The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  13

  LUBE: IT’S NOT JUST FOR SEX ANYMORE

  For just under ninety days, in the spring of 1998, I worked in D.C.’s now defunct LGBT bookstore. I was underemployed, and spotted their flyer offering slightly better-than-minimum-wage pay, plus benefits, while out with housemates at the District’s long-mourned vegetarian haunt and sometimes punk venue, Food for Thought.

  “Did they ask if you’re straight?”

  I knew this would be my mom’s first question. Oddly, my prior employment at a bookstore in the Georgetown Park mall hadn’t prompted questions about whether I was banging the bored wives of congressmen.

  “No, why would they? Also, I’m not. It’s a pretty stupid, meaningless category, no?”

  Without realizing it, I was already feeling averse to more traditional—say, my mom’s, or even those conventionally understood as “progressive”—notions of sexuality: building an identity around what sort of friction gets one off had come to seem pretty dubious. The only reason such preferences mattered more than, say, what you soap up first in the shower, is that certain people convinced other people that what one does with one’s genitals tells some disproportionately deep truth about who one is.

  “Wait. What do you mean—you’re not straight? What are you telling me?”

  This is why the coming-out process almost never involves the phrase, “Mom … Dad … I like having my pucker consensually and capably fucked.” We’re relatively clear on the fact that such joys, in and of themselves, aren’t really any of our business and have negligible impact on where our lives overlap. Unless our lives overlap in someone’s asshole. But the conspicuously nebulous secret supposedly embedded in that confession? We harbor an inexplicable entitlement to and have proven ourselves abundantly amenable to routinely destroying people over it. Even though that secret is about as real as Santa Claus.

  “Come on, mom. You can’t possibly believe I made it to adulthood without ever having sexual contact with another male. You’re not that naïve.”

  (Long. Awkward. Pause.)

  “Well, whose pud were you pulling?”

  I held the phone away, forcing hysterical laughter into as inaudible a sound as I could manage.

  “Do you really want the answer to that question?”

  “No.”

  “Probably for the best. Good talk, mom.”

  This was still a whole half-decade before the abolition of sodomy laws in the United States, and the internet was not yet user driven in ways that easily facilitated the formation of virtual communities. The District still technically had laws against “fornication” on the books. So spaces like bookstores were deeply necessary. A refuge. We were forbidden from censoring anything, or hanging up on anyone who called, as a boundary against perpetuating the shaming people faced on the outside. It turned out a friend of mine was dating the assistant manager, and she’d call in anytime I was working, sending me searching the magazine section for specifically dated copies of Latin Inches, and then subjecting me to incredibly graphic lines of questioning as to how my anatomy compared. To which I was required by store policy to respond with a not at all conspicuous, “I’m sorry, I can’t give you that information,” while coworkers and customers alike looked on.

  The only employee manual I was ever given pertained to lube. The various brands and varieties we stocked, their qualities, the uses for which they were best suited, etc. Water-based (condom-compatible) vs. oil-based. Goopy vs. runny. “JO” (for solo use) vs. the stuff with the Ben Gay–esque warming agent, that you scoop out like pomade (the label read “elbow grease”). I had to memorize all of it. The shop didn’t sell sex toys or the other sorts of things you’d find in a sex shop, but it sold lube. A lot of lube. Like, gallons. Daily. I know this because I was literally handing off half-gallon bottles, affixed with hand pumps. And not only to gay men. To lesbians. The odd hetero couple, even. I quickly deduced that anal sex was a grossly underreported activity, and I became somewhat hyperaware of it happening all around me. You know when someone points out something in a picture, and thereafter you can’t not see it? Like that. Except what I couldn’t not see was people balls- and/or elbow-deep in each other’s backsides.

  This meant that throughout any given day at my job, I was navigating transactions with customers that involved an intimacy most of my friendships did not. Counseling complete strangers on how to optimize, prolong, and better tailor to their desires a pleasure taboo bound up with everything from social condemnation and religious guilt, to deviance, emasculation, and … well … excrement. And yet, in a twist perhaps worthy of a sociology dissertation, I learned quickly that there was a bright boundary for most people around actually acknowledging the act itself in any explicit way. Something about it was too tender, too vulnerable to be named. It was as if to go to the source, the very fulcrum upon which these detailed and often clinically graphic conversations turned, was to excavate and color saturate every desperate, normalizing act of physical and emotional violence suffered by the person to whom I was speaking. Understandably, some tiny kernel of their experience needed to remain unambiguously and safely theirs. It was never a tension we openly discussed, but it was always present, always palpable.

  The delicate verbal dance this required was not unlike pushing two magnets together. I nonetheless learned it; how to anticipate and assuage anxieties someone could not be brought to verbalize; how to take seriously and tend to desires that could be owned in one moment, effaced in another; how to affirm and usher someone’s attention toward the unequivocal dignity of joy, while pirouetting through a minefield of self-hatred and stigma. A sodomy Sherpa, if you will.

  I was eventually given a week to quit, or else be fired. It turns out that, whatever “liberatory” claims an enterprise can make for itself, some things are shameful. Namely, the comedian Leah Delaria’s stand-up routine about Reagan’s AIDS legacy and her reference to spite-fisting the former First Lady and impersonating her as a sock puppet. This apparently wasn’t in-store stereo appropriate, notwithstanding the fact that we sold it. The management was also shorting the pay of the one Latina they had on staff, presumably thinking she wouldn’t speak up and that the rest of us wouldn’t care. The day of Youth Pride, on which the store was annually beset upon by jubilant throngs of queer teens, I bought four books on my employee discount and promptly walked off the job.

  What I held on to, though, was that ability to discern when it was advantageous to perform an understanding of something that would otherwise compromise someone’s modesty. I discovered very quickly, especially as I later phased out of working for pet-care agencies and into building my own freelance client base, that competency as a dog walker can be measured almost entirely by that very intuition. Run a cursory search for pet-care businesses in a given U.S. city, and you’re bound to come across an ungodly number of names you wouldn’t be caught dead saying out loud. Waggy Walkies, or some similarly cringe-worthy atrocity on the English language. If you’re in the market for someone with whom to entrust your animal companion’s well-being for some portion of each day, the first thing you’re going to do is wonder whether whoever came up with that name was recently struck in the face with a heavy object. The second thing you’re going to do is wish such a fate upon them, just before you resume looking for a dog walker.

  This inability to glean that a client is in the market for a service with which they will heretofore be associated—if only in their own minds—has ramifications beyond your having failed to notice you’re marketing the care of a living thing and not the services of a birthday clown or some new diaper wipe. It suggests you’re oblivious; that you won’t notice things of real import, in situations with potentially fatal consequences. But more subtly, it betrays an oblivious lack of regard for the client. At minimum, their encounter with you should not compromise their self-respect.

  And it’s here that that attention really counts: human-animal relationships are incredibly weighted, emotionally complex things. The fact that a cl
ient has reached out to you at all suggests they care about this weird, furry thing in ways that involve some degree of projection. They see themselves reflected in their animal. They very likely perceive and deeply believe in far more personality in their dog than is cognitively plausible. They baby-talk to it. They make sacrifices for it that are well out of proportion with a being that will be lucky to live more than a decade in many cases. And when that relationship comes to a close, they will be reduced to an absolute mess—probably within earshot and line of sight of professional colleagues, dating prospects, and children too young to see them as anything but invincible. The reasons for them to fear the real risk of embarrassment in how they relate to this little being are manifold. And at the end of the day, this emotional intensity is precisely what allows dog walkers to command the price point that they do. It should be honored. Not in some cynical preservation of a dog walker’s economic self-interest, but because humans digging deep and risking that for the joy that is empathy is a fucking gift. It is what holds back the monsters at the gate: the flicker of an immune response to the worst of what humans have brought into this world. It is not to be trifled with.

  If you’re not willing to accept and honor that that is, in even its silliest manifestations, absolutely sacred, you have no business in the trade, and you should promptly—for everyone’s benefit—get the fuck out. More still, you should humor whatever modesty is required for someone to wade into that adventure. That means learning how to perform client consultations. Deftly. Attentively. Disarmingly.

  14

  INDICATOR SPECIES

  As the demand for dog walking has grown in particularly dense, gentrifying urban centers, many an entrepreneur has seized upon it as a scalable service enterprise like any other. It isn’t, and when the MBAs get going, an often illustrative bit of unwitting self-parody results, on a variety of fronts.

  First, there is an open presumption of expendability when it comes to workers. Large-scale pet daycare and dog-walking agencies in New York City advertise weekly open interviews with candidates for whom they’ve seen not so much as a resume, signaling to workers their own precarity, and to clients an evidently epic turnover rate. The former is an extreme version of a longstanding and common tactic in retail industries. Management continues to advertise openings or accept applications even when fully staffed, so as to discipline their workers through a constant, enforced vulnerability. The latter reflects an utter lack of self-awareness and an obliviousness about the service they’re offering or how to market it. Setting aside the risks this sloppy vetting poses—both for the safety of living things, and the security of clients’ homes—dogs are incredibly sensitive beings, with often complex needs and interests. Stability in their relationships is of a premium. The only reason a service provider wouldn’t advertise their sensitivity to these considerations is that they don’t get them. At all.

  At the same time, the lack of barriers to entry in the trade tends to attract some very questionable members of the managerial class. No qualifications are required; one needn’t even have ever so much as looked at a dog. Often, these businesses are acquired through purchase. So cluelessness and self-infatuation make for a dangerous combination: grown adults acting the part they bought their way into, as though sticking a card in your bike spokes makes you Evel Knievel. I’ve had agency interviews where owners courted me with the delusional “genius” of their expansion into online pet-supply retail or nebulous pet-care certification credentialing services, with negligibly little explanation or sense of why any of what they were selling was even desirable (much less competitive with existing models). Another feigned to contract me as a consultant, when she discovered her underpaid, overworked staff was cutting corners (mostly, skipping walks), a situation paired with abysmal employee retention, which put her at risk of being unable to meet the needs of her existing clients. I asked if she’d considered paying them more, or perhaps offering benefits or some profit-sharing structure. She countered with the suggestion I cover her existing labor gap, at the same shitty pay the rest of her staff apparently resented. Perhaps most telling of all, I was once asked to interview my potential employer, as though their fascinating responses would be sufficient compensation for my time, prior to even being hired.

  A recurrent and rarely understood feature of commercial dogwalking outfits is the noncompete clause as a standard, baseline condition of employment. In effect, in exchange for any hope of being hired, an applicant is compelled to sign a document that enables their would-be employer to sue them for continuing to work as a dog walker after ceasing to work for the company in question. This cuts against the most classic models of work-experience acquisition, effectively giving a single employer outright ownership of their workforce’s relevant skillset. It also applies a de facto downward pressure on wages: one cannot translate one’s skills into a better opportunity, and one’s knowledge and ability of a given trade effectively dissolve into thin air when not generating revenue for a specific employer.

  Worse still, structuring a business this way hobbles quality control, by immunizing an already undemocratic scenario. A smaller agency I worked for had two tiers: the owner, and the four of us working for her. The back-end, administrative dimension of the outfit was totally opaque; we showed up and worked the schedule of dogs we were given each day. Twice in as many weeks, my boss failed to put a certain client on my schedule. The first time, she offered to pay for the rug the dog pissed on while locked in the house all day. The second, the client was prepared to move to another service. All of this was out of view for those of us doing the actual work. So I was surprised when I ran into this particular client one day and she mentioned the firing of a coworker I was absolutely certain did not exist. Rather than be transparent with our clients, and own mistakes or lapses in service, our boss had invented a worker, blamed him for the problem, and positioned herself as the responsible proprietor by assuring the client that this slacker had been canned. Given that I had performed reliably and to the satisfaction of the client, I clearly stood to offer a better service, working with her directly. This would’ve been mutually beneficial in that I’d have been entitled to the full value of the invoice, as opposed to working for a wage. I was not bound by a noncompete (our boss was hardly so attentive to detail), but had I been, such a solution would’ve been cause for a disorganized, dishonest business owner to sue one or even the both of us. Regardless, even revealing I knew this story to be 100 percent bullshit would’ve cost me my job.

  Noncompetes also ensure, in perpetuity, an unskilled labor pool. If one cannot take one’s skills elsewhere, only those with no skills will apply to work. And on the flip side, businesses will only hire those with no experience, for fear of being sued under a noncompete. Conventional logic would dictate this is a terrible marketing strategy, but employers are increasingly confident their customers are too stupid and undiscerning to ferret this out. Indeed, according to The New York Times, noncompete clauses are steadily proliferating to unlikely trades. Editors, landscapers, yoga teachers, personal trainers, hair stylists—even interns are being slapped with and bound to bans on working in the field for which they’re apprenticing. Which means that you can be enticed to provide free labor for a period of time, in anticipation of and as an investment toward future employment, and if an employer simply decides they’d rather just not pay a new someone for the same period of time, stringing together desperate, unpaid workers indefinitely, they can even bar you from being paid for that same labor elsewhere. Typically, these clauses have expiration dates or geographic limits. But it ultimately doesn’t matter. With innovation in so many fields moving at such rapid pace, returning to work from which you’ve been barred for six months to two years means you might as well move on.

  It’s also not uncommon for a dog-walking agency to be but one limb in a small empire. The second agency I worked for launched a housecleaning service, doubling the value of its existing client base, while replicating the lucrative cost-minimal stru
cture of a staff comprised entirely of contractors. The lack of real overhead in both trades likely resulted in capital sufficient to finance other such ventures. And on and on. Much as Amazon’s business model is built around monetizing consumer data—and an almost contemptuous indifference to the products it sells—the landscape of commercial dog walking is more often than not breathtakingly cynical, despite literally selling care for living beings. The correspondence between these two disparate iterations of enterprise suggests a lack of novelty to any of it. It is, in effect, the world we wake up to; the air we breathe; the orientation of those with decision-making power expressed with greater or lesser degrees of candor. Dog walking being so unencumbered by any real standards or accountability, its entrepreneur class can avail themselves of a sometimes stunning lack of subtlety.

  So, as an exercise in meeting entrepreneurial logic on its own terms, and foregrounding its brazen contempt for the intelligence of others and the actual content of the human activities it colonizes, below I’ve answered the job application questions featured on the website of one of New York City’s largest dog-walking agencies.

  You’re welcome.

  Do you have an iPhone or smartphone? [Y/N]

  I have an iPhone. My friend unlocked it for me after I couldn’t pay the bill anymore. So now I have prepay service through another carrier (and a new number the bill collectors from the last one don’t know about). I rarely get better than an edge signal in New York City, and occasionally let the service lapse in favor of eating. Hope that’s okay.