A Forsley Feuilleton: He was eating my prose as the typewriter shit it out

William F. Buckley, the conservative writer from the right ruling class, owned a King Charles Spaniel named Rowley.  Eli Cash, the Western writer from the film, The Royal Tenenbaums, ran over a Beagle named Buckley.  Because the title character in that Wes Anderson film had a persona – insensitive, captivating, and slightly racist – similar to that of the writer named Buckley, I believe Anderson named the Beagle after the writer.  I also believe that he cast a Beagle in the role of Buckley rather than a King Charles Spaniel because film audiences don’t like seeing dogs die, but exceptions are made with Beagles since they’re more annoying than an unemployed roommate.

Does referencing Buckley, the conservative and slightly racist writer, make Anderson a supporter of the right ruling class? No it doesn’t: Anderson ended The Royal Tenenbaums with Cash murdering the Beagle named Buckley.  In your first viewing of the film, the murder may seem like an accident.  But if you pay attention, right before Cash uses his Austin-Healey 3000 to crush Buckley into the Tenenbaum House, he says, “Here I come,” proving that the murder was premeditated.

What did Cash have against Buckley the Beagle?  Many viewers of the film assume that he had nothing against the dog – that the murder was only a result of a Mescaline binge gone wrong.  The only binge gone wrong, though, is the inhalant binge that those viewers must have partaken in to come up with such an idiotic assumption.  Cash, whose literary career was starting to falter, murdered Buckley the Beagle for two reasons: one – the dog shared a name with a writer whose career never faltered, and – two – although a dog is a man’s best friend, it is a writer’s worst enemy.

I didn’t know a dog was a writer’s worst enemy until I read that Anderson modeled Cash off Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City. . . and childhood neighbor of Mama Forsley.  Among other interesting anecdotes, my Mama said, “The McInerenys had a habit of collecting dogs that would yap all day and night.”  My research indicates that the habit continued throughout McInereny’s life and was likely responsible for his other habit: snorting Cocaine.  Without the assistance of that expensive stimulant, I doubt he could have written, while his dogs assaulted his concentration, such a great debut novel.  But, like every trust-fund Williams College graduate I have ever met, McInereny eventually grew a tolerance to Cocaine, and his career never again reached the high that his first and best novel produced because his yapping dogs became his worst enemies.

If I had known that Anderson modeled Cash on McInerney and that Cash killed Buckley the Beagle because a dog is a writer’s worst enemy, I never would have brought home that flea-infested mutt I found roaming the factories of South San Francisco.  But, right before taking him home, I watched the SPCA commercial where Sarah McLachlan sings “Arms of an Angel” and my heart was bleeding. . . with the knowledge that many writers – more accomplished writers than I – owned dogs:  P.G. Wodehouse had a Dachshund named Jed. E.B. White had a West Highland Terrier named Susy. Robert Penn Warren had Cocker Spaniel named Frodo. Kurt Vonnegut had a Lhasa Apso named Pumpkin. Edward Albee had a Maltese named Poochi.  Stephen King had a Corgi named Marlowe. John Cheever had a Labrador Retriever named Flora. Dr. Seuss had an Irish Setter named Cluny.  Charles Dickens, at Gad’s Hill, had an entire colony of dogs – Newfoundlands, Saint Bernards, you name it. Stanislaw Lem had a German Shepard. Gertrud Stein had a Poodle.  Faulkner had Rat Terriers. Both Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad had Chihuahuas.  Franz Kafka, Eugene O’Neill, Jerome K Jerome, Blaise Cendrars – they all had dogs.  And I, Christopher Forsley, now had a flea infested mutt named Ren – alluding to the psychotic dog on The Ren & Stimpy Show and short for Renegade.

I thought Ren, in some unknown way, would improve my writing just as I thought all dogs improved the writing of their masters.  Dorothy Parker’s wit, I was convinced, was channeled through the intellect of her Poodles – C’est Tout, Cliché, and Poupée.  It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Anthony Burgess’s dog was just as horrifying and black as the scenes in A Clock Work Orange are.  I told myself that E.L. Doctorow’s prose is as fluid and fresh as the water in Gardiner’s Bay because of all the time he spent swimming there with Becky, his Weimaraner.  Donna Tartt’s incredibly ugly Pug, Pongo, must have inspired her to expose the human condition as an equally ugly ordeal in The Secret History.  If Amy Hempel’s Labrador Retriever, Wanita, was anything like the Labs I know, its constant begging for attention undoubtedly led to the author’s enchanting ‘minimalist’ style.  I bet J.K. Rowling’s retired racing champion of a Greyhound revealed to its owner how to race through novels without a thought and earn incredible amounts of money without a talent.  And Denis Johnson’s Bullmastiff, The Colonel, probably has a military mindset that demands the same kind of critical attention as its master’s short stories.

But I was wrong.  I made the mistake of trusting Arthur Schopenhauer, who said, “To anyone who needs lively entertainment for the purpose of banishing the dreariness of solitude, I recommend a dog, in whose moral and intellectual qualities he will almost always experience delight and satisfaction.”  Schopenhauer was an idiot.  He thought the human desire to write – or create anything for that matter – was futile, illogical, and purposeless.  And I’m an idiot for reading, studying, or trusting anything that pessimistic old German wrote.  Instead, I should have read, studied, and trusted the work of Joe Sacco, the cartoonist, who said that the dog “ranks next to the child as creativity’s greatest impediment.”

If I had listened to Sacco instead of Schopenhauer, this Forsley Feuilleton you are reading would be a lot better, or at least a lot less shitty.  Because of Ren, my dog, I had to rewrite it just before the deadline, leaving time for neither a proper revision nor a shit cleaning.  Actually, I had to rewrite it, from scratch, several times.

I finished the first draft in San Francisco’s Mission District on my laptop at a Café on 16^th & Valencia called Muddy Waters.  They serve really strong coffee that causes me to shit every hour.  While taking a shit in that cesspool of a bathroom I thought about Ren’s taking of shits – about how much time I’ll waste picking them up: a few minutes here, a few there, during every walk, and after every meal. . . add it up and that’s at least one great American novel, over the course of his fifteen year life span, that I won’t write.  When I returned from the bathroom, I found that Ren had chewed up my power adapter, causing my computer to shut down before I saved what I wrote.

I walked down the street, hoping, as William Styron said, the walk would simulate transactions in my head so when I sat down to rewrite everything I wouldn’t have to “face the first page of a cold blank paper with pitiful anxiety.”  But the only transactions the walk stimulated in my head were related to defensive tactics to use against the angry hipsters Ren humped and pissed on at every corner.  Then I bought a typewriter at an antique store called Viracocha, and, in emulation of McInereny – on stimulants more powerful than Muddy Waters’ coffee – I rewrote everything in a state of manic delight.  But those stimulants were so powerful and my focus was so intense that I didn’t realize Ren was eating my prose as the typewriter shit it out.

So another rewrite was required, and this time I did it, painstakingly, by hand. . . one letter at a time, one word after another.  I had a bag of Bacon Bits that I threw, one by one, into Ren’s open mouth every time he whined, which was between every word.  I quickly finished – both this piece and the bag of Bacon Bits – and was preparing to fax the papers to PANK for your reading pleasure when Ren came over and, encouraged by those Bacon Bits, shit on them.  I didn’t have it in me to do another rewrite and sent these shitty pages to PANK anyway. . . so forgive me for all the shit you had to read through in this Forsley Feuilleton.  I did what I could.

People who know about dogs, people who buy miniature sweaters and expensive pedicures for their canine companions, tell me that I could do more – that I could get Ren’s balls chopped off.  They say if I take his manhood, some of the problems he causes will cease: he’ll stop chewing on power adapters, stop humping and pissing on hipsters, and stop eating and shitting on my prose.  But I don’t have the money to take his manhood.  I spend all my money on Ren, that little bastard from a basket: flea protection for him to abuse, leashes for him to destroy, toys for him to choke on, bones to puke up, crates to piss in, dog food to shun, and human food to steal.  And any money I have left goes toward the horse tranquilizers I need to sleep through his all-night howls.

I’m eager to have his balls chopped off – for revenge more than anything else – but I don’t have the money that San Francisco’s sadomasochist veterinarians demand in order to perform their self-gratifying sexual act.  I don’t even have the money San Francisco’s left ruling class slumlords demand in order to keep a roof over my head.  The dollar-per-hundred words my SEO articles earn, the non-existent royalty checks my first book brings in, the ego points this PANK column gives me – they aren’t enough.  I have to write more, write better.  I guess this is why so many writers get dogs: financial desperation produces literary inspiration.