Lou's Angel

I met Louis years ago, before I had fully moved to our new city and settled in. My dog Albee and I lived in a 15 room Victorian in the Highlands of Holyoke. We were renovating the behemoth of a home when, after an array of colorful roommates, we hung up our tool belts and gave the place back to the bank, whom we felt rightly should have it and it's 2000 dollar per month oil bills.

After moving here, it was clear that Albee would need a daycare program. Our nice, but paper thin walled apartment, was safe and comfortable, but it was not Albee friendly. He had been able to overcome his intense separation anxiety while we lived in Holyoke, but this was another matter entirely. With every step, outside our door, Albee growled, and with every knock on the door, he barked violently and loudly.

I worried about losing Albee for good and finding a day care for him was not easy. The local professionals charged 25 dollars a day and the care was not up to my strict standards. I interviewed a lot of wacky dog loving "would be" day caretakers but none made the grade. I was "Craigslisting" my way through Hamden County in hopes of finding a suitable situation, when Louis over heard me talking to a colleague about the problem. He offered to provide day sitting services for a fee significantly more affordable to me. I was not certain about Louis but decided to give the plan a chance.

Louis attended a social program in my office building, and we regularly met one another at the coffee machine, where he would show me his latest artistic creations. Lou is a dedicated crochet artist who makes wonderful hats and caps and doilies. He would make Rosie Grier blush with his needle work accomplishments. He is loud, garrulous and prone to the occasional "hissy" fit. A large man with a swarthy complexion, he wears ornate earrings and huge jewel encrusted rings that make me feel, most mornings, as if I am handing off Albee to a cardinal or bishop or some papal type who wears this type of adornment.

His make up has toned down quite a bit in the past two years, and it is less Adam Lambert and more Michael Jackson these days. A touch of eyeliner, a sweep of blush and only rarely a quick film of lip glaze and he is good to go. He likes to tease me that I should "try a little color" myself, a practice I have eschewed since moving here from the big city five years ago.

Lou is quite a snappy dresser and he loves colorful and splashy tropically inspired shirts unbuttoned low enough to reveal his many fine chains and crosses. He dresses in vacation wear even in the dead of winter, which makes me feel rather hopeful and happy on the coldest and dreariest of days. He and Albee usually take their morning nap from drop off time until around ten, and then have a day filled with too many activities to list.

It is rare that I remember that Lou is sick. Yes, I know his schedule of medical appointments and sometimes he calls me for rides here and there. Often we have gone to the CVS together at prescription filling time, and then I am acutely aware that Albee's Lou is very ill indeed.

I become unnerved on days when Lou does not answer my door bell ring. Some days I am frightened and other days just aggravated that he cannot wake up in time for "Albee drop off" and so that I can get to work on time.

One day a few months ago, I was banging on Lou's front door after several moments on the stoop. A much younger man answered the door and told me that Lou was not feeling so well and he would take Albee. I refused to pass off my dog and was headed back to my car, and a call out sick day from work, when my cell phone rang. It was Lou.

"Give Arby to Angel" he told me, "Angel will watch over him today". I trudged back to Lou's building where Angel was waiting and Angel did exactly what Lou assured me he would do. When it was time for "pick up" Angel was waiting for me and instructed "Arby" to "be a good boy for Mama". Albee did not look back and he was very quiet on the short trip home. Later that night, my phone rang, and I learned that Lou had been hospitalized for pneumonia. "All is well", Lou assured me, "Angel is taking care of Arby for the rest of the week". "I see you soon Baby" he told me and then he hung up the phone. The next morning I left Albee with Angel who was heard cooing up the stairs to the apartment, "Just you and me today Arby, just you and me".

Now I had just about had it with "the Virus" in the late 1970s. I had grown up in the comfortable confines of the School of the Hartford Ballet in the 60's and it was around then that I learned so many of the men I had danced with had succumbed to "the Virus". I had been working full time, as a waitress, while attending graduate school, in New York City, a mecca for gay waiters from around the world. Back then, there were few services and resources for those in the advanced stages of HIV. My "straight" friends and I were hopeless and helpless, and in agonizing pain as we sat by and watched our many gay friends die horrific and cruel deaths. We had one single hospital in New York City, back then, who welcomed AIDS patients and I had memorized every ceiling tile in that hospital waiting room, waiting. I had not listened to my very wise mother and followed her footsteps to nursing school, but somehow I learned how to change IVs, give baths, apply salve to wounds and wait. This was in the years before latex gloves and universal precautions.

I was still a practicing Catholic at that time and I attended Mass diligently. I begged God to take away this scourge and to make my many friends whole again. I cried, I screamed and I did my level best to hide how great my own very selfish losses. I was a new and young therapist and some days, I thought, I would not go into practice as I learned lessons of hate and bitterness and just how immensely callous the world can be. I raged at the injustice of it all and flailed in utter helplessness for month after month. Eventually I stopped attending Catholic Mass when one week the skewed and hate filled message toward homosexual men poured forth from the mouth of the Diocesan priest where I had worshiped for quite some time.

Back then, I vowed to myself that I would not ever make the mistake of caring so deeply for those so doomed. I did,however, make after midnight van rides with my good friends from the Geffen Center to hand out condoms to ladies of the evening in Hunts Point, and to Manhattan's many gay bath houses. My then husband thought my actions could not hurt, so why not? He knew he could not stop me.

I am pleased to report that Lou is doing better now. Angel has since moved into Lou's apartment and I noted recently that the stains on Albee's snout at the end of the day are much more Chef Boyardee than they were before Angel did move in. "Angel", I inquire, "Have you been feeding Albee Beefaroni again"?

"No, no. Miss Cathy, he just had a taste". I roll my eyes and bring Albee home who now spends a lot of time peering into our cabinets searching for cans with pictures of a man wearing a large chef hat.

Thanks to God who finally heard my prayers and sent Lou his Angel.