Realize her lack of social grace
Realize she’s in a different space
Mabel, The Juliana Hatfield Trio
My neighbor Kibbie and I talk now. Her dogs, my dog, I suppose, give us reason. Kibbie is 62. She’s told me more than once. My wife balls her fist, releases a pinkie vertical to describe Kibbie’s figure. Neighbors for years, I’ve recently been informed Kibbie likes the sound of licking butt. The Kibmeister told me herself in so many words. So many. Live and let live, I say, I’m no puckered up nincompoop. But still.
To be clear, I speak not of fondness for oral spelunking, the act, nor a proclivity for aural emanation of such — gentle, lapping sounds — but the interplay, the sounds of the words themselves, working together, rolling over tongue, extruding out mouth, paired, a braided corkscrew, like cinnamon-bun or tootsie-roll, but more versatile, reversible: lick-butt, butt-lick. Kibbie likes to sit pretzel-like on folded spindles, collapsed on sidewalk or lawn, and narrate anal play-by-play.
“Jack won’t stand for butt lick, but Tillie, she takes her butt lickin’ like a big girl, don’t you darlin’?” Kibbie’s eyes fix on me. I look past her down a long stretch of mildewed sidewalk. In the air, a wild tang. It’s just us. And our beasts.
Kibbie has two Yorkies. Jack is 14, yappy, walks well enough with tiny paws splayed ninety degrees, a four-legged Charlie Chaplin. Once, a young dad walking his 5-month-old shaggydoodle had pointed out Jack’s paws — look at his feet sweetie — to his pre-school daughter, an adorable kid I’d met a week earlier. She’d introduced her dog to my Gypsy, “hi Gypsy, this is Jenkins, my puppy, but my sisters and I, and my mom, and my dad, we all like to call Jenkins our real-life teddy bear.” Kibbie sized up the dad’s New Balances, bent to the tot and said, “Jack’s twice your age kid, give me a break, it’s called arthritis, an affliction your dad will get soon enough.”
A few weeks ago, school closed for a day after so many positive COVID cases. Per County protocol, a Phase Two shutdown. Or Phase Three? As transparent as the County claims its process, closings are impossible to anticipate. The weekly COVID report lists the number of positive tests by school, but shutdowns, while data-driven, are not based on numbers. If not numbers, what then? A feel? Wish I was trusted to grade by feel-osophy. Teachers are advised to take laptops home every day. You never know.
Mid-day, I see Kibbie and her dogs. Our leashes tangle.
“Tillie is in a mood,” Kibbie says. Not one single sniff, lick, or near-miss — not even a dog thought— goes unnoticed. “Look,” Kibbie points, time and again, Look, whenever Tillie passively allows, or prances to tease, or backs that ass up, practically begging for butt-lick. Tillie’s rheumy eyes give her a look of perpetual sadness, the seeping seems a metaphor, prompting Kibbie to leak too.
“Her wiggles, a tell, like poker,” Kibbie jiggles the leash, the shudder a transfer of pleasure. Seamy witness to public gratification, it mercifully lasts only so long. “What about Cheryl?” Kibbie asks.
“Sorry?”
“She got off today, too?”
I guess what’s happening, my neighbor is proud of her salty, farm-girl persona. Her way of saying she’d deliver a colt breach by moonlight in the barn with a pan of water in a night shirt. By refusing to anthropomorphize dog behavior, it’s her way of standing apart from the neighborhood Rover drivers, man’s best friend riding shotgun: groomed, neutered, ribboned companion, window down, nose up as they pass. No coy rejection of dirty animal for Miss Kibbie, no way, rather a warm, moist, slurpy embrace.
A dog sniff is an invasive greeting, request for ID, and physical exam rolled into one. Like being pulled over by a brassy cop and asked to say ahh before bending over.
Dogs can detect cancerous cells in situ, locally, before the spread. Prostate cancer is dog detectable. I am 55, to my wife’s dismay, yet to be checked by human tool.
Gypsy digs her nose past my waistband and detects a used tissue in my pocket. Researchers are testing whether dogs can smell the coronavirus.
I don’t know where Kibbie grew up. She cuts hair. I picture her station last to be swept, clippings strewn like hay. Freud’s theory of psychosexuality says anal fixations develop by degree of attention during potty training. Retentives — Marie Kondo, Johnny Weir, Tom Brady — follow the rules, bend to authority, tidy up, products of fastidious, observent potty trainers. Lax caretakers produce anal-expulsives: messy, attention-craving, norm-busting, anti-authoritatives. Think expulsives, think Facebook friends who rant on Facebook about switching to Parler but stay on Facebook. Think Tommy Lee, Donald Trump Jr., Whoopi Goldberg.
Back in April my wife had taken to calling me grandpa after I’d gone weeks unshaven. On our porch, Kibbie offered four times — in a pre-dog, hence brief, conversation — to lend me her clippers, nice enough offer, I suppose, if I hadn’t responded to every single entreaty with, I own my own clippers, but thanks.
I shaved later that day.
Kibbie is persistent, but more, it’s the sound for her, I think she keeps saying things, over and over — would you like my clippers, would you like a Kroger coupon, would you like your butt licked — because she likes playing it for the unexpected. Our dogs are BFFs now. Or, as Kibbie might say, BLFs.