A man sits at a table, drinking water and chain-smoking. An audio cassette recorder is running.
See? I knew you were going to ask me that. First question I get, every time. It's like fifteen minutes. Hello? Andy Warhol? The "fifteen minutes of fame" guy?
Anyway, what old Andy never told us was that during your fifteen minutes, you have to answer the same goddamned questions over and over.
So I'll say it now, finally and for the record: to this day, I have no idea why I took that chihuahua.
So I guess I should start at the beginning. I was in New York for the first time in my life and I wanted to visit Ground Zero. I think that's pretty understandable. I mean, I don't think you're sitting there saying to yourself "shit, that's weird" or anything.
But let me tell you, it's eerie. It's like a graveyard and a carnival and a city all in the same place.
Anyway, who gives a shit, right? So, anyway, there I was and there's this big hole in the ground and I've never been there before so it seems perfectly normal. There are big holes in the ground all over the place, why not here?
Except, of course, you know that there isn't SUPPOSED to be a big hole in the ground here. There are supposed to be...well, you know what's supposed to be there.
So anyway, anyway, I started to feel dizzy, like when you stand up too fast? and so I go into this rest area and right away there's this really helpful girl and she hands me this chihuahua. And I'm holding this thing and its heart is racing a mile a minute and it's looking up at me with those buggy eyes and I lose it.
I don't really know how to describe the feeling, but it just seemed clear to me that either the towers needed to be there or I needed to not be there or the chihuahua needed to not be there.
So, by now the girl is catching on that something's weird and she's whispering into this microphone thing hidden in her sleeve and backing away from me slowly and I knew that no matter what happened next the chihuahua and I were in this thing together.
So I bolted. I just ran right out the door with this little six pound dog-rat thing under my arm and it's panicking and hyperventilating and pissing all over me and I didn't have a plan and I didn't know the area or where I was going.
So I just ran until I couldn't run anymore and I found myself sitting on this bench by the harbor and I could see the Statue of Liberty off in the distance and I had this animal and I don't know any better way to explain it except it made sense to me that a chihuahua could make the swim.
In retrospect, it probably wasn't reasonable to assume that he'd be able to survive very long in the near freezing water, or that he'd have any instinct to head for an island miles away from where he was thrown in, but those details didn't seem important then and they don't seem important now.
What is important is that I gave that animal the only chance at freedom he had in this life, and that's a pretty good feeling.
Posted by Jason at July 10, 2003 12:52 PM