Thank you, Ander.
Thank you, Poetry Center.
Thank you, Hannah Ensor.
Thank you Ben.
Thank you Natasha.
If I had others, I have to check.
One second.
I feel like a--
oh no, here's what I want to do.
I want to call my mom real quick.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh no, one second.
No, that's not my mom.
[LAUGHTER]
So I do have a broken phone, so bear with me just one second.
Really, I got this.
Last time I called her--
here, it was yesterday, of course.
OK.
I don't know if she's available.
I just thought of this.
[RINGING TONE]
[LAUGHTER]
Hello.
Nice.
Oh, shit.
Hi, mom.
Hi.
You called the wrong number?
No, you want to come to my reading?
Oh, they introduce you guys yet?
Yeah, just now.
I'm just going to set the phone down,
but you can just listen along, OK?
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Love you, bye-- er, hold on.
[LAUGHTER]
Really, thank you for having me here.
I feel like a bucket of red paint
is about to fall over my dress.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm waiting for you to prank me any minute now,
and this is not real.
So really, thank you for having me here.
I also want to thank all the current MFA
students who are here.
I had the privilege of meeting some of you
throughout the week, and I keep running into James.
I don't think he's here tonight, is he?
You would know.
Is James here?
No.
But this reading is dedicated to James
because I ran into him three times in one day
yesterday, just around campus.
And as I walked around campus, I always
feel like when I come back, I just
pretend like I'm still a student here,
and nobody knows the difference.
But James does know the difference
because I met him on Monday.
And so when he sees me, I feel like I'm a ghost.
I feel like that is what it means
to be an alumni sometimes.
And I don't think that's exactly right.
Alumni is not a ghost.
Instead, the weird alumni comes from the Latin for foster son.
And it's cheesy, I know, and a little bit
Freudian to think of the ways in which graduate school is
like a second home, how faculty might be somewhat parental, how
one's peers become sibling-like.
As an only child, though, I don't mind thinking this way.
I remember when I got admitted into the program.
I called my mom and told her Aurelie Sheehan, who
was the program director then, just
wrote me an email, inviting me to go to U of A.
I moved to Tucson and stayed there for three years,
and on the day I left, Aurelie was the very last Tucsonan
I saw.
I'd been watching her dogs, cats, and some fish
while she was away, and I needed to return her house keys.
My mom, who was helping me move to Sacramento at the time,
drove me to Aurelie's house, and I
remember seeing Aurelie and my mom
face-to-face for the first time.
My mom started crying.
It was like she was picking me up from a really long summer
camp.
And then there's Ander.
In his hybrid workshop, I set out
to write my first essay, "Dogsucker."
It's an essay about an experience I've mostly tried
to keep secret my whole life.
Feeling encouraged though, I submitted a version
of the essay at the workshop.
Ander got behind that essay right away,
and it became my first major publication.
Meanwhile, when my father read that same essay,
he forbade my mother from reading it.
This means that my first published book is officially
banned reading in our home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The foster child etymology gets kind of complicated
considering I ended up marrying an alumnus of the program.
I think that makes Andie my stepsister.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh well.
The officiant at our wedding--
an MFA alum.
The readers-- MFA alum.
The majority of the groomsmen and bridesmaids-- alum.
Someday, when we're feeling nostalgic,
our house can become an echo chamber of MFA memories.
The first monsoon when Jamison took off his shoes
and ran a raving lap around the block.
The time Tim held my parrot as he dipped his feet in the pool.
The first time I introduced myself to Josh Wilkinson
as we stood at a urinal.
[LAUGHTER]
The time Sarah and I teased cactus spines
from Andie's heel.
The birthday party where Louis jumped in the pool
and didn't get out for what seemed like eight hours.
How many times you must have peed in that pool that day?
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, even if we're not really related,
I'm happy that we can all relate.
So this is an excerpt from "Dogsucker."
"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 mean, 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 and 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 Pokemon.
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--
skin and bone and ligament, 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 windowsill, 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.
On Christmas Eve the next year, 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, PP for short--
and put on something public-school-looking.
I soaked my gelled hair under the sinks 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 leg-lift 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 backseats, backseat tyrants, homework head
starters, headphone head bobbers, last-second seat
shufflers.
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 buoyant smacks
of rubber-soft cement, each smack
obscuring valuable terminology for a boy
eager to learn the parlance of the public school.
They'd utter words like fellatio and its crude synonyms,
blowjob, BJ, head, dome, suck-off, deep throat,
pole smoke, et cetera.
For the first 12 years of my life, they call 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 the congruous response.
If he or she had the time, I tell the whole story.
Here's how it happened.
Rushner, an oafish eighth grader with these demon-like contacts,
got off the bus prematurely.
His assigned stop was on Charles Drive,
not Christine, where my parents lived.
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 naive 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.
Did he to once get stuck with Tamagotchi?
I gave Rushner the leash, and he took off.
[LAUGHTER]
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 five pound body
bouncing off the asphalt like a furry deflated basketball,
dragged 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'm making him unsympathetic,
but this is my first attempt at making
a record of why they call 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 in 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 look 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.
Tom told Rushner to give me the leash.
"Quit fucking around, Rushner."
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 those villainous X contacts.
Rushner replied, "Larry has to suck its dick first."
Tom snorted, but when he understood
Rushner's seriousness, his head shook slightly,
and he became still.
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,
and 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 fingers, but he pinched my trachea,
and it felt instantly 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'd
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 will--
I stood inside of that ellipses, felt the grizzly 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 cannot 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 fucking faggoty ass."
And I wasn't sure why he couldn't believe it,
because he was the one who commanded it-- demanded it.
I started speeding home, walking towards my house,
heard Rushner's uncontrollable laughter at my back.
I ignored my friend's 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.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]