(Me an’) Bobby McGee

(I meant to tell y’all ‘bout this before, but I never got around’a it. Well, here’s t’ gittin’ ‘round…)

FLASHBACK, 1998: “The Lot” in LA. I’ve just begun to feel settled-in amidst the other artists, the ‘70s leftovers, and the boho wanna-be’s who constitute my new SoCal alterna-digs’ total residence. The apartment’s been spackled, it’s been painted, and it just been carpeted. The garden’s been sown, and the life force that is Spooge has manifested himself – presently in the form of an uncut adolescent pup.

It’s dusk. I think it’s wintertime. (It's not as easy to tell in La-La Land... You have to look for what's in bloom and ask yourself if you need a sweater.) I’m hosing down the parking lot. (Martini in left hand, nozzle in right. Yeah, I switch hands from time to time, in the name of trying to avoid Carpal Tunnel, but for the most part, this is the stance.) I’m stoned. (What else is new? These are the CA years.) Spooge is doing his thang. So are all the cats. So are all the other dogs. The other dogs all bunk down with Jerry, the “Potato Sack guy,” we call him – a 40+ queen who values the gym about as much as I value monogamy. All these animals are sniffin’, scratchin’, and piddlin’, each according to his or her immediate needs. All of which is to say, it’s just another typical night on the Lot. The sun’s gone down, as it always does, past the edge of the parking lot and past the tops of the Magnolia, Pine and Palm trees aligning the streets that fall between us and the beach. (There’s about 20 minutes worth of ‘em, in Angelino miles. We Angelinos like to describe distance in terms of how long it’ll take you to drive there… We're a "Rate x Time" kind of folk.)

The artists who are lucky enough not to need a day job are busy working in their studios. Those who are in “job phase” are sipping Merlot and listening to Pat Sajak drop cryptic crossword clues. Vanna White patiently awaits illumination. (She will NOT act until she receives her Pavlovian cue. THAT's what got her the job, way back when -- did I ever tell you that? But I digress...) As for Myself? Categorically, I dwell somewhere within the strata of my subculture. I’m a slacker who’s just re-realized he needs to get back to work. So, I work harder than I have to, on The Lot itself, y’see, to make up for my inadequacies.

“Heck,” I tell myself (each and every day I do it), “it’s not like it doesn’t need doin’.”

Anyway, it was on just this kind of day, at exactly this time of night, while I was doing this exact sort of thing – when I first met Bobby McGee. He was a large dog, by the Lot’s standards. By our Lot’s standards, Spooge was a big dog. Spooge was the first big dog who had succeeded in earning permanent residence on the Lot since Catherine, the crazy dyke who'd made and subsequently lost a small fortune via a T-shirt and novelty enterprise called "Flying Fish," had lived there with her ever-rotating population of Pit Bulls. Catherine now lived three doors down, doing God knows what, while her T-shirts and novelties rotted away on gray metal shelves. ANYway, before Spooge, all we on the Lot had, in terms of canine compansionship, were little, “yappy” dogs. And they all shacked up with Jerry.

But picture if you will: Myself, almost 10 years ago… Martini and garden hose in hand(s); proud father of the first full-sized dog to have recently landed residence on the Lot. And then picture, if you will: Myself, meeting – for the first time – a Border Collie/Sheep Dog mix (who’s only recognizable to me as such because I grew up with a father who bred dogs and who familiarized me with the appearances and inclinations of many hunting and show breeds). And THEN picture, if you can: The simultaneous combination of delight and despair I experienced when I: a) recognized that another large-sized dog had made his way onto the Lot, and b) realized that the reason he’d done so was because he was crippled to the core – the obvious victim of a car accident.

Whether on human or canine, cat or canary, I had never before seen such injuries. I had never before witnessed such raw, open, dripping wounds. They were puss-ridden; fur-mixed-with-skin-mixed-with-flesh-mixed-with-sutures, CATASTROPHIC symptoms. Never before had I viewed in real life such obvious consequences of nature and industrialization colliding, VIOLENTLY. But I was witnessing them then. Martini in one hand, garden hose in the other, there I stood, under the LA sunset, witnessing it. And it was disgusting. "Such, "I tried to assure myself, "is the nature of life in LA." "Such is the rare yet predictable outcome of a certain unlucky percentile who have to live a flesh-and-blood existence under the utterly unforgiving reign of mechanism." More precisely, I thought, mechanism met with speed. For it is the marriage of mechanicality and motion that makes up the make-up of Los Angeles. Ride with it and everything’s fine. Floating and jetting, the flotsam and jetsom move along quite smoothly, providing an aesthetic that predates and predicts the visual effects of the internet. Southern California long ago raised surfing to another level; it just needed Microsoft Windows to teach the rest of us how to recognize it.

But for this borderline Border Collie whom I came to deem Bobby McGee, surfing hadn't helped. Surfing hadn't proven to be a conduit. Unlike the rest of us who surfed LA traffic daily --negotiating stop signs, traffic lights, hair-pin turns and multiple intersections -- Bobby, apparently, hadn't made it home safe one night. His was an unlucky number. His was a number representing collision. Running the numbers hadn't helped Bobby; it had hurt him. That's what the numbers dictate. That's what the numbers require. The numbers require that in order for 95% of us to make it home safe, 5% of us -- be we human, canine, or of any other life form -- must suffer. We must suffer eventuality.

So I suppose it was my own particular form of eventuality that eventually led to my having to witness the likes of Bobby McGee. But nothing could've prepared me for the moment. Nothing could’ve helped me witness what I witnessed that night while I was watering down the Lot in LA – that night when I first met him. That night when I first laid eyes upon Bobby McGee. No Martini, no bong, no drug could’ve prepared me. Nothing, except perhaps a glimpse of death itself, could’ve prepared me to glimpse what I glimpsed that evening, right around twilight. I don’t even know how he walked. I don’t know how he walked up to me. And I'm not really sure why. The rest of Jerry’s dogs always scattered whenever I sprayed the hose. But not Bobby.

Bobby, that night, hobbled right on up t’ me, even tho' I was sprayin’ full throttle. He hobbled right up t’ me. He hobbled right on up, introducin’ himself, 'spite th’ fact that no other dog who’d’ just been through what he’d just been through would’a ever cared t’inroduce himself t’anybody… An' I couldn’t believe what I saw. I’d never seen anythin' like it. It was like lookin’ at half a dog. Half a dog sliced right down the middle – and not from belly t' belly, but from head t’ toe! Right down the middle! A perfect half a’ dog! He was a perfect half a' dog. Cut right down the middle. Like the Invisible Dog from the ‘70s. Like the friggin’ Invisible Dog. Cut right down the middle. From schnout t’ tail, Ol’ Bobby was a perfect half a' dog.

One side of him looked like the dog he was – or at least, the dog he’d once been. But the other side of him looked like a science experiment. It was flat, it was transluscent, and it had no fur. I don’t think it even had bones. (Looking back, I realize it must’ve, but at the time, I couldn’t even see them.) The one side that was him was pretty. It was full. It was black, it was white, it was long-haired, and it was full. It was full of life. But the other side of him – the one that was damaged – was so damaged I couldn’t imagine how any dog would've been able to get along without all the stuff he was missing.

Aside from Jerry, I guess, I was the only other human who took to Bobby. Everyone else ignored him. I can’t say as I blame them, because during our time on the Lot, we all witnessed many a damaged animal. It was just part of being there. I mean, c’mon – there we were, living where the city had forgotten itself, and in so doing, allowed the desert to reclaim itself. There were plenty of wild creatures to contend with, mostly in the form of feral cats and pack dogs. But because Ol’ Bobby’d made the effort to introduce himself to me that night, I couldn’t help but wanna get to know him. So I got to know him. And in getting to know him, I came to name him. Yeah, I’m the one who named him. I’m the one who named him “Bobby McGee.” At first, no one asked me why. But as time passed – as he healed and grew back into the cute sheep-herding collie dog he’d been before his accident – people grew curious as to why I called him what I did. And when they asked, I told ‘em, “I call him Bobby McGee. ‘Cuz when he first showed up here – he had nothin’ left t’lose.”

Maybe that’s why he'd hobbled up to me that evening. Maybe he recognized that we had something in common. And y'know somethin'? He was right. Because on that particular evening, on that particular Lot, in that particular corner of the world, Me ‘n’ Bobby McGee – as the illustrious Miss Joplin herself would’ve attested, had she been there to witness us – were just about the free-est souls in the Southland.