Kathy Dobie

How many news reports have I read where “Man kills girlfriend and children, then self”? Hundreds, I suppose. I’ve always wondered if they turn the gun on themselves at the end to escape judgment. Or were they suicidal all along and just couldn’t bear to leave her and the kids behind? Couldn’t bear it because they knew that their families would survive fine without them; indeed, they would be happy to see them go.

Who did Benjamin Smith decide to take with him? Not his family, not his girlfriend — she left him over a year ago. A black man walking with his children. A Korean man coming out of church with a group of fellow worshippers. He shot at Orthodox Jews returning from temple and a group of Asian students talking outside their college dormitory. Like the high school killers in Littleton, Colo., Smith went after anyone who believed — in God, in family, in the rightness of their own existence. And anyone who belonged.

When I interviewed white-power skinheads a few years back, they were almost all the children of middle class, suburban families, like Benjamin Smith, like the Littleton boys, like the white supremacists in Sacramento, Calif. accused of murdering a gay couple. To the skinheads I met, being white meant being rootless, causeless, no flag to wave, no people to feel loyal to, no one feeling loyalty to them. “If the race war happened now, whites would lose,” they complained. “Blacks are so close together. They’d be real easy to set off and they’d all stick together but whites wouldn’t.”

They were educated kids, articulate. For all their talk of racial pride, they didn’t seem to like white people much. White meant weak. Greedy. Complacent. Most of all, lonely. They complained bitterly about how materialistic and bloodless white families had become.

Here’s how one skinhead described his parents’ middle-class life and their expectations for him: “It was go to high school, be on the football team, do all the things kids are supposed to do, then go to college, be a doctor, have a couple of kids when you’re 30.” His voice was filled with disgust.

He wanted to be working class. He wanted to be living in another era — the 1930s or ’40s, he thought, “when America was proud.” At 16, he defied his parents and his class and dropped out of school to get married. He had three kids, worked a couple of jobs and he was happy. “I slept in the bed I made. I took care of business,” is how he described it, proudly. Then his wife left him, and took the kids.

Every time I hear about another murderous young white man — Benjamin Smith or the Bible study killer or the Sacramento white supremacists or the Colorado boys who spent their Saturday nights closed inside the garage making bombs — I think of Kundera’s phrase, “the unbearable lightness of being.”

Who do they matter to? What value do they have, these awkward, bookish, lonely, none-too-pretty white boys? Where do they fit in? I doubt anyone feels more white today than these nerdy boys. It’s obviously not a good feeling; they seem afraid of being afraid, of being perceived as weak or nerdy or alone. And that is how they are seen now; they can no more help it than an Asian kid can help being seen as smart.

Beware the lonely white boy. Beware the nerdy ones, the ones without girls and stuck with each other on weekend nights, in the garage, breaking glass, trying to make a party, a tribe out of two. They live in their heads because it’s so unpleasant out here, and in there, they imagine themselves as warriors, wreckers of vengeance. Stephen King’s “Carrie” is now a boy, a white boy. He is in a rage because he’s a bookish, awkward boy and he has been made vulnerable.

When he was 20, Smith joined The World Church of the Creator. He couldn’t have made a worse move — a church without a God, a church that worshipped nothing but its own self, white men believing in … white men. And so, Smith went out and he killed people who went to real churches, real temples, people who believed in something bigger than themselves, people living as if they mattered.

This weekend I went looking through some of the white racist sites on the Internet. One of them was nightmarish. “Is anyone out there?” read the most recent message. “I keep coming here and it looks the same. I posted a message awhile ago but no one’s answered.” All alone in cyberspace, like Bowie’s astronaut, cut off from Ground Control, whirling endlessly. No one to hear you call, no voices coming through. This is the white man’s nightmare, a nightmare he can’t stop tweaking and calling up, shivering in dread all the while.

Last I heard, the skinhead I interviewed, the one who wanted only to raise his own family, had been arrested for murder. And Benjamin Nathaniel Smith died a white man’s death: alone in a car, driving fast, he put a bullet in his head. It was the night of July 4th and his ex-girlfriend told the New York Daily News, “This is his Independence Day from the government, from everything.”

) Pacific News Service

“I’m glad I wasn’t there,” says a Palestinian-American in my neighborhood, a twentysomething guy who works hard but likes to party, who could’ve been there if he hadn’t had to work.

He seemed anxious about how he would have behaved and even more afraid that he would’ve done nothing wrong but gotten swept up in the arrests anyway, melding fear of the police and fear of his own nature.

Some observers saw the Central Park attack as abuse directed against women. But for others it was also about being a young, nonwhite male in this city, always judged guilty in some profound way. Thus the question “Who knows what I would’ve done if I was there?” contains a deep anxiety: Am I a good man? Can I be?

In an editorial in the New York Daily News, Anne Roiphe wrote that the young men who attacked the women were not on “their own familiar turf but in the heart of a cold stranger, America the successful.”

She went on: “They roved across midtown Manhattan past exclusive clubs and fancy restaurants and co-op apartments that are not within their budget, and somewhere anger joined the mix of emotions that fueled the terrible hour.”

Roiphe is not alone in arguing that the men were moved by deprivation, men on the bottom trying to feel like they were on top of somebody. But that argument assumes we are one, very white world and these young, mostly Puerto Rican and black men from the boroughs are enraged by their inability to enter that world.

Well, it’s not one world, and the white monied class might bore many of these young men to death.

You can only be envious of what you desire. And 20-year-olds look up to glamour — hip-hop artists and basketball stars, record execs, actors, comedians and all those who have made big money and won adulation by seemingly having fun or doing something it seems we could all do if we only tried hard enough, like making music or throwing a ball. Above all else, the young want recognition and a chance for self-expression: Money without those things, quiet money, has no shine.

On the videos, it’s obvious these men felt perfectly at home. Being on “familiar turf” in this case wasn’t any more about your neighborhood than it is for middle-class white folks — it was about looking around and seeing people who look like you. These guys with their video cameras, football jerseys, young strong bodies, tats and piercings, brown faces, high spirits and roused appetites recognized each other, an insta-tribe, made up not from turf but from taste and consumption: Who do you love? What do you buy?

Sometimes when a man rips a shirt off a woman, he’s angry at women, not at class injustice. Sometimes when a man rips a shirt off a woman, grinning as she sobs, he’s having a good time.

Why should we decide that young men who aren’t white might think or feel differently than the rest of us or be any less involved in the daily battle between good and evil — sometimes evil wins out, sometimes good.

Sometimes the explanation for cruelty is hard to live with but is as simple and clear as rain:

Why do you kick the fat boy?

Because you can.

But if the Central Park assailants were mainly black and Latino, so were the men who attempted to help the terrified women. There was a moment of compassion caught on camera that’s as powerful as all the awful moments. When one woman stumbles from the crowd, weeping and trying to hide her bare breasts, three men come up to her, surrounding her but protectively. They make a wall of their backs. They bend low, concern on their faces, trying to talk to her. She’s crying so hard, I don’t think she hears them. One man tries to put something over her shoulders — a towel, a shirt? Another of the men pulls his mesh jersey over his head and hands it to her to wear.

In that way, with their bodies and their clothes, they cover her nakedness. And with their concern, they pull her back into the human family.

Those three men looked like every other young man there, like the attackers: young, male and nonwhite. They had also come for some excitement. They were also in a crowd on a hot summer day.

It’s just not true that, given the right conditions, every person will behave the same way. You can’t say the men in the park behaved the way they did because they’re left out of the American dream or overly influenced by MTV or the way girls behave on spring break or how President Clinton behaves year round or any number of reasons that have been bandied about.

Instead, imagine yourself there in the park that day and then ask what you would’ve done.

The girls were obviously afraid. They all were yelling or crying. There are men who look at a girl stripped and afraid and are exhilarated. And there are men who look at that same girl and more than anything else want to be able to rescue her.

There are people who have a strong sense of injustice and are inflamed by anything so obviously unfair, so simply cruel. And some of those people are men, young men, young black and Puerto Rican men who came to the parade that hot sunny Sunday to party.

) 2000 Pacific News Service

All Pets Go to Heaven has been in operation for two years now and it seems very much part of the neighborhood. The Leones describe it as an “all service” pet funeral home, providing burials and cremations, both private and communal, wakes in the Victorian viewing room, online counseling for the grief-stricken, memorial cards and plaques, embalming and even freeze-dried taxidermy.

It’s housed in a large, handsome brownstone on a street of brownstones. Raymond’s parents own the building and his brother lives upstairs. Brown awnings shade the windows and are stamped with the silhouettes of rabbits and frogs.

Even though every year more and more hip young Manhattanites are moving into Carroll Gardens, it still feels like a working-class Italian neighborhood. There are religious shrines in some of the front yards and small markets run by fathers and their sons. And there’s the pet funeral home. As soon as I stepped into the viewing parlor and saw the small, powder-blue coffin
for the small male dog or cat, I knew I was among people who weren’t afraid of family feeling.

“I just had a wake for a Rottweiler, day before yesterday,” Kathleen tells me. “He’s being buried this morning. His owner’s a single woman. She’s burying him with a blanket she crocheted when she was a girl that was supposed to be for her first child. But she never married, never had any children. The dog was her son.” Kathleen’s the mother of three girls and very pregnant with the fourth. She has short blond hair, a strong face and brown eyes that look tired this particular morning, only a couple of weeks away from her due date. She’s a registered nurse, and before she and Raymond opened up All Pets, Kathleen was a nursing supervisor in a long-term care facility for the elderly. Her daughters are named after her and Raymond’s mothers and grandmothers. She describes herself as “old-fashioned” and says that their clients are just “regular Joes that come in off the street.”

We talk at Kathleen’s desk, in the middle room of the funeral home. In the front is the viewing parlor, where rows of chairs face the little blue coffin and a statue of St. Francis of Assisi. In the room behind us, there’s a wide selection of urns displayed on shelves. Some are shaped like dogs; some look like pretty cookie tins and are stamped with kittens’ faces or flowers.

The engravable urns are the most popular, according to Kathleen. They come in dark and light woods, white or gray granite and white marble, and are engraved with the deceased pet’s name. The dates of birth and death and a photograph are applied to the front — the smaller ones cost $125.

“In the past there were no options for people [whose pets have died],” Kathleen says. “Just our being here raises a question in people’s minds — oh, what am I going to do when my pet dies?” The options she and her husband provide raise more questions: Burial or cremation? Would I visit a grave? Do I need them nearer to me? On the mantelpiece? If I give a wake, who would come? And should I have a religious service or just read a poem?

Kathleen’s right: The very presence of a pet funeral home causes you to think — if not about what you want to do for your pet when it dies then about animals and where they fit into our lives, and about the rituals we have around death and the ways we circumscribe love.

The Rottweiler was the biggest animal that has been brought to the funeral home so far — 52 inches long, running the entire length of Kathleen’s freezer. He was only 6 years old when he passed away. “His owner was in shock,” Kathleen says. “She thought maybe he got depressed when her mother got sick and that killed him.”

The smallest animal was a goldfish named Poppy. His owner wanted him cremated. “I tried to convince her just to bury it,” Kathleen says. “I said, you’re not going to get hardly anything back, if you get the flick of an ash — and that’s about what she got back — but she wanted that. I gave her the urn because it was ridiculous not to. Firing up the cremator costs the same amount of money whether it’s a cat or a goldfish.”

Kathleen had a goldfish herself at one time, and though she was sorry to see it pass on, she couldn’t grieve for the fish like she would a dog or a cat. “But you know what? Someone could say, ‘How can you feel that for a cat?’ I think it’s about security and love. That goldfish? That was what she had to come home to at night.”

When I ask Kathleen what’s the most unusual request she’s ever gotten in the pet funeral business, she says, “I don’t find anything to be unusual. Everything is individual, so it’s not unusual.” For a moment she seems to regard me almost warily, but it’s not the look of a wounded person; it’s sharper, more measuring than that.

“Your customers seem to be mostly women,” I say to her, and she says quickly, almost sternly, no, not really, it’s women and men, gay and straight, young and old, we get them all.

She’s cremated two pythons for two different customers. Cato and Bruno. Bruno’s the one she remembers because he was beautiful and big,about 150 pounds. The owner was a bouncer in a Manhattan club. He told Kathleen that he had his apartment climatized for the snake. He opted for cremation and a Roman urn.

“Actually I was surprised I didn’t hear from him afterward,” Kathleen says, since the more grief-stricken clients often feel the need to stay in touch for a while and the bouncer was pretty shaken up.

“But he had his friends,” she remembers. “They came with him. I mean, he didn’t have a viewing or anything, but his friends all came with him when he brought the python in and when he picked up the cremains, they all came with him again. So he had a good support system there.”

It’s always easiest for Kathleen when the clients want to tell her everything about the pet, especially if they choose to have a wake. Then she can spend those two hours talking to them about their animal and not just coming in and out of the room, asking if they’re all right and if they want some water.

“Most of my people will bring photo albums and share the pictures of their pets with me, tell me about the one funny incident, the one bad incident — you know, talk about the guilt of how they feel when they yelled at him,” she says. “And I’ll take them through what I need to do at that point to help them get over those guilty feelings.”

She sees no difference between the human and the pet funeral business — mourning is mourning, she says.

“Right now, I have a man whose pet is still living. His wife passed away within the last few months. She’s out in St. Charles cemetery and he said he wasn’t prepared for her death, and now the dog he’s had for 14 years is pretty much … on her last leg and he wants to be prepared.

“He doesn’t want the same thing to happen to him, you know — the emotions — as when his wife passed away,” she continues. “He wants to be prepared, so I’ve been talking to him on the phone throughout this week, two, three days a week. He wants to bury [the dog] out at the cemetery, which is very close to St. Charles, so this way he could do two visits in one day.”

Kathleen didn’t grow up with animals. Just one family dog, she says, and her sister got to have a turtle, a very small turtle, because “we didn’t have the space, my mother worked full time, my father worked full time and there was a big stress on education, that was your first priority.”

Her husband, Raymond, was the one with the zoo in the backyard. “Pigs, cows, snakes, everything,” she laughs. “Believe it or not, when I first met him, they had pheasants flying in their house, they had goats in the backyard. They used to run pony rides in the neighborhood.”

“So do you love animals more now, I mean, working in this business?” I ask her.

“I notice them more,” she says, sounding careful again.

“Well, has running this business changed you?”

“Not really,” she replies. For a minute I think she’s just determined to make sure I find nothing strange or unusual about the pet funeral business, but maybe she’s just telling me the truth.

“I used to be a regular Joe, working 8 to 4, Monday through Friday, and now I work by appointment when it’s convenient for my clients,” she explains. “Otherwise I’m really doing basically the same thing I was doing before — I’m serving the public and I’m providing a service that’s necessary. I come from a family of doctors and nurses, so we’re all community service.”

Finally, I get her to admit to one difference when I ask her if she ever gets her heart broken on this job.

“Yes, that’s part of the business,” she says. “I mean some people can detach themselves. I found that I was able to do it better — function in the role of a nurse than I can function in the role of a funeral manager.

“As a nurse, my specialty was geriatrics and I felt that, all right, they had lived a very fulfilling life and they’re here now, they’re in a long-term care facility and I’m doing whatever I can to make the best of the rest of their life. I made every day fun. I made sure recreation was scheduled; I ran parties, dancing, singing, art. I really investigated their lifestyles,” Kathleen continues, “so if they were just some antisocial people, they like to have their cup of tea and their crossword puzzle, like my mother, then I made sure that was maintained. I never forced them to do anything.

“So I felt satisfied, but here you don’t have the time. I try to get as much information as possible but I don’t have a lot of time. There I had years, you know? Here I don’t. I have a very small window to work with.”

On my last visit to the funeral home, I have the odd desire to ask Kathleen for a job. She has to take maternity leave, doesn’t she? But I never get up the nerve. I feel incredibly peaceful sitting at her desk in the funeral parlor while she tells me the story of a young man named Elvis who had a wake for his cat, though no one in his family could understand.

“I felt so bad for him, he broke down in pieces,” she says. “He was a real bruiser, someone you would think wouldn’t shed one tear and I had to scrape him off the floor.” His mother looked appalled; his girlfriend rolled her eyes. Kathleen sat with him, speaking to him about his cat. She paid no attention to the nonbelievers in the room. “I’m not going to leave the person who’s come to me out in the cold,” she says.

Elvis still calls her from time to time, though now it’s every few months, instead of every week, so Kathleen knows he’s worked through his grief; he’s feeling better.

And my feelings about Kathleen have changed also. At first, I saw her as a brave defender of a misunderstood, even ridiculed love — “How can you be so upset for a dog?” But finally, I could see that in defending and protecting these loves, she was protecting love itself, in whatever form it takes — “Crying for a hamster, for God’s sakes!”

Oh, the extravagant heart!