Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(20)

    When I moved my hand to my chest to try to self-soothe, I realized my bra had been torn open and one of my breasts had been set loose and was bleeding. I looked over at Chunk, who at some point during the altercation had wrapped himself inside the drapes.

I don’t want to call Chunk a pussy, and I don’t want to call Tammy a cunt, but I want to just throw those two words out there.

I called Molly and told her that I was living with a real-life Cujo, and even though I knew it was Tammy’s fault, I was scared to open the door and check on John.

“I’ll come get him,” Molly said. It was 12:30 A.M., and while I waited for the coast to be clear, I texted Brandon to scan the security cameras in the morning and save whatever footage had just been captured for the next time me and my friends did mushrooms.



* * *



? ? ?

John never made the cut, because Tammy took him to task. Chunk knew better than to fight over territory he’d conquered long ago. He knew he belonged with me, but he understood there would be random dogs coming in and out of our lives, just the way people did.



* * *



? ? ?

Tammy was with me for three years and died shortly after the inauguration in January 2017. She felt the same way I did about Donald Trump. Molly and I were in South Africa at the time, and I got the call while Molly was out getting gifts for her brothers and sisters. She came back to the hotel room where I was sitting in a chair feeling guilty about traveling so much and not spending more time at home with Tammy.

“You gave her a good life, Chels,” Molly said, hugging me. “No one else would have ever adopted that dog. Do you know how much shorter her life would have been if you’d been home more? And, don’t forget, she brought me Hodor.*”

After Tammy died, I had some friends over for a small memorial service at my house, where we watched the video footage from my security cameras the night of the attack. It was the first time I had seen the crime scene, and Brandon had scored it to the theme song of Rocky. In it, you can see Tammy actually airborne after I got her off of John. The four teeth that I had campaigned for Tammy to keep ended up biting me in the tit. If I hadn’t busted my nut with my topless photo rampage years before, this video would have been released on all of my social media platforms, on a loop.

    Watching the video of Tammy alone, pacing in my closet like a large brown bear, reminded me what a force of nature she was. She was an underdog and a badass. She was a fighter, and even though I don’t spend much time looking in the rearview mirror, my biggest regret is not ever getting her ears pierced.




* Which is what Molly renamed John. As it happens, John/Hodor wasn’t part Chow at all. Molly did his DNA testing and found out he is a purebred Leonberger. For the record, Tammy’s testing revealed she was a Keeshond/Shepherd mix with a tiny bit of Chow. So, my obsession with Chows comes from being misinformed time and time again that they are the breed I am rescuing, not from ever actually having one.





In our next session, Dan told me about self-defining relationships—the critical relationships that are formative, that determine the person you become. The relationships that, if they were to go away, would change you. You would never recover from the loss.

“So, everything goes back to Chet? Really?” I asked Dan. “That seems too obvious.”

“How do you mean?”

“Like, too easy. Is it really that simple? Am I really that simple?” Although it was a relief, at the same time it seemed like another cliché. Of course, that’s how simple this has always been.

“Well, it sounds twofold to me. It sounds like you had one injury when your brother died, which you’ve said you’ve never properly addressed, and the second trauma was the retreat of the rest of your family, your father especially. Let’s talk more about that.”

    “I don’t remember much about those first few years after Chet died, other than that I had tons of problems at school. I became ‘trouble.’?”

“Did you have ‘trouble’ at school before your brother died?” Dan asked me.

“I don’t really recall, but now that we’re talking about it, how much trouble could I have gotten into before the age of nine? It’s not like I was Satan. I think it was partly because my parents were so unreliable, so I think other parents wanted to avoid them, and partly because the attention I used to get at home had disappeared, and in response to that, I tried to get attention in other ways at school—however I could—which resulted in me constantly having to stay after school and sit in detention, and then, one by one, I was ostracized by all the friends I had in elementary school. Not because of my brother’s death, but because I had turned into someone else.”

Every once in a while I would self-analyze just to show Dan that I wasn’t a complete moron and also to surprise myself with what I’d known all along but had never said out loud.

My sister Simone and my brother Glen became my de facto parents after Chet died—or at least they were a more reasonable version of parents. I think Roy had gone off to live in Miami or something. He smoked a lot of pot, and needed a place he could do that without my father screaming at him all the time. Shana was there, but for some reason I don’t really remember her during that time.