END OF THE NIGHT
Matt Borczon’s Wild Dogs details the final conversations between two dissimilar individuals: Trevor King, whose wife has just thrown him out of the house for terminal wimpiness, and his unlikely buddy Rex, whose own wife left him years ago. King had been hiding his harmless but repulsive uncle in the attic, and when the hapless relation died there, he postponed giving his wife the news until the decomposing corpse forced him to do so. He has been taken in by Rex, abandoned by his wife after he suddenly gave up his teaching career to become a truck driver. By this time, however, the Huckleberry Finn dream is wearing thin–permanently snake-brained on Mad Dog 20/20, Rex howls like a bloodhound, unwraps his food with his teeth, and eats off the floor. In his more lucid moments, he recounts tales of brawls where his only triumph was never crying uncle. (“Even the guy whopping me was telling me to stay down, I’d had enough. But I got back up, so they hit me a few more times and then took off. And I went off to lick my wounds and revel in my victory.”) Rex is lonely in this dog-eat-dog world, though, and welcomes King’s companionship–“Rex and King, wild dogs together”–if King will only stop clinging to his notions of commitment, responsibility, and moral autonomy. King’s ultimate refusal to adopt Rex’s kill-or-be-killed code leaves Rex no choice but to kill himself.
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One of the hazards of nostalgia for the 60s is the tendency to regard everything these kids do as sweet, innocent, romantic, and lovable (Michael Weller’s Moonchildren being perhaps the best-known example of this sentimental approach). Thus, Bus’s habit of wearing a gas mask everywhere he goes is presented as a cute personal statement rather than a stupid affectation. The mean-spirited trick of dosing Hula with a mind-bending drug (that apparently goes to work in five seconds) and then trying to disorient him, which would have been an inexcusable breach of etiquette in 1970, is here laughed off as a schoolboy prank. Details such as LSD brand names, campy film festivals, pseudo-health foods, and news stories quoted verbatim are tossed into the script for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate the extent of the author’s research or her nonselective memory. There are also anachronisms like Bus’s pierced ear–a fashion that didn’t become widespread among men (except for performers) until some years later.
