Live Fast Die Hot (24 page)

I was asleep in my bed, my body still throbbing from being cut in half like a magician's assistant days prior, when suddenly the entire room started shaking. The framed painting above my head swung back and forth on the wall; the unread baby books on my nightstand came crashing down beside me.

“Oh my God! We're having an earthquake! Save the dogs!” I screamed.

I dug through my sheets and scooped up Gina and Teets, hoping Harry was already dead under a fallen dresser.

“Jenny! We have a fucking baby!” Jason sprang from the bed and charged downstairs to check on Sid. By the time I flipped on the lights and stumbled after him, the series of mild tremors had passed. As had my days of giving a shit about my dogs.

Having a dog and then having a baby is like falling in love with someone new while still living with your ex. No matter how hard you try to convince the people around you that it isn't weird,
it is.
People told me that things would change when I had my son, that my dogs wouldn't hold the same place in my life. I considered those people animal haters who didn't cry at the movie
Blackfish.
To think that I could ever prioritize somebody over Teets was fucking preposterous. I was twenty-one years old when I got Teets—barely old enough to take care of myself—and yet somehow, together, the two of us survived. He flew with me all over the country, only taking breaks to refuel on Starbucks breakfast sandwiches and cappuccino foam. He walked me down the aisle at my wedding. He was there when I broke up with my long-term boyfriend, Lance (whose wife isn't secure enough to let me control his life still). He was there when I stopped being anorexic and when I started again and when I finally stopped for good. I sobbed into his fur when I didn't get the
One Tree Hill
pilot, when I didn't get the
Mad Men
pilot, when I didn't get the
Suits
pilot, and when I didn't get the waitressing gig at Maggiano's. (They said that my three weeks of experience as a barista at the Coffee Bean made me more hostess material.) Teets and I were partners in crime. I'd been spooning his matted beige dreadlocks my entire adult life. He wasn't a dog to me. He was a classy fucking gentleman in a fur suit. He raised me as much as I raised him. He taught me how to love, or at least taught me how to love someone who never criticizes and offers only unconditional adoration.

After having Sid, as I was being wheeled into postop, I'd weepily confessed to the attending nurses that Teets was on his way to visit me. Jason had insisted that if we were going to smuggle Teets into the hospital to meet Sid, it had to be covert, but in my doped-up state, under the influence of adrenaline, estrogen, and Dilaudid, it slipped my mind. I was sure they would understand where I was coming from. Teets was my other half. He had to be there to take pictures with Sid and sleep in his Isolette. My pupils were more dilated than my uterus ever had been as I rambled on and on about the bond between a woman and her dog. The nurses seemed to think I was delirious and, luckily, didn't take my ramblings seriously.

When Teets arrived as planned, he popped out of my mom's purse the way Sid was supposed to pop out of my vagina. Confused and decked out in the doggy scrubs I'd purchased online weeks earlier, Teets was lifted up onto the bed to meet Sid. Jason rushed to lock the door, as if we'd just pulled out a gram of celebratory heroin. Sid was busy trying to siphon the first drops of creamy, yellowish colostrum out of my nipples when a cold nose touched his squishy head. Startled, he threw his hands up in the air, decking Teets in the face. I pushed Teets away, trying to soothe Sid.

Teets looked up at me, shocked. He cocked his head to the side, taking in my topless body and the tiny naked man sucking my tits. It was the ultimate betrayal. Sure, he'd seen other tiny naked men sucking my tits before, but I'd never let it stop me from scratching his head or braiding his hair while it happened. And Sid wasn't trying to prove anything to Teets or anyone else. His only game plan was to suck my nipple until it literally detached from my body. Then maybe poop.

It had been a long day. My mom was going to take Teets home that night, leaving Sid, Jason, and me at the hospital to recover. I kissed him goodbye, satisfied that we'd been able to share such a special moment, but Teets still felt snubbed. He refused to make eye contact, jumping into my mom's purse and disappearing.

Three months later, in what he claims is a total coincidence, he was diagnosed with nasal cancer.

Jason and I were in New York, about to go live on Sirius with Jenny McCarthy, when the oncologist called me back with the results. Teets had been having trouble breathing out of one nostril for a few weeks, but I assumed it was just seasonal allergies. Apart from his hay fever and a bee sting when he was two, Teets had always been the epitome of health. Just before Sid arrived, we threw a Bark Mitzvah to ring in his thirteenth birthday. The idea of him not living long enough to see his
quinceañera
devastated me. Jason and Jenny held me in the studio as I sobbed. Teets was my best friend. I didn't know myself without him. I wasn't @jennyandteets without him.

Gathering myself, I appraised Jenny McCarthy as she sat back down in her swivel chair, adjusting her microphone. Could she be my new Teets? Touching the back of her long platinum hair with my hand, I whispered the handle @jennyandjenny just to hear how it sounded and instantly burst back into tears. The fact was, there was no replacing Teets. He had been my life when I had no other life.

Teets's death would mark the end of an era—an era when I was reckless and could wear cutoffs that barely covered my ass. I had other obligations now, an ass to cover, a child to raise, but still, it didn't seem right that Teets had to die, or that I should ever have to own a pair of Bermuda shorts. I'd always figured one day, when the time came, Teets and I would fall asleep gracefully on a bed of Egyptian cotton and never wake up. We'd probably be buried in the same tomb, pharaoh-style, eternally resting side by side in matching mummification Spanx. Or maybe we'd be like Sean Connery in
First Knight,
sent to sea on a giant funeral pyre, then torched by a series of flaming arrows. Either way, we would be together. We were never supposed to
not
be together.

I returned to L.A. and turned my focus to my dying sidekick.

“Unless he is a complete outlier, my guess is you have six months,” the vet said, brutally honest.

I couldn't swallow, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't even remember what I was craving for lunch. Teets looked at me with a look that said, “Remember the movie
Terms of Endearment
? Well, this is going to be ten times worse.” The vet suggested radiation with the caveat that it would just be palliative, but I shook my head, refusing to draw out his death sentence.

“No, I don't want to have him suffer. I won't do that to him. I wouldn't want him to do it to me.” My voice shook.

“Well, it's not painful. It's just a laser we zap him with. We put him under light anesthesia and he wakes up having no idea what happened. Just think about it. We aren't in a rush.” With that, she took Teets's chart and left the room.

“She said we aren't in any rush except for the fact that we are in a big fucking rush because he's DYING!” I screamed into my Bluetooth as I drove back from Venice Beach to the house to meet up with Jason.

“Baby? Are you driving? You don't sound like you should be driving.”

“I probably shouldn't because
I CAN'T EVEN SEE OUT OF MY EYES
,” I cried.

“Jenny! Are you serious?”

“Who cares, Jason! We are all going to die anyway. What's the point of anything?”

Even at my most nihilistic, I knew what the point was: Sid. As hard as it was going to be, I was going to have to let Teets go. I pulled over to the side of the road and waited to calm down. Teets nestled into my arms, happier than I'd seen him since I'd given birth. Maybe he
had
been this happy post-Sid, but if so I hadn't taken it in. I barely noticed when his water bowl was empty. Our relationship had changed. As much as I promised myself I wasn't going to turn into one of those assholes who cast off their dog as soon as they have a kid, that is exactly what I'd done. And as terrible as it was to say: I loved Sid more. I had to hide it from Teets, because it would break his heart. But I knew I was going to lose him. In a strange way, I already had.

We got out of the car and sat in a nearby park. We reminisced about the past: our first apartment together in L.A., our first kiss, our first fight…Like all breakups, you don't just lose that person, you also lose the
you
that you were when you were with them. I was nostalgic for the past because the past felt simpler, less painful, less complicated. I mean, it obviously
wasn't.
I was an anorexic, unemployed actress who spent her days driving aimlessly around Los Angeles with a ten-pound poodle for a boyfriend. But with the distance of time, we're able to make even our darkest hours seem romantic. Those days had already been cataloged in an archive in my brain labeled
Carefree times better than the moment I'm currently in.

After discussing it with Jason at dinner, I decided I had to try the radiation.

“Who cares if it doesn't give him more time, at least he'll be comfortable,” I said. Jason watched as I fed Teets a porterhouse steak off my plate at Wolfgang's.

“Really, is this necessary?” Jason looked around, waiting for somebody else to object so he didn't have to.

“I'm feeding him whatever he wants. He's gonna be dead by the end of summer, so until then, he's living it up!” I was loud and indignant, eager for someone to confront me just so I could shame him for insulting a cancer victim.

I did whatever I could to spend time with him. I invested in a double stroller so he could ride alongside Sid on our afternoon walks. Whenever I left the house to do errands, Teets came with. On the rare occasion that I was forced to leave him behind, he'd widen his eyes and I'd start hearing Sarah McLachlan's “Angel
.”

Riddled with guilt, it got harder and harder for me to do anything without him. He accompanied me to business meetings, bridal showers, bikini waxings. I even got his blood work done so he'd be able to travel with us to Tahiti in the fall. And if he died before that, well, I figured it would be a great place to spread his ashes.

As I looked more closely, I realized I'd gotten myself into one of those relationships that my husband had always found himself in (before me, obviously), my white knight complex beginning to infringe upon my own happiness. It wasn't that I didn't
want
to be around Teets twenty-four/seven, it was that I had a baby to tend to and Teets was monopolizing too much of my time. I knew I should be focusing my attention on Sid, but I accepted the situation because I also knew it was temporary. Or so I thought.

Several weeks after his radiation treatment, Teets started to change. His breathing was back to normal, as was his appetite. He was running around, humping things, and barking into thin air. My fragile, glassy-eyed ex-boyfriend had turned into a cocky, arrogant, cancer-beating Lance Armstrong. With every day that passed his sense of entitlement grew. He started bossing me around the house, furiously scratching the door to Sid's nursery if I tried to lock him out. I couldn't make a move without him all over me. He wanted to know who I was talking to, where I was going, what I was eating. Then every so often, just to underscore his dominance, he'd lift his leg and empty his bladder all over Sid.

“Yeah, I just don't understand. I thought you said he'd be dead soon,” I said to the vet, two days before I was supposed to leave for Tahiti. It had been just over six months and Teets's health hadn't stopped improving. “Not that I'm disappointed or anything…It's just, I planned for him to be dead by now, you know?”