I pit my dog (long, lame, TMI!)
OK so first I should give you some background. The first dog I had was when I was like 5. He was a Brittany Spaniel named Playdough. The interesting thing is, I read somewhere that Brittany Spaniels aren’t called Brittany Spaniels any more. They got like divorced from the spaniels, and now they’re called Brittanys, like Spears, except different. This dog—well, he was a puppy first. My dad bred bird dogs, and had a bunch of Brittany Spaniels. By the way, even though they’re not technically called Brittany Spaniels anymore (see above, divorce, etc.), I’m gonna keep referring to them as Brittany Spaniels because that’s what my dad always called them. And he bred them. For quail hunting. He used to take them out to hunt quails on the weekends. These quails were called Bobwhites because when they like chirped, that’s what it sounded like they were saying. “Bob White! Bob White!” It was kind of funny, because if you like squinted your ears it really did look they were calling some guy named Bob White! I used to hear them sometimes because my dad would take me with him sometimes. One time we were walking down this dry creekbed. This was in Texas; we lived in Richardson, outside of Dallas, because my dad got traded to the Dallas Cowboys from the Greenbay Packers. He was always a real hardhead, and when Vince Lombardi traded him to the Cowboys, he told Tom Landry that my dad was “uncoachable.” Imagine; the world’s greatest coach, threw his hands up in defeat when it came to my dad. That’s what kind of person my dad was. Plus, the reason I even know that is because he like brags about it. He’ll brag about the lamest things: His roommate, in college, was Warren Beatty. Well, for a few months anyway, before Warren Beatty left Northwestern to go to New York to be an actor. So one time, a few years ago, my dad comes to me with a Vanity Fair magazine, with an interview with Warren Beatty in it. He goes, “Warren Beatty mentions me in this interview!” I’m like Where? And he points to this one paragraph, where the interviewer has just asked Warren Beatty why he quit his football scholarship to go to New York to be an actor. So Warren Beatty tells this story about how, one night at the frat house, a couple of the frat guys came and dragged him out of bed because his roommate had passed out in the hall. So Warren has to go get him and put him to bed. He says in the Vanity Fair that he had to drag him to the bathroom before he could put him to bed, and as he stood over him and propped him up while he vomited into the toilet, he says he suddenly realized, watching everything his roommate had eaten that night—broccoli, steak, yadda yadda—that he didn’t have the stomach to be a professional football player. “That’s me,” my dad goes. “He’s talking about me!” I’m like, wow. How pathetic is that? So that’s kind things my dad’s too stupid not to brag about. So when Lombardi traded him to Dallas, we got a house in Richardson, a suburb. When I was a kid, in Richardson, the trip from my house to downtown Dallas was like an hour of cotton fields and wilderness. Nowadays, it’s solid strip mall: no break: one big ugly sprawl. But when I was a kid, sometimes my dad would take me out in the fields, and this one day when we were walking down this dry creek bed, he suddenly yanks me back by the arm so bad I feel like he’s dislocated my shoulder. I’m like What? He goes, “Sh, water moccasin!” I’m like Water Mocassin? Nuh uh! Where? He goes “Right there,” and points at like this stick, that suddenly moves. I kinda freak, in a very backward moving kind of way, and my picks up this log and smashes this snake wide open. And these little baby snakes spill out of this slit my dad’s busted into this snake! Perfect little snakes, in perfect little coils, like they work for a snake charmer and they’re just waiting for their cues. Perfect little coils wrapped in these tight little see-through sacs with like veins running through them. So the mama snake is WAY dead by now, but these babies are like full term, and starting to move around a little. My dad shoves them all into this garbage bag and ties it closed, and we go the Dallas Museum of Natural History on the way home, and this guy puts all these snakes, even the mom, into jars of pee-yellow liquid. He kinda looks at his watch while my dad tells him about Vince Lombardi, and finally we get to go home. Meanwhile my dad’s three dogs, his three Brittany Spaniels, are in the back of his pickup, sitting in these cages in the sun, so they’re just as happy to get home as I am. He had a girl and two boys: Silver, Max, and Playdough. Oh, actually, I realized later that his name was probably Plato, but when I was a kid I thought his name was Playdough. Which struck me as weird, but whatever.
So my second dog was a long time later when I was in college. I was in art school, and I was one of those obnoxious art school geeks, the kind who have a long explanation for everything they do. I could explain the significance of the color of my socks if anyone asked me. Plus I was a performance art major, so I was worse than normal. So when I get a dog, I can’t just name her Queenie or Silver or anything; I have to think of a significant name, that requires a long explanation. I already had three cats: one of them was named Wilma and Betty (I was in a kind of ironic postmodern phase), one named Gladys, and one named Vera. My grandfather, my mom’s dad not my dad’s dad, was a lawyer, and he had these two secretaries who were like a hundred years old, Gladys and Vera. So I couldn’t come up with an intellectually impressive enough name for the dog. Then I thought, I know, I’ll name her after another animal. Like Rooster, or Yak, or Platypus. I finally settled on E. coli. So I called her E. coli for a while; never felt right. At the time, I was working for an environmental activist group, Citizens for a Better Environment. We would like raise funds to A) pay the fundraisers’ salaries and B) promote environmental awareness, or whatever. One of the things we were aware of at the time was Gypsy Moths. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Gypsy Moths, but they build these like tents of webbing all over trees, and then spend all day following each other around the branches. They can make a tree look Morticia Addams has been dusting it with that kind of opposite-vacuum she had, that blew dust and cobwebs on stuff instead of cleaning them off. Or was that Lily Munster? Which one used to cut the flowers off the stems? Morticia, right? Anyway, so we were trying to get people with Gypsy Moths to be afraid of this certain pesticide that was supposed to work really well on Gypsy Moths, but it was also supposed to work almost as well on little kids. It was called Sevin 4 oil, and I don’t remember what was wrong with it, but we were trying to get people to be scared of it so they’d be aware of the environmental issues and things. So I called my dog Sevin 4 for a while. “Here, Sevin 4, come on, Sevin 4.” It never quite felt right. But it kind of felt like I was onto something: wouldn’t it be cool, and mysteriously intellectual, to give her a number instead of a name? It could like a whole commentary on the dehumanization of modern society, even though the dog wasn’t a human. “Sevin 4” sounded like “7-4,” which is what got me thinking. So I tried other numbers. I called her 3D for a while, but sculpture was always me least favorite class in school, and sculpture was called 3D, so I never really liked that very much. Then I thought of 99. It was the first number I came up with that sounded right as a name. Of course that was probably because of that show, Get Smart, with Agent 99, but that doesn’t mean my dog was named after that show. I was over the whole ironic postmodern thing and was moving on to serious social commentary. But it did sound better as a name than Sevin 4. So I named her 99. But when people asked me if she was named after the TV show, I was like, No, it’s short for her real name, which is “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Not just the title, the whole song was her actual name, I just called her 99 for short. Some people thought that was clever.
So to make a long story short, cut to now, well OK cut to a couple months ago, when my housemate decided she couldn’t live without a dog. This was especially disturbing because, actually, she couldn’t live with a dog. She had this dog, Mac, that she bought from a pet shop. Everybody knows you don’t ever buy a dog from a pet shop, but not my housemate. She goes into a pet shop one day and of course she looks at the puppies and of course she falls in love with one and of course she pays like $500, tears dribbling down her trembling chin, so some trailer dwelling tornado bait puppy mill proprietor can pay bail herself out when Animal Planet comes by to videotape her kneedeep-in-puppypoop kitchenette. So she gets this dog home—the pet shop guy told her it was a Border Collie. If Mac was a Border Collie, I’m a Border Collie. He might have had a great aunt on his grandmother’s side who was once run over by a guy whose mom’s maiden name was Border, but that’s as close as Mac ever got to being a Border Collie. But whatever. So she gets him home, and she figures, OK, you get a dog, you feed him, you let him hang out in the rainy back yard all day in case he wants to pee, so he doesn’t have to think about it one way or the other, and eventually some day he’ll get old enough to stop peeing on the carpet. Then some day he’ll get old enough to stop chewing huge holes in the couch. Then some day he’ll outgrow growling at her whenever she comes in the kitchen. Then someday he’ll get over biting her when she pets him for longer than she wants to be petted. It never occurs to her to do some research, learn how to train a dog, find out how other people communicate to their dogs that barking the house down every time someone passes on the sidewalk in front of the house is maybe the second or third best way to react to that phenomenon. But no, instead, when he barks, she sits down with him and speaks softly to him, pets him, thinks she’s calming him down. When in fact what she’s doing is going, “Good dog, good dog. Every time you bark I’ll reward you by caressing you gently and whispering sweet nothings.” Or when, once when I was over there, and she accidentally stepped on his foot, and he snapped and growled, and bit her, she got down on her hands and knees in front of him on the carpet and fluted “I’m so sowwy I’m so sowwy I’m so sowwy” until he gradually stopped growling. And I’m like, You just told him that it makes you his happy sweet talking bitch whenever he bites you. And she’s like, “But it was my fault.” And I’m like, Well it’ll be your fault the next time he bites you. So finally, when Mac’s like six years old, and my housemate’s been hospitalized five times from him biting her, he snaps at her aunt and she has him put down. Whatever.
A couple months go by, and she starts cruising slowly past pet stores with sad and shiny eyes, whimpering. No, seriously, whimpering. OK, not whimpering. But still. So by now I’ve moved in—her last housemate moved out WHY? Yep, stitches. So I tell her to wait, there will always be cute puppy-eyed dogs that need homes. Wait a while, till she can read a couple books I recommended to her. Wait until I could explain to her the whole idea behind training a dog. It’s not a way to limit their dogness, or some bull like that, like Bill Maher thinks. You know, I used to like Bill Maher, but then I see him on some interview show, and he’s sitting in this posh glossy LA livingroom, with like three big dogs just lounging around, sitting on the table, licking the toothbrush in the bathroom, dragging their itchy ass across the couch cushions, and Bill Maher’s like, “I don’t believe in training dogs. It messes with their essential dogness,” or something like that, and I’m like, whatever. That’s like saying, I don’t believe in teaching my kids not to wipe their boogers on their friends, that’s limiting their essential primateness. An untrained dog is like a child raised by wolves: they just do whatever feels right, and it never occurs to them to do anything else, because no one ever tells them about it. It’s like they’re completely outside human culture—I’m talking about the wolfchild now, not Bill Maher’s dogs—and they’re expected to figure out the whole history of civilized human behavior all on their own. They take a dump in the baby’s bed—talking about Bill Maher’s dogs now, not the wolfchild—not that Bill Maher has a baby, I’m just saying—they take a dump in the baby’s bed, and what the hell, that’s where they’ll dump next time, because it worked, and no one said boo.
So I’m trying to explain this to my housemate, and she goes out and gets a dog anyway. No, serious, she’s at a PetSmart—which I hate, because I used to work in a pet store that was in the same family for 75 years, and they had to close because a PetSmart opened up down the block. So customers who’d been coming there literally for generations, who’s kids went to grade school and highschool and college with the kids whose parents owned the pet store because of the money that came in through providing personal service to the neighborhood pet owners for 75 years, these people stopped shopping there. They destroyed 75 years of neighborhood tradition to save 75 cents on a bag of dog food. Doesn’t that suck? What really sucked though was when people would come into the fish room—I worked in the fish room, although sometimes I worked in the cat room, or the dog room, or the bird room—people would come into the fish room and pick Frank’s brain for like two hours at a time. Frank was this old Japanese guy—he’d been in Manzanar as a kid, and his mom’s $5,000 settlement check came in the mail on the day she died. He’d been working at this family pet store for 35 years. Seriously, 35 years. So the guy knew his fish, right? I mean, YOU work in any one job for 35 years, and you’ll end up knowing something, right? So people would come and pick his brain, because there are very, very few hobbies that are as information intensive as pet keeping. I mean think about it: you want to keep some fish alive. Temperature, chemistry, biology—the biology of a fish, and the biology of an ecosystem that you’re trying to recreate in a box of water in a third floor apartment. You need to know which fish can live with other fish. You might want to know what kinds of plants work OK with this kind of lighting, or which fish eat the hell out of plants so you DON’T want to put these fish in with these plants. Or how to keep algae from growing over everything like swamp moss. Everything, you have to know so many things to keep a successful fish tank. Especially some of the more sophisticated things, like say you want to breed some fish. Say you buy a Discus fish because it’s freaking gorgeous, and a round chocolate brown disk with neon metallic wavy turquoise lines across the side like reflections from a tropical sun, and you find out, fine, you want to keep Discus? What’s your pH? What kind of live food you got? Will these Discus take flake food, or do they insist on live food, like a lot of Discus, like bloodworms or brine shrimp? And what if you want to breed them? What kind of food do you need to bring the female into breeding condition, and what do you do when the dad wants to guard the eggs and ends up kicking the mother’s ass because the tank is too small? Where do you go to find this kind of stuff out? You got to Frank, that’s where. And why does Frank know all this stuff? Because he’s devoted 35 years, 40 hours a week, to fish and fish tanks. But Frank’s got two kids, and one of them, Yoko, is an artist, and wants to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is like $25,000 a semester. So if you’re a pet store owner, and an employee like Frank becomes more and more valuable to you as time passes and he accumulates this bizarrely esoteric knowledge from firsthand experience, and you want him to stick around because this knowledge is valuable to your customers, too, and YOU have kids to put through college, too. So you keep up with Frank’s cost of living, right? You pay him a decent living wage. And then a PetSmart opens up down the street, they hire highschool kids who all they know about a fish is that they’re wet, and you pay them minimum wage so you get an endless series of the same stupid kids who don’t know a plecostomus from a polypterus, and this allows you to keep your overhead down so you can charge 75 cents less for a bag of dog food. Then people come into the pet store where I worked, and pick Frank’s brain for like a couple hours, because they know they’re not gonna get this kind of information from the kids down the street, they say “Thanks, Frank, good to know,” and walk down the street to save a buck on a bag of gravel. So Frank, being overhead, is laid off two years before his planned retirement, because a PetSmart opened up down the street.
So my housemate’s in this PetSmart (which I hate), and there’s this lady there who—get this—goes to Puerto Rico a couple times a year and rounds up stray dogs and brings them to Seattle—like we don’t have enough stray dogs in this country, we gotta import them from Puerto Rico—and finds homes for them. She doesn’t make any money on this, but she charges her costs, so at least it doesn’t cost her a lot of money to do this. So my housemate drops $250 and brings home a skinny trembling street rat of a dog who has to eat his food one bite at a time because he has to go get a bite of food and then go behind the couch to eat it, because (this is my theory), he had to hide any bite of food he was gonna get to swallow when he was growing up in the stray-swarmed streets of Puerto Rico. Cute dog, sweet, painfully—painfully—shy, but sweet. But get this: the thing has mange. Mange is little tiny bugs that burrow under your skin and make you itch until you want to rip your own lips off. So now the couch has mange, and the carpet has mange, and I swear I can feel these little itching sensations when I’m lying in my bed at night.
Doesn’t that suck?
