It ended the same way it began. On a hard, linoleum-covered wooden floor. Me lying next to Clay, the Dog. Comforting him at the very beginning. And comforting him again at the very end. Clay, my homeboy companion. My escape artiste extraordinaire. Clay, the canine outlaw of Echo Park. The cat killer and coyote enforcer. The sweetheart and heartbeat of Elysian Heights. Clay, the Dog, who is no more.

I remember the first night on my brown-diamonded, linoleum kitchen floor, high above the lowlands of trendy Echo Park, that locals used to call “Red Hill” (for its Commie-leaning, rabble-rousing residents), but we modern-day, local bohemian artistes now liked to call “Elysian Heights”. October, 1998. Clay was just about to show up in my life. I was on my way to the Glendale Humane Society looking to adopt, when Nate, the long-residing, Echo Park juggler, came over one Sunday afternoon with a mushroom and feta pizza. Over to “Lucretia Gardens”, the place I’ve now called home for just nigh on 20 years. I’d just lost the love of my life, a French-Colombian filmmaker-mime… to the cruelty of distance. I was 51 years old, never married, and all the years of freedom and promiscuity had finally and inevitably caught up with me. I was lonely and getting older fast.

“Dude, my next door neighbor, Chantal, you know Chantal, right?”

“Nope, can’t say that I do, Nate.” “Chantal, man, the painter….”

If you wanted to take the long, scenic route to a conversation, you could always let Nate drive.

“Listen, Nate, I gotta go to the Humane Society. I’m gonna adopt a dog today.”

That’s what I’m tryin’ ta tell ya, man. Chantal just found two abandoned husky pups in the park. You gotta see them!”

“No shit.” “No shit, Trules, I’ll call her right now. They are so fucking cute; you won’t be able to walk away without one or both of them.”

“One’ll be just fine, Nate.”

And so it was to be. Just as my acute loneliness was driving me to the Glendale Humane Society to adopt, good ol’ juggling Nate came rambling by and had me take an artistic and impulsive left turn over to Cerro Gordo, chez Chantal, right to the top of the hill at the entrance to the park, where… I met 2 foundling mutts, both abandoned in Elysian Park. I chose the one with the greige, fluffy coat, and took him home to sleep on the hard linoleum kitchen floor.

You see, abandoning pups was common practice at the time. Don’t want the litter of your pregnant bitch? Just leave them all under the swaying eucalyptus trees in Elysian Park, where good ol’ Christine, of the Echo Park Animal Society and La Casa de Perros Perdidos, will do her level-headed best to find them all good canine-loving homes. Or Chantal, the painter, will scoop two abandoned pups up and juggle them into some lonely clown’s home high atop Lucretia Avenue on Red Hill in Echo Park.

The first night he howled.

“Where am I?” Howl. “Where’s my mom, that bitch?” Howl. “Who’s this long, tall dude lying on the floor next me, stroking my down-soft fur, paper-toweling up my endless pee, with such boundless, unknown-to-himself, affection and attention?”

It was as if young pup, Clay, was the first to discover the mother’s love so deeply encrusted inside the hard heart of his USC theater prof front, right there on the hard linoleum floor of succulent Lucretia Gardens.

I was a natural at dog owning. I had the dancer’s discipline to house train him, the artist-warrior’s way to bend him to my will, and the freedom of spirit to never keep him on a leash.

“If dogs run free, why not me?”

That’s what Bob Dylan crooned on his l970 “New Morning” album. And that’s exactly the refrain I taught Clay, the Dog, from the day he was old enough to mingle his young puppy fur with the big boys in Elysian Park. Taking mine and Bob’s cue, he grew quickly into a “roamer.” Into a gray-white, husky-shepherd-Akida mutt who looked like a wolf and ran like the wind. A free spirit. An independent operator.

“It can cure the soul, it can make it whole. If dogs ran free….”

Free roaming led to… more free roaming. More free roaming led to… escaping, especially when I traveled overseas and first left him with dog sitters. There wasn’t one who could contain him. Who knew? Maybe it was separation anxiety. Maybe he missed me. Like in “The Searchers”. Or maybe, it was just plain wanderlust. But there was never a leash or harness that Clay couldn’t outwit, never a wall he couldn’t jump, never a fence he couldn’t dig under, never a human scheme that he couldn’t confound or outsmart.

Friends would swear he “could leap tall buildings in a single bound”. Bite through steel-enforced metal harnesses. Climb chain link fences. Tunnel under yards of hard rock California soil. We learned early on never to leave Clay inside a house when humans were away. Because if we ever did, there was a price to pay: screen doors were lacerated, moldings chewed, door frames scratched, doors themselves destroyed beyond repair. At the height of his accomplished escape artist career, Clay found his notorious badass image on an internet “Most Wanted” poster of LA’s North Central Animal Care Shelter. “Control ID# A266687”.

“You’ve reached the home of Eric, Surya, and Clay, the Dog. If you’ve found runaway Clay, don’t worry, he does it often; just call 323-712-2336 and we’ll come over right away to pick him up. Otherwise, leave a message. Thanks and have a nice day.”

That’s the outgoing message on our home phone’s answering machine, old and current; the phone number naturally matching the one on the runaway rascal’s Houdini collar.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve gotten messages from people having found Clay. Mostly, they’re from neighbors in Echo Park & Elysian Heights.

“Got your dog. Give me a call.”

“Do you ‘own’ a gray & white husky named Clay? If you do, I think I have him. Give me a call.”

“Clay’s here again” Come pick him up.”

The last one’s probably from Nate, Clay’s number one runaway destination, still on Cerro Gordo. It seems almost like a homing instinct with him, or maybe just the most frequent path he learned through Elysian Park, the 2^nd biggest park in LA and probably the only one that doesn’t ticket for off-leash dogs.

Every once in a while, the call is from Santa Monica. Or Hollywood. Or San Diego. We don’t put anything past Clay, the Dog. Although it’s usually the freaky humans who have transported him from our hood to theirs, it’s still an expansion of his impressive geographical resume: Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, the Grand Canyon, even Monument Valley. Hey, that’s John Wayne…. and Clay, the Dog.

Sure, Clay’s a nefariously mobile quadruped, but what are these Clay-enablers thinking? Sometimes I wish I’d just add to the phone message:

“Look, he’s done this hundreds of times. We know the routine. Thanks for calling but just let him go. He knows the way home & it’ll save us all a lot of trouble.”

Of course, I don’t do it because all the humane and concerned Clay finders will think I’m a cruel and uncaring owner – just because 1) I let my dog run free and 2) I have never figured out a way to successfully confine him.

Sometimes I think Clay is the best known creature in the hood. More than any of the neighbors, more than Councilman Eric Garcetti, certainly more than myself. He’s had so many dog walkers and dog sitters over the 14 years of our multi-month-long international jaunts, that finally, it’s just him, not us, who’s the party of record. “Hey, isn’t that Clay? He’s still alive, huh? What a great dog. I remember him 12 years ago. 8 years ago. Still the most handsome dog in the park. What a great dog.” “Uh… thanks?” What am I supposed to say. You’d think by now, that Clay could speak for himself! Probably does when I’m not around. And, oh yeah, that San Diego call? That was just from a friend of da wife. We actually dropped him off there for a couple of weeks, but not before they forgot not to leave him alone inside the house and he tore his way through their screen door down to Ocean Dog Beach. Ahhhhhhh… Clay, the Dog!

I remember one of our many road trips together in particular. It was the one we called “Dog Beaches of Southern California.” Spring, 2008. In between China and my upcoming hip replacement. I think da wife was back in Indonesia, visiting the family, and I was spring break vacation, thanks to my lucky job at USC. I decided to pack Clay in the back of the white Corolla station wagon, and to head… south… all the way to the Mexican border… to see how many off-leash dog beaches we could find.

You see, Clay doesn’t dig dog parks, mingling with all the other gentrified huskies, terriers, and Danes. As Bob and I like to say, he hankers to “just run free”, particularly on the wide-open, sandy beaches of Southern California. The problem is that, as far as we know, there are no public off-leash dog beaches in all of LA County. He’s twice been ticketed at Point Dume, up along the Malibu coast, at $150 a pop, although the friendly but unyielding Malibu police officer told us that we’d be “fine” as soon as we crossed the border into Ventura County. But as soon as we got into Oxnard, onto what Ventura had the nerve to call a “beach”, Clay let me know in no uncertain terms,

“C’mon, Tru-les, you call this little scratch of flea-bitten sand a beach? Let’s split. We can do better than this.”

So now it’s a bright blue, California-dreamin’ winter’s day. We take off from Lucretia Gardens in Echo Park and jump on 110 south, from downtown LA near Dodger Stadium towards Long Beach. “Orange County? What’s that, man?” Apparently, Clay’s never heard of the Orange Curtain.

“Clay, bud, that’s the same white bread, Tricky Dick (Nixon) bastion of straight-jacketed bourgeois-woisty that we’ve sped through along the 5 south on our way to Baja.”

“O, man, Tru-les, why would any self-respecting, native New Yawker wanna stop in the sterile orchard of OC? Except to take a piss?”

“Clay, dude, be cool. We are tryin’ to find you… dawg beaches. Where you can just run free, doggio.”

“Alright. Tru-les. But this better be good.”

“Don’t worry, Clay-mon, it’ll be groovy.”

So we’re on a California mission, taking the 405 straight south to Lakewood (Route 19) which, sure ‘nuff, merges into PCH, and, in ten more minutes, we’re at our first Orange County beach town. It’s called Seal Beach. And it’s immaculate. Toney houses. Perfect gardens. Wealth galore. We decide to meander amidst the lazy, beachfront residential drives and we park a short two hundred yards from the beach. I grab Clay’s red, tooth-marked leash and drape it over my shoulders. We leash on over to the sand to take a look. No signs in site. “Clay, dude, go……..have a good time.” He springs onto the perfectly manicured beach… and runs.

“If dogs run free, why not me? Across the swamp of time?”

I reluctantly do my due diligence and take a plastic doggie bag from the Corolla. Humiliating. But hey, I keep it on the QT, Clay doesn’t have to know. We make our way down the five-hundred-yard-wide beach, toward the ocean. Clay’s running circles around me. I’m digging up sand, flinging it at him. It’s a beautiful day. Then, Bam! Right out of the flat, pancake-orange horizon, we see it. The police truck, absolutely zooming our way. I figure it’s too late to fumble with the leash, so I play dumb.

“Sorry Officer, I didn’t see any signs.”

“They’re all over the parking lot, Sir. No dogs!”

“We didn’t park in the lot. Sorry. We’re leaving, don’t worry.”

The slim, kacky-clad police officer nods and walks back to her truck.

“Have a nice day.”

Just like in the funnies. But swell, no ticket. So I push my luck. “By the way, you wouldn’t know any dog beaches in Orange County, would you?” “Try Huntington,” she says matter of factly. Clay jumps in the Corolla and we head south. “Yeah, Huntington, Tru-les. Let’s get crackin’.

We’re excited. The EmeraldCity. Dog Mec-ca! We cruise along the Yellow Brick Road, I mean, PCH, through Sunset Beach. It’s a lot funkier than Seal, but still, no dogs on da beach. We carry on. South into the OC. After about 20 minutes, out of the perfect California blue – we suddenly see it: “

HDB”: Huntington Dog Beach. “One mile of dog heaven where dogs play and frolic with the freedom they so richly deserve.”

In print. That’s what the sign actually says. Damn. After twenty-five years in the California desert, 9 years for Clay, we’ve both finally arrived: The Promised Land.

We park. Get out of the car. Walk right over the grassy palisades, down the brown sea-weathered wooden steps, onto the … beach. Where….  it’s every dog for himself. Clay is beside himself. He doesn’t know which way to run first. To the right. To the left. To the shore. Back again. He’s rolling in the sand just like he did as a pup in Monterrey. I protest.

“Clay, man, what about the car?”

He barks sharply. “C’mon Tru-les, what’d you bring the damn sheet for? It’s already all over the back seat, right?”

“Yeah, yeah… fine. Do whatever the fuck you want.”

“Thanks, man, you da best.”

The next 20 minutes are full of seaweed, sand, salt, and sea spray. Everything is in constant motion. Clay looks like he’ lost 50 of his 70 dog years in ten minutes. Me? I just wanna keep the show moving south.

“C’mon Clay! Let’s go. We got other fish to fry.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Tru-les, whatever you say. Forget about being in the moment, you professorial hypocrite. ‘Be here now’, right, Prof? Isn’t that the schpiel?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back in the car, Clay. Vamanos!”

“If dogs run free, why not we? Across the swooping plain?”

Damn, we’re going to find every damn dog beach between here and Tijuana. Yeah! We head “south”, back onto a wide open stretch of PCH, until we run right into… a bottle neck… at Newport Beach.

“This is a drag, Clay-man.”

“Bark, bark! Yeah, let’s get outta here, Tru-les.”

“Ok, ok, be cool.”

An improvised detour: Balboa Peninsula. A slow, two lane highway, lettered street names, harbors on both sides of the road. Many signposts of manicured wealth and Republican votes.

Clay barks impatiently, “Outta here, Tru-les. South.”

We zip back up the Peninsula, through the oh so west coast Gatsby and Fitzgerald tone of Newport. Galleries, leashes, money… what more do you need to know? Absolutely no dog beaches. Same with Corona Del Mar and Crystal Cove State Park. Clay’s getting a little antsy.

He barks from the back seat, “Man, what was wrong with HDB?”

“Have a little faith, hound dog.”

We drive on. A long crawl past Dana Point to the equally dogless Capistrano Beach. By now, both of us need a pit stop. So… we park in the mostly empty-at-this-time-of year parking lot, and I decide to take a chance. I let Clay out to relieve himself. On the perfectly clean, white Capistrano sand. Where there are definitely unfriendly, red and white

“No Dogs Here” signs. Every 20 feet.

(Long Beat)

Big friggin’ deal.

(Looking both ways.)

Clay runs over to sand, and very business-like, takes a piss. He jogs back over and jumps back in the wagon, as I make my way to the immaculate men’s room. Thirty seconds post-pee, I see a big burly, blue-suited police dude making his way toward the wagon with a ticket pad in hand.

I hightail it back to the car, but… it’s too late.

“You gotta leash, sir?”

“Yeah,” I say hopefully, my New Yawk charm dialed up to the max.

“Then use it,” she says, pointing to the aforementioned signs all along the beachfront.

I smile submissively, and I put the dreaded cordon around Clay’s neck.

He looks at me reproachfully and telepathically snaps, “Let’s get out of Dodge.”

By now, we’re racing against the sun. So far, we’ve actually found only one off-leash beach, but we heard there was another in front of the nuclear site at San Onofre, about twenty miles south. So we hop back on the I-5, and just past San Clemente and before the Camp Pendleton Military Base, we pull off the freeway, and head over to the ocean. The road winds around and around, down towards the beach, and actually turns to gravel before it dumps us into the old dirt parking lot.

Flashback: 1975. Beach dudes and dudettes, many over 50, in wet suits, their boards tied onto their cars; the hardcore ones still riding the waves as the sun inches towards the horizon. I ask one bare-chested dude if it’s cool for dogs on the beach. He smiles unevenly, displaying a mouthful of enamel piano keys, and answers “Whatever, man.” I let Clay out of the wagon and he sprints the whole length of San Onofre Beach. There are no signs, no cops, just a sprawl of seagulls digging in the dark wet sand, and maybe ten surfers far out in the ocean, racing against the fire-ball sun setting over the big pond of the Pacific, and oh yeah, one happy, leashless dog named Clay.

Now here we are again, 5 years later, down in the OC again. But this time it’s to the Veterinary Surgical Specialists in Tustin, about half an hour south of the happiest place on earth. I’ve driven Clay here on an early Saturday afternoon to get an orthopedic expert’s opinion about his deteriorating hip dysplasia and in general, just about his rapid deterioration since we’ve come back from Bali in early January. Myra, the Christmas dogsitter extraordinaire, had fattened him up over the holidays with whoknowswhat, but we’ve fed him nothing but weird foods since, like kangaroo, rabbit, buffalo, and whoknowswhat-  to try to control his constant chewing and licking of himself, the carpet, and every floor in sight.

Basically, he’s been living in a plastic green cone for 6 months, so he doesn’t eat himself alive, while we try to change his diet, force-feed him antihistamines, and suffer along with him, as he declines into decrepitude and old age. It’s painful.

What’s happened to the Clay, the Breeze? To Clay, the “I never met a squirrel I didn’t want to chase, catch, and dangle proudly from my mouth” super dog of yesteryear?

What’s happened to Clay the notorious cat killer, who, much to our chagrin, ran with next door neighbor, Pitbull Lucky, when they terrorized the neighborhood all day and all night long, sometimes not coming home for more than 48 hours, and only then, caked in dried mud, or dried blood, from cat fights, coyote tangles, or whoknowswhatever other kindatroubletheymanaged to get into? I never could quite believe that Clay turned into a cat killer, but I will be convinced to my dying day that it was only because of PitBull Lucky, who was born a badass bitch, and who corrupted the integrity of the pure and noble Clay.

No grudges held though. Lucky is still lying inside her chain link fence, probably 16 years old by now, still waiting for renegade Clay to show up, so he can unlatch the gate with his prestidigious magic, and lure her out… for their last bandito run. In fact, I just ran into Lana, PitBull Lucky’s owner, who brought over a fat green, memorial succulent for Clay. She smiled wistfully as she set down the heavy pot, wiping a tear from her retired schoolteacher’s eye. “Man, they sure did have fun together.”

“How old is your dog, Mr. Trules?”

It’s the nurse. She’s looking mournfully at Clay who’s lying on the clinic’s white linoleum floor, like a long-spilled drink of water.

“He’s 14 and a half.”

“Well, I’m afraid he’s too old for a hip replacement, sir. It’s an arduous surgery and he won’t survive it?”

“Well, what can we do.?”

“Let me send the doctor in, Mr. Trules. He’s in a lot of pain, isn’t he?”

Rhetorical question. She goes out, closing the door behind her, and I wait for the doctor. Yeah, no shit. He’s in a lot of pain. He just lies around the house all day, or under the bushes out front. He hasn’t escaped in a year. Not even tried. He keeps stumbling in the park on the fire road where my wife has walked him for years. She’s even stopped walking him. It’s too painful… for her. I hate to say it, but he shit in the house the other day.

“It’s not an orthopedic problem, Mr. Trules. Do you see his abdomen? It’s all distended.”

Now it’s Doc Schulenmeyer, from Eastern Europe or Scandinavia perhaps. He’s young, prematurely bald, with a kind voice, and sad eyes.

“No, I hadn’t even noticed.”

“Well, he’s definitely got some kind of advanced internal sickness. Maybe cancer. I’ve seen it many times before. He’s in a lot of pain.”

“I know, I know. Do we need more diagnosis?”

“You could certainly do that, Mr. Trules, but no matter what it is, your dog won’t be treatable. It’s too late.”

Damn, what was I thinking? I was so obsessed with this skin thing, which we’d treated so many times before, that I never even thought it could be something else. Something internal, something more serious. The symptoms were the same, itching and chewing and licking and endless discomfort. Fuck!

“What can I do, doc?”

“Well……” he pauses mournfully.

And I suddenly remember my favorite Clay story… with my wife.

She’s come home late on a weekend from bartending in Chinatown. She’s parked the car and let Clay across the street into the empty lot, otherwise known as “Clay’s Personal Dog Park”, for his before- bedtime duties. Unfortunately, he’s in one of his cone-headed “mite” treatment stages, and before she knows it, there are 6 or 7 coyotes surrounding Clay, who can’t really see more than 1 or 2 of them because of his cone.

The coyotes are going in for the kill; they’ve had to bring the whole “mishbucha” to put an end to the notorious coyote hunter of Elysian Park. They recognize the scars on his face, and they remember the blood spilled between them. They remember the ritual war dances they’ve done for years, Clay chasing them up the street to the downhill stairs back into the wild, and their return dance down the street, showing him they weren’t gonna take any shit from any house-broken wannabe wolf. Back and forth for years.

Now they have him circled. Surya, my wife, can hear the blood-lust rumbling in their throats. All of a sudden, she runs straight from her car – into the empty lot. She picks up 3 huge stones, and breaks right into the circle to defend Clay. She flings the stones and hits one coyote directly in the head. He howls. The others take off. Wisely. They absolutely know, 100%, that they don’t want to be tussling with one 5 foot tall Batak Indonesian woman who’s seeing red… and defending her dog.

I love that story.

Now it’s time.

“We should put him down, huh doc?”

“I think that would be the compassionate thing to do. I can see that you love your dog and I’m sure he’s had a good life.” “Yeah, he has……………..”

Euthanasia. I believe in it. Humans. Dogs. What’s the point of keeping a being alive past the point where they have any quality of life? Why not end the suffering? The pain? I remember my father’s slow, 5-year demise from congestive heart failure. We knew it was going to be grim and irreversible, yet we kept him alive, in an out of the hospital, just because we could… and because our society doesn’t have any better way of dealing with, and accepting, death. We should know better, people. It’s part of life. Why don’t they teach us that in school? If you’ve been lucky enough to live a good life, then when it’s time to go, it’s simply… time to go. Please, just put me out of my misery if I’m just lying on my back in pain every day. Better yet, let me decide. And… let me have the courage and conviction to make the choice myself.

What else can I tell you about Clay? I know the neighbors would remind you about all the mornings I hollered his name from our hillside back deck, screaming his moniker down into the “holla” below – for him to come home.

“CLAYYYY!”  (PAUSE) “CLAYYYY!” 

Once or twice, as loud as I could possibly muster. But it must have carried, because 5 times out of 10, there the old wolf would be, 5 minutes later, wagging his tail in front of our gate, as if he’d done nothing wrong at all, except take his morning “constitutional” around the neighborhood. The other 5 times, like I said, we just had to… wait.

The nurse brings him back from the “Employees Only” door, back into the clinic room. He’s on a leash and has a red heplock on his left front leg, just above the paw. It’s the intravenous device where the doc will inject the lethal dosage in 2 installments, one for sedation, the other for the euthanasia.

We lay Clay down on to a blue and white beach towel. He moves docilely, as if he knows what’s coming. I look at the doc who’s crouched on the floor to Clay’s left; I’m on the right.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Are you a good doctor?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Are you 100% sure this is the right decision?”

“Yes.”

“Would you do it to your dog?”

“Yes.”

“Ok then.”

We both hold onto Clay and the doc injects the sedative. I start sobbing in large welts. I look at the doc and he nods. He injects the second, lethal dose. I look directly into Clay’s eyes. His eyes roll back into his head and I swear he says to me,

“It’s okay, man.”

I will never forget that look. Or the fact that I chose to euthanize Clay, the Dog. And then, he’s…. gone.

Today I scattered his ashes in Elysian Park. At the place he was found by Chantal, the painter. All along the path we walked between Academy Road and Scott Street. Then up along the rugged path to the gold-domed Orthodox Church, where we sat many times in the tall grasses and shadows of the eucalyptus trees. To the very spot where we sat in silence, listening to a Scottish bagpiper sitting on a eucalyptus trunk, practicing his dirge-like song. I thought of my dog, Clay, and I heard the pipes again.

 It can cure the soul, it can make it whole. If dogs run free…..”

 R.I.P. Clay, the Dog, 2008-2013

————————————————-

A few friends’ remembrances:

“Whenever I watched Clay, he sold me on the world of dogs. I judge every dog based on him and his great demeanor and character that he showed everyone. I know you loved him dearly and he knew it. He will be missed in spirit and on the Elysian trails.”

“Jesus, what a gut punch. I loved every second I spent with that guy, and will never forget our long walks and runs in Elysian Park. Probably the coolest dog I’ve ever known.”

“Awww……Loved that dog! Another legend gone…..”

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