Guitar Wolf

It was last summer when I found her.
I was going to get a coffee at this place on Bull Street right next to a dog park. The heat had come already, but it wasn’t yet the wet, suffocating, thick, thick burning of late July and August.
I’d only experienced one summer in the South and I’d quickly learned that it was something you survived—a test of endurance and stamina. Just walking from my apartment to the car I’d be drenched and sticky with sweat. The sun beat down mercilessly. The air constricted your lungs.
I moved to Savannah after getting outta my last rehab. I fell in love with a girl who went to school down there, so I scrounged up the money for a Greyhound ticket and rode the bus for four days across the desolate, ugly, flat, flat highways of the central United States. I was broke, starving, exhausted. Actually, all I had to eat the whole time was a package of peanut M&Ms. I was skinny, skinny and dirty and wild. I’d been sober only three months. My last detox, off meth, heroin, cocaine, Xanax, and an opiate blocker called Suboxone, was absolutely the most wrenching, terrible, painful thing I’d ever experienced. My body was pulsing with tiny seizures as an electrical storm ragged through my brain. My stomach was a lake of burning oil fires and I didn’t sleep for nearly two weeks. I mean, no sleep at all.
The process of getting clean was long and raw and emotional. I was a mess and the habits I’d picked up on the streets were nearly as hard to kick as the drugs—stealing, lying, scanning the curb as I walked for fallen change, or cigarettes, or maybe a purse, or something.
There was a time when some family friends had tried to help me get sober, taking me from being homeless in San Francisco to their spacious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
I’d already become too feral and crazy.
I stole from them.
So coming to the South, I was determined to do things differently. I moved in with my girlfriend and got a job at her school. I started working on my book again, a memoir about my addiction and my struggles growing up. I’d been sober nearly a year.
And that’s when I found her, or, uh, you know, she found me.
I was walking into get a coffee. It was summer, like I said, but not yet so hot that I couldn’t stand it.
A woman called out to me.
It took me a minute to figure it out, but, yeah, she was calling to me.
Her voice was all raspy like she’d smoked too many cigarettes, or, after looking at her, too much pot.
She was probably in her late fifties, with tangled grey hair and a sack dress covering her heavy, sagging body. She had beaded necklaces hanging down and round Janis Joplin sunglasses. She was bent low, her arms wrapped around a shivering dog.
“Hey,” she yelled. “Hey, kid, can you come help me?”
I walked over.
The dog was super skinny—it’s ribs sticking out—it’s nipples swollen and hanging down. It trembled, trembled, trembled as I came closer.
It looked maybe like a beagle, but with long legs and big, bugged, wide open terrified eyes.
“I just found her,” the woman said. “She was running out to Victory. I don’t know what to do with her. She doesn’t have any tags or anything.”
“Okay,” I said, crouching down low to the dog and rubbing it’s ears encouragingly. She felt almost wet with grease and I could see fleas the size of sunflower seeds scattering down around her head. “Maybe we should take her to a shelter.”
“Yeah,” the woman answered back. “Do you have a car?”
“Uh, huh.”
“You don’t mind taking her?”
“Well, uh, I guess not. No, of course.”
I grabbed the dog by her neck and tried to led her forward to my car. That was no good. She wouldn’t move. Eventually, I just picked her up and carried her shivering against me. As soon as she got inside, she climbed behind the passenger seat and curled up in a ball on the floor. I drove off, my heart beating fast—wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.
At the shelter they agreed to check her out and put her up for adoption if I was willing to foster the dog until they could find her a permanent family. I had two cats at home, not to mention my girlfriend, but I figured they’d all be okay with it. They said she was a hound dog mix, maybe Walker and Fox Hound. They thought she might be pregnant.
When they led the dog by a rope leash into the back, well, that was when the problems really started. A vet tech with a needle went to give her a shot. The dog’s eyes went glossy, staring unblinkingly at her. And then the dog lunged, lip curled back, teeth out, barking, snarling, growling—ready to tear the vet apart in order to defend herself. I grabbed the rope and pulled the dog back and told her, “No!” and for some reason she didn’t bite me, but instead took shelter behind my legs.
And so the people at the shelter told me to have her killed. They wouldn’t work with her and said that my only option was to drop her off at Animal Control.
I walked her outside. She was uncomfortable on the leash and kept stopping and tucking her tail between her legs. As I led her back to my car, scared she might turn on me at any second, I suddenly noticed she’d been scouring the ground and had picked up a Snicker’s wrapper. She was chewing on it frantically.
I took a breath.
I put my hand up next to her mouth and grabbed the wrapper. She didn’t growl at me. She just looked up with those sad, sad blood shot eyes.
She was feral—wild—homeless, like I’d been. She wanted help, she just didn’t know how to accept it.
I bent down next to her and she hesitantly licked my cheek.
Fuck, I thought.
I got her back in the car. I wasn’t going to Animal Control. I drove her home.
She spent the first few days outside in our little back yard, huddled beneath a covering of bushes. We managed to get her a bath and out to another vet, though she had to be muzzled so she wouldn’t go after anyone there.
I wanted to name her Guitar Wolf, of course, but my girlfriend wouldn’t go for that, so she picked out Ramona and we put Guitar Wolf in the middle and then Jackson at the end, ‘cause that’s the best last name ever.
And so Ramona Guitar Wolf Jackson became our dog.
She was bad. I mean, so totally bad. She chewed up our house, ran away, jumped on people, lunged at all large men and anyone whoever tried to bum a cigarette off me.
She woke me up early and in the middle of the night and I had to walk her all the time.
Actually, it was really our walking together that made me fall in love with Ramona. Teaching her to trust, to understand that the world didn’t need to feel so threatening any more.
I cared for her, like all those people had cared for me—taught me how to live and really participate in life again.
So we’ve just walked and walked around Savannah.
Ramona and me…or, I.
Eventually, she’s learned to play off leash, with other dogs, in the stretching out parks.
I gave her another chance, you know, and now she follows me everywhere.
This is my penance and one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever known.
So when Ramona gets scared and comes cowering up next to me, I rub her ears and tell her to hold on.
‘Cause that’s the same thing I tell myself.
Just to hold on.
Hold on.
It’s gonna be alright.
I know it will.
And that’s the truth.