This isn’t the real Maverick as I couldn’t find a photo in my computer.

❤️🌟❤️😎

Many years ago, once upon a time, my parents had a black Labrador called Maverick. We named him Maverick because my sister Lisa and I were obsessed with the film Top Gun.

Lisa and I saw the film in San Francisco, where I’d been surviving for a while with a bad boyfriend, and she’d flown over (eating Space Cakes with a musician who’d been playing in Montreux) to persuade me to return home to Switzerland. Anyway, we’d barely left the cinema when Lisa decided she wanted to marry Tom Cruise, while I declared I wanted hair like Kelly McGillis.

I didn’t really have the money for such extravagances but the following morning, when we saw an advert in the San Francisco Chronicle for perms on sale at the Macy’s hair salon, we both knew it was a sign. So we cut out the coupon and danger-zoned our way to Macy’s on Union Square, where there just happened to be an opening with Stacey!

A few hours later I emerged looking like Kelly’s twin-sister! Biggest and best perm ever.

**Call me Kelly! Here with an old friend I haven’t seen in decades, Dolores. Also, I can’t believe I had legs like that…Or everything else like that…**

So that was my Top Fun fantasy sorted.

Sadly, there were no coupons for getting Lisa down the aisle with Tom, which is a shame, because she might have set him on the straight and narrow, persuaded him to remove his rose-tinted aviators and see through Ron Hubbard’s dodgy parlay. He’d probably even have spoken to his friends, and they’d have seen Lisa’s light, and now we’d all be sitting around eating fondue with Tom and his buddy John Travolta. Also, Lisa’s always been a fast and crazy driver, so they could have done stunts and stuff.

**Lisa, sans Tom Cruise, but with wine and in Ibiza on holiday with me in July 2021**

So Lisa never met Tom Cruise and she didn’t want a perm. Instead, we went back to Switzerland and found out our mother wanted a black Labrador, so I bought her one and we named him Maverick. He was a cool puppy who loved eating everything he could get his teeth into, including the kitchen cupboards, the Sunday roast, my mother’s shoes, lipsticks, eye pencils, La Perla undies, and a couple of designer handbags. You dropped it, Maverick enjoyed it, especially if it belonged to my mother.

One evening, a few months into this new companionship, my father and I took Maverick out for his evening stroll. We chatted and walked, and Maverick trotted, sniffed and peed, searching for a good place to conduct his bigger business. The more he searched, the more worried he seemed, trotting and stopping and circling and sniffing, but no place seemed right. Finally, it seemed he’d decided, dropping into position, wearing that slightly embarrassed expression dogs get when they have to poop on a leash.

My father and I waited, chatting, looking away so that poor Maverick could relieve himself.

But nothing was happening. Maverick kept on circling in that crouched position, his expression now both embarrassed and anxious. Finally, something slowly began to appear. Then it stopped. The poor dog circled some more, clearly mortified. My father bent down to take a look.

What the heck?

Sticking out of Maverick’s bum was some sort of net-enclosed sausage. Maverick looked beseechingly at my father, clearly willing him to conduct a rescue mission. So my father, grumbling in Italian (porca miseria, Ma-vereeck!) gingerly grabbed the tip of the sausage and began to gently pull. And pull. And the sausage kept coming. And coming.

“Merde! His intestines are coming out!” my father exclaimed.

Maverick whimpered, mortified.

It wasn’t his intestines. It was a pair of tights. Filled with poop. A tight-poop sausage.

Once the tights safely removed, Maverick performed the usual canine ceremony of scratching and flinging divots, then boogied on down the road beside us as if butter wouldn’t melt.

I guess Maverick was kind of like our American dream: glamorous and shiny, with big ideas, slightly wonky judgement, and spectacular consequences.

I got a perm.

Lisa got a good story.

And our mother got the coolest dog ever.

MAVERICK

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