Bad Dog (2 page)

We’d had so much hope, my wife, Gloria, and I. It still stings me to remember with what prematernal optimism we read Jean Donaldson and Karen Pryor and Sharon Chesnutt Smith’s
The New Bernese Mountain Dog
, scouring hardware stores for these strange things called baby gates. She mail-ordered a Bernese-ready version of what dog people call a crate—it’s a cage—and I almost had a petit mal. It was bigger than our Toyota Echo.

Dreams die hard, and so did this one. Puppies are a pain at any price, and we marked up a lot to exuberance. Certainly she wasn’t shy. Just ask our neighbors. Many times she helped them with their groceries and tossed in a prostate exam on the house. Years passed and passed again.

At a certain point, without announcing it even to ourselves, we gave up. I gave up. We’d had our idea of what a pet should be and had been baited and switched. We’d been had by the dogs
of the gods or vice versa. She was housebroken; she seemed happy; she didn’t actually bite people, with a single exception.

What I know now is that settling for a dog who is housebroken and doesn’t draw blood is like settling for a child who can talk.

And I might as well admit the exception was my wife.

Gradually—very gradually—as we stopped working with Hola, she turned into a beast. There are reasonable people who would have euthanized her for the way she treated Gloria, and to those people I have no response.

“She’s a wild one, dude,” said another of the trainers we visited to deal with this new reign of terror—the occasional growling, the passing nips, the light bruising and marks on my wife’s arms and legs that more than once had a predictable result.

“How’d that happen?” asked some woman at Ann Taylor or at the Whole Foods where Gloria worked for a year as a cook.

“My dog did it.”

A look of deep, sisterly karma. “It’s okay,” they’d whisper. “You don’t have to lie for him anymore. There are people who can help you.”

“Really, it’s my dog. She’s a menace.”

“Of course it is, girlfriend. Of course it is.”

Wink.

Of course it’s the man. And were they so wrong? Where was the man, after all?

So I am being sincere when I say I don’t lay blame for what Gloria decided to do next. She saved both of our lives—mine and the dog’s—after all.

She left us.

Gloria is a wiry, birdlike woman with bobbed brown hair, a sharp nose, and milk-bottle glasses; she’s usually smiling
slightly as though eavesdropping on a funny conversation. Her eyes are a serious blue that almost glows, and her skin is pale and buttery, her features stacked together with such unusual symmetry that the first thing my male friends usually said to me after meeting her was: “Wow.”

A professional charmer, she’s reduced vanloads of folksong fans in Manhattan’s East Village to tears with her gorgeous voice, tart lyrics, and improvised monologues. The one about the death of Frank Sinatra was a classic I wish I’d committed to tape. She has a master’s in music theory and can recognize any celebrity, no matter how obscure, by their voice.

People love her, and those who do not simply haven’t met her yet. She is utterly uncontroversial. Coincidentally, she’s suffered a few dog years herself. She’d decided to go to cooking school, worked for a while, and then quit because the career was too dangerous and poorly paid.

Inspired by the old
Schoolhouse Rock
series, she started writing one-minute songs about cooking techniques—“Read the Recipe All the Way Through”; “Shock-Shock-Shock the Vegetables,” in the style of the Ramones; the ribald “Pull Wiggle Wiggle,” a pseudo-gospel song about how to bone a fish—and set them to animated videos featuring a trio of musical chefs named Do, Re, and Mi.

Chefdoremi.com
is her message to the world, which so far is considering its response.

I still believe she is some kind of genius, but she has reservations.

And, like many Gen Xers, we’d sort of forgotten to have children until it was probably too late.

As snow continues to swallow the obedience club, I hand back the CGC forms in triplicate. AKC registration number—yes.
Spayed—yes. Age—almost six now, an old lady in Bernese mountain dog time.

“You’ll be second,” says the steward. “Wait over at the side, please.”

Let’s go into the corner
, Hola seems to say,
and remind me what I’m supposed to do here. Preferably using a food lure
.

As I’m walking backward monitoring Hola’s stay, I scan the ring where the first team is doing item #7, “Coming when called.”

The dog half of the pair is a rather sluggish toy poodle who meanders back to her handler like she’s waist-deep in canola oil.

“Did you see that, Hola?” I whisper. “No pizzazz at all.”

That poodle lacks heart
, she agrees.
She has no business out there on the mat
.

For the first ten years of my marriage, after a month locked in a rehab I don’t remember checking into, I’d been abstinent from alcohol.

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before.

Burned out as a TV writer, I went back to business school and got a job as a management consultant, working out of hotel rooms in cities far, far away, and one night I went into the minibar for a Diet Pepsi and thought,
Well, nothing livens up a Diet Pepsi like some Captain Morgan, correct?

So I took out the bottle and unscrewed the cap.

I see now the difference between sobriety and abstinence is like the difference between marriage and pornography. It’s apples and rotary saws.

To her credit, Gloria stayed with me through my bottom, stayed with Hola and me as we began our own
Incredible Journey
of mutual rehabilitation, then went off on a journey of her own.

To this day, I understand.

In the words of a country song she wrote, “You’re Leavin’ Me, You Lucky Dog (If I Was You I’d Leave Me Too).”

Hola and I trotted on alone: to a terrifying dog camp in the Green Mountains of Virginia, a gallery of trainers and priests, all-breed shows, and obedience demonstrations, meeting wonderful people along the way—the top Bernese mountain dog breeder, the national canine obedience champion, the world’s best dog writer, even the head of the CGC program herself.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in animal behavior to see that I traded an obsession with alcohol for an obsession with dog training.

But looking back, I like to give our adventure a more romantic spin: we were trying to get Gloria back. Somehow I thought succeeding in the impossible task of winning our four-legged demon child a Canine Good Citizen rating would make us both family friendly again.

To be fair, Gloria didn’t know this; even I didn’t know this in the beginning.

But I’m sure that Hola did.

We’re practicing our automatic sits as the steward comes up to us from the judge’s table.

She’s a large, older woman in an L.L. Bean red flannel shirt, and her breath spreads out in front of her like a paint roller. Her wide face is a map of White Plains: gray, flat, and functional.

“Are you Hola?” she asks me.

“Yes.”

“Here for the CGC, right? Not Therapy Dog?”

“Yes.”

“You’re up next. Use the buckle collar. Leave the treats outside the ring. Are you ready?”

I peer down at my sidekick, whose head is cocked to the left
quizzically in a look that says life is a punch line, so you’d better be joking.

“Are we ready, girlfriend?”

Are you kidding me?
she says, breaking her sit on my cue.
I was BORN ready!

So we enter the ring …

I
F YOU WANT
to get a purebred dog, all I can say is good luck. Almost by definition, you won’t get a good one, not if you’re a civilian who lives in that sad world outside the show rings. Purebreds are graded in degrees of conformation to an ideal standard—the perfect specimen. That’s what judges are doing at Westminster or in the movie
Best in Show:
sizing up against the standard, some combination of physics and temperament that the AKC has written down but good judges know in their heart.

Very Platonic. And just as in Plato’s
Republic
, the further you get from this ideal expression, the closer you get to your life.

Dog breeders have a term for this kind of life—the kind you’ll get if you’re blessed enough to get anything at all. It’s called “pet quality.” And in the world of purebred dogs, pet quality is not who you want dating your daughter.

Gloria had always wanted a dog. She’d grown up with a St. Bernard, a big dumb animal named Alex who’d missed the critical socialization window and didn’t play well with others. But he adored Gloria, as we all do, and set her on the path to large dogs.

I’d been tempted by the Bernese myself a few times. As my ex-sister-in-law once said, “They’re the George Clooney of
dogs.” The word is
charm
. Even though I didn’t like woofies, I was lured along a train platform in Bennington, Vermont, by a Bernese male who smiled at me, ambled between my legs, and flopped onto the ground with that full-throated yogic breath release I’ve come to know so well. It’s like they’re exhaling all the bad vibrations in the world.

The owner was a rambling, friendly guy with about a hundred kids, and my wife got to asking him what the dogs were like.

“Let’s just say,” he said, “you have to include them. They don’t like to be left out.”

Color me similar.

Gloria claims she got my permission to look for a Bernese of our own. I was still swimming in moonshine at this point, which didn’t help my memory, but I’d hate to think she took advantage of this for her own schemes. She told me later she just wanted a friend in the house for a change. I was home with my wife very rarely, even when I was home with my wife, if you get what I mean.

“I want a puppy,” she supposedly said.

“That’s okay by me,” I theoretically answered. “What kind?”

“A Bernese mountain dog. They’re very sweet.”

“As big as that one in Vermont?”

“Oh, no,” she lied to my face. “The females are much smaller.”

“Okey dokey,” I hypothetically concluded, cracking open another Mickey’s Wide Mouth.

At the time I shared the prejudice—common to co-op boards, landlords, and other fools the world over—that smaller dogs are somehow more domesticated. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Big dogs might seem like more trouble, but they tend to be lazy and fat. Small dogs are like the most annoying runt you ever knew in high school, plus fangs.

As their name implies, purebreds tend to come from breeders, and breeders are a class apart. When it comes to deciding who is worthy of their spawn, the best ones are as selective as the Harvard Admissions Committee. More selective, actually—Harvard doesn’t do home inspections.

“How’s it going?” I’d ask Gloria by phone from the Marriott, watching the Mondavi swoosh against the bathroom water glass.

“Not too good,” she’d say.

“What’s the problem this time? We don’t know Dick Cheney? We’re not on
American Idol
?”

“It’s the yard. We don’t have a fenced-in yard.”

“We live in the New York area, for fuck’s sake. Nobody has a yard.”

“And we never had a Bernese before. That’s a problem, too.”

“First time for everything,” I fumed. “What’re we, supposed to get our dog from a pet store?”

Sick silence as we thought about where pet store puppies come from. If you haven’t heard of puppy mills I won’t kill your buzz by describing them. Just imagine the saddest song you’ve ever heard and add barking.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The last one made me fill out this four-page application and give references. I had to swear to feed the dog organic liver. We had an easier time getting the mortgage.”

“What’s so great about this dog anyway? It’s just a stupid pet.”

“I have to go,” said my wife. “The other phone’s ringing.”

It was only after she hung up I remembered we didn’t have another phone.

Eventually, she did find a breeder up in Rochester who agreed to part with a precious pet-quality Bernese for two thousand dollars. That this breeder was not in the first rank was confirmed a few years later when I mentioned her name to one of the champion Berner owners backstage at the Westminster Dog Show in Madison Square Garden.

Pursed lips. “You have to be careful,” she said.

But still, it wasn’t a puppy mill and it’s not like we had options.

My approach to marriage has been to give myself one
no
per year, whether I need it or not. That’s how I show who’s in charge. I was this close to hauling out that
no
after we wandered into the kitchen of the breeder’s roomy suburban ranch house and I heard a loud
thump!
and saw an abominable snowman slam against the back screen door—closed, mercifully—stretching its massive paws six feet in the air as it tried to smash the door in and go about its evil work.

I think I actually yelped and grabbed Gloria. Then the breeder woman appeared from somewhere and did about the single stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.

She opened the door.

Yeti hopped onto all fours, trotted directly over to me, smiled, lay down, and rolled onto his back, bicycling his big white paws in the air.

The sole reason I hadn’t snagged my wife and bolted for the New York State Thruway was that I had been paralyzed by fear.

“Aw, come on,” said the breeder, whose name was Florence.

“W-what?” I shuddered.

“Rub the tummy! Rub the tummy.”

I’d get used to the high-pitched Japanese-department-store-girl tone people used with dogs around the time I started doing it myself.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

“Aw, he’s friendly,” squealed Gloria, who was already down next to the grizzly and running her hands through the thick white curls on his barrel belly. “
Who wants the tummy rub! Who wants the tummy rub.”

Dog people tend to repeat themselves, because they don’t have much to say.

By this time four or five marginally smaller specimens had appeared and were milling around the kitchen and conspiring to knock me off my feet. Figuring it was safer to lower my center of gravity, I crouched down next to Gloria and touched the beast.