I Want to Kill the Dog (3 page)

A History Lesson

H
ow did this happen to me? What did I do wrong? Job never had it this bad. It’s a mystery, because the first step into dogland felt so right. Ben was our only kid then. He loved dogs and threw himself at them unflinchingly. Our family trek through the Wild Kingdom began when the lad was barely two. The year was 1990, and Ben was sucking all the energy out of the house.

The journey of a thousand miles began as Meredith was minding her own business in her office at
60 Minutes
, and a stray dog magically appeared. It had been found wandering in Riverside Park along the Hudson River by a couple of young staffers. The little doggie found his way to Meredith, passed Go, and collected $200, which he did not share. A bad beginning.

Meredith asked me to come over to meet the little puppy, and I knew he had already joined the family. It seems like a long time ago. Ben has finished college and lives in Shanghai now, an indication of how long it has been and how far he has traveled to escape the mammal madness enveloping his homeland.

Adopting a dog was no small deal. A friend in the city had told me dogs are worse than kids. Children have at least a small chance of learning something, anything. Dogs, on the other hand, are and always will be blank slates. But no alarms sounded, no sirens wailed inside my skull.

After all, I did demand naming rights for our first new dog and somehow got them. Willie seemed like the right name for a mutt discovered hanging with hobos by the river. Meredith probably would have gone for something more elegant. “Willie” was a poor man’s “Reginald,” a fit for a sort of scrappy terrier. Willie was a small dog, though still young. Most importantly, Willie was a boy’s dog.

I imagined Ben announcing, “I’m going out to play ball with Willie,” and hearing the reassuring sound of the screen door slamming behind him. Our Irish babysitter later informed me that, in her country, Willie is what a guy’s private parts are called. I believe that was my last contribution on matters animal, vegetable, or mineral.

Willie and Ben were instant buddies. The system was working. I thought Willie
enriched
our lives. I did. What a splendid, though highly subjective notion. Life in our house would change; that tired expression,
enriching our lives
, would become a phrase used against me with pets to come. Willie seemed an okay pet, at least for a while.

It could not have been six months later when the dog was hit by a car—two cars, actually—and left for a goner. A vet had doubted poor Willie would make it through the night, but the scrappy animal rallied.

Willie would make it through more nights and burn through many dollars, fifteen thousand of them, to be precise. Later, we knew the dog would survive. I thought all of us would have to move out of our new home and back to Willie’s old territory, the more affordable wilds of Riverside Park by the Hudson.

Willie was in bad shape for a long time. At first, the poor dog could barely stand. He quivered and shook when he tried. Meredith left for work every day before I did. My mission was clear. And rather unpleasant. In fact, I could not believe I had become an orderly for the mutt, but I gritted my teeth and did my duty. Each morning, I struggled to lift Willie as if he were a hand-carved, wooden cigar-store dog and deposit him outside before he peed on my hands.

When I picked him back up for the return trip, the walk to the front door was not a fabulous aesthetic experience. My hands were strangely moist. Make that wet. I renamed the dog Willie Wet Cock.

This went on for months. I was doing my part. Willie was slowly improving and began to walk again. The days of compulsively washing my hands with a vengeance before just about any activity finally vanished.

The dog had aged after the accident and now moved like an old man, though eventually he could run pretty fast. Like, away. Whenever possible. Willie would flee the house like an escaping convict. He never came back willingly. The police knew who we were because of Willie, also because a babysitter once started a fire in the oven by heating up a pizza that was still in the box, but that’s another story.

I guess I can’t totally blame Willie for putting us on the cops’ list of high-risk homeowners. But they did keep their eyes on us because of him. The dog fled the premises frequently. When the police found him, a cruiser would show up in our driveway with their buddy Willie sitting up front, riding shotgun like he belonged there. It was cute, at least for a while. I think the cops should have given Willie a badge to wear on his policeman’s hat.

By now, we had three children. Gabe and Lily had joined the menagerie. They fit right in, and family chaos was ratcheted up a notch. Most of the time, the house was up for grabs. Willie was in his element but moving into his nuisance phase. I think his aging body was beginning to ache from his collisions with cars years earlier. The dog’s temperament took a turn for the worse, too.

Willie took to accosting passing bicyclists, including children. He would nip at their feet. He was scaring friends and neighbors, not to mention passersby, who were ambushed regularly. Grown guys were smart and just kicked at him as hard as they could. Women were more gentle, frequently tumbling onto our front lawn to avoid hitting the animal. Little kids just started crying and instantly fell off their bikes.

The dog went after me occasionally. Nipping had turned to biting. First it was just the air near a foot, then an ankle. Once, I tried to kick him hard and missed, joining half the neighborhood, the legion of kickers, piled high on the lawn. The milk of human kindness in me was beginning to sour.

I am pretty sure that was the point when I began to question why humans collect pets. “They enrich our lives,” Meredith answered. Right. By now I was thinking maybe, just maybe, pets are more trouble than they are worth. Life with Willie had changed.

Then I went from annoyed to pissed. The dog chewed up my souvenirs from years in the news business. When Willie tore up and half devoured a baseball cap reading U.S.S. Something-or-Other, given to me by the captain of a landing craft anchored in Beirut harbor, I went over the edge. I had survived covering a long war in Lebanon and now was fighting my own dog for the spoils. I wished I could locate my dusty old AK-47.

Willie had been with us for about eight years and pretty much had the run of the house. Life must have been too calm. So out of nowhere and with no warning, Meredith adopted Shea.

Enter the Horse

S
uddenly there was another animal in the house claiming to be a dog. Instantly I knew better, but did not know how to react, or even what to think. At first I was fine with it, though mystified by my wife’s enthusiasm for throwing a live grenade into the living room.

Shea was a real dog. A big dog. Actually, Shea was a behemoth. Of course, any decision to acquire another animal should have been a family affair. That is how to preserve the peace. Peace was, alas, elusive. No one fought the addition. I knew it would be like talking to my foot.

Shea resembled a small horse, and I began to think maybe he was not a dog at all. He should have been eating hay. Shea was jet-black and all muscle. He could have run the Preakness.

I never knew his breed, but his coat was smooth and this doggie or horsie was as big as the stadium where he turned up. If Meredith was looking for trouble, bingo, she found it. Shea was the heftiest child in the house.

Gabe is and always has been a
Mets fan. Meredith heard that a stray had been found hanging around a parking lot at Shea Stadium, the tired old ballpark where the Mets used to play, and decided she had to adopt it for Gabe.

It is possible the woman may have made this move out of misplaced loyalty to Gabe. But clearly she has a taste for chaos and strays, and the two seem to go together. This particular hobo could have crushed the only Mets fan in the house. Little Gabe.

Shea Stadium is where the Mets
defeated the Red Sox
to win the 1986 World Series. I don’t know if the Divine Ms. M. (a Red Sox fan) remembered that we were there for the last game of that memorable series. Meredith is a forgiving person, though, even with me. I am not certain she even thought of the team’s history or her second son’s love for the team. That series came long before Gabe. As a matter of fact, I have no idea what or if she was thinking when she brought Shea home.

Maybe someone made a bet that Meredith could be conned into adopting the pony. Or somebody dared her. My money is on the fact that my wife cannot complicate life enough. We kept Shea indoors, of course. I did not want to scare the neighbors.

Besides, I lived in fear that Shea would collide with a car. That would have been like a high-speed embrace between a motorcycle and an elephant, clearly not good for the cyclist. Not good for me. Great for the lawyers. Have you ever seen a car after it collided with a moose? Shea would have walked away without a scratch.

None of us knew quite how to relate to Shea, though our three small children did not seem the slightest bit intimidated. Eventually we let him venture outdoors.

And our rat pack ran around the house and through the yard oblivious to the moose hiding somewhere in the bushes, towering over the foliage, actually. I lived with the fear that sooner or later we would hear a loud belch and there would be only two children running around the house and through the yard.

Willie was not amused. He was getting older by the minute and was semiretired as the neighborhood terrorist. The vet had warned us that, since the poor dog had been welded together after slow dancing with a moving car, he probably would have a shorter life expectancy than normal. Shea seemed determined to make that happen.

Willie would go missing for extended periods, not to be found by anyone, especially Shea. I think the gigantic beast frightened Willie much more than he actually threatened him. Meanwhile, the gentle giant terrorized the house.

I dared to take him for walks, imagining with horror what a supersized mess he would make on the floor if I waited too long, and wanting to avoid the same mess on our lawn. That was not going to happen on my watch. But I did learn the hard way not to walk directly behind Shea.

And I would not let one of our pint-sized kids walk the giant on four legs. Shea was many times heavier than all of them weighed together. I pictured Lily grabbing the leash and getting dragged to New Jersey.

Chaos was spreading.

Shea often got out of the house as our small troop was gathering to leave for school and work. The twenty-minute ride to school had become a wonderful ritual, a time for family fighting when bonding became boring. Then Shea stepped into the batter’s box, and all hell broke loose. The game immediately was sent into extra innings. The car remained in Park for what seemed an interminable period as we tried to recapture the bounding beast.

Shea came right out of
War of the Worlds,
Tom Cruise’s movie about alien monsters from space trying to take over. There the extraterrestrial dog was, running around outdoors, larger than life, like the crazy horse he was. Shea was grabbing coats and stealing books, even holding lunches in his teeth, with hats and gloves and assorted items strewn around our property. The yard looked as if a typhoon had blown through.

If the dog saw one of us approaching an item on the lawn, he would drop everything to thunder over and grab it before one of us got there. Screams filled the air. Where were the cops when we needed them? Where was the National Guard?

The kids were not happy. They wanted to get in the car and go and instead were watching a three-hundred-pound fullback steaming down the field and jumping over them. The tears would begin as our children imagined starting the day in the school office with an excuse that sounded an awful lot like “The dog ate my homework.” If the kids did not like Shea, they never let on. Maybe they just wanted to please their mother. Children have been driven into therapy for less.

Then Meredith would walk out of the house, and the last kernel of calm was transformed into hysteria. My low-key wife became a maniac, dropping everything, her own books and reams of paper, as she joined the chase.

Meredith never really got angry. She had brought this monster into our lives and was not about to concede remorse. Instead, she started screaming and reasoning with Shea as she followed the dog around the yard. Reasoning with an animal. That always works.

The dog would double back and grab some of her belongings, including research for one of that day’s segments of
The View
. The sighs became louder. Cars going by would stop as an audience built. Some impatient commuters would start honking as the wild scene spread to the streets. This became a recurring theme. I think our neighbors were amused.

I hadn’t screamed like that since the Beatles came to town. It was great. Surprisingly, it took very little food to calm the moose down, that is, when we could slow him down long enough to offer it. Shea was a cheap date.

Willie, by the way, was nowhere to be seen during all this, cowering deep in my closet, hiding under dirty laundry. This spot was the quivering animal’s new home. My thought that this was no way for Beaver Cleaver to live was ripening. I do not know what Wally would have thought about our delightful pets, but my life had been
enriched
enough. We were fast losing our status as the all-American family.

Then, amidst the household’s constant uproar, we almost lost Shea. Meredith and I had purchased a basketball hoop for pickup games in the driveway. Filling a modest-sized tank in the base with water stabilized the metal frame. We were shivering through the middle of an especially frigid winter and were advised to mix the water with a healthy dose of antifreeze.
Healthy
may not be exactly the right word.

Antifreeze, it turns out, was an aphrodisiac for the moose.
Poison
is another colorful term. We had left an open can of that thick, sweet-smelling stuff lying around outdoors. What did we know? We had no idea it had mystical powers, summoning a dog to its doom. When Shea polished off the rest of the antifreeze, I just figured the animal was down a quart. Meredith managed to remain calm.

But like Willie years before him, our daredevil dog cheated death that cold, cold night. Then, once again, we got the bill. I caught Shea ordering another drink and told him his bar tab was getting out of hand.

By now, these animals were into us for tens of thousands of dollars. This situation was not making sense. Living in misery and paying through the nose for the honor was nothing less than insane, in my mind only, of course. We had been down that road before, but now it seemed unending.

Fortunately, a happy resolution came unexpectedly. The lady from the animal shelter where we had officially adopted Shea made a routine call to ask about the dog’s well-being. Meredith said the doggie was fine but drank too much. When we told her Willie tried to kill himself, the old white lie to make the point that our aging mutt was tired of feeling intimidated, she grew self-important and stern.

The woman was humorless. She seemed more concerned about Shea than poor Willie, probably worried that if Shea committed suicide, she might be sentenced to the slammer as an accessory to the crime. I was in Willie’s corner, tired of the horse. The lady said not every dog is suited for all homes and announced she was recalling Shea. “But we love him,” Meredith pleaded. I thought that was stretching the truth just a little.

“This is not about you,” the lady lectured in a voice as warm as cold antifreeze. “Our priority is the welfare of animals, not people.” Well, excuse me. And then Shea was gone.

There were no tears at the dinner table, not even from my wife. Nobody hated Shea, but it was time to trade him to another team. Eventually Willie hobbled out of the closet, looking like an old man being released from a home for the aged. Our pal Willie would last a few more years before wasting away, probably from his old injuries. He had redeemed himself during the moose’s reign and kept his dignity. The moment was sad for all of us.

The doggie drama was getting old by this point. I had gone through enough with pets and vets. There is a big difference between animals in the abstract and those in your face. In our family, however, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. The question became not
what
but
when
. I intuitively knew it was only a matter of time.

I called Meredith’s old friend Priscilla. The two had gone to elementary school together and have stayed close. “Why does Meredith do this stuff?” I asked point-blank. “We are raising three kids, one a young teenager. We work hard. Keep terrible hours. Already we live with stress. Why does she feel the need to complicate everything?”

Priscilla sighed. “Some people feel guilty if life is too easy.” Okay. “Meredith probably thrives on chaos.” Maybe. “And there are those who think the crazier life is, the more exciting it becomes.” Nothing I hadn’t thought of.

“In other words, you don’t know,” I said.

“Right,” she replied apologetically.