Bull Mastiff

I was lying very still on my back in a junk-cluttered yard, breathing very carefully, expanding my abdomen instead of my rib cage. The mastiff standing on my chest made it difficult to keep up my air flow, and the pain from having been tackled had only begun. There were bruises on my chest from his paws, and on my back and legs from the large river rocks on which I'd landed. Fortunately for the mastiff, I had broken his lunge.

His maw was only inches from my face. A great frothy, glue-like beard of thick drool slowly oozed from his wide, rubbery lips. He wasn't quite growling, but kept showing his formidable teeth with a silent snarl that wrinkled his wide, wet snout. His breath was like a sugared bouquet of Alyssum flowers, except the opposite.

When this went down, I was a meter reader for a gas company in Los Angeles. I'd had extensive training on dog safety, the golden rule of which was: Never Risk Contact With Any Dog. Period. Well, okay. But this house had never had a dog before. The first time I'd approached the six-foot high wooden fence, I'd followed procedure and stood a foot away from it with my back to it while holding a rectangular mirror aloft and using it to scope the yard. There had never been, then or since, any sign of a canine.

Until this day. This day when I nonchalantly threw open the gate and stepped in trusting blindly in the universal continuum of status quo. I was three strides in when I saw the blur of fur to my right. I managed enough of a turn that I was facing the four-legged battering ram with teeth head on when he leaped and paw-punched me in the chest.

And then I was on the ground in a lot of pain, trying not to move, trying to breath. Mastiffs
were used by the Romans as dogs of war. They're between 26.5 and 30 inches tall and weigh anywhere from between 160 to 200 pounds. I'd put the one on my chest in the median range. A Roman soldier would have looked at my mastiff buddy and seen a carrion-making machine.

I looked into his eyes for just a second. That was the only time he growled, a basso profundo promissory note of bone-crushing bites to follow. He didn't like eye contact.

So, I employed a trick I'd learned from Al Pacino. I'd read about this technique in an interview. He was asked what he did to so believably seem blind as his character in the movie Scent of a Woman. He said he learned to focus completely on peripheral vision until he honestly didn't see anything in the normal scope of his sight funnel. I was an actor at the time and practiced all kinds of odd ticks and mannerisms in my spare time, just in case a role ever called for them. Playing blind, Pacino style, was one I'd mastered. I put on my best blind face...

And considered my options. Sudden movement wasn't one of them. And sudden loud noise was probably a bad idea, too. If I yelled for the owners, I could be pretty badly mauled before they got to me, if they were even home in the first place. We meter readers carried long, thin metal rods with a hook on one end and a square of leather riveted to the other. The leather was for excitable dogs unexpectedly and suddenly met. You were supposed to proffer the leather for them to chew on as a substitute for your flesh. I'd used it. It worked. But this "tool" was about six feet to my right, fumbled during the tackle and now unreachable.

I didn't want to hurt the dog. Or maybe I just resisted the desire to do exactly that. My father, while often citing his belief that he was a peacemaker, a gentle spirit, had taught me mainly how to punch, kick, bite, gouge, knee, elbow and claw my way out of any given bad situation. I knew how to break a dog's leg by the time I was ten. I had long ago begun to believe that I was fearless, but the fact was that I had developed a taste for fear; an adrenaline addiction. I knew how to channel fear to my own advantage. There was a small knife attached to my belt, inches from my right hand. Small, but the blade was razor sharp. If I detached it's clip from my belt smoothly with the first try, I could have the mastiff split up the center, from groin to sternum, in about one second.

(A lot of folks think this is testosterone at work. They're simplistic in their conclusion. And eluded. It's adrenaline. It's human. It's something called the flight or fight response that has kept us around as a species for countless years. And in West Virginia, where I'm from, I'd known many women who had stabbed abusive husbands to death because they were facing the threat of brutal damage, with their flight options removed from the equation.)

But like I said, I didn't want to hurt the dog. I just wanted to get away from him. I knew the fence was five or six feet behind me, that the gate had closed and latched after I'd entered. I knew I wasn't going to disembowel my attacker, and probably wouldn't break his leg.

I needed to relax and think. I began expanding my belly further taking longer and deeper breaths. I tried to remove my mind from the fear of the crisis at hand. Now maybe it was the strained breathing. Maybe it was some chemical released in my body for coping with pain and/or near-mutilation experiences. But I had a sort of vision.

I saw through, beyond, the large dog to the sky above. And as I watched, the heavens
darkened quickly, as though some all-powerful stage manager were dimming the lights before a stage play. And lo, as the sky grew black as the pupil of panther, four stars shone brightly in the middle of the firmament. And the four stars descended slowly, on a gentle arcing path, over the curve of the earth. And as they neared, each star began to assume the form of a person. Three were male, one female, and all were endowed with golden flares of passion, and searing eyes of truth. And while they were still too far off to be positively identified, they stayed their descent, blazed gloriously and a note of celestial music, in four-part harmony, vaulted from them across the face of the earth and beckoned with such urgency and might that every living thing bent toward their station in the heavens. Every tree, shrub, man, woman, child, guppy, and newt cocked their necks as though listening, enchanted.

And then the stars receded with the sudden return of daylight.

The mastiff was still on my chest. But in the vault of inner calm I found magic item. A forgotten possession of infinite influence over dogs of all sizes, at home and abroad. In my left pants pocket was a ziplock baggie containing a fat sandwich generously plumped with peanut butter.

I gingerly stuck two fingers in my left pocket and pried apart the ziplock. A second later, Mr. Mastiff's sniffer went into hyperspeed. For the first time since our abrupt introduction, he took his eyes off my face and cast about for the source of the scent. As he did, I drew the baggie out of my pocket and flung it to my left as far as I could. It bounced off the fence and landed in the ground on a pile of ashes and sand. Using my chest as a spring board, he pounced after the morsel, widening the radius of the paw shaped bruises and causing me to exhale with a sharp pang.

And as he jettisoned off me, the beard of gluey saliva plopped from his chin and splattered on my face. I swiped it off my eyes and walked backwards to my little tool. After I picked it up, never taking my eyes off the dog, I sidled toward the fence. The mastiff was chomping the sandwich, baggie and all. For the moment, I had ceased to exist. I let myself out.

Now this incident held a valuable lesson for me as a writer, whether of songs, of true accounts such as this, or any other work of fact or fiction. And the lesson was that the thing to write about will always come from within me. I never need grope about in the atmosphere for inspiration or material. A childhood of proverbial mastiffs waiting behind every fence, and of skies peppered with back-broken semi-saints and tainted angels would never fail to gift me with the stuff of story and song.