s e p t e m B e r 2 0 1 8 1 4 1 i tio file photo Dogman Lie by dan doMenCh M y father’s a liar. Ask him any question and he looks at you blankly while searching his brain for the best horseshit he can muster. Then he starts right in on you. Take this Sunday morning in the town- house where I grew up on a side street not far from Congress Street. I’m folding fresh- ly laundered clothes and packing them in a bag to throw in the car. I have to get back to college in Boston for a meeting. Feeling hungry, I call out to my father through the doorway to the living room, asking if he’s eaten at the new diner on the corner. My father thinks that because he’s a fic- tion writer, lying is his prerogative. I sup- pose he considers it literary practice. If you ask a painter a question, would you be okay with her licking the tip of a brush, dipping it in paint, and smearing her answer on a canvas? If you ask a guitarist a question, would you think it accept- able for him to grab his six string and pick away at you? Through the doorway I see my fa- ther put down his magazine, see the distant look in his eyes, and I cringe. He inhales through his nose. “Char- lie Hawkins opened that diner. I re- spect him. When he had the hot dog cart on Exchange Street twenty years ago, he was almost totally responsi- ble for keeping the dogman’s pack of dogs alive.” You see how it is? You ask about a diner and you get a dogman. “I never told you this before,” my father says, “but the dogman woke you every morning from the time you were three years old to four and a half. He was a scarecrow of a man who emerged from a hidden cave near the sewage dome on the Eastern Promenade and zigzagged down Congress and Cumberland and Spring and every downtown alley with a pack of nine brown dogs.” “Dad. The diner. That’s all. The diner.” “It’s all connected,” my father says, “Nine brown long-legged dogs the size of young fawns would come down our street at dawn circling the dogman as he screamed at them. They wanted only food and affection, but he screamed like a vengeful murderer at the dogs that barked and yelped and scuttled away from his kicks in pitiful self-defense. You’d go to the window and watch the dogs pass by below. They made you sad and there was an ex- pression on your face watching them. I saw it–a fierceness.” I say, with a touch of tone, venting some, “He was waking your child up. Why didn’t you do something about it?” “It was a phenomenon,” my father says. “The dogman lunged and screamed at the sweet sad dogs all day in a trauma inducing performance that we Portlanders seemed to believe we deserved somehow. This ty- rant. This fascist, showing us something, but what?” “I have to go soon,” I say. “There’ll be traffic.” “Bankers shared their avocado sand- wiches with the starving dogs. Old la- dies doddering out of morning Mass pet- ted the dogs until the dogman snarled at them. When the pack crossed a busy street, stopping cars for blocks, no one honked. Think of it, a pack of nine dogs in downtown Portland all day, every day. It was the young Charlie Hawkins who fed the dogs, got organized about it. He set out piles of dry dog food in a wide cir- cle around his hot dog cart, so each dog had a chance to find a bit to eat. And bowls of cool water. It was Charlie Hawkins who kept those dogs alive.” My father pauses, waiting for his cue, and I provide it quickly, be- cause my father will wait silent- ly for his cue until you pro- vide it. I say, “What hap- pened to the dogman and his pack of dogs?”