By Michael Kaufman

Which of the following statements best describes our new dog Benji?

A. He is the sweetest, cutest thing ever.
B. He is a demonic monster who takes special pleasure in torturing the people who love him.
C. Both of the above.

The correct answer is of course C. It just depends on how Benji is feeling at a given moment. When Benji is in his sweet, cute mode he will follow you around adoringly, obey your every command, and sit calmly in your lap as you stroke his hair or rub under his chin. He will look at you with the light of love in his big beautiful eyes and you will wonder why you didn’t adopt him sooner.

And just as you are getting used to these idyllic moments of joy, something will snap in his little brain and he will go completely bonkers. Those big eyes that a moment ago looked so beautiful suddenly take on a devilish glow. He may take a little nip at your arm before leaping from your lap to embark on one of his maniacal search-and-destroy missions.

In the last few days alone the little fellow has chewed and swallowed (or tried to swallow) an amazing array of household items, only some of which are food-related. These include a penny, a 3-inch nail, a whole thigh bone from a cooked chicken, a small flashlight, the plastic cap of a container of fluticasone propionate nasal spray, toilet paper, a pepper mill, shoes, socks, underwear, a used coffee filter and grounds, one of my wife’s fancy earrings, and the dough hook from the Kitchen Aid mixer.

Although he enjoys playing with his own toys he seems to take extra pleasure in running at full tilt around the house with something he knows he shouldn’t have in his mouth.  He delights in evading capture and then pausing to look at us from a safe distance, chomping merrily in defiance, laughing at us with his eyes.

The nail was especially worrisome.  We were afraid it would cut up his insides and he’d die if he swallowed it. He didn’t. However, he did swallow the chicken-thigh bone in its entirety. My wife Eva-Lynne wanted to call the vet immediately. I opted for “watchful waiting” as Benji seemed to be suffering no ill effects. The next morning he vomited it up, still in one piece.

The dough hook was too large for him to swallow and it remains fully serviceable despite the presence of numerous tiny teeth marks. We will have to take the earring to a jeweler to see if it can be repaired. If not maybe we can let Benji chew on the other one so they can be worn together to effect an artistic “funky” look.

On the brighter side, he has gotten the hang of relieving himself outside and sparing our carpets and floors from contact with his bodily fluids and solids. This has led me to an idea that I think may yield great financial reward. It occurred to me during one of my walks with Benji.

You know how there are all these books that give new parents instructions on how to toilet train their children? Try Googling the topic some time if you don’t know what I’m referring to. Or just take my word for it: There is a glut. But is there really a need? What happened during all those years there were no books on the subject? Do you think the world was full of adults walking around peeing in their pants?

Anyway, my idea is to adapt that successful model and to write a book entirely devoted to the subject of “toilet training” puppies and young dogs. Maybe I’ll even write several books on the subject, one for small dogs, another for larger breeds, perhaps one on training older dogs. For illustration we can take pictures of Benji and his friend Linus as they go through the various stages of doing their business….that is, if Benji doesn’t swallow the camera first.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

Charlie Sheen, on ABC

By Bob Gaydos

The manic meltdown of Charlie Sheen’s life, live on TV this week seemingly every time you turn it on, got me thinking about how we react to other people’s erratic behavior.

There is the “live and let live” theory, which says a person’s got the right to do whatever he wants to with his own life, his own body. It’s none of my business and no one, certainly no network, has the right to tell him otherwise, so long as no one else gets hurt. “Go get ’em, Charlie. Who do those CBS suits think they are, cancelling your show?” Admittedly, this view has been in the minority in the unfolding Sheen saga, but he has his fans.

Then there is the “I am my brother’s keeper” approach to life — the one in which someone tries to rescue the drowning man, saving him from himself even if he has to be knocked out to do so. Charlie’s dad, Martin, has been smacked down trying to rescue his son too many times in the past to try again and no one else, including his ex-wives seems to really care anymore.

Which leaves us with the prevailing sentiment in America these days: “This is going to be one hell of a train wreck so let’s all jump on board for the ride of a lifetime.” Our celebrity-obsessed, reality-TV society thrives on this. But the ones most guilty of promoting this response to Sheen’s drug-fueled mental breakdown are so-called news shows on NBC, ABC, FOX and CNN. They fell all over themselves and Sheen to put the delusional actor on their networks and treat what he had to say as if they were the coherent thoughts of a person in his right mind.

Here’s an example of the wit and wisdom of Charlie Sheen, in an interview on ABC-TV: “I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body.” The interviewer from TMZ, a celebrity website and TV show, absolutely fawned over the gaunt Sheen and the British guy on CNN who replaced Larry King was absolutely lost, as he is with most of his interviews.

ABC producers, trying to appear like serious journalists rather than sensationalist exploiters, took pains to tell viewers that Sheen had taken and passed a drug test, which showed he had no drugs in his body during the last 72 hours. But ABC did not say what drugs were tested for, nor account for the fact that alcohol, which Sheen consumes like air, is quick to metabolize. Maybe they believed his three-day home miracle cure from addiction.

(I should also note that CBS, which shut down Sheen’s show “Two-and-a-Half Men,” prompting his parade around the other airwaves to slander their executives with ethnic slurs, had given Sheen more than enough rope to hang himself with drunken, boorish, violent, illegal behavior over the years, but resisted stepping in since his show was a big hit. Their intervention, such as it was, came years too late to qualify in the “brother’s keeper” category.)

In truth, there is no excuse or justification for any of this prime TV coverage. If Sheen has not been drunk or drugged during the interviews, he has been suffering from some other mental disorder. Most likely it’s both, given the grandiose and delusional statements he’s made. For all anybody knows, he could have been in a blackout during any of the interviews.

None of this qualifies as anything but a sad — and utterly predictable — tale of addiction, denial, arrogance and, most likely, mental illness. And let’s not forget Sheen’s addiction to hookers and porn stars. The wreckage, which Sheen cannot see he has caused, is there in the pain inflicted on his family and in the future lives of his children, who will know of their father only shame when they can understand all this in the future. It is in the absurd, self-serving statements he makes every day as reporters write them down breathlessly and TV producers rush to get them on the air.

And that, oddly enough, is the silver lining in this tragedy: A nation long in denial about the effects of alcohol and drugs on people who appear to be functioning has been getting a first-hand lesson in addiction, live on TV in living color, well, actually, the grayish skin tones of the once handsome Sheen. This is what professionals who treat addicts deal with every day in the privacy of clinics and outpatient centers: the doggedly blind stubbornness of people who cannot admit that alcohol and drugs have taken over their lives and made them do things they might ordinarily not do. No, it’s not the cocaine and pot. I can handle the booze and pills. It’s all those people — my wives and those guys in suits who can’t stand that I make all that money for them because I am wonderful and what do you mean I can’t see my kids because I’m an unfit father? Those porn stars are good kids.

The difference with Charlie Sheen is that he got away with it for so long because he was famous and powerful and made lots of money for people and so his bosses and even the courts looked the other way.

Meanwhile, other guys get fired for not showing up for work too many Mondays in a row. In America, some train wrecks are more entertaining than others.

Bob@zestoforange.com

By Michael Kaufman

Duke Snider won almost every game he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers with a home run in the bottom of the 9th inning. Those games, all against the Giants and Yankees, were played at an imaginary Ebbets Field in the driveway of my Aunt Sadye and Uncle Joe’s house on Reads Lane in Far Rockaway. Grandma Kaufman lived upstairs.

Duke Snider (1926-2011)

The brick wall on the side of the house was the perfect target for the pink rubber “spaldeen” that served as the baseball. The neighbor’s hedge on the other side of the driveway was the outfield wall. Those were all I needed to be pitcher, catcher, umpire, batter, fielder—and even the announcer–for those epic contests against the Dodgers’ arch rivals. “Runners on first and third, one out….The infield is at double-play death.” (I hadn’t learned the word “depth” yet.)

For a ground ball I would throw the spaldeen near the bottom of the wall, field it, and throw it back to the wall so I could catch it as the first baseman. “Top of the fourth, two outs, nobody on…. Alvin Dark the batter for the Giants…. Here’s the pitch from Erskine…. grounder to second… .Gilliam up with it, throws to first…. side retired.” Ground balls that got past me were hits. Fly balls that went over the hedge (“on to Bedford Avenue”) were home runs. The neighbor never complained.

The 1919 Chicago White Sox had nothing on me. My games were all unabashedly fixed, although I had an occasional slipup….like the time I tried to have Snider make a great catch to rob Mickey Mantle of a home run but I threw the spaldeen too hard and too high up on the wall so it sailed into the neighbor’s yard.  Or the time I tried to get Willie Mays to hit in to a double play with the bases loaded but the usually dependable Pee Wee Reese bobbled the ball and then made a bad throw to first.  Of course the good thing about having all the games at Ebbets Field was that no matter what happened I could still arrange it for the Dodgers to win….and for the Duke to be the hero.

Jackie Robinson was my father’s hero, for reasons I would understand better later on. But for me, no one came close to the Duke. My parents bought me a little Dodgers’ uniform with the number 4 sewn on the back, Duke’s number. I copied his batting stance, his stylish uppercut swing that looked good even when he struck out. Even now I can make the case that during the years that he, Mantle, and Mays played in New York (1951-1957), he was every bit as good with the bat and glove as those two all-time greats (although he was never the base runner they were). But someone looking only at their lifetime career statistics would have no clue. The Duke ended his career with a total of 404 home runs. Mantle had 536, Mays 660.

Duke’s home-run total would have been a lot closer to Mantle’s were it not for Walter O’Malley. When O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner,  broke Brooklyn’s heart and took the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958, he also took the home runs out of Duke’s bat.  The Dodgers played their first four seasons in La La Land in the cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum, where the right-field fence measured 440 feet from home plate. Snider, who had hit 40 or more home runs every season from 1953 through 1957, hit only 15 in 1958 and would never hit more than 23 again.

Legend has it that Don Drysdale, the Hall of Fame Dodgers pitcher and Snider’s roommate, wept when the team sold Snider to the Mets in 1963. But for old Dodgers fans it was a chance to come out and cheer for our hero again. At first it was a thrill to see him standing in center field at the Polo Grounds in a Mets uniform, to shout at the top of our lungs when he came to bat, “Come on DOOK!” But soon it became clear that for Duke the thrill was gone. He scowled and shivered uncomfortably in the outfield during the cold-weather games in April. He didn’t run out ground balls, which angered some of his younger teammates who had illusions about the team’s chances of success that year. (Duke knew they were none to none.) He ended the season with 14 home runs, 45 runs batted in and a .243 batting average in 354 at-bats (his most at-bats since 1957).

That was his penultimate season and it was not without its good moments. There was the time the Dodgers were in town and Snider came up to bat against Drysdale. Drysdale grooved a fastball down the middle of the plate and Snider timed his signature swing perfectly to hit a home run. After the game Drysdale said with a wink, “I just wanted to see if he could still hit the fastball.”

For those who were there it was a glimpse of the Snider of old, the great hitter who had once explained in an interview with The Sporting News, “In the split second from the time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand until it reaches the plate you have to think about your stride, your hip action, your wrist action, determine how much, if any, the ball is going to break, and then decide whether to swing at it.”

There was one last forgettable season in 1964 with the San Francisco Giants. He hit only .210 with four home runs and 17 RBI in 91 at-bats.  But no one will remember him as a player for the Giants or the Mets—and only the Californians will think of him as a player for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was and will forever be the Duke of Flatbush.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.