“THE HYPOCHONDRIAC’S GUIDE TO OVERPROTECTIVE DOG CARE”

“THE HYPOCHONDRIAC’S GUIDE TO OVERPROTECTIVE DOG CARE” (More tales from my serial blog "Rex and the City")

Until I brought a dog into my life, I never considered myself a hypochondriac. And I swear I’m not—for myself that is. If I were, say, bleeding from the palms and the eyeballs, that wouldn't necessarily stop me from being first in line at the semi-annual Barney's sample sale (although whether they would let me into the dressing rooms, or allow me to manhandle the Prada bowling totes is another matter). And don't get me wrong—I like going to the doctor. I like being in the presence of someone who will listen to my problems and pretend he actually cares about them, but the thing is, in New York City, the doctors don’t listen to you. They schedule a new patient every twelve minutes, make you wait two hours in their lushly appointed reception area for your twelve o’clock appointment, then spend a total of ten minutes in your actual presence, during which they shine a light into your ears, tap you on the knees, and call you by the wrong name. (I am often addressed by my primary care specialist as “Irene”). For this you will be charged $600, with the optional consolation prize of a two-week trial sample of Prozac or Viagra (even though you came in to talk about the inexplicable stigmata on your ribs) and/or a referral to see a specialist, who will call you $900 and call you Aileen. At least when I was little I got to choose between a jeweled plastic ring or a lollypop.

So, needless to say, I didn’t go to the doctor much. But then Ted and I adopted Wallace from a New York City shelter. This was back in 1997, for those who are not familiar with my stories. Some of you have already read, in these columns, how we soon learned that Wallace had been abused, and that his spirit had been broken by his previous owner. Because of his behavioral problems, and general fear and mistrust of humans, Wallace was difficult to train and manage in those first few months, but despite the struggles this wonderful dog opened up our lives, and taught us how to be nurturers and lovers of nature, and taught us how to better love ourselves, etc. But now is the time to talk about the dark side of all this, the other, seamier emotions that attach themselves to love like demodectic parasites: worry, over-protectiveness, irrational paranoia, the fear of the loss of love.

All my friends who had birthed human children, who swore they’d never be worry-worts like their mothers, told me of their transformations into paranoid schizos who lay in bed at night obsessing over Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, child molestation, and whether the trees closest to the house should be sawed down, for fear that their branches would shatter the nursery windows during a freak New England storm. And I understood this to be a phase they went through, a Rite of Passage that every parent undergoes with their first born child. But I never imagined that I would undergo the same rites with my dog.

It all started with the instruction manual that came with Wallace when we brought him home from the shelter. It was called something simple, like “You and Your Shelter Dog” and it contained some basic advice—when to feed your dog, what to do if he or she is not housetrained—and recommended, at the end, a list of books for further reading. And because Ted and I were eager for knowledge and eager to be good caretakers, we acquired these books, but it seemed that for every one we ordered there was Amazon.com saying, If you like this book, you may like _____ and _____ and _____, listing at least 75 other books to read as well. So we acquired those additional 75 books, too. You just never knew which one would be the one, which book would explain your dog once and for all, and so, over and over again, we found ourselves clicking “add to cart,” and every night, for the next several years, Ted and I stayed up late in bed, reading side by side, pouring through countless training guides and veterinary manuals, comparing notes, hoping, praying in the meantime that the foreign four-legged creature who menacingly paced our floors would not murder us in our sleep (but who can sleep when you have one hundred and seventeen books to read?). With every book we finished, we would begin the next one, hoping, believing, that here would be the definitive one, the one that would solve the mystery of Wallace, and then we could get on with our lives. (Note: We’re still reading.) I felt like a hopeless smoker who announces he’s going to quit as he lights his next cigarette with the butt end of his current one.

And then there was the internet (which some say exists solely to pray on the paranoias of people like me). At my temp job, I would spend six of my eight hours visiting veterinary websites and recoiling at the graphic images of cocker spaniel with eyes bulging out of their sockets, of unidentified rectal prolapses and hyperestrinism (you don’t want to know), of dogs who had been hit by cars. I’d call Ted in tears, telling him to log on to such-and-such a website as proof as to why Wallace should not be allowed out of doors.

“You’re just upsetting yourself,” Ted would say. “And you’re upsetting me. Can’t you find something more constructive to do with your time?”

But Ted, too, worried about how to best care for our dog in those early days. How could we not? Our friends with human children could at least comfort themselves with the fact that someday their infants would be able speak to them and communicate their wants and needs. Our friends with human children passed through the worrywort phase smoothly, and told their second borns, who might be bleeding from the eyeballs, to “get over it” and leave them alone. But Ted and I, with our dog-child, would never have that advantage. Sure, Wallace was smarter than average—he knew 23 words in the English language (which is more than we could say for then-“President” Bush). But none of those words could be found in my Index of Signs in my Dog Owner’s Home Veterinary Handbook (which Ted soon dubbed the Hyponchondriac’s Guide to Overprotective Dog Care).

So in the beginning we always erred on the side of caution. In our first few weeks of having Wallace we very sincerely took him to the vet for panting, yawning, flatulence, and the weird black discolorations on the bottom of his paws. “Those are spots,” the nice, patient vet told us. “You have a spotted dog.”

“Oh,” I said, “I thought maybe it was tar. We crossed a street the other night that had some freshly filled pot holes and I thought—”

“They’re spots,” the vet said.

Early instances such as that did not dissuade me from always imagining the worst case scenario. In June I worried about heartworm and ringworm; in July it was fractures and fleas. My biggest paranoia, the thing that kept me up most at nights, became foxtails and burrs. Foxtails and other barbed seed-heads, I read, could easily penetrate the skin and travel down the ear canals or up the genital tract, causing irritation, abscesses, serious tissue damage and/or infection. “In extreme cases,” I read, “foxtails have been known to puncture the organs, including the brain.” This was not an image I could easily forget, and it didn’t help that the warning signs—excessive sneezing, scratching at the ears, pawing at the nose, shaking the head—were gestures Wallace made on a regular basis.

So every time my poor dog sneezed (which is a lot if you live in New York City in a ground floor apartment and like to keep your windows open, under the guise of “getting some fresh air”), I insisted that we rush him to the emergency clinic.

“Are you sure a foxtail hasn’t punctured your brain?” Ted began to say. His biggest paranoia was the rising costs of veterinary treatments, and after the seven or eighth office visit it was clear we had divided into two camps. There was sense and then there was nonsense, and in Ted’s opinion I resided in the latter.

When we had had our Wallace about 6 months, I noticed that, well, he was licking himself. A lot. Down there. Now, we have all heard the joke that starts with the question “Why does a dog lick his balls?” and ends with the punch line “Because he can!” but Wallace’s behavior seemed unusual to me. Like, kind of obsessive/compulsive. Plus, Wallace didn’t have balls. He was licking something far more, um, pointed.

I rushed to my Hypochondriac’s Guide to Overprotective Dog Care.

“If your dog begins to lick himself excessively,” I read, “and has a purulent, foul-smelling discharge coming from the prepuce, he may be suffering from balanoposthitis.” My eyes widened and I looked over at Wallace, who sure enough was licking himself again. I read this sentence a few more times, trying to figure out exactly what amount of licking constituted as “excessive.” It didn’t say. So then there was the matter of the discharge. I hadn’t noticed any per se; but then again I hadn’t looked.

Ted walked in the door as I was conducting my prepucal inspection.

“What are you doing?” he shouted, his voice screechy.

I was positioned much like an auto mechanic under a car. Wallace was busy with the task of cleaning out the insides of a Ben and Jerry’s carton that I have given him to keep him occupied, but all that ended when Ted walked in the door.

“I'm looking for a purulent, foul-smelling discharge. Come here, do you think it smells funny?”

“Stop it!" Ted said. "You're acting crazily.”

I sat up. “I think something’s wrong with him. He won’t stop licking himself.”

Ted folded his arms. “Nothing’s wrong with him.”

“What does purulent mean, anyway?" I asked. "Do you know?”

“I have no idea,” Ted said. “Wallace, come over here. Stay away from your mother.”

I stood and walked over to the bookshelves and reached for the dictionary.

“What are you doing?” Ted hugged the dog protectively.

“I’m going to find out what purulent means.”

“Would you stop it?”

“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” I said. This sent Wallace into a tizzy of barking and spinning, and Ted had no choice but to take him out. That or listen to me talk about purulence.

We had discovered a bright new way to end a discussion.

Over the next few days, Wallace kept up with his licking. And I kept up with my research. I discovered that a small amount of cloudy, yellowish discharge is not unusual in mature males, but “an excessive purulent discharge is associated with overt infection.”

“Well, there’s the word excessive again,” I said to Ted that night. “And purulent. What constitutes a normal amount of discharge?”

Wallace settled onto the sofa and began to lick himself again.

“Don’t look at me,” Ted said.

Then I read: “If the pus-like discharge is dripping directly from the penis opening, the condition is probably more serious. You should look for foreign material, such as foxtails, inside the prepuce of affected dogs.” I put the book down. “Foxtails!”

“He does not have a foxtail stuck up there,” Ted said.

“How do you know?”

“Because we haven’t been anywhere near foxtails. It’s November, for God’s sake. Foxtails are a spring occurrence.”

“Well, it could be something else.”

“But nothing is dripping. You’re overreacting here.”

At this moment, I swear, something green dripped from Wallace’s privates.

“Look!” I shouted to Ted, pointing. “Did you see that?”

Wallace ceased his licking for a moment and stared at me, a somewhat guilty look on his face. Then he looked over at Ted and, I swear, rolled his eyes, and lapped up the evidence. He buried his snout in his crouch and resumed with the licking, making a lewd snuffing sound.

“Something is wrong,” I said. “I know it.” I produced a diagram entitled “how to expose the penis” that illustrated how you were supposed to seize your dog’s privates with both hands and push one part forward (the penis) and pull another part back (the prepuce). Having been raised Catholic, I had a hard time even reading those words.

“Here,” I said to Ted, pushing the book toward him. “You do it.”

“Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s licking himself. He’s a dog.”

“But he has a discharge. And when the discharge is excessive, perhaps greenish or odorous, and the dog licks at his prepuce excessively, these are signs of balanoposthitis.” I was now waving the book in the air as if it were a Bible. “So someone is going to have to extract that prepuce and it’s not going to be me!” Wallace stood, belched, and then lumbered off to the other room.

For reasons we no longer understand or remember, it was Ted who had to take Wallace to the vet that day. This is what transpired, second hand:

DR. MARTER: “So, what seems to be the problem today?”

TED: “Well, my dog is licking himself a lot. On his penis?

DR. MARTER: “He's a male dog, right?”

TED: Yes

DR. MARTER: “Well, that's what male dogs do.”

TED: “Yes, but my wife says she saw—”

DR. MARTER: “Wives (DR PAUSES WEIGHTEDLY) know nothing about licking.”

PAN TO CLOSE UP OF TED’S BURNING FACE.

It took several years for me to live down this story, and for Ted to get over the humiliation of having brought the dog in in the first place. He vowed never to listen to me again.

And they seemed to have the same idea at the veterinary clinic. I noticed that, after that, every time I brought Wallace in for an appointment we got The New Vet, the one who had graduated from Cornell like the week before. And this is not to say Wallace got inferior treatment; it’s just that I started to wonder: was I not being taken seriously? Did they see me as a crazy dog lady?

Or was it the dog? Early on in his career as the English Setter Patient at this particular vet, Wallace had received a written warning of sorts. Someone at the vet’s office had written caution in black magic markers at the top of Wallace’s chart. This is another story, which requires a lengthy explanation, but the point is, I started to wonder if that caution referred to me.

Soon it seemed even Wallace saw me as a Crazy Dog Lady. If I, say, admonished him if he ate his food too quickly, he’d eat even more quickly, attempting to finish off his breakfast before I had even placed the dish squarely on the floor.

Like many dogs, Wallace gulped down his food as if at any moment, six adolescent wolves were going to burst forth from the kitchen cabinets and try to steal it away. (Thus the verb “to wolf”.) But this, I had read, was not healthy. “Wallace, don’t eat so quickly,” I’d say. “You might get volvulus.” He ignored me and continued to wolf. Clearly, volvulus was not one of Wallace’s 23 words.

“If you eat too quickly,” I continued, “your stomach could bloat, and then distend, and then twist on its axis, and that’s life threatening, and we’d have to rush you to the vet. Do you want to have to go to the vet?”

In two more bites he finished his food off, lapped up some water, and then belched. He knew the word “vet” but pretended that he didn’t. The belch I took as an insult. And a secret signal that he sided with Ted.

By the end of the summer, I had pretty much given up on the idea that I would ever be able to properly care for Wallace. And I realized, again, that this is something parents of human children must go through. You must reach a stage of resignation, in which you vow to simply do your best. And pray that no tree branches crash through the windows.

That August, my sister had to go away for a week and she asked me to come look after her two young daughters and their Yellow Lab. (This in itself is another story, for after this visit my sister banished Wallace from both her properties for this and all future lifetimes, but let us not go there.) I was flattered that my sister would entrust her two children to me, and I looked forward to spending a week on the Cape. There would be bike rides to the beach in the morning, blueberry picking at dusk, ice cream and fried clams in the early evenings, and then leisurely walks around the cranberry bog with the dogs.

And it was a lovely week, despite the fact that I felt inadequate as a substitute parent. I had always thought that children loved chaos, loved to defy order, and loved to eat candy for lunch, but not my nieces. They, bless their hearts (and my sister’s) found true stability in the routines my sister had set up for them. So instead of taking delight in the fact that I was not a rule enforcer, that I was a Cool Aunt, they themselves enforced the rules. When I told them the first morning that they could get their own breakfasts (which would have been a thrill to me as a child, as I was not allowed to eat anything but what my father dictated, and that was usually unsweetened wheat squares) they just looked at me with perplexity. “Mom always makes us fruit salad,” they said.

“Mom always gives us lunch at twelve,” they would say at three o’clock with their stomachs rumbling. “Mom always brings sunscreen to the beach,” they would say at high noon, as the sun’s harmful UV rays beat down upon us. Egads.

“It’s a good thing I don’t have children of my own,” I said to my friend that night on the telephone. “Can you believe I forgot sunscreen? My poor nieces. It’s like my sister has left them with a chimpanzee.”

“It’s understandable,” my friend said.

“But how do people do it?” I said. “How do people have children? How many childrearing manuals did you have to read before your first son was born?”

“None,” she said. “It’s just a wisdom we all have within us. You’ll see. It’s there.”

But I didn’t believe her. Take my wisdom with Wallace for instance. He had already burst through a screen door, stolen all the rawhide from his Lab cousin Bailey, and shredded two of my niece’s favorite towels. He played tug-of-war not to win, it seemed, but to kill, as if he had watched one too many episodes of Gladiator, and poor Bailey took to hiding under the porch as soon as we let her out. I wasn’t the Cool Aunt, I realized; I was the Lame Aunt. Not even a houseplant could thrive under my care.

But then, on the final day of my visit, there, I was lying on the lawn, reading a book, and occasionally marveling (as city people will) at the smell and feel and the color of the grass. Nearby, my nieces played on the waterslide and Wallace and Bailey were down by the cranberry bog, traipsing around with a giant Wolfhound puppy (cutely named Chewbacca) who lived down the road. This pup’s goofy presence, or perhaps his size, had sedated Wallace somehow, and he no longer lunged at Bailey. So all was well for the moment, and I kept putting my book down to smile at my nieces and check up on the dogs. The air had a lazy, end-of-day quality to it: soft and supple, and in the distance lawn mowers hummed and the birds had started their evening song. Off and on, my nieces giggled, a musical, uplifting sound that spoke of purity and innocence. Intermittently, the dogs barked.

But then, suddenly my youngest niece ran up to me and said, “Aunt Lee, Wallace is limping.” And sure enough, there was Wallace, hobbling toward me on three legs from the bottom of the hill. His friend Chewbacca ran alongside him, like some bucktoothed neighbor; he had an “I didn’t do it” look on his face. Wallace came right over to me and presented me with his paw. Suddenly I was surrounded by two children and three dogs, all of them panting from the swift climb up the hill, all of them expecting me to somehow know what to do. Never had I been so aware that I was an adult, at least in theory. Never had I felt so inadequate. In the distance, a pair of seagulls cawed, and it sounded mocking. The salt air suddenly felt harsh and abrasive. I took Wallace’s paw in my hand to inspect it, thinking that I had to at least go through the motions of a competent person, and Wallace seemed willing to go with this. But when I turned Wallace’s foot over I saw very clearly that he had a thorn in one of his pads. A rosebush thorn stuck right smack into the center. And so I pulled it out. “There you go,” I said to Wallace. “You’re fine now.” Wallace gave me one wet kiss and then tore off down the hill again with his pals, to menace the seagulls who had dared laugh at me.

“You did it!” my younger niece said. “You fixed him.”

I smiled. “I did!”

I looked down at the thorn in my hand, feeling outlandishly proud and competent. My pride was disproportionate of course, but still I let myself feel it. Then I put the thorn in my pocket so that no one would ever step on it again.

I pulled my niece onto my lap and stroked her sun-warmed hair. Together we watched the Wallace and his pals frolic. Wallace, my formerly broken dog, had been fixed.

Foul Weather Friends - What do to with white dogs on rainy days in NYC

April is the cruelest month. And in New York City, February and March are too. Especially if you have a white dog. Each spring, with the thaw, come the rivers of mud, collecting mostly in those places you need them least: like right on the walking trails of Prospect Park, inside all the dog runs, and in a big, unavoidable puddle right at the bottom of your apartment building’s stoop. City mud, of course, has its own unique accoutrements, including cigarette butts, lottery tickets, and carcasses of the rats poisoned by the parks department every fall. These are not the sorts of things you want your white dog rolling in.

The spring thaw also reveals all that unscooped poop that people left behind during the winter months. For some reason, even those New Yorkers who are typically conscientious about cleaning up after their dogs will walk away from steaming piles on the snow during the winter. Perhaps because the snow in New York is so offensive anyway (it’s not white, dear readers—it’s gray). Perhaps they think the poop will simply disappear, blanketed by more and more layers of snow, until it disintegrates. But just as a frozen body can last thirty years in the name of science, so can frozen poop. It can last until the thaws of April, the cruelest month, when there it is once again, underfoot. This is proof that you can’t leave the past behind.

So can you blame New Yorkers for being grouchy in the spring? When we were children, spring meant crocuses and daffodils, green grass, budding trees, and the smell of Mother Earth shaking herself off and rising again in all her rich wonder. When we were children, I swear it didn’t rain so much. So where did all this rain come from—the Bush era?

In New York, the spring rain falls so hard that it bounces right off the sidewalks and straight up your skirt. It ricochets off the sides of buildings, pelts you on the neck, and seeps down into your collar, even though you are wearing a giant duck-billed hood and a scarf wrapped thrice around your neck.

Wallace, like many dogs, did not like the rain. At least not city rain. In the country, he would bound across the fields as he always did, occasionally stopping to shake himself, even though he never got dry, but on the Upper East Side he considered rain to be an assault. When we took him out to relieve himself, he’d press his body against the sides of buildings, trying to shelter against the downpour. Sometimes we’d pass under a scrawny awning, and there Wallace would stop. He’d put on his doggie emergency brakes: feet planted, leaning backward, with a look of stubborn solidity on his face—like that of George Washington on Mt. Rushmore.

I always had an umbrella on these occasions, of course. And, good dog-parent that I was, I would hold the umbrella over him rather than myself. I’d follow him along and hold the umbrella over him as he squatted to poop. Last summer I saw a picture of Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, or whatever he’s called, strolling along the promenade at Cannes looking positively smashing in white linen pants and a white shirt. And a similarly dressed manservant was hurrying alongside him, holding a white umbrella over his boss’s head. I couldn’t help but think of this picture as Wallace lifted his leg on a fire hydrant—he was protected: I was splashed by a passing cab.

The big problem with carrying an umbrella to keep your white dog clean and dry is that when it comes time to pick up his deposit, you need a third hand, because one of your two hands is holding the leash and the other the umbrella. This is why Puff Daddy has a manservant, I guess. My method was to put the umbrella between my knees, but then it would tip over, and both of us would get wet. Wallace, offended at this injustice, would bolt toward another awning, and more often than not, I’d topple over.

I decided to buy the dog a raincoat. Now, on the Upper East Side, most of the dogs wore clothing—expensive garments from Burberry’s and Coach. But Ted refused to pay $300 for a “sissy rain coat.” So I ordered an inexpensive coat from Drs. Foster and Smith. It was a cute yellow slicker, just like the one I’d had as a child, the color of a school bus, or a Crayola crayon. This made me like the idea of a raincoat even better, because I always liked to find yet another way to infantilize the dog. But when the slicker arrived, it was too small. I’d ordered at Extra-Large, but it still didn’t reach all the way to his backside. You were supposed to hook a large elastic band around the dog’s tail, but this coat barely reached the big brown spot on top of his rump. So I had to return it.

“Good,” Ted said. “How are you supposed to shit with a big yellow elastic stretched across your anus anyway?”

“Could you not use the word ‘anus’?” I said.

Then Ted said he had another, less expensive idea. “Remember that dog at the Halloween contest that was dressed like a raisin?”

I did—an Irish Setter had been wearing a big Hefty bag that was stuffed with newspaper. It never occurred to me to wonder how the “raisin” went to the bathroom, but Ted figured we could cut the bag in half lengthwise and fasten the “cinch wrap” around Wallace’s neck.

“What about his anus?” I said. “And that other body part he needs to use?”

“They will be unobstructed,” Ted said. I figured that, when it came to matters of male anatomy, he knew best.

And so Wallace became a raisin. It took an additional 20 minutes to walk him each time it rained, because Ted and I laughed so much at the way he looked in his Hefty bag and his cinched-up face. We didn’t stuff him with newspaper, but still. It seemed to embarrass Wallace to have to walk past all the fancy restaurants on Madison Avenue, and by that Poodle in the pink plaid Burberry raincoat. And he still pressed himself against the awnings, and his belly still got wet and black and coated with that toxic spring mud.

After it had been raining for what seemed like 40 days and 40 nights, and Noah had not yet called to invite us aboard his arc, I decided to keep the dog indoors more often. I bought a book called Caninestein, which showed you how to measure your dog’s intelligence and offered tips on how to increase his IQ. Thus I was inspired to develop a game I called “Find the Kong.” I’d make Wallace sit and stay in one room (remember that we only had three rooms in that apartment: the kitchen/living room combo, the bedroom and the tiny bathroom only big enough for one). Anyway, I’d make him sit in the kitchen and then I’d go “hide” the Kong in one of the other rooms. I used the word hide in quotation marks, because, in the bathroom, the Kong would be “hidden” right on top of the toilet and in the living room it would be “hidden” on the windowsill. In any case, I’d tell Wallace, “Okay, go find it. Find the Kong!” And he’d race off, tail held high in excitement, with that look of fun in his eyes. He always found the Kong, of course, and would bring it back to me, his ears flattened back with pride and his tail wagging. I made a big show of praising him and his cleverness. “Who’s an Einstein? Who’s a Caninestein?” And then I’d hide it again—always in an obvious place—and the game would begin again. Sometimes Wallace would cheat and break his stay. I’d see him peeking at me from the doorway, and make him return to his designated spot. Most of the time he cooperated, because he knew if he cheated too much, I’d stop the game. He was a genius, I tell you. A regular Caninestein.

When Ted came home from work, soaked to the waist even though his umbrella was the size of a table for six, I threw myself on him in excitement and told him I had taught the dog a new game. I was as proud as if I had just typed a full novel in 23 days, which is what they say Stephen King always does.

“What a good mother you are,” Ted said, “teaching him a rainy-day game. Most mothers would just plunk him down in front of the television set.”

When we moved to the Upper East Side, our repertoire of rainy-day activities increased. This is a neighborhood where, starting at age three, all the children are sent to riding school at the Claremont Riding Academy, impressionistic painting classes (in oils) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then to flute lessons with a man who used to play with the New York Symphony. After a short break for toast and tea with their etiquette instructor, the children would be on to French lessons at the Alliance Française.
On the Upper East Side your dog could have a quadruple pedicure at Lolly’s Pet Salon, or go for a temperature-controlled swim at Biscuits and Bath. Then, after being washed, dried and fluffed by an aesthetician at the club, your dog could accompany you to the Regency Hotel, where waiters in white gloves would pour chilled Evian into a silver dog dish, and then serve him a warm dish of chicken, broccoli and rice. Twenty bucks if just the dog ate. Forty if you treated yourself. But you can’t do any of this wearing a plastic bag.

Luckily, Petco was just a few blocks away from our apartment. And, as you all know, “well-behaved” dogs are allowed inside the store, provided they are on a leash. Petco doesn’t even mind those dogs who leap up onto the biscuit bar and steal a couple of treats, because there are always security guards around who will narc on you and you will be forced to pay for the treats. This is a New York thing, I think—the security guards in a pet store. I heard that one time an Akita peed on one of them—a quick squirt to the pant leg—and the dog was banished for life. But then people on Manhattan Dog Chat got word of the banishment and threatened to sue Petco for breed-specific discrimination.

Anyway, my dog did not pee on anyone at Petco; nor did he jump onto the breakfast bar. He seemed to know that those biscuits, in their unnatural colors of orange and green, were not fit for canine consumption. Plus, I had told him that most commercial dog food was made of euthanized animals, elephant carcasses and baseball gloves, and reminded him that such food was beneath him. “Remember, you are a French Spaniel, and as a Frenchman, you must value your food.”

Instead, he would pull me to the second floor, where all the fish, birds and rodents were kept. It always smelled to me like sawdust up there, and indoor/outdoor carpeting; but to Wallace, with his heightened sense of smell, it must have smelled like the rainforests of Costa Rica, or the hedgerows of England. As we walked past the sealed terrariums full of gerbils, hamsters and tiny white mice, his nose quivered, his eyes narrowed into pinpoints, and his right foreleg rose into a hunting point. His face was focused and full of anticipation, and I realized this was the same look I had as I walked though the shoe section at Barneys: I want one of those, and one of those, and two of that pair...

Wallace would rush up to each terrarium and press his face against the glass. Oddly enough, the rodents never noticed him. They would continue spinning on their little wheels, or nibbling on grass, their little pink noses twitching and their tiny red eyes focused on the task at hand. If they had noticed him I would have taken Wallace away, because I don’t like to frighten other living creatures, but I never saw them blink or shiver. I wondered if they were sedated. Or if their cages were sealed so tightly they got no real air.

Once we had said hello to all 36 gerbils and hamsters, Wallace would pull me on to the bird section. This was a small, glassed-in room, like a squash court, full of cockatoos and parrots and one splendid African Gray. They were kept in cages, in neat rows, except for that Gray, who stood in a bird cage the center of the room, suspended from the ceiling like a chandelier. This was Wallace’s favorite room. The birds were not encased in glass, so the smell was more acute. Wallace would jump toward their cages and send them squawking in various notes. I’d always pull him off, make him sit and tell him to be quiet. “If the security guards hear us, they’ll kick us out,” I said.

But the security guards never said anything. Which I thought was weird. I’ve noticed that sometimes the people who work in pet stores seem to have little compassion for the animals they sell. But here, I guess, as long as you didn’t pee on them, you were okay.

I found a way to calm the birds down. I am now officially a crazy dog lady, remember, so why not talk to birds? I’d cluck and whistle and explain that, although technically Wallace was a bird dog, he wasn’t really all that that “birdy.” This wasn’t true, but I wanted to reassure the birds, let them know we meant no harm. Wallace would sit there, all beady-eyed, his body tense, with just the tip of his tail moving. Anyone with a bird dog knows what this means. But I explained to the birds that we lived in a tenement apartment building, and that there were no trees on our street, so we really didn’t get that much exposure to wildlife. “Plus, it’s raining cats and dogs out there,” I said, which sent them squawking again, I guess because I mentioned cats.

At that point we’d leave; Wallace reluctantly (at having to leave his own private aviary and head back into the dreadful rain) and I, satisfied (knowing that my dog got to hone his instincts and exercise his brain). Caninestein said this was essential. At Petco, Wallace got to practice what he did best: plotting how to kill all these hapless creatures. In his dreams, he actually did kill them. I could tell by the way he woofed triumphantly and flexed his lips and his paws. I knew he dreamed of open fields and sunny days. None of this rainy-day-in-a-Petco crap.

Anyway, I always allowed Wallace to pick out one toy on our way out of the store as a reward for not lunging at any of the birds. Wallace liked the fuzzy-wuzzy toys, especially those that resembled a squirrel, because he liked to practice the art of snapping spines. He also liked to pick out a greenie bone or a piggy ear and carry it home himself. With his tail up and a spring in his step, he’d hurry home, anxious to get out of the rain and eat his treat. His lips stretched around his prize into a dog-smile, big a goofy grin. And even though it was raining, and even though rain puts all New Yorkers into the foulest of moods, everyone we passed would smile at him as. He seemed to suggest that May would come, that spring really was just around the corner, and that the cruelest month would soon come to an end.

On Being a Slightly Overweight Woman with a Slightly Overweight Dog

Chunky Canines & Portly Pooches

January is the month, as we know, of New Year’s resolutions. Take one look at the covers of dozens of womens’ magazines at the local newspaper kiosk and you will see that most resolutions—in fact, 90%--involve Losing Weight. My resolutions, however, have nothing to do with losing my own weight. It’s my dog who needs to shed some pounds.

My niece likes to tell the story of the time I stayed at their house for Christmas a few years ago, and brought along my dog—a jolly little spaniel mix named Chloe. As we pulled up to my sister’s driveway in suburban Massachusetts (“we” being the dog and I), and stepped out of the car, my niece and brother-in-law were watching from their living room window. It was snowing; I think they wanted to make sure I didn’t slip.

“Wow, she’s put on weight,” my brother-in-law said as they watched us make our way up the walkway.

“Dad!” my niece replied in horror. “How can you say that about Auntie Lee? She looks great. She always looks great.”

“I mean the dog,” John said.

I get this a lot. People telling me my dog is fat. But is this true? I mean really and truly true? Read on...

The words Chloe’s critics (and my friends) use to describe her are myriad: plump, chunky, well-fed, sturdy, a linebacker, no-stranger-to-the-meatloaf. My favorite description comes from the sweet Austrian librarian at our local library. “My, my, aren’t you getting portly,” she’ll say to Chloe, when Chloe comes forth for her daily treat.

On the one hand it’s cute; on the other it’s not. I’ve become The Woman With the Fat Dog. Perhaps I am even known as the Crazy Dog Lady with the Crazy Fat Dog.

It seems so unfair, especially given that I take her out on walks at least five times a day. In the country these are full-out romping walks, and Chloe gets to run on miles and miles of wooded trails. In this city, we walk through Greenwich Village and play in Washington Square Park. She is not a sedentary dog and I am not a sedentary person. So. Mr. Cesar-Macho Male Milan can’t call me on that one.

I also feed my dog the best possible food one can provide. Most of her diet is of the BARF variety—an unfortunate acronym for what is otherwise a superb food system. It means Bones And Raw Food and it follows the theory that dogs, in the wild, would eat bones and raw food. Simple as that.

I personally find this BARF dog diet most convenient for me, the provider, because I don’t have to open any cans or lug around large bags of kibble. And who knows what’s in some of that low-quality kibble anyway? Beyond the preservatives and genetically modified corn meal I mean. Old baseball gloves and work boots, ground to a fine oily powder? Sawdust? Old elephant hide? One study found traces of—get this—euthanized dogs in dog food. Can you imagine? Anyway, let’s get back to BARF, because thinking of dogs eating dog meat, or animal shelters selling this meat to manufacturers, makes me want to barf...

As I was saying, feeding your dog raw meat is very easy. You just have the butcher chop up the chicken or beef or whatnot to designated sizes, and then you just throw the meat on the floor (or outside) for your dog to chow down. “There, go pretend your feral,” I always say to Chloe when I toss her her meat. I don’t think she quite gets the joke, but she eats happily, and that’s all that counts. That girl ain’t got a feral bone in her body. And neither do I.

Feeding raw, by the way, is less expensive than purchasing commercial manufactured dog food. Go look at the per-pound price of the kibble and/or wet food you are buying. And see the light.

When I am traveling, and/or visiting family I do not feed Chloe raw, mostly because it grosses people out. Once my step-brother, as a joke, started to spread a rumor among family that I fed Chloe raw meat on his bed. That part was funny. It was not, however, funny when I found out the rest of the family believed it was true! That’s when I realized I better work hard to change their opinion of me and my ways :)

So, no raw meat at the homes of my hosts. Instead, I cook Chloe’s food. This is a hot new trend, by the way, but I’ve been doing it for years. My previous dog, Wallace, had food allergies, so I prepared his meals as well. Beef and vegetables mixed with oatmeal, or a bit of yogurt, and funny things like kelp, krill oil, lentils, kale....the kinds of things people who buy kibble like to make fun of. They find us excessive. And who knows?

The funny thing is, I technically don’t cook. Not for myself. I eat like a bachelor (frozen burritos and Indian entrees) and my only saving grace is that I buy organic bachelor-food. And I don’t microwave it. I use the stove—less chemical mutation that way. So my “cooking” consists of buying pre-made thing and pushing buttons. But the dog gets the whole shebang: stews prepared in large soup pots, vegetables pureed in a food processor, grains fluffed up in rice cookers, and then a hundred pots to wash. And I’m the one who has to wash them. This, to me, is a solid reason not to cook.

So sometimes, when I am in a rush, and/or camping, I do buy canned food. But it’s always no-grain organic food. PetGuard or Wellness. Nothing but the best for my dog.

And, despite giving her the best with my best, she’s still fat.

Would you like to hear my excuses?

EXCUSE #1: HYPOTHYROIDISM - A VALID MEDICAL REASON
For the record, Chloe has thyroid issues, and that’s why we have trouble keeping her weight down. It’s true—you can call my vet and ask her. And I have a thyroid problem too (hypo, just like Chloe). So cut us some slack.

In fact, one might say that my dog has thyroid problems because I do. You’ve all heard how some animals “take on” our physical ailments, i.e.: the heroic cat who developed throat cancer just after her human went into remission for the same thing. But is another topic for another day....in the meantime we have heroic Chloe taking on my propensity to gain weight.

Not a day goes by in which people do not tell me she is fat. I mean, I find it cute when Pia the librarian calls Chloe portly. Or when Clayton, my ten-year old nephew, calls Chloe “Miss Chubs” or “Chunky Monkey” or “Honker-Wonker.”

But when other unnamed people offer their habitual “your dog is overweight” comment, I get pissed. I get offended. I take it personally. I hear in their benign, offhand observations decades of latent criticism: you’re a failure; you don’t have a real job; you don’t know how to take care of yourself, let alone your dog; you’re a f—ck up—look! Your dog is going to die of heart failure, or suffer through a lifetime of hip problems and arthritic needs, all because YOU ARE A FAILURE!!

Do they actually say these things?
No

Do they actually think these things about me?
Probably not.
Okay, definitely not.

Then why do I react so negatively to being told my dog is overweight? Why do I take it so personally?

For one thing, it’s rather bad manners, don’t you think? Children are taught that it is rude to shout “Mommy, look at that fat man!” in the supermarket aisles. Aren’t they? Or is this permissible now?
But then again, some people these days spend most of their days flaming other people anonymously on the internet....perhaps children are more apt to flame to peoples’ faces now.

Anyway, I guess people think it’s okay to insult a dog’s weight because some people think dogs don’t have feelings. Or that they don’t hold grudges. The latter is true. And Chloe, she’s just as friendly and loving and goofy with the strangers who call her a Fatty-Fat as she is with the people who call her a Cutie-Cute. She, likes all dogs, loves the attention.

I suppose I like attention too, as long as it’s positive. Criticism crushes me.
In the interest of full disclosure: I used to be very self-conscious about my weight, and about the way I looked. I cared so much about looking “good” that I starved myself into near-oblivion. They called it anorexia back then and they still do. I remember well the feeling of starvation, of insatiable hunger, coupled with an intense self-loathing that had somehow convinced me I didn’t deserve food. At that time in my life I guess I thought I didn’t deserve to live. It was a horrible belief, a horrible sensation.

Now, thankfully, I don’t really care how I look. I could stand to lose five pound, but I don’t care enough to spend the time or effort accomplishing this. I just don’t eat crap, or high fructose corn syrup, or anything with exclamation points or cartoons on the packaging. I don’t eat anything genetically modified, artificially colored, or brewed in a test tube. Simply put: When I am hungry I eat and I eat when I am hungry. In behavioral therapist terms, this is called a “healthy relationship to food.”

So does my dog. She has an extremely healthy, well-functioning, vigorous relationship to food.

EXCUSE #2 – IT’S GENETIC! SHE’S GOT CHOCOLATE LAB IN HER BLOOD!
Chloe is part Lab, however, and it is said that Labs will eat and eat and eat until they explode. I cannot prove this, having never seen a dog explode.

But once, when I was staying at a friend and fellow band-member’s house (a friend who serves her dog kibble), we came home late from a music gig and found Chloe lying sideways on the floor. She seemed stiff and uncomfortable, and didn’t get up to greet us when we walked in the door. This is unusual Chloe, who always regards the occasion of a human entering a room as a cause to celebrate.

I rushed over and knelt before her, to check her breathing and feel her heart. I even checked for blood and felt for broken bones. “What’s wrong?” I said to the dog. Her posture was that of a dog with a twisted intestine.

“I think I found the answer,” my friend called from the kitchen. She led me into the pantry, where we beheld a tipped-over bag of kibble, more than half of it gone. And we’re talking one of those thirty-pound bags.

“Chloe, how could you?” I said to her, back in the living room. But she didn’t acknowledge me. She was practically passed out on the braided rug, sleeping off her kibble-induced stupor like a drunk.

She farted all night, by the way. Which is why I personally never give my dog kibble.

So. Here was proof that any animal with a drop of Labrador Retriever in her portly body will at least try to eat until she explodes. But she will not actually explode.

Chloe remained comically bloated for the next day or two, and even seemed somewhat chagrined...the way a college freshman might be after one of those nights of too-much-to-drink, and “Oh, God, I don’t remember what I said.”

During those two days I was a bit more lax in my reaction to those people who happened to call her fat. I had a perfect excuse.

And why are the called Chocolate labs, by the way? Isn’t chocolate often associated with food addiction? I’m just saying...

EXCUSE #3 – YOU’D LOOK FAT TOO IF YOU WERE WEARING A FOUR INCH THICK FUR COAT.
I like to joke that Chloe is part Wooly Mammoth. She has very long, very course, very thick white fur on certain parts of her body—mostly her back. I don’t know where this fur comes from—I mean, what part of her DNA would produce such thick, abundant fuzz, that is wiry in some areas of her body, long and smooth in others, and short and coarse underneath?

But this fur honestly does make her look bigger than she is. Go ahead and call my groomer if you don’t believe me—he’ll vouch for us.

In the summer time I get the dog groomed—a “spaniel cut,” they call it—shaved down to a buzz cut on the top half of her body, and fringed on the lower half. Thus, in the summer time, everyone says: “Wow, Chloe has lost a lot of weight.”

People say that to me too, in the summer time, by the way: that whole “Wow, you’ve lost weight! You look great!” thing.

“It’s because I’m no longer wearing seven layers of sweaters, four layers of woolen leggings, and a North Face full-body ski suit on top of it all,” I tell them. Rather irritably. Because inside I’m thinking: so this whole time you’ve been thinking I’m a fat cow?

It’s true that in the winter I look like the Michelin man. In the winter I do not get asked on dates. But who cares? Looking bloated is better than being cold, I always say.

But when people start to exclaim in the summer how great I look, it makes me suspect that I must look absolutely wretched and bloated in the winter.
How shallow people are, to judge a book by her covers like that. Her many, many covers. I’ll see you next June.

EXCUSE #4 – SHE WAS A SHELTER DOG, AND MALNOURISHED; I CAN’T JUST LET HER STARVE, CAN I?
Yes, yes, I know it is unhealthy for a dog—or anyone—to remain overweight. It’s not like I’m trying to have an unhealthy dog.
Let’s recap my excuses thus far:
1) She has low thyroid function.
2) She is a part Lab. Chocoholic Lab.
3) She is part Wooly Mammoth.

Plus, I want her to be happy and comfortable. Starving is not at all comfortable. I know this first-hand. I starved myself for about four years when I was a teenager. It was horrible.

One of my friends once told me that his vet told him that dogs are always supposed to be in a state of hunger. It’s in their nature, this vet says.

Always in a state of hunger.

When I was anorexic I was like a ghost. I used to think of food all day and dream of food all night—I used to consume trays of macaroons and French baguettes and almond croissants in my dreams, and then wake up aghast at the thought that I might have actually truly eaten something. I rarely ate anything. Food was the enemy. Food equaled fat and fat made me detestable, corrupt, hideous, etc. I don’t think I had a genuinely happy or healthy thought for about ten years.

In my twenties, when I moved beyond the affliction of eating disorders, I made a vow to myself: I would never go hungry again. So now we must ask: Am I somehow transferring this vow, this fear of starvation, onto my dog?

When she is hungry she lets me know it. She pokes me with her snout and leads me, like a gallant Lassie, into the kitchen, toward the refrigerator, and then goes en pointe, like an elegant, hard-working bird dog. It’s so cute I just have to feed her. Even if it’s just a small morsel of something. But usually she does this only twice a day—at her usual feeding times. She reminds me to feed her, you see. Because she knows that I am a spacey artist who needs to be reminded to tend to practical things. I forget a lot of things these days. I need a service dog to remind me to feed the dog.

Years ago, a very famous article appeared in Atlantic Magazine, entitled “Why Your Dog Pretends to Love You.” I can’t remember the author’s name, and I don’t have time to Google it, but the author’s theory was that dogs have learned that acting affectionate and cute and loving will result in the reward of food. But that they don’t actually really love you. Or even like you. They’re just in it for the food.

Hmmm. My ex-husband once accused me of the same thing....

I wouldn’t be surprised to find scientific proof that my dog Chloe is manipulating me, and that she goes en pointe at the refrigerator because she knows it will make me laugh and because she knows she will get a small morsel of hotdog or a larger morsel of sliced turkey breast, or perhaps even a full-fledged dinner, even though it’s technically not dinner time. We call it the “early bird special”: her 6:00 pm dinner meal, served at 4. All because she is cute. And please note that she always gets her thyroid supplements with her meals.

Okay. So perhaps we could say that it is my dog’s fault that she is so fat. Or portly. Or chunky, chubby. A Mack-truck-in-fur...whatever you want to call her.

Perhaps we could say I am wimp with former eating disorders and self-worth issues, who is afraid that her dog won’t love her if she doesn’t feed her “enough.”

Or perhaps we could say I’m just a softie, with a kind heart, who wants her sweet middle-aged dog to have a happy, comfortable life.
I prefer to think of it this way.

Years ago, when I was married, and had another life, and another dog, the dog named Wallace, who had a perfectly functioning thyroid, we used to spend our summers up in Wisconsin. My former mother-in-law had a place there--an old family compound belonging to her husband and his siblings. My husband, dog and I had the grandmother’s old cabin (Oh, that place was heaven!) and my step-father-in-law’s step-brother F____ had the cabin next door.

F___ and his wife had an old Labrador Retriever. I forget his name but I remember his girth, and his sweet grey muzzle, and his vaguely clouded eyes. I also remember that he was—and remains—the fattest dog I have ever seen.

Two images stay in my mind: One is of this old dog lying on the dock, in such a manner that his entire body covered the width of the dock. He was the sort of dog who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, move much, so once he spread himself on the dock he was there for the day. We’d step over him on our way out to the kayaks, and step back over him to retrieve the coolers and the sun block, etc. This was easy and simple enough for us humans. But I remember my dog Wallace did not quite know what to do. He was the younger dog, clearly not the leader of any pack, and also clearly a guest at this compound. Wallace seemed to know that it would not be cool for him, the Gamma, to jump over the Alpha dog. So he used to leap off the dock and swim up to the kayaks, or back to shore.
This was my first experience with fat-dogs-as-roadblocks.

The other thing I remember about that fat old lovely lab is that, at meal times, he would plant himself next to his Mum—a jolly woman named M.—and rest his head on the table, and basically receive treats all night long. Like a slot machine.

M. too was a softie. Older than me. I always saw her as someone I might become.

Ben was the dog’s name—I remember now! We all used to joke about how, well, obscenely obese Ben was, but we never said that in front of M. Or in front of Ben for that matter. What we would say—and mean—is that “Ben has a good life, eh?” And he did. He lived eighteen years as a canine slot machine.

So back to Chloe. Chloe of the Big Appetite and the Low Thyroid. You may call her portly or flabby or Chunky-Monkey. But you can’t call her unloved.

Perhaps that is why I get so offended when strangers—and family members—make those off-hand comments. Perhaps I worry that at some level, another person is challenging my own personal version of love. But that’s just is—love is so personal. And we I’m just trying to love my dog the way I think she deserves to be loved.

And so, I give her her thyroid medication (when I can afford it, which lately has not been often). I dose her up with homeopathic remedies and herbs. I groom her in the summer and call her a Mammoth in the winter. I give her plenty of off-leash exercise in the acres of mountain trails behind our house.

And when she eats, I watch her wag and wag and wag her tail and think about an Alice Walker quote I read in Oprah magazine: “You do your best, and when you know better, you do better.” And in the meantime, let us eat and be merry.

If you, dear readers, have any input as to how you handle your portly pooches, we welcome it. Cheers!

PS - That sweet fat dog pictured above is not Chloe. Here she is. Ain't she cute?

Rex and the City, Part 4 - The Country Dog Acclimates to City Life

Here is the (very belated) fourth installment of my little series about my beloved dog Wallace. In the previous installment, my boyfriend Ted and I were on the verge of taking this dog back to the shelter, because he had turned out to be more than we could handle (wild, aggressive, untrained, hostile to all dogs and humans, and slightly dangerous). But then we took the dog camping and finally saw his (Wallace’s) potential as a normal happy dog. We decided to keep him no matter what. We decided we were willing to face the hardships because we knew that beyond the hardships we would find a beautiful, rehabilitated dog, ready to accept our love.



So here is a continuation of that story:



Rex and the City, Part 4

It had been two months since we adopted our shelter dog Wallace, and in that time he had shown us affection exactly once. But when it comes to love, isn’t once sometimes enough? Last night, Wallace had pressed his body against mine while we slept at a campsite. And those few hours of closeness was enough to give Ted and me hope.

On the way home from the Catskills that fateful weekend, Ted and I stopped at a small-town diner for a late lunch and left Wallace in the car. He howled, of course, and the three customers in the restaurant turned around to stare.

“That a bird dog you got there?” one of the men at the counter asked.

“Yes,” we said sheepishly. And then we went into our now-familiar spiel about how we had just rescued him and that we suspected he had been abused because he was so hard to deal with, but we loved him nevertheless, etc., etc., etc. The waitress, one of those gruff, big-bosomed, grandmotherly types, smiled at us and said, “Yep. Dogs is harder than kids. But you gotta love ’em. Look at that face!” She walked over to the window and tapped on it and began to coo. “Aw, what a sweetheart!” she said. “Look at that brown and white puppy wuppy face!”

This sent Wallace into a froth of snarls and barking and scratching maniacally at the windows.

“Looks like you got a live one there,” the man said.

“That we do,” we said, but when Ted and I exchanged a look, I saw that something had changed in our attitude. Yes, we had a live one, but he was our live one and we knew from that moment on we would be fully committed to him.

Once we got back to New York City, Ted and I began to work doubly hard on turning Wallace into the Dog He Was Meant to Be. First we hired a private trainer—an eager young woman from neutral Switzerland who managed to strike a workable balance between my coddle-and-nurture training methods and Ted’s sock-it-to-'em New Skete.

Now, before we go any further, let me remind you—gentle readers—that I am currently an avid (Ted would say “rabid”) supporter of clicker-training, which is a brilliant, effective, and impeccable easy system of training that uses positive reinforcement. I have now been working with and writing about dogs for eleven years, and I see no reason why anyone should have to resort to shouting, alpha rolling, and/or choke-chaining their dogs to get their dogs to behave in certain ways. We don’t need to choke our dogs every time they try to walk in a certain direction. I’ve seen men yank harshly on their dogs’ leashes if the dog so much as looks in a certain direction. This damages our dogs’ throats, necks, and vocal cords, my friends. We do not need this Cesar Milan negative-reinforcement bullocks. Clicker training is easy, safe, fool-proof and pleasurable for your dog. This sort of positive reinforcement training is crucial when working with shelter dogs, who may have experienced abuse, neglect, or heedless cruelty at the hands of humans. So enough of the soapbox (before I get flamed!)

I am ashamed to say that, back in 1997 when we first got Wallace, I knew nothing of clicker training. Therefore I brought needless, heedless suffering upon my already traumatized dog. I am so sorry, Wallace, wherever you are. Now, back to the story:

So we had hired a trainer. And each morning Ted and I would meet her at East River Park and work with Wallace on a forty-foot lead. We worked on sit, heel, come, stay, and if Wallace’s attention strayed she encouraged us to yank violently on his choke collar and then offer praise. None of us paused to consider the incongruity of these mixed messages, and how that would affect an already confused do. No one took into consideration how hard it would be for us non-prey animals to keep the attention of a hunting dog: or, for that matter, how hard it would be for me, at that hour, to stay focused myself.

I’d always said I wanted to be a morning person--out there at dawn with the joggers, the go-getters, the high-metabolism Wall Street freaks who made gobs of money. But now that I was required to get up before seven and stand inside an abandoned soccer field, I wished I was still in bed. While the trainer talked to Ted about, say, the importance of always heeling the dog on his right side vs. left, I’d find my attention drifting off toward the other dog people, who passed beyond the fence with their well-trained dogs.

There was the tall, sleek Icelandic woman gliding by on Rollerblades with her ice-blue Weimaraner. There was the hipster East Village dude racing his Ridgeback on his bike. And then there was the perfect blond yuppie couple with their perfect blond baby and a matching yellow Lab. Every day they would appear through the morning mist like aliens from Planet Future with their high-tech stroller and their crisp, seize-the-day clothes. The Lab trotted along side them happily with a ball in his mouth, his leash slack, his focus on them. They would park the stroller under a willow tree and throw the ball for the dog exactly 30 times. The baby never cried; the dog never pooped. Then they were off again, off to their bright, promising days. I would stare after them in wonder. How did she manage to push the stroller, drink a Starbucks Caramel Macchiato and hold the dog’s leash all at the same time? How did she find the time to have a dog and a baby? Or even just a dog?

Ted would yank on my sleeve and tell me to “Pay attention!” All in all, Wallace caught on quickly to the training. He learned that for one hour every day we would take him to a certain spot on a certain leash in the presence of a certain woman and require him to be obedient. The rest of the time he still pulled on his leash as much as ever. I honestly was not enjoying this. Walking a dog, at that point in my selfish city life, felt like work. And I wanted so much for everything in life to be easy and breezy and light. And I wanted to look good doing it.

But that was not to be. Five times a day I was getting yanked through the city streets by a dog who didn’t even seem to really like me.

“Faster than a speeding bullet,” our super, Sander, would say as I got yanked down the stairs of our apartment building in the morning. “More powerful than a locomotive,” Sander would add in his deliciously ironic tone. “Able to leap out of car windows in a single bound.”

“You heard about the car window incident?” I asked, surprised. In New York, one cannot keep secrets. Especially if one lives in an old tenement building on an un-gentrified street in the not-yet-hip portion of the Lower East Side. We were a building full of young white artists, dreamers, and public school teachers in a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. We did not quite fit in, and that made us all band together in familial ways.

“Oh, I heard all about that dog, all right,” Sander said with a wink.

I should point out that our super was not your ordinary gray-haired Mr. Fixit with 800 keys on his belt and stained workman’s pants. No, our Sander was a hot young poet/playwright/Marxist with a Mohawk and his own printing press. He had a piano in his kitchen and held poetry readings in his bedroom and was so über-cool that in his presence even Lou Reed might shake in his combat boots. At night we could hear him singing show tunes through the air shaft, his warm voice curling into our windows like an appetizing scent. Ah, Sander.

Secretly I had a crush on him, so in his presence I got tongue-tied and turned red. In his presence Wallace always took gigantic poops on the sidewalk, which I then I had to stoop down and pick up using a plastic bag. (This made Ted laugh for hours on end, for he knew of my crush and loved to tease me about it).

Once, just as I was carrying a bag of poop to the outside trash can, Sander appeared, wearing a pair of workman’s gloves, a white tanktop, and a pair of overalls, with one of the straps sexily undone. I felt bad that I was placing shit into a barrel that he would be required to empty.

“Things seem much better,” Sander said to me that day.

“What seems better?” I asked, a bit alarmed. You see, in New York City, all your neighbors can hear your arguments, and for the past few weeks Ted and I had been having huge ones about how best to handle the new dog. But we hadn’t argued for at least two days which seemed magnanimous.

“Your new dog,” Sander said. He seems like he’s chilling out.”

I smiled, relieved. It was true. As the weeks passed, Wallace was becoming more and more dog-like. He stopped to sniff more often on our walks through the neighborhood and began to mark. Up until then he would squat to pee, and let it all out in one sitting, as if this were the one and only chance he’d get. Now he lifted his leg like a boy-dog and took his time. I can’t tell you how joyful that made me feel. Just that one tiny change meant to me that whatever we were doing was working.

And even though it still wasn’t easy to walk him, he at least began to acknowledge that we were there at the other end of his leash. That in itself—just the fact that he would turn his head toward me sometimes while I walked him, began to make dog-walking more fun.

I wouldn’t say Wallace had taken a total liking to us yet, but his seething, misguided hatred of us had definitely toned down. Sometimes, in the apartment, he would allow us to pet him and praise his patrician good looks; but he still wouldn’t look at us, nor offer any affection in return. But at least he wasn’t cowering so much. Slowly, we seemed to be earning his fractured trust.

And sometimes, when I paused from writing at the computer, I’d feel him watching me, as if trying to figure out exactly what my role was in his life. “I think you’re starting to like me,” I’d say, my eyes still on the screen. “Yes, I think you are.” But when I turned to smile at him he’d quickly look away and pretend to be consumed with licking his paws.

And while Wallace was becoming a dog, we were becoming dog people. The city was full of them—I had just never really noticed before. And now they all gravitated toward us and stopped us on the sidewalk to say hello. They’d address Wallace first, and after he recoiled from their outstretched hands or barked at them or their dogs and/or lunged at their throats, we would go into the “he’s a rescue dog” spiel and nine times out of ten it would turn out their dog was a rescue too. Or liberated from a junkyard. Or abandoned on the streets.

We found, in our neighborhood, an entire support group of young and old people who had gone through what we were going through. And most of them were visibly insane. One such neighbor—a weathered man in his fifties—wore marching-band jackets and painted his fingernails pink. He rejoiced every time Wallace barked at him. “What a wonderful dog!” he would shout from across the street. His three dogs—whom he called his children—would bark back at us, and everyone would have to shout to continue the conversation. “My children bark at everybody and Mother of Mary I prefer it that way,” our neighbor would say. “I got mugged back in the Seventies when this place was a festering drug pit, and then I went straight to the ASPCA and adopted my children and that, thank the Blessed Mother, was the end of that. Your dog was definitely abused.”

“How can you tell?” I said.

“Look at him! He has no hair around his neck. It’s all worn away.”

Ted and I looked at each other guiltily. “We did that,” I said. “It’s from his choke collar.” I waited for this dear man to curse me for being cruel.

But instead he said: “Ah, you’re good people, I can tell.” He paused to wheeze. “It took one of my children three years to figure out this leash-walking ordeal. Patience is all it takes. Patience and a no-pull harness.”

Ted and I smiled as we walked away. A stranger had called us good. Could it be true?

I thought about how rapidly our lives had been changing since we got Wallace. Up until then both Ted and I had been devotedly, almost rabidly pursuing our careers and following our bliss. Now we were following some mad dog’s rump.

I was so encouraged by the Marching Band Man’s compliment I decided to take our relationship to a new level.

“Let’s take Wallace to a café,” I said to Ted.

I had always wanted a café dog—a dog who would sit placidly under the table while my lover and I nibbled each other’s earlobes and sipped white wine. You know, like in Paris.

“I don’t think he’s quite ready for that yet,” Ted said. He was always the voice of reason. Blast him.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Please? We’re good people.”

“Well....”

I finally convinced Ted to take us to Benny’s Burritos—a Mexican restaurant with sidewalk tables that faced a relatively quiet street. Our waitress had the innocent, pouty-lipped look of Liv Tyler, and when she saw Wallace she gasped in sweet, childlike wonder and sunk down to her knees. “What a beautiful dog!” she said. I started to tell her that Wallace had been abused as a pup, that he was afraid of people, that he might bite, but hers was the sort of beauty that healed wounds and opened doors, and Wallace melted beneath her touch. He spread himself beneath the table, head on paws. I was so proud of our beautiful dog. And proud of us for having chosen him.

“He likes you!” Ted said giddily to the waitress.

When I saw Ted sneaking a peek down the waitress’s shirt, I said, rather testily, “Could we order some drinks?”

, Ted felt we should order our food right away as well. “Just in case. Wallace is being good now, but I don’t want to push our luck.” So we put in our orders for giant stuffed burritos.

Our drinks came first—big, salty Margaritas on ice—along with a bowl of tortilla chips with salsa, and as I took a sip of my drink I had one of those moments when you realize you are exactly where you want to be at that particular time. I was at a sidewalk café on a beautiful summer evening with my handsome boyfriend and our handsome dog in the most magnificent city in the world.

“I’m happy,” I said, meaning it. How glorious it was to finally have a cafe dog after all these years! But then a homeless man came up to our table asking for change. Ted said we didn’t have any. All we had was a fifty-dollar bill with which we planned to dine. The man continued to beg of us however. And thus. Wallace’s fur began to rise. Ted noticed and shouted, “Hold on to him, Lee!” but before I could, Wallace had already sprung into action, tipping the table over as he lunged. Immediately Ted caught Wallace by the collar, and the homeless man shuffled away, but still. Our complimentary bowl of tortilla chips had crashed onto the pavement, our drinks had spilled, and a bottle of hot sauce had rolled off the curb, making its way up First Avenue as if fleeing the scene.

“Oh dear,” our waitress said, arriving with our order. “Should I wrap this up to go?”

~

Ted and I didn’t speak on the long walk home, but I know we were both thinking the same thing: “He’s your dog.” Once again I was unhappy with my choice and with my life. And yet, when we turned the corner that was our block, there was the marching-band man out walking his children. He looked so content, so deliriously happy. Like a true New Yorker. “Have a fabulous evening!” he shouted from across the street. “And God bless you for saving that beauuuuutiful dog!”

Ted and laughed and joined hands. Sometimes, in New York, you need someone else to tell you who you really are. And we were ready to listen.

The Moment You Realize Your New Shelter Dog Loves You

The Moment You Realize Your New Shelter Dog Loves You

Rex and the City

Part III: The Trial Period



It was the Fourth of July weekend of 1997, normally a time when my then-boyfriend and I would have been out barbecuing on the rooftop or having drinks with friends. Anything that involved being outside in the cool night air, basically; for Ted and I lived, back then, in a 300-square foot tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. With a new shelter dog. The fact that we now had a dog had us in shock. Still. So no fun rooftop parties for us.

Instead, Ted and I were sitting comatose in front of the television, watching a documentary on fireworks with the sound turned down. We were not habitual TV watchers per se, but there was something about having added a satanic shelter dog to our lives that made us want to prostrate ourselves in front of something that wouldn’t challenge us or make us think.

Meanwhile, on the television, a burst of green explosives lit up the TV sky, and then came a commercial for carving knives. Vegetables and fruits were chopped with alarming speed, curls of yellow peppers falling away from the knife in spirals, like fireworks, and then a fast-talking announcer promised guaranteed satisfaction over a 30-day trial period or your money back.

“You see that, Wallace?” Ted called to the dog hunkered under the computer table.

I forgot to mention that Ted and I weren’t speaking.

“You’re on a trial period,” Ted continued, still addressing the dog rather than me. “Thirty days. After that, we might have to take you back to the shelter.” He actually wasn’t joking.

“Don’t let him talk to you like that,” I said to the dog. “We’re on trial just as much as you are.” I reached over to pet my dog, to smooth back his ears, but he growled at me and ducked away.

So great. Ted wasn't speaking to me and neither was this dog.

Why were we so upset with the dog? And why were we not speaking? Well, earlier that day, Wallace had tried to escape again. (I am told that shelter dogs do this often--try to run away from their new owners). On this, this second escape attempt on Wallace's behalf, we’d had him in a fenced-in lot on Suffolk Street, and we were trying to get him interested in a tennis ball, which is what we thought all normal dogs would be interested in. But Wallace apparently had no time for games. And no interest in living in New York City. He seemed to consider himself a prisoner and thus, he had apparently scoped this abandoned lot for escape routes and had spotted on a hole in the fence in a far corner.

Meanwhile, Ted and I bounced the ball to each other at first, talking in loud, baby voices about how fun it was, and then we threw the ball for Wallace, saying “Look at the ball! Look at the bouncy wouncy tennis ball!” Ted even unsnapped the dog’s leash and encouraged him to chase it.

Wallace—intelligent, scheming creature that he was—took off after the ball and then, we swear, turned at a 90-degree angle and made his escape. He ran straight up Orchard Street and turned toward Houston.

I screamed his name in terror, but the thing was, Wallace didn’t even really know that his name was Wallace yet. He seemed to still think his name was AH1012 – the intake number he had been assigned at the shelter.

Anyway, Ted and I of course ran after the dog, shouting, crying. After a complicated, death-defying chase, which involved lots of shouting and O.J.-Simpsoning ourselves over hydrants and traffic cones, we caught him. Or rather, Ted caught him, tackling Wallace outside a bodega. By the time I reached them, Ted had alpha-rolled the dog onto the sidewalk and was clutching a hand to the dog’s throat. “Look at me!” Ted was shouting at Wallace. “You look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Poor Wallace was terrified. He had his tail tucked so high between his legs he looked as if he might swallow it.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “He’s upset.”

“You!” Ted turned to me with venom in his eyes. “You baby him too much.”

“Well, you bully him. Dogs don’t like to make eye contact. It’s not natural for them.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“What the fuck do you know?” Ted said. "And why did you let go of him anyway?"

"What do you mean why did I let him go. You unclipped his leash!"

"Well, you should have known there was a hole in the fence."

Inside, I was thinking: I should have known there was a hole in your heart.

Ted turned away from me in disgust and shook the dog again.

Thirty days, I was thinking. Maybe I’d go to a shelter myself. And take the dog with me.



For the past few weeks we had been doing everything we could to figure out how to handle this shelter dog. We loved him from the moment we set eyes on him, and we knew he was meant to be our dog. But still, we were slowly realizing that the dog's aggression was more than we could handle. We had never had a dog before, and we were clueless about them. Still, we tried out best.

That month, we had cancelled all social and job-related engagements, read every dog book and training manual we could get our hands on, and took Wallace to the park daily to apply what we had learned from our books the night before. The thing was, the books I favored suggested positive reinforcement, whereas Ted’s books encouraged aggressive dominance paired with punishment. My books said to reward desired behavior with treats and praise. Ed’s books said if the dog exhibited undesired behavior, you should clock the unruly dog under the jaw.

Not my style, really. I was more of a let's-talk-this-out-peacefully sort of girl. I imagined Wallace years later on a therapist’s couch, complaining about all the mixed messages his parents gave him. “I never learned how to be a good dog,” he would say. "Everything I did was wrong."

Needless to say, both Ted and I were feeling that we really weren’t capable of handling a dog. One night, Ted and I looked up Wallace’s alleged breed on the Internet. We visited all Spaniel and Setter sites and were told, repeatedly: It is cruel to keep this type of exuberant hunting dog in a city apartment. The word cruel really struck us. Wallace no longer had hair around his neck because his choke collar had pinched it all off (think Epilady). He had to walk backward out of the bathroom because there wasn’t enough room for the poor dog to turn his body around. “It’s like making him parallel park,” Ted said. Outside, on walks, poor Wallace would cut his pads on the glass that littered the sidewalk, and not even sleep gave him solace, as he would spend the nights snarling and snapping and grinding his teeth.

“Maybe we should leave New York City,” I said. “Or give Wallace to someone in the country who wants a dog.”

“But he’s not a normal dog,” Ted reminded me. “He needs professional help.”

At this, I started to cry. We all need professional help, now and then, and I loved my needy, confused little dog. He needed me. How could I ever abandon him after all he had been through?

Ted seemed to be thinking the same thing. He suggested we go camping. “Maybe all Wallace needs is some country air.”

“That’s a great idea,” I said.

We smiled at one another for the first time in weeks. It was so nice to actually agree on something.

So, that weekend, we drove to the Catskills, with Wallace howling in protest the entire way. Who knows what he was thinking--that we were taking back to a shelter? That we would dump him off the side of some highway? He kept hurling himself against the back seat and clawed at the windows, calling out in desperation to the birds overhead and the passing cars: Save me! Can’t you see I’m being kidnapped? It was like traveling with your own personal mosh pit, and by the time we reached the mountains our ears were shot, our jaws were tight and my crisp linen skirt was as crumpled and dirty as that one-dollar bill you always see in a homeless person’s bucket--the one he put there himself.

OKay, so the dogs hates b eing in cars, I thought. Just as musch as he hates being in apartments. Or maybe he simply hates being with us. And who couldblame the dog? Frankly sometimes I hated being with us too.

Once we reached the campground, however, my thoughts changed and I was hopeful again. About Ted, about Wallace, about the concept of "us." Perhaps it was he fertile smell of Silver Lake that lifted my state of mind. And Ted's too. I could see it on his face as he rolled down all the windows.

It was as if each of us saw in that shimmering water the solution to everything: the need to be cool, the need to relax, the need to be cleansed.A vacation! It's what all New Yorkers need.

We headed to this lake as soon as we had set up the campsite--Ted and I in flip-flops, Wallace on his Epilady leash. Two fishermen in a rowboat were just coming in from a day’s outing, and when they saw us at the shoreline they touched their caps. “Good-looking dog you got there,” one of them said. I smiled and said thanks.

“Are you supposed to thank people who compliment your dog?” I asked Ted, who walked far ahead of me. “because it’s not as if we birthed him.”

“Does it matter?” Ted said. He was already busy trying to coax Wallace into the water. Wallace seemed nervous as we waded in. He’d lift one paw out of the water, then another, as if trying to figure out a way to lift all four at the same time. Ted tugged gently on his leash. “Come on, boy,” he said. “Come! Come!”

“Maybe he can’t swim,” I said.

“All dogs can swim.”

“Where did you read that?”

“It’s just a fact,” Ted said.

He started to say come in a more authoritative voice, the way his MOnks of New Skete said to do it. They were the ones who encouraged jaw-punching, and I secretly referred to them as the Monks of Steel.

So as Ted called to the dog in his commanding, slightly threatening Alpha voice, I joined in using a happy, lilting voice, in the manner of my books.

As we spoke, both Ted and I waded backwards, into deeper water, tugging the dog along. But Wallace had put his emergency brake on: feet planted, body leaning back, refusing to go any further. Just then a duck flew overhead and like that, Wallace changed. He became a bird dog, arching his neck and howling in an ancient, primal way, as if calling out to his ancestors. Then he plunged in the direction that the duck had flown. He hopped through the water—his body making lovely, acrobatic arcs—and stopped (in an almost comical way) when he found himself immersed.

Then he wasn’t a bird dog anymore—he was once again a confused city dog, newly released from prison, finding himself in another new and impossible situation. A situation which was cold and wet.

Looking confused, he moved his legs slowly, then more quickly as he realized paddling would propel him forth. He seemed surprised by his own abilities and kept moving his head around, a gesture that made him swim circles.

“Look! He’s swimming!” I said. “Isn’t that cute?” My heart seemed to leap with joy –this was one of my first experiences with the true elation one can feel when witnessing dog joy, and it was exhilarating.

It wasn’t cute or exhilarating, however, when Wallace, suddenly an expert, doggy-paddled to the shore and sprinted away.

“Not again!” Ted said. He used some of his favorite swear words and waded quickly to shore.

Ted and I scrambled to pursue the dog, but given that we were both wearing flip-flops, we couldn’t run very quickly. Plus, I was not about to bounce through the woods in a bikini. O.J. Simpson, yes. Pamela Anderson, no.

Ted ran off ahead of me while I threw on my clothes. Why had we gotten a dog? I asked myself as I heard Ted’s angry voice fading farther and farther away. The answer seemed as elusive as Wallace himself. Instead of bringing us together, it seemed, the dog was wrenching us apart.

For a moment I stood there, seized with worry. The dog would fall off a cliff and get killed. The dog would get shot by an off-season hunter. The dog would get caught in a bear trap. The dog would get hit by a car. And it would be all my fault! Ted would totally blame me! I had to find him now!

I decided to go dog-hunting in the opposite direction of Ted. My instinct told me that Wallace had run east, not west. Plus, I didn’t Ted to yell at me. So I bush-whacked through the woods for about twenty minutes, listening for the dog, and after twenty minutes of searching I spotted a flash of white in some far-off woods. It was our Wallace, galloping down a hill toward a creek, and the look on his face was one I had not seen before. It was a smile. A doggy smile. He disappeared jubilantly from my sight and remained missing for another hour. Maybe he would be happier out here, living in the wilds, hunting birds.

Then Ted’s words came back to me: What the hell do you know?

Feeling worried, abandoned, and defeated, I decided to return to the car. Then, up in the distance, I saw Ted walking toward me with our dog in his arms. Ted was limping from having reactivated an old ski injury. I was limping from weeks of trying to walk Wallace on a leash.

Ted carried Wallace the way a farmer carries a lamb, and Wallace looked distinctively embarrassed by his capture. He’d been emasculated (e-dogulated?), and he knew enough not to protest when Ted put him down on top of a large, flat rock. “Get the camera out,” Ted said. “I want to take some pictures to remember him by, because on Monday we’re taking him back.”

I nodded and once again started to cry. Ted, back in those days, made all the decisions; and I was the wimp who let him.

And so, sadly, we took pictures—one with Wallace and Ted, one with Wallace and me, and then a family shot, automatically timed. You can see in hindsight how exhausted and unhappy we all were. In the group shot the three of us—young couple, messed-up dog—look like Angry White Men on an album cover. Our hard stares were aimed away from one another, as if we were each so locked into our private disappointments we could no longer reach out to people and were ready to turn to drugs.Ah, relationships.

On the way back to the campsite, I held Ted’s hand and Ted held Wallace’s leash. Neither of us spoke until Wallace stopped to poop on the pavement. This made me incredibly sad. “He’s been holding that in for hours!” I said. “Do you think he doesn’t know enough that he can go on grass?”

“Maybe he has never seen grass,” Ted said.

We both considered this. It seemed so tragic to be a dog and not know grass. To not know human love.

That night, in our tent, Ted and I both slept fitfully. I presonally felt like a horrible person--returning an abused dog to a shelter! But I had no words to express this. I worried that Ted would simply criticize me for having such feelings. For having been "stupid" enough to adopt a dog in the first place without thinking it through. I worried he would blame , even though Ted is the one who chose Wallace out of all those dogs at the pound.

Meanwhile, Wallace was outside the tent, tied up to the picnic bench (having declined our invitation to join us), and he paced around like, well, like a wild animal. “Who ever heard of a dog insomniac?” I said. Back and forth the dog paced, uttering grunts of frustration. It was like a tangible represenation of my own thoughts; my own decision.

Ted too kept shifting his position.“Maybe I was too hard on him,” Ted said finallly said after about an hour. There was a tenderness to his voice that made me remember why I had fallen in love with him.

I crawled into his sleeping bag. “Maybe I was too soft,” I said, hugging him. “Maybe we can find a way to meet in the middle.”
Finally, it felt safe to sleep.

As we dozed off, Wallace continued his nervous pacing (a sign of anxiety in dogs). It was though he also had some serious thinking to do—about his life, his career, his future. Or perhaps he had simply felt the weight of our thoughts. And wanted to get away from us—this angry, dysfunctional couple—as quickly as he could.

I could only hope that Wallace, in some moment of clarity, would recognize that we kept chasing him down because we loved him, not because we wanted to hold him back.

In the morning, as the sunlight sieved through the tent screens and the swallows chirped, I felt a strange weight on the right side of my body. I thought for a moment that I had slept in an awkward position that had put half my body to sleep, but then I realized that the pressure came from outside the tent—and that it was something large and warm. Wallace, at some point in the evening, had gotten cold or lonely and had spread himself against me. This was the first time our dog had ever really touched us. There we were, separated by only a thin wall of nylon,

“Ted,” I whispered. “Give me your hand.”

Sleepily he complied, and as I took his hand and pressed it against the warm flank of Wallace’s body, he opened his eyes.

“What’s this?” he said with a smile. And I answered: “I think it’s a normal dog, looking for some snuggling.”

And that was all it took for us to become a family.

Doggie Halloween Costume Contests - How Far Will We Go To Win? I Went Over the Edge....

In honor of my appearance—as a “celebrity judge” at the 17th Annual Tompkins Square Park Halloween Dog Parade, I thought I would post a chronicle of my own experiences forcing my poor dog to wear a costume, and how I became a psycho-stage mother in my desperation to win the contest.


Rex and the City: The Curse of the Three-Headed Dog

There’s nothing like Halloween in New York City. New York is home to some of the most artistic and creative people on the planet, most of whom will jump at any opportunity to put on a show. Consider the city’s eight hundred thousand drag queens, who, just to take a trip out to the deli, will put on seven-inch platforms, a sequined butterfly shawl and a two-foot wig. In the weeks before Halloween, the whole city began to fill with a fizzy, randy excitement. Shop windows were crammed with bondage gear, feather boas, broquaded undies and outrageous wigs, and the window boxes of the West Village overflowed with chrysanthemums and pumpkins and squash—all in their final bursts of color before the decay of the winter set in. And all those flamboyant colors; all those sequins, feathers and rubber masks started to bring out everyone’s inner drag queen. And it was no different for the dog people. There are more that thirty dog runs in the city, and therefore more than thirty annual doggie costume parades.

At that point in time (1998) we had just started taking Wallace to the Tompkins Square Park dog run. Each run in the city has its own flavor and “First Run” as it was called (because it was the first in NYC) was known for 1) the youth of its doggie parents (most were East Village kids in their twenties); 2) the number of pit-bull mixes (most of the young doggie parents adopted pits from the ASCPA in the East 90’s, or found them on the streets); 3) the number of dog-brawls that occurred daily (it was a transient neighborhood, with a lot of new dogs); and 4) The legendary First Run Annual Halloween Costume Contest, which drew the likes of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

When I first saw the sign for this Halloween contest in early October, I felt my entire universe expand. Dogs in costume! At the thought of this, something latent was awakened in me—something ancient and profound. I told my then-husband Ted in no uncertain terms that we had to go to this contest.

“Are you thinking of dressing Wallace in a costume?” Ted asked.

“Absolutely.”

“He’ll hate it.”

“No he won’t.”

Most conversations I had with Ted went like this: yes, no, yes, no, why, because, no, yes, I said no, yes, no, FUCK YOU!

In the case of whether to dress up our dog in a silly costume, I ultimately won. I can’t remember how, actually. Perhaps I had to promise some sort of sexual favor, but it’s hard to say....I’ve blocked it all out.

Anyway, I managed to convince Ted that Wallace wouldn’t mind having to wear a costume. I can’t remember how we came up with the idea, but we had decided to dress him up like a little hiker. I think it all started with this brown wool hippy hat that used to belong to a stoner friend of Ted’s from high school. The hat was handmade in Peru, and slightly pointy on top, and had two strings that you could tie under your chin. Ted had asked me once if I wanted it, but I am much too serious a person to wear silly Peruvian hats. (The hats I wear cost $550 and I never even wear those, because I always buy them on a whim, and they are really only appropriate at English garden weddings, and I have not yet to date been invited to any weddings in the UK.) So anyway, I suggested we put the Peruvian hat on Wallace, just for kicks.

This opened up a can of worms, of course, that determined much of Wallace’s future. For I quickly realized that I got a true and unadulterated pleasure from dressing up my dog. “He looks so cute,” I shouted. “Oh my God. Get the camera.”

“The poor boy,” Ted said. “How humiliating.” But still Ted got the camera.

The rest of Wallace’s Halloween costume quickly fell into place. Wallace already had his own little backpack, for camping trips, and Ted agreed to donate a pair of ratty hiking shorts he’d had for years. He started to have regrets, however, when I spent $30 on a little wool sweater and cut strategic holes in his cherished shorts to accommodate Wallace’s tail and privates, but by then it was too late. The contest was only one day away.

“You’re going overboard,” he said the next morning as I gussied up Wallace. “Everyone else will probably show up with their dogs in cat ears and witch hats.”

“So what?” I said. “This is fun. Plus, we’ll win.” For a final touch, I put a Catskills trail guide in the pocket of Wallace’s backpack, so that there would be no doubt that he was a hiker.

The day itself was one of those perfect fall days you read about: crisp, cool, clear, with the scent of autumn leaves and hot cider donuts lingering in the air. I insisted on dressing up Wallace at the apartment and couldn’t contain my excitement at the cuteness of it all. I started to have visions of Wallace being in the movies, of starring in dog food commercials, of his face gracing millions of cutesy-dog greeting cards. And a photographer from the Times would definitely be at the contest—one came every year. So maybe finally I’d get my picture in that paper. With my award-winning dog.

“Oh my god, he’s so cute!” I said for the millionth time. (If I couldn’t have my own time in the spotlight, then, by God, Wallace was going to have his.) “Will you take a picture of him before we leave? It’s his first party, in his first party suit.”

“Let’s not prolong the torture,” Ted said. “The poor boy.” Admittedly, Wallace did look downtrodden, as if he wished he had nothing to do with the human world. He kept lifting his eyelids, and twisting his head left to right, trying to figure out what was on top of his head. He also tried to pull off the backpack with his mouth, but he couldn’t quite reach.

“Let’s just go!” Ted said.

I enjoyed all the attention we got on our twenty-minute walk to the dog run. “Look at that dog!” people on the sidewalks shouted. “He’s so cute!” All around us, people laughed and pointed and smiled. I basked in their praise; I loved being in the spotlight, even indirectly.

But Ted seemed pained. “He’s such a dignified dog,” he kept saying as we walked through the East Village. “This isn’t right. You’re humiliating him. He’s going to grow up to be a pansy. He’s going to be like Hemingway, who was all screwed up because his grandmother dressed him in girlie clothes.”

“No, he’s not,” I said, undaunted. I stopped to talk to strangers and told everyone cute little anecdotes about Wallace. “He used to be a shelter dog,” I would begin. “And he used to hate us. And he would never let us touch his head. And now look at him with his little hat….”

“Wallace come,” Ted would say, pulling on the leash.

“Wallace was enjoying himself,” I said to Ted when I caught up to him.

“That’s because that woman petting him has a hot dog.”

“No it’s not. It’s because she told him he was cute.”

On and on this went, all the way to the park. It wasn’t until a horde of pretty girls in go-go boots ran up to Ted to ask what kind of dog Wallace was, that the tight, slightly pained look left Ted’s face.

When we reached the grassy area within Tompkins Square Park, Wallace went immediately went into hunting mode. His steps slowed, his torso sank lower to the ground, and his nose twitched with the precision of a sonograph as he picked up subtle scents. You could tell he had forgotten he had a little ski cap on, and a backpack, and a toddler’s sweater and silly shorts. “Look at him stalking those squirrels!” the girls in the go-go boots shouted.

“Poor Wallace,” Ted muttered. “The poor emasculated boy.” But this hadn’t stopped him from bringing along his video camera. He followed Wallace along, zooming in for close-ups, as Wallace crept slowly toward a squirrel.

When we finally reached the dog run, I was astounded at what I saw. You’re always going to find, at every Halloween contest across the country, a lab in Christmas antlers, and one or two Dog-zillas, and a golden retriever in a store-bought Yankees cap. But try to picture a Harlequin Great Dane dressed up as a giant sunflower. Or a matted grey Shitzhu dressed as a mop and accompanied by a short gay man dressed as a frumpy housewife. The costumes were spectacular. There was a shepherd mix in a curly black wig and Gene Simmons makeup, and a tiny leather jacket embossed with the logo: Kiss. There was a couple dressed up like farmers, carrying baskets of produce, and tucked within the vegetables was a tiny Chihuahua in a pea pod costume, shivering nervously the way Chihuahuas do. There were Pit Bulls sporting cow udders, and six Dachshunds spray-painted yellow to look like a bunch of bananas, accompanied by a giant man in a gorilla suit.

“Wow,” Ted said. “I’m impressed.”

“I’m depressed,” I said. One of the great, but also one of the rotten, things about New York City is that no matter how creative you are, no matter how talented or clever or smart, there’s always going to be someone out there who’s smarter and more talented and more creative than you. Every second of every day.

“Look at that costume!” Ted said. And there I beheld my nemesis. Across the run, wearing Gucci sunglasses and surrounded by adoring fans, was a man and his golden retriever, whom he had fashioned into a Three Headed Dog. From a distance the two extra heads looked life-like, and they continued to look life like even as we got close. “How did you do that?” someone asked, through a crowd that was three-people deep. “With Styrofoam,” he explained. “I’m a set designer.” And he went on to describe how he had begun constructing the heads back in August, how he had required his dog, Butterscotch, to pose for an hour each evening as he painted her likeness on the busts, and how it had taken him three weeks to find the best “suspension mechanisms” to attach the heads to Butterscotch’s collar. Then of course he had to go out and find the perfect cape to conceal the suspension mechanisms. And the cape had come from Shanghai Tang ( a high-end Asian boutique on Madison Avenue).

“That shawl had to have cost six hundred dollars,” I said to Ted as we slunk away. “And did you see that they eyes on the Styrofoam heads actually blinked?”

“I’m blown away,” Ted said.

“If I had known people were going to spend six months on their costumes, I would have put more effort into Wallace’s.” I stared at the three-headed dog’s magnificent cape. “I don’t even have socks from Shanghai Tang.”

“But look our puppy, he’s adorable,” Ted said. “And he’s being such a good boy.” Wallace always stayed by our side at the dog run, because he was still intimidated by the presence of so many dogs. “Come on,” Ted said. “Let’s go sign him in.”

When we got to the registration desk, we found out we had to have a name for Wallace’s costume. I hadn’t thought of a name. I thought the costume spoke for itself. To me, Wallace looked like a little hippie kid, a Bates student, a Trustafarian going off on a hike. “How about Happy Camper?” I said to Ted.

And don’t they always say First Thought, Best Thought? Because then, for some reason, I decided that I had needed to have a more literary name. Something more clever and tongue-in-cheek. I thought then of Jon Krakauer, the author of Into The Wild.

“No one is going to know what you’re talking about,” Ted said.

But I reasoned that we were in the East Village, a neighborhood full of artists and writers and tortured souls. Any of the above would certainly have read Into the Wild, which was the “it” book of the moment.
So we—or rather, I—registered Wallace as “Jon Krakauer” and we took our place in line for the parade to begin. Ted gave me one of his looks—one I liked to call “The Crow.”

The contest began by everyone parading their dogs around the perimeter of the run as a group, and then each of the contestants was called one by one. The whole dog run was lined with was lined with giddy onlookers. As each contestant was called forth they hooted and clapped and cheered. The sound of so much applause was uplifting, and I laughing along, but then Wallace’s name was called. The MC said: “And here’s Wallace the English Setter, and he’s posing as, as, um, Jonathan Kra……Jon Cracker?” The crowd, who had just been cheering madly for the Mastiff-as-ballerina before us, now grew silent.

In this void, I told Wallace to heel and we promenaded along. I smiled nervously and fakely, like a beauty contestant finalist who has just found out she was eliminated after just the first round. I tried to make eye contact with Ted, who was out there somewhere with the onlookers, but I couldn’t find him in such a crowd. Then our moment was over. Wallace and I returned to our place in line, and then some other dog’s name was called. “That was our fifteen minutes of fame,” I whispered to the dog. “And it sucked!”

The Three-Headed Dog won of course, soon the dog and his costume designer were mobbed by photographers and fans. Dejectedly, I took off Wallace’s short and backpack, so that he could go and happily hump the ballerina and bite other dog’s necks. “I should have just called him the Happy Camper,” I said to Ted as I stuffed Wallace’s little hiking shorts into my bag. Across the run, I watched people congratulate the set designer. He seemed a bit too proud of his achievements; a bit too smug.

Ted thought the whole thing was hilarious. “Jon Krakauer,” he said over and over again. “Into the Wild!” He trained his video camera onto me and said, “This is Lee pouting because Wallace didn’t win the Halloween contest.”

When he saw that I wasn’t laughing, he said. “Let’s go to Veselka’s and get some lunch.” Ted, like all good city boyfriends, knew that certain restaurants could always cheer certain mopey women up. For me, it was Veselka’s: pirogues (steamed, and stuffed with potatoes, cheese and broccoli), French fries, and a cold Pilsner Urquell on tap.

We leashed up Wallace and headed off. As we were leaving the park, a nice young woman ran up and touched my shoulder. “I thought yours was the best costume.”

“Really?” I turned to her and smiled.

“He should have won first place.”

“Thanks.”

This is one of the wonderful things about New York: for every stranger who has the capacity to ruin your day—whether deliberately or not—there are always two or three more strangers who will extend to you a fresh, pure act of kindness.

“See?” I said to Ted at Veselka’s. “Someone got it. I wasn’t totally out of line.”

“Yes, Lee,” he said. “One in twelve hundred people gets you.” He touched my hand. “Make that two.”

Wallace, as if he understood us, turned around at that moment and looked at us with what we call his “treat face.”

“Make that three,” Ted said.

This is not where the story ends, however, because from that day forward, for the next two years I tried to devise schemes to out-do the Three Headed Dog and his set designer man.

It was now the year 2000 and, much to my disappointment, the world had not ended as everyone kept insisting it would. Thus, I had to continue living my drudgery of a life. I started thinking about Wallace’s costume in early August. Ted and I would be walking along the beach at Fire Island, or hiking in the Hudson Valley, swatting away flies, and I’d say things like, “What do you think of Tommy Hilsetter?”

“What?” Ted would say. “What are you talking about?” He was a serious hiker, who always kept his eyes on the trails, and therefore never really listened to me while he was hiking. Perhaps—and I am seriously just realizing this now, as I write: perhaps this is why he liked hiking so much. It was the only time he could legitimately tune me out.

“For Halloween,” I said. “We could put a little skull cap on him, and really baggy jeans that hang low off his butt. He could be a little ghetto dog.”

“I think that might be offensive,” Ted said. “A lot of kids from the projects play basketball in that park.”

“Well then how about Brittany Spears? We could get Wallace some of those big plastic tits and a shiny pink thong.”

“That’s not very original,” Ted said. “Everyone with a Brittany Spaniel has probably thought of that. Plus, Wallace doesn’t even look like enough of a Brittany to pass as one.”

Up ahead, we could hear that Wallace had flushed out a wild turkey. He let out a war cry and took off through the brush.

“It would be hard to keep a thong on him anyway,” I said.

Eventually—I don’t remember how—I came up with the idea of Dogatella Versace. It was the year Jennifer Lopez had worn that infamous, diaphanous, one-button dress to the Grammys. (And if you don’t know what dress I’m talking about, I can’t help you).

I like to think that the idea came to me in one great creative burst; a flash in which I saw the complete outfit: Wallace in a mini J. Lo dress, with a long blonde Donatella wig, and his white fur tinted to Versace’s creepy shade of tan.

Eureka! My heart began to pound and the area behind my neck began to tingle, as it always does when I have tapped into The Universal Source.

There were two obstacles to expressing my creative inspiration, however. One was convincing Ted that his son needed to be swathed in Versace, and the other was finding someone to make the dress. Fortunately, we lived in New York City, the land of oddball specialists, so the latter was a piece of cake. At any given moment, you could open up the Yellow Pages and find someone to sing opera to your geraniums while you traveled to Reykjavik; you could hire someone to sew mink to the straps of your seatbelts so that you wouldn’t chafe your chest. And you could find a handful of talented, expensive seamstresses who would custom make a dress for your dog. I found my doggie dressmaker, by providence really, on Manhattan Dog Chat. She just appeared one day in early September, answering a post from someone who had some extra upholstery fabric and wanted to make a little jacket for her “hard to fit” Maltese.
Immediately I called this woman and told her about my Dogatella Versace idea. “How big is your dog?” she asked me. And when I told her Wallace weighed seventy pounds she said, “Well, I usually only work with little dogs.” I felt myself getting defensive, and reverting into that hateful “Us and Them” mentality that, as a Buddhist, I try to not maintain: Us being big dog people (they are real dogs, after all) and little dog people.

Meanwhile, she was probably thinking I was insane for wanting a Versace dress for a 70-pound spaniel. A male spaniel with no effeminate qualities whatsoever. But because I was the customer, and because I offered to pay her a hundred bucks, we agreed that she would pick out some J. Lo-looking fabric and meet me at my apartment for a fitting the following week. “He’s really cute,” I said added at the end of our conversation, because Little Dog People love to use the word cute.

Ted wanted nothing to do with this. He tried to list all the reasons why I should not dress our dog in drag (i.e.: you’re humiliating him, you have better things to do with your time) but in the end he saw how excited I was about the project and how unwilling I was to back off. “When is she coming?” he finally said in resignation.

“Next Saturday. At three.”

“Well, I’ll just make sure I’m not around Saturday at three,” he said.

When Sheila, the dressmaker, arrived at the appointed hour, we were both relieved to find that we liked each other immediately. You never know with the Internet. She was a theater person, a costume designer, who made clothes for dogs on the side, because it was profitable, and because she loved dogs. “I used to have one,” she said, “but now I travel way too much.” As she talked, she measured Wallace’s ankles, and the length of his legs, and the distance from his neck to his tail. “Now, this will be the challenge,” she said, pointing at his privates. “We have to have the plunging neckline to mimic the dress, but it will have to fasten in front of his wee-wee. I’m just not sure it will hang right though.” She stared at Wallace thoughtfully, considering how his body would handle the complicated drapes of cloth, and I was glad Ted wasn’t here to witness this. The “wee-wee” comment would have sent him through the roof.

Wallace was a perfect fit model. I fed him liver treats throughout the whole process, so that he would stay still, and he didn’t try to lunge at Sheila when she leaned in too close to his head. I was so proud of his behavior, and of his progress as a formerly abused dog, that I started to get teary-eyed. “You’re like the mother of the groom,” Sheila said. “Or the bride, as it were.”

“It’s just that,” I said, wiping my eyes, “he’s a shelter dog, and he was abused, and whenever I see him interact tenderly with new strangers I am just so grateful.”

“Now you tell me,” Sheila said. “But he doesn’t seem threatening. It’s usually the little dogs you have to watch out for.”

I agreed. “They’re assholes.”

“Would you like me to take a picture of the two of you when I come back to fit the actual dress?” she said.

We hugged when she showed me the material she’d selected. It was perfect: sheer, green, bold, in a tropical pattern that mimicked the actual dress. Then I showed her the wig I’d bought, which was made of human hair and had cost me $50. “We mustn’t mention costs to my husband,” I said.

“My lips are sealed,” she said.

Then I told her about the Three Headed Dog Man.

“We’ll kick his ass,” she said.

I gave her cash and we arranged to meet for a final fitting in two weeks’ time.

In the meantime, I got a call from one of my mother-in-laws, who said she was going to be coming to New York for a visit. I absolutely love visits from my mother-in-laws (I happened to be blessed with not one but two dynamite mother-in-laws, who liked me despite the fact that I never cooked for their son/step-son, never wrote or called, never produced any grandchildren, and talked non-stop about my dog). But this visit was scheduled for the weekend of Halloween. I faced a true conflict. My manners, upbringing, and sense of general decency suggested that I should scrap the Halloween contest and act like a proper hostess. My mother-in-law was a sharp, sophisticated woman who, when she visits the city, likes to spend her time good restaurants and sample sales. But I’d already invested all that money into Wallace’s dress, and I couldn’t get the smug face of the Three-Headed-Dog man out of my head. “Do you think I could talk you into going with me to a doggie Halloween contest?” I asked her on the telephone. “It might be fun.”

“Sure,” she said. “We can do anything you want.”

Her graciousness did not put me entirely at ease, however. I worried that I was taking a risk with my reputation with that half of the family. In fact, years later, when Ted and I got divorced, I wondered if that particular weekend continued to come up in conversation, when the family sat around the dinner table discussing “signs.” As in, “we always knew that marriage wouldn’t work out; why, think of the time she forced her dog to enter a Halloween contest….”

Anyway, the big day of the contest arrived and I was nervous. My mother-in-law, had arranged to meet me at Tompkins Square Park so that she could do some shopping beforehand, and Ted had decided not to come at all. “I have to work,” he said, which I noticed was something he had to do whenever I had Wallace in costume.

He had to work on St Patrick’s Day, when Wallace wore a headband with sparkly shamrock antennae. He had to work on Easter (bunny ears) and the Fourth of July (flag hat). He was a hard worker, Ted, and that morning he apologized to Wallace for not being able to spend the day with him. “Someone had to pay for all your food,” he said. “And your clothing.
I was busy combing Wallace’s wig out. Then I combed my own hair.

When Wallace and I got to the park, the sky was overcast and the day was humid—an uncommon phenomenon for October. I was wearing a turquoise vinyl jacket to match Wallace’s costume, and the vinyl made me sweat. This for some reason made me cranky, and it was a mood I couldn’t shake. The whole vibe of the contest was off that year. Maybe it was the humidity, maybe it was me, but the dog run seemed less festive; less crowded. “There’s another doggie parade this year over in Chelsea,” someone told me. “All the drag queens are over at that one, I’m sure.” I felt a bit dejected by this—once again something better was happening someplace else, where I was not. And the best place to be is always Where the Drag Queens Are.

But then I got a good look at some of the costumes and felt better again. There was a Corgi transformed into a Hoover. There were two baby cocker spaniels dressed as a bride and groom. Then the Three-Headed Dog man entered the dog run and Butterscotch was dressed up as—get this—Dogzilla. I could hear Ted say, “How unoriginal,” and I couldn’t help but smile. Sure, it was a spectacular costume—he had created a twelve-foot, elaborately airbrushed Styrofoam tail, with spiky fins, savage scales, and moveable parts. But please. Even Aunt Mabel in Idaho could have come up with Dogzilla.

Two years had passed since The Happy Camper had faced the Three-Headed Dog. And Wallace was a completely different dog by this point. He was happier, and better adjusted, and the dog run no longer meant “defend thyself” to him; it meant Play. So the minute I took his leash off inside the dog run, he took off after a Border Collie and the two of them ran like mad. “Wallace!” I shouted. “Your dress! You’re ruining your dress!”

I told him to come but he wouldn’t listen to me. It took fifteen minutes to finally cornered Wallace and put him back on his leash. “Now stay still,” I said to him. “Sit!” His wig had been thoroughly dragged across the ground and was now tangled with woodchips and leaves. I told Wallace he was the worst dog in the world.

My mother-in-law showed up just as I was shouting at my dog about the state of his long blond hair. She waved to me from beyond the fence. Only dogs and their guardians were allowed in the run. I blew her a kiss and smiled. Wallace’s wig kept slipping off, and every time he moved his dress would shift sideways, and he’d step on the hem with his back paws. “Stay still!” I snapped at him. “When I tell you to sit, you sit!” There was irritation in my voice, and I looked around to see if anyone had heard.

The registration was about to begin. Butterscotch and his guardian sat placidly in line, both confident that they would win the contest.

Meanwhile, the Border Collie kept running up to us and biting at Wallace’s wig. “Go away!” I said to her, and to Wallace: “Stay still! When I tell you to sit, you sit!” But poor Wallace wanted to play with the Border Collie. He wanted to stalk squirrels. But I was convinced the whole “effect” of his dress would be ruined if he even lifted his leg to pee. So every time he tried to get up from his sit, I’d apply pressure on his shoulders and push him back down.

Years ago, I’d worked at a children’s fashion magazine and one of my jobs was to assist the art director on photo shoots. Once a month, stage mothers would arrive with their stiffly coiffed sons and daughters. I remember my shock the first time I saw a toddler girl wearing makeup and four-inch heels. Her hair had been curled a la Shirley Temple, and she was unhappy that day—perhaps because of the shoes. But her mother was even unhappier. She kept insisting to me that Kelly normally didn’t act so ornery, that Kelly knew how to be a good girl. “She’s just being very bad today,” the mother kept saying loudly and bitterly “Very bad.”

Now the line of dog-contestants moved, and Wallace stood up without permission and stepped on the hem of his dress. “Sit!” I snapped at him.
Then, suddenly, I saw myself: angry, snappy, perfectionist, dissatisfied.

I had become a stage mother. I had put my own needs before my child’s.

When the beginning of the contest line-up was announced, I couldn’t even look at my mother-in-law. I thought she might see the shame on my face and I didn’t want to see it on her face too.

The crowd roared with laughter when Wallace was introduced as Dogatella Versace, and they cheered madly when, later, he won first prize. Last year first prize had been a six-month supply of California Natural and a CD player; this year it was a $40 gift certificate to a new pet store. When we went up to the stage to take the prize, the judge hung a “Best in Show” medal around Wallace’s neck. It was brass with a red white and blue ribbon that made him look like an Olympian. As the crowd clapped and cheered, a newspaper reporter snapped our photograph, but I refused to tell him my name. I, who for years had told myself I had sought the spotlight, was suddenly ashamed.

As soon as the contest was over I took the medal off Wallace’s neck. Then I took off the dress, and the wig. “You were such a good boy today,” I told him, and then I knelt down and apologized for the beastly way I had behaved. “I’ll never put you through that again,” I told him. “I won’t even make you wear a birthday hat if you don’t want to.”

And so far, my promise has been good.

The medal still hangs on Wallace’s bulletin board, which hangs above his “feeding station.” I’d like to think he notices this medal every time the bowl of ground turkey and boiled potatoes is set down before him, and that he somehow feels wistful, or proud, but mostly he just gobbles his food rapidly. Grateful, perhaps, that he isn’t being forced to wear a wig.