You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (2 page)

Once the decision was made to get “Buddy,” I started, like any mother-to-be, to purchase things. This was where I could really bring my expertise as a shopper to bear. I bought a red-and-black-checked dog bed from Orvis and in a trimming store I found small varsity football letters. I bought two sets of Offensive Tackle letters and sewed “O-T-T-O” onto the front of the bed. I sent away for an engraved name tag in the shape of a bone, and spent hours poring over the contents of dog catalogs, putting check marks next to bowls, revolting-sounding treats like pig ears and marrow bones, stuffed animals that had squeakers, Kong toys, Nylabones, collars, and leashes in a variety of colors and patterns. I bought four books all called
Boston Terrier
. In short, I went nuts.

The night before my aunt Mattie and I went to get him I stood in the kitchen of my small studio looking at his bed with all of the toys lined up neatly beside it, a few treats on the pillow. “Tomorrow at this time, a real live dog will be in that bed.” I could hardly sleep that night.

It was an awful, nasty, sleety March day when we drove to the rural Pennsylvania county where the breeder lived. On the way, I began to get nervous, really nervous.

“What’s wrong?” Mattie said to me, looking over from the driver’s seat. Her own dog, Harry, a mutt she rescued from the side of the Bronx River Parkway going north, was sitting on her lap. “Your lips are white.”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “We can turn right around.”

“I want to.”

Mattie was a wonderful aunt, but at this moment her concern was not for me. What troubled Mattie, the most insane dog person I or anyone else had known, a woman who ordered room service entrees of filet mignon for her pups, was that I’d get this dog and not treat it well and then she’d stop liking me.

Picking Otto up in that farmhouse in One Black Tooth County was what I imagined, at the time, it must have felt like to give birth. My nerves were so jangled, I could barely see. It didn’t help that the week before, I’d started taking antidepressants, so I was all fuzzy-headed from my body’s adjustment to the drugs. I don’t remember my initial meeting with Otto as love at first sight. The family who’d been keeping him took me into the kitchen and there was a baby French bulldog in a playpen that was utterly adorable—and then Otto came in. He was jumping up on everyone, sweet as could be.

Otto had a funny little bent tail, and his eyes went in two totally different directions—a complete East-Wester—and he had some lumps on his back (I was told they were fatty tissue). But he was undeniably the cutest dog I’d ever seen. When we took him into the car I noticed his feet were all bloody. His nails had been clipped too close to the quick. I picked him up to bring him back in to get something for the bleeding and he didn’t want to go in the house. He had already bonded with me, and he also really loved riding in a car. One time months later when I was walking him in Manhattan with my usual very long lead and not paying attention, I looked down and he was gone. I followed his leash into the backseat of a car; there was Otto sitting on a clean, white pillow, face forward, ready to ride. Some foolish person had left their car door open while loading it.

On the way to the home we’d be sharing, he lay on my lap, and though I acted cool, I couldn’t imagine I would be able to manage life as a dog owner. When we got to the city, I walked him up my street. He didn’t have any leash skills, and nor did I, but in my apartment he went straight for his bed and sat in it like he’d been there all his life. And as with everything else he did, I took it as a sign of genius.

 

 

 

 

SO THERE WE WERE.
That first night I felt embarrassed as I ate my dinner. I was used to living alone, and thus eating while reading the
Times
, without anyone watching. Otto’s dinner was in his bowl in the kitchen, but he wasn’t ready to eat and he just sat and stared at me. I felt it was rude to ignore him, or read, so I just scarfed down my meal not looking up and we moved on.

I took the week off from work and stayed with him to help him get adjusted. There was a difficult adjustment period, mostly revolving around my chronic neurosis about leaving him alone for any more than a few minutes. I’d walk out of the apartment and tell him to stay, then I’d stand in the hallway for an hour. He never made a peep. I’d come back in from my fake shopping trip and he’d be positioned right where I told him to stay, and I’d say, “Oh no, you don’t have to remain in that one spot. Just the apartment.” He was good. And he was bad. He’d started snapping at people so I had to keep him on a really tight leash. Yet interestingly, there was a developmentally disabled woman who waited for her bus when I walked him in the mornings and she would run to pet him every day. She was not gentle or cautious or quiet, but Otto just knew. He never snapped at her. He let her do whatever she wanted and waited patiently till she was done, which we’d know when she’d say, “Now that’s what I call a good dog!” and repeat, “Now that’s what I call a good dog!”

 

 

 

 

I THOUGHT ABOUT HIM
every minute we were apart, brought him everywhere the law allowed, fed him everything I ate, carried him up to my sleeping loft every night, and tucked him under the covers, his head on the pillow next to mine. All my energy was put toward making him happy. It was the best relationship I’d ever been in.

The more time we spent alone, the more I thought he was just like me. We were both on our own, we both needed someone, and we both hated being left alone. I started to realize after a week or so that I loved him.

“You’re in love with him,” my therapist said to me. It had been her idea for me to get a dog. She’d recently gotten two bichons frises and was overwhelmed by the number of men who approached her to chat on her walks.

Yuck, I thought, not so much for the bestiality connotations but for the idea that my new boyfriend was four-legged, flat-faced, and neutered. Somehow it made me feel like that was going to be it for me. I’d never be a part of a human couple.

As I walked him around the Upper West Side, I noticed more families and I continued to worry that people would now begin to see me as a “dog person.” You know, the kind who likes dogs better than people. Or the kind who can only attract a companion who relies on her for food. I wondered if by adopting Otto, I had sealed my fate as a single woman with a dog. I could see our future together. Me and him. Otto and Julie. “Happy Holidays from Julie and Otto” accompanied by a picture of Otto dressed in a Santa hat. Well, so be it. At least I wouldn’t be totally alone.

But something close to miraculous did happen. I suddenly discovered I had developed dog-vision. Prior to this point, I had not known there was a dog run two blocks from my apartment at the Museum of Natural History.
I’d never seen it though I’d walked by it thousands of times.
It was like entering the Twilight Zone or suddenly being able to see dead people but instead it was dogs and people with dogs. I’d apparently walked by these formerly invisible neighbors again and again, but only now, with Otto as my ambassador, did I stop to say hello. I had to wonder what else I had been missing. Were handsome single men all over the place, too? Thrillingly, I also got to talk to celebrities with dogs, now that we had a common denominator. While walking Otto, I met Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, who were walking their dog. Otto peed on the ground and did his usual male-dog kicking of dirt to cover his potent scent.

Kevin gasped and said, “Wow! Did you see that? That dirt went like thirty feet!”

I said, “Yes, he’s quite talented.”

Kyra said, “Isn’t that the kind of dog Travis wants?”

“No,” Kevin said dismissively, “that’s a pug.”

“Oh yes,” I said, determined to stay in the conversation. “Pugs.”

We met Dianne Wiest and her terrier; hunky Chris Cuomo, son of the then governor Mario Cuomo, with his black Lab; Billy Baldwin and Chynna Phillips and their dog Thurman (after New York Yankee Thurman Munson); Carol Kane and her pug George. Other celebrities like Cameron Diaz and Rosie O’Donnell just stopped to pet him because he was so cute. Having Otto opened my world. I found that a good percentage of people liked to pet cute dogs, and even when they ignored me I’d get to say the never tiresome, “Say,
Thank you for petting me. I’m Otto and I love to get my tummy scratched.
” I made friends with other people though none of us knew each other’s name—we were Otto’s owner, Mercedes’ owner, Amy’s owner, and Scungilli’s owner. I also couldn’t count the number of times an elderly person told me that a Boston terrier had been the first dog they’d had or it was the kind of dog their aunt or uncle or grandparent had. And their names were almost always Buster. I surmised it was because they look like Buster Brown’s dog, Tige, who was actually an American pit bull terrier.

I also made friends with my upstairs neighbor John, a guy who lived across the hall from his partner. He had four dogs, so he walked them a lot. We started going out on our walks together, and I liked that I didn’t have to go it alone, plus we gossiped and made fun of everyone so it was good times all around. Little by little Otto implanted himself in every part of my life. I took him to parties and to bars, he slept in my bed (under the covers), and we traveled together. A month or so after I got him I took him to Barbara’s office so her friend, the one who referred me, could meet him. I told him about our intense relationship and he shook his head.

“I used to be like that with Buster but not anymore,” he said self-righteously. “He has his life and I have mine.”

I felt like he had just called me a loser. I was the grown-up equivalent of the kid in my second-grade class who brought his stuffed bear to school every day. How the hell was Otto going to have his own life? Was he supposed to call other dogs for movie dates? And what about me? What was I going to do?

In late September, I sat with Otto on our couch and we began the process of finding him a Halloween costume. I knew he had no idea what was going on, but my enthusiasm was enough to make him know he was going to hate it. Halloween has been my favorite holiday, but after the year I went to a grown-up party dressed as the Wicked Queen from
Sleeping Beauty
and everyone else was dressed as people who are too cool for Halloween, I stopped celebrating. When I found out that there was a doggie Halloween parade at the dog run, I nearly blew a nerd gasket. Dog Halloween costumes had become increasingly popular and nowhere was that more evident than the Upper West Side dog world. I went through the costumes in the catalog, dismissing any that seemed undignified (the hot dog) or too cutesy (bunny or bumblebee) or ones that simply made no sense (Superman?). In the end, Otto and I went with a handsome Howard Hughes costume with a faux-leather aviator hat, white silk scarf, and goggles that wouldn’t stay on and just swung around his neck.

On Halloween, I dressed him up and walked him to the dog run. We passed through a group of high school kids who laughed at him (or at me). One of them said to me, “Why don’t you just have a kid?” Once we got to the dog run, we were insulated from that kind of attitude. Otto started chasing after a Jack Russell dressed up as Jane Russell and enjoyed a treat bag of Liv-A-Snaps and Beggin’ Strips.

Every occasion was a chance to be together. I worried about doing anything that would keep me away from him too long. I cut out of work early and took the subway instead of walking home from the office to save time. I didn’t want him to be lonely for one extra second. Our bond was entirely different from what I had with our family dogs growing up. Dogs who need to be walked and not just let out in the yard are much more connected to you. You know, though you may wish you didn’t, their whole potty schedule, for example. My dogs growing up lay on their dog beds in the kitchen regardless of where we were, but Otto was never out of my vision. I used to fantasize about coming home and finding a note from him: “Went to
La Bohème
and for a quick bite with Maud and Addie. Don’t wait up!”

In my first years with him, we’d often go out to dinner to restaurants that had dining alfresco. Otto would start on the ground next to me and before anyone knew it, he’d be on the chair facing me. Many a passerby did a double take. Not because he was a dog at the table, but because he appeared to be a person. He was very well behaved, ignoring the bark of intractable four-legged pedestrians (it really seemed to piss them off to see him sitting at the table, those dogs who were just dogs). To me, it wasn’t so much my doing as Otto’s, since he insisted upon being a member of the family. The sooner everyone got that through their heads, the better.

As we got to know each other, I learned so much more about Otto: