Bad Dog (11 page)

My sister burst into tears, and my brother started to argue.

“That’s not Sammy anyway,” he said. “Make sure you give her the right dog.”

My dad left with the poodle right then and didn’t come back till the next day. That wasn’t unusual. His shifts at the lab were strange, and we never knew quite where he was.

Be fearless and thorough from the very start. Do not be discouraged
.

Did we miss Sammy? Although my sister cried for two days, and I did not, I felt a warm and constant ache for a good long while, especially at night. It’s only looking back that I can see what it meant. I didn’t know yet just how lonely I was, how much I needed someone around me who did not wish, every night, that the night would go on.

I’ve never known a dog who didn’t say
Good morning, God!
Rather than
Good God, morning
.

But years later I got a hint, a confirmation of what happened to Sammy. I was quizzing my dad on his days in Zambia, where he’d pioneered some transplantation techniques, and I asked him how he practiced.

“There weren’t all those silly laws in the bush,” he said.

“You mean malpractice laws?”

He winked at me.

“Let’s just say the sick people there were grateful for anything. Even if we hadn’t quite worked out the kinks. Very disappointing when I got to America.”

Bad moment. My dad always said America like it was the name of a virus we’d caught at JFK Airport in the late 1960s.

“How so?”

“We couldn’t use human subjects anymore,” he said. “So we had to use dogs.”

D
ON’T DRINK;
go to meetings. Go to meetings; don’t drink. Call your sponsor. Walk the dog; train the dog. Work. Don’t waste time thinking about what thinking cannot change. Move a muscle; change a thought. It’s into action—not into thinking. It occurs to me more than once that the program works for me in those early months only because it keeps me so freaking busy with annoying activities—go to meetings; call your sponsor; hit ninety meetings in ninety days; write a fearless and searching moral inventory; sleep; work your fourth step—I don’t have a spare moment to walk over to the liquor store.

Gloria is ignoring us. I feel like a man at the bottom of a well.

I don’t like my apartment anymore. When Gloria was there, I looked forward to going home. She was a big improvement on Internet marketing. Now my walls and I are at odds. I’m training the dog. I’m rereading a Susan Conant mystery. I’m sleeping. Waiting. This is my life.

For some reason, showing up sober improves my performance at work. People comment on how “rested” I look. I’m going softly insane. Which is the only explanation I can give for what I decide to do next. It’s entirely whimsical and without point. Maybe that’s the point. I don’t know.

I decide to single-handedly create a word and use word-of-mouth (what we call WOM) and viral online marketing
(VOM)—which is, after all, my job—to seed it into the culture. Think of it as office-based performance art.

There is a young woman who works for me at the marketing agency, twenty-six and a Harvard Business School graduate—very competent and connected, with lavish auburn hair and JLo-like frame, no makeup, one of those lawyer’s kids who seem older than their years because of ugly divorces and being smarter than their friends.

I’m noticing one day she has over one thousand friends on Facebook.

“Wow,” I say, “that’s a lot of friends.”

“Not really.”

“How’d you manage that? I don’t think I’ve even
met
a thousand people.”

“Well, I’ve been on since the beginning,” she says. “It started as an all-Ivy networking site. I was in college. It was very smart. Marketing went through connecteds and word of mouth and …”

She is always raving about somebody or other’s WOM and VOM strategy, so I watch her lips move for a while.

“… just need to figure out a revenue model.”

“Totes,” I say.

A moment.

“What?”

“Totes. It’s like
totally
, only shorter. Everybody’s saying it.” She nods, dubiously. “Right.”

I’ve noticed if you mention everybody’s doing something, and it’s a remotely good idea, eventually somebody starts doing it. Thus, I wasn’t exactly lying, just playing with the element of time.

And for a few weeks I make an effort to place this word in strategic locations in my speech.

A coworker says: “You know, MySpace is so over.”

“Totes.”

A client: “Let’s regroup next week to talk about how we can work social into this campaign.”

“Totes.”

At the vending machine in the pantry: “All these little coffee packs are the same. They don’t taste any different. It’s just marketing.”

“Totes.”

One night, as nervous as I was on our first date, I call Gloria. She picks up and says: “How’s Hola?”

“I’m doing okay.”

“And how are you?”

I realize the silence is more what I want than the words; words strap us to their meanings, which are never quite what we mean, since we didn’t invent them, just inherited them from people we never met. Except for
totes
.

“I’m working on Hola,” I say. “She’s doing better.”

“That’s good.”

“Much better.”

“Okay.”

Crickets. “Do you want to see her?”

“I’m thinking of staying out here a while. Just to … figure things out.”

I’m thinking: This is not fair. I’m conscious of something fragile connecting us and if I move or even think too hard it’s going to break.

“Her training is going well,” I say. “The teacher said her recall is better than her own dog’s.”

“The teacher?”

“We’re taking a class.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah,” I say. “How is it up there?”

“Good. It’s good.” Bop. “Are you still going … to those meetings?”

“Yeah. Every morning. It’s good.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Better. Good. You?”

“Riding a lot.”

“Nutmeg?”

“Brenda has me on a new one now, Blackie.”

That time she had her mother write me a formal invitation to visit them in Iowa for Christmas, me so shaky from my first rehab, just looking at her mother’s perfect penmanship, wheels touching the runway like a hand on my back.

“Who’s Blackie?”

“You haven’t met him. He’s bigger than Nutmeg, but he’s a great horse.”

Telling me a thousand years ago, in the world’s worst apartment on St. Mark’s Place, across from the old Kim’s Video: “You’re crazy about me; stop trying to convince yourself that you’re not.”

“How’s Brenda?”

Something about her kid—Gloria has an antifetish for riding instructors’ seven-year-old children ordering her around in their little generals’ voices during her lessons, something she claims has become an epidemic. In fact, she thinks that kids have gone wild. Her idea of an ideal parent is the Fran Drescher character in
The Nanny
, which she watched religiously every weeknight at 11:30 p.m. and again at midnight. When she lived with us.

“And how’s Samba?” I say. “Tim and Andrea?”

“Good. I’m going every day. I got a part-time job there—”

“Job?”

“Just on Sundays, four hours a week. Helping with the empanadas.”

“That’s part-time all right.”

“Like I said.”

“Are you …?”

And I’m thirty again, starving myself, she’s sick all the time, we have no health insurance, I’m working overnight answering questions about word processing, she’s picking up phones at the last public riding stable in Manhattan, now deceased, and there isn’t a day I’m not grateful I have her voice to listen to rather than the ones inside my own head.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing.”

“I have to go now, Marty.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“Totes.”

T
HE BIG-BONED
OTCH handler scans me up and down and says, “Hey, sit here—a guy!”

So I sit next to her at the round table in the cellar of a hunting lodge in the middle of Virginia, listening to the dog-obsessed, and I’m realizing that to count as a sex symbol in the world of dog training all you really need to be is male. The dog training magazine
Front & Finish
recently ran a survey of its readers and discovered more than 90 percent were women over fifty. Competitive canine obedience is overwhelmingly a sport for post-menopausal women.

Continuing her conversation with the nun, in full habit, the handler says, “I won’t do the NOI anymore. It’s too hard on the dogs. Seven straight hours of drills over two days. A lot of the OTCH handlers push their dogs; they’re nasty and competitive. There was this dog called Zipper you used to see all over the place; he just disappeared. They’re pushed and proofed and corrected half to death. Eventually, they just won’t do it anymore.”

Outside, through a wedge in the top of the cellar window, I see a steep green hill leading up to our lodging for the week: stark hunting rooms so humorously heated Hola and I will not age at all during the night.

And behind them a mountain of forest so fertile it’s liquid.

“Uh, really?” I say.

The big-boned, child-faced, retriever-like handler taps my fingers lightly as they come to rest on the tabletop.

“There’s no friendships among the OTCH types. It’s kind of ugly at the top.”

OTCH: Obedience Trial Champion, the highest level a dog can earn in canine obedience trials sponsored by the American Kennel Club. NOI: the annual National Obedience Invitational, to which my new friend is evidently invited. Making her very, very successful indeed in this subculture of serious dog trainers.

She takes her hand off mine, peeks at my name tag, saying, “So, Marty, why are you here?”

Even the nun leans forward in the din to hear this one.

What I’m doing is feeling chopped up.

Hola’s in the lodge, sleeping on top of the bed, a narrow double bed that already feels empty to me.

The camp is a six-hour drive due south from Manhattan, and Hola cries the whole way.

She doesn’t eat lunch; she doesn’t stand on the backseat gazing at the passing pageant of life, as she usually does when my wife is driving.

And I feel nothing but guilty, because her mood, as Wendy told me, is just a theatrical amplification of my own. Even Gloria knew this: she used to call Hola my radar detector.

Somewhere south of Baltimore, I call my sponsor.

“Where are you going?” he asks me.

“Dog camp.”

“What now?”

“It’s a camp for dog training run by this famous couple. They have their own method, called the Motivational Method. It’s supposed to be great.”

“You took off work for this?”

“Yup.”

“How long?”

“A week.”

“I repeat: Why?”

“This couple wrote the only book there is on the Canine Good Citizen. I’m hoping they can help me get Hola in shape.”

“Again,” says Clark, again, “why?”

“I don’t know,” I relent. “I need a change of scene. Work makes me crazy. Hola’s down-stay is weak.”

“Sounds like a fucked-up idea of a vacation. They have any meetings out there?”

“It’s in Virginia. The middle of nowhere. I don’t want to go to some hillbilly,
Deliverance
meeting.”

“Don’t be a snob. You can call people, right?”

“Probably not. It’s the middle of—”

“This doesn’t sound good to me, Marty. We’re only an arm’s length away from a drink all the time.”

“How am I going to get any alcohol? I don’t see any stores—”

“Where there’s a will,” says my sponsor, “there is always a way.”

We wend through twisted hills stuffed with impossibly green vegetation. Noticeably damp, pregnant trees and grass, as though the leaves have been lightly steamed. Passing through towns that look like they were built by eccentric billionaires for a boom that never quite arrived. Thrown up in a day—new gas stations, hospitals, schools. Elegant strip malls with leafy wainscoting and full-bodied pines.

But no people.

Then we round a corner past a tumbledown hog farm, and there’s the dog camp: a two-story wood-framed hunting lodge
with rows of gray-trimmed windows, and behind it on the foothills of a steep dark mountain loaded with lumber, two long buildings that resemble the original Bates Motel.

Big dog events tend to be held in places humans abandoned in the 1950s—out-of-the-way, downscale locations with no heat, no cellular reception, no TVs in the room, no Internet, no tiki bar or hot tubs or robes or room service.

But they all have the most unusual amenity of all: they allow dogs.

I pull into the parking lot crammed with ramshackle campers larded with bumper stickers like I Brake for Yorkies and Dog Is My Co-pilot, roll down the window to give Hola some air, and go into the lodge. It has a narrow hall and paeans to Graves Mountain’s storied past, which seems to involve a lot of very severe-looking tall men with beards and long guns.

There’s no line in front of the card table marked Reception, behind which sits an elderly woman wearing a tan Graves Mountain polo shirt and bright pink lipstick.

Right away there is a problem. A pennant tacked to the wall behind the women reads:

“Welcome Back—Volhard Instructor Training Camp”

See the problem?

“Instructor?!”

“Hello there,” says the woman. “What’s your name?”

After telling her, I say, “I’m a regular person.”

“Good for you.”

“I mean, I’m not an instructor. I just want to learn the Canine Good Citizen.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, handing me my plastic name tag and a silver bag of canine nutritional supplement. “You’re a serious dog trainer. That’s all that matters.”

“I’m not that serious.”

“Ha,” she says. “Ha, ha.”

Dinner is family style, at long tables, with the deep-fried dishes being passed around relentlessly and scooped onto plates in a way that reminds me of my elementary school cafeteria back in Birmingham, Michigan.

The scene also reminds me of Holly Winter’s observation: “My lackadaisical attitude toward my own diet had been in total contrast to the care I devoted to making sure that my animals received optimal nutrition.”