Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

by John Grogan

Our house was a 1970s-vintage four-bedroom ranch with twice the square footage of our first home and none of the charm. The place had potential, though, and gradually we put our mark on it. We ripped up the wall-to-wall shag carpeting and installed oak floors in the living room and Italian tile everywhere else. We replaced the ugly sliding glass doors with varnished French doors, and I slowly turned the bereft front yard into a tropical garden teeming with gingers and heliconias and passion vines that butterflies and passersby alike stopped to drink in.

  The two best features of our new home had nothing to do with the house itself. Visible from our living room window was a small city park filled with playground equipment beneath towering pines. The children adored it. And in the backyard, right off the new French doors, was an in-ground swimming pool. We hadn’t wanted a pool, worrying about the risk to our two toddlers, and Jenny made our Realtor blanch when she suggested filling it in. Our first act on the day we moved in was to surround the pool with a four-foot-high fence worthy of a maximum-security prison. The boys—Patrick had just turned three and Conor eighteen months when we arrived—took to the water like a pair of dolphins. The park became an extension of our backyard and the pool an extension of the mild season we so cherished. A swimming pool in Florida, we soon learned, made the difference between barely enduring the withering summer months and actually enjoying them.

  No one loved the backyard pool more than our water dog, that proud descendant of fishermen’s retrievers plying the ocean swells off the coast of Newfoundland. If the pool gate was open, Marley would charge for the water, getting a running start from the family room, going airborne out the open French doors and, with one bounce off the brick patio, landing in the pool on his belly with a giant flop that sent a geyser into the air and waves over the edge. Swimming with Marley was a potentially life-threatening adventure, a little like swimming with an ocean liner. He would come at you full speed ahead, his paws flailing out in front of him. You’d expect him to veer away at the last minute, but he would simply crash into you and try to climb aboard. If you were over your head, he pushed you beneath the surface. “What do I look like, a dock?” I would say, and cradle him in my arms to let him catch his breath, his front paws still paddling away on autopilot as he licked the water off my face.

  One thing our new house did not have was a Marley-proof bunker. At our old house, the concrete one-car garage was pretty much indestructible, and it had two windows, which kept it tolerably comfortable even in the dead of summer. Our Boca house had a two-car garage, but it was unsuitable for housing Marley or any other life-form that could not survive temperatures above 150 degrees. The garage had no windows and was stiflingly hot. Besides, it was finished in drywall, not concrete, which Marley had already proved himself quite adept at pulverizing. His thunder-induced panic attacks were only getting worse, despite the tranquilizers.

  The first time we left him alone in our new house, we shut him in the laundry room, just off the kitchen, with a blanket and a big bowl of water. When we returned a few hours later, he had scratched up the door. The damage was minor, but we had just mortgaged our lives for the next thirty years to buy this house, and we knew it didn’t bode well. “Maybe he’s just getting used to his new surroundings,” I offered.

  “There’s not even a cloud in the sky,” Jenny observed skeptically. “What’s going to happen the first time a storm hits?”

  The next time we left him alone, we found out. As thunderheads rolled in, we cut our outing short and hurried home, but it was too late. Jenny was a few steps ahead of me, and when she opened the laundry-room door she stopped short and uttered, “Oh my God.” She said it the way you would if you had just discovered a body hanging from the chandelier. Again: “Oh…My…God.” I peeked in over her shoulder, and it was uglier than I had feared. Marley was standing there, panting frantically, his paws and mouth bleeding. Loose fur was everywhere, as though the thunder had scared the hair right out of his coat. The damage was worse than anything he had done before, and that was saying a lot. An entire wall was gouged open, obliterated clear down to the studs. Plaster and wood chips and bent nails were everywhere. Electric wiring lay exposed. Blood smeared the floor and the walls. It looked, literally, like the scene of a shotgun homicide.

  “Oh my God,” Jenny said a third time.

  “Oh my God,” I repeated. It was all either of us could say.

  After several seconds of just standing there mute, staring at the carnage, I finally said, “Okay, we can handle this. It’s all fixable.” Jenny shot me her look; she had seen my repairs. “I’ll call a drywall guy and have it professionally repaired,” I said. “I won’t even try to do this one myself.” I slipped Marley one of his tranquilizers and worried silently that this latest destructive jag might just throw Jenny back into the funk she had sunk into after Conor’s birth. Those blues, however, seemed to be long behind her. She was surprisingly philosophical about it.

  “A few hundred bucks and we’ll be good as new,” she chirped.

  “That’s what I’m thinking, too,” I said. “I’ll give a few extra speeches to bring in some cash. That’ll pay for it.”

  Within a few minutes, Marley was beginning to mellow. His eyelids grew heavy and his eyes deeply bloodshot, as they always did when he was doped up. He looked like he belonged at a Grateful Dead concert. I hated to see him this way, I always hated it, and always resisted sedating him. But the pills helped him move past the terror, past the deadly threat that existed only in his mind. If he were human, I would call him certifiably psychotic. He was delusional, paranoid, convinced a dark, evil force was coming from the heavens to take him. He curled up on the rug in front of the kitchen sink and let out a deep sigh. I knelt beside him and stroked his blood-caked fur. “Geez, dog,” I said. “What are we going to do with you?” Without lifting his head, he looked up at me with those bloodshot stoner eyes of his, the saddest, most mournful, eyes I have ever seen, and just gazed at me. It was as if he were trying to tell me something, something important he needed me to understand. “I know,” I said. “I know you can’t help it.”

  The next day Jenny and I took the boys with us to the pet store and bought a giant cage. They came in all different sizes, and when I described Marley to the clerk he led us to the largest of them all. It was enormous, big enough for a lion to stand up and turn around in. Made out of heavy steel grating, it had two bolt-action barrel locks to hold the door securely shut and a heavy steel pan for a floor. This was our answer, our own portable Alcatraz. Conor and Patrick both crawled inside and I slid the bolts shut, locking them in for a moment. “What do you guys think?” I asked. “Will this hold our Superdog?”

  Conor teetered at the cage door, his fingers through the bars like a veteran inmate, and said, “Me in jail.”

  “Waddy’s going to be our prisoner!” Patrick chimed in, delighted at the prospect.

  Back home, we set up the crate next to the washing machine. Portable Alcatraz took up nearly half the laundry room. “Come here, Marley!” I called when it was fully assembled. I tossed a Milk-Bone in and he happily pranced in after it. I closed and bolted the door behind him, and he stood there chewing his treat, unfazed by the new life experience he was about to enter, the one known in mental-health circles as “involuntary commitment.”

  “This is going to be your new home when we’re away,” I said cheerfully. Marley stood there panting contentedly, not a trace of concern on his face, and then he lay down and let out a sigh. “A good sign,” I said to Jenny. “A very good sign.”

  That evening we decided to give the maximum-security dog-containment unit a test run. This time I didn’t even need a Milk-Bone to lure Marley in. I simply opened the gate, gave a whistle, and in he walked, tail banging the metal sides. “Be a good boy, Marley,” I said. As we loaded the boys into the minivan to go out to dinner, Jenny said, “You know something?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “This is the first time since we got him that I don’t have a pit in my
stomach leaving Marley alone in the house,” she said. “I never even realized how much it put me on edge until now.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “It was always a guessing game: ‘What will our dog destroy this time?’”

  “Like, ‘How much will this little night out at the movies cost us?’”

  “It was like Russian roulette.”

  “I think that crate is going to be the best money we ever spent,” she said.

  “We should have done this a long time ago,” I agreed. “You can’t put a price on peace of mind.”

  We had a great dinner out, followed by a sunset stroll on the beach. The boys splashed in the surf, chased seagulls, threw fistfuls of sand in the water. Jenny was uncharacteristically relaxed. Just knowing Marley was safely secured inside Alcatraz, unable to hurt himself or anything else, was a balm. “What a nice outing this has been,” she said as we walked up the front sidewalk to our house.

  I was about to agree with her when I noticed something in my peripheral vision, something up ahead that wasn’t quite right. I turned my head and stared at the window beside the front door. The miniblinds were shut, as they always were when we left the house. But about a foot up from the bottom of the window the metal slats were bent apart and something was sticking through them.

  Something black. And wet. And pressed up against the glass. “What the—?” I said. “How could…Marley?”

  When I opened the front door, sure enough, there was our one-dog welcoming committee, wiggling all over the foyer, pleased as punch to have us home again. We fanned out across the house, checking every room and closet for telltales of Marley’s unsupervised adventure. The house was fine, untouched. We converged on the laundry room. The crate’s door stood wide open, swung back like the stone to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning. It was as if some secret accomplice had snuck in and sprung our inmate. I squatted down beside the cage to have a closer look. The two bolt-action barrel locks were slid back in the open position, and—a significant clue—they were dripping with saliva. “It looks like an inside job,” I said. “Somehow Houdini here licked his way out of the Big House.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Jenny said. Then she uttered a word I was glad the children were not close enough to hear.

  We always fancied Marley to be as dumb as algae, but he had been clever enough to figure out how to use his long, strong tongue through the bars to slowly work the barrels free from their slots. He had licked his way to freedom, and he proved over the coming weeks that he was able to easily repeat the trick whenever he wanted. Our maximum-security prison had in fact turned out to be a halfway house. Some days we would return to find him resting peacefully in the cage; other days he’d be waiting at the front window. Involuntary commitment was not a concept Marley was going to take lying down.

  We took to wiring both locks in place with heavy electrical cable. That worked for a while, but one day, with distant rumbles on the horizon, we came home to find that the bottom corner of the cage’s gate had been peeled back as though with a giant can opener, and a panicky Marley, his paws again bloodied, was firmly stuck around the rib cage, half in and half out of the tight opening. I bent the steel gate back in place as best I could, and we began wiring not only the slide bolts in place but all four corners of the door as well. Pretty soon we were reinforcing the corners of the cage itself as Marley continued to put his brawn into busting out. Within three months the gleaming steel cage we had thought so impregnable looked like it had taken a direct hit from a howitzer. The bars were twisted and bent, the frame pried apart, the door an ill-fitting mess, the sides bulging outward. I continued to reinforce it as best I could, and it continued to hold tenuously against Marley’s full-bodied assaults. Whatever false sense of security the contraption had once offered us was gone. Each time we left, even for a half hour, we wondered whether this would be the time that our manic inmate would bust out and go on another couch-shredding, wall-gouging, door-eating rampage. So much for peace of mind.

  CHAPTER 18

  Alfresco Dining

  M arley didn’t fit into the Boca Raton scene any better than I did. Boca had (and surely still has) a disproportionate share of the world’s smallest, yappiest, most pampered dogs, the kind of pets that the Bocahontas set favored as fashion accessories. They were precious little things, often with bows in their fur and cologne spritzed on their necks, some even with painted toenails, and you would spot them in the most unlikely of places—peeking out of a designer handbag at you as you waited in line at the bagel shop; snoozing on their mistresses’ towels at the beach; leading the charge on a rhinestone-studded leash into a pricey antiques store. Mostly, you could find them cruising around town in Lexuses, Mercedes-Benzes, and Jaguars, perched aristocratically behind the steering wheels on their owners’ laps. They were to Marley what Grace Kelly was to Gomer Pyle. They were petite, sophisticated, and of discriminating taste. Marley was big, clunky, and a sniffer of genitalia. He wanted so much to have them invite him into their circle; they so much were not about to.

  With his recently digested obedience certificate under his belt, Marley was fairly manageable on walks, but if he saw something he liked, he still wouldn’t hesitate to lunge for it, threat of strangulation be damned. When we took strolls around town, the high-rent pooches were always worth getting all choked up over. Each time he spotted one, he would break into a gallop, barreling up to it, dragging Jenny or me behind him at the end of the leash, the noose tightening around his throat, making him gasp and cough. Each time Marley would be roundly snubbed, not only by the Boca minidog but by the Boca minidog’s owner, who would snatch up young Fifi or Suzi or Cheri as if rescuing her from the jaws of an alligator. Marley didn’t seem to mind. The next minidog to come into sight, he would do it all over again, undeterred by his previous jilting. As a guy who was never very good at the rejection part of dating, I admired his perseverance.

  Outside dining was a big part of the Boca experience, and many restaurants in town offered alfresco seating beneath palm trees whose trunks and fronds were studded with strings of tiny white lights. These were places to see and be seen, to sip caffè lattes and jabber into cell phones as your companion stared vacantly at the sky. The Boca minidog was an important part of the alfresco ambience. Couples brought their dogs with them and hooked their leashes to the wrought-iron tables where the dogs would contentedly curl up at their feet or sometimes even sit up at the table beside their masters, holding their heads high in an imperious manner as if miffed by the waiters’ inattentiveness.

  One Sunday afternoon Jenny and I thought it would be fun to take the whole family for an outside meal at one of the popular meeting places. “When in Boca, do as the Bocalites,” I said. We loaded the boys and the dog into the minivan and headed to Mizner Park, the downtown shopping plaza modeled after an Italian piazza with wide sidewalks and endless dining possibilities. We parked and strolled up one side of the three-block strip and down the other, seeing and being seen—and what a sight we must have made. Jenny had the boys strapped into a double stroller that could have been mistaken for a maintenance cart, loaded up in the back with all manner of toddler paraphernalia, from applesauce to wet wipes. I walked beside her, Marley, on full Boca minidog alert, barely contained at my side. He was even wilder than usual, beside himself at the possibility of getting near one of the little purebreds prancing about, and I gripped hard on his leash. His tongue hung out and he panted like a locomotive.

  We settled on a restaurant with one of the more affordable menus on the strip and hovered nearby until a sidewalk table opened up. The table was perfect—shaded, with a view of the piazza’s central fountain, and heavy enough, we were sure, to secure an excitable hundred-pound Lab. I hooked the end of Marley’s leash to one of the legs, and we ordered drinks all around, two beers and two apple juices.

  “To a beautiful day with my beautiful family,” Jenny said, holding up her glass for a toast. We clicked our beer bottles; the boys smashed their sippy cups
together. That’s when it happened. So fast, in fact, that we didn’t even realize it had happened. All we knew was that one instant we were sitting at a lovely outdoor table toasting the beautiful day, and the next our table was on the move, crashing its way through the sea of other tables, banging into innocent bystanders, and making a horrible, ear-piercing, industrial-grade shriek as it scraped over the concrete pavers. In that first split second, before either of us realized exactly what bad fate had befallen us, it seemed distinctly possible that our table was possessed, fleeing our family of unwashed Boca invaders, which most certainly did not belong here. In the next split second, I saw that it wasn’t our table that was haunted, but our dog. Marley was out in front, chugging forward with every ounce of rippling muscle he had, the leash stretched tight as piano wire.

  In the fraction of a second after that, I saw just where Marley was heading, table in tow. Fifty feet down the sidewalk, a delicate French poodle lingered at her owner’s side, nose in the air. Damn, I remember thinking, what is his thing for poodles? Jenny and I both sat there for a moment longer, drinks in hand, the boys between us in their stroller, our perfect little Sunday afternoon unblemished except for the fact that our table was now motoring its way through the crowd. An instant later we were on our feet, screaming, running, apologizing to the customers around us as we went. I was the first to reach the runaway table as it surged and scraped down the piazza. I grabbed on, planted my feet, and leaned back with everything I had. Soon Jenny was beside me, pulling back, too. I felt like we were action heroes in a western, giving our all to rein in the runaway train before it jumped the tracks and plunged over a cliff. In the middle of all the bedlam, Jenny actually turned and called over her shoulder, “Be right back, boys!” Be right back? She made it sound so ordinary, so expected, so planned, as if we often did this sort of thing, deciding on the spur of the moment that, oh, why not, it might just be fun to let Marley lead us on a little table stroll around town, maybe doing a bit of window-shopping along the way, before we circled back in time for appetizers.