Sorta Like a Rock Star(35)

“What if they fight?”

“They won’t. Ms. Jenny’s a lover.”

So I let BBB off the leash and the two little dogs began to wrestle and run around in circles and roll all about for at least a half hour as PJ and I just watched and smiled.

“This is the happiest I’ve seen B Thrice since I picked him up off the streets,” I told Private Jackson.

“I think Ms. Jenny is in love,” PJ said to me.

And then we both agreed that for the sake of our dogs’ happiness, we would meet at the field at least once a week, for doggie playtime.

But when it was time to say goodbye, I couldn’t help asking whether PJ liked the doggie haikus I had been sending him.

“Ms. Jenny will be looking forward to seeing Bobby Big Boy again,” PJ said. He leashed Ms. Jenny and walked away.

I was pretty proud of BBB for not trying to hump Ms. Jenny on the first date, so I chalked the experience up as a victory, and left it at that.

We started visiting the baseball diamond pretty regularly, and after a few weeks or so we were walking Ms. Jenny and PJ back to their house, and then one day we went inside for tea, and I saw that Private Jackson had been hanging up my haikus on his living-room walls, and that he had completely covered one of four walls with my haikus!

“Why do you put my haikus up on the wall?” I asked him.

“Do you like green tea?” he replied.

“Yes,” I said, even though I had never before even had green tea, and then we drank tea together silently, while BBB and Ms. Jenny took a nap, spooning on the rug under a glass coffee table.

A bit later on—after many house visits—Private Jackson started allowing me to read through his haiku notebooks, which impressed me very much, because he writes beautiful poetry.

Here’s Private Jackson’s best haiku, as far as I’m concerned:



TOGETHER PLAYING





GRAY AND WHITE-BROWN DOGS OF OURS





WE WATCH QUIETLY





Simple and true. Like a frickin’ snapshot. Jackson wrote that one for me and gave it to me on this really nice piece of paper for my birthday last year. I carry that haiku around in my backpack and I read it whenever I am feeling really down. I have it memorized, of course, but I like looking at Private Jackson’s handwriting, because it is so meticulous—like a little kid’s. It’s as if he was trying so hard to remember how to spell each syllable, or maybe like he was giving each syllable so much importance, that every single letter had to wait an extra second to be born and is therefore spaced just a little too far apart. You’ve never seen anything like it, and his kick-ass handwriting makes the haiku even better.

To this day, if I ask Jackson any questions about his past or his family or anything like that he’ll usually say some Zen bullcrap like “There is no past,” or “I am here in the present,” or “Like our dogs playing in the grass, I am.” It used to piss me off a lot, before I got used to the Zen hooey. But now, I sorta like it. True.

And that’s all I ever do with Private Jackson—run the dogs, drink tea, and read his haikus. I still write him haikus, only I hand deliver the poems to save money, because postage adds up and I’m living in Hello Yellow as of late.

Something cool: I’ve covered three and a half of his living room walls with doggie haikus. I’m going to cover all four before junior year ends. Word.

As we are riding Donna’s bike back to her house from the old folks home I ask BBB if he needs some good lovin’ and he barks once, so I make a detour and we ride toward the ghetto, toward Private Jackson’s house.

It’s past five, so no diamond running for BBB today, as we’ve missed Ms. Jenny’s daily sprint around the bases, but B Thrice can still get some kissing and spooning in, so when we arrive, we stash the bike around back and then knock on PJ’s front door.

When Private Jackson opens up, BBB sprints into the house in search of Ms. Jenny and disappears into the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. My dog can get quite randy from time to time. He needs a release every once in a while.

“I’ll put on tea,” PJ says to me as I enter his house and sit down on his old-ass couch.

I listen to PJ preparing tea in the other room—the sound of water running into a metal kettle, the clicking sound of the electric gas stovetop starter, the ignition of gas—I imagine the blue flames and the bubbles rising in the kettle, and I start to feel better.

Time sorta stops when I’m in PJ’s house—it’s sorta like stepping into a real church, not like Father Chee’s converted-store-strip-mall church, but like some ancient holy stone church that smells of centuries worth of praying and hoping and believing, sorta like in the Catholic church where I was confirmed, St. Dymphna’s, and PJ’s house feeling holy is strange, because—after reading so much of Private Jackson’s poetry—I’ve sorta gathered that he’s in the Nietzsche-Donna-Ricky camp. I’m pretty sure PJ’s an atheist.

Here is the saddest haiku I have ever read:



CUNNINGHAM PRAYS WHILE





BAGGING OUR CASUALTIES AND





I AM SO ALONE





Private Jackson wrote that one back in ’Nam. He doesn’t know that I read it, because I flipped through the back section of one of his haiku notebooks when he was making tea.