group of boys approached my table and offered me ranch for my fries. I thanked them for the random kindness. After they left, I read the Sharpied container lid: Grizz Jizz. Later in the week, the same coterie caroled “This Old Man” behind me in the lunch line, emphasis on the “give a dog a bone” lyric. I tried shrugging it off, even joined them in a failed harmonic round.

Others called me Dogsucker in the corridors and locker rooms and classrooms and principals’ offices and bathrooms of Norwin High. They called me Dogsucker in the bleachers and under the bleachers and by the concessions stands of stadiums and on curbsides near guardrails during fire drills and in stairwells against the tiled walls.

They called me “Doggy Style” too; some thought it was cleverer than Dogsucker. In psychological epistemology, the primacy effect dictates that your first memory of something will serve as an eternal, privileged model no matter the recency effect of later phenomena. Even now, twelve years later, when my girlfriend asks if I want to switch to doggy style – a proposition that would lead a normal guy to high-five his erection – I cringe before acquiescing. And as I thrust, the pleasure conflicts me; the crème de la crème of sexual positions nearly renders me flaccid. “Doggy Style” didn’t have the longevity of Dogsucker, though, because it was eventually abbreviated into “Doggy,” then “Dawg,” benign because I shared it with the same wiggers and rednecks that persecuted me.

I taped pieces of paper on the inside of my locker and numbered the lines. By the end of my freshman year, there were 72 names on the list. Each person on the list had either punched me in the jaw or the chin or the nose, kicked me in the crotch, contorted me into a field house locker, thrown me down the twenty-two steps from the swimming pool, picked me up and slammed me on the concrete at the Circleville Fireman’s Fair, given me the middle finger while spitting a chewing-tobacco loogie at my face during a fire drill, batted my cheek with a psychology textbook, shot me with paintballs from a pavilion as I ran through Oak Hollow Park, showed me a knife (“Come here, let me show you something, fag”) and held it so close to my face that my eyelashes blinked against the blade, slammed my teeth into the water fountain spout while I was drinking and left me tooth-chipped and gum-bleeding through chemistry class, tripped me while I carried my chromosome project, took a lunch-line lunge at me for looking too long and sucker-punched me in the gut, etc. When an observant hallway monitor told the principal about my list, Principal Nist summoned me. I had endured the ambiguous embarrassment of his office several times before, but had managed to keep my story encrypted. He thought the rolodex in my locker was some kind of Columbine hit list. He told me there were police in the conference room that wanted to talk to me. I assured them I was not premeditating violent revenge.

In homeroom, I sat in solidarity with the punks while all the others stood and pledged the flag. A girl, Gianni, leaned toward me. She said, ‘I don’t talk to flags either.’ Even though the defiance was aimless, it felt good to have a little control before the day’s melee. After school, I smoked pot and played guitars with the punks, tried methamphetamines too, later PCP and cocaine. This outcast cliché was a much-needed stability.

After one especially violent cafeteria fight (with Rushner no less), I was asked to explain to our esteemed principal Dr. Nist how I got the nickname Dogsucker and why it became the viral cafeteria rally chant following my toppling of the uncoordinated Juggalo. Dr. Nist was candid in his perplexity, but there was something slightly unprofessional in the way he prodded. I explained it to him, a wrought synopsis. It made sudden sense to him, the reason I kept ending up in his office. I wasn’t the antagonist; my myth was. It was a myth that provoked homophobic tirades from the children of conservative-minded Western Pennsylvania parents. Mercifully, Dr. Nist decided against calling my parents, and I returned to the dubious corridors.

Bullfucker (continued): carmen et error

Behold the causality of myth. The labyrinth not just created for the sake of architectural conundrum, but constructed to house the Minotaur. The Minotaur exiled not just because he was hideous and foul (allegedly, he was), but because he was the sire of bestial adultery and oracles recommended his imprisonment. Had Minos just swallowed his pride, stepped in as stepfather to the chimera half-man half-bull, the Minotaur might have been a well-adjusted little boy-bull.

Before there was Virgil or Ovid, there was Euripides. In 400 B.C., Euripides in Cretans said that a woman who committed adultery with a man had sinned while sex with a bull could only be “divinely-inspired madness.” Ovid’s Ars Amatoria was a departure from the popular Gigantomachy genre in which the giants revenged the Olympian deities of the Greek Pantheon. Because he wrote in elegiac form – a poet speaking about the mores of his society – it became an exercise in applied mythology. It was Ovid’s don’t-say-I-didn’t-tell-you-so to Roman men everywhere.

It turns out that the Romans weren’t ready for Ovid’s mythico-historical paradigmatic shift, though. In his final and unfinished work, Exile, he talks about why he was exiled from Rome: Carmen et error. ‘Two charges, a poem and an error’ ruined him. While the latter refers to an impudent affair Ovid had with Augustus Caesar’s daughter, Julia, the poem is Ars Amatoria, which was too provocative, too progressive. It was revolutionary. Rather than invite his reader to peek into the usual telescope aimed at the overplayed gods, Ovid’s burlesque satire acted as a premature microscope on human relations. This reorientation caused his readers whiplash and his reputation backlash.

As for Pasiphaë, who may have otherwise been forgotten in weaker manifestations of her myth, her wretched existence in Ars Amatoria may at least be retroactively redeemed vis-á-vis the reassessment of scholars such as Rebecca Armstrong.

Bullfucker (continued): post-Ovid

I’ve been spinning post-Ovidian myths in my dreams.

. . . in which Daedalus builds the hollow heifer, sure, but he also castrates the snow-white bull, turning him into a sterile steer, thusly eliminating the Minotaur sire as evidence of zoophilia, and making irrelevant Ovid’s indictment in Ars Amatoria.

. . . in which Minos, in an act of love and reconciliation, anticipating Poseidon’s deus ex machina, has Daedelus craft an impenetrable contraceptive, an ironclad chastity belt for his queen – rendering the bull impotent – at least until Pasiphaë’s lust wears off.

. . . in which Athena, Poseidon’s rival and saboteur, has her owl peck out the bull’s eyes, and the bull roams wildly all around the proxy heifer, but never mounts, and Pasiphaë, growing impatient, returns home and dutifully fellates Minos.

. . . in which all remaining translations of Ars Amatoria on rust-manged gunmetal gray university shelves undergo rapid disintegration, a mythoptosis. The lignin breaks down into stinking acids. The pages turn brittle. In which the written record has faithfully replaced the oral, and I kick in my sleep because myth is material despite what I thought. In which information cryonics (whether by digitization or magnesium oxide preservatives) hasn’t been able to keep up. In which all myths have been mortalized by cellulose decay, and Pasiphaë’s story is alive only in the fetid funk of ground wood pulp.

. . . in which Pasiphaë – her wretched spirit – manifests two millennia later, reincarnated in my myth. In which we somehow, by senior year, manage to defeat what seemed like an insurmountable stigma. In which we are somehow voted to Senior Homecoming Court, as if we’re vying for king like Minos before the bull came to shore. We are an underdog waiting to claim the throne to the high school. In which we walk to the fifty-yard line before thousands of people, and our name is echoing in the valley – our real name – not Bullfucker, not Dogsucker – as everyone knew us in plastic prehistory – and we consider the box of ballots, our name written over and over again on tiny flags of white paper, certainly more submissions than were on the locker door’s “hit list,” and all because we found the antidote, our circle-circle-dot-dot. All because we became the master artificers of our own mythography, constructed ourselves narrative portals through which we could enter, participate, redact.

etc.

Dogsucker (continued): on tense

What if my parents had instead given me batteries on Christmas 1999? “For your Tamagotchi,” they might have said. Or, what if Grizz had instead been a female dog, eradicating the anatomical possibility of my eponym?

In high school, my girlfriend Amanda provided steadfast defense. She refused to let anyone tell the unabridged version of my story. “Larry sucked his dog’s dick” was never enough. “Yeah, because Rushner made him do it,” she would append. I call her, ask her to tell it to me as she remembers it:

“What do you mean? You walked Grizz to the bus stop. Then Rushner got off the bus and took the leash away from you. And he dragged Grizz across the road. Right? And then, he like, convinced you to like, well he told you he’d give the leash back if you sucked its dick.” She whispers the last part.

“And then?” I ask.

“Why are you being weird about this? You know what then. You sucked his dick.”

Amanda tells the story in simple past tense. Walked, dragged, convinced, sucked. These regular verb forms end with –ed to narrate events that are chronologically past. There is something inherited and removed about the authority. Something secondhand.

Amanda tells me that she saw Rushner at a house party a few months ago, that he was sitting on a porch step, drinking a Monster energy drink. She says she was acting badly toward him until he asked her why she was being such a bitch. She reminded him that she used to date me. “Remember: you made him suck his dog’s dick?” she said to him.

I gasp. “Seriously? You said that? What did he say?”

The thing is, to my knowledge, nobody had ever – in the twelve years since the act – said anything like this to Rushner. It seems – if people really believed the story – Rushner’s role was equally heinous. Shouldn’t he have received some of the flak?

“He said he was doing you a favor letting you suck his dick because you’re a faggot anyway.”

So, Rushner was proud of his complicity.

When I call Jaybo, though – he was there, at the bus stop – the facts’ tense transmogrifies.

L: Were you there the day I sucked my dog’s dick?

J: Yes.

L: Where was Rushner?

J: He was sitting on the bus. His bus stop wasn’t until Charles.

L: He never got off?

J: No.

L: How did it happen?

J: You were just being really weird. I don’t remember why. We got off the bus, and you were sucking it for whatever reason. For like a second.

L: And afterward?

J: We were playing basketball in my driveway.

The past progressive tense, also known as past continuous, has an eye-witness quality to it. Rushner was sitting. You were sucking. We were playing. Each is formed with the past tense of be (was/were) followed by a present participle of the main verb. The past progressive indicates an action that was ongoing at the past time being considered.

A secondhand narrator like Amanda is virtually disallowed from using past progressive tense. It seems inherent to secondhand narration that the speaker’s experience of the action was always past – always –ed – and so the perspective feels secondhand. An eye-witness or primary observer like Jaybo, however, has the capacity to narrate in either simple past or past progressive tense. Inherent to the past progressive is that habitual –ing. The speaker, as he tells it, was present at the moment of the action being discussed, and he is still psychologically present in that moment, the memory so crystalline that he can’t relegate it to the –ed.

Dogsucker (continued)

I finally go back to Pittsburgh, this dozen-year anniversary. I stand outside in blustery cold winds, pumping gas into my dad’s Corvette. Both Amanda and Jaybo told me that Rushner was the cashier at the BP on Brownstown Road. Alongside a You must be 18 tobacco sign, I see his chubby face in the window. The gas pump trigger is locked as the fuel gushes into the tank. I blow on my hands for warmth. I consider going in, consider buying holiday lottery ticket gifts here so that I can ask him: “No bullshit, Rushner. Just tell me: Were you even there the day I sucked my dog’s dick? Were you there? How did it happen?” I am working up the courage as the pump trigger clicks. How do you even ask someone, “Did you or did you not make me . . . ?”

Why set a record straight when the status quo has been to my advantage for so long? Why risk amnesia of his potentially false memory?

I look at Rushner through the gas station window. He is utterly unaware of my vision. I want to tap on the glass, stare at each other as if at a carnival mirror. In high school, Rushner threw a rock through my window. My dad swept the glass as I picked two river rocks off the carpet. In response, that same winter, I carved a gash in the aluminum of his above-ground pool so that it slow-leaked during the late February thaw. If I purchase the lottery tickets here, will the ensuing small talk bury or sharpen the hatchet? I hedge bets and buy the tickets at the Sunoco down the road.

I’ve looked many times, but haven’t found Monsignor’s Bible verse on cowardice. Maybe he made it up.

If Jaybo’s story is true, then what’s in it for Rushner to insert himself into my fiction? The symbiosis of this myth, I suppose, relates to power. Perhaps I needed to appear powerless in order to save face with a middle school girlfriend, and fearing eternal virginity, I made up a story that could elicit enough sympathy to ensure my act was counterbalanced. An emergency myth. Rushner, on the other hand, needed to appear powerful. He didn’t reject his role because it advanced his brand, achieved for him new levels of desired infamy. It is a myth as myriad as the Greco-Roman vein, as literally oral as it gets. Perhaps Rushner’s history of sadism is so rich that the biographical invention of forced zoophilic rape on a minor is negligible. Or, he is so impressionable – his memory so plastic – that he can absorb any convenient fallacy I concoct. When I do encounter him again – when that courage occurs to me – I wonder if he’ll issue an obtuse false apology or an acute pledge of gratitude.

On my last evening in Pittsburgh, I decide to ask Thom too. A tiebreaker perhaps.

L: Were you there the day I sucked my dog’s dick?

T: Yes.

L: Was Rushner there?

T: Yes.

L: How did it happen?

T: I just remember Rushner’s fat ass running down the street and thinking, ‘I didn’t know he could run that fast.’

L: How far did he run?

T: I don’t know man. The Derroch’s? The Perry’s?

L: And afterward?

T: We probably played basketball in Jaybo’s driveway.

Dogsucker (continued)

In my last memory of Grizz, I sat on the steel guardrail and waited for my father to pick me up from track practice at Norwin High School. I was with a dozen or more of my teammates. Mac, a member of the B-relay team, attached the gold-flaked relay baton to his crotch and stroked it with his eyes comically closed, mouth agape. There was mild laughter and some blank stares.

When my father pulled up to the curb in his blue Corvette, he put the passenger window down. Grizz, just six pounds, pawed his way up to the window’s ledge. I held my breath as everyone hushed – even Mac whose baton dick went limp against his thigh. Everyone looked at Grizz, mascot of my myth. Grizz, who was used to many eyes upon him, seemed disquieted by all the fraught attention. It was as if they were, for the first time, meeting the Taurus, sprung from myth to actuality. I opened the door and dropped into the bucket seat of the Corvette. Grizz took his position on my lap, paws back up to the window ledge, and I heard my teammates giddy with laughter under the engine’s rev. I yanked at Grizz’s leash, doing my best to make him invisible. As my father pulled away, I neglected to wave goodbye to anyone. In the rearview, Mac pretended to fellate the baton, his tongue pushing at the inside of his cheek. From twenty yards away at the first stop sign, I could hear the energized response to Mac’s lewd pantomiming. I put the window up.

“Can you not bring Grizz with you when you pick me up anymore?” I asked.

Bewildered, my father agreed, pulling at the leash until Grizz was on his lap.

I return to Tucson tomorrow. I am getting restless in the old neighborhood. Inside my parent’s house, I watch television and occasionally peek to the mantel where they keep a lifelike statue of a Yorkshire terrier that wears Grizz’s actual collar. In my every memory of Grizz, he is substituted by this statue now: in the Pet Taxi on Christmas Eve; in the Garasy’s driveway; in the Corvette in the garage; he is especially a statue in the memory in which he slipped beneath the neighbor’s fence, where one of two retired racing dogs – greyhounds who once chased mechanical, Yorkie-sized rabbits – snapped Grizz’s neck out of natural instinct.

The statue has no genitalia. I think of Pope Pius XII’s iconoclastic castration of Roman sculptures. The sight of animal genitalia – even ceramic cock and balls – can provoke an anxiety within me so profound that it regularly occurs to me to just lust after these animals, to perform a self-conscious self-fulfilling prophecy. I have dog-sat for friends and for professors and have been paralyzed by irrational guilt when the crotch-nuzzling dog comes near. When a woman at Himmel Park tells me, “Go ahead, you can pet my dog,” I hesitate. I feel like I should confess to my stigma before posing a threat to her Lhasa Apso. When I’m convinced the Yorkie statue is looking at me, I turn off the television and avert my eyes.

In the backyard, I fill the birdfeeders with seed. Winter cardinal, winter jay, winter titmouse feast here. I accidentally spill the bag onto the ground. I rake up the spillover of seeds, chips, and kernels across hard sallow yard. I am raking just a couple feet above where Grizz is buried. Raking, and I shiver at the cold coast.

Until now, the only written version of this story that existed – the hasty urtext – was that which Dr. Nist scribed as part of my school record. I realize that in writing this I am resuscitating a myth that has otherwise grown mute, whose oscillations have diminished and been absorbed into unexceptional suburban static. It may be that I write out of deference to my deranged creation lore; it may be too that I am pleading again for a dog, that this is my mythic taxidermy of his corpus.

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Lawrence Lenhart’s nonfiction has appeared in Sundog Lit.