Of Mice and Me
Mae Graber | Tolka, Issue Four, July 2023
John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men and then his dog ate it. I love Of Mice and Men. It’s my favourite book, and I love that a dog ate it. I wish I had more details about the dog to tell you. He was not John Steinbeck’s famous poodle, Charley, who there is a wealth of information about. All I can find out of this book-scarfing hound is that he was a setter and his name was Toby. For me, personally, his literary contribution blows anything Charley ever did out of the water.
I would bet my life that Toby was over eleven months, but under one-and-a-half years old. I can suppose this with such certainty because younger puppies are too unreliable to leave alone with manuscripts, and John Steinbeck, as an avid dog-haver his whole life, would have known this. The dog would’ve been old enough that it had probably been a while since he had ruined something important to humans, almost so long that a man could think that the dog was no longer inclined to destruction, but also young enough to still fuck up just when you were starting to trust him completely. Since dogs can do no wrong, I’m sure that Toby’s shredding the manuscript ultimately made it better in the end.
In 1932, when Toby ate the novella first titled Something That Happened, computers didn’t exist. He ate the only copy. It was completely handwritten. Roughly two months of work was ingested and then probably deposited on John Steinbeck’s lawn. John Steinbeck, after discovering this grave dog crime, would’ve had to recall the plot from memory and write it out all over again. I can’t imagine John Steinbeck flying into a rage and hitting Toby, which is what I would have done, before I read Of Mice and Men. I imagine instead that after his initial anger John Steinbeck became frustrated and sad, and he cried. Sadness is an appropriate response to a dumb beast ruining something. Hitting and punishing is not an appropriate response to a dumb beast ruining something.That’s basically the plot of Of Mice and Men.
I used to not understand appropriate responses because I was a dumb beast myself, and a terrible alcoholic. When I was a terrible alcoholic I slept outside all over the country, just like a character in a John Steinbeck novel. To protect myself while I slept outside, someone gave me a small puppy. While useless at first, in time this puppy grew into a pretty intimidating German Shorthaired Pointer Pitbull mix. She was beautiful and sleek and lean. She had brindle stripes over her body and her legs and neck were speckled. She was cuddly and disgustingly smart, and she made people who had never had dogs before want a dog. If dogs can be funny, she was hilarious. But she had a darker side, too. She was terrible with other dogs, as sadistic as a cat, and tenacious. She was fiercely protective of me and anything she considered mine. She never bit a kid, but that was only because no one ever let us anywhere near their children.
She got to be the way she was because I was the way I was. When I mentioned earlier that I would hit my dog if she ate my manuscript, I meant it. I don’t remember ever hitting my dog, but I don’t remember anything really. For what it’s worth, and to my everlasting shame, I’m sure I did hit her when I got mad. My dog listened to me, but she was more than happy to take things into her own hands if I was indisposed, which I constantly was. My dog bit people who really deserved it, but more often she bit people who didn’t deserve it at all. If I was there I could somewhat control her, but left to her own devices my dog was a very bad girl.
I slept outside all over the country practically trying to get myself killed, but my dog had a different plan for me. In the time we travelled together, no one ever robbed me, no one ever assaulted me, and no one ever lit me on fire while I was sleeping, dousing my backpack in accelerant, igniting it and setting it on top of me in Riverside Park. All these things happened to other people I knew. I slept like a baby on metropolitan sidewalks all over the country, knowing that anyone who got closer than a leash length to me would be swiftly repelled.
There were plenty of mornings when I woke up without my memory, backpack, sleeping bag or friends in some strange place, with my dog lying on top of me to keep me warm, everything else gone forever. I thought I was taking care of her by throwing her some kibble and carrying around extra water for her. Sometimes I raged at her. ‘God, you’re a lot of trouble . . . I could get along so easy and so nice if I didn’t have you on my tail. I could live so easy.’ But she was the one with the responsibility. I was completely dependent on her to keep me safe from myself, like Lenny was to George.
When I finally got my shit together enough to have housing again, my dog was two years old and had lived on the street her whole life. Now we had walls and locking doors, which did her old jobs of protection. Her responsibilities were pared down to just being my sole emotional support. Two years of being a homeless alcoholic had stripped me of almost every relationship I ever had. My dog turned from a perceived burden to the only thing I could depend on. The transition to being housed was not easy for either of us, though. While I busied myself getting fired from jobs, kicked out of housing and trying to stay somewhat sober, she busied herself cornering and snapping at roommates and guests who, according to dog logic, were threats as they were touching my stuff or walking past my room when I was sleeping. As bad as her behavior had been when we lived on the street, it was at least justified. But in her new context, as a house pet and not a guard dog, her behavior was just plain vicious. Even as I got more comfortable living in a house, my dog did not. Sometimes it seemed like she was getting better, but then she would fuck up just when you were starting to trust her. She wanted to do what I needed her to, but, like Lenny, she just didn’t understand no matter how hard she tried.
Our come-to-Jesus moment arrived when my dog bit a mailman. She was now four years old. I mostly could hold down a job, but she had been getting steadily worse as a pet dog. She did it because I was sleeping on the couch with the door open. The mailbox was right next to the door. Like everything in this story, it wasn’t her fault. It was my fault. The mailman didn’t speak much English, but I managed to communicate with him enough to help clean and bandage the wound and give him all the money I had. I hoped that that would take care of it. Three days later Animal Control called me with an impound order to take away my dog.
There would be a hearing and consequences, potentially including euthanasia. When the Animal Control agent showed up to take away my dog, I was at first too hysterical to notice that he was Jack Kronk Sr, father of Jack Kronk Jr, whom I had once gone with, because he asked, to a high-school dance. He fudged the paperwork, and by the grace of Kronk I got to keep my dog.
Having seen a preview of the chaos that would overtake me if anything ever happened to my dog, I finally began to see how bad things had always been. I hired a trainer. I saved, borrowed and, if I’m being honest, stole, to come up with the $1,000 the trainer told me it would take to help civilise my dog. I dropped her off at a training facility, where she would stay for a week. My dog and I had never been apart except for a few days when I got us put in jail and the pound respectively. I was nervous to be without my dog and for my dog to be without me. My brother drove me to drop her off. We tucked her into her kennel. I lied to her and told her that she was a good girl. I told her the truth and promised that I would be back for her. On the way out of the building my brother said, ‘I have a bad feeling about this. Go back in and get her. Please.’ I told him to shut up, that I was nervous enough as it was. Foreshadowing is a storytelling device John Steinbeck uses a lot in Of Mice and Men.
The trainer had been updating me daily and told me that everything was going very well. But my dog’s specialty was fucking up just when you thought you could trust her. She learnt that from me. On the last day of her week-long training, she hopped over a fence. With staff in hot pursuit, she circled a field lazily for a couple of hours and then disappeared into the nearby woods. They called me to tell me about her escape six hours after it happened. I looked and looked for her, going home only once for four hours to sleep during the whole three-day ordeal. It was January and snowy in central Ohio; the temperatures dipped in and out of freezing. I walked mile after mile in the woods and fields, calling her name into the sound-deadening snow. My feet were wet and cold, and I was scared and exhausted, but I was eerily calm while I looked for her. I knew that she had left to try to find me, and when we couldn’t find each other in the woods that first night, I knew she was dead.
I found her little body on the train tracks three miles away from the training facility in the direction of home. I felt so relieved that I had found her, but so, so sorry that I had let her down. The bar of how well I functioned was exceptionally low to begin with, but my dog’s death set a new personal record for how low I could go. I didn’t get out of sweatpants for six months; I cried daily, lost thirty pounds and had to have my best friend move across the country to take care of me. I had to cut my hair short because I let it get too matted.The grief was constant but sedating for the first six months. I didn’t have to think about my role in our dynamic. I could easily blame the trainer for everything bad that had happened. I only had to eat a little something every day, be easy on myself, brush my teeth at least once every three days and not get shitty drunk and take off. Just bailing on my life and sleeping under a bridge when things got dumb was my golden move. But without my dog it was unthinkable. With her gone I was completely alone, and I could really feel how reckless and scary my behavior had been.
As I moved forward I began to see the shape of myself through a multiple-year haze and it was not pretty. The grief became less sedating and omnipresent, but the moments it hit were much sharper. This new grief came in contractions. A contraction when I saw how messy my life had been. A contraction when I read a book about dog psychology and realised how everything was my fault. A contraction when I got a foster dog who, while sweet, was just a dog, nothing like my dog. A contraction eight months later when I watched mine and my boyfriend’s new puppy begin to turn into a secure and happy pet dog. A contraction a year later when I realised I didn’t need to be taken care of anymore. A stabbing, twisting contraction fourteen months later when I read, for the first time, Of Mice and Men.
I felt such a burning sadness and recognition in the characters and circumstances of the book. Reading it was almost like talking at last to someone else who understood. I began to process the guilt in a productive way, realising that the presence of guilt meant the adoption of responsibility. I had taken such little responsibility over the past several years. No leases, no jobs, no effort towards staying healthy or even basic functioning. My only responsibility had been to my dog, and I let her down. Not because she had died – that seemed accidental to me – but because she had been unhappy. Her difficult behaviours were manifestations of insecurity and unhappiness. Just as my own were. I wanted redemption through more responsibility, and it cracked open my ability to function in society and take on more involved roles with those around me. I reread Of Mice and Men every year, and like the love I have for my dog it never dulls in its beauty and pain.
My dog did me one better than eating the only copy of my hand-written novella and tore my heart to shreds. Since dogs can do no wrong, I’m sure it came out better in the end. Through the darkest parts of my grief, the thing that gave me the most comfort was that no matter how I had messed up, no matter what mistakes had led us to that place, we didn’t give up on each other. We didn’t wilfully abandon each other to our twisted fates. She had looked out for me in all the ways she could. When we were separated, she set out to find me until death intervened. She would not leave me alone when I needed her. I had taken care of her in the ways I could. When she was missing, I looked for her until I found her; I would not leave her alone. My dog and I were, at alternating times, both of the central characters in Of Mice and Men. We had plenty of Lenny moments in our time together, but in the end we were both George. We both knew that when you are responsible for a dumb beast, you see them through until the end. It is what makes you good, even if many other things about you are undesirable. It is your duty and an honour, even if it destroys you. That’s basically the plot of Of Mice and Men.
Photo: Alexis Ellers
‘Of Mice and Me’ was first published in Issue Four of Tolka (November 2022). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
Mae Graber is a landscaper and undergraduate student at Tulane University. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her stories focus on her time as a homeless American.
