Chihuahuas, Women and Me

She had eyes as black and shiny as fresh grapes. Her head was shaped like an apple and her ears were shaped like a bat’s. She was so small that she could fit into the breast pocket of my leather jacket. She was Ren, my black and tan chihuahua.

The last time I saw her my marriage was ending. My wife and I had been separated for a short time and so things were raw and bruised between us and trying to find common ground to talk without accusations was difficult. We met in Rushcutters Bay Park where we used to take our two chihuahuas for their evening walk. As we sat on a bench under a giant fig tree, plump white Plugger sat dozing at his mistress’s feet while Ren excitedly scanned the park for any signs of other dogs, regarding them as intruders on a territory she thought of as her own. Her ignorance of her owners’ turgid attempt to find some sense of detachment in talk of divorce and property settlement was contrary to the anthropomorphic sentimentality of dog owners who believe their dogs sense emotional upheaval in their owner’s lives, and instead, was closer to the truer representation of dogs in Renaissance paintings where, as a duel is fought or Christ is about to be born, a dog sits in the corner of the picture scratching itself or licking its balls. And yet, when it came time for my wife and I to part, Ren looked up at me with what could almost be described as a frown, slightly puzzled that she was being called to follow her mistress rather than the four of us returning to the apartment together.

I watched my wife walk over the storm-water bridge and occasionally Ren turned back to look as if half tempted to run back and join me. Then the trio headed around the sports oval and Ren with that upright bouncing gait common to the breed grew smaller until she resembled a bouncing dot not unlike those cheerful bouncing dots indicating rhythm and tempo that once accompanied songs on the cinema screen. And then, as my wife was about to disappear with the dogs behind a row of fig trees, I was struck by a visceral sense of déjà-vu. That was not my short, black-haired second wife walking away with my chihuahua but my tall, strawberry-blonde-haired first wife, and instead of heading off in the opposite direction I am hurrying towards her as she walks through the Exhibition Gardens in Carlton. And trotting beside her is our young chihuahua. I laugh because he looks so small, almost as if Sarah is being accompanied by an orange with four toothpicks as legs.

When I finally catch up to her, having been delayed by a phone call, Iggy, hearing me approach, spins around. He is so excited that he wraps the leash around his neck several times almost choking himself. I unfasten the clip that attaches the leash to his collar and he’s off joyously running through the thick carpet of brown, yellow and red autumnal plane tree leaves, alternatively vanishing below them and then resurfacing like some rabid squirrel. I hear a couple laughing and pointing at Iggy, Oh, look at the rat!  Sarah and I are used to this abuse because it seems that most people regard a chihuahua as if it is some freak of nature rather than a real dog.

Yet I asked for this. I could have bought any other breed of dog for Sarah’s birthday but I had my heart set on buying her a chihuahua. There was nothing in my past to suggest I would ever buy one. My family liked dogs and we had several over the years. There was the white German shepherd dog that guarded my parents’ trucking company. It was always filthy because it liked to roll in the oil stains. There was a fat beagle that spent hours on its back waiting for its mottled warm belly to be rubbed. A Cocker Spaniel that went so mad it used to jump through closed windows if it saw anything of interest on the other side. And a Pomeranian so randy it was called Phillip after Prince Phillip.

My knowledge of chihuahuas was limited. When I was learning the clarinet I liked to watch Hollywood musicals on television, and the first chihuahua I ever saw was in a 1940s MGM musical featuring the Cuban bandleader Xavier Cugat who popularised the mambo and the rumba in America. While he conducted his orchestra he held a baton in one hand and a chihuahua, about the size of a tea cup, in the other. So identified was he with chihuahuas that the cover and the text of his 1948 memoir Rumba is my Life is filled with drawings of the little dog.

Cugat is credited with popularising the breed and yet it is women who seemed to be attracted to them, especially actresses. The love of Lupe Velez, the so-called ‘Mexican Spitfire’, for her chihuahua Chips was returned so fervently, that the dog would often turn on her lovers with a ferocity that belied his smallness. Marilyn Monroe had chihuahuas, but it was Jayne Mansfield who adored them so much that she was once caught trying to smuggle two of her tiny dogs through Heathrow customs where she was spotted by one transfixed officer who noticed that her huge breasts were not bouncing so much as squirming. There is also the infamous photograph of the car crash that killed her. In the foreground is the gruesome sight of her dead whelping bitch lying on the road, surrounded by her mistress’s blonde wigs and bottles of whiskey. Billie Holiday’s chihuahua Chiquita was photographed many times at police stations being cradled by her mistress as the singer was booked for heroin possession.

 Lapdogs and women have seemed a perfect canine and human match for centuries. Film stars and idle, wealthy, kept women have been especially identified with small dogs, such as the woman in Chekhov’s Lady with a Lapdog, although in the story it is a white Spitz, a favourite dog also of Queen Victoria. Of course it has to be said that Sarah was not wealthy nor was she idle. She was a composer and, at the time, was struggling like I was to make a living from her creative work, and we were forced to supplement our paltry income by performing in nightclubs with our band, which had a transvestite. A chihuahua would suit the cramped narrow house where we lived behind a boot repairer’s shop. However, there was a couple of other reasons why I wanted to buy one: it was not only its peculiar appearance but there was something strange about a dog that had abnormal appeal for a Cuban bandleader, a junkie singer and blonde bombshell actresses. It wasn’t your normal run of the mill dog. It was weird.

Chihuahuas were hard to find in the middle 1970s. I tried to buy one puppy but the owner’s children cried so much I had to return it. Eventually I found a breeder who sold them out of the back of her car. We named him Iggy, after Iggy Pop the rock singer. In some ways he was to change my life more than Sarah’s. Fawn-coloured with intelligent eyes, he was not the timid, yapping thing most people imagine chihuahuas to be. He was robust, proud, very intelligent, with a profound dislike of being laughed at which is common to most chihuahuas and which unfortunately goes with the territory of being one.

Because they are lapdogs I was to learn that chihuahuas, unlike a lot of other breeds, like eye contact. Iggy had a fervent desire for eye contact and would sit on my lap as if trying to mesmerise me, then, after staring into my eyes, he would at odd moments jump off my lap and run around the room as if looking for something to do. It was only after several weeks that I realised he believed that somehow I was communicating something important to him when I winked. In order to test my theory I placed a bowl of milk in front of him, made him sit and then I winked. At first he was confused and then he realised that the wink was a yes. Over the next few months he learnt to obey several codes of winking that ordered him to bring his bowl over to me, made him jump up on the chair and place the bowl on the table, and gave him the command (three winks) to drink his milk. He could do this in any sequence and became especially excited when visitors came because he understood that the both of us would be showing off his wide selection of tricks and he would end up with a bowl of milk. The trouble was that he grew so adept at obeying my winks that if I accidentally blinked he would hurtle off my lap and rush to pick up his bowl. His intelligence was such that I believed he thought he was training me, and sometimes he would run to the fridge and look back as if trying to train me into giving the required number of winks to open it. In his own way Iggy also trained me to like chihuahuas, not only as an odd even amusing looking dog but also as a smart and devoted animal. He made chihuahuas essential to my life.

By the time we shifted to Sydney Iggy became pushy and grumpy if I didn’t wink at him, and in order to stop him from fixing me with a stare as if demanding me to wink I had to look away from him so he couldn’t read my eyes. In our house in Sydney he would jump up on the arm of the couch I was sitting in and trot backwards and forwards behind my head and peer around at my profile, satisfied at being able at least to wait for one eye to wink. Melbourne may not have put on my plays or played Sarah’s music but Sydney was different and Iggy liked us being successful because it meant more dinner guests and visitors and that also meant many more chances to cadge food. Although his bug-eyed hypnotic stare unnerved many people, he had also learnt new tricks, including a dance, which gained him many a titbit from impressed guests.

During the early eighties Sarah and I spent two years in Adelaide working for Lighthouse, the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Besides directing and writing I was also Associate Artistic Director so I was spending an inordinate amount of time in the theatre. So involved was I that I failed to realise that although Sarah was composing music she was lonely. I only realised this when I picked up some photographs from the photo shop. The first group were of Sarah in a bikini standing in a dam. She is laughing because she has just carried Iggy out in the middle of the dam and has released him to swim back to shore. There is a look of abject terror on his face as he frantically paddles towards land, his muzzle straining to lift itself out of the water. The next photograph is also of Iggy and Sarah. She is standing in a doorway, holding him in her arms. She is trying to smile but has an aura of desperate unhappiness about her, while Iggy looks pensive. The rest of the photographs were of Sarah smiling glumly or not even pretending to be happy but allowing herself to be photographed as if too unhappy to complain about being photographed. I had been so caught up in my work I didn’t realise how unhappy and lonely she was. My solution? Another chihuahua. This one was extremely tiny, or as the Americans say in the dog ads, ‘a tea cup chihuahua.’

The first photograph I took of Patsy (my musical tastes, as revealed by the names of the chihuahuas, were as diverse as Iggy Pop and Patsy Cline) she is fastidiously trying to nibble at a bone held by Sarah which is twice as big as her. Patsy was so tiny that she was easy to sit in the palm of a hand. One day as I was walking down the corridor into the kitchen, holding her in my hand, she fell. She hit the floor with a soft thump and lay still, not breathing. Before that moment I had never understood or experienced shock. I was paralysed by the thought that I had accidentally, carelessly, killed her. It was up to Sarah to rush to her and revive her. In a couple of hours she was bouncing around Iggy trying to make him play with her. As usual, he walked away believing play was beneath his dignity – he was never a playful dog – and, of course, he was jealous that he no longer received his owners’ undivided attention.

I decided it would be a nice idea to cast Patsy in a play I was directing. It was the Australian premiere of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro. I thought it would be a splendid touch to have the countess carry around a chihuahua with her so as to indicate her vapid, pampered life. On the first day of rehearsal the actress accidentally dropped Patsy, nearly sat on her twice in the bedroom scene and barely missed stamping on her when supposedly annoyed with the count, her husband. During the lunch break as I was holding the traumatised dog the vastly more experienced stage manager came up to me and said: ‘She’s gonna kill that mutt because there’s no way she’s gonna let a dog upstage her.’ I saw the wisdom of what he was saying and realised that if I continued with the idea Patsy would be dead by the end of the day. After lunch I told the actress the news. She could barely hide her satisfaction. ‘That’s good,’ she said, pretending she was thinking of Patsy, ‘cos that absentminded cunt of a stage manager is likely to drop her.’

A few days later Sarah found Patsy in the back garden under a flowering almond tree foaming at the mouth. We took her to the vet who thought she had eaten some snail bait that probably came into our garden from the next door neighbour’s after the unnaturally heavy rain which had put a stop to his and his girlfriend’s adulterous and strenuous sex sessions outside on his back lawn. Patsy was so small that her internal system broke under the strain of trying to combat the poison. Patsy was quickly followed by Lulu, who was a dumb as Iggy was smart, and I think Iggy never really got over the feeling that despite all his tricks, eye-reading and dancing, all Lulu had to do was sit before us with her constant stupefied gaze in order to get snacks.

After completing my contract in Adelaide it was back to Sydney where we bought a house in Sydenham, but something had irrevocably changed during our time in South Australia. The more Sarah’s unhappiness grew, the more I retreated into my work. Iggy, however, was becoming more interested in Lulu, especially when she came into season for the first time. We decided to separate them, worried that Lulu was too small to have puppies. But Iggy was frantic and spent all day trying to mount her, and at night he whined with sexual frustration and scratched at the door of the laundry where Lulu slept. What made it even more frustrating for him was that he could poke his muzzle under the door, but could not squeeze through, no matter how much he tried. Several times I found him stuck under the door, whimpering with desire. I read all I could on the subject and constantly came upon the euphemistic description of chihuahuas as ‘sturdy stud dogs’. Tiny rapists came readily to mind as I watched him feverishly pawing at the door. The only time he ever tried to bite me was when I pulled him off Lulu when he tried to mount her while she was sleeping on my lap. I began to worry about him. He was losing weight and becoming red-eyed with a lack of sleep. Then one morning I came out into the laundry to see him contentedly sleeping next to Lulu. He had eaten his way through the door.

Soon Lulu was showing signs of pregnancy and she began to resemble a football on four pegs. The vet told us to watch for the signs that she was about to give birth because he would have to perform a caesarean on her. The time came late one evening when, after several glasses of wine, I was about to sit down and watch the FA cup final and Lulu began hobbling around the room in distress. We rang the vet who was at home having a wild party, if the cacophony of music and laughter in the background was any guide. We rushed to the animal hospital. The vet was already there, a little unsteady on his feet, apologising for not having a nurse because she was, as he said, ‘pissed as a fart.’ Sarah and I were there with our goddaughter, Juliet, and he asked the three of us if we had ever given a needle before. We shook our heads and he pointed to Sarah. ‘You’ll do,’ he said, believing women were better at this than men. As the two of them were tying Lulu down on the operating table Sarah went white and, looking as if she were going to faint said, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ and with that went out into the corridor.

‘It’s up to us boys,’ said the vet cheerfully. Lulu, looking like a bloated toad, was on her back with her four legs tied to the four corners of the table, as if taking part in a canine sado-masochistic ordeal. The vet instructed me where to put the needle, which had to be done while he was cutting her open. He made an incision down her belly and then pulled apart the two flaps of skin. Standing on the opposite side of the table to him I was expecting a calm, wise remark about what he saw. Instead, I heard a gasp of ‘Oh, my God!’ It sounded like a scientist in a horror movie who cuts open a pregnant woman only to find a demon in her womb. It turned out that she had four pups, which he had never seen in such a tiny dog. I felt a tinge of male guilt. There was Iggy back at home, probably fast asleep, while the object of his brief sexual passion was near death carrying his pups. Each pup the vet extracted, removing the thin membrane that shrouded their bodies, was not breathing, and at the same time Lulu was dying. ‘I can’t do two things at once,’ he said, motioning to fourteen-year-old Juliet. ‘You’ll have to suck the mucus out of their noses, that’s why they’re not breathing.’ ‘You mean I have to suck our their snot?’ asked an incredulous Juliet. ‘Don’t worry, it’s sterile,’ he said. So while the vet and I attempted to save Lulu, Juliet picked up the first unconscious puppy, which was the size of a mouse, and gingerly sucked at its nose. The pup was so tiny that it needed Juliet to give just one strenuous suck for her to swallow it. Eventually after clearing the nasal passage she whooped with delight. Its tiny heart was starting to beat. Sarah joined in and one by one they breathed life into the pups. By the time all four were breathing so was Lulu.

Back home we placed Lulu and the four puppies in a cardboard box in our bedroom. Iggy trotted in, took one sniff of his offspring and left the room, never to show any interest in them again. Because Lulu was recovering from her operation Sarah got up every three hours and fed the puppies with an eyedropper. We didn’t intend to have children and yet Sarah was as devoted to the puppies as any mother. To hear the alarm go off in the early hours of the morning and hear her get out of bed and return from the kitchen with warm milk for the puppies and feed them one by one was curiously affecting. In a way it was the chihuahua puppies that temporarily brought us closer together.

As if to reclaim our attention Iggy’s back legs started to hurt him. If he were a human he would have been called a sook and a hypochondriac but the vet decided to operate on him, telling us that any normal dog would take only a few weeks to recover the use of his legs. But Iggy, appalled by the idea of even the slightest twinge of pain, decided he wouldn’t use his back legs at all. He took to walking on his front legs like some sort of canine acrobat. To see him hopping down the back steps on his front legs was to marvel at his skills but also his sheer stubbornness. Now we had six tiny dogs, five of whom would rush everywhere together. Iggy only deigned to become part of the mob if food was in the offering, and even then he would barge between his offspring and Lulu, sending them scattering because he carried a large plastic bowl in his mouth. Afraid that we might step on the pups we put bells on their collars, only to take them off a few days later when the sounds of loud arrhythmic tinkling began to get on our nerves.

But even the chihuahua pups couldn’t stop the inevitable and Sarah and I separated. She stayed with the dogs and I shifted into an apartment. When we got back together to talk about our future it was the dogs that preoccupied us of course. After giving away two pups we kept the parents and Candy and Brutus, the largest of the four pups. Candy was the smallest of the litter and although she had the slight dazed expression of her mother was extremely cute. She was named after Candy Darling, one of Warhol’s transvestite stars and I wanted to give her fifteen minutes of fame.

I wrote a television movie called The Lizard King and demanded that the character of the barmaid in a country pub carry her when working behind the bar. In order to humour me the producer Jan Chapman agreed, and on the first day she was required, there was a knock at the door and a uniformed chauffeur asked for ‘Miss Candy’. ‘I’ll just put her in her box,’ I said to the bewildered man. When I returned with Candy in her carry pack he was stunned. He quickly got into the spirit of the thing and for the next two days allowed Candy to sit on the front seat of the white limo so she would get the benefit of the air conditioning. I went to the set on the third day. The director was using an old Balmain hotel as the set for the country pub. It was so hot that the actors’ make up was dripping off them. There was one old rattling fan on the bar but no-one got the benefit of it because standing in front of it was the chauffeur holding Candy whose eyes were closed with pleasure and her two bat’s ears shaking slightly with the force of the breeze.

The barmaid was played by Clarissa Mason, the widow of the famous James Mason. She was a strong-willed woman whose smile sent a shiver through me. ‘The dog’s a treat,’ she barked in her husky voice. I could tell she didn’t like the idea of having a cute chihuahua to compete with her and yet as I watched take after take she didn’t make a fuss. It was only after we saw the rushes that I realised how cunning the old pro had been. Knowing how much the camera was framing the top half of her body she would lower the hand carrying Candy so that all one saw at the bottom of the screen was something that looked like two flickering razor blades.

My last attempt to promote Candy came when the director Neil Armfield wanted her for his bawdy and infamous production of The Country Wife at the Sydney Opera House. I have never been so proud as when, on opening night, I saw Kerry Walker come onto the stage carrying my chihuahua. Candy was so docile in any situation, compared to her hyper father, that she always seemed to be soporific. So lazy was she that when Kerry exited, Candy, having become bored with the play during the many rehearsals, jumped on her train as if hitching a ride, and so she left the stage to huge laughter and applause. ‘I thought it was me they were applauding,’ said a slightly miffed Kerry afterwards, as I cradled the sleepy, tiny star.

I returned to the house and the dogs while Sarah went to live with a painter. Iggy liked my new partner, Justine, because for the first time he was allowed on the bed, and since he was the only one capable of jumping from the floor onto the bed now that his legs had completely healed, and the others had to be lifted up, he always got the best spot, which was her lap. Photographs from the time show Justine sitting up in bed while the sheets seem to squirm with rodents. ‘Well, you think an Aboriginal like me would be surrounded by dingoes, but here I am with these tiny things,’ she once said, marvelling at her own attraction to a dog she would have once dismissed as a joke.

A few years later I was briefly living in Melbourne, while Sarah cared for the dogs. Iggy didn’t like Sarah’s new boyfriend and often took the opportunity to piss on his leg, knowing that the new man in his mistress’s life didn’t like dogs, especially small dogs. I had grown very fond of Candy and once settled in Melbourne rang Sarah asking her to air freight the dog down to me. The next morning she rang to say that Candy had died overnight. I made a joke that she shouldn’t have told Candy that she was going to Melbourne, but I was devastated. Then Iggy, in ill health and ill humour died aged fourteen, and Lulu quickly followed suit two days later as if bereft or at a loss to understand the world now that her grumpy guide had gone. I vowed never to have a chihuahua again.

Back in Sydney I often talked about them to my eventual second wife, Gerri, so much so that she joked to people that the reason why I liked her was that she was small like a chihuahua. One Christmas night, after we had had our customary Christmas drinks party, she said she was going to visit a mutual friend who lived a few doors down in Elizabeth Bay Road. She returned half an hour later with a brown paper bag and said, ‘This is your Christmas present.’ I looked in the paper bag and saw two tiny furry animals with bright black eyes and apple shaped heads staring back at me. I thought I had had too much to drink but no, my Christmas present was two black and tan chihuahuas. They were adorable and cute and the size of a tennis ball. There was only one problem: animals, of any and every description, were forbidden in our apartment building. ‘We’ll teach them not to bark,’ said Gerri cheerfully. Overwhelmed by the fact that they were illegal, and afraid that if I fell in love with them either the Board would hear about them and force me to get rid of them or else they would die young like Candy, I went straight to bed unable to cope with the responsibility of them.

Once they were on the bed Christmas morning, staggering around, their tiny insect legs finding the thick doona as treacherous to negotiate as newly fallen snow, and peering curiously at me with their gleaming black eyes, I fell in love with them. At the time my favourite television show was a cartoon called Ren and Stimpy. Ren is a psychotic chihuahua and Stimpy his fat docile friend is a cat, so naturally I called the bigger chihuahua Ren, especially as her slightly lazy eye gave her a disturbing similarity to the psychotic cartoon chihuahua, and the other one I called Stimpy. Gerri wouldn’t hear of it. I couldn’t name a chihuahua after a cat, so after much deliberation we called it Holly, after Holly Golightly from the Capote story.

Not long afterwards there was a ghastly coincidence when both dogs broke a leg. Chihuahuas hate children and Ren had every reason to have that attitude reinforced when a child demanded to hold her after the mother proclaimed that ‘she’s good with dogs’. Ren tumbled from the child’s clumsy grip onto the floor and yelped in excruciating pain. Later that day Holly fell from a chair. For the next month the dogs, each with a leg encased in a cast, hobbled around the living room looking like more like cartoon dogs than real ones. Because I had to search for film locations in Ireland I went away for two weeks and while I was away Holly died. According to the vet, she was so tiny that survival into adulthood was always going to be difficult. Twice, while I was separated from them my dogs had died. It seemed to me that being apart from them I was somehow partly to blame, as if some sort of crucial psychic bond had been broken by distance and that if only I had been with them maybe their deaths might not have occurred.

We bought a new dog, a white chihuahua, who had a slight medical condition in that one of his balls had failed to appear and was still lodged inside him. As the famous Australian Rules star Tony ‘Plugger’ Lockett had a groin injury at the time, the new dog was christened Plugger in his honour. From the day of his arrival he was an amiable slow-thinking dog who seemed in awe of the highly strung Ren, who, like her namesake, had a demented intelligence that made simple things arduous. It was easy to teach Plugger to sit because it was a comfortable position that didn’t require much energy but Ren seemed to require a reason for it and found it difficult to get the point of why, after having proved she could sit, she had to remain seated. Her curiosity was boundless but Plugger’s was tightly circumscribed by the amount of effort it required. Once the doorbell buzzed Ren would rush excitedly down the hallway to greet guests, while Plugger remained in the living room, knowing the guests would eventually end up there anyway. Plugger would wait patiently to be lifted up and placed on my lap but Ren would leap up onto my ankles and then crawl up my legs like a salmon struggling upstream. If I didn’t pay attention to her, she would gain my attention or that of a guest by jumping up from a standing position. Her back legs were extremely powerful, as she had come from what the breeder had said was a ‘long line of jumpers’. Many a guest sitting in the living room was disconcerted to see what looked like a crazed large rat momentarily appearing in their eye line before vanishing, only to mutely reappear with increasingly frenzied expressions of demand.

Of course, there was the problem of how to hide the dogs from the rest of the apartment owners. Although chihuahuas are regarded as yappy dogs they proved easy to train to be quiet, especially Ren who seemed to sense that there was something important about being silent. Both dogs seemed to understand from the first time we stuffed them into a handbag and took them down in the lift and through the apartment foyer that it was important that they did not bark or move, which they never did, even when someone unexpectedly entered the lift.

Recently I read a survey in a tabloid newspaper that said a marriage was in trouble if the couple allowed a dog or cat to sleep with their owners. Ren and Plugger were introduced to our bed soon after we got them. This step was not so much our doing but Ren’s, who demanded to sleep with us by jumping up and down for hours on one spot next to my side of the bed with a demented and increasingly exasperated desire to be on the bed. The dogs quickly grew more attached to one of us than the other, so while the lazy, shuffling Plugger took to sleeping on my wife’s side of the bed, Ren liked to crawl down under the sheets to curl up at my feet or else, if it were too hot, curl on the pillow beside my head so that sometimes when I woke up I would be shocked to see what looked like a black fetus on my pillow. Plugger was content to sleep all day, Ren saw it as her duty to wake me at the same time every week day. She was as regular as a clock and if I took too much time to get out of bed she would show me what to do by jumping onto the floor and hurrying towards the bathroom. If I did not follow her immediately, she would repeat this endlessly until I did as instructed, then worn out by her efforts to get me up, she would jump back on the pillow and contentedly fall asleep now that she had completed the job she had assigned herself to do. If I decided to work on a Saturday Ren, who hated disruptions to her routine, would mope and look at me with what I can only describe as a sad hope that I would take her to my office, a place she seemed to regard it as a privilege to be, especially as I took her and not Plugger. Of course, on the way she liked to canter along the slippery floors of the Edgecliff shopping centre as if knowing she was the centre of attention, especially from old ladies and the woman newsagent who liked to cradle her and whisper sweet nothings in Greek into her ear. Chihuahuas generally dislike all other breeds except for their own but Ren disliked all other chihuahuas except for a grizzled ancient chihuahua who arthritically followed in his blind owner’s footsteps. Tied to a short leash, and at the mercy of his owner’s limited vision which frequently had the both of them bumping into benches and shop windows, the dog gave up trying to pull away from constant and imminent danger and was content to be dragged on its back across the shiny floor by its owner, who was oblivious to the fact that her dog had given up walking. Ren became so possessive of me that if Plugger somehow ended up in my lap Ren would jump up and head-butt him off. Plugger would tumble onto the floor and sleep where he fell.

The chihuahuas took over other aspects of my work. They began to appear in my fiction and my screenplays. Any film that had even a fleeting image of a chihuahua I videoed or hired out and soon I was able to discourse to dinner guests on the way chihuahuas have been used in movies, either as a prop to indicate homosexuality as in The Third Man, or as a leitmotif in Tim Burton’s films, where they are used to suggest Bela Lugosi’s remoteness from the real world in Ed Wood, or the weird and absurd humour of Mars Attacks! where aliens genetically splice a chihuahua with a woman. Then there are the many full-length cartoons, like Oliver and Company where the chihuahua is portrayed as a hyper, highly strung character with a high pitched Hispanic voice.

In fact the more I looked for chihuahua references and portrayals the more I found. It seemed that in the 1990s the chihuahua’s time had come. The dog was on greeting cards, its image was used to sell mobile phones and insurance and even featured on the covers of such novels as Laurence Shames’ Sunburn where an an old plump chihuahua is wearing sunglasses and using a Zimmer frame. Chihuahuas feature in many of the urban myths written up in the books The Mexican Sewer Rat and Pelicans and Chihuahuas and other Urban Legends. There are many such urban legends, some of which had been told to me as fact, including that of the American couple who bought a Mexican sewer rat believing it was a chihuahua, and the common Australian urban myth of an old lady walking her chihuahua along the beach when it is scooped up by a pelican and the last she sees of her dog is the leash hanging outside the bird’s beak as it carries the chihuahua aloft. But reality proved worthy of these urban legends. In 1999 Californian newspapers ran the continuing saga of how a three-metre long boa constrictor had grabbed a chihuahua called Babette whose cautious seventy four year-old owner had briefly allowed it outside to ‘go potty’. No charges were laid against the owner of the snake but Babette’s distraught owner did get compensation when she appeared on a television court show presided over by former New York mayor Ed Koch.

I also set out on what has proved to be a never-ending quest to buy any ornament, toy or paraphernalia that has something to do with chihuahuas. I have several large boxes of towels and T-shirts with images of the dog. There are key rings, statues, coffee mugs, drink coasters, socks, book covers, advertisements, and even a music box on top of which sits a carved chihuahua with one foot resting on a large red ball. When wound up the music box plays ‘Friends’. To others this is probably a pitiful obsession but then – what would they know of the love and obsessions a chihuahua can inspire?

I have found myself at chihuahua shows, earnestly discussing the merits of the normal chihuahua compared to what is called ‘the Bambi’, a chihuahua favoured by the Americans. If there is a generalisation to be made about chihuahua owners it is that, yes, many of the women are fat and the men thin, with disturbing shifty eyes. The last time I went to a show one of these men was hoping his chihuahua would win in memory of his male lover who had hanged himself from a tree the week before. But even the breeders and exhibitors know little about the origins of the breed, except to claim it goes back to the ancient Olmec, Toltec and Aztec civilisations. Carvings and even toys from the period seem to indicate that there was a chihuahua-type dog. Many Spanish chroniclers, writing about South America and the Caribbean at the time of the Conquest, refer to small dogs which the Aztecs sold in the markets or the Incas venerated. Acosta writes about mute tiny dogs that ‘were for the amusement of the ladies, who carried them in their arms.’ Probably most of the references are to the Mexican hairless dog rather than chihuahuas who seemed to vanish from Mesoamerica only to reappear in the late nineteenth century when the breed was saved by American tourists. Because of its rarity and exotic looks it soon became highly sought after and was quickly associated with upper-class women and courtesans. In Punch there is a cartoon entitled ‘Dog Fashions for 1889’ which ridicules the taste for new dog breeds. It shows a wealthy woman walking in a park with several weird hybrid dogs and leading them in a prancing gait is an extremely tiny chihuahua labelled ‘Bug Dog’. It was around this time that chihuahuas broke into show business. A British performer, Rosina Casselli, had a group of at least a dozen chihuahuas in her stage act performing ‘all manner of tricks’. Yet, although it is easy to trace its history since the late nineteenth century all the reading I have done, including such splendid histories as the Varners’ Dogs of the Conquest and Marion Schwartz’s A History of Dogs in the Early Americas, still refuses to throw up information that would definitely confirm the existence of chihuahuas as we now know them. Gradually I developed the theory that the chihuahua may be the hybrid of a dog native to the Americas and a later imported European dog.

What set me on the path of this theory is a stunning painting by the Venetian painter Carpaccio (1460?-1525). Called Waiting, it consists of two panels, one entitled ‘Men hunting on the Lagoon’ and the other ‘Two Venetian Ladies’, which shows two upper class women waiting for their men to return. One of the women is clutching the paw of a small white dog who stares directly at the viewer. There is no mistaking its similarity to a chihuahua – the apple-shaped head, bat-like ears, prominent eyes and small size. The likeness is uncanny. It’s possible that this typical Venetian dog was taken to colonial Mexico where it was interbred with a local variety. The notion obsessed me so much that when an Italian film company asked me to write a film partly set in Venice I agreed in the hope that I could prove this theory correct. The director, who was much more interested in Venice’s huge empty tobacco factories, found my interest in visiting every art gallery mysterious and tedious and soon gave up accompanying me. What I discovered confirmed my suspicions. There is a popular eighteenth-century Venetian genre painter Pietro Longhi, whose rather stiff but cheerful works have an undeniable charm. What fascinated me is the leitmotif of a small white dog, not unlike the one in Carpaccio’s masterpiece, that occurs in many of his paintings, appearing at the feet of plump children, beautiful women in gorgeous gowns, and in one delightful example, sitting on a stool gazing in bewilderment at a violin trio playing from sheet music spread out on a piano top. The film director grew increasingly annoyed with my absences from location-hunting but I was spending my time searching for paintings and images that featured this little white dog that looked for all the world exactly like Plugger. I irritated library staff wanting reproductions of the paintings or secretly filmed the paintings with my digital camera. In a way Iggy had led me all the way to Venice. The film didn’t eventuate, as I knew it wouldn’t, but I had uncovered enough information to think my theory had some sort of credibility.

My own credibility however was losing ground with friends who thought that what was once an amusing interest of mine was becoming an obsession, yet around me the chihuahua was becoming ubiquitous in films, advertisements and television commercials. I have no doubt that part of its growing attraction was its idiosyncratic appearance. In advertisements such as the Orange Internet promotions, the chihuahua is deliberately made to look bizarre. It seems to me that one of the reasons for its rise in popularity has been the contemporary fascination with aliens who are generally seen as small odd-shaped creatures with appealing large bright eyes. But if there was one thing that caused the chihuahua to become extraordinarily popular it was the Taco Bell dog with big brown eyes, quivering body and deep voice that did for the chihuahua what Lassie did for the Collie and what 101 Dalmatians did for the Dalmatian.

The fast food company Taco Bell brought out a series of commercials which feature a chihuahua who hangs out with Generation X-ers, climbs fire escapes and roams the desert to convert hamburger loyalists into taco lovers under the banner of the Taco revolution and is given to loudly demanding, ‘Yo Queiro Taco Bell!’. The ad agency that came up with the idea decided that the chihuahua was their idea of ‘A nineteen-year-old guy in a dog’s body who primarily thinks of food and girls.’ In other words, for the first time in popular culture, a chihuahua was considered, as one reporter remarked, ‘a cool dude’. There were of course criticisms from various Hispanic organisations who thought that the voice given to the chihuahua was demeaning to Hispanics, but the Hispanic actor who voiced the dog put these criticisms down to the fact that Hispanic men didn’t think a chihuahua was macho enough for them. For breeders there were both good and bad aspects to the rapid popularity of the breed caused by the advertisements. Because the demand was so great unscrupulous breeders sold inferior dogs; but the thing that made many chihuahua lovers despair was that the Taco Bell dog is an anomalous example of the breed. It is too tall, too heavy, too leggy and the head is not round enough and its muzzle is too long. Chihuahua purists feared that children especially would be demanding a chihuahua that looked like ‘this freak’, as one breeder called it, and force them to cultivate sub-standard dogs.

Frankly I didn’t care about the fuss and on my visits to LA I was always thrilled to see the many huge billboards featuring the Taco Bell chihuahua. An insomniac, I would spend the early hours of the morning in my hotel room sipping gin and channel-surfing in the hope of seeing the Taco Bell commercials. My love of chihuahuas was being vindicated; they were now considered cute, funny, and hip. The Taco Bell advertisements were so successful that Taco Bell in Australia held a search to find an Australian chihuahua to use in the local commercials. Without a skerrick of shame, but on the contrary with a pride that is common to stage mothers, I entered Ren in the contest. A few weeks later we turned up at the Taco Bell restaurant in George Street Sydney on a hot humid night with nine other chihuahua owners, all of whom were women of a certain age and bulk. The restaurant was filled with photographers and television cameras. Ren and I were to audition last but as we watched the others I realised that every dog before us was white. The judge was a blonde, voluptuous TV celebrity who was a part of a long line of attractive blonde chihuahua lovers from Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe right up to Madonna. By the time our turn came to parade I realised that black and tan Ren would not win against the white chihuahuas. However, in a pathetic attempt to gain Ren an advantage I grabbed her after she had done her tricks and placed her on the celebrity’s lap before she knew what was happening. With a stage mother’s cunning I wasn’t aware I possessed, I knew that dark Ren would make a wonderful photo opportunity as she sat on the white frock of a beautiful woman. And sure enough, photographers literally elbowed me out of the way in order to get the picture, one of them so furious that I had impeded him that he snarled, ‘Out of the way, cunt’. But my cheap stunt wasn’t enough. During the presentation of the prize (private limo to photo shoots, five hundred dollars) I vainly wished I was in the US and could cite prejudices against blacks in giving the prize to a white dog. I suspect Ren realised I was disappointed because in the taxi trip home she was very affectionate, and spent the time snuggling up to me and licking the back of my hand. As a consolation prize I gave her more cheese than usual and was later gratified to discover that the winner never appeared in any advertisements.

It was around this time that my marriage began to dissolve. When the atmosphere in the apartment become tense and strained I would take Ren out for a walk late at night, but unknown to my wife, we did not go down to the park, instead we headed up the street to the Sebel Town House hotel where, after hiding her inside my leather jacket to sneak her past the concierge, we would slip into the tiny bar. The barman knew us and without a word he would pour me a dry martini and give Ren a champagne glass full of salted peanuts. After stuffing Ren into the top pocket of my jacket I would sip my martini and she would dip her head out of the pocket and daintily pick up a peanut at a time. I could always tell the alcoholics at the bar because they pretended they didn’t see what looked like a large rat eating peanuts out of a champagne glass.

And then the events that helped break up our marriage become a blur. Once the marriage was over my wife and I would meet on the neutral ground of Rushcutters Bay park to discuss our future. Because I had shifted out and was settling into an apartment of my own Gerri kept the two dogs. We didn’t discuss their future because it was fraught with a major problem. Ren was my dog and Plugger was hers. And even though I wanted Ren I didn’t want to separate them – dogs can get terribly lonely. Our last meeting in the park settled nothing and after watching my wife and the two dogs head off back to the apartment I went on my way.

When I shifted into my new apartment it took me quite a while to unpack all the boxes of my belongings. Eventually I came upon several photograph albums from the past two decades. Curiously, although I had several studio photographs taken of me with my chihuahuas, amongst the hundreds of social photographs there were none of me with them. All the photographs of chihuahuas were with the women who had been a part of my life: Sarah walking Iggy, Sarah with the tiny, mouse-sized puppies, Justine beaming as six chihuahuas swarmed over her, countless pictures of Gerri with Ren and Plugger – even at our wedding there is a photograph of Ren, who had to be sneaked into the reception room, sitting in the hand of a beautiful actress, her blissful face turned towards the last rays of the setting sun.

I heard that my wife was working briefly in Brisbane and had the two dogs. A couple of months later I was in the Edgecliff shopping centre buying a newspaper when the Greek newsagent said sympathetically, ‘I’m so sad to hear about Ren.’ It turned out that Ren had died in Brisbane. For the third time my separation had resulted in the death of one of my chihuahuas. I was distraught. She meant much to me. I held my own wake at the Sebel Town House bar where the barman placed a champagne glass full of peanuts next to my martini for ‘Ren’s ghost’. Some days later I received an e-mail from my wife. Ren had been run over outside a veterinarian’s surgery when, on getting out of the taxi, she smelt the horrid odours of a place she had always hated, and blindly bolted across the street. My wife buried her in a friend’s backyard and on the grave placed a cube of cheese, for which she always had an inordinate if not fanatical craving. I felt guilty. If only Gerri and I hadn’t separated then Ren would never have gone to Brisbane and would be alive today. The death of my marriage had also resulted in the death of my beloved chihuahua.