Chuffalo Buffalo by Paula Brancato
Creative nonfiction intern Sophia Torres on today’s essay: Electric and ecstatic, “Chuffalo Buffalo” is a delightful delve into Myrtle-the-dog and all the wonderful inner-workings of her mouth! Filled with slobber and silliness, Brancato perfectly blends adoration with an overwhelming amount of doggie drool, treating the reader to an illustrious - though not exactly exclusive - tour of what lies inside Myrtle's maw. Trust you’ll find yourself in good company among the taxi flattened pizza and neck-snapped sparrow (she is a dog after all). Let “Chuffalo Buffalo” sink its teeth into ya (you deserve it) and surrender your offensive limbs to Myrtle. Come on, don’t be shy! Come drool with us.
chuffalo buffalo
Here are the things I pull from Myrtle’s mouth on our walk down Jackson Avenue:
- A chunk of Chile cornbread, crumbs slithering down her gullet
- A slice of 3-day old, taxi-flattened pizza, which she licked at (mostly)
- Half a loaf of Challah bread: I stomped on one end while she chowed down on the other, much to the delight of the 21st Street Bodega and synagogue crowd, and
- Three quarters of a quarter pounder, nosed from a brown paper bag and still in its white semitransparent wrapper. She chewed like a billy goat.
So anxious was she to swallow this paper-burger-pickle-cheese concoction, she balled it up with her tongue and gulped, errant pickle seeds and ketchup coating her nose. These too went down, down, down born by the second wave of her smooth wet tongue into the dark recesses of throat and tummy. You could plop a small boat in there, rib bones ringing. Then she burped. A baby’s belch redolent of kraft paper, lettuce and pulp.
Here are the things Myrtle-the-dog likes to lick: me, my sofa, my pillows, me, my boyfriend, anyone’s boyfriend, anything or anyone slathered in cream, butter, vitamin-E oil, olive oil, preparatory food emulsions of any sort and once, only once, an open jar of Tiger Balm red, extra strength with camphor, menthol and cassia oil, after which she ran round and round in circles, receiving none of the pain alleviating health benefits, which the label says apply to joints, but not to tender tongues. Test this theory at your dining peril.
Of her 55 pounds of solid doggie-dom, Myrtle’s head is at least 20, 5 of those teeth and tongue. Her tongue is very pink and wide and droopy. Slurpy, in fact. I’d say 20% droop, 50% slurp and 30% lick-a-whirl, which is like Lik-M-Aid but saltier and wetter. Myrtle’s snout is spectacular. 5” long it can scrunch up to fit into a 1” demitasse, especially with coffee at the bottom. Any bottom, she will lick with abandon if allowed. When Myrtle smells food, when she watches me eat, when she even thinks of the possibility of a picture of food, drool drips in a silent stream, first from one side of her mouth, then the other, then both sides. A flood of drool overflows the banks of her mouth and streams down like an endless Fu Manchu, drool pooling on her paws, on my carpet, the bed, the floor, the sofa, the sidewalk, your shoes, your nice clean newly-ironed white shirts, your silk dress, whatever is wherever she is. She sits with a singular focus, a living, breathing rainforest.
Pavlov knew what he was doing when he picked doggie drool as a measure of conditioning, because doggies drool. A lot. Immediately. On olfactory cue. Eventually without the cue, as Pavlov discovered when his dog drooled simply when he entered the room. Dogs know when you are even thinking about thinking about food and will drool to show encouragement. Myrtle cannot help but drool. And those eyes! Almond shaped brown to the rims, they do not show white unless she is eating and then, they roll back into her head in a kind of ecstasy. Feed a dog. You will see. Pavlov was a difficult man. He must be. A cruel scientist, making dogs drool with no food. It is painful to watch Myrtle drool in an I’m-sorry-and-I-know-it’s-ridiculous-but-I-can’t-stop-this-both-sides-of-my-mouth-drooling thing. She says furthermore: “It is a form of pre-digestion. It is like the stomach leaping up into the mouth and saying ‘Incoming’ ‘Incoming’ ‘Prepare’ ‘Prepare the enzymes for digestion of… a little morsel perhaps?’” Here she rocks back and forth and side to side, wiggling her bottom, grinding it into the carpet. Sometimes, she slaps her paws to the ground and turns herself, like a top. “Oh come on, look at me! Look at me!” “Gimme, gimme gimme some, puh-lease!’” Then she stops and fixes those almond brown eyes on the food. My last bite. It seems cruel not to give her any.
Drooling is the only time when, confronted with water, Myrtle does not shake it off. In her focused stupor, she might very well drown, or drown you, if you do not give her something! Even one rice grain will do. Shutting down Niagara Falls.
Myrtle’s mouth is 6” across and her snout is 5” long. She is only 20” tall so her mouth is nearly a third of her. That is like a human having a mouth that goes past his or her sternum. Ungainly large, Myrtle’s mouth makes perfect sense. A doggie’s mouth is it’s only means of personal doggie self-expression. A dog must use its mouth to do everything. Laugh, cry, bark, howl, lick, eat, kiss, pull, push, bite. A dog cannot hug you. Not really. Not like a person can in a deep soulful breast to breast clamp around the back, smelly, sweaty, sweet human kind of way, that is sometimes sexy and sometimes sisterly or brotherly.
Dogs’ mouths smell. Don’t get me wrong. Unkind people have announced, “Just because you are inured to the smell of Myrtle’s mouth or farts doesn’t mean I am.” This is a direct quote from some man or another who was in my bed once, and only once, who obviously did not understand. This statement is right up there with “Let’s get one thing straight. I will never love your dog.” And “What do you mean I’m not supportive? It doesn’t matter if you succeed at (writing, investments, the Olympics, whatever). I just want you to be happy.” And how is that supportive? What if succeeding at (writing investments, Olympics, whatever) is what makes me happy? There are certain people Myrtle should deeply bite.
Anyhow, dogs have relatively stubby arms that really do not bend in a human hugging, free-frontal abandonment kind of way. So their heads and mouths are all they’ve got to show love and affection. Not sex, you pervert! I said, affection. I have added you to the bite-this-pervert list. It would be a good idea for you to cease and desist now. N’est ce pas?
Myrtle’s mouth, wide and low, has a complete set of sharp white teeth meeting in a scissor-bite, Chuffalo Buffalo, lickety-split, with upper and lower eyeteeth that arch back into her mouth like a crocodile’s. Her bottom front teeth angle out, straight out, jut out sharply like a garbage scoop, the eyeteeth guarding either side, playing catcher, hooking into this and that the tongue and front teeth scoop up, flicking morsels to her red long tongue for further processing or, if bigger to her second set of eyeteeth further back for grinding. Her front top teeth too angle out, but any idea she cannot bite down is highly misleading. Just as she scoops the unsuspecting morsel in, she nabs and locks down on it with her jaws and the eyeteeth dig in. Her incisors, both sets, can be sharp as a medical scalpel when she wants them to be. Otherwise not. I have seen her grip an angry male German shepherd more than twice her size, by its throat and bring it to the ground. Then release it, becalmed, without so much as a scratch.
I have also seen her snap the neck of a sparrow in mid-flight. She is a dog after all. And so, this business of taking food from the mouth of Myrtle on our walks is a careful one. She is careful not to nick me; I am careful not to inflict any unnecessary pain. Such as, rarely, ramming my thumb into her throat so she releases a shattered bone that would only tear up her insides. Or extracting a 2-day old bagel from her incisors by sticking a mittened hand into her mouth and simply pulling till the bagel falls apart. Like a dentist -patient relationship. After it is over, neither of us says a word. Chuffalo Buffalo, we walk on.
One thing. People think that terriers are nervous. Terriers are not nervous. Pitbull terriers are totally not nervous. They are just highly focused on finding food, rats, cats, mice squirrels and small animals. They like to eliminate pests. If you are one beware! Myrtle knows.
Another word of caution. Should Myrtle ever clamp down on a body part, say, an arm or a leg of anyone. Or a hand, say. I highly recommend you not try to pull your offensive limb from poor little Myrtle’s mouth, no matter what you did to deserve this, such as: stealing an avocado; ignoring your crying baby; ignoring anyone’s crying baby; embezzling your company funds; beating your wife; kissing your assistant; or stomping on your chihuahua’s tail.
Rather, you should push the offending body part in as hard as you can so as to effect a choke at the back of the dog’s throat. Her eyes will tear, her drool will stop and she will unlock her jaw and release you. Chuffalo Buffalo. You evil thing!
But for now we are all good. So long as Myrtle does not poo my Persian carpet which she has only done once, or … maybe twice. Poor thing! That is what you get from the sidewalk buffet of life.
Paula Brancato was the 2015 winner of Tampa Review’s Danahy Fiction Prize and Booth’s 2015 Poetry Prize, and Second Prize winner in Cutthroat’s 2019 Rick DeMarinis Story Contest. Her work has also appeared in The Interpreter’s House, Ambit, Kenyon Review, Mudfish, GSU Review, Georgetown Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slipstream and Barrow Street. Brancato’s chapbook, Dar a Luz, was selected by Ilya Kaminsky for pacificReview’s 2007 Brushfire Award. Her chapbooks, Painting Cities and For My Father were published by Finishing Line Press. Brancato grew up in Queens, NY, escaped early on, earned her MBA at Harvard Business School and is a graduate of Hunter College and Los Angeles Film School. She has been a music industry CFO and Wall Street executive. You can find her on her website at paulabrancatowriter.com and on Facebook.
You can find Myrtle the Dog on Instagram at @myrtlethedog_.
