Howl (8 page)

Home on the Mange

[Neal Pollack]

O
NE NIGHT IN
January, my family sat on the couch, watching television. We’d just moved to Los Angeles and we knew almost no one. A terrible freezing rainstorm had driven us inside; we cuddled for warmth and friendship.

There was a knock at the door.

My wife, Regina, and I looked at each other, a little annoyed and a little fearful. In our previous neighborhood, in Austin, Texas, we’d been constantly bothered at home by people asking us for money. One night I’d chased a couple of guys off my lawn because they were fighting over a prostitute. Then, the week we’d moved into this rental, Regina had answered the door to reveal a one-armed woman who was asking for money to benefit the family of a teenage girl who’d been slain in some random act of gang violence. Regina gave her a dollar. A panicked call to the neighborhood beat officer later revealed that this had been a scam. All the gang violence had moved either six blocks to the east or to the south, he assured us.

We’d learned to be skeptical of knocks at the door. But on nights like this, even scam artists stayed home. So I got up.

Through the slats of our door-length plastic blinds, I saw the French-woman who lived in the house behind us. A Ph.D. candidate in bioengineering at USC, she made a good neighbor: quiet, rarely home, and prone to taking weeklong surfing trips to Hawaii. We were friendly enough with her, though she never thanked us for the Christmas cookies we left on her doorstep.

“I have a leetle problem,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Eet’s a dog.”

She opened the door further. Behind her was a medium-sized terrier. Its white fur had been torn away in chunks from its torso, leaving a hideous vista of red-raw skin and sores and eminently visible bones. The dog was soaked and desperate to come inside; it stank like an entire animal shelter full of filth, with that certain kind of desperate putridity that presages death.

“Eet followed me home,” she said. “I don’t know much about dogs.”

“We have a dog!” I said proudly.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m asking you for help.”

Our dog was a neckless Boston Terrier named Hercules. His hobbies included eating cat barf, licking my ankles under the bedcovers, and moping on the couch. When we did take him for walks, we had to lift him over puddles because he was afraid of water. Particularly compared with the other dogs in this neighborhood, hungry-looking Pit Bulls and Boxers who spent their entire lives shitting in concrete lots enclosed by wrought iron, Hercules was really more Muppet than dog. Owning him hardly qualified me as an expert in canine care.

But I’d only been in town for two weeks, and was feeling neutered and useless. This was the perfect mission to break my slump. A great surge of heroism and duty welled in my chest. I began barking orders.

“Regina! Get me some dog food! And a bowl! No! Two bowls! And a towel! And some treats and some doggie shampoo! We’re going to clean this mutt up!”

A few minutes later, we walked through the rain to the back house. The French girl’s place already smelled like the dog throughout.

“Eet’s a he,” she said. “I looked.”

The stray hovered in her kitchen. But when I offered him doggie treats, he just looked confused, like he’d been hungry so long that he’d forgotten food’s purpose. So I skipped that step, picked him up in a towel, and carried him to the bathroom. Then I placed him in the tub, soaked him with water from a cup, and scrubbed him down with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. He behaved himself. At least the water was warm.

When we were done, he still smelled like death, but at least now it was a clean death.

“Now what do I do?” said my neighbor.

This woman had obviously spent so much of her youth in microbiology labs that she had no idea how to function in the world of the mundane.

“Um,” I said. “Call a vet?”

For some reason, instead of making the call herself, she handed me the phone book and phone. I dialed the Eagle Rock Emergency Animal Hospital.

“Yes, hello,” I said. “I have a dog here. I found…well, actually, my neighbor found him on the street and took him home and then I gave him a bath. Where should I send him?”

“You need to get in touch with the Humane Society,” said the man on the other line.

“OK.”

“And, because you handled the dog, you might have mange.”

“What?”

“Mange. Scabies. You should check with your doctor in two weeks. It usually doesn’t set in for a month to six weeks. And if you have it, then everyone you come into contact with will get it too.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t touch anybody for a month?”

“Just to be safe.”

“Mange?” I said. “Are you
sure
I’m going to get mange?”

“Go to your doctor,” he said. “You have mange.”

This seemed impossible. I’d bathed the dog with disinfectant shampoo and washed my hands afterward. I’ve come into contact with stray dogs many times. And yet mange is not on the list of diseases I’ve contracted. Nevertheless, I ran home in a panic.

“We have mange,” I said to Regina.

“What?” she said.

“You need to take off all your clothes and put them in the washer.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Do it! NOW! And take off Elijah’s clothes, too! And Hercules’s collar!”

“Oh, come on.”

“Dammit, Regina,” I said. “We have mange! Mange!”

“Nooooo!” said my son. “I’m cold. I don’t want to take off my clothes!”

If anyone is trying to decide whether or not to become a parent, let me provide you with this image: Regina and I forcibly undressing a three-year-old because his clothes might be infected with mange. If that doesn’t dissuade you, let me try another image: All three of us in our underwear, shivering, afraid of having contracted mange, and watching
Monsters, Inc.

What the hell were we doing here?

We quickly determined that Hercules’s heartworm medicine protects him from mange. Also, we learned that while people can contract mange, it’s an entirely different disease from the one that afflicts dogs. So we were safe. By the time we went to bed, our frenzy of disinfecting had ended.

That night, the French girl took her sad mutt to a shelter. A couple of days later, Regina came into my office bearing a concerned look.

“I’m worried about that dog,” she said. “Will you call the shelter?”

Some dogs are born into families that dress them in argyle sweaters and feed them steak, while others are destined to walk the earth in misery, desperate for the sweet relief that death provides. It’s never pretty when you run into one of the latter dogs. I called the shelter. Of course they’d put the dog down immediately.

Rather than putting us off from dogs, this incident actually made us like them even more. Regina started sidling up to me, just as she had right before we adopted Hercules. She put her head on my chest. She stroked my hair.

“Puppy, puppy, puppy,” she said. “Puh-peeeeeee! Puh-leeeeese! Puppy!”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Not again.”

“They’re so cute.”

“We don’t need another dog,” I said.

“Of course we do,” she said.

As of this writing, we’re still a one-dog family. That probably won’t be the case by the next writing. Recently, we put in an application online for a Boston Terrier named Shaq, but he had a dozen other suitors and we lost him. We found an adorable little Pug named Ella whom we liked, but to acquire her we had to go meet her at a fair, which we found out about too late. Regina liked another Boston named Chloe, who sounded cool from her online description. I rejected Chloe because she had a nasty-looking overbite. My wife was getting frustrated.

“It’s just so hard to find a dog in L.A.,” Regina said.

Not true, I told her. Dogs are ubiquitous here if you want them. You just have to be prepared to deal with a little mange.

Dog Whores

[Margaret Cho]

I
LIKE WET
dog noses resting on my skin, and feeling the fine, downy soft hairs of a sweet muzzle underneath. I love dogs, mostly all dogs. Possibly one or two I have met in my lifetime rubbed me the wrong way, but of the many thousands I have petted and cuddled, that isn’t too bad.

When I am away from home, I put pillows on my body so that when I fall asleep, it still feels like my dogs are there. Pillows don’t radiate heat or curl around my neck like a Chihuahua can, but when you are a dogless nomad, these and other people’s dogs are all you have.

I think that there should be dog prostitutes. High-priced Great Dane gigolos. Miniature Doberman hustlers, in tiny white tank tops and studded leather collars. A fancifully beribboned Bichon Frise, a little aloof, but with kind eyes, to coo over and stroke all night. I want a mixed-breed Midnight Cowboy, to warm my bed and ease my lonely heart. Of course, in the end, when you have to go to your early-morning flight, with no time to check in any odd-sized baggage or go to the vet to get a travel certificate, you would have to pay them to leave, just like you paid them for the extras, like maintaining a down stay for an extended period or any particular canine agility.

I would spend a fortune on dog prostitutes, most likely fall in love more than once, filling up my home with dog whores from all over the world. Lhasa Apsos and Labrador Retrievers. French Poodles and English Bulldogs. Chows and Irish Setters. All mine for the night, then all mine forever. I have the potential to be one of those crazy people who take in hundreds of strays and then irresponsibly die, only to have all my dear pets eat me. I will have someone look in on me now and again to ensure that does not happen.

A Catwoman in Dogland

[Kathe Koja]

T
HANKS FOR HOLDING
the gate…yes, I’ll watch my step. Honestly, it’s a lovely country you have here, with such strange and wonderful objects—the Burberry leash, the Mutt Mitt, the fluorescent-green Kong—the like of which we’ve never seen in Fresh Scent Litter Land—which I abhor, by the way: I would rather smell my oldest cat’s ammonia-drenched scat forever than that perky “pine” reek. Although we clean the box twice a day, I swear. We have to: We have three cats.

We also have friends, and some of those friends have dogs, and one of those friends, Jay, is as close to me as a sister. So when she adopted T.S., big and gangly and beautiful, a brown-eyed, blue-eyed (yes, one of each) half-Dane/half-who-knows-what, all at once this confirmed catwoman found herself, like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, squarely in Dogland.

Of course I like dogs, and always have: they’re furry, they’re animals, what’s not to like? But cats are my ur-animal. Their quirks and flings and ailments, their small determined moods, their butting heads and twining tails—well, you get the idea. The three we live with now are members of a long and loving line, dating all the way back to when my husband and I were children. We are, in all senses of the word (well, maybe not the Paul Schrader–movie sense), cat people.

So I had to wonder, how would it be, now, with Jay and T.S.? It was like she’d gotten hooked up with a new boyfriend, one whose language I didn’t speak, and whose expressions (the bark!) were a little strange to me. But I was game.

The shelter adoption process held no surprises: It is what it is, forms in triplicate, neuter, shots, and tags. Although T.S. didn’t go home in an adorable purple-paw-print cardboard carrier; he couldn’t fit, natch, and anyway he would have eaten it. My first real lesson in Dogland came at Jay’s, with the concept of the crate. In our little suburb of Cat World, the “crate”—den, safe house, time-out chair—is my office. Unless it’s the sofa in the living room, or the downstairs bathroom sink. Or the exact middle of the bed, in the exact middle of the night. Or my face. Wherever, it’s the cats who make the call. So “What if he doesn’t like the crate?” I asked Jay.

“Well, he’ll be trained,” she said.

Second lesson. There is no such thing as training, period, in Cat World. Some people claim to have trained their cats to stay off the furniture with deadeye squirt bottles or double-sided tape, but actually these people are delusional, and their cats laugh quietly at them behind their backs. The people at the obedience classes I attended with Jay and T.S., however, didn’t seem delusional, although a few of them needed training far, far more urgently than their chubby Pugs or funky little Terriers. For six weeks, I stood on the taped-off sidelines, observing as the dogs learned—with a combination of firmness, praise, and the occasional (OK, in the beginning, the constant) jerky-treat reward—to sit and stay, to walk at heel, to trace a serpentine route between one another without leaping up for play or combat. It was kind of like watching contra dancing, except half the dancers had four legs. Originally I didn’t care much for the instructor, because she liked to wear a floppy sweatshirt that said
IT’S A GOLDEN THING, YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND
, and I didn’t. But it turned out she had many nuggets of exotic wisdom to share regarding proper leash length and those cute collapsible water dishes you see at Pets & More (a godsend, according to her). And I admit, I was secretly enchanted by the concept of rules as applied to human-animal relations. To ask an animal to do something that s/he would then, you know,
do:
Wow. And apparently with no hard feelings afterward, either.

The dog park was some more terra incognita. T.S. had come from a sadly solitary situation; i.e., he was a yard dog, but he learned quickly how to play with the others, to catch the ball and the Frisbee, to solicit pats and fondling from the dog parents. As I hung around listening to them talk, and occasionally tossing in a comment (“Oh yeah, T.S., he’s so not dominant”), I marveled at the way the dogs, sized from Humvee to compact, chased and rolled, nipped and yipped, in a big perpetual-motion canine mob where no one ever really got hurt, unless a human happened to get in the way of the rolling scrum and got bowled over; still, no harm, no foul.

But trust me, there’s a reason why there’s no such thing as a “cat park.” Not that my cats don’t adore playing with one another—they definitely do (until they definitely don’t). Run, chase, pounce, tussle, even the eldest of the three can turn kitten on a dime. But play with a
strange
cat? A cat of unknown provenance, possibly with testicles still attached? Oh boy. A few years ago I briefly sheltered a midnight stray, but had to hustle him to a neighbor’s when my cats went seriously emotionally AWOL, and tried to claw through the door to get at him and his ballsy little behind. Even if he’d been neutered, no amount of ass-sniffing could produce a workable détente in less than a calendar week, if ever, and never is a long time to stand around outside making conversation with a guy in a Polarfleece vest.

Other things about Dogland were instantly, comfortingly familiar. The worship of crinkly snack bags remained just the same, as did the daily task of shedding (black hair on white sweater, brown hair on black dress, etc. etc.). Everybody, dog and cat, wants to know what it is you’re doing behind that bathroom door, and how they can become actively involved in it. Chef Barkley’s Organic Beef Canine smells exactly like Organic Beef Feline, except maybe when it comes out the other end, but who’s counting? The ritual greeting at the door—dog people don’t think cats do this, but they do, the little faces pointing up as soon as you walk in, the little tails swishing, impatient with delight. And climbing on laps—same deal, whether you weigh seventy-five pounds or fifteen. All you really want is to get some love, and give it.

So we go down different aisles in the pet store, we plan our trips differently—she calls the doggy day care, I hunt down the home-care gal—does it matter? Dogland, Cat World, they’re just neighbors on the same big continent, although one has more scratched-up couches and the other is damper from drool. It’s the passport that really matters, that truly separates Jay and me (not to mention T.S. and my cats) and all of us—dog people and cat people, bird and rabbit people, that guy with the bandanna you see walking his iguana—from the place where animals, all animals, from the shelter to the zoo to the veldt to the forest, are a toy, a nuisance, a commodity, a nonentity, the place where it’s only humans, all humans all the time.

And the passport out of that empty land is the empathy that realizes, that cherishes, that the dog, the cat, seeks what you seek, and offers it too: the love, the bond between beings. Expressed by a run around the block rather than a twisty string across the floor, still, a thumping tail equals a purr equals the clean and wordless joy of being close to a friend in whom you trust, who trusts you, who knows you. When Jay walks T.S., when I snuggle my cats, when you hug your critter of choice, the love is the same. The love is exactly the same.

So now, when I hear the inevitable question, at the dog park or the vet’s or the pet supplies store—
Are you a dog person or a cat person?
—thanks to T.S. and Jay, I can truthfully answer
Yes.