Wax

Valerie tells us about a very special dog named Wax.

Dead Pets is a podcast about pet grief that celebrates the lives of the creatures that have changed ours.

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Transcript

Elyse Wild: Welcome to Dead Pets, a podcast about pet grief that celebrates the creatures who have changed our lives and left this mortal coil. I'm your host, Elyse Wilde. Today, Valerie joins us to talk about a very special dog named Wax.

Valerie: It was spring of 1996 and I worked at the Knitting Factory, which is a club in New York City. Most of the employees at the Knitting Factory were squatters, and they lived in squats all over the Lower East Side, which was still a thing back then.

One of the bar backs—his name was Arrow, everyone called him Arrow, not his given name—he came into work one day and said, "I've got this great little pit bull puppy. He's nine months old. He was the runt of his litter, but the other pit bulls in the building just keep attacking him, and it's not good for him to stay with us, so I really want to find him a good home."

So me, of course, I said yes. I went to meet him at the street squat and Arrow brought him out, and I just fell in love. He was so cute. He was chocolate colored, a beautiful dark chocolate color, with a little white spot on his chest, and he had a little bit of a limp on his back left leg because of just being so beaten up by the other pit bulls in the building.

Finding His Name

So Wax came home to live with me at that time in the Bronx, and he was with me from that point forward, for over half my life—the most reliable, honest, loyal man I have ever known.

I had a roommate. His name was Nigel. He was a DJ from Trinidad, and he was actually the one who named Wax. When Arrow gave him to me, his name was Trouble. And Trouble is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I firmly believe you do not name anything Trouble. So Nigel was just like, "His name is Wax, like the DJ spins the records on wax. I waxed him. I took him out. His name is Wax." And so, alright, Wax. Cool. And that just became his name.

I was living in New York, and I hadn't really found my tribe yet, like my group of friends yet. So I felt really alone. He was such a loyal companion, right off the gate, at a time when I didn't really know a lot of people, wasn't really established in the city yet. And then not long after that, I actually did meet my people and my tribe, and he moved with me everywhere I went, and was just my best friend through it all. All of my other friends also established relationships with him too. He was a good, good dog.

I felt really safe and really grounded because you can't walk down the street as a young woman, especially in New York back then. This was long before the internet. It was before cell phones. And I worked in bars and clubs, mostly as a bartender, so I would get out of work really late, or go to work really late.

Having Wax with me on the street, especially because I lived in low-income neighborhoods, I just always felt safe. Nobody would ever mess with me. People would cross the street when they saw me coming with him. He was the friendliest dog, but just his look—he looked so fierce that I figured anybody who didn't have good intentions would just stay out of my way, and they did for years and years and years.

I kind of settled in East Harlem. That was where I spent most of my life. When I settled there, everybody knew me, and everybody knew Wax. The stretch of East Harlem is kind of nestled between two sets of projects.

I remember one night I was out walking Wax, and these two young men were walking by, and one guy started giving me shit. I think he thought I was white. And his friend corrected him and immediately shut him down and said, "She lives here. She's always out here with that dog, they're cool." And the kid who had started giving me shit was very embarrassed.

I didn't recognize the young man who defended me, but I knew that Wax and I were known in the neighborhood and just recognized and respected. And that really meant a lot to me, that people knew us and that they had a level of respect for us.

This is an embarrassing story, but I lived in this brownstone—I had the third floor of a brownstone, and all the other apartments were filled with men from all over Latin America, and we were all friends, and we would have these big parties.

Wax would get in my dirty laundry when everybody was hanging out in the living room, and he'd get my panties and trot them out into the living room and just drop them in the middle of the living room floor. He would just stand there over them after he would drop them. It was always so embarrassing. But in retrospect, it's funny because it was his way of saying that I was his human.

He was great. He had such a strong personality. People still talk about Wax. It wasn't just his relationship with me, but his relationship with other people.

One time I was living in DC for a short period of time. We lived in this big house—there were nine of us, three dogs, two cats and a rabbit in this nine-bedroom house. It was my 27th birthday party, and it was a rager.

One of my friends came, and he was extremely afraid of dogs. He had a phobia—I don't remember what the word is, but when you're terrified of dogs. Any dog is terrifying to you. He knew I had Wax, but I don't think he was thinking about it that night. One of our other friends had given him some ecstasy.

So he gets to my party, and he's already rolling on the MDMA, and Wax went to him, and they spent the next eight hours playing together. Wax played with him for eight hours during his entire MDMA trip. They were outside playing in the yard, rolling around, playing fetch. Wax did not leave his side the entire night.

By the morning, when the party was winding down and everyone was going home, and he was no longer tripping, his fear of dogs was gone. Wax was that kind of dog. He would establish his own relationships with people. Everyone had a relationship with him.

He was very, very smart. When I was living in that house, he learned how to open the refrigerator with his muzzle. He would get his nose in there and pop open the refrigerator and then lead the entire pack of animals into the fridge to just gorge and eat whatever they wanted.

My roommates were not happy, but it was also very amusing. My roommate was like, "Wax is the ringleader. He's the one opening the fridge." Finally, my roommate got a lock, like he figured out a way to make a lock on the refrigerator so that Wax couldn't open it anymore.

To everybody's credit that I lived with—that's a lot of people who could have gotten upset that all their food was gone—everybody just kind of laughed and rolled their eyes. It became a strategy, like how you keep your food in the fridge safe, as opposed to being mad at me or mad at Wax, because everyone loved Wax.

I've got a picture of him on the wall from a day we spent in Prospect Park. A friend of mine from DC came up and they just played. Wax liked to tear up trees. He would just rip a tree apart and then he would sort all of the different sticks into different piles—big sticks, medium-size sticks, small sticks. But he loved the big sticks the most. So when everything was sorted, he would lay on the pile of big sticks.

Or he would get this massive stick—when I say massive stick, I mean like a 12-foot-long stick that was probably a good six inches in diameter, like a big stick—and he would carry that running around, just like full speed. It might be dragging on both ends, but he would still just run and carry it. He loved when you held the stick and you spun him around, and he would hang on with his mouth. It was just great. He could do that for hours and hours and hours.

He could work all day. He was a pit. I think he really liked to work and use his muscles and play kind of rough. Those days where he was able to run free someplace and do that was just always the best.

He wasn't technically—I think he was an English Staffordshire Pit Bull Terrier. He weighed 55 pounds, and he was all just solid muscle. He was very, very, very handsome, very good looking.

This was years, so long before Instagram. But whenever one of the TV shows or movies were filming near where I lived, people would always be like, "Hey, they're filming, you got to take Wax down there and see if they'll cast him." Because he was so good looking. He was so handsome. People always thought he should be on TV or in a commercial. If we'd had Instagram back then, he probably would have had an Instagram page, because he was very photogenic.

His fur was like an iridescent chocolate color. It just shimmered in the sunlight. He wasn't black and he wasn't brown, but he was just a really, really beautiful, deep chocolate. He was a great dog.

He was just with me as I grew up, because I was such a young person when I got him. By the time he was old, I was grown up. I was living in Boston and going to school.

I remember my dad came to visit. Somebody came home really late at night, was staying upstairs but didn't live in the building, so Wax got up and he sat by the door, and he just listened. He was ready to take action, but he didn't. He was super quiet, and he let the person keep walking up the stairs.

I remember how impressed my dad was with that. Wax was very protective, very caring. He wanted to check everybody out. He wanted to check everything out. I feel like he kept me safe until I was old enough to keep myself safe.

I'm going to start crying. The day itself, I don't remember anything that happened that day. I don't remember anything about that day. I remember the weeks leading up to that day. He was getting sicker and sicker, and I knew he was old. People kept telling me I should have him put to sleep.

To me, there was no way I could do that, because he'd taken care of me for 15 years. He'd taken care of me—the least I could do for him was take care of him at the end of his life. That meant carrying him everywhere because he couldn't walk, and helping him pee and holding him while he pooped. He was heavy, but I felt so blessed to be able to care for him.

He just took care of me for so long, and he kept me going. There were times when I was younger, especially, I really struggled with depression, and I kept living because I had Wax to live for. Because Wax was always with me and always taking care of me. If he hadn't been there, I don't know if I would still be here.

At the end, the last few weeks of his life, they were very special and important to me to make sure he was comfortable and cared for.

I remember the night he passed, it was evening. My roommate had made—she liked to cook, and she was from Singapore—so she made this traditional Singaporean comfort food that I loved. We were in the kitchen talking, and she was cooking, and something told me to go to Wax.

He was in the living room on his bed. I went to him, and he started breathing differently. So I got down and held him in my lap, and I was holding him as he took his last breaths, and he stretched his head out. It was like he was leaving his body.

And it was so beautiful, and I knew it was his time, and I knew it was his relationship with God or his relationship with whatever happens next. And it was really beautiful. And I loved him so much, and I know he knew I loved him.

I'm so thankful that I was able to give that to him, give that space for him to get older, that space for him to pass peacefully. I felt very strongly about that too. I have to take care of him, and his life was between him and God, not between him and me. He always had his own relationships with everybody else, and even though I was his human, he had purpose, and he took care of the humans in his life. I was just blessed to be there with him for it, and blessed to be his human. And then he went, he walked on.

People were like, "Oh, you got to get another dog." How could I ever get another dog? I already had the best dog in the world. There's no way any dog could ever live up to Wax. I couldn't do that to another dog.

He was a living being. He was his own being. After he passed, there were people who I hadn't been in touch with for years, and who I'd even had falling outs with, but I knew that they loved Wax, and I knew that they had a relationship with Wax. Wax had an impact on their life. So I had to reach out to all of them and let them know that he'd passed on. That felt good too, to know that he had that impact on people's lives.

I still respect his energy. Friends still bring him up. I remember I worked in this bar in Brooklyn, and he would come to work with me, and he would sit at the bar, and he would drink Guinness. He would sit on a stool. I wondered if he'd drink beer, so I had a little dish and filled it with Guinness and put it in front of him, and he would sit there and drink Guinness. The foam would hang on his whiskers.

We never gave him a ton of Guinness, but it was just so cute. He just hung out like he knew he could sit at the bar. It was the most normal thing in the world for him to just hang out at the bar. He was a great dog, really something special.

That was awful. It was also awful because I didn't know—I lived in an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts—what do you do with his body? I hadn't thought of that. What do you do with his body? I can't bury him.

It was Fourth of July weekend. So every place that disposes of animal bodies or does anything, every place was closed. And we had no air conditioning. He was gone—who Wax was, his being was no longer there. It was just his shell or his container that was left, and once you leave it, the container just starts deteriorating. So I tried to keep it cold. It's too big to put in the fridge or the freezer.

My roommate, her name was Seaweed, she helped me find a place up in New Hampshire where they cremated dogs. She was a mess, so she rented the car the day after the Fourth of July. She rented the car and she drove, and I just held his body on the way up, held the box with his body on the way up.

The man who ran the crematorium, he was very sensitive. There were different cremation options. I could cremate him with a group of dogs, or I could cremate him on his own. I chose to cremate him on his own. We went into town while it was going on, and a couple hours later, went back and picked up his remains.

I remember picking up the bag of the ash, and just thinking I'd never hold his paws again. I'd never feel his muzzle or touch his body again. He was gone. He was just ash.

Thank God for Seaweed, because she really was with me through that whole time. She really held my hand and got me through it.

After he passed, this was in July, I felt really lost. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to live my life really, because I never really lived as an adult without him.

I had an opportunity to go to Guatemala, of all places. And I said, fuck it, I'll go to Guatemala. So I gave away a whole bunch of my stuff. I wasn't thinking clearly. I know now why they tell you after someone dies, don't do anything for a year, because I just gave away my mirror and my silverware. I made really stupid decisions that made perfect sense in the moment that years later, I was like, I wasn't thinking. I was a mess.

I gave away almost all my stuff and put some stuff in storage, and moved out of my apartment. I went to Guatemala, and I spent the next almost four years just traveling.

She had two cats, and Wax got along great with the cats. He respected other animals, and other animals respected him.

Little dogs would try to attack him all the time, and he would let them, because what are they going to do to him? They couldn't do anything. He would just stand there, maybe attacking his legs and biting his belly or whatever. When he would get really annoyed, he would just take one paw and pin the little dog down, because all he needed was one paw. The little dog would be freaking out. He would just hold it with his one paw and stand over it.

He played well with other animals. He was a very special, very smart, very powerful, smart being. I was blessed to have him in my life.

I just think of love. I think of all those things and just how much joy and love and loyalty he brought into my life—that unconditional, you know, be with you till the end, just unconditional.

He was pretty low maintenance. Humans might have that, but humans have so much bullshit with them. Humans are so faulty, and we're so stupid, and we've got so many challenges. But dogs don't carry that baggage. Some of them do, but they're so different.

Wax in particular, he didn't have any bullshit. I didn't train him or anything, but he just knew how to behave. He knew how to control himself. He knew how to have fun. He knew who needed support and when they needed support. He knew when I needed to be protected and from whom. He just always knew.

Elyse Wild:Do you have any altars to Wax, any talismans, any visible ways of keeping him with you?

He only had one collar his entire life, and it was a black leather spiked collar—a pretty badass collar. After he passed, I had it made into a bracelet.

What Wax Taught

Elyse Wild: What did Wax teach you?

Valerie: He taught me love, just love. I don't know if he taught me—I know he did, but what lessons did I learn? I don't know. But I know that I loved him. I still love him, and I know that he loved me.

I think he taught me trust. He taught me a lot of trust, because I could always trust him, no matter what he did or his decisions. He had his own mind. He had his own thing going on, and whatever it was, I could always trust it.

Elyse Wild: So if there is an afterlife where we get to see our pets again and you get to see Wax again, what would you say to him when you first see him?

Valerie: I love you. But I think he's still there. He's just not in his—he's free of the limitations of his container. I would like to think that getting rid of the container is really a liberating feeling, and that he's continuing on his journey. I hope that—I'm sure our journeys will cross again somewhere.

Elyse Wild: Thank you for listening. If you have a dead pet that you'd like to share, please send an email to deadpetsofficial@gmail.com.

Dead Pets is a Wild Media Industries production. It is written and hosted by me, Elyse Wilde. Our sound is edited by Brandon Hill. Original music is written, performed and produced by Brandon Hill.

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"Until one has loved an animal, one's soul remains unawakened." — Anatole France