Bad Dog (13 page)

Hola knows sit; she knows it in her sleep. But I was always told to stand facing her, raising my palm, say, “Sit!” and then give her a hot dog.

First problem—no hot dogs. Second problem—no standing. Third problem—really, the primary one, if you are observing us, as Mary Jo and her assistants pretty quickly are—is that Hola is
hysterical
. There’s no other word for it. She’s pulling me left and right on the leash, spinning around, all the while emitting a high-pitched squeal that can probably be heard in Richmond.

“Shit,” I say to her. “Stop it!”

As Mary Jo moves onto the down, her assistant, Sally, peels us out of the circle and off to the side.

“You’re a leaner,” she says to me. “Stop leaning.”

“But Mary Jo said to lean over her.”

“It’s not a lean,” she says. “It’s a crouch. Body straight. Like that. Okay.”

I try to grab Hola’s back paws, but she snakes away and explodes to the end of the leash. I stand and reel her back in.

“Imagine how you’d feel if a big man was leaning over your head like that,” says Sally.

“Not so good.”

“Someone five times as tall as you are.”

“I see what you mean.”

We try it for an hour or so next to the wall of the picnic shed, to give Hola fewer options for escape. What I feel like is a guy trying to spear a live salmon with a piece of string.

“How can I get her to calm down?” I ask Sally, who is a very patient, older woman from Missouri.

“Don’t comfort her. Keep smiling. Be positive. Just give her a job to do and get on with it.”

Later, during the afternoon session, Mary Jo comes up to us while we are still struggling alone against the wall, watches for a while, and says:

“You need to have more energy and purpose, Marty. You need to have a purpose for your dog to have a purpose. They mirror you exactly.”

“Why is she so hysterical? She’s not like this at home,” I lie.

“She’s upset. She’s afraid. I’ll bet she’s got a high flight drive. She wants to run away.”

Ditto.

T
HAT NIGHT
, we drive like twenty miles through a tunnel of winding darkness to a strip mall somewhere that looks like it has just seen the vast zombie invasion, and I try to get my sponsor, Clark, on the phone.

But I hit the wrong speed-dial and am surprised to hear Gloria’s voice ask me, “Are you lost?”

“I wish,” I say, thinking fast. I’d e-mailed her about the camp, in case something happened. “We made it to the dog camp. It’s horrible. I want to leave. It’s so confusing. Hola’s a mess.”

“Now listen,” she says. “This is not Harvard Business School. It’s a vacation. Calm down.”

“It’s too advanced. We’re not smart enough.”

I hear some suspicious crunching noises on her end of the phone.

“What are you doing?” I say. “Are you eating?”

“Doritos. So how do you think Hola’s doing?”

“She’s the worst dog here.”

“Don’t you think everyone feels that way?”

“Yes,” I say. “Everyone feels like Hola is the worst dog here.”

Let loose the hounds of laughter. If it’s hysterical, we say in recovery, it’s historical. Then I realize Gloria isn’t joining me. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s been a long—”

“Just remember,” Gloria says, “you’re in partnership with a special-needs dog. This is hard for her. She needs a lot of help. Give it another day.”

Then she’s gone.

That night I look over from my Susan Conant novel with exhausted eyes at Hola, airplaned on the empty bed next to mine, and say, “What do you say, girl? You want to go back to New York?”

Zzzzzz zzzzz
.

“We can pack it in now, Schmoe. No guilt or regrets. At least for you.”

Grrrmmgggg zzzzz
.

She kicks her legs out in her sleep and curls herself into a big ball, her nose resting on the white tip of her tail.

“You want to give it one more day, huh?”

Zzzzzz
.

Zzzzz.

N
EXT DAY WE’RE GATHERED
in the cellar and a new teacher, Francie, a red-faced woman with a brace of champion agility Jack Russells, announces, “We’re going to take a personality test.”

“But we did that yesterday,” I say. “My dog is high in flight and pack.”

“This is not for your dog this time,” she says. “It’s for you.”

Kelly leans into me and whispers, “They want to let the dogs sleep in.”

“No,” says Stella, “they need time to set up the agility course.”

“Maybe,” I say, “they want us to learn something.”

“Well,” snorts Sister Irene, digging her fist deep into the bowl of peanut M&M’s. “You’re obviously new around here.”

So Francie spends an hour explaining the Keirsey Bates and Myers-Briggs personality inventories which are, as promised, for humans.

We take and self-score the inventories, and it turns out I’m semi-introverted, prefer harmony to disagreement, make rapid decisions based on internal rules, and, despite what Sister Irene suspects, have a pessimistic view of the world. I am both sociable and afraid—desperately wanting to belong to the group but
scared of everybody in it. If I were a dog, I’d be called high in both pack and flight drives.

In other words, I have the same personality as Hola.

I’m sitting at the table marveling over this coincidence in the half-hour break before class when the woman I’d met on the hill with the Swissies, the tired-looking fortysomething CGC graduate, sits down next to me and says, “How did you do?”

“I’m an INTJ,” I say. “I’m doomed.”

“So am I,” she says. “My name is Beryl.”

“It’s amazing we’re talking, since we’re both so introverted.”

“And afraid.”

“Well, actually I’m almost tied on everything, except judgmental. I’m very judgmental.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

We talk about our dogs and then she says, “I have a severely autistic son. He’s a lot of work. I was kind of losing it, and my husband said I could come to this camp to get away. I needed a break.”

“Wow,” I say. “This counts as a break? It’s stressing me—”

“Are you kidding me? The hills and the … the countryside … even the no TV—it’s such a relief. And my boys are doing so great.”

“You can talk to your kids?”

“No” she says, “my Swissies. They’re brothers.”

I’m awkwardly me-like for a moment, and then Beryl betrays that almost uncanny perceptiveness I’ve learned to expect from real dog people.

“You know,” she says, touching my arm, “I saw you in the class today. You guys are doing fine. Don’t wish she was somebody else. They are what they are, you know?”

That night I take an exhausted Hola on a slow walk through a darkening forest, over ruts in the track from horses and ATVs.

We look up at the clouds so close I can almost touch them, and I receive a wordless message from HP.

I need to stop wishing my dog is something else.

I need to stop wishing I was someone else.

This feels like just the first step of the first awakening.

But still, it’s the first.

A
FTER THAT
, we get a little better in class; I’m not sure why. Certainly, neither of us got smarter overnight.

But I’m in the circle as we practice our heel, sit, heel, sit, stand, and heel over and over again, and I notice that Hola has a couple of entirely successful circuits in a row.

And I realize I am not focusing on her, or on myself, but simply feeling how lucky I am to be in a place where everyone is gathered for such a noble cause.

Mary Jo notices our progress, too.

“Look at this dog,” she says to the entire class. “You’re doing a lot better, Marty. Mind coming in the middle here and showing the group? Remember how much they struggled in the beginning. Now watch how much stiller Marty’s upper body is. He’s a lot calmer. Have her sit.”

We’re in the middle of the circle now, the demo team, and I say to Hola, calmly: “Sit.”

Nothing.

“Hola, sit.”

She stares at me as though I’d asked her to yodel.

Awkward shifting.

“Don’t worry,” says Mary Jo. “You’re gonna learn more from that dog than any you’ll ever own. She’s just so sensitive.
You have to be very careful with your posture. You all saw how Marty was leaning slightly forward?”

Nods all around: Yup.

“Some dogs it’s not so critical, but with Hola here, you can’t be casual. She’s the most sensitive dog in this room. And that’s saying a lot.”

As I slouch back into the circle and start up the heeling patterns—my nemesis suddenly remembers how to sit—I’m struck in the face again by how little I actually know my best friend.

And the curriculum gets metaphysically difficult, incredibly fast. A flavor pill for you: day three, we’re introduced to the “Stay.”

I am proud of Hola’s stay now; it is one of her more solid exercises. But this new curve conforms to the Volhards’ inability to do things anybody else’s way. For the best of behavioral reasons, no doubt, they take your textbook stay and morph it into something by Hieronymus Bosch.

Like this:

Hola sleeps like a dead dog on the carpet in front of the door, and I have a very strange dream as I lie shivering in the dark half listening to my girl snore.

I am walking up a thickly wooded mountain with Hola. The vegetation looks like southern Massachusetts. Dense mats of pine needles and browning leaves make a slick path, and I lose my footing at times as I struggle to keep up with Hola, who is strapped into her Sense-ation harness, weaving nervously through a bewildering maze of routes.

The leaves are slippery, and I hear rain drizzling overhead. I look behind me, a steep descent into a rocky river, and there is Hola, as the sun falls and the storm clouds crash into place, frantically trying to help me find the way out.

I wake up a lot more tired than I was when I got into bed.

Hola is now sleeping on top of the bed, in the spot where Gloria should be.

Dog camp graduation
.

I
F YOU WANT TO KNOW
what people are thinking about you, the answer is: seldom.

Which is why I have to call Clark after Hola and I get back from dog camp and ask if he will meet me at a huge Sunday beginners meeting on Eighty-seventh Street. Beginners meetings—designated with a
B
in the meeting lists—are mainly for people who are new to the program or coming back after a relapse. The tone is raw and rugged. Grown men sob out loud. Nobody believes in God. So in the hidden language of our order, simply by saying the name of the meeting, I have already told Clark that the camp did not go particularly well and that I can no longer handle the Gloria thing.

He shows up in his usual khaki pants and rugby shirt, looking slightly tousled, with his round rimless glasses lowering on his ski-slope nose and a baked-in, just-woke-up vibe. I wonder if his kids are keeping him up nights.

The speaker is a well-put-together Wall Street–type woman who’s been in and out of the rooms for years. She says something I have often replayed in my head:

“I didn’t call people when I needed help,” she says. “I thought I was being considerate. I didn’t want to bother them. But when did I ever care if I was bothering anybody? No, it’s not that at all. I just didn’t want to ask for help. I lacked humility.”

She looks at me, or near me, saying: “Be humble. Ask for help.”

We walk over to the New World Diner on Broadway with a couple of other friends from the morning meeting. Karole is what used to be called a “dark study”: blond, late thirties, a successful account executive with a major ad agency, formerly a cokehead so legendary in her West End Avenue co-op that the doormen called her Elvira after the Michelle Pfeiffer character in
Scarface
. To be honest, she scares me: the essence of New York style. In contrast, Darryl is a soft-spoken criminal lawyer with a rigid body and crew-cut silver hair, military in his manner, although he skipped Vietnam for law school and skipped most of law school for the gay scene in Ithaca.