Basil Rathbone Died Today

Basil Rathbone died today. My compulsion to clean, to tidy up, now that he’s dead, appears to be spent. I’ve raked all of the random bits of kibble from the floor into a dustpan. I’ve dumped the pills that were probably prolonging his last wheezing months into the trash. I’ve packed the unopened cans of wet dog food and half-chewed bones into a box, like a holiday care package for a homeless person. I’ll pass it along to my friend Cheryl, hard-core dog-lover and a friend to me and my English Springer Spaniel for all these years. She’s coming to pick me up for a walk on the beach, intended to help heal. I hope it works.

As I haul away a heavy-duty garbage bag filled with Basil’s shit, a sob overtakes me. The keening and the tears grab me and I drop the bag of dog shit. I think for a minute, I should just go really crazy behind this grief. I should spread his shit all over my body and my face and howl at the sun, so maybe they can cart me away, so maybe this madness can be verified. Maybe they will give me the forgetting-type drugs. Only I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to run. I don’t want to let him go. I drop the bag into the oversized can with wheels and the top goes thunk. I let myself cry, again.

You’d think I would want to memorialize my longtime companion, not erase all evidence of his existence, my best friend, sometimes my only friend, it feels like. I have been abandoned one more time. Death took him: he’s better off. I’m not. And yet, I see myself putting all his water and food dishes into the dishwasher to eradicate the dog slime. I dump the the last of his special “early renal failure” kibble into the sink, thinking as I shove the crunchy stuff into the grinding maw, I’m so glad the bag was almost done, I didn’t make that trip to the store to stock up last Saturday. What? I’m glad I saved a few bucks? Like it would matter — like I hadn’t spent thousands, and wouldn’t have spent thousands more just to have him, HIM, not just any dog, but that dog, my friend, in my life.

He was a gift, literally — a gift for both my natal birthday 13 years ago (#47) and my very first AA birthday — a gift from Richard, my dear, now-dead Richard, who had rescued me from the drugs and moved into my two-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake. The gift came in the form of a certificate for my pet choice from the Pasadena Humane Society. By giving me the dog, Rich was agreeing to help raise him. I couldn’t do it by myself: such a kindness.

I almost got a boxer, but one look at Basil’s big round Springer Spaniel eyes, and, boy, I was a goner. He knew it too: we tell ourselves these lies, we dog-lovers. He certainly knew, as I lingered and clucked, that I was an easy mark, so he wagged his big, fluffy tail back and forth double-time. He barked. He jumped up on the cage. Show dogs of the Springer breed typically have cropped tails. This guy had the whole tail, and he wagged it for all he was worth.

The sign by his cage said he was “one year old’, but the counselor said that was an estimate. He was pure-bred Springer, but of course, without papers, being a runaway. He was beautiful, although his liver-and-white colored coat was matted and he needed a bath. He had been picked up on Huntington Drive in San Marino the evening of July 4th — I always thought that his former owners were richies who just couldn’t cope with his high-energy ways. When the fireworks started, they let him run away.

It has been very easy for me to remember Basil’s age, he was the same age as my sobriety. He was “one” on my one-year anniversary. He was my sobriety: he, too, rescued me. He made it possible for me to learn to love again, and to believe that I was lovable. Dogs do that. Mine did.

About the name. Basil Rathbone was the actor who played Sherlock Holmes, about the most English name I could think of — Basil for short, though people always seemed to mispronounce it, used to piss me off, people would say: Baaaasil, with the long-A, BAAAsil, instead of the correct short A, Basil. He’s not an herb, he’s a detective! I always said I wanted a second Springer, would have named him Nigel Bruce — the actor who played Dr. Watson. Alas, my one singular Springer would suffice.

Basil was a happy dog. Maybe all Springers are happy, I’m not sure, I only had the one. He was energetic, inquisitive, lots of “personality,” people would say. Perfect for me, they said. Crazy. Nuts. Insistently playful. People-oriented. Whatever bullshit descriptions people have of dogs, born of their own childishness and anthropomorphic projections, I don’t know, but there were so many, many days of fun, years of satisfaction and obligation we gave each other.

I’ve lived in only two places in L.A., the apartment in Silver Lake, which is where Basil came into my life, and my little bungalow in Burbank, where I sit writing today, a house purchased largely because of its yard for the dog, a house that echoes with his spirit, and I suspect will continue to do so for years to come. So many reflex actions of every moment in this house caused by the existence of my friend Basil. Don’t leave anything, including tissue boxes and backpacks with gum at his level. Don’t throw anything away in open garbage cans that he could rifle and chew up. Keep the water bowls full indoors and out and keep certain doors closed. On and on. My routine and my life in this space revolved around keeping him, keeping him safe. Moment by moment.

A big part of Basil’s life was our live-in dog sitter Mike, who moved here to write and act and otherwise succeed in show business, earning a living in part by pet-sitting. He was the only person I called today, for he was with Basil every night I was away from home for the past 8 years. Mike told me that I was a good dad to this dog, and how much he would miss Basil. It was designed to comfort, and it did.

“He’s falling down and bumping into things,” Mike said when I returned from a trip last year. “He seems awfully needy, he won’t stop following me around,” he said, a few months ago. It was getting to be Basil’s time. Mike and I both knew it. At 14, Basil was ninety-something in dog years, he was definitely old. Even as a young dog, Basil had health problems: an incessant foot-licker. OCD, said the vets. I gave him 20 milligrams of Prozac every day since he was two. He had a big fatty lump on one side, benign said all the vets, but I was never really convinced. I spent 8 grand one year on his foot operations. And he had seizures, the first one happened right after we moved to Burbank, walking along the bank of the concrete L.A. River with Cheryl. I refused to put him on Phenobarbital, the only recommended course of action.

Most importantly, and fatally, he had a heart murmur and an enlarged heart, leading to congestion and coughing when he was excited, and when he was laying down. The heart just grew and grew, and today, it stopped.

He would cough up and try to swallow his sputum. His breathing was labored. He was nearly deaf and half blind. He paced. His back legs were weak and his fur was getting soiled, since he waddled funny when he shat. On Sunday I thought he needed to be cleaned up, so I tried to give him a bath. He freaked out. I thought he was going to die right then, but he made it through the night. I called the minute the vet opened this morning, and got an 11 o’clock appointment.

After he took an X-ray, the doc came back in. He looked at the laptop image and turned to me. “He’s not going to live much longer, you need to decide what to do. You can put him down. You can let him die on his own, or we can try some other medications. But nothing we can do will make his heart work right, it’s too far gone.”

So, I took the dog out to the back and called Cheryl at her office. She was with a patient. By then, I guess I knew I had to put him down, and I just wanted to make sure Cheryl would be there for me. I waited for her call and walked with Basil one last time. I gave him some water and petted him, handed him a last doggie snack. I started to cry and leaned over to pet him. We walked around a bit. He sniffed the pissed-up parking meters and other objects leading up to the front of the vet’s building, years of dogs marking the territory. He lost interest in that, but seemed drawn to a hedge of fragrant pink flowers, until I pulled him away for fear that a bee might sting him.

We walked and I contemplated his pending extermination. I thought walking was better than sitting. The doc had asked, is he walking around a lot? I said, yes, as a matter of fact. That’s because he can’t breathe, standing upright helps a bit, said the doc. He can’t breathe when he lays down.

He walked as long as he could hold out, my buddy, walking at my side, until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he fell, and he died, before my very eyes, in an ugly parking lot in an alley in Glendale, California, at 12:05 p.m., March 31, 2008.

He collapsed, flopped onto his side, and made a choking sound, his eyes distended, and then nothing. A woman in a pickup truck stopped and yelled, What’s happening? My dog is dying, that was all I could say, as I ran gasping to the front of the building, barging in and yelling, My dog is dying in the parking lot, I need some help.

And the desk gal said, he’ll meet you around back, so I ran back around. A husky Latino vet tech went with me to Basil’s still shaking body. The lady was on the street and out of the truck, the door hanging open. She wore a look of confusion and horror. A Glendale college campus police car pulled up and yelled, What happened? but I ignored him too. There were two of them now, the vet techs, and they lifted Basil, who was still quivering, and carried him into the back of the building. They laid him out on a grate over a sink.
I realized it was the first time I had ever been in the back. Other pets were caged up but I couldn’t look at them. A little dog, a whitish little creature, maybe a Chihuahua was barking. Is he dead? I asked, Make sure he’s dead. The tech felt his neck, and somebody said, Get Dr. Martin.

The doctor came in and felt Basil, and turned and said, “I’m so sorry, he’s gone. I’m not surprised, his heart just gave way. Nothing we could have done for him, really. It was just his time.”

I asked, could I get him cremated, and the doc said, yes, you will need to sign a card. And then he put his hand on my shoulder and says, “One more thing, I need to tell you. Washing him yesterday isn’t what killed him. It was just his time.” I thought that was so kind.

***

The smell of Pine-Sol permeates the air now, or maybe it’s from the chewed up parts of my fingers. I had sloshed the diluted detergent onto the expanse of the deck in my backyard, trying to get rid of the shit- and piss-stains, but I don’t think that sign of Basil’s presence will ever go away. Scraping that dog shit, hosing down the residue of his urine stream, this was part of my daily routine, part of my life. I wanted it all to be gone.

I called the number on the Cal Pet Crematory brochure they gave me at the vet’s. They will be picking Basil up tomorrow, she tells me. I wonder, where is he now, in a refrigerator? What about the other dogs and cats in there waiting for a shot or an operation, won’t they smell the death on him? Tongue lolling out of his foamy mouth, his eyes still open against the grate where they laid him.

They’ll deliver Basil’s ashes on Friday, she said. I gave her a credit card number. Tidy, like mail order. They’ve done this a million times, a million served, serving California since 1947, the brochure said. I wonder how many cremations they had actually done, and who did them. And I wondered what I would do with Basil when he came home in a box.