An Old Dog’s Epilogue.
“Aaaaaaand cut,” Penny the film director shouted. “Good work Chumley. That’s lunch.”
“LUNCH,” the production manager echoed loudly. “Everyone back in one hour.”
Lunch, one of my favourite human words and favourite time of the day with the exception of dinner. Rufus dragged himself out of his chair and escorted me back to my trailer. For the first time in thirteen years, I had a trailer that wasn’t a converted horse box. Rufus and I, sprawled out across my big couch and gorged on the best of craft services. He threw little sausages at me, from a buffet large enough to feed a family for a week. I snatched most of them mid flight and gobbled them down and the escapees were hunted down and devoured. It was the easiest job of my life – life was good.
Six months after Harvey Spinks took a nose dive into rehab, followed by a measured period in seclusion, ‘The Life and Times of Chumley P. Movi – A Dog About Town’, was green-lit. The L.A. Times had brought Harvey Spinks to his knees and the tabloids dragged him through the wood-chipper.
The homeless man in the park, who was unfortunate enough to experience Harvey Spinks, turned out to be a hero, who’d lost his way in life, on his return home from war. Corporal Terry Glass’ own life story, had been unearthed like a forgotten bone – he had received a Medal of Bravery and a Purple Heart in Iraq, for taking a bullet and saving the lives of two members of his unit and a local Iraqi doctor. His medals were traded to fund a healthy drug habit. The same habit cost him his family. Once Harvey Spinks’ rant hit the internet, a deluge of live ammunition rounds were mailed to the offices of Creative Reality Productions. Some were accompanied with threatening letters and others were chaperoned by dead rodents. Rumours of bombs in the mail cleared the staff from the company, like a double dose of horse wormer through a Chihuahua.
The L.A. Post headline, ‘Doggonit’ was followed by a blow-by-blow replay of how Harvey Spinks and Flowers had subjected my family to continuous exploitation. In another time, he would have been heralded a visionary but in the current climate, he was hunted like a feral dog from the industry. Creative Reality Productions was dismantled under the watchful eye of the trade papers and the social media moral police. The media smugly rode the wave of shame, with Harvey Spinks planted firmly under their feet and my family and I, were sung as heroes.
Rufus, Max, Bunny and Dallas bathed in the attention. Suddenly, I was everywhere – for a few weeks at least, until a more sensational story about a famous newsreader, getting a sex change broke. For one single week, I had more daily memes than the president of the United States of America and a following, bigger than your garden variety, cult.
Murray retired as an agent and as Murray, but Mariana Shamowski agreed to keep us as her sole client. She navigated the journey through my biopic. The Amazing Fernando and Mister Floppers, including all the others in Murray’s book, had to conjure up new representation. Mariana knew that we couldn’t possibly survive without her – she had become, like me, an adopted member of the family. I’d never known Murray to be a truly happy person, but Mariana reveled in her new life and could strike fear into the toughest film executives, more than Murray ever could.
My family got to play themselves, in a biopic, a dography, about yours truly. No one dictated what we should do or who we should be – we were us. There were a few embellishments of past glories, including Rufus’ career as a stage actor in London’s theatre circuit, which had more bells added, than Big Ben on new year’s eve. Rufus handpicked an actor to play his younger self. His choice of actor was compromised by Rufus’ vanity but justified by the actor’s ability – his skill at being young Rufus, was even better than Rufus, as a youth. Max always used to say, if you’re going to tell a story, then why tell a boring one. Rufus adopted that philosophy, like it was compulsory.
My own past life as a K9 police dog come howling back at me, like a bloodhound on a prison break. That little metal disc, hand punched with the letter ‘P’, that had dangled from my collar for my entire life, was the one piece of evidence, that lit up the trail to my past life. My old handler’s wife Annie, recognized it on her niece’s Twitter page and called my family. At first they thought it was a prank call. A regular stream of crazy people tried to lay claim to me, including a Russian man phoning the studio and telling them that I was a KGB spy and Harvey Spinks had been a terrorist cell operative – Moscow wanted me back, now that my mission bringing him down was complete. Another man said he was blind and I was his guide dog and he wanted me back, so he could do the Sunday crossword puzzles – no one could figure out how that could possibly work. Mariana spent most of her time hunting these kind of people away with a big legal stick. If her towering presence in flowing maternity dresses wasn’t enough to scare them off, she showed no mercy with the pen.
Everything was happening so fast – faster, than when I was young, at the peak of my career. Maybe it was old age but I think it was the human obsession with every form of media – it seemed to make their lives more frenetic. Everyone’s head appeared to be buried in a screen. People gorged on content from their little screens, then purged what they had just consumed but came back for more, and they repeated the same process over and over and over. I was pushed and pulled by the studio producing my life story, but I was always protected by my family, who seemed happier than they’d been for a long time – even Minnie took part in the entire charade, without getting too angry with the production crew. Everyone seemed to be on the up and up.
As soon as some of my old police acquaintances realized that there was a payday to be made from me, every anecdote, from me being blown up, to taking a piss on the Captain’s hat, was hawked to any tabloid willing to take a punt on half truths, with claims supported by the most tenuous shreds of evidence. (For the record, I never remember pissing on the Captain’s hat but it might have been in my downward dog years.) I was happy that old associates and friends were turning a buck from my past – it’s the least I could do, for those that I’d damaged the most.
Once my past life as a highly trained sniffer dog, gone bad, was revealed to my family, their reaction was a mixture of wariness, admiration and curiosity. At first it was like I’d been exposed as a spy. They acted differently around me for a few weeks. They skirted around me, like I was monitoring them and about to expose them for a crime, that they hadn’t committed. It took some adjustment but slowly their anxiety ebbed. Chuck would test me regularly, by hiding marijuana in his pants pocket. I had never barked at him in the previous ten years when I picked up the scent but he seemed to enjoy the novelty of me detecting it on him, so I made a big deal of it and jumped up on him and barked at him – he would cackle with laughter and wrestle me to the floor. I always like wrestling with Chuck.
Chuck won a REALLY award for ‘Most Entertaining Newcomer in a reality TV show’, for our show. He pretended he didn’t care but he did – I saw him polishing his trophy, when no one else was looking, when others handled it. It helped him score a gig in a TV car commercial, where he played a crash test dummy working for a Chinese car company. The commercial sees him coming home from work in agony, night after night, dressed as a crash test dummy. His wife tells him to get a job at Ford and within two weeks at his new company, he’s skipping gleefully down the garden path and over the white picket fence to work. Chuck wanted to do his own stunts but they refused and he was replaced with 3D animation – he was gutted but the commercial was a big success and he didn’t seriously harm anyone on the film shoot, which was a bonus for everyone.
Success means something completely different to Chuck. He always sees things differently to other people. It’s one of the things that I like about him. He comes and visits me on set but spends most of his time devouring the food contents of my trailer – today was no different. I think he must have been a dog in a former life. He shoveled his pie hole with five star catering, for at least thirty minutes, and predictably, the extent of his conversation was limited to a few muffled grunts. He then leaned back into the couch, rubbed his belly and mined his teeth with a broken chop stick.
“You know, you’ve got to love the irony,” he said.
“Irony?” Rufus mumbled.
“Yeah, if it wasn’t for Harvey Spinks we wouldn’t be where we are right now,” Chuck said.
Rufus lowered the magazine he was reading. “And where’s that?”
“Easy street, right off lucky bastard avenue.”
“Could be a lot worse, there’s an article in here about this guy who was preparing to play the role of a cab driver,” Rufus said. “He ends up working for twenty-six years as a cab driver and he claims he’s still preparing for the part.”
“Now that’s method,” Chuck declared. “That’s like something that Daniel Day-Lewis would do. I respect that level of dedication.”
“Dedication? I think not. This guy, is no Daniel Day-Lewis, he’s a delusional cab driver.”
“In your mind maybe.”
“Maybe we should send him flowers,” Rufus said sarcastically.
“Who, Daniel Day Lewis?”
“No, Harvey Spinks!”
Chuck’s eyes narrow and he grinned devilishly. “No, it’s got to be something more dramatic, like a set of steak knives,” he said. “You know, I emailed him a selfie, of me with my REALLY award.”
“And?”
“I never heard back.”
“I’m not surprised. I read in Variety the other day, that he’s got some new show coming out. Apparently the budget’s so low, the canned laughter is made in China.”
Chuck shook his head. “Spite and rage alone, will motivate that guy to claw his way back up out of the hole he’s in. He’ll be back,” he said ominously. He tried to snap his fingers but they were too greasy from eating half my buffet. “I’ve got it, it’s brilliant, we send him twenty feet of red carpet, you know, for his comeback.”
Rufus laughed. “Chuck dear boy, that’s not bad at all. Cruel but not too shabby.”
“Even better!” Chuck remarked. “Twenty feet of shabby red carpet. I could take a blow-torch to it and scuff it up a bit, maybe drag it behind my car for a few blocks. It’s almost poetic.”
“Let’s not get too carried away.”
Chuck spent the next twenty minutes swiping through his phone in search of a store that sold red carpet, while the hair and make-up people groomed me for my next shot, under the watchful eye of Rufus. The scene we were about to shoot, was when I met Rufus, outside that off-off-off Broadway theatre, where my relationship with this crazy family all began. The make-up artist sprayed a dirty coloured gel on my head and rubbed it over my body. I looked the part – I looked like I’d been living in a sewer.
Even though I sit in the choicest of surroundings and indulge in the trappings of success, I could dump it all in a heart beat, once I had my family. They may be broken, certifiable, have a lot less hair than me (with the exception of Chuck) but they are my beautifully, odd tribe. I still feel fit but I’m almost fourteen, which in human years makes me ninety-eight. Considering the life I’ve lived, I’ve definitely beat the odds. But I’m happy that I’ve managed to tell my own tale and leave something behind, before I become dead dust in the cosmos, unless the story is true about all dogs going to heaven and we might meet again – possibly, with the exception of Chuck, because I think he might be heading southbound and I’m not talking about Mexico.
My life, might have been completely different without them but I wouldn’t have changed a thing. And as a family we head into the unknown, but from my experience, the unknown, is a good destination. Just remember, like all dogs do, you’ve got to enjoy the now.