Feed: Waiter Rant - AggScore: 87.9

Not Yet

Two weeks ago my dog Buster became unable to jump on the couch. Buster lives on the couch so I found this development mildly worrisome. At nine years old he has some arthritis and is not a limber as he still thinks he is. Then a few days later his back legs gave out and he almost tumbled down the steep stairway leading up to my apartment. If I hadn’t been behind him to break his fall he’d have been a dead duck. I called the vet and made an appointment for the next day.

The next morning, however, Buster was walking in tight left circles and falling down every few feet. And, when I got to the vet, the hammer of every dog owner’s fear came crashing down.

“There’s something neurological going on,” the vet said after taking one look at him.

My vision tunneled and I felt like I was going to faint. I plopped into a chair and started breathing heavy. I knew what was going on, I was having a stress reaction. I thought that Buster was going to die.

Looking concerned for me, the vet, who is a really sweet man, said, “Let me take Buster in the back and examine him”. My nervous pacing wore a trench into the linoleum floor. Then the vet came back with more bad news.

“Buster had a seizure while I was checking him out,” he said. “He needs to see a neurologist right away.” I was handed an address and my dog. “Go now,” the vet said, looking brokenhearted. “And good luck.” I wasn’t even charged for the visit, but the look of sympathy on the vet’s face alarmed me. It was the look doctors have when when they know things are going very bad.

I got into my car, secured Buster and made a beeline for the highway. I had no idea where the specialist hospital was and, to be honest, my brainpower had been reduced by 50 percent. I really shouldn’t have been driving. Luckily I had OnStar to feed me the directions. Of course, being rush hour, the roads were jammed. My anxiety was so high a bottle of Xanax wouldn’t have put a dent in it. Then I realized I had to get my shit together, pronto. I managed to relax myself, more for Buster’s sake than mine, and made it to the hospital. Then I got more bad news.

“Brain tumor, meningitis, or a hole in the spinal cord,” the neuro vet said. “These can all cause the symptoms we’re seeing. We’ll have to admit him and do an MRI.” So Buster was whisked away and the receptionist told me I had to put down a mighty big deposit. MRIs are very expensive. I slapped down my Amex card without a second thought.

There wasn’t much to do after that. The docs had to stabilize Buster and the tests couldn’t be run until the next day. My girlfriend joined me and, before we left, one of the techs brought Buster out to say goodbye. His tail wagged when he saw me, but I could see he was frightened. That broke my heart.

Being an idiot, when I got home I Googled “dog” and “brain tumor” and discovered that Buster’s symptoms hit very one of that condition’s diagnostic indicators. What would I do if that were the case? Take him home to live out his last days? I didn’t want to see him suffer or deteriorate. I did not want to take my dog home to die. It was then I realized I might be faced with a terrible decision. I didn’t know what to do. “This will kill me,” I said to my girlfriend. “He’s too young. It’s not his time. It’s all too fast. If I have to put him down this will just kill me. “ It wouldn’t have of course, but that’s how I felt at the time.

So I lost it, utterly and completely.  I haven’t cried so hard in years and, if my girlfriend weren’t with me, it would have been exponentially worse. After the storm of emotion left me drained I went to bed and, amazingly, fell asleep. That was the only mercy that terrible Thursday.

My girlfriend stayed home from work the next day as we waited for the tests to be run. To be honest, the financial hit I was taking was unnerving me too. I am lucky to have resources I can draw on to cover the costs, not every one does. Years ago I took out pet insurance to guard against this very kind of disaster. When I got Buster I was a broke waiter, but I never wanted to have to put him down because of lack of funds. Some people have to and I understand that, but not me. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

When I called my ex to tell her the bad news, she cried too. But when she got herself together she said. “I feel so bad for you! Buster’s your baby.” And she’s right. For the past nine years, Buster has been sort of my child. I know that make me sounds like one of those crazy dog people you see on TV, but I guess that’s what I am. Some people might tell me that my response to all this is way out of proportion. Having a sick dog is not like having a sick child, but what you feel is what you feel.

By five o’clock on Friday I was almost out of my mind. Then the doctor called. No tumor. No meningitis or spinal cord holes. The MRI revealed that Buster has two messed up vertebrae compressing his spinal cord. That’s what was causing the problems. While surgery was an option, the doctor counseled trying to handle the situation medically. Buster was put on steroids and stayed in the hospital for four days in case he had another seizure. There were none. The docs have no idea what caused it. It could have been brought on by stress but I was so happy I didn’t have a terrible decision to make. So my girlfriend and I went to the movies and saw The Artist. It was a great film. By the way, I missed my 25th high school reunion that night. I was too spent for public appearances.

Monday came and I went to the hospital to get my dog. Before I could even see him I had to pay the bill in full. Ouch. Then, as we went over the discharge instructions, the doctor told me to give Buster a tapering dose of steroids for three weeks and put him on strict cage rest for at least a month.  I knew that would suck because Buster is used to having the run of the house. He also didn’t look a hell of a lot better than when I dropped him off, but I told the vet if Buster came back 75 percent I’d be happy. Now I had to settle in for the long haul.

My Dad had open-heart surgery a month ago. In a funny way, getting your chest cracked open, your heart stopped and restarted and your valves sewn up is the easy part. Dad came though it like a trooper but recovery, it turns out, is really the hard part. Your moods swing, you can’t drive or have to ride in the back seat like a kid and you’re basically housebound, totally dependent on others to help you live.  You have doctors, nurses, physical and occupational therapists poking and prodding you and mundane things like showering or taking a piss become Herculean efforts. Dad’s doing fine, thank God, but now I’m facing a similar situation with Buster. After care for a dog is a bitch.

Cage rest sucks, but it has to be done. Because of the steroids, Buster is eating and drinking more, so he’s peeing and pooping more – usually when we have to sleep. I can’t tell you how many times my girlfriend and I have carried Buster out at three, five and six in the morning. Our sleep cycles are trashed. My mother said it’s good training to have a baby. If Buster hears us moving around in the apartment, he cries and whinnys until someone comes to hold him. But we can’t do that every time. It’s not good for him. Since he’s also used to sleeping in our bed, when he see’s our Boston Terrier snuggling under the covers while watching from the cage, oh man, it’s bad. The Boston is still trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Two weeks later, I’m happy to report, Buster is back to eighty percent. Some lameness is still in his left hind leg, so he still falls down from time to time. He’s not out of the woods yet, when he’s off the steroids we’ll have to watch him carefully, but we’ll do everything to keep him from an operation. The vet even suggested acupuncture and I just might try it. Buster is a Japanese Chin, so, in a strange way, it’s part of his heritage.

But no matter what happens, we’ll have to change the way we handle Buster. He’ll always wobble and will have to be carried up and down stairs for the rest of his life. And since he loves to jump onto the couch and bed, an activity that must be minimized, my girlfriend and I will get some do-hickeys  to help him get to his favorite places more easily. When we’re not around, he’ll have to be in a cage. There’s a bit of mourning associated with that because Buster won’t be the dog he once was. But when I remind myself how crazy I was at the thought of losing him, that puts it all into perspective.

Now it’s Monday night and as I write this, Buster is lying next to me on the couch. I give him some one on one time every night so he doesn’t feel like he’s being punished. The funny thing about dogs is that they really don’t know when they’re handicapped. They think everything is just going along swimmingly so Buster doesn’t know what the fuss is about. Dogs are simple creatures. They just want to be loved and to love you.

The past weeks have reminded me that everything and everybody gets old. At some point we all will be unable to do the things we’ve done before. We have to accept that, one-day, we will lose the people (And pets) we love the most. One person told me, “I’ll never buy another dog. When my last one died, I was devastated. I never want to go through that again.” I can sure understand that, but I know that when Buster goes to his reward I’ll get another dog. Dogs give you far more than you give them, and they are worth the pain when you lose them. The same thing could be said about love. You will always lose it, either though death or life’s cruel turns, but that should never stop you from seeking it. A life bereft of love is a cold and dark existence. And from all the support I received, especially from my girlfriend, I know Buster and I are loved. That’s a great feeling.

Buster is now snoozing, happy to be in his favorite place in the world, next to me. As he whimpers softly, chasing squirrels in his dreams, I stroke his silky fur and smile. Not yet old boy.

Not yet.

Ghouls

My girlfriend loves estate sales. Every weekend for the past couple of months, she’s been hunting for bargains in what I call “dead old lady houses,” usually with me in tow. The irony that I’m engaging in a Yuppie activity akin to antiquing is not lost on me.

My girlfriend has indeed found some nice deals, like an Irish lace tablecloth and a china tea service she paid 25 bucks for and could sell on EBay for dollarsignr300. I wasn’t too crazy about the antique sewing machine that is now taking precious space in our small apartment but, to be fair, she’s also been looking for things to class our place up. Before she moved in, my domicile was a true bachelor pad. Now femininity is relegating my stuff into the second bedroom I use as an office. That’s the way it goes, but the apartment sure looks nicer. Smells nicer too.

But estate sales kind of unnerve me. You are going into a house where the occupant had died and picking though their stuff. “The best sales,” my girlfriend told me, “is when a younger person dies.” A woman in her apartment building, a buyer for a ritzy department store in New York, succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty, so all her stuff was in good condition and still fashionable. My girlfriend felt bad for the woman but she still thought the sale was a “score.”

To date, I have purchased six dollars worth of stuff on these excursions – a Swiss Army Knife and an old tape measure – both of which I threw into my girlfriend’s purse. Other than that, I haven’t been interested in much of anything. My primary role on these trips is to act as chauffeur and say, “Don’t buy that.” But I have seen some spectacular houses. One was a large and very old time Italian home in Weehawken with a breathtaking view of Manhattan. Standing in the dollarsignr2.5 million dollar home’s glass enclosed back porch, I could glimpse the flickering neon signs of Time Square and watched open mouthed as a mammoth cruise ship pulled out of dock and set sail to destinations unknown. The house, however, was furnished like something out of The Godfather, leading me to ask how many Mafioso got whacked in the basement. The lady running the sale was not amused

In that same town we also found a beautiful converted brownstone with a pristine grand piano on the first floor and an elegant salon in the apartment upstairs. The new owners were in the midst of renovations and asked us if we’d like to rent it. Would’ve been nice, but the place didn’t have the three P’s – price, pets and parking. They wanted dollarsignr2600 a month for place in an area where fistfights break out over parking spaces and you couldn’t even have a cat. No thank you. But I knew some Manhattanite real estate fetishist or refugee from Hoboken would rent it by the end of the day.

Despite getting to see some cool homes, I’m still bothered by the mercenary attitude of many people who flock to these sales. Every person overseeing these events, usually supplied by a professional company, have told me that large lines of people queue up an hour before the doors open, eager to be the first person to swoop in and find some discarded treasure. “They almost knocked me down when I opened the door,” one agent told me. “They usually know what they’re looking for. I had one lady buy all the draperies in the place five minutes after she was inside.” Many of these people are interior decorators or people hustling to buy stuff low and sell it high online. Of course, some are just regular people like me. But when I asked one agent if the interior decorators or professional antiquers gave them little kickbacks to get in early, my question was met with stony silence. I’ll take that for a yes.

The sales are usually quite crowded. One day, in a very small but well maintained home built in 1900, the place was filled with people bumping into each other and I could feel my undiagnosed agoraphobia start ramping up. It’s interesting to note that most of the buyers are usually very quiet and tend not to make eye contact with others; lest they tip off the competition what they’re fondling might be valuable. But the jostling, a few shades short of rude, made me fell like the walls were closing in so I dashed outside. As I caught my breath I thought to myself that these people were ghouls, picking through the material remains of the dead. Yes, I know I’m calling my girlfriend a ghoul, but she’s more like Casper the Friendly Ghost, and a cute one at that.

Not all of the houses we’ve visited, however, have been nice. In fact quite a few of them have been very sad. This Sunday we went to a house where the place reeked of “old person smell” and the entire upstairs looked like it had never been finished. Then I realized it had been finished, but the owner had let it fall into horrid disrepair. To be honest, it looked like a hotel room 20 years after Keith Richards trashed the place in some drug-fueled guitar smashing mania. Even the toilet was broken.

The first floor wasn’t much better. The occupant seemed to have limited his existence to the downstairs bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. I knew a guy had been the last person to live here because even a dying old woman usually keeps her living room in good order. This guy’s place was filled with the detritus of a life breaking down.

As my girlfriend rooted around the kitchen, I picked though the old man’s stuff on the front porch. There was a picture of him in a World War II uniform and a yellowing photo of him and his wife on their wedding day. They looked young and vital, the future in front of them bursting with possibility. I also uncovered some autograph books from his wife’s high school days, pages with limericks, well wishes and hopes for a happy tomorrow written in long faded ink. When she was young, did that woman frozen in the sepia tinted pictures even think about when there would be no tomorrows? What would she think about a guy like me roaming around her home, looking for clues about her life? I also couldn’t help but think, how long ago did this man’s wife die? How long had he been alone? Who knows? Maybe his wife left him and is still alive in a nursing home somewhere, not caring that her old beau was dead. But whatever happened, this man spent his last days living in a junk pile. I did find estimates to fix up his house squirreled away in his desk; but it was obvious he never had the work done. Maybe he didn’t have money. Maybe he didn’t care because the tenderest part of him had gone into that long good night.

My girlfriend didn’t find any “scores” so we left. But as we drove back home I was thinking about my last days. Would I end up like that guy? The way my life is going, I don’t think so – but you never know what cards life will deal you. A guy born today might be rifling though my shit fifty years from now.

“Honey,” I said as we slipped onto the highway, “When I die don’t let people like that into our home. Just give my stuff away to family and friends. The idea of some guy carting off my collection of pocketknives for twenty bucks would make me roll over in my grave.”

“What happens if I go first?” my girlfriend said. Good question.

“Honey,” I replied. “I think it’s finally time for me to get a will.”

Anything to keep the ghouls away.

Customer Disservice

Hi everybody.

I’ll be on CNBC tonight. The program is titled, “Customer Disservice” and it will air at 9pm ET/8pm CT. Tune in!

Merry Christmas

Hey everybody:

Sorry I’ve been away so long. Let’s just say my life is unfolding nicely and I’ve been very busy. I’m enjoying the holidays with my fantastic and lovely girlfriend, so I’m just fine.

May you all have a Happy (Insert appropriate holiday here) and a wonderful New Year!

And if you go out to eat tonight, tip your server well!

All the best

Steve

50 Reasons I Love New Jersey

I’m a New Jerseyan and proud of it. Here’s why!

1. Because we have the most diners in the world, you can always get something to soak up the booze at 3:00 AM.

2. The Jersey accent makes you sound tough, even if you aren’t.

3. You’re usually only three persons removed from knowing a Mafia guy.

4. We have the beautiful Jersey Shore. (And the bad tipping Québécois that go with it.)

5. We have Princeton. Not too shabby. Einstein didn’t seem to mind living in Jersey either.

6. The light bulb, the phonograph and motion pictures were invented here. I’m pretty sure the first porn flick was made here too.

7. Jersey Babes.  If you need to ask why, you’ll never understand.

8. Our governor doesn’t give a shit what you think of him. He doesn’t even give a shit what we think of him!

9. We’ve take wearing leather to an art form. Black leather blazer with green leather pants? Rock on.

10. I enjoy feeling like a shark when I see Zip cars with New York tags on the Turnpike. Blood in the water!

11. Cheese fries. Cheese fries with gravy.

12. I love always being ten minutes from a mall – until it’s Christmas.

13. Gasoline pumped by friendly attendants. How civilized. Only Oregon has a similar sense of class.

14. I can give snobby New Yorkers faulty directions and send them into Newark.

15. Jersey’s a movable olfactory feast.

16. We have the highest property taxes and auto insurance rates. We’re number one! We’re number one!

17. The Statue of Liberty is ours; we just don’t want to make the support payments.

18. We have two New York pro football teams.

19. It’s easy to get Newark Airport. JFK? Fuggedaboutit.

20. Our State Troopers wear scary uniforms modeled after the German Army! Not that Smokey the Bear shit.

21. We all know where Jimmy Hoffa’s buried. We just ain’t telling.

22. We have the second largest waterfall on the East Coast  – in Paterson of all places.

23. One of the first commercial television networks (DuMont) began broadcasting out of Passaic. So, in a weird way, Snooki and the Situation is our fault.

24. We have to love Bruce Springsteen under penalty of death.

25. We have the most guys named Tony. We have the most girls named Tina.

26. We were invaded by Mars.

27. We took down a Nazi dirigible. Yes, that was us.

28. We have the biggest state Napoleon complex in America. Probably because his brother lived here.

29. We had the Lindbergh baby thing long before OJ Simpson was born.

30. George Washington slept just about everywhere here. Guy got around.

31. Samuel Colt made the first revolver here. You feeling lucky, punk?

32. The modern submarine was developed here. And I don’t mean that sandwich deluded out-of-staters insist on calling  a hoagie, grinder or a hero.

33. New Jersey was corrupt before Chicago was a name on a map.

34. The Army tests secret weapons here. Probably because of that Martian thing.

35. A shitload of Nobel Prizes were earned in Jersey. (Princeton has 35 alone) See! We’re smart.

36. We have more municipalities than California and are way cooler.

37. If Manhattanites are suddenly faced with a zombie outbreak, we have plans to blow up those bridges and tunnels they love to make fun of.

38. Batman lives in New Jersey.

39. We are the country’s third largest cranberry producer. Dead mafia guys make great fertilizer.

40. We used to have the Miss America pageant until some jerk took it from us. When we find that guy Tony Soprano will fuck him up real good.

41. We have more vintage IROC-Z cars than any state in America. (You have to be from Bloomfield to get that reference)

42. Frank Sinatra was from Hoboken. He hated the place, sure, but he’s still ours.

43. Watching tourists trying to drive though one of our traffic circles. We should sell tickets.

44. Our sweet corn is the shit.

45. A significant percentage of our male population gets their eyebrows threaded.

46. Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark is bigger than St. Patrick’s. So there!

47. The first dinosaur bones were found here – next to the bodies of Tony “Cannoli” Zamboni and Frank “The Fink” Careltti.

48. If you want to get rid of your car, leave it in Newark for five minutes.

49. Jersey is musically stuck in the Eighties. Bon Jovi! Bon Jovi!

50. Valium was invented in NJ. You’ll need it on the Turnpike.