When he was seven years old in March 1968, Daniel discovered a Doberman Pinscher hanging by its neck from the swing set of Sarita Berkheimer, a girl his age that lived down the hill and across the road from the Johnston home. Daniel was badly spooked, both by the general scene and by a perfect triangle of feces that had formed beneath the dog’s corpse.1 Daniel would go on to recount this story again and again.
It is memorialized in the song “Dead Dog Laughing in a Cloud” on Continued Story and it may have played a small role in his “Dead Dog’s Eyeball” phase in high school, though the “Dead Dog’s Eyeball” was primarily influenced by a lyric from “I Am the Walrus,” by The Beatles. Twenty years later, in 1988, Daniel reencountered Sarita at Weston State Hospital (Weston, WV), when they were both patients there, and convinced her the Mountain Dew was not poisoned.2 When we met Sarita at Daniel’s fortieth high school reunion, she told us that there had been a feud with some neighbors, who probably hanged the dog, but they told her the dog had hanged itself. Prior to this incident Bill and Mabel had determined that the Berkheimers were a bad influence and Daniel was forbidden to play with the Berkheimer children.