4: Gabriel sketches a political agenda
Gabriel stood proudly: a Colossus of Rhodes in a Raiders jacket straddling the sidewalk of Fell Street, beer bottle raised in defiance at the blitzing linebacker of a German Shepard rushing towards him. Down came his arm—much too early!—he lurched to the side, his ankles crossed. Arthur made contact and man, dog, and bottle tumbled to the ground with a shout a bark and a shatter.
Cicero rushed down from the porch. In the mayhem he managed to grab hold of the flailing leash and pull it taut, feeling the writhing spool of muscle on the other end slowly unravel. Eventually the dog popped free and turned its attention towards him, who, emitting a much less potent scent than the man lying face-down in the sidewalk and intent on not angering the riled up dog, slowly coaxed it back towards democratic solutions.
“Are you okay?” Esmerelda said, rushing towards the scene.
Mrs. Franklin, who had regained her feeble command of her dog’s leash, repeated the same question from ten yards off.
Gabriel rolled over onto his back, clearly more irritated than injured.
“It’s perfectly alright, Mrs Franklin. I shouldn’t expect anything else from you.”
“Thank you dear. I’m terribly sorry. It’s the weather. He gets a cold, and he gets so irritable when he’s got a cold, you know!” She was slowly waddling further away. “I’m so sorry. It’s just—it really is just the cold.” She looked down at the dog, who was still coming down from his bloodlust, and scrunched her nose. “Aren’t you so cold mister Arthur? Don’t you have a cold? Aren’t you such a sick little dog?”
She continued on her way.
Gabriel pushed himself to a sitting position and stood with a groan. He opened his jacket and retrieved a small wooden comb from an inside chest-pocket. Wandering over to the nearest car, he carefully combed his hair back into its vineyard-row pattern and wiped dirt and blood off of his scraped cheeks and took a sharp, deep breath.
“What a paradise it was!”, he finally exclaimed, “before these damn dogs took over our city. I can’t walk a single block without seeing one. In the parks, in the offices, in the restaurants, in the bars—when will they be satisfied? When they have laid claim to the churches too?”
He paused expectantly, but neither Esmerelda nor Cicero graced this outburst with a response, so he shortly continued:
“‘He’s just being friendly!’—I swear, I want to kick them in the mouth! They used to be contained to families in homes large enough for them. Now we’ve got ugly little twenty-five year olds living alone in ugly little studios easing their ugly little lives with ugly little dogs, all because they think they deserve to own anything they can buy.”
“Mrs. Franklin is a lovely neighbor,” said Esmerelda, “and there’s no need for an outburst.”
Gabriel was not to be deterred.
“This has nothing to do with Arthur!” he cried defensively. “In fact I place him among the very best of dogs in this neighborhood. He is well-bred and exudes a consistency that is quite becoming—he follows through on his intentions. I trust that he will always do what he believes is right, and that is as honorable a trait as any, regardless of whether I concur with his morality. I am concerned with the political issue.”
His voice picked up steam and cadence, like a tumbling boulder:
“The dog-owners have reached critical mass and they are forcing their lifestyle upon the lot of us! I don’t blame them for advancing their own self-interest, but I will not sit back and concede my own. Hannah Arendt said that revolutionaries do not just find revolutions lying in the streets and pick them up; they create them, or something like that. Well, I say it’s high time for revolution! We’ll have to fight hard to claw back our streets—politics is a zero sum game! We’ll start with a program of dog-free streets. Once people see how much better their quality of life can be, we’ll start with a proposition to exile all the ugly ones. I think it’s a wonderful strategy. Many people are wrongfully convinced their own dog is not ugly—but nobody enjoys the company of an ugly dog that they recognize as such. All we need is an objective method of scoring their attractiveness and we’ll be underway.”
Another lack of response from his two interlocutors. Another awkward pause before he saw, walking towards him, a young woman with a yappy white terrier.
“Look!” he cried, pointing in her direction. “That’s a four.”
Her face reddened as she removed her headphones.
“Be a little louder, would you?”
“Tell me, honestly, that you’d rate that godforsaken thing higher than a four,” he said, jabbing his finger again in the woman’s direction, “and I’ll do you one better; I’ll shut up.”
Unsure of how to respond, the woman kept walking.
“I am not going to rate passerby—or their dogs,” said Esmerelda.
“Oh, come on. You’ve got a number in your head. You’re not an angel for refusing to say it out loud. Butter yourself up in your own mind, but I’ll call you what you are: a damn Pharisee!”
Esmerelda rolled her eyes.
“I’ll give it a five,” Cicero said, venturing into the fray of a conversation with Gabriel.
“Yes!” he cried. “Now you’re speaking sense!”
“Dogs are like women,” he asserted, gesturing with his hands, spurred on by the strength of this give-and-go. “I can grant an exception for the cute ones, but why anybody puts up with an ugly one beats me. Nobody desires the company of an ugly dog. To be sure, many are deceived as to the status of their own dog—but if they could only be enlightened as to the sheer ugliness of the creatures they strut about this city with, surely they would come to their senses!”
Before this molotov left his lips he knew that it was a step too far, and for the remainder of the conversation the great pendulum of Cicero’s sympathy swung decidedly back towards Esmerelda. With each passing sentence Gabriel dug himself deeper and deeper, until they had built for each other an impregnable rhetorical wall around the sacredness of dogs.
When they finally threatened to go later that same day to the animal shelter to pick up a puppy to bring into the home, Gabriel threw up his hands in capitulation.
Later that evening, Cicero wandered downstairs to the wonderful earthy smell of a slow-cooked stew. Esmerelda was standing in the kitchen with a creased blue apron on. She opened the oven and removed a steaming dutch oven with two towels.
“What are you cooking?”
She lifted the lid to reveal a magnificent jumble of hearty beans, sausage and chicken wading in broth, all of their caramelized reduction scratched like cave-paintings into the side of the pot.
“Cassoulet.”
As the three roommates spooned mouthfuls of the invigorating meal, Cicero cleared his throat for a sort of toast.
“I’m going to rent the room.”