Those of you who have read my first novel, Memoirs of a Bad Dog, may be wondering how a sequel is even possible. Well, my friends, Bogart has a lot to say. For my part, I'm always working on two or three projects at a time. The new Bogart book is almost finished--which is to say, the first draft is almost finished. Then there's editing, polishing, and preparation for press. But because I suffer from a condition called Impatience, I'm going to post the first chapter here. If you haven't read Memoirs of a Bad Dog, go out and purchase it right away, read it, and then come back. :)
CATASTROPHE
Chapter One
I escaped from heaven. There were way too many rules there, so I had to. Plus, you’re required to become a vegetarian. If I would have known that from the start, I would have walked out then and there. You couldn’t get a hamburger patty in heaven if you sold your soul for one—and there were days that I would have, trust me. Besides, I heard that if you broke even the tiniest rule, like Don’t Beat Up the Cats, for example, God would castigate you. I was able to avoid castigation before I got to heaven and I certainly didn’t want to have that procedure done while I lived there. I had a buddy get castigated on earth one time, and he had a lampshade around his neck and his belly shaved for days afterword.
My name is Bogart and I’m a basset hound. I have very long ears. If I had thumbs, I could tie them into a fleshy fur-bow under my chin. Imagine how dapper I’d look then. The ladies would be lining up for blocks to look at them. But I don’t have thumbs, and that didn’t get corrected when I got to heaven, so you can add that to my list of complaints.
All my life I wanted to be a good dog. I wanted to make it to heaven. I didn’t realize there would be so many things I couldn’t do when I got there or I wouldn’t have tried so hard. I couldn’t tell a lie, for instance. I tried it once and it came out all mumbly like a guinea pig. And I couldn’t hate anything or complain about the endless number of talking cats no matter how much I wanted to, because then I would have had to deal with the wrath of God and castigation and it just didn’t seem worth it.
Hopefully you never end up in heaven. I still have nightmares about it.
Busting out wasn’t easy. I couldn’t walk up to God and ask Him to open the gate. It would have seemed ungrateful, for one, but also, I didn’t know where to find Him. I think He lived on Seventh Avenue. But whenever I looked for Him there, I got mixed up at Fourth and had to start over at Ninth, and after so long of trying to decipher the complex mathematical formula called “counting”, I gave up.
So this is how I got out. One night, I was walking around on a golden pathway thinking about my troubles. My ears were swinging back and forth under my chin like they sometimes do when I’m in a good walking rhythm. Fields of clover were all around me. I could hear the song of a night bird and I could hear the whoosh of the breeze in the clover. (For all of its faults, heaven is quite beautiful). A crossroads was ahead of me and I went there. Under a road sign full of unreadable slashes was a large, black goat.
“Nice night,” I said to the goat.
“It really is.”
I looked around. “Is this Seventh Avenue?”
He shook his head. “No, Seventh is between Sixth and Eighth.”
“No kidding?” I said, astonished. “I never would have guessed that. I’ve been looking for it everywhere.”
“You’ll have to keep looking,” he said. “This isn’t it.”
I sat down. “I’m Bogart.”
“Mephistopheles.”
“Gesundheit,” I said. “You live here in one of these clover fields?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I’m not from heaven at all.”
“This is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live here.”
He smiled.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Hell,” he said.
“Really? Hell?”
“Yes,” he said.
I regarded him, noticing for the first time how black his fur actually was. It was like oil. The moonlight reflected off of it in shimmering bars. He had a Billy goat beard that curled up toward his mouth and two sharp horns sticking out of the top of his skull. His ears were long, but not as long as mine, and they hung down from the side of his head making him look both sad and thoughtful at the same time.
“Is it as hot as they say it is down there?”
“Oh, yes. It’s quite hot.”
“I bet you have a lot of fried chickens in hell.”
He didn’t reply.
My mind raced with possibilities: salami, bologna, turkey, pepperoni. I continued. “That’s why I was looking for Seventh Avenue. I was kind of hoping to ask God for a transfer. Maybe not all the way down to hell, but someplace I could get a fried chicken. Or a slice of bacon—I’m not picky. And I’m not talking about the bacon flavoring they put on the bones here. I mean the genuine article.”
“Bones?”
I nodded. “It’s weird, right? I mean, how can there be bones when there isn’t any death? I was telling Snowball just the other day—Snowball is my pet cat—that I think someone makes them in a celestial bone factory. Probably out of baked pudding or something, I don’t know.”
Again, the goat said nothing.
I licked my chops. “Truth is, I’d do almost anything to have real bacon again. Or sausage.”
Now the goat’s ears perked up. His eyes narrowed and I could see the yellow in them. “You’d do almost anything for sausage?”
“Have you ever tried sausage? It’s great.”
He nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“So, Melanomaknees—”
“It’s Mephistopheles.”
“—I’m curious. If you’re just visiting, you must know how to get in and out of this place.”
“I am aware of a secret entrance or two,” he said.
“Let’s say I wanted to go someplace where I could get a real sausage. How much would a ticket like that cost me?”
“How much would you be willing to pay?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I told him. “I’d be willing to pay quite a bit if I knew you could deliver. I haven’t had a sausage for at least eleventy-one years.”
“Hmm,” he said. “That is a long time.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Actually, there isn’t any sausage in hell. Strange as it seems, heaven and hell are similar in that regard. But I could send you back to earth for a while. You can have all of the sausage you want there.”
My heart skipped a little. My human lived on earth and I missed him more than anything else in the universe. I wanted to see him badly. “Are you serious?”
“I’m serious.”
“For, like, a month or a day or what?”
“How long would you like to stay?” he asked.
I have no concept of time despite my fondness for the moon phases. I wasn’t sure what to tell him. Finally, I said, “Six?”
“Six months?”
“No, six months doesn’t seem long enough. Let’s say days.”
“Six days?”
“Better make it three,” I said.
“Three days it is then.”
I know how to bargain—I’m no dummy.
“So, how does this work?” I asked. “Do I just hop up onto your back and we gallop out of here?”
“There are some formalities first,” he said. “We haven’t discussed a price.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I almost forgot. I don’t really have anything to pay you with. Unless you want to try one of those synthetic bones I was telling you about. I have a big pile behind my doghouse.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t one of those amused smiles like before when I told him that funny joke about visiting heaven. This smile had a little wicked behind it. For the first time, I started to feel some unease over what I was about to do.
“I’m not here looking for bones, Bogart. I’m shopping for souls.”
I lifted one of my paws and looked at the pads of my feet. “I don’t think they come off.”
“Not those kind of soles. I want you to join me in hell.”
Now that he’d laid it all out for me, stark and naked like that, it didn’t seem like such a good idea. I didn’t love heaven, but it had its perks. My parents lived here. So did my best friend, Snowball. “I’m not sure.”
“Oh, come now. Don’t you remember how a well-cooked sausage simmers on your tongue? All the subtleties of the flavor, the delectable aftertaste…”
“And there’s the gas,” I said, conceding his point.
“That’s right.”
“Would I get to visit my human, Swifty?”
“If you’d like.”
I cocked my head suspiciously. “You’re not going to drop me off in Guacamole, right? I don’t know how to speak Guacamolean and I don’t understand the culture at all. What’s more, my inner compass hardly works. I’d never be able to find my way to Swifty’s house from there.”
“You mean Guatemala?”
“No thank you, I don’t like avocados.”
The breeze died. For a moment, there was silence between us.
“I’ll send you back to Swifty’s neighborhood,” he said. “I promise.”
“And I get three full days?”
“Of course.”
I felt bad for all of the questions. “I’ve been taken advantage of in the past,” I explained, “so now I get all the information up front before closing any deal.”
“I understand,” he said.
“And what happens when my time is up?”
“You come with me.”
“To hell?”
He nodded.
“Can you give me some time to think this over?”
“Sure,” he said.
I weighed the pros against the cons. On the one paw, I would be able to see Swifty again. That alone was probably worth an eternity with the heater on. Plus, I had three days to eat real food. I wasn’t going to limit myself to just sausage, that was for sure.
On the other paw, I had never seen hell before. I was smart enough to know that if heaven had a downside, hell’s was probably steeper.
But then, back on the original paw again, I could stop by to see my girlfriend, Ginger. She was still on earth and a conjugal visit would be in order. Plus, our son, Duke, was down there. I never got to meet him before I died, though I did look in on him from time to time.
I’m not good at math, but even I could see that the pros outweighed the cons.
“Okay, it sounds like a good deal.”
His jaws had been moving side-to-side, grinding the whole time we were talking—chewing on some cud or whatever—and now he spat a wad of it onto the golden pathway in front of him. He smeared the cud out with his hoof until it was about the size of a piece of paper. Then he reached back behind one of his ears and removed a long, pointy thing.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He wedged the pointy thing into the crook of his hoof and used it to scrawl out several slashes onto the cuddy paper. “It’s a pen.”
“Like a pigpen or what? It’s awfully small. How do you even put the pigs in it?” I nosed in to get a closer look. “What are you doing with it?”
He stopped scribbling and looked up at me. “I’m writing out a contract. Give me a little room, please.”
I caught of whiff of the cuddy paper. It smelled like sulfur, poop, and vomit. The inside of his mouth must have been filthy. I backed away gladly. “What’s a contract?”
He returned to his scribbling. “It’s an agreement between two parties.”
“I see,” I said, and I saw. I waited for him to finish. It took him a long time. “Did you get the three days in there?”
“Yes.”
“And you got the sausage part?”
He pushed the cud toward me. “The sausage is up to you. I can’t tell you what to eat.”
I glanced at it. “What do you want me to do with that?”
“You need to sign it.”
“Sign it?”
“Just put your paw on it.”
“Oh, so you want me to step on it then.”
“Yes.”
I lifted my paw and let it hover there for a moment. “What if God finds out? I don’t want Him to know about this.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve done this countless times before. The thing about God is, He trusts you to do the right thing, Bogart. He won’t get in your way or even say a single thing about it.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m quite sure.”
“How do I know if it’s the right thing to do or not?”
“Think about how delicious sausage is. Would sausage lie to you?”
“You make a good point,” I said, pressing my paw into the cud.
The goat smiled.
In retrospect, making that deal with Methyleyesorepees wasn’t the best decision I’d ever made, but that was the strength of the goat. He wasn’t particularly clever, just well prepared. He studied me for my weakness and targeted it. Then he went to work on the offer. That was the sticking point. The offer. When all was said and done, I had given up my place in heaven for three days on earth and a sausage. I didn’t even say goodbye to Mom or Dad.
He bowed his head, offering me his back. “Climb on, Bogart. You’re in for a helluva ride.”
The cuddy contract disappeared in a puff of black smoke. I climbed onto the goat’s back, wrapping my paws around his neck. The skin beneath his coat was intensely hot. As we made our way out of heaven, I remember thinking: I hope that sausage is worth it.
CATASTROPHE
Chapter One
I escaped from heaven. There were way too many rules there, so I had to. Plus, you’re required to become a vegetarian. If I would have known that from the start, I would have walked out then and there. You couldn’t get a hamburger patty in heaven if you sold your soul for one—and there were days that I would have, trust me. Besides, I heard that if you broke even the tiniest rule, like Don’t Beat Up the Cats, for example, God would castigate you. I was able to avoid castigation before I got to heaven and I certainly didn’t want to have that procedure done while I lived there. I had a buddy get castigated on earth one time, and he had a lampshade around his neck and his belly shaved for days afterword.
My name is Bogart and I’m a basset hound. I have very long ears. If I had thumbs, I could tie them into a fleshy fur-bow under my chin. Imagine how dapper I’d look then. The ladies would be lining up for blocks to look at them. But I don’t have thumbs, and that didn’t get corrected when I got to heaven, so you can add that to my list of complaints.
All my life I wanted to be a good dog. I wanted to make it to heaven. I didn’t realize there would be so many things I couldn’t do when I got there or I wouldn’t have tried so hard. I couldn’t tell a lie, for instance. I tried it once and it came out all mumbly like a guinea pig. And I couldn’t hate anything or complain about the endless number of talking cats no matter how much I wanted to, because then I would have had to deal with the wrath of God and castigation and it just didn’t seem worth it.
Hopefully you never end up in heaven. I still have nightmares about it.
Busting out wasn’t easy. I couldn’t walk up to God and ask Him to open the gate. It would have seemed ungrateful, for one, but also, I didn’t know where to find Him. I think He lived on Seventh Avenue. But whenever I looked for Him there, I got mixed up at Fourth and had to start over at Ninth, and after so long of trying to decipher the complex mathematical formula called “counting”, I gave up.
So this is how I got out. One night, I was walking around on a golden pathway thinking about my troubles. My ears were swinging back and forth under my chin like they sometimes do when I’m in a good walking rhythm. Fields of clover were all around me. I could hear the song of a night bird and I could hear the whoosh of the breeze in the clover. (For all of its faults, heaven is quite beautiful). A crossroads was ahead of me and I went there. Under a road sign full of unreadable slashes was a large, black goat.
“Nice night,” I said to the goat.
“It really is.”
I looked around. “Is this Seventh Avenue?”
He shook his head. “No, Seventh is between Sixth and Eighth.”
“No kidding?” I said, astonished. “I never would have guessed that. I’ve been looking for it everywhere.”
“You’ll have to keep looking,” he said. “This isn’t it.”
I sat down. “I’m Bogart.”
“Mephistopheles.”
“Gesundheit,” I said. “You live here in one of these clover fields?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I’m not from heaven at all.”
“This is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live here.”
He smiled.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Hell,” he said.
“Really? Hell?”
“Yes,” he said.
I regarded him, noticing for the first time how black his fur actually was. It was like oil. The moonlight reflected off of it in shimmering bars. He had a Billy goat beard that curled up toward his mouth and two sharp horns sticking out of the top of his skull. His ears were long, but not as long as mine, and they hung down from the side of his head making him look both sad and thoughtful at the same time.
“Is it as hot as they say it is down there?”
“Oh, yes. It’s quite hot.”
“I bet you have a lot of fried chickens in hell.”
He didn’t reply.
My mind raced with possibilities: salami, bologna, turkey, pepperoni. I continued. “That’s why I was looking for Seventh Avenue. I was kind of hoping to ask God for a transfer. Maybe not all the way down to hell, but someplace I could get a fried chicken. Or a slice of bacon—I’m not picky. And I’m not talking about the bacon flavoring they put on the bones here. I mean the genuine article.”
“Bones?”
I nodded. “It’s weird, right? I mean, how can there be bones when there isn’t any death? I was telling Snowball just the other day—Snowball is my pet cat—that I think someone makes them in a celestial bone factory. Probably out of baked pudding or something, I don’t know.”
Again, the goat said nothing.
I licked my chops. “Truth is, I’d do almost anything to have real bacon again. Or sausage.”
Now the goat’s ears perked up. His eyes narrowed and I could see the yellow in them. “You’d do almost anything for sausage?”
“Have you ever tried sausage? It’s great.”
He nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“So, Melanomaknees—”
“It’s Mephistopheles.”
“—I’m curious. If you’re just visiting, you must know how to get in and out of this place.”
“I am aware of a secret entrance or two,” he said.
“Let’s say I wanted to go someplace where I could get a real sausage. How much would a ticket like that cost me?”
“How much would you be willing to pay?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I told him. “I’d be willing to pay quite a bit if I knew you could deliver. I haven’t had a sausage for at least eleventy-one years.”
“Hmm,” he said. “That is a long time.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Actually, there isn’t any sausage in hell. Strange as it seems, heaven and hell are similar in that regard. But I could send you back to earth for a while. You can have all of the sausage you want there.”
My heart skipped a little. My human lived on earth and I missed him more than anything else in the universe. I wanted to see him badly. “Are you serious?”
“I’m serious.”
“For, like, a month or a day or what?”
“How long would you like to stay?” he asked.
I have no concept of time despite my fondness for the moon phases. I wasn’t sure what to tell him. Finally, I said, “Six?”
“Six months?”
“No, six months doesn’t seem long enough. Let’s say days.”
“Six days?”
“Better make it three,” I said.
“Three days it is then.”
I know how to bargain—I’m no dummy.
“So, how does this work?” I asked. “Do I just hop up onto your back and we gallop out of here?”
“There are some formalities first,” he said. “We haven’t discussed a price.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I almost forgot. I don’t really have anything to pay you with. Unless you want to try one of those synthetic bones I was telling you about. I have a big pile behind my doghouse.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t one of those amused smiles like before when I told him that funny joke about visiting heaven. This smile had a little wicked behind it. For the first time, I started to feel some unease over what I was about to do.
“I’m not here looking for bones, Bogart. I’m shopping for souls.”
I lifted one of my paws and looked at the pads of my feet. “I don’t think they come off.”
“Not those kind of soles. I want you to join me in hell.”
Now that he’d laid it all out for me, stark and naked like that, it didn’t seem like such a good idea. I didn’t love heaven, but it had its perks. My parents lived here. So did my best friend, Snowball. “I’m not sure.”
“Oh, come now. Don’t you remember how a well-cooked sausage simmers on your tongue? All the subtleties of the flavor, the delectable aftertaste…”
“And there’s the gas,” I said, conceding his point.
“That’s right.”
“Would I get to visit my human, Swifty?”
“If you’d like.”
I cocked my head suspiciously. “You’re not going to drop me off in Guacamole, right? I don’t know how to speak Guacamolean and I don’t understand the culture at all. What’s more, my inner compass hardly works. I’d never be able to find my way to Swifty’s house from there.”
“You mean Guatemala?”
“No thank you, I don’t like avocados.”
The breeze died. For a moment, there was silence between us.
“I’ll send you back to Swifty’s neighborhood,” he said. “I promise.”
“And I get three full days?”
“Of course.”
I felt bad for all of the questions. “I’ve been taken advantage of in the past,” I explained, “so now I get all the information up front before closing any deal.”
“I understand,” he said.
“And what happens when my time is up?”
“You come with me.”
“To hell?”
He nodded.
“Can you give me some time to think this over?”
“Sure,” he said.
I weighed the pros against the cons. On the one paw, I would be able to see Swifty again. That alone was probably worth an eternity with the heater on. Plus, I had three days to eat real food. I wasn’t going to limit myself to just sausage, that was for sure.
On the other paw, I had never seen hell before. I was smart enough to know that if heaven had a downside, hell’s was probably steeper.
But then, back on the original paw again, I could stop by to see my girlfriend, Ginger. She was still on earth and a conjugal visit would be in order. Plus, our son, Duke, was down there. I never got to meet him before I died, though I did look in on him from time to time.
I’m not good at math, but even I could see that the pros outweighed the cons.
“Okay, it sounds like a good deal.”
His jaws had been moving side-to-side, grinding the whole time we were talking—chewing on some cud or whatever—and now he spat a wad of it onto the golden pathway in front of him. He smeared the cud out with his hoof until it was about the size of a piece of paper. Then he reached back behind one of his ears and removed a long, pointy thing.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He wedged the pointy thing into the crook of his hoof and used it to scrawl out several slashes onto the cuddy paper. “It’s a pen.”
“Like a pigpen or what? It’s awfully small. How do you even put the pigs in it?” I nosed in to get a closer look. “What are you doing with it?”
He stopped scribbling and looked up at me. “I’m writing out a contract. Give me a little room, please.”
I caught of whiff of the cuddy paper. It smelled like sulfur, poop, and vomit. The inside of his mouth must have been filthy. I backed away gladly. “What’s a contract?”
He returned to his scribbling. “It’s an agreement between two parties.”
“I see,” I said, and I saw. I waited for him to finish. It took him a long time. “Did you get the three days in there?”
“Yes.”
“And you got the sausage part?”
He pushed the cud toward me. “The sausage is up to you. I can’t tell you what to eat.”
I glanced at it. “What do you want me to do with that?”
“You need to sign it.”
“Sign it?”
“Just put your paw on it.”
“Oh, so you want me to step on it then.”
“Yes.”
I lifted my paw and let it hover there for a moment. “What if God finds out? I don’t want Him to know about this.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve done this countless times before. The thing about God is, He trusts you to do the right thing, Bogart. He won’t get in your way or even say a single thing about it.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m quite sure.”
“How do I know if it’s the right thing to do or not?”
“Think about how delicious sausage is. Would sausage lie to you?”
“You make a good point,” I said, pressing my paw into the cud.
The goat smiled.
In retrospect, making that deal with Methyleyesorepees wasn’t the best decision I’d ever made, but that was the strength of the goat. He wasn’t particularly clever, just well prepared. He studied me for my weakness and targeted it. Then he went to work on the offer. That was the sticking point. The offer. When all was said and done, I had given up my place in heaven for three days on earth and a sausage. I didn’t even say goodbye to Mom or Dad.
He bowed his head, offering me his back. “Climb on, Bogart. You’re in for a helluva ride.”
The cuddy contract disappeared in a puff of black smoke. I climbed onto the goat’s back, wrapping my paws around his neck. The skin beneath his coat was intensely hot. As we made our way out of heaven, I remember thinking: I hope that sausage is worth it.