about a dog

I used to hang out at this coffeehouse in college that had an open mic night, and one time this woman told us she had written a poem about her cat, something you had to get out of the way according to her, everybody did it. Since I had written a lot of poetry at this point, I immediately felt the shooting pains of guilt, never having written about Jake, my cat. I was much more interested in writing about colors or using my words as weapons. Good times.

And all these years later, it occurs to me, I still havent written a poem about Jake, or for that matter my best girl the last 10 years, Kinka, my dog. The good news is I no longer write poetry, the bad news is, I'm going to write about Kinka, and I think it's gonna be kind of boring.

I got Kinka about a year after I moved back to New York in July of 1997. I had always wanted a dog, but truth be told, I also thought a dog would be great for picking up women, and I was right about that for a while. Unfortunately the crowd at the dog park has lost it's charm over the years.

Kinka was not my first choice, but the dog I liked, a cute black lab puppy, was gone when I went back to the pound. So, I trekked to the CACC in Harlem, a pound largely populated by big Pit Bull mixes, which were not my ideal dog. They did have a few cool dogs, and then they had Kinka, then known as Whitney, and with as charming an attitude as you would expect if you put Leona Helmsley in a cage. She had a deathwish and how they ever got her out of the cage, I'll never know. They tried to persuade me to take some dog with curly hair who was nice enough, but that dogs hair surely would have been as much a pain in the ass as my own jew fro, and I told the girl at the pound I wasn't interested even though this dog was thrilled with me. I told her I wanted to see the bitch that kept biting at us. Man, I never learn.

Eventually they did get her out of the cage and she was very shy but also very pretty and winsome and you could just see that she was only scared. She was about 6 months old and had a scar under her eye. They found her on the streets, she probably had a rough time of it. I gave her a chance and two days later I took her home. That night, I woke up in the middle of the night and she was sitting up next to the bed. I reached out to pet her and she took a chomp at me. Nice.