from CHAPTER ONE: ENTERING THE DOG WORLD
"I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves."
--August Strindberg
I was not a dog person of any kind in the autumn of 2001, when my wife and I went for drinks at a down-at-the-heels but newly cool Brooklyn bar called O’Connor’s.
Time Out New York had recently cited the place as having the best moose head in the city, a designation which said more about the sorry state of the outer borough moose head situation than the dubious magnificence of O’Connor’s threadbare Bullwinkle. The thing presided over a joint where black-clad, ear-cuffed groovies drank alongside pre-gentrification habitues. On this night, there were no hipsters in evidence, only a ragged row of regulars slumped on stools in the dim light, staring into their drinks. No camaraderie, no Jell-O shots, no bar food, no pickup action, not even a television: a perfect Dark Bar, just the place for the serious talk we’d gone there to have.
Except for the dogs. What were the damn dogs doing here?
They weren’t creating a fuss; the three of them lay on the worn linoleum, taciturn as their masters. I admit I didn’t like it. This is Brooklyn, not France, where dogs are permitted in restaurants and intensive care units. Dogs had just never been one of my things, though getting one was exactly what we were there to discuss.
The reason was our son, approaching thirteen and showing all the signs of impending adolescence. I say this knowing that we have been spared the full teen catastrophe. He sported no Mohawk, no piercings or tattoos. He never wafted around the house smelling all herb-like. As of this writing, he still doesn’t. Believe me, I know how lucky we are.
But there’s no denying that our son, like many twelve-year-old boys, found us lacking--in wisdom, in charm, in spirit, in just about anything any reasonable person might expect from parents. I’m not complaining, merely pointing out the psychic challenge our little family faced.
As an only child, our son is all too often the center of both attention and tension. It’s an old story, but I hated being an actor in it anyway. Sometimes I’d look at him and his brow would be furrowed with an intensity of concentrated worry that stopped me in my tracks. What was bothering him, I wondered, and what could I do about it?
The answer to the first question was everything, of course, and the answer to the second was nothing. And boy, did we share his pain, or at least remember the feeling. My wife and I vowed to help. Pets, we knew, are a time-honored way of providing kids with ready-made love and commitment, a soul mate and companion through the uncertainties and agonies of adolescence.
This assumption is one I took on faith, having little experience to go by. My wife shared her early years with assorted fauna, including a cat, a hamster, and Jimmy the Mouse, of whom she still speaks fondly. I grew up in a pet-free home, aside from a goldfish that died within a week and a little alligator we brought home from Miami Beach and soon flushed down the toilet, from whence it and its fellows would inspire generations of urban myths and Thomas Pynchon.
Pets, in the childhood view I carried unsullied into adulthood, were demanding, unpredictable and unhygienic. This impression was not changed by the succession of half-dollar-sized turtles we got for our son. The turtles inexorably grew big as dinner plates, requiring frequent and ever more repulsive tank cleanings. But at least the turtles didn’t have to be walked. What could a dog do for our boy that the turtles didn’t, I asked. My wife fixed me with a look that suggested she didn’t believe my question was entirely sincere. “You can only relate to a turtle so far,” she said.
Obviously, helping our son was a good reason to get a dog, but not compared to all the good reasons not to: the walks, the shedding, the poo, for starters. Before I could make my case, though, my wife was distracted by one of the bar dogs, a big brown mutt who’d gotten up to stretch and wandered over to our booth. My wife cooed, “Aren’t you pretty?” and petted the creature. Pretty? I smiled gamely in the dog’s general direction. Speaking of game, I noticed the dog had a faint odor. This was before I learned that all dogs have a faint odor. (Actually, you’re lucky if it’s faint. The strange thing is that after a while you get to like it.) My wife petted the dog and the dog leaned into her hand. I noticed a little raw area on the dog’s side, almost on her belly. The owner said quietly, “She’s got a hot spot. Lying on the floor keeps it cool.”
“A hot spot?” I said, apparently a shade too inquisitively, because the man dismounted from his stool and sat down with us. A hot spot, he explained, is an area that a dog rubs and licks until there is an actual break in the skin. Not surprisingly, it is generally considered a sign of stress. “I work at a dot com and I usually bring her in to work with me so that she doesn’t have to be home alone all day,” the man said. “We’ve had to lay off a lot of people lately and it’s become a pretty sad place. That’s when she started this compulsive grooming. They blame themselves, you know. They blame themselves.”
Our chat continued. He told us about several of his past dogs and how, though all had been wonderful, none matched this one’s sheer compassion for la condition humaine; all right, he didn’t actually say anything in French, but he did make the dog sound like Gandhi incarnate. My wife asked questions solicitously. I nodded sympathetically, but the words of Victor Spinetti as the harried exec in A Hard Day’s Night thrummed in my mind: “I could’ve done wonders in vivisection.”
Eventually, man and beast went off dolefully into the night and my wife and I resumed our discussion. I was convinced I could never take proper care of a dog, the way that guy did. That guy was obviously a committed dog owner, tender and devoted. Also crazy as a loon. Therefore, I reasoned keenly, only crazy people should have dogs. Not that I claim to be playing with a full bag of clubs myself, only that my particular pathology does not lead me to seek solace with the four-legged. Even though we were still technically discussing the issue, in my heart, I believed that the whole dog issue was closed.
You would think experience would teach me not to make rash predictions. But if experience has taught me anything, it is that experience rarely teaches me anything.
