Jojo

My wife and I recently watched a documentary about broken soldiers eating shrubs and smoking toad venom to hallucinate their way to health. All the guys in the film seemed more sane afterwords. The natural medicines revealed to these men the true depths of their fear and sadness. After the film ended, I asked ponderously, “What might the toad show us?” My wife and I laughed. Then we got quiet.

Unlike stereotypically emotionally illiterate military men, I believe I understand myself and my past thoroughly. I don’t find this situation worth praising though, because I had very little to do with my self-awareness. An easy and curious relationship with one’s self and one’s past is, at least in my case, a quality cultivated in the good light and fresh soil of a childhood free from abuse. Shit rolls downhill, as the saying goes, and these fucked-up veterans were inheritors of dad-shaped holes1 dug into them by fucked-up fathers. So at first I thought the toad would likely show me nothing new. “I’d probably have some dad stuff, sure. Maybe I’d be forced to revisit my darkest depression days.” I paused and thought for a moment, lit by the TV’s shifting colors. My throat started to tighten. “I’d probably think about my first dog.” Tears rolled down my cheeks as if the ground demanded drink.

I kept thinking about my first dog. She was a Golden Retriever named Jojo. In the self-generated mythos of my family, she was our best dog: the faithful, smart, patient, and happy animal whose presence never felt a burden. She died when she was old, too tired to move from her spot behind our truck’s back tire. Her hip completely crushed, my parents put her down as soon as they could. But I wasn’t crying on the couch about Jojo’s death, even though I could cry about a pet’s death longer than the world would like. I sat with my wife that night and cried over Jojo because I was thinking about the time I beat her.

I don’t remember how old I was. Until that night on the couch I had barely tried to reconstruct the facts infusing the memory because the pain of it was so sharp. But I now think I was about five. Jojo and I were standing about fifty feet from our home’s front porch. She was an adult dog and I was a kid animal, so she was about half my height. The day was bright and hot and we were alone out there in the yard. Jojo was panting and standing beside me, waiting with dark eyes in that patient yet hopeful way of which dogs are masters. Thinking of the moment before I first hit her, I cannot remember what I thought or felt then, but I now believe I didn’t feel angry or frustrated. Regardless of the activity or inactivity of my mind, I swung my fist into Jojo’s ribs. I don’t remember her face but I do remember she stayed still. Then I lifted my right leg and kicked her in the same place. I don’t remember whether or not the kick moved her from her place beside me. Then I hit her a third time, again with my fist. She did not yelp, nor did she run away. I stopped and looked at her. She was standing beside me and panting, as if nothing had happened, though her eyes flickered away from me every other second or so. I’m sure she felt confused, afraid, both. Thinking about the beating now, my cowardly heart says maybe I was too small to hurt her at all, my fists and feet too tiny to register as anything beyond the realm of play, but I know this is not the case. I remember the beating not just for the uniqueness of that kind of cruelty in my life, but because I know that I hurt her. And because I know—this next fact the edge of a knife—that she continued to love me.

I don’t know why I hurt my dog then, but I suspect it was for one of two reasons. The first possibility is that I hurt her because I wanted to see what happened. Young animals exercise their strength against one another, biting too hard or pinning too long, and this aspect of play seems exploratory: What can I get away with? When will this feel wrong? Hitting her could have been a way to sound the depth and span of her patience, to try the solidity of her love: Will she move? Will she hate me now? The beating could have also been an experiment in finding the edge of my strength, determining whether or not I could effectively hurt someone else of my choosing. All these experiments are necessarily cruel because of their lack of communication and consent, but in my case, there is the additional disparity in power between a human and their pet. Even still, cruelty is secondary to the point of such experiments.

The second possibility is that I hit my dog in order to be cruel. Cruelty, in this instance, is both means and end. I could have hit her to feel better than her, to prove to myself that I was superior and that she was inferior—dumber even if bigger; naive even if older—so, in a basic sense, to feel good. That this goodness was at the expense of another creature wasn’t worth considering. Learning is not the point of such cruelty; its aim is mere feeling. This is selfish. Arbitrary. Evil.

During COVID’s peak, I decided to read everything I could about fascism. I wanted to know what the word meant. I considered dozens of definitions backed by hundreds of historical examples and thousands of arguments. At the end of this sixteen month-long period of research, I articulated my own definition. Fascism is the violent maintenance of a belief in one’s superiority. Thus it is an act meant to feed a belief; belief is the ground in which fascism seeds, but violence is what makes it bloom. Maybe it sounds silly or harsh to say that when I hit my dog as a kid I was being a little fascist, but I believe it. In hurting her I felt better than her, and thus believed in my own superiority. I superficially proved in that moment my mastery, at least through the limited tautologies and cowardices available to children.

For the last thirty years I have not stopped feeling haunted by my momentary cruelty towards that good and beautiful animal, my friend. Any time I think about it I hurt and cry, just as I’m doing as I write this sentence. And I know this pain is sharper for Jojo’s immediate forgiveness. If she had lashed out, biting me and drawing blood, I wouldn’t feel as badly as I do. I would view the moment a simple example of a stupid child learning that actions have consequences. But the pure love emanating from most dogs, that simple animal love atop which Christianity’s most challenging moral notion rests, renders me entirely guilty in its light. I had done a needless thing, bringing pain into this world where it had not existed before; the world was made worse by my three bad decisions. Yet the dog stayed put. Shortly afterwards, Jojo wagged her tail and we walked together to the barn. I don’t remember if I spoke to her. I don’t remember if I hugged her that day. All I remember is that she walked beside me the rest of the afternoon, and on many afternoons to follow.

I have no convictions about what follows the end of life, if anything. But I tend to think more easily of human death, even that of friends and family lost to despair and disease, than I do the ways in which we’ve lost our animals. Though I would like to believe that, were I to somehow meet Jojo again, I would drop to my knees, wrap my arms around her, and say I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry; that this would be a kind of heaven.