Giant George

by Dave Nasser

  “You think George will be okay?” she asked me just before she drifted off. “I mean, at some point he’s going to need to pee, isn’t he?”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” I said, immediately worrying about that.

  “But what if…”

  “Shhh,” I said. “Stop worring. He’ll be fine.”

  And he was fine when I got back to him, if a little put out at the hour. It was really late, well into the middle of the night, but it was the first time I’d felt able to leave Christie, and only then because the nurse promised that all would be well and nothing would happen while I was gone.

  I let him out and you could tell he needed that pee real bad; you could literally see the expression of relief on his face. He was less thrilled, of course, when I prepared his food and water and then headed straight off out the door without him.

  “I’m sorry, buddy,” I told him, conscious of what a good job he was doing looking lonely and abandoned and making me feel like a heel, “but your mom needs me, and if I don’t get back before she wakes up, we are both going to have our heads on the block. I’ll get back just as soon as I can, promise.”

  He looked completely unimpressed, and not at all enthusiastic about the prospect of being abandoned again. Probably just as well, I decided, as I climbed back in my car, that he didn’t know what was coming next.

  Our beautiful daughter was born at twelve thirty in the afternoon of September 4, 2009, and we named her Annabel Mary, after both of Christie’s grandmas. It was a lovely name, and a great tribute to two wonderful women, but it didn’t come without careful negotiation. I liked Shayley, but Christie didn’t. She preferred Quincy, which I liked even less—it sounded much more like a boy’s name to me. So in the end we compromised—always a good thing to do at such moments—and the happiest day of our lives could begin properly, though not without a touch of anxiety.

  Christie confided that even as she gave birth to our precious daughter, there was a part of her heart that was back home with Georgie, concerned for the state of his poor bladder. And not just his bladder, either: we were both well aware that the happiest day of our lives might feel like a pretty grim one for him. It was something we needed to keep in mind.

  Since Christie was staying in the hospital for two nights, it was up to me to prepare him for the arrival of this new family member. I hadn’t been complacent about it either. I’d read up some, and I knew that there was potential for discord. Amiable, even-tempered and obedient as George was, I knew from finding out about the experiences of other dog owners that I couldn’t take his acceptance of Annabel for granted. Great Danes are well known for being emotional dogs, who form strong, lifelong, unbreakable attachments to the humans they live with and love. They are also vulnerable to all manner of stress-related ailments, as we already knew, and the last thing we wanted was for the arrival of our baby to cause any sort of upset for any of us.

  To this end, I decided to use psychology. On the night after Annabel came into the world, I had Christie hand over her first crib blanket. I figured that, scent being so important to dogs, if I could prepare George by first introducing her smell, then at least I’d have laid a little of the groundwork.

  It was late when I finally got home from the hospital, so right off I was at a disadvantage. He was at the door to greet me as soon as my key turned in the lock, but once it was clear that I’d failed to bring his missing mom back, his expression was a picture of bitter disappointment. Where was she? What exactly had I done with her? And where had I been all these hours? These and other similarly probing questions were writ plain as the nose on his disgruntled face. He then turned away and loped off down the hallway.

  This clearly wasn’t the time to bring out the blanket, so I followed him into the kitchen instead. “Hey, Georgie,” I called. “You feel like a walk? Just the two of us? Go on out and get ourselves some fresh air?”

  This did at least produce some enthusiasm from him. So much so, in fact, that I knew I was on to a winner, and, since it was such a lovely late-summer evening, I decided to spoil him and get the golf cart out too.

  He was so excited at this prospect that he started barking, and I could hear the thunderous noise booming through the hallway of the house as I reversed the cart out into the road. He was beside himself, I knew, by the time he heard the sound of it out front, and once I’d parked it and opened the front door, he streaked out like a rocket and jumped straight into the front, immediately moving across to the passenger seat—his seat. Right away he was ready to go, with his head—which was now so big it stuck out through the front space—poised to catch all the exciting evening scents.

  From this regal position, he was also well placed to drip great strings of drool all over the dashboard and hood. Most days it came out, particularly in the hot summer months, saw me having to hose it off. I turned on the headlights, and soon we were cruising through the darkness and the velvety night air, passing neighbors, who were used to George now, of course, and waving hellos as we sped by.

  We stayed out for a good while—twenty minutes or so—because it just felt so great to be out there. I was still taking in the enormity of everything. I was a father. It didn’t seem quite real. But eventually I figured we’d been out long enough, and swung the cart around to head back home.

  Sadly, George didn’t share my enthusiasm for home and refused point-blank to get out of the cart. It took every ounce of my strength and my entire bodyweight against him to finally persuade him to come back indoors. Only then, once he’d enjoyed our spot of post-natal male bonding, did I finally produce the tiny blanket.

  “Hey, Georgie,” I told him. “This blanket is from Annabel. Annabel’s our baby daughter and she’s coming home real soon, and you and she are going to be the very best of friends.” Luckily there was no one around to hear me besides George.

  Unsurprisingly, his reaction to this statement was minimal. The blanket, however, with its rich potpourri of new odors, did a better job of holding his attention—but only for five seconds or so, no more. And having completed his analysis, he turned on his heel and loped off to lie down on his bed. I went to the kitchen to make myself some dinner and call the family. Who knew if the blanket had done any good? It would be a case of wait and see.

  To say that George was in any way distressed at Annabel’s arrival would be to paint a completely misleading picture. He wasn’t distressed at all; he was just completely uninterested. From the moment she arrived home he made it clear as clear could be that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with her. Yes, he sniffed her from a distance once or twice when Christie tried to coax him, but after that he ignored her completely.

  But if Annabel’s presence was a minor irritation in the daytime—why was Mom so wrapped up and tediously unavailable all the time?—at night it became something much worse.

  Nights with a new baby are a whole other experience, both for sleep-deprived parents who are dragged from their fitful slumbers and for irritable, sleep-deprived dogs. The difference was the sleepy parents had a reason to be up, and an instinct, developed over several millennia, to care for their recently born offspring.

  Dogs, on the other hand, have no such driving instincts where human babies are concerned, and this dog was not at all happy about the changes that had taken place in his home—and, very particularly, in his bedroom. And who could blame him? For George—used to spending his nights in blissful oblivion, in the comfort of his queen-sized mattress at the foot of the bed that was shared by his beloved owners—Annabel’s high-decibel presence simply wasn’t acceptable.

  Where once it was me huffing irritably at the sound of our new puppy’s incessant nocturnal whining, now the tables had definitely turned. And funniest of all was that he sounded just like me. You’d hear him wake, and then harrumph, and then turn over in annoyance, and then, once it was clear that the racket was going to continue, exhale heavily again to make his point. He’d keep this up till one or the other of us did that whole feeding t
hing we did with this new interloper, before grunting his way grumpily back to sleep. It was priceless—so much so that, were we not so exhausted, we’d probably have been crying with laughter.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Rising of a Star

  George’s reaction to Annabel joining our family was showing no signs of improving. Indeed, his initial indifference and irritation turned out to be a symptom of a sulk that would endure for four long months.

  Still, we reasoned, he’d get used to her in time—he had to; he didn’t have a choice. In the meantime, we could live with indifference, which was far preferable to him displaying any kind of hostility toward her. Not that we ever worried on that score, because though Georgie had turned out to be a champion sulker, he didn’t have a hostile bone in his body. He just carried on as if Annabel wasn’t there.

  But while George was practicing to become Most Martyred Dog in Tucson, little did he know we had bigger ambitions for him. While Annabel slept, Christie soon got to work for our newly christened Team George, going online to complete the Guinness application, which turned out to be a lengthy and complicated business, after all. There were multiple forms that she had to fill out, plus a bunch of strict protocols to follow. You couldn’t just write in and say, “Hey, our dog’s the biggest,” you had to prove it, and send them the evidence. And you couldn’t take a quick video on your phone, either—you had to shoot a proper movie that would provide the required evidence. You had to take measurements according to a precise set of instructions, and get a veterinarian to oversee proceedings, plus a couple of upstanding witnesses, who’d be prepared to swear you’d done everything by the book.

  It wasn’t just Christie who’d been busy on George’s behalf. We’d all become quite excited by the Guinness application. And though we were still seeing it mostly as a fun project, we’d started to warm to the whole record-breaking thing and begun discussing its various possibilities. So, at the ensuing happy hours, George became the number one topic (number one, that is, after our beautiful Annabel and my latest bunch of besotted dad photos).

  “Can you believe this?” Paul exclaimed, a couple of Fridays later. “I have actually managed to secure the domain name giantgeorge.com!”

  Paul had worked for nearly a decade in public relations and was now in sales and marketing, so to him this was all, I figured, everyday stuff, even if it meant little to me. He had already spotted and pointed out that another record-breaking dog had his own website set up, but I’d never thought about the idea of creating one for George, let alone the relative desirability and availability of domain names. Little wonder, then, that it had never occurred to me that getting hold of the name “Giant George” might be something that was difficult to do. I hadn’t thought about it at all.

  But once I did think about it, I realized it was quite a stroke of luck, because “Giant George” was the sort of name that tripped off the tongue easily, like Jesse James or Big Ben or Atom Ant or Mickey Mouse. Hell, Giant George might already be a character in a cartoon, for all I knew. Paul was right: once you thought about it, it was incredible that it hadn’t been snapped up already.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” he continued. “So I took the plunge and grabbed it quick for the princely sum of twelve dollars a year.”

  “And you know what?” Dana added, making notes in her pad. “We should also set George up with a Facebook page. Then we can link that—and maybe Twitter—to the website.”

  Paul nodded. “Which we’d better start building pronto, I guess.”

  I was impressed with my friends. These guys clearly knew their virtual worlds well.

  “And we also need to think about getting some publicity,” Dana suggested. “Get his name out there. Start getting some interest whipped up.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Paul, handing out a second round of beers. “I know this guy from back when I owned my PR agency. Name’s Phil Villareal. He’s a senior reporter with the Arizona Daily Star, and he’s really good. I should get in touch and see if he wants to do the story. What d’you think?”

  “Great idea,” agreed Dana.

  “Great idea,” I agreed too. “That sounds pretty damned cool. Let’s do it. Hey, Georgie,” I called to George, raising my beer bottle to toast him. “How would you like to be famous?”

  We didn’t have a clue what to expect from all this, but in less than a fortnight my throwaway comment about fame had become a reality. The story about George and the big photo that accompanied it filled the whole front page of the Arizona Daily Star—the very paper in which I’d placed that Puppy for Sale ad back in the spring of 2006.

  The reporter, Phil, had been hooked on the story right away, and had come over to Paul’s for the next happy hour to get all the background he needed. He’d brought along a photographer, who’d taken a whole load of photos for the piece. As ever, George rose enthusiastically to the occasion—you never saw a dog do such a good impression of a supermodel strutting her stuff.

  And then, as they say, it all snowballed.

  Dana and Paul, true to their words, had been busy. Dana had created a simple website for us to start with, with some basic facts about George, bits of news and lots of photos, as well as a guest book where visitors to the site could say hi and ask questions.

  Paul, meanwhile, had set up a page for George on Facebook—a great way for him to interact with his fans. While Dana managed the website, and dealt with all the e-mails, the page on Facebook became Paul’s new baby. He’d post on it daily, updating George’s status, as well as posting factoids and quotes, as if he himself were George. The kids, in particular, loved it.

  With all this now in place, it was easy for folks to follow what George was up to and make contact. We knew I’d get inundated, so Paul and Dana kindly stepped in to deal with this as well, both adding their e-mail and cell phone details so that people could easily get in touch. We also set him up on Twitter, where he gained new followers daily.

  Paul’s daughter, Jami, had been busy too. Along with her friend Andrew, she’d made a video of George playing at the dog park with Boomer, and they’d posted the film on YouTube. They then put links on the website and Facebook and Twitter pages, and he was amassing hits at an incredible rate.

  At this point we were still only halfway through the process of trying to arrange a date with Doc Wallace for the measuring, yet it was as if George was already a Guinness record holder. Paul’s and Dana’s cell phones were ringing off the hook, and the e-mails and Facebook messages and tweets from his growing fanbase were coming in astonishing numbers.

  Maybe it was a pretty slow news week—who knew?—but as soon as the paper hit the newsstands that morning of Friday, October 9, it was like a publicity floodgate opened, and the story was picked up by a whole bunch of other papers, both in print and online, across the world. We also got calls from the local TV stations, wanting George to appear on their shows. We soon realized that to deal with all these inquiries individually would be a big undertaking, and had the potential to get seriously out of hand (not to mention out of paw), so Paul hit on the brilliant idea of arranging a press conference, which he suggested we could hold at the dog park.

  We also realized that a press conference would be a great opportunity to distribute press packs and Giant George T-shirts, and rack up the scope of the publicity even more. So I got on the case and sourced a bunch of cheap white T-shirts and had them printed with paw prints and our website address. Paul, meanwhile, created a Giant George fact sheet, which we could hand out to people with the T-shirts.

  The day itself was a huge success, and was incredibly well attended. Who’d have thought our little big dog story would attract so much interest everywhere? Yet pretty much every local print media and TV journalist turned up, many of them accompanied by photographers and videographers. And it was here that we threw down our challenge: we announced that we were certain George was the tallest dog in the world, and invited all challengers to a nose-to-nose face-off. It was re
ally good, lighthearted fun.

  Once again, when the clips aired and the stories were written up, there was another great flurry of activity. And it was one such contact, close to home, that got us thinking about what a truly special dog George could be.

  Paul’s sister had called him because her son, Will, a second grader—just seven years old—had been telling all his school friends he knew Giant George and, as a consequence, was getting a bit of ribbing. It wasn’t that bad, but he was getting seriously fed up with half the class refusing to believe him when he said he knew George. “Yeah, right,” they were all saying, with normal childish skepticism about such claims. Yeah, he really knew Giant George—not.

  Could George, Paul’s sister wanted to know, maybe make a surprise visit to his school? That way not only could the doubters be silenced, but it would also be a neat thing for all the kids to get to meet George since he was such a hot topic.

  Will’s school, Fruchthendler Elementary School, wasn’t far away—about ten minutes from our house. And as we knew George would love the chance to meet his growing band of fans, the visit—a surprise one—was duly fixed up with Will’s teacher and the principal of the school.

  We sneaked him in late one morning, just before recess, and had him arrive in the lunchroom as the kids were filing in. The result was staggering. You never saw such an explosion of excitement. And once again, even when surrounded by a whole bunch of overenthusiastic children, George, far from getting skittish and anxious and stressed, just lapped up the attention, all the strokes and all the cuddles, as if being a superstar was in his genes.

  Will, of course, was now the superstar of the class, and as for George, well, George was a hero. All animals tend to have a positive effect on kids, but the way George seemed to be able to light up a room—particularly a room full of children—really blew us away. It also made us think. We realized at that point that, whatever else happened, our gentle giant seemed to have found his calling.