Dammit vs. the Ace Bandage

My Grandparents were born in the early 1900s, so it is no surprise that they are prepared for everything.  They have always remained steadfast in their belief that the apocalypse will occur at any moment, and because of this my grandmother packs her toiletries as if she were marching off to war.

Included in her kit are needles (injection and sewing varieties), every kind of salve known to man, copious amounts of the wonder-drug Benadryl (which not only lessens the effects of allergies, but also provides a mellow, sleepy high), various cutting and pulling utensils, a one quart jumbo-size bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and the list goes on, and on, and on.  Needless to say, the woman could touch down in an unknown, war-torn wasteland and immediately begin triage/surgery on a long line of waiting wounded refugees.

I often wonder if this is what she envisions as she regularly refills the contents of this mobile hospital.  She is, after all, nuts.

Perhaps the crown jewel in this toiletry kit from hell is the ace bandage.  Affectionately referred to by my cousins and I as simply, The Ace.  Its uses myriad, this amazing item will always remind me of my many childhood trips to consult the contents of the kit.  An ace bandage really is a marvelous thing.  It can stem bleeding from a sucking chest wound, it can bind a realigned broken bone, it can support a useless arm after it has been pulled out of location from the shoulder, or it can bind the hands of small younger siblings when they are misbehaving.  (I have had great success with this latter utility, but that's a different post altogether.)

What is most intriguing about The Ace is its durability and smell.  As a kid, whenever I was feeling blue, I would visit my grandmother's bathroom and pull The Ace out of her M*A*S*H toiletry bag and let the healing begin.  It was possibly the only item in her fix-it bag that could bring comfort simply through the memories attached to it.  As the rain would pour down outside, I would hold The Ace close to my face and recall all the good moments we had shared.  The time I fell out of the tree in the backyard and sprained my ankle, and it was there to save me.  The time I crashed on my bike and had angry, bloody road-rash on every pristine part of my left ass cheek--The Ace was there to hold fast the peroxide-soaked bandaging.

It smelled of medicines that only the elderly know about, and its unfading elasticity was more comforting than anything I've yet encountered in this life.  The Ace was, as they say, the absolute tits.

With all of the healing potential of the bandage offered for your consideration, it should definitely surprise you that my most enduring memory of it had nothing to do with medicine.  Far more bizarre than anything you would encounter in an emergency room, it had to do with the slovenly yellow Labrador that my grandparents owned.  A dog called Dammit.

Dammit was so named because it was always doing something to incur someone's wrath, and it was easier to just change its name to the first word that would come to mind when you saw what he had accomplished.  This fucking dog would chew up something metal, shit the shrapnel out on sunroom floor, and then come to you wagging his tail because he expected you to be proud of him.  He was fat, lazy and smelled of something that I can only describe as the sweat that slowly drips of the dirty nutsack of a rhinoceros.  I absolutely loved this dog simply because it was proof that a goat successfully fucked and impregnated an unlucky dog somewhere in West Virginia.  Dammit was a household holocaust.

I don't know the precise moment that Dammit devoured The Ace, but I like to envision the event in my mind.  I like to think that he took his time, enjoying every last stretchy swallow.  Regardless of how much affection I thought I had for The Ace, it was clearly nothing compared to the desire of Dammit.  Like a jealous lover, he must have decided that if he couldn't have this beloved 12 feet of elastic miracle to himself, then no one else would have it either.  The patience that it must have taken to eat the entire thing is simply breathtaking, and doing it without getting caught is one of the finest K9 achievements in history.

And Dammit ate the entire fucking thing.  Gone, without a trace.

We may have never known the fate of Ace if it Dammit's digestive abilities weren't so peerless.  The Ace would probably have killed a normal dog, balling-up in the lower intestine and causing total blockage, but not this maniac.  This dog was special in many ways, but when I first caught a glimpse of The Ace working its way out of Dammit's larger-than-life, pink/brown asshole--only then did I understand the magnitude of his importance.

This dog was a freak of nature.  On the day when The Ace came out, he spent the entire day trotting around the house with his tail slightly raised.  My grandparents knew what was going on, but until Ace was completely out they would just resign themselves to the fact that their dog would be parading the numerous soft, fleshy folds of his asshole around their home.  I still don't fully understand how they could get so comfortable with the sight of that.  It looked as though someone had pulled the fabled yellow ribbon through a wrinkled knot in the old oak tree.  So rarely in life to we get to witness performance art that is so bold, so horrible and yet so beautiful.

The moment to pull the string came just as I was introducing my date to the junior prom.  I had brought this young lady to their house so that they could take the requisite snapshots and tell us how great we looked in a tuxedo and an evening gown.  This girl was the fucking daughter of a Mormon cop, and she was not impressed with me as it was.  No one else had asked her to the big dance, so I was simply a free meal and a ride to the party.  No one could have warned her about the beast known as Dammit.  Even if they had, no one could have imagined the series of events that would unfold as we were preparing to leave the house.

After the photos and hugs and kisses, we were turning to head out the front door when Dammit came prancing in--breathing heavily and dragging about 9 feet of The Ace behind him.  My grandfather--who was sitting in his easy chair--spotted the trailing bandage and in a sudden, but precise flurry, stomped his foot down upon it.  When he did this, Dammit spooked and began to run away.  Well, he didn't exactly run (Dammit was approaching 190 lbs.) but executed a sort of modified low-crawl across the living room floor.  My dear old granddad held fast on the bandage, and as the dog crawled he howled in laughter.  As he howled in laughter, the poor beast moaned in agony.  I'm not sure if the pain came from The Ace being violently unthreaded from his rectum or from the knowledge that his beloved would be back in the world for everyone else to access once more.

Either way the look on my date's face was priceless, and one reason that I will forever hold my grandmother in the highest esteem is that she seized the opportunity to take a quick snapshot of her face as she watched the pathetic creature free himself of The Ace.  It was absolutely poetic--the seamless melding of abject horror, Depression-era simplicity and the beauty of nature.

Love is often expressed, sometimes understood and frequently lost.  But it is never so fully embraced in each of these ways as it was by Dammit and his brief courtship with that childhood favorite, The Ace.