The Return of Milkshake

     A concrete stairwell, somewhat like a bunker is where I met Andy.  He was just finishing up at 420 Evaluations where he worked as a Cannabis doctor from 11am to 7 pm four days a week. He bounded down one flight of the stairwell, reached the landing, while I was climbing up step by step from the street - we met somewhere in the middle. In my arms, I was cradling his beloved dog, Milkshake, who had been "stolen" from him sometime over the weekend.

    Andy's stepdad and I had driven from Hollywood to Carpenteria that very day on the 405 to rescue Milkshake. Truth be told, he'd not been stolen.  He'd been picked up by a Carpenteria Compliance Officer who seems to have found Milkshake tied to a lamp post outside of a restaurant. Officer Lopez had gone into the restaurant and found the dog's owner - Andy -and given him his card.  Andy had been out of compliance with town ordinances.

     Andy reached out and grabbed Milkshake from my arms. He collapsed onto the concrete step in his dark dress trousers and gathered Milkshake up to his cheek, kissing her over and over. Tears of anguish and relief filled his eyes. "Milkshake, my love," he moaned, kissing her white patched face one more time.

     His fervor and intensity hollowed me out - a thirty-five year old man, my son, contorted in his embrace of a tiny dog.

     It was in September three years ago that I began to connect the dots. Andy had gone delusional. A graduate of Albany Medical College, he'd done two years of a surgery residency at UCI - then a one year research spot in Tucson, when one fine day, I got a call from him after a four hour long surgery on his left hand due to a lab accident, a call that marked the end of the world as I knew it.

    "Swear that you won't tell anyone, not even God, not even God, " he said to me in a hoarse whisper.

     That was the beginning of the 10,000 delusional stories that I'd hear morphing from one shape to the next over the course of the following three years.