The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  The number listed on our website was pointed at my phone more often than not, so I had a pretty direct interface with how people reacted to what we were doing. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to call, kind of flustered, and say “I just forewent The Washington Post this morning, and read your entire website, instead.” While explaining services and pricing, I’d also inform clients that we ran the company democratically, and that each of us had access to full health benefits and six weeks of fully paid vacation annually—something no other agency could say. Ninety percent of the time, the person I was talking to would pause, before coming back with something like, “Jesus. Can I come work for you?” I never really got over that. Lawyers. Congressional staffers. City employees. Doctors. Federal employees. All asking if they could come join an anarchist operation.

  One day before starting work, I returned from the shower to a voicemail from the owner of a conventional, top-down agency, seemingly beside himself in awe, lavishing us with praise. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Listening, I kept waiting for him to make some proposal, to want something—to sell us his clients, or some referral arrangement, or some cross promotion. This happened from time to time; business owners were always trying to negotiate some new edge, or a parachute out of actually working. Weirdly, the voicemail ended without him doing anything of the sort. Either he just called to tell us he loved us, or he got so caught up in what he was saying that he forgot to make his pitch.

  All of this had, I’m convinced, very little to do with any singular genius on our part, so much as a generalized dissatisfaction—despair may have even been more accurate. Even people who appeared to have jumped through every hoop on the road to “stability” seemed exhausted—and those were the lucky ones, who hadn’t been saddled with extraordinary levels of debt just to get there. I sat in a café behind the Securities and Exchange Commission one afternoon, eavesdropping on a woman roughly my age interviewing for a position in some or another political campaign. As she rattled off her experience, I visualized it in a timeline. She had never actually lived. Never had a chance. From high school, to undergrad, to internship, to grad school, to internship, to campaign, to campaign, to staff position, to campaign—and on and on. I honestly had difficulty figuring out when she slept, given how she described the workdays she’d kept up in these gigs. And this was a young woman whose parents had every reason to be over the moon at her success; someone headhunted by campaign directors for her apparent skill and stamina. To what end, exactly? And what other option did she have, anyway?

  Tzippi and Dov’s companions, as Dougie explained that day, were a gay couple that spent roughly $180 a week to have him coax their senile, increasingly feeble—albeit adorable—would-be children half a block to the Gandhi statue opposite the Phillips Collection, twice daily. This, when the dogs were not residing at their other—far more modest—home on the far side of the historic gayborhood, in a shared custody arrangement with a repartnered ex. The wealthier of the couples tended to cover the expense of the walks, regardless of where the dogs were housed—either out of some goodwill, or just an affinity for conspicuous consumption. Eventually, one of the two better-off gentlemen would confess to me that he commuted to New York by plane three times a week, where he worked for a Wall Street law firm representing a major financial firm in bankruptcy. The other made partner at a K Street firm after representing Enron in the class-action suit brought against them following their eponymous collapse.

  At least that’s what it said on the framed event program mounted on the wall of the room some architect had almost certainly intended as a guest bedroom with a full bath, but which was now lovingly converted into a sort of daytime barn-stable for two small, aging dogs; daily decorated and redecorated with their errant excrement.

  This extravagance was the backdrop for the more or less total evisceration of every meritocratic trope that had been beaten into me, growing up. At this point, I no longer had many illusions about the upward distribution of wealth that drives the bulk of human activity. What was new was the license I felt to dispense with equivocation as to the moral questions embedded in that the idea of meritocracy—not merely the morality of capitalism’s distributive outcomes, but the sorts of behavior it incentivizes, and the unflattering lie it gives to our collective identity.

  As I carried the dogs to the triangle of grass spilling out around the Mahatma each day (it steadily proved less work than trying to make them walk), I’d sometimes replay my mother’s lectures to me about initiative, education, and work ethic. Often enough, these had amounted to a nod in the direction of some poor soul, and a “Study hard, or you’ll end up like him”—a (rather common) parental tactic less emphatic about the value of education than it was disdainful of poor people. I’d imagine her or some teacher saying, “Work hard, go to bat shielding monsters from accountability for the havoc they wreak in others’ lives … and you, too, might be able to make some portion of a gazillion-dollar apartment smell like an outhouse!” It wasn’t enough that incomprehensible rewards were showered on those who legally enabled the avaricious to shit all over untold numbers of people. Those rewards were, themselves, so abundant and apparently expendable that they could (quite literally) be shit all over, as well.

  Steinbeck is famously quoted saying that the reason socialism never took root in the United States is that no American believes they are working-class; we’re simply all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” We are not millionaires, in any sense. We are, rather, as a whole impoverished in every meaningful way. I’m not altogether convinced we’re embarrassed, either. It’s not necessary to cite all the various statistics about wealth disparities and the force with which they bludgeon the human condition. It’s enough to look at what wealth—and the drive for it—has made of us; its implicit morality; that today, tomorrow, or the next day, a child in south Lebanon will be cut in half by a toy-looking object left in a field, actually an unexploded cluster bomb someone at Lockheed got very rich selling to the Pentagon. Ultimately, the pipeline by which reward flows to the insidious is—apparent in the sheer volume it conducts—vast. And the monuments erected to it in the lives of those so rewarded, at best, reflect a stunning lack of self-awareness. At worst, they’re obscene. The vector by which fortune accrues to those with even a modicum of concern for anyone or anything but themselves is what we colloquially refer to as coincidence. There exists no metric by which we can claim to value the only thing that actually matters in this life: being gentle. It is conditioned out of us, maligned, and mocked in any case where it might matter, and then paraded about with a cynical lack of irony, as if anyone powerful enough to conduct such spectacles gave the faintest fuck.

  Whatever its successes, our little collective had simply managed to game a very small corner of this bad joke, and we were keenly aware that such gaming was not, on its own, any sort of redemptive or sufficient condition.

  None of which is to suggest that I didn’t see the compassion in devoting such resources to the care of two very old dogs—nor is it fair to say that these men were, in their personalities, contemptible. Hardly. They were incredibly kind, personable, and generous toward me. But such is the banality of evil, no? I wasn’t being asked to perform any task ethically prohibitive in and of itself. The crucible in which our collision occurred was keenly compartmentalized; simple and comfortable enough to eclipse the barbarity it necessitated, though perhaps not its own absurdity. I’d still encounter Salvadoran women who’d dragged themselves across the border, fleeing United States–funded bloodshed and civil war, and now scraped some threadbare living, keying into the penthouse week to week, to clean up after the whole sad comedy. And this was a world we’d all somehow tacitly agreed to live in—one in which we somehow didn’t share any notable bewilderment or embarrassment.

  “You know,” Dougie said, clearly amused. “These dogs were Bar Mitzvah’d.”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” I shot back. Even as comedy, it didn’t seem plausible.

>   “I’m not kidding!” he insisted, becoming slightly more serious. “When they turned thirteen, Zack went to his rabbi, and said he wanted to have it done, and the guy apparently flat out refused. So he told him that was a shame; he’d planned to leave the temple a million dollars in his will.”

  Dougie seemed disappointed in my lack of response. The truth was that I had no words. Wills were as abstract to me as anything counted in millions. The joining of the two in a single sentence, with regard to someone in whose home I happened to be standing, honestly stunned me.

  Frustrated, Dougie resumed, as if rounding out a joke that’d have typically involved a cast of clerics in a brothel or a space shuttle. “So the rabbi says, ‘You didn’t tell me they were Jewish!’ ”

  In what felt like a silence of almost tragic weight, I ran my hands over my face, wincing in a “this is why we can’t have nice things” moment of resignation. “All right, then. What’s the routine, here?”

  24

  OMAR

  What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?

  —Michel Foucault

  Since “retiring” from dog walking, I’ve spent most of my time in transit, living out of an oversize messenger bag in various corners of the world. I find it, on the whole, far less aggravating than sedentary life, for reasons that may seem (at first, anyway) counterintuitive. I’ve found that fluency with one’s conditions inclines one toward second-guessing circumstances that are better just observed and accepted. To have specific expectations of a situation is to be unable to meet contingency with any skill or flexibility—it begets an ugly sort of arrogance. Moving through experience with even a subtle sense of entitlement to routine, predictability, explanation, and so on is—in addition to being unchallenging—incredibly stressful. When I’m on a subway car in New York, stopped between stations as happens with some regularity, my inner monologue quickly, and without any real effort, shifts into “It’s not supposed to be this way.” That utterance implies another: that things are supposed to be some other way. This impulse, while subtle, establishes a baseline in one’s life mostly at odds with ease.

  A lack of familiarity with one’s circumstances or surroundings disables such sensitivities, at least after some time. One doesn’t know how things are “supposed” to be, in such scenarios. One (hopefully) has no entitlements, as an outsider. Which is not to suggest that one ought to go blindly or naively into situations of real risk. There’s simply a difference between caring for oneself and one’s well-being, and putting demands on the world that are pointless and wildly lacking in perspective. Granted, it’s perfectly practicable to be less attached to preferences in one’s own environment. The opportunities are, at least on the surface, simply less abundant, or perhaps just less obvious. Our environments are simply not structured for us to notice such things, and we’re trained to approach life—especially particular facets of it—in ways that treat anything nonnormative as an obstacle or even a net loss.

  Unless we decide that they’re not.

  Some of the clients Dougie had handed off to our collective at the beginning of 2007 lived in a luxury condo building just south of Logan Circle, one of many that characterized the rapid transformation of just about everything east of Sixteenth Street NW. With this “luxury” motif came certain touches aimed less at any substantive improvement in anyone’s quality of life, and more a matter of what I guess could be called showmanship; a psychological ROI for those who’d bought into the whole narrative of D.C. living, remade. The front of this particular building’s lobby had a vaulted ceiling that climbed past the second floor, with glass window panels looking out onto Thirteenth Street NW extending up from the entrance. The inside was outfitted with a lighting system rigged to what I surmised was some sort of thermometer, softly coloring the adjacent walls to signal outdoor temperatures to residents exiting the building. How this was of any use to anyone who’d already ventured out of their apartment, down the elevator, and into the lobby, I have no clue. But according to some real-estate developer, it’s value-added to have your building’s lobby tell you whether or not you’re dressed poorly, once it’s mostly too late to do anything about it.

  Another feature of this particular building was that, initially anyway, it didn’t allow dog walkers to hold keys to residents’ units—or even to the building. On the surface, this could be passed off as a more rigorous approach to security. But given how many people’s keys I held day to day—and the nonexistent impact that’d had on anyone’s home security—it was a bullshit measure. Its function was performative and pretentious. To access clients’ homes, I had to be buzzed into the building by the concierge and have him accompany me to each unit to key me in. The same was true when returning dogs to their homes. Predictably, this was time consuming, some days more than others. I would race UPS guys to the door, knowing full well they came with a pushcart full of delays; contractors and cleaners, for their part, typically posed an absolute clusterfuck. Half the time, they’d arrived well before me, and I was left pacing the lobby while some fuckup of theirs was remedied.

  The concierge at this building happened to be a very sweet, exceedingly kind Egyptian man, justifiably beloved by everyone living there. He was also a devout Muslim. This meant he prayed five times daily, suspending all functions for which his participation was required. I had late-morning and afternoon walks, in the building. The odds of our respective, appointed obligations colliding were generally pretty good. It was not infrequent that I found myself standing outside the main entrance, with and without dogs, waiting for him to finish his prayers, so I could get buzzed in.

  There was also the matter of his having to accompany me in the task of managing dogs, at all, given they were deemed unclean by the interpretation of Islam to which he was partial, and any contact with them whatsoever would require him to bathe head to toe before praying again. This posed a demanding and considerable logistical challenge. A dog that’s heard the telltale sounds of an impending walk is typically at the door, on the verge of jumping out of its own skin. Totally unpredictable in its movements. Getting between them and the guy who’d just opened the door with sufficient speed and agility to prevent a rather likely collision of the two, is what one might call a nonstandard trade skill. Locating a leash that may or may not be immediately visible—in order to stabilize the situation—added another level of difficulty. I often hobbled around apartments hunched over, holding a dog’s collar while in search of their leash, just to head off catastrophe.

  Then there was the (often excited, erratic) walk back to the elevator, and the importance of maintaining a no-contact buffer zone within its confines, the whole ride down.

  Some of the coworkers who subbed for me on occasion were vocal about loathing this whole process, often in dismissive remarks bordering on Islamophobic. “Fucking Omar and his fucking prayers. If you’ve gotta do that shit, you shouldn’t take that job.” To my knowledge, no one was ever anything but kind to him, but I never really understood how they rationalized their frustration.

  In his short book, On the Shores of Politics, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière articulates a particular characterization of equality; a departure from conventional, typically liberal notions of equality. For Rancière, equality is not a condition—it’s not a state of being that we bring about through this or that measure. Rather, in his analysis, equality is a practice; a potentially counterfactual assumption that everyone—regardless of race, class, gender, nationality, or any other such consideration—is equally capable of making meaningful decisions about their lives. More still, for Rancière, a (small d) democratic politics cannot even get off the ground without our taking up and committing to this practice, moment to moment. At its core,
this means beginning from a position of taking people seriously, as people, and not putting conditions on our willingness to do so. The measure of equality, for Rancière, is the degree to which we begin from this practice.

  Buddhist practitioners are routinely instructed to experiment with going through a day imagining that everyone but them is enlightened, and that everything that happens in their day—every conversation, every encounter, every snag, every joy—is designed to bring about their own enlightenment. There’s no morality to it; it’s simply intended to produce a nonhabituated reading of one’s experience. Its function is simply experimental.

  When my high-school art teacher introduced us to cubism, she described cubist works as portraits that functioned as though painted onto a Rubik’s Cube, then turned in various sections, and represented in two dimensions. For whatever reason, it unlocked something for me. I looked at Picasso’s works in a totally different way, able to see how what was effectively a disruption applied to established method had yielded extraordinary, inexplicably captivating images. Works that were not possible otherwise.

  Omar’s prayer schedule and all it demanded of him was that twist in the portrait that was my workday. It was a constraint that—as all constraints do—had productive effects. It forced me to improvise and innovate in how I went about my work routines. It forced me to be curious. It was the running of a completely different obstacle course; a prompt for the cultivation of different forms of knowledge, different skillsets. Outside my habituated routine.