“You going to my place?” the grad student asked coyly, from the far side of The Wyoming’s suddenly very cozy elevator. I felt guilty she was forced into such close quarters with me. I checked the clock on my phone. Nervously. There was no real risk I was late to my friend’s birthday thing, but pretty much any distraction would’ve sufficed at that point, short of being able to disappear entirely. I was fairly certain she was just making light of my outsider status, inquiring as to whether I was up to something nefarious. Like stalking. It probably embarrassed her how eager I was to assuage what I’d read as concern, feigned as it may have been.
“Ah, no. I’m just going to feed someone’s cat.” Definitely stammered. Summoning all the stupid earnestness I’d somehow evaded during puberty.
We passed from three to four in silence. Clearly attuned to the timing of the elevator from floor to floor, she looked up just before the doors opened on five. Eyes trained on me. Like prey. All confidence and seriousness. “That’s not nearly as exciting.”
She turned back to her mail and coolly strolled out of the elevator.
It didn’t even seem real. A sort of “Dear Penthouse Forum …” moment. As the evening wore on, I kept replaying the exchange in my head. Did that just happen? Do people do that? Certainly it was completely at odds with every other encounter I’d had in The Wyoming.
Christ, I thought to myself, actually laughing a little, as I rounded Columbia’s downward slope onto Connecticut toward the Hilton. What would she have done if I’d said, “Actually, yes. I am going to your place”?
18
A NOTE ON BOARDING
Don’t. Just don’t. If you can afford to pay for overnight care while you’re away, pay someone to do it in your home. Here’s why:
• Any veterinarian worth a shit is going to tell you that animals do best in their own environments. Absenting yourself from that is disruption enough. Don’t make it worse by tossing them into some unfamiliar space for days on end.
• Without fail, clients of mine who used boarding services reported their dogs were not themselves upon returning. They exhibited all manner of abnormal behaviors, from skittishness to lethargy to lack of appetite to digestive issues. Sometimes, this lasted days. Others, it lasted weeks.
• To make cleaning easier and reduce the likelihood of various incidental objects being destroyed, boarding facilities are often an acoustic nightmare. Polished concrete floors, painted cinder block walls, no real furniture or any other surface that might absorb sound. Dogs have incredibly sensitive ears. Putting them in such a space for days on end, alongside other dogs barking, shrieking, and so on, is predictably stressful and anxiety inducing.
• The constant stimulation that such environments yield is similarly distressing. In the home, your little guy can curl up in a corner or some other secluded spot and have some alone time. This is rarely the case in daycare setups.
• I’ve had friends who’ve worked at boarding/daycare businesses. First, the turnover is constant. There are few barriers to entry for employment in these places, and the pay is such shit that people rarely stay long enough to develop any useful expertise. They’re magnets for the terminally unhirable. And that’s when businesses aren’t simply finding some reason to shit-can people before the threshold of being legally obligated to provide benefits. Second, these friends have reported seeing dogs horribly mistreated—beaten with belts, in one particularly egregious case. This should be an absolute deal breaker. There’s no excuse for this, and no meaningful way for you to insure against it, once the doors close.
Here’s what you should do, instead:
• Find a freelance walker or pet sitter. Hiring an agency reduces your odds of having any rapport or direct relationship with the person caring for your animal.
• Ask for references. Contact said references. Any decent person in the trade should easily be able to provide you with three, and experienced ones can provide you with more. Neither should blink at this request. And yet, 90 percent of clients I met with never asked. Don’t be surprised if the person you’re asking won’t give you phone numbers. That’s a good sign, actually. You wouldn’t want your pet sitter giving out your phone number, would you? E-mail their references, and ask them for their phone numbers, if you need to talk to a live person (talking to a live person is recommended).
• Once you’ve settled on someone, establish some quality controls. Solid pet sitters will offer to text you photos and brief notes about how things are going. It’s 100 percent okay to request they do this. If they don’t have a device capable of doing both, you’ve hired someone who either doesn’t take their work seriously, or puts greater priority on some idiot principle about technology than they do your comfort. If you’re on good terms with neighbors, put them in touch with your sitter, and have them check in once or twice. It’ll add a layer of accountability, and provide a potential support in any unclear or emergency situation.
At the end of the day, direct relationships, community networks, and the hard work of maintaining trust are better suited to ensuring the well-being of your companion animal. There is simply no substitute. Anyone who would tell you there is has some interest at stake to which your peace of mind will be subordinated, and should be kept at a great, great distance.
19
LITTLE DEATHS
The relative purposelessness of my movement throughout the day lacked the single-mindedness of the more traditional Point A to Point B jaunts, and that meant an atypical lack of distraction—and a mostly useless spectrum of detail present in any given moment. That lack of any driving narrative to my inner monologue meant noticing, which, for anyone in my line of sight, meant being noticed. It wasn’t always a welcome shared experience.
Had it not been for the blanket wrapped around him, I might not have even given him a second thought. Deeply vulnerable, tender, even humiliating moments unfurl on people, indifferent to their preference of time and place, all day long. Breakups. Toddler meltdowns. Missteps and mild falls. Arrests. And the insidious, hushed secret of such contingency is that it is inversely proportionate to privilege. The homeless cannot hide how their bodies fail them, or the logical outcomes of scant access to toilets. Young black men are more likely to be cuffed on a curb in the afternoon sun than, for instance, their landlords—despite the likely distribution of criminality between them. There’s a decidedly not-accidental taxonomy to people pleading into pay phones. And so on. Most of us spare ourselves the ugly math of such constants, and thus surreptitiously construct considerably less unsettling notions of the world we inhabit, by simply being indoors. Not even by choice. A fluency with the equal parts structured and petty humiliations at hand in any given moment—an intimacy with the attrition and moral indifference of each day’s backstory is simply disciplined out of us by otherwise mundane demands on our attention.
I’d negotiated a tenuous peace with and an awkward etiquette in being that not-altogether-willing witness to other people’s personal moments. Opting for a deliberate state of distraction, ignoring people hit with some inopportune broadcast of their fallibility, fear, or suffering in public space seemed a contribution to some cosmic accumulation of cold human awfulness. I didn’t want to pass my day wandering about in that mind. So I settled for, in the least invasive—often wholly nonverbal—manner I could conjure, letting people know they weren’t alone in the moments for which they hadn’t prepared. But often enough, being in the field, exposed to whatever the human condition spit up in my presence, the courtesy of allowing someone to believe they weren’t seen was the most gentle option, if not the most expedient. It was counterintuitive and unsettling, but I learned to practice it as distinct from an aversive reaction, with time and trial.
He’d launched out of the front entrance to his building with an unlikely urgency, like he was two steps behind something or someone critical to his day. Nineteenth and Florida NW. Given the hour, and the swelling density of telecommuters in those blocks, I figured he’d overslept, and b
olted in the realization he’d missed some vital UPS delivery or such. Or perhaps he woke up sober and alone in the bed of someone he’d gone home with drunk, disoriented by the unfamiliar scenes around him. Regardless, despite his unsubtle, gesticulated panic, he seemed to go unnoticed by everyone but me.
But then he threw a curveball: he let the door close behind him. It threw me off. I tried and failed to read him, as he continued to wander Florida Avenue, his demeanor shifting into a sort of curiosity at his surroundings. Like he’d nodded off to snowfall, and woken to some Twilight Zone episode in which lower Adams Morgan sat brightening in the late-morning spring. He readjusted the blanket around his shoulders, pulling it tight at his chest, like he was settling into a more-than-momentary bout with the outdoor elements. Beneath his makeshift cloak, he wore nothing but a pair of bed shorts. Panic no longer registered. He wasn’t locked out. Or if he was, he either didn’t know or didn’t care.
As an Alaskan husky and I ambled east on Florida, circling the block between Eighteenth and Nineteenth, I could see him at various points, wandering aimlessly. I watched him shuffling calmly at the base of Nineteenth Street’s southward incline, back at the front of his building, observing traffic like it was utterly new to him. When we reached the intersection, he approached us.
“Do you know what time it is?” His voice lilted with an affect betraying his likely sexual orientation. Florida being the northern border of Dupont, it made sense. It was 2002. I wasn’t carrying a cell phone, and I hated how watches felt, so I wasn’t the best person for him to ask. The most I could do was guess based on what the kitchen clock read when I picked up the dog. “Ah, it’s probably about 10:45.”
Seeing him up close, his blonde hair curtained over what were more apparently sunken eyes. He was gaunt, though not otherwise visibly unhealthy. He pondered my answer in a manner befitting a disclosure of far greater consequence. I still half-suspected he was just pacing his building’s entrance, awaiting something or someone’s scheduled arrival.
“Say …”—he seemed to have forgotten our exchange up to that point, or simply lost interest—“Could you call me an ambulance?” I wanted to assure him this was a perfectly normal request; that he was still with the rest of us, out in the world. But it seemed unlikely I could adequately move through the task before me without further clarification, and the risk of flagging to him that nothing about his present situation made sense in the least.
“I don’t have a phone on me, but when I take this dog home, I can call from there.”
“That’s fine,” he said casually, returning his gaze to the passing cars.
His figure being what it was, his lacking any obvious signs of an emergency condition, and his seeming dissociation from even what he was asking left me wondering if he were living with late-stage AIDS; perhaps delirious from wasting, or mixing the wrong prescriptions.
“Can I tell them something in particular is wrong?”
“I just think … I think I’m dying.”
In the shell of a once likely factory atop an EPA superfund site in Brooklyn, sometime in 2013, I watched the stories come so hurried and unrehearsed as to almost stumble over one another. A nineteen-year-old, newly sober. Anguished and enraged because everyone had told him it would be easier. And it wasn’t. Nothing was easier. Everything was awful. No salvation was forthcoming, whatever his efforts. The two years that’d followed his parents kicking him out for his sexuality, he’d turned tricks to get by, and gotten high just to make it through each encounter. In short order, the dynamic flipped. Sex work serviced using. Staying clean and away from the johns blowing up his phone, while skipping meals and barely making rent. His speech was shaken. Full-bodied sobs.
Across from him, a man leaning into fifty described how using had been a salve for shame and stigma, as he eased into a life of any romantic or sexual possibility, after coming out; the only way to pry his way out of himself, and open to physical affection. Impaired, often risky affection. By the time he got clean, the two were fused, triggering one another. And in recovery, so were sobriety and celibacy. Seven years clean, confident he was better equipped than ever to forge healthy, rewarding romantic and sexual relations—he couldn’t. The fear of relapsing was paralyzing. He was adjusting to the possibility that his survival may preclude intimacy; a sentence most would never have to ponder.
All firemen in the District are trained EMS, and given the distribution of firehouses, they’re pretty much always the first responders. I wasn’t surprised to see the fire engine clogging up Florida Avenue as I made my way to my next client. Two responders sat with him on the edge of a planting box, and I couldn’t much tell what, if anything, they were doing. Toward the back of the truck, a guy who appeared to be the team’s supervisor was radioing back to dispatch. I caught his attention.
“I’m the one who called it in. What happened?”
He shook his head and then shrugged, as if I were somehow knowing and in on his obvious, dismissive annoyance. “Meth.” The easy answer.
A year or so later, we passed each other on that same block. He was fully clothed, this time, considerably more healthy looking. I searched his face for any sign he recognized me. He nodded a friendly hello. Perfect strangers.
20
MERRY CHRISTMAS: I HAD SEX IN YOUR HOUSE
The five-week period that runs from Thanksgiving to New Year’s is huge for pet care. Especially the stretch running from Christmas Eve to the first days of January. While standard workday routes ebb during much of this period, requests for overnight care spike dramatically. Under the right circumstances, thousands of dollars can be made. You learn to take advantage of this fact. Schedule your family holiday to-dos mid-December, then take whatever you’ve banked from the season’s work rush and go somewhere warm in February. Its effect on life routines is substantial, even annoying. But the payoff is often jaw dropping.
And typically some of this otherwise finite, episodic work can be converted into ongoing, daily clients. Someone hires you to care for or check in on their little ones while they’re away, and they wind up liking you enough to keep you around. If you do the whole thing right, you should see your annual revenue increase substantially, year to year.
That said, this season is also brutal. The learning curve that comes with any new client relationship basically threatens everything, and with experience, that looming inevitability wears on the nerves. Often, the people who inquire about services during this window have never considered hiring someone to care for their pets, and every facet of what’s material to the task is new to them. Alarm codes go unmentioned, and you wind up explaining to ADT (and usually the cops) why it is you’re inside a home that doesn’t match the address on your ID (or you just lock things back up and bail before they arrive). Leashes are hidden some place, and the client won’t answer their phone. The dog that was perfectly friendly during the consultation is now defensive as fuck, and leashing them up involves ninja-level acrobatics (with good odds on comprising one’s bodily integrity). So, in addition to the workload, you’re managing contingency at pretty much every turn, with the added pressure of knowing that failure probably means someone rebooking a flight, to remedy whatever’s come unhinged.
Obviously, once you’ve committed to staying overnight in someone’s home, you can’t then be booked to live out of someone else’s. So you wind up working what I call rounds, from about 6 a.m. to just past midnight. Beginning with the dog(s) with which you’re staying, you walk every dog you’ve booked (no matter the distances between them), as though they were yours. Morning. Midday. Afternoon. Dinner. Bedtime. Cats you’re tasked with feeding get worked into that schedule, with less demanding frequency. Depending on how many clients you’ve taken on, these rounds can be three hours apiece, leaving maybe an hour between them.
This, in addition to commutes. I worked on a bike, and my rounds would often begin somewhere in central Capitol Hill, taking me as far east as RFK Stadium, then up to Trinidad, taking Florida Avenue (a
pothole-laden gauntlet, wherein any cyclist is effectively disrupting every driver’s personal make-believe music video—and tempting a corresponding rage) west across the District to Logan Circle, up the hill into Columbia Heights, Mt. Pleasant, Adams Morgan, and then finally back down to Dupont, before riding the four or five miles back to Capitol Hill.
We’re also talking about late December, here. If I were lucky, precipitation wouldn’t kick in until the new year. But often, I did rounds in the worst of winter weather. Snow. Freezing rain. “Wintry Mix” (on par with swarms of mosquitos, as experiences go). To survive, I layered like crazy, wore two cycling balaclavas simultaneously, and dropped $350 on a snowboarding jacket. I also acquired two pair of “slacks” made by a cycling company in Brooklyn, fashioned from material developed to prevent death from hypothermia in English airmen who survived being shot down over the channel in World War II. As soon as any liquid touched this fabric’s surface, the threads swelled, fully sealing out moisture as though waterproof. I could actually pour coffee on them, and watch it bead up and roll off. These cost me $180 each. And they were (and remain) worth every goddamn penny.
The Dog Walker Page 12
