 Raised on a dairy farm in northern Illinois, Jamie's extensive experience in social awkwardness has led to a successful career in dog training and therapeutic horseback riding. Please welcome Jamie. Hey, you can't do that here. These head jerks up out of his doze. First of all, you can do pretty much anything here. He's slouched against the pylon that marks his spot and camp, but has been dreaming of the park where he first had crushes on girls. There is a dampness, a dirty, earthy smell that connects the two places in his mind. But some crazy white ones leading out her driver's sidecar window yelling at a teenager with a short, spanily mohawk, hitting a red-nosed puppy with the end of its cheap nylon leash. The kid gives the woman the finger, but then stands looking furtive and embarrassed as she peels away up Gilman, looking around to see who saw, who's judging him. Kid, no one sees you here, Diogené thinks. It really does not matter for shit whether you beat your dog or not. She's soft for a second, but she does not exist, except for once a day when she comes down that off-ramp. That whole group of kids is gone the day after, gone with their guitar and boombacks and rip tights and stolen food from Trader Joe's. The puppy tied up to the chain link fence under the overpass like a toy discarded outside an arcade. Up against the border of the office max where trash piles up from the camp where people piss against the side of the building. Diogené goes over and unties the little thing, all bones and pot belly from tapeworms. Then he sticks her in the high chair part of his cart and takes her to McD's for the dollar menu dinner. Hell, he doesn't know what to feed her. Stupid dog. She's cute though and she doesn't have anything now. Might as well just join the rest of the camp. Duchess, he calls her, and she wags her little tail furiously each time he says it aloud. Everyone needs a name. It's the only thing you can really own and take around with you. And he wants her to have a proud name she can grow into, pitiful thing. She has an orange slash of fur over one eye that makes a perpetual frown of perplexity. What is this world doing now? He likes how she cuddles into his belly to sleep at night right up inside his blankets. He can't remember feeling so warm. That damn dog eats practically all his hustle the next day. Three burgers off the dollar menu and she's still hungry. So he broke down and bought some full-fledged puppy chow from Safeway. The pet food section seems decadent and alluring. Dee picks out a little red collar with a bell on it and some diamonds all in a row around the outside and a little white and black stuffed dog toy. Here, Duchess, he says when he gets back outside around the corner to the cart. Look, here's your baby doll. He sees, smells first. She's shit diarrhea all over herself, even on her stupid little head. How in the hell, Duchess? He uses all his whole big bottle of water and his own personal washcloth to get the shit off. And then he refills his bottle from the spigot in the back of the Arco station across the street and bends and washes his cloth out real good with soap. Despite all this trouble, there's a feeling that is eased. The one that makes most days feel like walking through waste high water. Duchess squirts that nasty stuff two more times on their way back home, but she makes up for it at bedtime. All tucked up and here comes Duchess snuggling inside the blankets to curl up against Dee's chest. Her baby head flopped warm on his throat. Up early the next morning and it's like they've always been together. Duchess sits up in her shopping cart bed outside McDonald's while Dee has his morning coffee and warms up. Looks over in the newspaper, soaps himself head to groin in the filthy restroom. He's quicker about it than most days, thinking of the pup waiting outside, tied up in her cart. Sausage muffin please. This is a splurge, but it feels so good to watch the baby wolf down her sausage while Dee stands close over her eating his roll. It's not their day for the off-ramp, so Duchess and Dee head over to 4th Street. Diogenes sits with his back against the warm brick of a stationary store in between cascades of bougainvillea and smiles gently at folks no matter while the time his brain goes, oh lord these uppity old folks hate the sight of me so bad, look what they'll pay. Hoping I'll move on when I have enough for booze and a sandwich or whatever it is they think I'll be buying today. The young folks today are big tippers too because of Duchess. These sweet young ladies all cooing and love and honor. Good job, baby. He tells her, you're working so hard. We stick together. Mama and we'll be sitting in a little place of our own one of these days. What does the blessed pup do but take a shit all over his jacket? Dee yells at her and gives her a mean hard swat, but then he sees her shivering and crawling close up into him under his legs, crawling like a little human baby and his heart breaks into a million pieces and he grabs her by the scruff of her little neck hard and cuddles her in his arms like he's never going to let go. The next day is no better even after Dee spends eight dollars on Pepto. She's sicker and he's meaner, ferociously sweeter and so gut-clenching scared he could about have the runs over it too. Finally about 4.30 he takes her to the veterinarian. It's a bad decision. We can't say for sure without doing tests, but she probably has parvo. What's that? It's a disease that causes diarrhea and vomiting and lethargy, like you see. See how she's so tired? Do you want to admit her? The doctor looks at Dee skeptically. Parvo can cause upwards of five hundred dollars to treat just so you know and sometimes even a thousand or more. Dee shakes his gray head. This is some bullshit right here. You can surrender her to us, sign an owner release form and then we can treat her using donations. Then can I come get her back? Oh no, she'd belong to the clinic. We'd find a nice home. Dee is quiet thinking, I'm a nice home. I'm her family. This here's a street dog anyway. She wouldn't like being left alone all day when her new people went off to work and all that. She needs to tag along with somebody. Dee snuggles Duchess closer up under his coat and spends some time looking at all the posters up on the walls. Little blonde puppies and little blonde girls. The life cycle of the flea. Eventually the doctor sighs and goes in the back and Dee does the sad swagger out the front door. The bell rings and he looks back scared for a second like they're going to come after her anyway. But no one's there but the receptionist and she keeps her head down kind of looking at the desk and not really moving so he walks out the door and doesn't go back. Dee nurses Duchess for three more days before she dies in his lab. He hasn't cried since he doesn't even know. He guesses since he had a surgery and that was 10 or 11 years ago. He thinks it's an evil man that lets his dog die out of pure selfish good for nothing. He sits in camp for a long time. Finally Dee picks up his little dog and cradles her against his belly, tucks his coat around her. If he ties the belt just right and only buttons the bottom buttons it helps to hold her in place. He can't see it right at first and gets the buttons matched up all wrong but somehow it gets itself done. Deogene turns sideways to get through the turnstile in the downtown Berkeley Bart. It's rush hour and the station and the train are filled with business people in suits and pretty skirts. Computer folks with its expensive looking fold up bikes so they can get around the rules that say you can't have bikes on trains during rush hour going into the city. Students and young folks going into San Francisco to find some trouble Dee remembers how that is. No one looks at a scruffy dirty old black mixed man crying and holding his big punchy stomach under his coat. The Civic Center stop is the same as he remembers it at first. Mean looking beggars and wheelchairs, folks laying around in doorways, residential hotels. This is the Tenderloin. But once he starts up on haze it becomes white and money. Shops or panties, displays of suitcases worth more than anything he ever had to put inside him. Pretty restaurants with little lights like stars outside in the trees. Women wear soft looking scarves with as much material as fluffy fluttery winged coats and have real smooth hair that is also fluttery and winged. And their high heels tap, tap lightly keeping up with their men. The men here are thin and dapper. Many are very white with very black mustaches. Dee has to watch the street signs. He doesn't recognize anything. He goes up the hill aways and turns right on to Fillmore and now he sees it's familiar. Still a couple blocks of section eight, some ratty kids hanging around in the dark. One of them on a scuffed up BMX with a noisy chain is showing off trying to pop a wheelie in the street. The scummy motel with its all night diner, the meth faced waitress smoking half inside the door. Steel gated liquor shops and corner stores. Here this one he remembers, even though there's a nice new mural on the brick wall outside. Dee and his cousins used to buy big-ass dill pickles and packs of Kool-Aid to dip them in. Later zig-zags and Cheetos. He wonders about his cousin Juan where he went to, whether his bitch wife ever stopped being pregnant in a cunt. Diogenes shifts his small bundle, gentle. There's really no good way to hold her. The hill up haze is brutal, even steeper than he'd remembered. He's so tired. That's just as ice cold except where he holds her. She's stiffen like plaster against his belly, has taken his shape. Her head rests in the crook of his armpit. Dee's face won't stop being salty, contorted, grief like never. He had been petting on the train rhythmically, furtively until a chunk of fur fell out. The roots must have just stopped holding onto the skin. He expected the fog to roll in over the panhandle, but it's a clear, lovely night. He decides against the 71 from the hate and plods evenly through the panhandle and then up, nor through the rich folks' houses overlooking the marina. Before he knows it, he's passing their yachts himself, bobbing all light and haughty at their moorings. Couples prominate around him without getting close enough to touch. Baker Beach. On one hand, the shadow of Alcatraz. On the other, the lit red looming of the bridge. Dee passes a young black boy in a stroller, his long legs tapping to some music, only he hears, almost touching the ground. He's so tall for his age. The boy looks up at him as they approach each other slowly on the path, and Diogené glances up at the white folks pushing the stroller. Both of them are wearing scarves, knotted so tightly he wonders how they can breathe. They don't look at him though, so he lets his gaze settle down and meet the boy's open stare. They look so long and Diogené thinks, oh son, where are you and where are you going? His boy's been lost for decades in the particular way that boys become lost in the way that Diogené himself was lost early and totally, a penny down a storm brain, because who would reach down for that shit? Diogené gives a furtive wave as the stroller slips by in the stream of people, almost as if he were reaching into his pocket for something he's not quite sure he has. The boy narrows his eyebrows and purses his beautiful mouth. Children often don't realize that something's over, often miss a chance to say goodbye, I love you, fuck you, and stay the fuck out. There are other people climbing the steep rocks up to the bridge, some tourists presumably, also young people on dates clutching at each other. Diogené clutches his lover too, holding her up with his burning arms and he moves his feet gingerly, each stiff step of an addiction and almost a fall. He should have had these boots cromping around in them like this for so long, when he did have the bit of money so many times in the time. The pedestrian path on the bridge proper, crossing all the way over to the hills of Marin, looks busy for about a hundred yards, but no one's dawdling. It's dark except the giant lights on the suspension bridge itself. Dark and windy and the fog up close is like big drops of icy rain suspended in the air, thickly waiting as he walks right into them. Yeah, the bridge is packed for a moment so folks can say they've tried it, but once they've ventured out a length or two the people are laughing and shivering and turning around from the wind. Di craves that wave and with that wind in his face the first time in memory that he's really wanted something or trusted that he could have it. Di walks out a measured pace and the land drops away a hundred yards, two hundred, he becomes aware that he's rocking Dutchess slightly under his coat and humming something, feeling the wind snatch the noise away from his body. The brutal wind and his own foot falls straight into it and then he's up and over the guardrail swaying for a moment with a sudden off balance of the dog. Jamie Niedemeier just gonna stop just like that just gonna kick our asses and then just kind of just like walk away just leave us all in a state now. Thank you, it was fantastic.