Dog Shit

I mailed a bag of shit to my landlords. I didn't want to do it. I felt I owed it to them. I was living with my younger brother and his new wife in this apartment complex, my own first marriage having just imploded a couple years prior, and I was working this late-night, boring, cubicle job, and I guess I needed a bit of excitement in my life.

The thing that happened, the property managers of this place, they started letting tenants have dogs in there. Now, I love dogs. But this just wasn't the place for them; especially not the way these tenants were letting their dogs shit all over the little communal grassy area right below my brother's apartment and not cleaning up after them. I had to walk across that grass to get up to the apartment after work. I got home late at night. I couldn't see the little landmines to avoid them. So I was always tracking in dogshit into my brother's apartment. He's a lot neater of a guy than I am. HE'd sure notice. And he did. The next day, I'd always catch hell. This made me feel like even more of a loser than just my marriage imploding, and even more of a loser than not knowing what the hell to do with my life other than work this boring-ass, night-shift, cubicle job.

So one Saturday after I'd just been yelled at by my little brother, I got the brilliant idea to mail some of that dogshit on over to the landlord people to let them know: Hey Folks? Dogs? Not a good idea. Not here. There's shit all over this lawn I gotta walk across.

I suppose I could have just called them--but what fun would that have been?

So early one Saturday morn, I dug through the kitchen trash and got out a used popsicle stick, I had a bunch of bubble-mailer envelopes from selling my gag cartoons out to magazines back then for a few extra bucks on the side, and I got one of those envelopes with me, and in my longjohns and slippers or whatever the hell I woke up out of bed wearing back in those days, and I walked on downstairs and out to that little patch of dogshat-upon grass, searching out some fresh, steamy coilers.

They weren't that hard to find, not when it was daylight out. I soon found a few, bent down, whipped out my trusty popsicle stick and scooped up some of that fresh, brown goodness into the envelope. I tamped it down in there good. Then I got some more. When I felt the heft of it grow to a meaty fullness in my hand, I tossed the stick in the outside trash bin over there--and I almost licked the damn thing closed before I caught myself and did a "Wait! What the hell am I doing?" So I went in and dabbed my finger under the kitchen faucet to close it, and I put a piece of tape over it just to make sure. I didn't want want that thing busting open in transit; I wanted that thing and its contents open and scattered all over the cubicle of some wage-slave, underling lackey over at that property management company. I wanted him or her to suffer. I wrote the property management company''s address on there, and for a return address I put a fake name--Jim and Betty Salisberry or whatever—and I made sure I gave just enough description to know that this envelope originated right from that little community, grassy knoll right there that they'd know about. And I mailed that sucker out, making sure the postage was adequate, and all the rest of that weekend and on that next Monday and Tuesday I felt so giddy in my outstanding cageyness and aplomb. Several times over the course of those four days I broke out in a sort of mirthful reverie and lost track of whatever it was I was doing, imagining what it would be like to be that guy at that cubicle to unwittingly open up that package and have that dog shit spill all over that desk of his, and who the heck poor bastard was gonna have to clean THAT up?

Come the very next Wednesday, when the landscaper-gardener guys or whatever came again, they did a real funny thing this time. They actually picked up the dogshit, too. From the Grassy Knoll. And from thereon out, they always did remember to pick up the dogshit before they left.

And so that was the first day ever that started me off to thinking that I was, after all, a genius. I had solved a big problem. Just like that. A unsolveable problem that was negatively effecting the lives of everybody in that community. No longer was I a loser whose marriage imploded, stuck in a dead-end job, stuck living with my younger brother and his new wife, stepping in dogshit after work each night, having him yell at me next morning. Thenceforth, I had made something of myself in life. I had really arrived.