Woojie's Talent

The year my brother graduated from college, we moved together to a duplex on France Avenue. Among the many stories I could tell of that time, this one is the funniest, maybe even THE funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

I had a little mutt of a dog I’d named Woojie, a spritzy haired, goofy little guy who had the misfortune to be born with only half his allotment of brains. And since most dogs only have half a brain to start with, that left him two doors down from nothing. He was a basically untrainable, soap-eating, flea-hosting, curtain-shredding little ball of mischief. A canine almost totally without mental ability or talent - with two key exceptions.

He loved to play fetch, and could grab a frisbee out of the air five feet off the ground.

And he could shit. Oh, my god, he could shit. Twice his body weight, three times a day. It wasn’t totally his fault, we bought the cheapest dog chow we could find, probably packed with filler, and his digestive system excelled at doubling the volume before it came back out.

This story takes place about a week before the fourth of July, as fine a summer day as you could ask for. Beautiful, hot weather, not a cloud in the sky and a perfect time to take the dog for a walk. We had made it about three steps out the door when the Wooj assumed the classic dog squat and laid down his first steaming pile, roughly the size of a gopher mound. Soon we’d have two more stops with two more piles of equally impressive dimensions, and it was on the third stop that inspiration struck.

Brother Dale reached in his pocket and withdrew a firecracker, and as soon as he did, we both knew where it was going. Easier to blow the rancid crap up than scoop it into a bag and lug it on home. So, with a devious grin he inserted the gunpowder packed cylinder into the dog poop and withdrew a lighter.

Now, these particular firecrackers had been giving us fits all week long. They were manufactured with defective fuses that absolutely refused to burn. You had to light the darn things four or five times, as each time they would spark and fizzle, burn a fraction of an inch and then die. Every cracker. Fizzle and die. Fizzle and die. But when he went to light this fuse, the flame literally leapt from the lighter, jumping five inches onto the fuse and burning instantly down in the blink of an eye.

Fzzzt. BLAM!

Dale, wide-eyed in disbelief, barely had time to register the unlikely event and start to turn away from the oncoming tsunami. The firecracker, which was the one explosive in the entire pack of one hundred that would actually explode, did so with the energy of ten of its brothers, atomizing the pile of dog poop into a fine mist which completely coated my sibling from head to foot. Not a speck remained on the sidewalk, and 99.7 percent of the flying matter found its target, a ratio any Air Force bomber would envy.

I took it all in for a glorious half-second, and then started breaking up. It was the perfect storm of dog, poop and recalcitrant fireworks.

I still haven’t stopped laughing.