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By Root 290 0

dumb enough to nurse a rock and roll fantasy, I was also smart enough not to expect it to come true. But about a year after we got Ella The Dog, the band reached a turning point and the pipe dream became real. When I quit my job to start touring, Amanda couldn’t have been more supportive; all we wanted for each other was happiness, and happiness, I was pretty sure, meant living on truck stop food and spending twelve hours a day in an un-air-conditioned 1986 Dodge conversion van, elbow-to-elbow with three other sweaty fools who share the delusion.

The constant touring caused another shift in my relationship. Amanda and I went from real teammates to imaginary ones. She was sleeping in our bed and going to her job and feeding our dog, and I was sleeping on strangers’ floors and getting paid in beer tickets. While the folks around me, unburdened by monogamy, were engaging in what is generally expected of rock musicians—stumbling from city to city blotting out the previous night’s memory with a new girl and a dozen more Pabsts—I prided myself on pining. I had emotional ballast in the maelstrom, a home team to believe in, a woman and a dog to miss. For months on end, our lives only intersected for the few exhausted minutes of our nightly phone call—it was about as exciting, and only slightly less sexual, than a romance between hospice patients—but still we soldiered on, loyal and determined and dedicated. We lasted this way for nearly two years.

But one day I came home to Chicago after an especially long string of shows, and it all came crashing down. Ella The Dog and I were throwing tennis balls and terrorizing ducks in Humboldt Park—which has surely become a thousand-acre lot for some palatial Starbucks by now, but was still knee-deep in immigrants and corpses at the time—when I realized that Ella was more important to me than Amanda. They had both come to stand for the same things: duty and loyalty and warmth and support, but to experience them with the dog was tangible; it required contact. It meant being there with her, and I loved it. I loved the sticks and Frisbees and contempt for animals smaller than herself. I loved the howling and hula hoop jumping and the careful inspection of particularly impressive stacks of feces. By contrast, Amanda and I had ripened our relationship past recognition, from practice to theory, until it had morphed into a purely symbolic belief in each other, something we didn’t even need real contact to sustain. We had lost whatever it is that differentiates romantic love from friendship and now we were just best friends doing our daily telephone checkup. The life we’d built was still there in our apartment two blocks away, but I was no longer a part of it, and all that really made Chicago home now was Ella The Dog. She had become my best friend’s girl, and I loved her, but this time I couldn’t steal her away.

In the end it was Amanda who dumped me, both of us lying faceup in the bed in the middle of the night, talking the way we did on the phone, not looking at each other. It was pretty low-drama; by then there wasn’t much to give up except the idea that there was something to give up. That, and of course, the dog. With a hint of determination that suggested she thought I might argue, Amanda asserted that she was keeping Ella, but it was a custody battle I’d already lost, and I knew it. It stung—badly—but there’s just no way around it: you can’t stay with someone just because of a dog, and you can’t try to take the dog when she’s been the one caring for it. (Unless you’re a total dick. Then you can do pretty much anything.)

So I just lay there and let it all go; the last traces of teamwork finally fizzled out. The saddest thing, that night, wasn’t the loss, it was the thought that there would someday be others: other dogs, other boyfriends, other girlfriends; that all of our diligent future-building would inevitably be undone by real people in the real future. We all want to believe that the people who dump us will regret it someday, but I knew it wasn’t true; it was over, and I would be replaced.