The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  When I stepped off the plane at Dulles mid-November, still destroyed, with the added humiliation of a failed escape attempt under my belt, I had thirty-five cents in my pocket. I was reasonably confident I’d find work in another nonprofit. Though only eventually. Such things always took time, even with well-placed contacts, and in the interim, I’d settle for any shitty retail gig I could nail down. I loathed the idea, but I had little choice. I’d deliberately set out to keep my return as quiet as possible, but my first morning back, I surfaced at a café staffed by a longtime friend, unable to decline food, now making a conscious effort to treat my body a little less terribly. It was there, slouched over the classifieds of the Washington City Paper, that I paused at an ad for a position with a small dog-walking agency.

  Can You Show Me How to Dougie?

  The first professional dog walker I’d met was a guy I’ll call Dougie. We were introduced in what was then a parking lot on the corner of Thirteenth and U Streets NW, across from Ben’s Chili Bowl—one of D.C.’s longest-standing cultural landmarks. It was June 1999. I was twenty-one. At the time, I’d just returned from an underwhelming antiwar conference in The Hague; my most enduring memories were that I’d chickened out of dropping twenty-five dollars to watch a live sex act in some seedy Amsterdam dive at the last minute, and had skipped the cost of housing by camping in The Hague’s main park for a full week. At home, I had been working two or three days as an administrative assistant at an animal rights organization alongside several overnights each week at a small church-run haven for homeless women. The evenings I wasn’t there were mostly spent reading in an over-air-conditioned basement apartment near American University, rented from a sweaty, mouth-breathing latter-day Marlon Brando, prone to drunken misdials that resulted in answering machine inquiries about “mother-daughter combos.”

  I’d recently been convicted alongside twelve other folks on federal charges of “invading the property of a foreign government” and named by said foreign governments’ cartoonish daily newspaper as a “terrorist” on retainer with both the CIA and the Vatican. That latter bit would’ve been convenient, if true, as none of what I was up to at that moment paid terribly well. My life was a headlong dive into coupling moral outrage with punk-rock irreverence, in which long-term stability figured mostly as trite; quaint, on a good day. I could’ve been stuck working retail or (god help me) food service, and instead, I had more free time than I really deserved; raw material from which to cultivate a not inconsiderable annoyance for various institutions.

  Dougie, by comparison, struck me as exceedingly normal. There was something unsettling about it; like he was a brazen imposter in circles saturated in a seriousness for which he had little use and to which he felt little obligation. I’d guessed him probably a decade or more my senior. He was stocky, had given up fighting his thinning crown, and exuded a joviality that seemed a fitting accompaniment to his rosy, cherubic features. Committed as he seemed to be, he looked an unlikely activist. His overall presentation was that of a vaguely bearish gay man, with none of the corresponding fashion sense. I’d abandoned any guesses about his sexuality upon discovering that he frequently left the house in sweatpants; a move I (only half-jokingly) declared a white flag of existential surrender—like sitting down in the shower. It was not uncommon for him to circulate videos from a campfire on some farm, decked out in his signature sweats, a warmer version of a Members Only jacket, and a clashing knit cap with earflaps, belting out a capella folk songs just as likely Balkan as Appalachian. He thus became, over the years, especially for other friends of mine who knew of him, a sort of cartoon character, and (no doubt exaggerated) tales of his antics were a routine and celebrated feature of our conversations.

  However comically absurd he appeared on the surface, it went without saying that he was, by comparison, far and away the better human being. And likely the happier, as well. Whereas Dougie embodied a sort of childlike, wide-eyed curiosity and absolute lack of pretension, my circles were hopelessly self-serious, despite still being mostly populated by adolescent dickheads. However noble our cause(s), we were still only a few years away from a distinctly juvenile lack of judgment. Just a week prior to my meeting Dougie, I’d regaled my tent mates in the Zuiderpark with an arguable low point of my adolescence in Sicily: an incident in which I’d assslapped an elderly widow decked out in the traditional black, from the anonymous comfort of a passing car. “Congratulations,” one of them replied. “You’re officially the eighth person I know who is definitely going to Hell.”

  Dougie and I crossed paths that day in 1999 for the purposes of a carpool into rural Virginia. We were both attending a training camp in direct-action protest tactics organized by the Ruckus Society, on a former tobacco plantation. If you’ve ever seen activists hang like rock climbers from a building, dangling a banner, or seen people locked to concrete-filled buckets to stop a pipeline or an arms shipment—odds aren’t terrible that they were trained by Ruckus. You typically don’t just learn these kinds of things by improvising. Back in the late nineties, these camps were happening every few months, free of charge to anyone whose application was accepted, thanks to considerable funding somehow coaxed out of Ted Turner (yes, that Ted Turner), who apparently fancied himself an environmentalist, for some brief moment. A few months after this particular training, however, Ruckus played a central coordinating role in the minor November uprising that shut down the World Trade Organization’s ministerial in Seattle, and kicked off several years of antiglobalization upheavals. Turner had, it turned out, a much more substantial romance for free-trade agreements than he did the natural world or its inhabitants, and he promptly pulled all funding for Ruckus, curtailing their activity considerably.

  Over dinner our first night at the camp, Dougie bonded with a guy from New York who wouldn’t have been out of place in the cast of Clerks. He looked more likely to hold forth on what hockey fights feel like after huffing gas than anything in which I might’ve been remotely interested. But there he was, attending camp as part of a group practically at war with Rudolph Giuliani over the mayor’s seizure of community gardens on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The bulk of his conversation with Dougie circled around their shared line of work: accompanying dogs around each’s respective city. I’d been aware the occupation existed, but had sort of assumed it was a negligible rarity; a unicorn gig that doubled as a punch line enabled by First World frivolity. Hockey Fights admitted he moonlighted thrifting cigar boxes from shops on pregentrification St. Mark’s and then selling them on eBay as “vintage,” but it seemed unlikely from his description that this could amount to a primary income. His tone suggested there was nothing terribly remarkable about the fact that he was making a proper and comfortable living leading groups of dogs around Lower Manhattan. I studied Dougie’s responses, expecting some disbelief, but he instead chimed in with his own shoptalk, waxing jubilant about the critters, the clients, and the truncated work hours this all involved.

  I was enraptured. I’d only been back in the United States four years, and this revelation left me feeling as though fairly major features of my environment had eluded me. Had these two weirdos really managed to short-circuit the parameters of making a comfortable living? They clearly weren’t working terribly hard—nor had this coup they’d pulled off come by way of any disproportionate insight or planning. It was as though they’d just fallen ass-backward into it, oblivious to its novelty. Like, “Yeah. I’m a professional doughnut eater. It’s no big deal.”

  Becoming Mr. Right Now

  My call to the number in the classified ad was followed by an interview, in a house on the far, western side of the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, half a block out of Rock Creek Park; a sort of unsculpted valley-forest that cuts vertically through the northwest quadrant of D.C. From the outside, anyway, there aren’t a lot of shitty houses in Mt. Pleasant. That said, this one seemed slightly out of reach for a thirty-something single mother running a pet-care agency out of her kitchen extension. Especially since
the business had recently been split with her ex-husband in a divorce. The house may have been acquired similarly, come to think of it, though I never asked. The setting seemed a bit too polished for the sort of revenue I suspected she was pulling in with a staff of four. My skepticism was mostly down to having not fully grasped what it was I was stepping into.

  Much like narcotics, dog walking is effectively all margins. Its operating overhead is very nearly negligible, limited both by its labor-intensiveness and lack of transparency. Urban neighborhoods are dense enough—and traversing them flanked by four or more dogs is conspicuous enough—that visibility and marketing are practically built-in. Word of mouth is, in many cases, perfectly sufficient. The liability insurance James Daley had sought to institute in the thirties, now very much a reality, figures mostly as an authenticating luxury; a “look, Ma, I’m a real business!” accessory. No licensing or certification is required—in nearly a hundred years no oversight agency has seen fit to become sufficiently dexterous with the industry’s terms or moving parts to regulate it. Additionally, the rate at which these outfits generate revenue increases not in increments, but exponents. A single thirty-minute Monday-to-Friday client amounts to an annual gross of $5,000 to 8,000, depending on local price points, and one is typically working that in a multiple of three or four at any given point. All of this in a workday that can last as long as six hours. It is, once one hits a critical mass of clients, breathtakingly lucrative.

  It was even more lucrative if you ran half the business off the books, as my would-be boss was doing. This was not at all uncommon, and it illustrates perfectly the anything-goes quality of the trade. In theory, at least, the relative lack of operating overhead has the downside, when running a business legitimately, of yielding comparably few tax write-offs. The incentive to hide revenue, and the means at one’s disposal in such an already informal and obscure trade, ought to be self-evident. The whole thing felt keenly illicit, and yet there seemed little indication that any state actor who ought to give a fuck was doing any such thing. Even now, about the only way one could really get any sense of how the industry’s grown, where it’s grown, or who’s working in it is through the membership rolls of the two industry associations that cater to it—Pet Sitters International, and the National Association of Professional Petsitters—neither of whom answer their phones, return calls, or reply to e-mails. As far as I’ve ever been able to tell.

  I all but waved her off when the boss mentioned a trial period. “It’s not for everyone. It’s incredibly physical. People have quit after a single day.” Bold, given that I’d just turned twenty-four weighing in at what I had at puberty, and only in the preceding month or so resumed eating with any regularity. Hired on the spot, I left that day with a six-month commitment and little intention of staying in the business. Frankly, I had little respect for it, as work. It seemed almost unspeakably quaint. Aside from the rather dire necessity of income, I was mostly there out of what seemed a fairly finite curiosity. The initial, relative mysteriousness made it enticing, but as work it seemed an embarrassing admission. I dove in with the hope that some quantity of fleeting adventure might be in the cards before I had to scuttle back into office environs. There was an off-the-books ten bucks an hour in it, in the meantime. Twelve if I made it three months.

  I turned up my first day, midmorning, to be paired with Fede—an Argentine immigrant breaking in as an illustrator, when he wasn’t drawing an off-the-books weekday income wandering the streets of Mt. Pleasant. He was handsome, nondescript, and all business—which he probably had to be. While he’d married an American woman, he wasn’t a U.S. citizen yet, and in our conversations I got the distinct impression that every resource made available to him was quickly allocated to maintaining any and all stability in his world. He retrieved a page-length strip of paper from the “work” table near the door off the back of our boss’s kitchen, broken out into four sets of four names. It should’ve been a sobering hint of what was to come, but the physicality of what it foreshadowed was lost on me. A corresponding ring of keys was retrieved and we set out south into the neighborhood.

  After three days, I was so sore I could scarcely move during my off-hours. Every muscle ached and dragged with an unwieldy fatigue—even during more rested, energized moments. Somehow, I hadn’t considered that walking nonstop for four to five hours a day was well outside anything I’d ever demanded of my body. It kicked the living shit out of me. My inner thighs chafed to the point of being open wounds, some days. My toes formed blisters as big as the toes themselves. My lips cracked and bled from the cold and exposure; my fingers followed suit from handling keys every few minutes, in the dry, open air. And then there was the rain.

  Yet after three weeks, making as much if not more than I would’ve in any nonprofit gig for which I was qualified; struck by how little interpersonal drama came home with me each day; and beside myself at getting to spend my work hours bounded by some of the most gorgeous architecture the District had on offer, I did as my forebears ambling about Central Park had: I abandoned any and all plans to return to office life.

  There was simply no compelling reason to go back. Even when committing to a more conventional work environment held the possibility of advancement, it was a gamble contingent upon pairing overperformance with the stress of groveling; one in which the house almost always won. The whole enterprise seemed rigged to induce unrewarded increases in productivity, and in the nonprofit world, this came with a loaded ration of moral weight. You were shamed into working for nothing, for the sake of “the cause.” In a stunning bit of self-caricature, friends working for AFSCME as union organizers were fired for trying to unionize, themselves. I, on the other hand, just had to ride my bike, be nice to people, and hang out with dogs. It was basically every eight-year-old’s dream. I slept in, waking most days at 10 a.m. Eventually, seeking to cover later walks, my boss staggered my day, starting me at 1 p.m. There was no pressure to do my work faster, more intensely, or more productively. Further, it was finite. When it was done, it was done. My life outside of work hours was mine.

  In truth, it did take some adjustment. I had spent my then short adult life earnestly committed to certain principles, and surreptitiously bound up with that was a sense that the present was—at least in presentation—a sacrifice toward something greater. Movement-building was, for my milieu, very much akin to old-school cathedral-building; you didn’t expect to see results in your lifetime. It wasn’t far off from the work ethic most of us inherited from our parents or our culture more generally—it just eschewed any attention to investment those might’ve counseled. Our postadolescent pursuit of authenticity was all about self-denial. So the prospect of making introductions at an organizing meeting, or some social gathering, and having to say out loud that I made my living in a manner that had real joy at its center was embarrassing. We had, after all, lampooned the subculture of dumpster diving, scamming, and otherwise siphoning off capitalism’s excess, as a lifestylist cop-out in radical clothes. Even working for a global debt-relief coalition with questionable ties to the Democrats showed more of a spine; at least the compromise there was in the name of something not strictly self-indulgent. Dog walking was different. It seemed childish. It flagged a shrugging resignation to the absurd consumer whims of late capitalism, while basking in a general lack of obligation.

  Ultimately, I stopped caring. The solitude of my workday proved indispensable in recovering from the disaster that had been my year up to that point. Instead of moody coworkers, or passive-aggressive bosses, I gave directions or made coffee recommendations to strangers, all of them delighted I even bothered. I keyed into thirty homes a day where I was greeted by a living being unable to contain its excitement about why I was there. I paused at regular intervals, marveling at how gorgeous my city actually was. These, among so many other subtleties, began to figure as an enormous privilege. The moments of deep presence in which I noticed, and said to myself, Holy shit, guy, this is what you’re actually getting
paid to do, were frequent. And, to anyone else, I could say the flexibility of my schedule freed me up to support movement work most folks I knew could not take on.

  I moved my books and a few other possessions into a collective house on Seventeenth Street NW, behind a Salvadoran restaurant on Mt. Pleasant’s main corridor. My rent totaled less than three days’ work, and my cost of living was greatly reduced by a communized economy within the house. I cooked for my housemates, and attended traffic-disrupting bike protests against the recent invasion of Afghanistan.

  At night, I read used books in teahouses. And I set about beginning again.