Gotham Diary:
Emotional Support
16 October 2014
There’s nothing like a good laugh, and it was about time that The New Yorker prompted one. The magazine has been very dull lately, as if commandeered by morose young puritans in pursuit of a transcendental hip. At last, in this week’s issue, there is a page by Paul Rudnick, who can certainly be very funny, but also “funny” in the way that raises a strained smile: you long for the days when you (and only you?) thought that Libby Gelman-Waxner was the real-life wife of an orthodontist (wasn’t it?). It can’t be easy being Paul Rudnick; the prospect of satirizing a college-application letter must have inspired a search for very large barrels and very small handguns. There was one deathless crack, though, near the beginning.
Although, of course, as a biracial child, I wasn’t sure if higher education would even be an option for me. And, when I say biracial, I mean that my father went to Harvard and my mother attended Oberlin. When I was young, this situation tore me apart, because I never knew which world I belonged in. Should I follow my dad and become hugely successful and condescending to everyone, or should I dream of becoming every bit as creative yet talentless as my mom? I still don’t know the answer, but maybe not knowing is my greatest strength.
The Oberlin zinger caught my breath a tad more stringently than it might have done because of a friend who not only attended the school but got a degree: he used to refer to Oberlin as “a crypto-Maoist institution,” or words to that effect. But Rudnick captures the uneasy fact that one hears much more about Oberlin students than about Oberlin grads. It’s not that nobody graduates, but what do they do? Where is their distinctive mark upon American society? (In Brian Morton’s new book, Florence Gordon, Emily, the budding granddaughter, has put Oberlin behind her after little more than a year, and is looking for another school.) “Creative yet talentless” has an ouchy-sticky feel. I hope that my friend wasn’t stung by it. It’s one thing to make fun of one’s school, quite another to have Paul Rudnick single it out for a highly-intended shaft of invective.
Then there was Patricia Marx’s even funnier piece about Emotional Support Animals, which also made me think of my Oberlin friend, because the very idea (and then the reality!) of taking a turkey on the Hampton Jitney or strolling through the galleries of the Frick Collection with a tortoise clutched to one’s bosom is — I surmise — symptomatic, in his view, of the peculiar madness, or lack of judgment, that corrupts today’s fashion for personal development. Marx, every inch the agent provocateur, was astonished that so few New Yorkers were actually provoked. You had to applaud the lone maître d’ who refused to seat Marx when she was wearing a milk snake called Augustus.
“But it’s a companion animal,” I said. “It’s against the law not to let me in.”
“I understand,” he said. “But I need you to take that out.”
It is not, in fact, against the law to bar animal-toting individuals from restaurants — except, of course, in the case of service animals. Service animals, such as guide dogs for the blind, are highly-trained and well-disciplined aides. There are no service turkeys or service milk snakes or service pot-bellied pigs.
Marx mentions in passing that more American households have pets than have children, and that eighty-three percent of pet owners think of themselves as moms and dads vis-à-vis their non-human dependents. Here in New York, real-estate prices have been somewhat displaced in the competition for outlandish extravagance by the price of cancer treatment for cats and dogs. I like to joke that dogs have been breeding human beings for fifteen thousand years or more, but pet MRIs suggest that the experiment is in the hands of the sorcerer’s apprentice. I grew up with dogs — a fine-coated black lab with a touch of Weimeraner in her, especially — and I used to have no qualms about pets. Didn’t everybody have them? When we came to New York, I wanted a dog, but Kathleen doesn’t like dogs. I wanted a cat, but Kathleen said that a cat would have to be de-clawed, and that that was cruel. So, no pets for me.
Over time, the imagined fun that I would have playing with a pet was eclipsed by the imagined tedium of various but inescapable clean-up chores. And then the pet clinics began sprouting on Yorkville’s side streets. They looked only slightly more casual than real-people clinics — and only slightly less expensive. When I heard about the agony (for the owner!) of submitting a dog to a round of chemotherapy, I snapped.
No more pets, was the grim line that emerged from the smoke and the hulkification. No more pets in the city. That was years ago. The vogue, if that’s what it is, for emotional support animals is all the proof I need that people ought to have listened to me.
I understand that some people are lonely. But people who are lonely in a city of millions of other people have a problem that it is unfair to expect a dumb animal to fix.
The next time I give a big party, I must remember to note in the lower left-hand corner, “No Support Animals.” I don’t want a repeat of the unexpected shiba inu who took a discreet dump on the turkey carpet. We very nearly didn’t see it.
***
On Tuesday evening, after work, Ray Soleil came up to the apartment to help me empty out a closet. It took most of yesterday to process (throw away, mostly) the things that came out of the closet, but I now had room for clothes that were stored in a dresser that I wanted to get rid of. Empty, the dresser could be carted down to the room with the service elevator, where the handymen would deal with it in their fashion. The floor-space occupied by the dresser would be available for stacks of boxes of packed books. One thing was leading to another quite nicely.
But the dresser did not in fact go the way of the handymen. It went across the hall, into a neighbor’s apartment. We loved the dresser, which Kathleen bought for our country house, and were sorry about seeing it taken away to an unknown fate. At the last minute, we were spared that sorrow. The dresser has found a new and happy home. Of the five large pieces of furniture that we have decided to unload, it was the only one that we cared about. When I told Kathleen the good news — she is on a business trip at the moment — she cooed with delight.
And for the first time, the impending move seemed very real.