The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  If, prior to the proliferation of digital photography, you ever took nude photos or opted to document yours or your friends’ sex lives in stills, you can sleep soundly knowing that the guys and gals working at the photo lab made their own copies. They probably made copies for their friends, too. I know, because I more than once returned from lunch to find the paper-towel-privacy-curtain up, and a stack of images I wish I’d never seen thoughtfully set aside for me by my coworkers. I didn’t have to ask. They were a giving bunch.

  With rare exception, anyone who’s hired a dog walker has relinquished control of a house key, much in the same way naïve, amateur pornographers did with their film in the mid-nineties. And a similar sort of tacit relation was constructed in that exchange, whether all parties knew it, or not. A dog walker’s key ring is, in a very real sense, a map of a surreptitious commons, one of which we are generally far more aware than clients are. Which is not to say it’s all sordid, or anything other than generally uncontroversial and common sense. Your dog walker is probably going to use your bathroom, for example, rather than risking everything that can go wrong with defecating in public. And he or she might, on occasion, pour themselves a glass of water. I’m not breaking any big news by disclosing this. Most client consultations involve an invitation to do such things.

  Then, there are other scenarios, where mere access stands in for permission, inasmuch as no real harm is done; scenarios in which any objection is keenly unlikely. For instance, charging a phone or a laptop at a client’s home. For the client, the decision to let an outsider into a private space is likely bound up with the dog walker’s status as a sort of surrogate; we’re performing in their stead, and thus the contours of license become blurred a bit. That surrogacy also has a temporality to it—a beginning and an endpoint. That is, there’s a specific occasion that makes for that exception. When you’re here to walk the dog … etc. But that occasion can be moved, quite literally, on a moment’s notice. A last-minute work obligation requires them to schedule an evening walk, or stagger the midday visit to a later hour. So, there’s nothing about the particular time of day that makes such license more or less acceptable. The operative exception is that the client is simply not home to be impacted in any way.

  This is where I am, perhaps, revealing something of a trade secret. In some technical sense, it can be argued that my taking a piss in a client’s hallway bathroom when I’m there to pick up or drop off their dog is distinct from my doing so for the simple fact that it’s there, I have keys, and they’re not home to care. But in the effects, and for the average dog walker, these two scenarios are identical. After all, dog walkers typically circulate in an area at once compact and familiar, so the spaces that key ring represents become less compartmentalized. One’s route is simply a network of facilities at one’s disposal, within the workday window.

  I should be clear: I’m not talking about anything done with malice or anything even approaching malice. A dog walker who steals objects from clients’ homes, for instance, is a piece of shit and has no business holding keys. But let’s say I was soaked to the bone only halfway through my day, from working in the rain, and splattered with the mud and grit that any activity in such conditions entails. You can bet your ass that—time permitting—I might’ve made use of clients’ showers, and thrown my clothes in their dryer. Again, the consequential dimension of such an act was whether it affected the client in any noticeable way. I’m reasonably certain most clients would not have cared, or would’ve at least been embarrassed to object. As their surrogate, in conditions they were perfectly happy to avoid, I’d have likely been afforded every comfort or convenience they themselves would’ve seized. At worst, it’s presumptuous. But uncontroversial, in principle.

  Here again, however, we run up against the quality of the operative exception. Let’s say I also routinely spared myself the cost and hassle of Laundromats by throwing my dirty clothes in a messenger bag, and running them through both the wash and dry cycles at a client’s home, checking in on things throughout the day, and retrieving it all at the end of my route. Or that I might’ve made a habit of taking ingredients to work with me, with which I made myself meals at clients’ homes—sometimes out of timeliness; sometimes because they had a better stove or cookware than I did. Hypothetically, I could’ve taken naps on clients’ couches when ill or fatigued, watched European football on their cable, or masturbated in their bathrooms when bored during down time between walks. It’s perfectly plausible that I invited friends lacking midday obligations to join me in availing ourselves of a client’s hot tub, while congressional staff shuffled past the privacy fence, back to their offices. Lacking sufficient seating in my own home, I may have scheduled and hosted reading groups in a client’s residence while they were at work. It’s not out of the question that, realizing I had a particularly light workday, I invited the one night stand in whose bed I’d woken up to tag along for the sheer challenge and adventure of having sex in every house on my route. And let’s say that, in the course of years no one ever noticed. Would it matter?

  I can say with some confidence that, in the actuality of how things go down, it doesn’t. Likely some quantum physics angle says these things don’t occur for the people who don’t know about them. But based on my own informal surveys of colleagues in the industry, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that all of the above—and probably much worse—happens with reasonable frequency. Including the one-night stand ride along. The rate at which clients discover such things and fire their walkers merely reflects the amateurish lack of tact certain folks bring to the routine.

  9

  A NOTE ON PRIVILEGE

  The trust a client exercises in handing off keys to a dog walker is worthy of a sociology dissertation, especially because it was, in my experience, often a pretty lazy, cavalier affair. Rarely did prospective clients ask for references, though I had a note on my iPhone from which reference contact info could be copied and texted to a client, before I’d even shown up for the consultation. It was enough that I was nominally charming, the same way people inexplicably ask the stranger sitting next to them at the café to watch their laptop while they hit the bathroom.

  Fact:

  That trust is highly mediated by race and class. It was enough that I was sufficiently charming and white and articulate in ways that made people feel safe. The things I got away with doing in people’s homes are ten times more shocking, given that black folks are shot on sight for knocking on a door for help after a car accident. No congressional staffer ever asked if I was legal to work in the United States, despite the fact that revelations on that issue tanked careers in their world, routinely. I was never subjected to a background check. No anxiety was ever provoked by my spoken accent. And so on. At the end of the day, everything I did in the job and every opportunity or freedom it afforded me was an effect of race and class privilege.

  While dog walking is not an exclusively white trade, it is nonetheless overwhelmingly so. Walk through any city where the trade operates, and you can’t help but notice. Not only should the gate-keeping mechanics that account for that tell us unflattering truths about ourselves, as a culture, but it also ought to bring into focus what dog walkers outside of the trade’s dominant demographics manage, on a moment-to-moment basis.

  Late in my career, a particularly incompetent colleague erroneously concluded he’d lost a dog he was sitting for a period of days (the dog had merely hid under a bed), and having explained this to the client, panic ensued and police were called. When they arrived, he had no ID on him and could not tell the officers the clients’ full names. He may have also been high. He was, however, definitely white. So none of it stopped the cops from helping him find the dog.

  I’d prefer not to ponder how it’d have ended had he been black.

  10

  THAT QUESTION YOU’RE DYING TO ASK

  Yes. Dog walkers deal with shit. Actual shit. Dog shit.

  For some reason, this preoccupies everyone but the dog walke
rs doing it. And that lack of squeamishness isn’t terribly interesting or profound. Go outside, and pick up the newspaper from in front of your house. If you don’t get the paper, steal your neighbor’s. Slide that plastic bag-sheath thing off of it. Put your hand in that bag, like it’s one of those oversized rubber gloves your mom wore to wash dishes. Now pick up any object outside, using that hand—a rock, some leaves, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Peel the bag off your hand, turning it inside out, so that whatever object you’ve picked up is concealed in it. The end.

  How long did that take you? About five seconds. A dog-walking route one could rank at the high side of average would involve doing this roughly thirty times. Two-and-a-half minutes. In four hours. I could rattle off any number of things in a dog walker’s workday that take up more time than that, and certainly take up more mental energy.

  Common rectal hygiene in much of the world involves considerably more direct hand-to-shit contact than dog walking. And it’s probably instructive in more ways than I can address in this short work that, as an American, the overwhelming majority of people who dilettantishly ask me if I’m squeamish about dog excrement are—unlike, say, much of the Muslim world—passing their tidy days with a mix of toilet paper and shit smeared up their ass cracks. Freedom isn’t free, I guess.

  I have three major problems with the premise of poop anxiety. First, the apocalypse we seem to think will swallow us whole if our taboos around bodily fluids and functions are transgressed is horseshit. Let me assure you, if you live in a city, pretty much every outdoor surface below knee height is covered in piss. You literally live in a piss-soaked environment. Dogs have taken care of that for you. Thankfully, in most cities outside California and the southwestern United States, it rains from time to time, and the piss-index dips for a day or two. So there’s a periodic reprieve. Nonetheless, this bizarre, sanitized construction of life that we so fiercely defend from contamination is little more than a story we tell ourselves. And it’s dumb. The vast majority of the world is not nearly so tidy, and people manage to not only survive, but accomplish feats that defy the imagination. Welcome to the grown-up table.

  Second, babies. Seriously. Most of you are procreating like mad, which means you’re handling quantities and varieties of shit that ought to induce nightmares, and not infrequently taking a stream of piss to the face in the process. Worse, you’re willingly sleep deprived (and have very likely forfeited all greater life aspirations) for the privilege. Even once you’ve graduated that phase of parenthood, you’re going to be wiping the equivalent of a very drunk person’s shitty asshole for another few years. And you’re seemingly incapable of shutting up about how it’s the greatest thing ever.

  Third, I am deeply skeptical of universal truth-claims of any stripe. But there is one truth I regard as absolute and unchanging, and it is that poop = funny. In fact, I am positively evangelical about this fact. If you don’t think bodily functions are absolutely hilarious, I’m not sure I even want to talk to you. And walking dogs for a living really only dialed in my devotion on that score. When a dog locks eyes with you while backing out a grumpy, with that mixture of spite and deep confusion in their expression—that is an incredibly special moment. The fact that you live in world where that even happens ought to make you want to go door to door with The Good News. When someone shits their pants—it doesn’t even matter if the cause happens to be life threatening. With time, it’s still funny. When one dog moves in to sniff something another has decided to mark, and you wind up taking him home with piss on his face? Incredible. When one dog locks in to pinch a few off and in his delicately balanced and highly vulnerable position gets his face fucked by an eager peer nearby? Day maker.

  This is a dog walker’s job. To bear witness to the most powerful truth on offer, and bask in it. ’Tis no burden, friend.

  11

  MOSES

  “At the time, I weighed just over one hundred pounds.” Cody was a slight—if indomitably scrappy—young woman when I met her. She once witnessed an accident while working, and pinned a guy twice her size to his car by his collar after hearing him hurl racist slurs at the cabbie he’d struck.

  “Just to put things into perspective, this dog had ten pounds on me.”

  We’d worked together in D.C., where she fronted a rather heavy, experimental punk band that acquired quite a profile in its short tenure. She also had virtually no filter when it came to conversation. I was as liable to hear of her one-night stand with a renowned anarcho-primitivist* and how she punted him out of bed for boycotting oral sex with women who forewent shaving as I was to learn how many days she could go without showering before her crotch “smelled like a hamster cage.” Both of these topics were as unremarkable—and as likely to be fodder for discussion—as an account of what she had for breakfast. It’s not that she was particularly bawdy, or sought to provoke out of some need for attention. Quite the opposite. She was unpretentious almost to a fault. Mostly, she just lacked much of a threshold for bullshit. And hangups and modesty were, in her estimation, bullshit. They were methods by which people set themselves apart, or exempted themselves from the messiness and complexity of everyone else’s lives. And she lived that sentiment intuitively, without a whiff of apology.

  Having since become a yoga instructor in Los Angeles, Cody was considerably more physically sturdy sitting across from me over brunch in Silver Lake. “I don’t know what breed he was—a black lab mixed with something huge. All I know is he looked really menacing, and his name was Moses—a commanding moniker that, I guess, kinda suited him.” Our waitress gently dropped our menus on the table in passing, clearly trying to not to disrupt our conversation. Formidable presentation notwithstanding, Moses was apparently a sweet dog. He possessed an energy that, combined with his sheer body mass, made him a bit of a wild card. But neither made for actual aggression. He was walked in tandem with a neighbor’s dog, in the U Street area, a few blocks east of where I’d first met Dougie.

  “I think that dog”—the neighbor’s dog—“was a chuggle,” Cody speculated, yanking her menu down abruptly, not sure if the term even existed. “A pug … mixed with a chihuahua, I guess? I think it’s actually called a chug.” There is apparently no end to the branding devised to distinguish hybrid breeds of dogs, themselves bred to mitigate the absolute catastrophe that is pure breeding—while, of course, retaining an elite distinction of some variety. These designer mixes will, no doubt, be further bred for their specific characteristics, recreating the same abusive shit-show that a lack of genetic diversity has already handed these poor animals. We ordered coffee, and the waitress made her way back toward the kitchen.

  “His name was Darby, and since his legs were so much shorter, walking them together meant Moses was constantly ahead of me, pulling, while Darby lagged behind, creating a split-arm thing, for me.” This particular piece of information was important, hinting at a methodological nuance potentially crucial to the story’s trajectory. Popular depictions of dog walkers typically feature a sole walker surrounded by umpteen dogs, leashes grouped on each arm. It’s not clear from whence this image came, but much of what it conveys is nonstandard. Walkers in Buenos Aires are reputed to work up to twenty dogs simultaneously, though I never witnessed it myself during my time there. Granted, I visited within a year of the 2001 financial collapse. The middle class had been gutted by the debt default, and the rich had largely fled (or at least their money had). So it’s not clear whose dogs anyone would’ve been walking, professionally. Either way, it’s been observed, and is held up as an extreme instance of this caricature.

  There’s also a network of Brazilians rumored to be pack-walking as many as sixteen dogs at a time on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. As one dog walker in the neighborhood explained it, they work in volume, charging something like 60 percent of market rate. So a single dog brings in fifty dollars a week or so. To break into the field, a new walker “buys” clients for a few hundred dollars, working off the cost of the investment (for roughly tw
o months) from more veteran walkers in the network, whose foothold and rapport generate new business.

  Beyond these two scenarios, I’ve found it uncommon to see anyone walking more than six dogs at once, and any group over four is a red flag for lousy judgment. Dogs don’t like being crowded. It makes them anxious. You’re not providing any meaningful service if the end result is an aggravated, stressed-out companion animal. Additionally, crowding can yield disaster in unanticipated situations. Without even the provocation of a pack walk, two Welsh terriers with fierce leash-aggression once turned on each other, set off by the mere sight of another dog on our walk. As I attempted to separate them, they attacked my pant legs, shredding the lower half of a pair of jeans. (I promptly carted them home, and shitcanned the client.)

  The matter of method in question is this: in my experience, even with a full group of four, all dogs are best leashed to the same arm, so as to keep a hand free for managing other things—namely emergencies. Your hand should be put fully through the loops at the end of the leashes, grasping where the lead and the loop meet. This tightens the loops around the hand so that if a dog pulls, the force is against the upside of where your hand meets your wrist, providing a second point of protection to the force of your actual grasp. This configuration also allows you to quickly shorten the lead by winding it around your fist with a simple wrist rotation. All the while, your other hand remains free.