Me and Doggie

The first time I heard of the Doggie Diner was in Philadelphia in 1973, several thousand miles away from the nearest actual Doggie Diner.

The bringer of Doggie Head tidings was Dan O'Neil. His cartoon character, "Bat-winged Hamburger Snatcher," appeared in O'Neil's book, Hear the Sound of my Feet Walking Drown the Sound of my Voice Talking, published by Glide Publications, and found in many a counter-culture dwelling in "The Sixties," which is to say the period from 1963 to 1974. Although I could offer my theories as to why the early '70's was part of "The Sixties," I'll just assert that it looks to me like that's the times people are always talking about when they use the term, and that we can always blame it on hippies, or radicals, or somebody equally disreputable from this distance.

Let me also here note that my friend in Philadelphia, in whose apartment I was staying at the time, was not a hippie, and would have objected to the phrase "hippie pad," to refer to his abode. But I digress.

The battle cry of the Bat-winged Hamburger Snatcher was "Doggie Diner!" uttered as he swooped to snatch and devour the evil hamburger, thereby saving many a citizen from fat and cholesterol. The Doggie Head itself appeared in O'Neil's second book from Glide, a collection of Odds Bodkins comics that had originally appeared in the Chronicle: The Collective Unconscience of Odds Bodkins. I thought the Head was really swell, so I moved to San Francisco.

Well, that's not really true, is it? I moved to Berkeley, where I stayed with my friend Douglas while I looked for a job. And I didn't come to the Bay Area because of the Doggie Head, I came because I was 24, and I knew someone out here, and I was just out of college looking to start a life and career, and because I was looking for adventure.

So maybe the Doggie Head did have something to do with it.

The first one I saw was the one on Sloat, on the way to Ocean Beach, because that was part of the Grand Tour. Ocean Beach, Marin Headlands, Mt. Diablo, the Army Corps of Engineers' SF Bay Hydrologic model, the lobby of the Hyatt Regency (Douglas' brother called it "The Krell Empire), those were the places I was shown. Some of it was deliberate (perhaps with a youthful seasoning of irony) tourism: Ghiaradelhi Square and the Cannery, Palace of Fine Arts, Coit Tower. Some of it was tourism of another sort: City Lights Bookstore, Dead Concerts, Winterland...

But, once more, I digress.

Much later, I noticed when the Doggie Diner chain put the Doggie heads went up for sale, and I even thought of trying to buy one, for about two seconds. But I was living in a house in the Berkeley hills by then, and no way was I going to try to get one up the stairs, and the garage roof was falling in.

But there were other people who thought about it longer, and to greater purpose. One of them was named John Law, and if you think I'm going to make a joke about his name, you didn't notice mine. Anyway, John managed to acquire several. He takes one to the Burning Man Festival every year, or so I've heard. I've never been to one; there's a limit to middle-aged hipness, and my limit is probably near Barstow, on the edge of the desert, not deep in the desert itself.

I do get to science fiction conventions, though. I met Dan O'Neil at one of them, and let him do most of the talking, because he's a lot better at it than I am. I remember asking him about the Doggie Head. I can't reproduce his answer, but the gist of it involves the intersection of comedy and religious awe. I'll get back to that in a little bit.

I have another convention story that begins on a small ranch up in Glen Ellen, in Sonoma County.

I'd known the people who lived there for many years: Jeanne Bowman and her then-husband Don Herron. Jeanne was doing Children's Programming and Activities for the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention that, in 1992, was to be at the San Francisco Moscone Center. My wife Amy, in her persona of Madame Ovary (the Lady with the Flaubert-ghasting name) was to be performing as part of the Children's Programming, so she and Jeanne were communicating regularly.

One day Jeanne asked Amy, "Say, can Jim drive a flatbed truck?"

"I think so," Amy told her. "I'll ask. What's it for?"

"We need someone to help drive a Doggie Diner Head from the ranch here to the Moscone."

So Amy asked me, and well, sure I can drive a flatbed. Especially that flatbed.

The head in question belonged to John Law. I did have to convince him to let me drive the truck, or, more accurately, that I had the proper reverence for the Doggie Head. That was okay. I understood his concern. If I owned one of the Heads (and he owns more than one), I'd be protective too. In any case, though I don't remember my exact answer, it had something to do with the intersection of comedic art and religious awe.

Anyway, the trip down was fairly uneventful, to the extent I don't remember all that much about it. John was driving, anyway; my job was for the return trip. I do recall that it was near dusk, and we got to the Moscone after dark. The trip back was another story.

I was flying solo, and it was in the morning, with the fog just burning off, so it was still gray around the Golden Gate Bridge, but you could see the disk of the sun through it. Nevermind. The important thing is this: if you are driving a flatbed truck through the streets of San Francisco with a large Doggie Diner head on the back, everybody is your friend. Drivers were honking, pedestrians were shouting encouragement, everyone was giving thumbs up. It was great.

Several years later, I stayed at the ranch in Glen Ellen after a winter solstice party over in Sonoma. Only one of the Heads was in residence at the time, and it was positioned in the middle of a small corral that had a wooden fence. The Head was clearly visible from the front window.

Now I know why turkey vultures like to spread their wings on a cold winter morning; they do it to catch the sun and to get warm. But that isn't what it looked like they were doing, three of them, perched on the wooden fence posts, wings extended, facing the middle of the corral. No, they looked like alien acolytes to a comical canine god, reverent before the giant bust, prayerful in their devotion to something that speaks to all of us. Magnificent. Goofy. Profound.

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