Farewell My Pooch

If you have a dog yourself, you likely knew Audrey by name. And if you happen to have an unfixed male dog, you know her for sure.

Even though she was altered by hysterectomy before her first heat and never knew the pleasures first hand, some things can’t be surgically removed.

She could pick up the scent of any non-neutered male canine from a block away. Then she would strain at the leash, forcing her otherwise well-trained but slow on the uptake and olfactory challenged companion to quicken his step in pursuit of quarry his limited faculties failed to perceive. Only when the object of her desire strutted around a corner did her human servant get the picture.

Some of her favorite boy toys, including a tawny pit bull from across the highway, and a black Chow named Apollo with a fearsome visage who was banned from community dog runs, were deemed too aggressive by some in the neighborhood and shunned.

“Keep back, he’ll eat her alive!” Apollo’s human warned at our first encounter, only to look on agape as Audrey charged his equally mystified Chow, danced in a circle, shook her booty in his face and then reared up on her hind legs and planted her forepaws on his back in a misguided, gender confused attempt to mount.

Apollo observed Audrey’s enthusiastic but futile mating ritual with regal indifference, which was a good sight better than the fang baring, fur flying violence the two humans bystanders envisioned.

Audrey turned 17 on May Day and she hadn’t seen Apollo around in a while. But her libido activated as always when she ran into her smaller, ever randy neighbor Oreo in Gateway last week.

So it came as a shock-unexpected despite her having reached an age, 119 dog years, when it should be anything but – that the end came suddenly on May 24, a Tuesday.

That was fitting in a way as Audrey, it is believed, is the last survivor of the dogs who lived in Gateway Plaza on Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001.

She had remained trapped in her apartment for two days and two nights because her human left her behind that morning, then was unable to return to the locked down neighborhood in the aftermath of the conflagration that engulfed it.

Audrey was rescued-thanks to the good graces of a rabbi from Hackensack in a HazMat suit who was able to cross the barricades at 5 a.m. on the 13th and reach Gateway; and of Angel the doorman who had stayed on alone in the darkened 400 building and allowed the rabbi entrance.

In the years since, all of Audrey’s boon companions from Gateway had passed.

Among them were:  Teddy, a happy cloud of white fur; Bosco, a black Cocker Spaniel who enjoyed the outdoors of his human’s terrace apartment, and invited Audrey to share it on sleepovers; Duke, a frisky Jack Russell who set the Gateway land speed record for ball chasing; Sammy, Audrey’s mixed terrier male replica and best bud (their ardor ceased, sadly, when Sammy was fixed); Silver, a Keeshond whose bright gray fur stood on end like a shocked cartoon cat; Beau, a bulldog named after the Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard; Lucy, a ladylike longhaired Dachshund; Claudius, a handsome German Shepherd; and Jimmy, another regal Chow mix who was also the object of Audrey’s undying affection and misplaced carnal desire.

Maybe you remember some of them, too.

All, like Audrey, leave heartbroken humans in their wake.  And the community they helped heal a little bit empty.