A Cautionary Tale
(Author’s Note: This story was set to appear in a post about something else entirely as an interlude. It did not match the tone or the feel of the piece, but I still liked it. I also didn’t wish to take away from the article with this, which is lighter and maybe just a touch mean. The moral of the story is that while true, you really shouldn’t give small dogs a lot of sugar.
Even if it is hilarious.)
From around nineteen eighty-seven till around right now, one of my closest friends remains my brother Scott. There are a lot of stories about us; just ask one of us. We could talk the balls off a brass monkey, as my sister used to say. And you would laugh.
One of my favorites is the story of Buster.
Buster was a very small dog. A silky terrier( although we would speculate over the years that the dog was nothing more than the physical manifestation of spite itself.) Like Pandora’s Box… if it barked and nipped at you for the sheer hell of it.
It was a cute dog but cute can only take you so far.
And Scott had been taken as far as he was willing to go.
The last straw had been a combination of Buster chewing up a few things of Scott’s. For example, his music book for The Eagles. Scott was a quite good guitarist, and he still loves the Eagles (despite referring to Don Henley as “The Man who Killed Rock and Roll.”) There were concert tickets (either for Def Leppard or Metallica) and back in those days, there were no digital copies to get into the venue. No screen shots, no QR codes, no anything. In fact, if you wanted to get tickets for anything, you had to find a ticket place (usually at the venue) or a company that sold overpriced tickets and then you had to wait in a line to a ticket booth in a mall. Finally, the proverbial straw that broke the Scott’s back was Buster chewing up about two hundred dollars in cash.
Scott did the most Scott thing ever, which was not unexpected. He looked at the little dog and exclaimed “What the fuck?”
Buster’s response was to growl.
Scott then kicked the little bastard literally out of his room and down the carpeted stairs.
Now, when I say “kick,” I mean Scott scooped him out of the room with his foot. And when I say “down the stairs,” It wasn’t all of them. Buster didn’t make it all the way down (from what I remember) but little Sir Bites-a Lot caught the drift and ran down the rest of the stairs. No cries of “YIPE YIPE YIPE.” He just went down stairs.
Scott never forgot this, nor did he forgive it.
He told his mother Carol, who hemmed and hawed and informed Scott that if he’d just taken care of things, put away the tickets and the other things, Buster would have never gotten into them to chew them up. The idea was never that Buster was a dog “just doing what dogs do.” And of course, kicking the dog would never endear himself to the dog, or soothe Carol’s anger.
One morning, Scott and I were hanging out in his parent’s house. For breakfast, the choice was made to have Froot Loops and root beer.
That was not a mistake.
In a long form video, Paul Stanley from the band Kiss had mentioned how to stay fit, and always ate breakfast.
“It doesn’t matter what time you wake up,” he said. “That’s breakfast.”
For reference, the interview this came from was on a VHS “Mockumentary” called KISS: Exposed. (Actually, KISS: eX-posed. Marketing, kids. Marketing.)
During this section, Paul grabs a box of cereal, loads it with nuts and berries, all the while with a lovely female model standing by. The interviewer asks if he ever eats meat for breakfast. Paul answers smiling, gently holding the model’s face “Only if it’s fresh.”
I digress.
Paul reveals the secret ingredient which to the shock of everyone is root beer.
And man, it did not disappoint! It is very tasty and absolutely recommend a one-time try. We ate the cereal and had a lot of leftover root beer, now loaded with extra refined sugar. Rather than drink it ourselves, we decided in a moment of genius (or cruelty) to see what would happen if we gave the root beer to Buster.
Buster lapped up this evil (albeit delicious) concoction in under a minute if not less. What happened next was impressive. Little did we know that it was about to get a shitload more impressive. Both Scott and I can attest to the fact that there was an almost audible SNAP when Buster began to run at full speed in a circle around the first floor of the house. And I mean FULL SPEED. We laughed hard for a solid ten minutes while this little bastard tried to break the sound barrier. Which meant he wasn’t trying to bite us and that was a good thing.
After the sugar in his tiny system had burned off, the dog stopped right in front of his little cage and passed out. This caused us to laugh even more.
Buster, fast asleep, was placed gently (honestly) into his cage to snore away the rest of the day, little leg kicks here and there. And, with that, we grabbed our multiple cigarette packs and left.
Ah, teenagers…
Years later, Scott’s parents are divorced. We tell this story to his dad Marv, who is laughing hard at the exploits of his ex-wife’s pet with tears in his eyes said in the voice of a little boy,
“I hated that dog.”
Buster managed to live a relatively long life after this incident and according to Scott, the dog never bothered him again. Perhaps all was considered even between them. Who can say for sure?
Some time later, Carol’s beloved Buster finally pushed his luck too far and destroyed a rather expensive Oriental rug. I was further informed that Marv, in his wisdom and well before the divorce, had opted to give Buster away to a home that had no previous history.
There were no arguments, no tears and no more Buster.
Scott’s sister Elissa summed it up in the best way while I was researching this story.
“We all really hated that dog.”
(Thanks to Scott, Shannon, Elissa and Kristina for the background research in this piece.)
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