We were 28 or 29, and collectively, as though we planned it—though, crucially, we didn’t—we all adopted pets. As aspiring artists who flaunted our intellect, we gave them literary names. Luis took in a tabby, the neighborhood stray, and named her Flannery. Maggie, a poet, bought a hamster, Ginsberg. Bill and Jill, who’d studied studio art and dance, respectively, and were our grad program’s class couple, got Maine coons they christened Rothko and Fosse. I found a coydog one night on the side of the road and dubbed her Didion.
The Great Pet Influx of 2010 became a focal point for our late-night drunken bull sessions that summer: how had it come to be that we became pet owners within weeks of each other, unplanned, by accident? Luis posited a passive-aggressive fuck-you to the overwhelming number of married parents our age. “Companionship doesn’t need to be a spouse you half-love or a brat puking on you. We’re forging a new normal here,” he said. Maggie agreed our age had something to do with it but insisted it was about our parents—what clearer sign is there that you’ve outgrown them than becoming a caregiver yourself? Bill and Jill flinched at the word “caregiver” and talk of pets-as-surrogate-kids in general. They’d adopted their cats as a stress-test for their relationship, a capital-B capital-S Big Step they could control, after years of their parents haranguing them about kids. What we secretly suspected but never voiced was that we’d graduated from our master’s program in the Arts, a program we’d only planned on keeping us in town for its three-year length, but now planted our roots, for better or worse. Bringing Tucson locals into our lives, even four-legged ones, was a declaration: we would not return to life before the program, the 9-to-5 monotony that was the fate of so many others. We were here to stay.
That summer we worked odd jobs without any real intention of doing anything other than create. At night, after part-time shifts at counters of thrift stores or a Surly Wench happy hour, we sat on Luis’ porch and wondered how it was possible anyone chose to live any way but this. We chain-smoked into tin coffee can ashtrays. We pitched new pieces to each other. Bill and Jill wanted to write a play with fifty, maybe a hundred dancers, all with varying shades of wet paint on their hands and feet, on massive sheets of onionskin, after which they’d sell the paintings to patrons in the audience. “You could do it forever,” said Bill. “’This painting is Beethoven’s Fifth’, ‘this one is Mozart’s Requiem’, you know?” Luis wrote a novel entirely as a series of Craig’s List ads. Maggie saw a homeless man using old bedsheets from a thrift shop as a makeshift tent, “the same Simpsons bedsheets I had when I was a kid,” she told us hauntingly, and knew there was a sestina in there somewhere. They were the kind of unworkable ideas that sounded great at three in the morning during a punishing Tucson summer. We played a game where whoever’s lap Flannery leapt onto after we floated our concepts won. Her approval meant a lot to us while high.
Luis brought men home after long nights dancing at IBT’s, Maggie flirted with her customers at the thrift shop, I chatted up whoever smoked on the Plush patio, the bar next to the house I rented a room in. We watched after each other’s animals on occasion, when we slept with Tucson locals and were out for the night. It became a tell. Normally we’d show up covered in black or fawn or auburn fur, but when we arrived spotless it was clear we hadn’t spent the night at home. Only Bill and Jill, whose domestication allowed them to view our drunken hook-ups with arm’s-length amusement, carried evidence of Fosse and Rothko on them at all times.
The fall brought a new grad class, new people to swap material with and sleep with and, necessarily, impress. We secretly felt less impressive since graduation, received endless rejections from magazines and contests and agents we’d queried. Other than each other, no one saw our work, no one even knew we worked. But the newbies found our bohemian lifestyle charming, even aspirational, a romantic future they didn’t mind trying on like a used shirt from a thrift shop, antiquated and discarded but fashionable in a certain light, to a certain demographic. Our pets served us well here again, as a convenient pretext for coming to our places. “I’d love to meet your dog,” they’d tell us. “Can I see your cat?” they’d ask. “I love hamsters!” they’d say.
We got jobs at the university, grant-writing or working in the library or, most often, adjunctly teaching freshman courses to bored and spoiled Orange County kids attending U of A for its party-school rep. We took these jobs sociologically, for material, we told each other: there was only so much you could learn about Tucson locals in dive bars; this was another stratum of society. None of us were rich and we wanted to study them. And anyway, the university paid better, kept us in rent and, more importantly, pet food.
To ensure ourselves the gigs weren’t serious, we met each night in one of our shithole studios to trade notes. Fourth Avenue’s Casa Libre served as an artist’s colony, housing the city’s struggling creatives. We skinny-dipped in its pool and tossed around stories of the 1%. “I ask one kid what he wants to be when he graduates,” I told them, “and he says a CEO. So I ask him, ‘Of what?’ and he says, ‘My dad’s company.’” We toasted our PBRs to this prick and I added, “The best part is, he didn’t know what his dad’s company did!” Didion ran back and forth as we talked, caught her tennis ball with remarkable agility, leapt five, sometimes six feet in the air. We watched her beauty and dexterity and wondered whether these rich kids would ever know that kind of grace.
. . .
Ginsberg was the first to die. Of course he was—I mean, he was a hamster.
This happened two years later. We gave him a proper funeral: buried him in Maggie’s backyard, though since she rented a room in someone else’s house, it wasn’t her yard, and she got evicted for desecrating it. We poured shots of Old Crow on the burial site and took one ourselves. “He served us honorably,” said Bill. We knew what he meant. All our pets served us in our late-night games, as excuses to leave after our one-night-stands. The people we’d gone to the program with had left town, the newbies who’d entered in after us now graduated. Our ties were cut from the program. We were on our own, in the wild, except for each other and our animals.
Around this time, the city commissioned, through a transportation grant, a streetcar connecting the university, where we worked, with downtown, where we lived. We stumbled, too hungover to make the trek, out of our studios and single-room apartments, nodded to each other as each stop gathered us up. Bill and Jill brought us coffee for the ride from Café Passe, woken up early by Rothko and Fosse leaping on their heads. My early morning walks with Didion cleared my head to write, though we had less time to create as the grind of our university jobs crept in.
Still, we remained diligent. We freelanced, wrote semi-regular columns for Pitchfork and Slate and Tucson Weekly. Our twilight porch sessions, in which we’d critique what we watched and listened to and read, became rough drafts. It was easy, because suddenly everything the world produced seemed aimed at us and those our age. We rode the streetcar to Hotel Congress to catch Animal Collective or the War on Drugs play a show while in town. We weren’t on assignment; it’s what we were doing anyway. We developed pithy opinions on Girls and Master of None, and no editor needed tell us they were en vogue because it was about us. Moderate successes followed: Bill and Jill’s live-art installation got accepted at a theater festival in Denver. Maggie’s poetry garnered a minor cult following in fringe online journals. Luis’s fiction was selected as notable in that year’s Best American Short Stories. For these and more we’d gather with candles and dime bags and promises of free drinks to celebrate, because a success for one of us meant a success for all of us, and anyone like us: the eternally young, fighting against the grind.
Maggie bought more hamsters that year. None took: one bit her, an elderly one died within weeks, then her new landlord told her he didn’t allow pets. She finally made enough money to afford a nice place and weighed the novelty of a doorman and an elevator against one more rodent breaking her heart. She settled on the former and never owned a pet of any kind again.
. . .
When Bill and Jill broke up, Bill moved out of town and took Rothko with him.
This made a kind of sense: in the five years since the Great Pet Influx, Bill was by far the most successful, gained buzz in alternative galleries. One piece of his collaged Rothko’s Fancy Feast cans alongside Campbell’s soup and baby food nutrition facts, a mashup one critic called “a Warholian sendup of mass consumption.” Still, we felt betrayed. Our group’s pact was a matter of you’re-not-dumping-me-I’m-dumping-you to the world. It felt Judas-like of him to dump us.
I walked Didion on the day he left. Jill joined us, and we made a game of it: Didion’s boundless energy was such that we’d walk for hours and I’d still never seen her tired, so Jill and I walked her for as long as it took until she slowed down. By hour six, we finally brought up Bill.
“Did you like his stuff?” she asked, and I said, “I don’t know if I should answer that,” and she said, “Come on, if you can’t tell me today of all days, when can you?” and I relented and said, “Honestly? I fuckin’ hated it,” and she laughed gratefully.
“I wish I hated it,” she said. “It would make this easier. Help me out. What didn’t you like?”
“I always thought it was a bit pretentious. Or became pretentious. It felt disloyal.”
“How so?”
I couldn’t believe she asked. Wasn’t it obvious? “The rest of us have stayed the same.”
“You don’t think our work has changed?”
“That’s what’s so great about it,” I said. “We have the courage of our convictions.”
Jill looked at Didion, walking at a steady clip. For the first time since the breakup I caught her eyes water. She said, to Didion instead of me, “Is that courage, do you think? Not changing?”
“Don’t you? We wanna say something. We say it. The world’s not going to beat that out of us.”
“Maybe we’re supposed to respond to the world. Maybe it’s not beating anything out of us except our own stubborn refusal to respond.”
As if on cue, we passed one of our old haunts, the Meat Wrack, a great piece-of-shit dive owned by a guy who’d legally changed his name to God and gave you free beers for life if you let him literally brand his moniker into you with an iron. It was demolished, and in its wake they constructed a high-rise, to accommodate the ever-expanding student housing.
I pointed, self-satisfied: “That’s the world changing and asking us to accept. Bill leaving is the world changing. This,” I pointed to Didion, outpacing us, not breaking stride, “is defiance.”
Before I could exhale a victory puff of my cigarette, Didion took a dump on the sidewalk. We couldn’t not laugh. It was a metaphor for something, we were too tired to work out what.
We couldn’t get too self-righteous about the abundance of high rises and student housing. For one thing, we’d come to like the students, our students, even our positions teaching them. We no longer got together to compare notes on their spoiled idiocy, instead swapped pedagogical strategies to engage them, to get underneath how they thought, what they felt and needed. We also couldn’t get mad at the high rises because we’d taken Maggie’s lead and moved into nicer places, Jill and I in adjacent apartments, Luis in a house his parents had helped with the down payment on. Luis began dating a new guy, Nick. We accepted him as a replacement for Bill on a trial basis. Our nights on Luis’s porch were no longer governed by Flannery purring up to whoever’s point she liked best because she adored Nick and wouldn’t leave his lap—and besides, her legs were now arthritic and she couldn’t jump as high.
It was a loss to see Luis not dancing until close at IBT’s any longer, but we took Flannery’s approval as a sign Nick was a Good Thing. He understood our conversational rhythms, our games, our vibe. “Who was president when you lost your virginity?” he asked us one night, petting Flannery like a Bond villain. We loved the question. It was the kind of question that, while drunk and sleepless, we could bullshit our way into meaning something. Maggie and Jill lost theirs under Bush II—did first-time sex as a woman under a pro-life administration affect how and when they lost it? Luis lost his under Clinton—was the formative sexual experience of a closeted teen boy informed by a president whose mixed messages included Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and speaking out against marriage equality? (The answer to all of this, according to them, was No—they just lost it when they lost it and barely registered who was in office—but we took mental notes anyway for possible future columns). We toasted Nick’s wine, a bottle of something nice with a fancy French name, in Luis’s new crystal glasses, and welcomed our new member.
. . .
It was good he had Nick, who comforted him three years later. Luis had taken Flannery in at age four. At age 13, she died too.
By then Nick and Luis made a home for themselves. Nick was a chef at one of the Fox Restaurant Concept© places that gentrified downtown. We didn’t see much of either of them, not in the nightly, bar-closing way of a few years prior. Luis now curated the book collection at the Poetry Center. They hosted once-a-month wine tastings which, the month before, was the last time we’d seen Flannery. She wasn’t in great shape—ribs like a ladder under her skin, mane disheveled no matter how much they brushed her. Even so, we assumed she’d live forever, as we assumed all our animals would: Maggie’s hamster had been a fluke but the rest thrived, even Rothko, last any of us heard from Bill. Didion twisted her ankle after missing the ground in a jump, her agility a bit diminished. Fosse needed surgery to remove a tumor. But nothing that couldn’t be mended.
Flannery’s death broke our hearts but the sight of Nick and Luis holding each other, like two boxers paused mid-spar for relief, put us back together. We wanted to grieve with them but there wasn’t time: Maggie was pregnant, half-sure of the father but fully intent on keeping it (breaking another of our initial pacts, but at least single motherhood avoided nuclear familydom). Jill and I, meanwhile, were immersed in our jobs at school. We shared an office and adored our students. We seldom spoke of anything else, often ran into them at bars on the occasion we were out late enough to cross paths with them. “Professor!” they’d say. We’d look over our shoulders for someone older, bearded and graying and besweatered, until we realized they meant us. We sat on patios with them for hours talking shop, Didion on a leash under the table. We’d leave early. There weren’t many of Tucson’s locally owned holes-in-the-wall left, and anyway hangovers were brutal now, sometimes lasting entire weekends from a single Friday night out.
The freelance gigs dried up. Overnight, it seemed, behind our backs, the dominant culture wasn’t for us—excluded us, even. Jill’s references to Seinfeld and Outkast elicited blank stares from her students. Salon commissioned me to write a review of Euphoria and I felt old. I felt like Abe Simpson—“I used to be with it, then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary”—a line I would have quoted to my students if I thought they knew, anymore, what The Simpsons was.
. . .
I was the one who got the call about Fosse. Of course I was. By then, Maggie had a two-year-old, Nick and Luis deeply married and in Minnesota with Nick’s family for Christmas.
She told me he wouldn’t eat or play or even walk. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—make it to the litter box. But she knew something was really wrong when he wouldn’t dance with her.
“No matter how old he gets or tired he is or lethargic he feels, he always comes alive when I dance. He always joins me. He won’t get up. He won’t dance,” she said, panicked, on the phone.
We drove to University Pet Clinic at 4 AM. Fosse, wrapped in a towel, didn’t meow, just silently stared at the door, like he knew where we were headed and wanted to get it over with. At the clinic, the vet didn’t mince words or promise anything. She gently let us know it was time.
It wasn’t one, but the room resembled an operating room with its stainless-steel table and white walls. There was a bench for us to sit on, but Jill sat Indian-style on the floor next to Fosse, so I lowered myself down next to her. The doctor administered a sedative first, let us know Fosse would be asleep soon so we had a few minutes with him. Jill stroked Fosse’s ears and massaged the scruff of his neck after the second injection as his eyelids gained weight. His tail, sweeping the floor, slowed. Jill was inconsolable but Fosse never looked more beautiful, or at peace, and I hated being a writer because I knew I’d never be able to describe how he felt.
Afterward we texted Maggie and Luis and Nick to keep them in the loop. They sent apologetic messages with accompanying emojis back. I took Jill for Didion’s morning walk. Jill wouldn’t be up for anything close to the seven-hour marathon death walk we once took, I knew, but that was ok because neither would Didion: she’d contracted arthritis in her paws and fluid in her knees and lately had trouble walking for longer than a half hour, if that.
I didn’t know what to say and for once felt like this would be the preferable subject change: “When was the last time you talked to Bill?”
Jill took a good minute to respond, still in shock I guess. Finally she snapped out of it and said, “Huh? Oh. A few months back. He texted me, so I guess we didn’t really talk.”
Bill had texted me, too, in the last few months, and since she didn’t seem bothered I pushed on. “I heard about his thing. In San Francisco? The Mission District?” I didn’t tell her I’d read about it in The New Yorker. “‘Tchaikovsky and Fingerpaints’?”
“He stole that from me,” she said, and I said, “I thought it sounded familiar.”
Bitter as she was, at least she wasn’t thinking about Fosse anymore. “Why’d he text you?”
“Rothko is sick. He just wanted me to know. Said it felt wrong if I didn’t.”
What to say? My back ached and Luis was balding and Nick had a gut and Maggie was perpetually exhausted and their pets were dead and downtown Tucson was a concrete jungle of student housing and hipster chains and Didion, in front of us, struggled with her back legs as she peed. She righted herself, turned around and nuzzled Jill’s palm. “Sweet girl,” Jill said.
. . .
Didion’s fur falls out in clumps as I critique this week’s workshop pieces. They’re decent, the pieces, shaky on craft but undeniably fresh, new, a sensibility I wouldn’t have appreciated fifteen years ago, let alone tried myself. Sometimes I let Jill see their work before workshop. Sometimes Maggie stops by our office with her daughter. Sometimes one of us lands a piece in a journal or a performance at a local theater, or even see Bill’s name in the paper, and Luis and Nick celebrate with an assortment of scotch and bruschetta. Sometimes I bring Didion to class, providing she has the energy to make the trip. And I’ll catch a group of my students in the back of the room, hovered around one of their phones. I ask them what’s up. They light up, turn their screen to me, and say, “Wanna see a picture of the new dog I just got?”