A Bear is Born
In honor of my first dogs, Basil & Bear, I'm re-sharing this essay from our Greenpoint days ✨
Hi lovelies! I originally wrote this essay for No, YOU Tell It!, a switched-up story-telling series featuring non-fiction essays read aloud by other writers. The theme of the show I participated in was “Stargazing” and took place in May 2013. They still host events today! They also do wonderful work supporting young artists and the community at large. Check ‘em out: https://www.noyoutellit.com/about/
Hope this essay brings you a moment of joy in these dark times. Dogs are the best! <3, Bex
A BEAR IS BORN by Bex Fine-Firesheets
Anyone who lives in New York City is bound to see a celebrity at some point. Being incredibly unobservant, I went five years without a single sighting. Then, within just a few months, my little section of Brooklyn was transformed from a quiet family neighborhood into a star-studded, hipster playground. Believe me, this part of Greenpoint was not fancy. But because there were numerous abandoned warehouses scattered along West Avenue, a litter-filled, broken strip of pavement on the East River that boasted a frightening amount of alley cats and a gorgeous view of Manhattan, quite a few television networks looking for something affordable (by industry standards) moved in. Boardwalk Empire built their 1920’s New Jersey boardwalk two blocks away, Lena Dunham and her girls with great hair yet no self-esteem moved in three blocks southward, and CBS took over a warehouse down the street to film their Broadway-meets-television flop Smash. Our peaceful corner of the world had been discovered.
Contrary to what you might imagine, this hubbub wasn’t glamorous or exciting. In fact, it sucked. Whereas we once always found a parking spot right outside our building, we now had to park a ten-minute walk away because trailers and equipment needed the street instead. Crew members yelled at us for walking our dogs through their set, also known as the public sidewalk, and fans hoping to catch a glimpse of so-and-so clogged the delis, whose owners doubled the price of Modelos. But we had a yard in a rent-stabilized building, a rare gem in New York City, and we were determined to keep it.
This yard wasn’t just our haven, but our dogs also relished it; the two of them, a mixed breed named Basil and a Boxer named Bear, enjoyed lounging in the sun as much as we did. So in order to keep our yard and swallow the neighborhood transformation a little more easily, I devised a plan to turn us into super stars. Or, more exactly, a plan to turn Bear into a super star, fulfilling the rags-to-riches dream I felt she so deserved.
— ◊ —
A few years before this transformation began, my partner, Dave, and I enjoyed a honeymoon cruise to Bermuda. Overflowing with giddy love the night we returned home, we visited our local bar and, drunk on beer, marriage vows, and personal pinball records, ran into our neighbor, Adam, standing on the corner with two big dogs, his Rottweiler named Zeus and Sarah the Boxer.
“Why do you have Sarah?” Dave slurred. She belonged to another neighbor of ours, a Polish man we often saw walking on West Avenue, and we’d never seen her with anyone else.
In his typical bro manner, Adam replied, “Well, dude, I hate to lay this on you, but her owner died this morning.”
As we pet sweet, stinky Sarah, Adam explained how her owner had been an alcoholic who lived in his broken-down car in the lot behind Adam’s house. He’d get drunk and wrestle with her, to the point that they both drew blood on one another, then pass out in a pile in the backseat. Adam discovered the man’s body earlier that day because the dog, sitting on the pavement beside the open passenger door, was barking nonstop. Her owner had died from alcohol poisoning that morning and his seemingly final act was to let Sarah out of the car. This was all shocking news to us.
“She’s a good girl, but I can’t keep her,” Adam said, gesturing at his already 100-pound Rotty who was only a year old. “I don’t know what to do, man. I just can’t have both dogs at my place. This breeder in New Jersey was supposed to pick her up thirty minutes ago, but now he’s not even answering his phone.”
“No, no, we know this dog!” Dave exclaimed. “You can’t give her to a breeder. We’ll take her for the weekend, find someone who will spay her and be good to her. Right, honey?”
“Yes, definitely,” I replied, knowing it was a question with only one answer. But even if I’d had a choice, I still would have agreed. Sure, she stank, she jumped, she licked, and, to be honest, I thought she was ugly, but, as Dave said, we knew this dog. We could take a weekend out of our lives to find her a loving home. Plus, little Basil would go nuts over a house guest.
I should have known what I was getting into when I first saw the look on Dave’s face as he listened to Sarah’s story, but I’d never “fostered” a dog before and honestly believed it would be a two-day commitment. By the end of the weekend, our decision to keep her came down to a moment when Dave and Basil were both looking at me with pleading eyes, and I just couldn’t say no. I blame it on the honeymoon vibes.
— ◊ —
My love vibes had vanished by the time the neighborhood usurpers moved in. The TV assholes seemed to multiply by the week, and they did not seem to care about us residents. One afternoon, I was late to pick up the kid I babysat for because a Girls’ crew member was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, arms and legs spread out as he aggressively repeated that no one was allowed through until the scene was over. Yet another crew member yelled at me when I took an orange traffic cone off the top of my car so that I could move the car to make way for their trailer. And, soon enough, every local business owner followed the delis’ lead and upped their prices. Dave and I would pass buffets of bagels, muffins, tiny sandwiches, fruit salads, and sodas set out for actors who made triple our income as we walked to the supermarket where we could barely afford groceries. We even grew tired of the Boardwalk Empire extras in satin-trimmed suits and bowler hats texting on their iPhones outside our building. While they were a novelty at first, they quickly came to represent the consumerism and materialism that had moved in.
Sunbathing in our yard with our dogs made the takeover feel somewhat better. But our road to laid-back afternoons with Sarah had been long and hard. Basil, who took treats in this hilariously ginger way, who gave kisses by nudging us with his tiny wet nose, who learned new commands in minutes and then obeyed them every single time, who housebroke himself at three-months-old by watching other dogs in the shelter, was my first dog. He was perfect. Therefore, I had no idea what it was like to own a normal dog.
And Sarah was no normal dog; she was what you’d call a special-needs dog. Because of her upbringing on the streets, she had worms and urinary crystals, was malnourished yet overweight. She ate random things off the sidewalk (like napkins, rocks, and pieces of broken glass), tried to kill our cats (we suspect some of those West Avenue alley cats ended up as meals during her homeless years), pooped inside the apartment then peed herself when we reprimanded her, and greeted me when I came home by jumping with such force that she busted my lip and bruised my chin. She was incapable of simply sitting near us; every time we interacted with her, she would climb on top of our chests and lick our faces. Oh, and because her old owner was a Polish immigrant, she didn’t know English.
It took two months, but I did finally fall in love with her. I clearly remember the moment when I first thought of her as my dog. I was washing dishes in the kitchen sink, the only sink in the entire apartment because the bathroom was that small, when she trotted in and licked the back of my calf. I turned around and there she was, big ol’ head cocked to the side, jowls gaping, one ear perked, a multitude of wrinkles in her forehead. I knelt down and pet her, and she melted into me. I even kind of enjoyed the face lick that inevitably followed.
“Well girl, there’s no use in trying to predict your future. I never would have guessed as a sixteen-year-old in Kentucky that I’d be sitting in my Brooklyn kitchen one day, petting my 75-pound bear of a Boxer dog.” I started calling her SarahBear after that, and the name stuck. She was Bear from then on.
— ◊ —
By the time our street became infiltrated with flapper girls, hipsters, and Broadway wannabes, Bear had grown into a healthy, well-behaved dog that knew a lot of commands in English. And, unlike skittish Basil, she loved people. Considering her story and everything she’d been through, I thought she deserved the cushy life of the rich and famous. She was a star at heart and had just needed a little training for it to shine through. Besides, the neighborhood truly belonged to her people, the Polish immigrants who’d settled Greenpoint over a century ago. And, of course, there was some selfishness involved: if Bear brought in an income, I could keep my yard.
I began my research on how to break your dog into show business and was not pleased by what I discovered. She needed a portfolio of photographs, a video showing off her routine, possibly an agent. But I had a better idea that would spare us the agent-hunting and take advantage of our neighborhood’s current climate. Smash had just brought on Uma Thurman to play Rebecca Duval, a self-absorbed movie star who couldn’t sing but was nonetheless making her Broadway debut as Marilyn Monroe. I’d always thought Uma Thurman was a badass and wanted to meet her more than any of the other celebrities now working in Greenpoint. The perfect, rags-to-riches plan I’d devised would go like this:
Bear, Basil, and I would be walking down the sidewalk on a beautiful summer day. Bear would be fresh off a bath and a tooth-brushing, preferably near the end of a short walk so that she’d be a little tired but still energetic. Uma Thurman would be walking towards us in all her blonde glory. She’d lock eyes with Bear who would tilt her head at that perfect angle and wrinkle her forehead in all the right places. While Basil waited patiently on the curb, I would show off Bear’s tricks (paw, other paw, roll over, catch it), and Uma would laugh in delight. She’d rush over and scratch Bear’s head, falling in such instant love that she’d have no other choice but to offer Bear a role on Smash then and there. After impressing the director and all of the producers, Bear would be the new it-dog at CBS, and Dave and I would be fielding calls for the rest of her life.
I looked out for Uma every walk. And then, one day, it happened.
The dogs and I had just left the apartment. We were a few minutes into our walk when Bear pulled toward the curb, tripping both Basil and me over her leash. She began her poop dance, a few frantic circles while positioning her hind legs into a squat. This dance is a typical dog thing, but the atypical part of Bear’s dance is that it doesn’t stop while she poops; if I’m not vigilant enough, she’ll step right in her fresh turds. As she turned in circles, I held her leash taut, forcing her to step around her falling poop, and cooed praise at her. “Good girl, Bear. Don’t step in your shit. That’s a good dog.”
With plastic bag spread over my hand, I bent down and picked up her pile, continuing the praise as she wagged her little nub. When I straightened up, there she was: Uma Thurman, blonde hair bouncing, sunlight glittering off her glasses, as she walked straight toward us. Rather than wrapping up the bag and trying to salvage the milliseconds I had before she passed, I froze, open palm filled with fresh dog poop, as Bear tugged toward her. I stumbled forward and Uma jerked away, shielding herself with her large leather bag, disgust scrunched up in her face while she hurried past us. Basil, sitting patiently on the sidewalk, was the only one who played his part. I hung my head, Bear’s cue to jump and lick my face. And with that, our moment, just like the neighborhood, was lost.
— ◊ —
Dave and I clung to our increasingly unaffordable yard for another year after my Uma encounter, but eventually, the semi-functioning radiators, the “repaired” leak in our living room, the roaches who crawled up from the basement through the cracks in our kitchen floor, and the busy, trendy strip we no longer recognized as our block, took their toll. I shed some tears over the unfairness of it all (we both worked forty hours a week — how could we no longer afford our home?), while also developing a deeper understanding of — and hatred for — the racist, classist, cyclical nature of the NYC rental scam: I had displaced someone who couldn’t afford the Greenpoint I’d moved into five years before, and now I was being displaced by someone with more money, only to move to a different neighborhood and displace someone else, most likely with darker skin than mine. And all so the rich could get richer.
Aided by our dogs and their unwavering, oblivious joy, we persevered through the apartment hunt and traded in our yard for a larger place in better condition near a park. The rents in our new neighborhood have, of course, skyrocketed in the three years since our move, but we’re wiser this time around. And, being as rigged as it is, the game must fall apart at some point, right? Either way, we’re happy here for now, especially when standing on our rooftop under six, twinkling real stars that are infinitely more interesting to ogle than the super stars we left behind.
