I miss my dog’s farts.
My dog died in my arms on Wednesday morning.
What I miss about her the most are her farts.
Dirt McGirt’s flatulence was rancid. It suggested at a minimum something rotting in her intestines, yet they were predictable, and, I might even say, comforting. Dirt McGirt’s farts were home to me.
I came to know her farts as a sommelier would fine wines.
“Ah, yes, this is a wonderful vintage. A base of Nature’s Balance canned dog food — wild boar and brown rice, I believe — layered with… hmmm, is that 5 day old lentil soup, from this morning’s trash? It’s got a strong nose, finished off with organic cat litter.”
On one particular trip to an apple orchard, she revelled in finding the most rotten, run over, worm-ridden fruit to gobble up. While we humans plucked the freshest fruit we could find from the trees, Dirt McGirt ate from the ground to her heart’s content.
It was on the 90 minute drive back that we realized the consequences of the dog’s afternoon of freedom.
What came out of her ass during that ride home was nothing short of the most impressively god-awful smells that didn’t come from actual corpses. Dozens of apples fermented in her belly in a matter of hours, and those gases came rushing out and would not stop. Lucifer himself couldn’t have opened a sulphur mine to match the product of Dirt’s intestines.
“WINDOWS!” I shouted from the back of the rented van the moment I smelled a stench billowing from Dirt. Our friends dutifully — necessarily — rushed to put down the windows before the noxious cloud reached up front. They were fast enough about half the time. The other half of the time there were cries, gasps, and groans.
Apples weren’t Dirt McGirt’s only guilty pleasure. Perhaps guilty isn’t the right word. Sure, she looked remorseful most times when she was caught pilfering the garbage. But she certainly wasn’t sorry about it.
An incomplete list of notable things Dirt McGirt ate:
- 100 Ikea tea light candles
- 100-count bottle of vitamins
- Most of a painting, stolen off a wall
- One shoe
- The first half of a signed copy of Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton’s book
- 5 pounds of kibble (she was found next to the near-empty container, panting on her side)
- 1/2 a pineapple (skin on, of course)
- Crock pot full of a pork roast
- 3 dead baby birds
- One 8" dead fish (perch, I think)
- Used condoms
- Fake dinosaur poop
- Fake owl poop
- Yodeling pickle (attempted)
- Boxes of crayons and colored pencils (the poop was what you would think)
- A metal takeout container (her one hospitalization for eating something, which of course was during Hurricane Irene)
- 1/2 tray of brownies
- 1/4 bottle of hydrogren peroxide immediately, and unsuccessfully, following the brownies
- 12 cans of Mountain Dew
- 18 cans of cat food, crushing the cans to open them
- Her own poop (countless times)
- Her own puke after throwing up after eating her own poop (countless times)
One day Dirt McGirt stole a banana off of the kitchen table and tried to walk away with it in her mouth like she didn’t just steal a whole fucking banana.
Another day she wanted to both eat cat poop and not get up from her bed. So she went to the electric litter box, unplugged it, dismantled the circuit board that controlled the box, dragged the whole thing across the room, took off the top, and feasted on cat poop from the comfort of her fucking bed.
When she was 5 or 6 years old I was taking her for an early morning walk down 5th Avenue in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. I wasn’t fully awake, so when the man walking towards me said only “baguette,” I wasn’t entirely clear what he meant.
“Baguette,” the guy said again. He pointed at Dirt McGirt.
The dog had, without me noticing, taken an entire baguette from a restaurant’s morning bakery delivery and was walking down Fifth Fucking Avenue with the whole thing in her mouth, both wildly proud of herself and so nervous that I would notice.
Despite all of the garbage that she ate, all of the raw chicken I fed her and the sweet potatoes I cooked for her and the 40-pound bags of dog food I carried home on the subway, I knew I could count on Dirt McGirt’s steady stream of farts.
They changed flavors day to day and year to year. But they never let up. Sometimes she would be surprised by them, and sometimes I wasn’t expecting one. But they were her farts, and I loved them.
Dirt McGirt, née Godiva, was mostly a chocolate lab, mixed with some German Shorthaired Pointer. A doggie DNA test said so, but Google Photos would sometimes show her pictures if you searched for the latter breed, so that’s probably just as good.
She was a birthday present from Lisa, my girlfriend at the time. I had just turned 23, was less than three weeks into living by myself for the first time, and by God I was going to exercise the fact I had a lease that said I could have a dog.
We went to the Washington Animal Rescue League. There was a small black dog, maybe about 40 pounds. She was probably some sort of a black lab and border collie mix. She was fine. If I got her, I was going to name her Onyx. I played with her in the little play room at the shelter and she was a good dog.
Then there was Godiva.
Godiva was an absolute fucking maniac.
The first time I approached the room where she stayed, she got up on her hind legs and stood against the half-door and just exploded with happiness and energy and love. So we took her to the play area out back. There was a dog run with a small fountain at one end.
Godiva went into the play area, picked up a tennis ball, ran straight into the fountain, jumped in, dropped the ball in the water, and proceeded to dig and splash up all the water that she could. It was absolutely the wrong impression to make on a prospective owner.
I was in love.
She was in my apartment one week later, and her new name was Dirt McGirt. I listened to a lot of Wu Tang then. That dog was never very much a Godiva anyway.
The only thing on planet Earth that could match the special place food held for Dirt McGirt was a tennis ball.
It was actually hard to get her to care about tennis balls at the dog park at first. She kept chasing other dogs or inviting them to chase her. I doggedly trained her to pay attention to me at the dog park, because this was obviously all about me, and the way to do that was to reward her with love and excitement as she played fetch. I wanted to recapture that first moment in the dog run.
I went a little too far, I think. Tennis balls became the center of her life.
Both times I lived in New York City we were walking distance from Prospect Park. It’s off-leash hours every day before 9am, so it is dog heaven — and there are two dog beaches. We went most days to play fetch. Nothing made either of us happier.
I knew it was bad when my parents called me and said Dirt McGirt wasn’t eating her food.
Since mid-February she was staying with my parents while Nicole and I live in Australia for six months. As my mom has said, living with my parents was the one constant in Dirt’s life. We lived together in seven different apartments, but always came back home to Buffalo. There’s a beautiful yard, lots of space to run and chase tennis balls, and, if you’re lucky, some deer poop to eat.
So when her breakfast went untouched, my parents brought her to the vet. Dirt McGirt had a kidney infection, and giardia, and, and, and. She’d been on prednisone, a steroid, for most of her life, in order to control unbearable itchiness. The steroids weakened her immune system finally, and this kidney infection and other ailments took hold.
It took days of hospital visits and IVs and nine medications, but she rebounded from the kidney infection, mostly. She at least started eating again.
The problem was she had to go off the prednisone so she wouldn’t be prone to that kind of infection again. As she did, the 11-year-old dog she was became unmasked from behind the steroids.
I knew she was getting old before. I knew she wasn’t the same dog who jumped into the fountain or who could run for hours playing fetch. But the arthritis raged without its steroidal mask.
She couldn’t climb a single stair on her own. My parents took turns sleeping on the couch downstairs. She started licking her paws incessantly as a way of trying to ease the pain, and could barely sit down on her own. The pain medications didn’t help.
My parents called me at 5:30am Melbourne time. They said it was probably time for me to come home. I was on a plane by 11:30 that morning.
Normally when you enter a house in which Dirt McGirt resides, you yell “DIRT MCGIRT!!!” and she comes running or spinning or strolling over to you.
I got to my parents’ house at midnight. I yelled her name, and nothing happened.
She was on her bed, and my mom had to help her stand up. I rubbed her ears and sat on the ground and petted her and imagined it wasn’t so bad. She was just tired, I thought.
The next day I took her to a creek. She always loved water, and I thought it would be good on her arthritis to swim. I had to use the ramp I sent to my parents from Amazon to have her walk into the back seat of the car.
Whenever Dirt McGirt got near water she just knew it. She’d run straight for it. It was no different that day. I just had to lead her down the ramp from the car before she could lumber to the water.
We played fetch in the creek. At first she stayed in the shallow part. A kayaker pulled up. Dirt McGirt dropped a tennis ball in the boat for her to throw.
I started throwing the ball into deeper water, and she swam her fat, achy body after the ball again and again. She was slow, but she was still Dirt McGirt.
I told myself that we would go back a couple times that week.
The next morning it became clear that the pain medicines were not working. You could see the pain in her eyes. She was hurting. It might’ve been excruciating. I said that it was time. I took my last photos of her.
My parents called the vet. We took Dirt McGirt on her last car ride.
I signed a form and checked a box for a private cremation with a cedar box for her ashes. Then we went into the room. The office had put on candles, dimmed the lights, and made what was about to happen as pleasant as they could.
I got down on the ground with her and petted her and told her she was a good girl and that I loved her very much and then the doctor put the needle into the catheter in her arm.
I cried and told Dirt I loved her and petted her head and her neck where she liked it the most.
Dirt McGirt let out a little breath, like a sigh.
“I think she’s still alive,” I said. “She just breathed.”
The doctor took out her stethoscope and listened for Dirt McGirt’s heart or lungs.
Nothing.
“It might’ve been gas,” the doctor said.
I took Dirt McGirt’s head out of my lap and put it between her paws. I leaned over her and sobbed into her fur and kissed the soft spot on her ears and told her I loved her and I would never ever forget her. And then I left.
I talked a lot about the things that Dirt ate and her farts and her tennis balls. But she was more than that. She was my daemon, a part of my soul.
I feel lost without her. She was my anchor, my heart, my constant. We spent 10 years together, nearly a third of my entire life. She was with me through deep depression, through relationships and breakups, through times when I had money to buy organic ground chickens from farmers in the basement of a Ukrainian church, to when I had to settle for the cheapest food the bodega had.
I’m talking about her food again. Such is Dirt McGirt.
It didn’t hit me that she was dead, really dead, until the next night. I dropped some rice on the floor and had to pick it up myself. There wouldn’t be any farts from scraps of Chinese food that night or the next night or ever again. She was gone.
I feel empty. I miss her more than anything. I know I’ll feel like this for a while. For now, it feels like part of my soul is gone and won’t ever come back.
I love you, Dirt McGirt. I hope doggie heaven has plenty of trash and tennis balls and maybe even a baguette. You deserve it.
