Cuckoo: the tale of Mike the Rock.

mike the rock was built like a fire hydrant: short, wide, and stocky enough to withstand a car’s impact. with shaggy white curls and bright blue eyes, he had a slightly crazed look about him, but he was mostly a mellow old deadhead. in fact, he was so stable upon first impression, generally speaking, you might swear he was gettin over on the government. however, he spent intermittent, intense periods of time truly earning his cuckoo check. during those times, he had a tendency to disappear, suddenly, without telling his friends. in the grips of his inner demons, he would run off in a “state”; a different man. that mike would wantonly steal things, scream and yell, smash things, tear things apart, beat people up, god knows what else—mike would just go out on the rampage until somebody stopped him, which, apparently, was not easy to do.
since these were solitary episodes of madness, we could only ever speculate as to what truly may have taken place, either from mike’s storytellin, (later, upon his quick return, if we were lucky) or from his prolonged absence(at which time we just assumed he was either in jail or, more likely, the looney bin, again. he always got out eventually, one way or another—how, remains a mystery to all but mike the rock.)
that is why it was so hard for mike to remain in subsidised housing. he would get a place, keep it for a few happy months of homemaking, get all settled in, and then suddenly go bats again. disappear, get locked down someplace for a few months, get out, thumb a ride back to Home Sweet Home, and find it occupied by a new tenant. his belongings would be long-picked-thru by either neighbors, landlords, or his “long-term-guests”, not that there was anything good there, anyhow.
then, he would get desperate, sleep outside, drink cheap whiskey with me(I had that youthful liver, and so could drink him under a dumpster with a liter of old thompson. yum, caramel coloring.) and end up goin batty again before you could say “cuckoo”. which he probably did. at least, after homelessness, getting locked up was no big thing. three hots, a cot, a toothbrush to sharpen, showershoes, dope, prison bitches, you name it, man. all the comforts of indoor livin.
but that wasn’t the Rock I saw. nope, the mike I knew was rough-but-gentle, friendly, and jovial all the time, always lookin for a semi-honest way to make a buck. we walked thru allston together, putting fliers in every pissed-off yuppie’s doorway, windshield, ass, you name it. yep, we plastered the place with ads. for what, i never payed much attention, but it wasn’t blatantly illegal at the time. and walking around outside gettin happy was something we both liked to do. he would tell me his old hippie stories. I’d tell him my young-hippie stories. that was a nice way to spend a summer day.
mike had a place for awhile in brockton, in a neighborhood that would not be more obviously infested with crack, if it had had a neon sign with an arrow above it, flashing “the drug dealers are IN”. brockton is a lovely city. mike raised nary an eyebrow with his guitarpicking antics and oddball guests. in fact, he received such a warm reception, a young puerto rican neighbor gave mike a pitbull puppy as a welcoming present. perhaps he anticipated a future customer in mike the rock. the kid was probably right.
mike loved that pup. his name, appropriately, was Cuckoo. he grew into a very sturdy specimen of dogliness in no time; full of energy, a doggy smile constantly plastered on his goofy, brown-white-and-pink face, tongue perpetually lolling out the side of his mouth. cuckoo loved people, belly rubs, children, even other animals. he was everything a pitbull is rumored not to be, and loving it, as stubborn as they come. and boy, was that dog solid. like a miniature mike in all respects, was cuckoo—boisterous, gregarious, a little bit odd, and generally the friendliest pain in the ass one could ask for. I liked them both. they were good for eachother, I figured.
in brockton, mike had a porch on his secondfloor crib, overlooking a shopping-carriage parking-lot of a vacant lot and several other dilapidated multiunits with similarly old, grey, and rotting shingles covering their outer walls. it was like old-hippie heaven, with a nice chair for him, a few milkcrates in case of guests, and a pot dealer right next door. mike and cuckoo were sittin pretty, living off of cheap steaks and government-issue canned goods, in their personal prepaid palace. there was nothing nice in the apartment to wreck, and no neighbors who would object to anything up to and likely including a dead body in the hallway, were one to appear.
check day was a veritable holiday in that place.
we visited mike one time out there, while his friend Matty was living with him. matty had been given The Boot by his longtime girlfriend/possible wife whose name was never spoken, and he was bummed out. matty was a pathetic specimen of personhood, when we got out to brockton. long brownish/greyish hair bedraggled, face puffy, clothes unchanged since god-knows-when, matty looked to be the champion of moping, as he lay sprawled on the “guest mattress” in mike’s back room. he barely spoke, and his brown eyes were very bloodshot. we didn’t ask him how he was doing. he didn’t volunteer.
mike and cuckoo more than made up for matty, however. cuckoo was pleased as punch to have new visitors to beg pets from, wiggling and waggling all over and slobbering big puddles of drool onto the decades-old formerly-red-and-brown linoleum covering the kitchen floor. he nosed us pleadingly, then tossed himself into my lap, all forty or so pounds of him, panting stinky hot dogbreath in my face and making sad-puppy eyes. a bit forward, but charming nonetheless. we smoked a bone and laughed at little cuckoo’s antics, then got the munchies and fried up some big hunks of meat. yum. pot makes things taste much more edible than they really are, I suspect.
mike and phil both are experts at chewing the proverbial fat, so after a bit of THC, nobody could get a word in edgewise, as the stories flew. even mattie graced us with his presence a bit, although he remained silent. the males all began working on the case of meister brau we had picked up at the (conveniently-situated) packie on the way over. I began swilling my pint of old thompson, not being a beer person—too slow for me.
mike was clearly taken with his happy little dog. he told us all about him the whole evening. we, in turn, told him our rabbit stories. my favorite has always been how, one time, our fifteen-pound White Rabbit (aka Grace Slick) hopped into our apartment (we had a backdoor and yard, and the bathroom doubled as the back-entryway), sneaked into our living quarters, and made off with a half-ounce of weed, still bagged, from the pocket of a sleeping Arthur. we only guess this is what happened, but there was plenty of incriminating evidence to support the theory: Arthur still asleep, an empty baggie in the backyard, and two tripped-out rabbits at their food bowl, chowing. Arthur didn’t appreciate the humor of this at the time, but he came around, after re-upping and smoking another few bowls with us.
cuckoo had a beer habit himself, as we found out. he liked to tip unattended cans with his nose and lick the resulting spillage off the floor. what a dog.
as evening fell, we sat on mike’s backporch and played guitar, sang songs, generally had a nice time. mattie retreated to his small cave of gloom and sulking. after that, we slept the night there, leaving the next day.
wish that was the end of the story, but it isn’t.
about two months later, the doorbell rang(as it did many times a day, every day). when we went to see who it was, it was Mattie, eyes still bloodshot, hair still tangled, wearing what looked to be the same outfit he had been wearing at our last encounter, holding a leash. at the business end of the leash waggled cuckoo. he had gained about fifteen pounds of height and muscle since our last meeting. the same could not be said for Mattie. he mumbled something tersely about mike the rock being in jail someplace, and held out the leash. phil and I were not used to people just showing up as far as the doorstep, but mattie looked to be in a hurry, and we were more than happy to hold cuckoo for mike if he were incarcerated. we liked cuckoo alright, and I was willing to hold the leash. dogfood is cheap. we invited mattie in, but he declined, and slunk off on his way, to wherever that may have been. cuckoo was ecstatic. he could hardly wait to sniff every bum in the basement(and every bum’s bum—he was a dogly dog.).cuckoo made himself at home right away, knocking over phil’s 40-ounce of colt 45 and slurping it up off our filth-caked, grey, trash-score oriental rug. phil was not amused, but I was.
as the days turned to weeks, cuckoo came to be our pet. he went everywhere with me, and we loved him. he was great for buying crack with—nobody dares rip off a girl walking a 60-pound pitbull. people offered me insane amounts of money for sweet little cuckoo. one gangsta-clothes-wearing crack-dealer broke out a wad of twenty dollar bills, counted off two thousand bucks, and said it was mine on the spot for cuckoo, but I was not even tempted. for one thing, he belonged to mike. for another, i knew everybody eyed cuckoo as a fighting dog, and that would have broken my heart. cuckoo was so sweet, he even liked our bunnies. he once broke off of the leash just to go play with a group of small children diagonally across copley square from where we sat. phil went chasing after him, and when he caught up, cuckoo gave him the “sad-puppy” look, but went willingly.
there wasn’t any way that I would sell that pup into a lonely life of pain. he was a real good dog.
then, one day, mattie showed up at our door again, looking about the same. I was beginning to wonder if his hangdog appearance had anything to do with the loss of his ladyfriend. this time, mattie had this young puerto rican kid waiting behind him, arms folded. mattie said that mike was getting out, and that he wanted to get cuckoo back for his return. he had been keeping the apartment warm for mike, apparently.
we were a bit flustered—something didn’t seem right, but we didn’t figure it out until after we had given cuckoo over to mattie. who was that kid, and why was mattie in such poor shape? we had other things to worry about, and cuckoo really was in need of more space than we had, anyhow. phil seemed to trust mattie, so I wasn’t about to get too particular about it.
that’s how poor, sweet cuckoo got sold into doggie-slavery for the price of one lousy bag of dope.
when mike finally got out of jail, he had lost his apartment to mattie’s habit, so he spent a few nights with us, crying and yelling over the shittiness of the world, raging about mattie’s disregard for his puppy, for his friendship. he disappeared soon after, probably off on another run of madness, and that’s the last I have seen of mike the rock.