My dad started dating Karen, the Jack Russell’s mother. They watched foreign films at the Angelika and dined at hole-in-the-walls in the outer boroughs, satisfying my dad’s twin loves of multiculturalism and thriftiness. I think she was slightly allergic to me, because whenever she was around her eyes were rheumy, though she never mentioned anything. Her armpits sweated a lot and she used a men’s sports antiperspirant to cover it up. She seemed like a good match for him, insofar as he had a good match.
The Jack Russell, however, I couldn’t stomach, and unfortunately Karen wasn’t allergic to him. His name was Tommy, and he was a spoiled little shit if I ever saw one. They forced us into long walks and dog runs together, and he was constantly boasting to me and other dogs we encountered about the gourmet biscuits his mother fed him from some boutique in California called Dog-Eat-Dog-Eat World. I wasn’t quite sure how Karen, who worked at the Met in some administrative capacity, afforded them, but when she walked ahead of me I noticed her sad, cheap shoes that smelled like mushrooms. Even well-intentioned mothers can produce brats. A lot of it’s out of their hands.
One interminable Saturday together along the putrid East River, Tommy finally mustered the curiosity to ask me about myself, sort of. “What kind of treats does your daddy get you?”
“Milk-Bones,” I said. I considered mentioning it was the variety pack, but knew it would smack of overcompensation.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Sucks to be you,” he said, lifting his left hind leg so the urine pooled around his front paws.
“At least I still have my testicles,” I said, unable to bite my tongue. It was true; my mother had always wanted to breed me so we could have puppies, but my dad said one dog was enough, so the compromise, I guess, was that I got to keep my balls, just in case.
“What’re testicles?” Tommy asked. It’s surprisingly hard to insult someone whose collar carries more ballast than his brain.
Trevor started sleeping over on weekends. I growled whenever he neared me, and he soon learned to keep his distance. When he was there they moved my bed to the living room. I could still scent his piss when he went in the middle of the night — always reeking of the scallion cream cheese he slathered on his bagels in the mornings.
My mother was showering before they went out one Tuesday night to Lincoln Center. Trevor was a classical buff and loved lecturing my mother on the subject, who feigned enthusiasm for it. “Listen to this movement,” I once heard him say to her, his eyes clenched in ecstasy. “Poetry.” My dad would occasionally listen to jazz on a low-watt station for background music, but he wasn’t a music lover. I suppose it was something she liked about Trevor, or at least could brag to her friends about — “Oh, Trevor just adores Schubert, too.”
Trevor was watching the Knicks game while sipping Chardonnay. I was lying on the rug pretending to be asleep.
The Knicks called a timeout after yielding a string of unanswered points. “Who’s in charge of this stupid team?” he said to the TV. “Never shoulda let Riley go. Downhill ever since.”
He looked away in disgust and down at me. “All right, dog,” he said. “Let’s make nice.” The Chardonnay bottle was half-empty. My mother takes a long time in the shower.
He got down on all fours in the beige chinos he stored at the apartment, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and tentatively patted my back. I sprang up, turned, and with a violent bark snapped my jaws right near his hand. I could’ve bitten him if I’d wanted.
“Jesus Christ!” Trevor said, pulling back and examining his spared fingers. “Dumb goddamn beast.”
I maintained dominant eye contact to let him know I didn’t give a fuck what he called me. When my mother came out of the bathroom he ran to her immediately. “Wally tried to bite me,” he said, closer in tone to a whiny child than he probably would’ve liked.
“Oh, my God!” She cinched the towel under her armpits. “Really? Did he get you?”
“I think he nicked me a little.” It took all my restraint not to lunge at his deceiving throat.
“Poor baby,” my mother clucked. “Where’d he get you?”
“My arm,” he said. His forearms were like black shag rugs; you couldn’t have seen the teeth marks of a wolverine.
She jutted out her bottom lip and made an excessive frown. “Would your boo-boo wike a wittle kiss?” she said, her voice rising several registers.
“My boo-boo would wuv a wittle kiss.” If they’d fed me dinner yet, I’m sure I would’ve vomited.
She kissed his arm a few times in various spots, then pulled him into the bedroom. In a few seconds I heard violins from NPR on full blast, and the light in the space under the door went out like a snuffed candle.
* * *
She called my dad that week and told him I’d started growling at people. I sat on the sofa so I could hear his voice.
“He never growls at people on the street with me,” he said.
“Well, he growls at friends of mine in the house.”
“Which friends?”
“Shelly, for one.”
“I don’t remember him growling at her before.” He was silent for a few seconds and cleared his throat unnecessarily. “Maybe he’s being territorial.”
“Whatever the reason, I want him to get some obedience training. The Y has a three-hour session Thursday night.”
“Absolutely not. Those programs thrive on cruelty.”
“This one isn’t like that, and I’ll be there the whole time. I can’t have him terrorizing guests.” I badly wanted to interrupt, to somehow signal that she was being dishonest, but if I so much as yelped it would be further proof of my insubordination.
“And how much does the privilege of canine Nazification cost?”
“I’ll pay for it.” Which meant Trevor would pay for it.
“I can pay for half,” he offered, and I almost fell off the couch. My dad isn’t one to pass up freebies.
“No.” Using her metallic reflection on the back of the remote control, she yanked a strand of gray hair her hairstylist had failed to dye blond. “This is clearly a problem only with me.”
He acquiesced without much of a fight. A year ago he never would have let her do this to me.
* * *
Chuck “C-Squared” Conti, a few inches above five feet in thick-soled shoes (he’s not fooling anybody, least of all those of us near the ground), an open-collar shirt exposing a silver necklace buried in a thicket of chest hair that crawls up his neck like ivy, in his perpetually constipated voice, on discipline:
“You gotta show the canine who’s boss. Masters, you gotta! Or else you know what that canine’s gonna do? He’s gonna show you who’s boss. That’s the C-Squared equation for discipline, masters.”
Chuck on housebreaking:
“Masters, how do you stop a canine from going pee-pee and poo-poo in your house? You don’t housebreak; you will-break. To clarify, because it confuses people: meaning you break the canine’s will, not that you, the master, will yourself break.”
Chuck on barking:
“Canines should be seen and not heard. The C-Squared motto? ‘The more they bark, the more you ignore.’ It doesn’t rhyme, but you’ll remember it. I get masters telling me, ‘Oh, oh, I just can’t ignore him when he’s barking.’ You know what I tell them? ‘Hey, master, do you want a canine, or do you want a dog?’ Because a dog barks; a canine obeys.”
I’ll never get those twenty-one dog-hours of my life back.
During a coffee break, as our mothers chatted, I talked to a hyperactive bulldog named Johnny, who had some kind of bumpy rash on his chest, like an archipelago of superfluous nipples.
“You don’t want that motherfucker having kids with her, do you?” he said after I told him about Trevor. “Here’s what you do. Tonight, while he sleeps, you’re gonna pull away the blanket with your teeth, ever so slowly, and sic ‘im in the balls!”
“They keep the door closed,” I said. It was a dumb idea — my mother had threatened me with a muzzle if I ever tried to bite him again — and I also didn’t want to reveal to Johnny that I wasn’t a biter by nature. Rescued from a pound, he mistakenly assumed I was a ruffian like him and unlike the other coddled Upper West Siders, many of whom were leashed to Hispanic nannies. I kind of enjoyed the association.
“Okay, okay, how ‘bout this,” he said, twirling in circles to help himself think. “You hide in the shower, right? You wait ‘til he comes in to do his thing. Then, just when his pants are down—”
“I sic ‘im in the balls?” I said.
“Tear those fuckers off!” he shouted in a high pitch, leaping and pawing his petite mother’s thighs.
“Down! Down, Johnny!” she screeched.
Johnny was insane, but he had a point. I needed to do something.
