Dogs Playing Poker (Or, a brief digression about dogs, memory prostheses, and white trash art)

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My wife and I share our home with two dogs.

Moxie and Cooper.

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Both were rescues. All of our dogs over the years have been rescues. Not because we’re cheap, mind you. No, not at all, because we’ve spent a small fortune on our pets. Moxie had to have surgery on both of her rear legs when she was still little more than a puppy. Something about her knees popping out of joint because of problems with her tendons, or some other technobabble reason not covered by insurance.

Not by my insurance, I should add. I understand you can buy pet insurance these days, but I’m not sure what it covers.

Within the past year, Moxie’s had additional surgery on her left rear leg for a different issue. Of course, the surgery was made more complicated because of the previous surgery. Anyway, she’s mostly better now, although she grew spoiled by the steps we carted around the house to help her get up on various pieces of furniture she shouldn’t be getting up on. She now believes she needs the steps, after stubbornly refusing to use them early on.

Moxie is a chihuahua mix, possibly with some terrier in the blend.

Cooper hasn’t cost us nearly as much money yet. Our veterinarian listed him as a “beagle mix” on his paperwork, but I don’t see it. He has some of the same coloration as a German Shepherd or Rottweiler, but some hound fleshiness around his jowls and, when he’s angry, some of the pit bull “warpaint” in the wrinkles of his face. We had him dewormed and neutered after we inherited him from our dog groomer, who discovered him abandoned and wounded in the trailer park near her shop. When we got him, he was quite skinny and was vomiting a lot. He would slink away to our backyard, dig a hole, throw up in it and then bury it, which I thought was considerate. According to our vet, he had broken one of his rear legs in the distant past and it had healed a little crooked. He said he could re-break and re-set it, but recommended against it, since it didn’t seem to bother him. So, he just has a slightly crooked leg.

Cooper was a street dog when we got him. He liked people but didn’t trust them. Since we accepted him into our home, he’s filled out and grown accustomed to being loved. There are still a few trust issues. I once had to strike him over the head with a dinner plate because he had our neighbor’s cat in his mouth and was about to chomp down with some finality. He has since forgiven me, because I’m obviously too stupid to know that cats are the spawn of Satan, an opinion punctuated by the tiny, crisscrossed scars on his nose and muzzle. He had tangled with a cat or two on the streets, it seems. He still steers clear of me if I have a dinner plate in my hands.

He’s probably middle aged now, but still has a lot of puppy in him. He likes to play with his toys, and he occasionally steals things from us that catch his eye. You can’t leave ink pens or washcloths around where he can reach them. And he’s eaten about three whole sticks of butter, I think. He doesn’t play fetch. You can throw a ball or a stick all day, and he refuses to retrieve them. He does, however, love sticks and frequently drags them into the house through the doggie flap in our back door. He’s a complicated animal.

Like any dog lover, I could talk all day about my pets. Past and present. There have been many. If I’m lucky, there will be many more in my future. Every time I welcome a new dog into my house, I always say to myself, “Will this be the one that outlives me?”

I know, it’s a morbid thought. But an honest one. As much as I hate having to say goodbye to a furry friend—and the grief is as real for a pet as for a human—I also want to outlive my dogs. I want to live. That’s why I don’t get a turtle as a pet. Well, that and salmonella.

But this isn’t a blog devoted to stories about my pets. I’ve read plenty of those, and I find them heartwarming and enjoyable. My love for my dogs is a facet of my personality, so it will creep into my work occasionally, but it’s never really been my focus.

No, this post was inspired by something else. Something dog-adjacent, certainly.

Sharon and I were in the living room. I had just finished watching the last episode of Firefly, for probably the third or fourth time. Great series, only a single season. You should watch it if you haven’t. Cooper was lying on the couch, something we discouraged for a long time but seem to have given up on in recent years. Maybe we’re ready for a new couch.

I said something to Cooper, using his name. His position on the couch did not change. He did begin to wag his tail at the sound of his name, his ears swiveled on his head so that he wouldn’t miss any of his favorite words, such as “treat,” “ride,” or “go.”

I made the comment to my wife that Cooper would not be a very good poker player. Because he has a tail.

Then I laughed at my own inadvertent joke, which is annoying when someone else does it but somehow seems okay when I do it.

“That’s funny,” I said, unnecessarily. The laughter communicated that rather effectively. My laughter, I’ll add, because my wife wasn’t laughing.

“Is that an original thought?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, and my wife must have understood this because she ignored me. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before. ‘Tail’ instead of ‘Tell.’ Is it possible that I just created a new joke?”

“Doubtful,” Sharon muttered, not quite under her breath.

“I need to look it up,” I said, getting up from my recliner and heading into the office.

That’s become a habit that I’ve developed over the past twenty years. My memory is no longer as clear and trustworthy as it once was. Sometimes, hearkening back to my days writing database programs in college, I can use associations to summon up names and facts from memory. The information is still all there. The retrieval process is somewhat broken now. If you can’t relate to this yet, know that you may one day.

For instance, this morning I had trouble remembering the name of the lead guitarist for Metallica.

My wife and I were listening to music dutifully played for us by Alexa, and I was pissing and moaning about David Foster ruining Chicago for me when he removed all the horns from their songs. We were listening to “25 or 6 to 4” as I complained. Prior to that, we listened to “New Soul” by Yael Naïm and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” by Bob Dylan and “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac. I was on a tear about horn sections in songs, in case you’re wondering what all these songs have in common.

This led organically to our trip to New York City way back in October of 2011. It was a birthday trip for me, and we got to see a taping of Late Show with David Letterman while we were there. I still smoked in those days. In fact, it was during this trip that I convinced myself to quit. To quit again, I should add. I paid ten dollars for a pack of cigarettes in an NYC bodega, and then had trouble finding a place where it was legal to smoke them. I didn’t quit right away, but once I made up my mind to do it I did it. This time it took. I haven’t smoked in about a decade now. Sure, it was killing me as well, however slowly, but it was the money thing that convinced me to quit. I no longer have the physical craving of addition, but I still miss smoking every day. Sad but true.

Speaking of “Sad But True,” I was talking about Metallica, wasn’t I? This train is often derailed, but it finds its way back to the track eventually. Be patient.

New York City. October 14, 2011. I know this because it was recorded for television and this information is right there on IMDb. Also, Letterman stopped making the show just four years later and then let his beard grow to Rip Van Winkle length. Dave’s guests that night were comedians Eddie Brill and Artie Lange. His musical guests were the band Beirut, whom I had never heard of before that time. They were playing horns, as I recall.

That’s why the trip came up in conversation. We were playing songs with a lot of horns in them. And I was complaining about producer David Foster, who I don’t like at all.

Anyway, my rant about Foster led to another memory. It seemed that the lead guitarist for Metallica, whose name I was having trouble recalling, was miffed after recording one album because he didn’t get to include guitar solos on it. I think it was the album St. Anger. You know, the one that sounds like Lars Ulrich is playing Hills Bros. coffee cans instead of his drum kit. I was associating the guitarist’s dissatisfaction with my own with David Foster’s hatred of horn sections and love of wimpy, successful pop music.

During this stream-of-consciousness rant, I could recall the names James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, but not the name of the lead guitarist.

That’s not why I went to the computer. But it is an example of reasons I most frequently use Google or Bing or whatever. The internet has become a prothesis for my brain. I believe this to be true. Maybe there are studies being conducted about this as I type these words. Remember how they used to forbid us to use calculators in school because we’d become too dependent upon them? How we used to have to memorize the times table and show all our work? Our teachers weren’t wrong. We do become dependent upon machines and technology. Because my memory isn’t what it once was, I’ve become too dependent upon Google searches.

I remembered Kirk Hammett’s name the old-fashioned way, however. I try to keep those mental muscles limber. I couldn’t access the information with a head-on attack, so I worked those associations. I went back in my memory, remembering how Dave Mustaine, who was kicked out of Metallica for his typical rockstar antics, complained how the band’s new lead guitarist was stealing his solos lick for lick. Suddenly, the name Kirk Hammett emerged from the murky swamp of my mind. The information was there, I just had to dig for it.

And, yeah, I remembered Dave Mustaine’s name without problem, too. Memory’s a funny thing. Don’t cry too much for Mustaine, because he went on to create the band Megadeth and has had a successful career.

This morning, I was making a beeline for the computer to check the provenance of a joke I thought I may have created.

Using Google, I typed the following:

My dog is a bad poker player because he has a tail.

I discovered plenty of examples pointing out that a dog’s wagging tail would give them away during poker, but none of it in joke form. Not even in a long list of dad jokes. Although it seems doubtful, it could be that I am the first person ever to craft a bad joke using the homonyms “tail” and “tell.”

Probably not, but I could be. Until I find out otherwise, I’m claiming ownership of the joke, so make sure you give me credit if you repeat it.

I’m looking at you, Steve Harvey.

I’ll forget about it at some point after I post this, of course. The past is the only reliable predictor of the future.

My attention span, as you may have noticed, is notoriously short. James Joyce’s Ulysses was too linear for me. I’m easily distracted by shiny things and calliope music.

My Google search resulted in several pictures of dogs playing poker, like the one at the beginning of this post. This led to another past association, as you may have already figured out.

My Aunt Doris, my father’s sister, and her husband, my Uncle Curly, had a print, on velvet, of the picture at the head of this article, hanging on the wall of their trailer, which sat in the side yard of my grandmother’s house until they purchased their own house on the corner across the street. Dogs playing poker.

I remember being enthralled by the artwork. The picture made me smile, because I’ve always loved dogs and the image was whimsical. Dogs playing poker.

Over the years, I’ve seen this image many times on television and in movies. Or one very similar to it. Usually as a sight gag. The implication seems to be that this is an example of lowbrow artwork, with the velvet version being the tackiest one, hands down. Set decorators like to have it hanging on a wall behind characters considered to be uncouth, poor, or “white trash.” I come from a long line of white trash, so this may be an accurate depiction.

My internet spelunking this morning gave me additional information about the painting.

The picture above was painted in 1903 by C.M. “Cash” Coolidge, and its title is actually A Friend in Need. You see the bulldog passing an ace to his buddy under the table, don’t you? It was one of sixteen paintings commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to sell cigars. The original painting, Poker Game, had been painted by Coolidge in 1894.

Yes, the paintings are kitschy or schlocky or whatever synonyms for “lowbrow” or “white trash” the art critics are using. And, yes, even though I did see A Friend in Need as one of the paintings being moved on the album cover of Rush’s Moving Pictures, I did first see the picture in a relative’s mobile home parked on my grandmother’s lawn, which is probably the most white-trash sentence you’ve ever read.

I still like the image, though. Sharon and I just talked about ordering a print for the office. Maybe not on velvet, but that’s not out of the realm of possibility. I’m not a fancy person. I’m not a snob. I just like what I like.

By the way, in 2005, the originals of A Bold Bluff and Waterloo, two of the Coolidge paintings in the Brown & Bigelow series, sold as a pair in auction for $590, 400. In 2015, the original Poker Game sold for $658,000.

Not bad for white trash art.

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