Travels with Casey

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

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  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1. In which Casey hates the RV

  2. In which dog-loving humans (okay, New Yorkers) behave badly

  3. In which Casey and I encounter cats, cows, PETA, and the “dog-poop lady”

  4. In which I drive down Hillbilly Circle, up Wit’s End Way, and past Hell for Certain Road

  5. In which Florida isn’t nearly as awful as I expected it to be

  PART TWO

  6. In which I cry over dogs in West Texas, hire a bed bug exterminator in New Mexico, and meet gay cowboys in Colorado

  7. In which Casey gets a little sister

  8. In which I hang out with Cesar Millan, homeless teenagers, and my former middle school English teacher turned dog masseur

  9. In which we hightail it home, with some heartbreak along the way

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Benoit Denizet-Lewis

  Notes

  Index

  To cats.

  (Just kidding.)

  To dogs!

  Author’s Note

  IN MOST cases, I have included the full names of those I met on my journey. In some instances, I used only a first name or changed a person’s name.

  For narrative purposes, I occasionally altered the sequence of dogs or people I met in a particular city. For space reasons, I also had to leave out many amazing dogs and humans I encountered during my travels.

  Prologue

  “I DON’T think my dog likes me very much,” I told Dr. Joel Gavriele-Gold, a Manhattan psychoanalyst shaped like an English Bulldog.

  I had come to interview Dr. Gold about his book, When Pets Come Between Partners: How to Keep Love—and Romance—in the Human/Animal Kingdom of Your Home, but he had deftly turned the tables and was now mining my subconscious for signs of canine-related dysfunction. Against my better judgment, I confessed to worrying that my nine-year-old Lab/Golden Retriever mix, Casey, would prefer to live elsewhere. By elsewhere, I didn’t mean in a different house or in a different neighborhood. I meant with a different human.

  “I feel like I’m disappointing Casey, like I’m not good enough for him,” I explained to Dr. Gold, who specializes in the myriad ways we saddle our pets with our psychological baggage.

  He leaned forward in his black office chair and looked at me with what felt like grave concern. “Go on,” he said, his gentle gaze moving down to Casey, who lounged at my feet on the carpeted floor of this garden-level office decorated with old paintings of dogs (including one of Rin Tin Tin). A few feet away, Dr. Gold’s enormous black herding dog, Dova, snored on a sofa by the window. Dr. Gold believes that dogs make for valuable therapeutic tools, and in the last fifteen years he has rarely come to work without one.

  But I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on. I was embarrassed to be here, prattling on about how my dog hurts my feelings—about how he makes me question whether I’m a good person. Dogs, after all, have been carefully bred to make us feel like champions. Best of all, we don’t have to do all that much to earn their adoration. This is a critical difference between dogs and cats. Mistreat your cat, and he will likely shit on your pillow and find a better place to live. Mistreat your dog, and he will likely stick around—eager to let bygones be bygones. Dogs are relentless optimists, eager to lick your face at the slightest sign of your better self.

  Of course, I don’t mistreat Casey. We swim in the ocean, chase tennis balls at the park, play hide-and-seek around the house. We wrestle. We bark at the moon. We even have our special little game, where I ask him to “Little Speak” and he growls softly and adorably.

  Still, I’ve spent much of our nine years together convinced that he’s not especially fond of me. And I didn’t think it was all in my head. “Casey’s really good at looking miserable,” I told Dr. Gold.

  If my dog deems it too long since his last walk or feeding, he will sigh loudly. (I’ve never heard a dog sigh the way Casey does. It’s his most human trait.) Many dogs seem to play the “poor me” card when they want to guilt us into something, but with Casey the look seems cruelly genuine.

  Even when Casey looks happy, he’s not one for outward displays of loyalty. He’s not like the dog I grew up with, Milou, a Husky/German Shepherd mix named after the dog in the popular Belgian comic Les Aventures de Tintin. Milou liked sleeping with her head in my lap and always seemed to be checking up on the humans around her. “Are you okay? Anything I can do?” seemed to be her default doggie mode.

  Casey, on the other hand, seems to like my friends more than me. I relayed a heartbreaking story to Dr. Gold: When Casey was two, I’d had to leave my Boston apartment for a week-long business trip. My friend Mike wasn’t working at the time and agreed to take temporary custody of my dog. He promised to “spoil him rotten,” and he didn’t disappoint. I received regular, hyperbolic updates recounting marathon-length walks on the beach, extravagant hamburger doggie dinners, a pet store chew toy spending spree, and an afternoon devoted entirely to letting Casey hump dogs at the dog park.

  Upon my return, I went to Mike’s apartment to retrieve my “best friend.” Casey seemed happy enough to see me, but as I tried to coax him into the car, he ran back to the front door of Mike’s apartment building, planted his butt on the stoop, and stared expectantly at the doorknob.

  “It’s difficult to overstate how crushed I was by this . . . betrayal,” I stammered in Dr. Gold’s office.

  “You saw it as a betrayal?”

  “I did.”

  “It sounds to me like he was just being a Lab,” Dr. Gold said, looking at Casey with a warm, rosy-cheeked smile.

  “How do you figure?”

  “He probably just wanted more hamburgers.”

  “I don’t think this was about hamburgers,” I countered, more dramatically than I intended.

  “What do you think it was about?”

  That was easy. Casey wanted to live with Mike. And was I being selfish by not letting him go? Was I putting my neediness ahead of my dog’s happiness?

  Those questions had ricocheted around in my head as I called for Casey to come to me from Mike’s doorstep. But the animal I’d loved and cared for since he was eleven weeks old looked right through me and didn’t move. (Woodrow Wilson once said, “If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.”)

  Devastated, I marched over to Mike’s doorstep, grabbed Casey by the collar, and pulled him toward the car. He looked sad. I must have looked sadder.

  IN CAROLINE Knapp’s book Pack of Two, she writes that “in all likelihood dogs do not make comparative assessments about their lives . . . do not lie around wishing they were elsewhere, fantasizing about better owners, dreaming of more varied settings.”

  I’m not so sure. I imagine that if Casey were blessed with the power of human speech, he might break my heart. “You’ve been interesting,” I could see him saying, “but I’d like to give another human a try.”

  Dr. Gold listened patiently as I unburdened myself in his spacious office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Every now and then he would look down at Casey with fondness, and when he did this I would wonder—as I often do—what my dog was thinking. Did Casey know how much he affected me? Did he realize we were talking about him?

  “Do you think I’m crazy?
” I asked Dr. Gold midway through our meeting. “I’d like you to tell me if I’m crazy, because I feel like a crazy person for not just appreciating Casey for the dog he is.”

  “You’re not crazy,” Dr. Gold assured me. “It just sounds to me like Casey might not be the dog of your dreams.”

  Not the dog of my dreams.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. “I feel guilty for even thinking that,” I told him.

  “You shouldn’t,” he replied. “Don’t think there’s any difference between you and the mother of a child. Many mothers are mortified to admit their disappointment that their child isn’t the child of their dreams—different temperament, different interests, tuned in differently. Same thing with a dog.”

  Dr. Gold shifted his attention to Dova, a Bouvier des Flandres (a Belgian herding dog known for its big head, beard, and mustache). “She’s not the dog of my dreams, either,” he said. “I mean, she’s a perfectly nice dog. I care for her and care about her, but she doesn’t have that typical I can’t get enough of you Bouvier vibe. And it sounds like Casey doesn’t have that same typical Lab vibe.”

  I nodded. “I wish Casey was more of a cuddler.”

  “I wish Dova was, too,” Dr. Gold agreed. “She sleeps on the floor at night, and about ten minutes before my alarm goes off, she sneaks quietly on the bed and puts her head on my shoulder. She pretends like she’s been there all night!”

  He let out a hearty laugh. Here was a man who didn’t take his dog’s quirks personally.

  “But all you hear from pretty much everyone is how much unconditional love they get from their dog,” I said. “I don’t feel it.”

  Dr. Gold shook his head. “Not everyone. People have a million kinds of conflicts with their dogs. Why do you think so many dogs end up in shelters? We talk about how great dogs have it in this country, sleeping in our beds and being members of our families. But we kick dogs to the curb, too. We treat them poorly or give them up if they’re too much trouble. And it’s rarely the dog’s fault. People project what they don’t like about themselves onto their pet. Or the pet is a kind of psychological stand-in for someone in their lives, or from their past. We think we’re mad at the dog, but we’re actually mad at our husband, or our dad, or our kid.”

  “I wonder who I’m secretly mad at,” I said.

  “I wonder that, too,” Dr. Gold replied.

  I scratched my nose. “I was joking.”

  “I know you were,” he said. “But if you’re willing, I’d like you to tell me more about your mother.”

  Earlier in our session, I’d volunteered that I’d spent many years in therapy talking about my mother. Though we have a wonderful and loving relationship today, when I was young, she struggled with depression and could be cold and insensitive. I don’t remember her ever hugging me. As I struggled through my twenties, I was pretty sure she’d ruined my life.

  Still, I didn’t see what my mom had to do with my dog. “I think you might be barking up the wrong tree,” I said, pleased with my cleverness.

  But he wouldn’t let me deflect without a fight. “Growing up,” Dr. Gold wondered, “did you often feel like you were disappointing your mother?”

  “All the time,” I conceded. “I couldn’t do anything right. I wanted her to be a normal mother who nurtured me, who made me feel okay about myself.”

  The room got quiet. “You deserved a mother who would do that,” he said a few seconds later, his words heavy with emotion.

  “I think I did, too,” I mumbled, suddenly on the verge of tears.

  “It sounds to me like you didn’t get the love you needed from your mother,” he told me, “just like you aren’t getting the love you think you need from Casey.”

  I felt tightness in my chest. Casey yawned.

  “What if I were to say to you that Casey is not your mother?” Dr. Gold continued.

  “Well, I know that,” I stammered.

  “Well, you know it intellectually. But what is your gut telling you?”

  I BREATHED deeply, leaned back in my chair, and tried to access the wisdom stored in my gut. As I did, I noticed a Sigmund Freud action figure leaning against a book on Dr. Gold’s massive wooden bookshelf.

  I knew that Dr. Gold had long been obsessed with Freud. In an article he wrote trumpeting the therapeutic value of dogs, he’d recounted a 1971 trip to London, during which he showed up uninvited at the home of Freud’s daughter, Anna, who was also a prominent psychoanalyst. He’d brought along one of Anna’s books and was hoping to get her autograph, but the elderly housekeeper who answered the door—Sigmund Freud’s longtime maid, Paula Fichtl, who had accompanied the Freuds as they fled Vienna and the Nazis in 1938—said that Anna was on vacation.

  Paula invited Dr. Gold inside and led him to Sigmund Freud’s study, where she told him that Freud loved dogs and that they were often at his feet during therapy sessions. She added that Freud once remarked that his Chow Chow, Jo-Fi, understood what a patient needed better than he did.

  Dr. Gold never forgot that, and when he rescued a shivering stray Poodle mix from underneath a car in 1973, it wasn’t long before the dog—whom he named Humphrey—was accompanying the doctor to work. Humphrey made a “wonderful co-therapist,” Dr. Gold recounted in an article for the AKC Gazette, the magazine of the American Kennel Club. The dog would lie by the couch next to patients and seemed to instinctively know when they were moving into difficult emotional territory. At those times he would lift his head and place it on a patient’s arm, usually prompting the person to “move into ever deeper emotions.”

  Amos, a Lab and retired seeing-eye dog, came soon after Humphrey and was especially good with kids. When a child wouldn’t open up in therapy, Dr. Gold would suggest that the child speak instead to the dog. “I would never make you sit on the radiator with no clothes on,” one boy, who had been abused, confided to Amos.

  Before long, Dr. Gold began seeing individuals and couples in therapy he believed were “transferring” their feelings and relationship problems onto their pets. In his book, Dr. Gold explores several forms of transference, including “displacement,” which he defines as “the unconscious act of putting past thoughts, moods, feelings, images, impulses, and even actions onto present-day individuals.” Gold argues that “someone might fear a very large dog because of an association with an overbearing parent.”

  The longer I spent in Dr. Gold’s office, the more I suspected I was using displacement (and probably other psychological coping mechanisms, too) in my relationship with Casey. Was I expecting my dog to make up for my mother’s shortcomings, to give me the love she hadn’t? When Casey didn’t deliver, was I growing judgmental and impatient with him just like my mom had been with me? And when I treated my dog that way, was I feeling the shame that Dr. Gold insisted my mother should have felt about her treatment of me?

  Though I’d first rejected Dr. Gold’s dog-mother-confusion hypothesis, I now suspected he might be right. Maybe confusing Casey and my mother wasn’t that big a stretch; after all, our parents and our dogs might be the only living things from whom we have the right to expect “unconditional love.” One truth, though, was beyond doubt: I had some serious work to do on my relationship with Casey.

  “I suppose I’ll have plenty of time on the road these next few months,” I told Dr. Gold.

  “Ah, yes, the road trip,” he said. “Do you know how fortunate you are to be able to drop everything and drive around the country with your dog?”

  DR. GOLD wasn’t the first person to express envy at my impending cross-country adventure, during which I’d be traveling for nearly four months through thirty-two states in a rented motorhome with Casey.

  My idea—man forces dog into RV, then writes book about it—certainly wasn’t original. Practically everyone I’d told about my journey brought up Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s 1962 travelogue about his cross-country voyage with his Poodle. One longtime acquaintance, who says things out loud that normal people merely think private
ly, cornered me at a party and announced, “Benoit, your book’s already been done by a better writer than you.”

  Maybe so, but the purposes of our trips were different. Steinbeck had traveled the country to tell the story of America’s soul; I was traveling the country to tell the story of America’s dogs. Charley was an accessory; Casey would have a starring role.

  When friends would ask why I wanted to write a book about dogs, I would often say, “Because, of course, there aren’t enough books about dogs.” In truth, there are probably too few books about cats and too many books about dogs. My bookshelf overflows with tales of troublesome but lovable puppies, inspirational strays, selfless service dogs, and brave canine warriors. Then there are the endless how-to manuals—how to feed your dog, train your dog, walk your dog, groom your dog, and, in the burgeoning age of canine cognition, understand what your dog is thinking, feeling, and dreaming.

  I wanted to write a different kind of dog book, one that would explore and celebrate the breadth of human-dog relationships in contemporary life. To do that, I planned to travel across America—the country with the highest rate of dog ownership on the planet—and hang out with as many dogs (and dog-obsessed humans) as I could.

  On my journey I planned to meet therapy dogs, police dogs, shelter dogs, celebrity dogs, farm dogs, racing dogs, stray dogs, show dogs, hunting dogs, dock-diving dogs, and dogs with no discernable “job” other than lounging around the house and terrorizing the mailman.

  I would also be hanging out with dog rescuers and shelter workers, canine cognition experts, show dog owners, wolf lovers, dog walkers, dog healers, dog haters, pet photographers, and dog mascot owners. And that was only on the East Coast. On my journey I’d also be cavorting with pet psychics, with my former middle-school English teacher who now works part-time as a “dog masseur,” and with a woman who was taken to court for not picking up her dog’s poop.

  We can’t agree on much in our increasingly polarized country, but we tend to find common ground when it comes to our love for canines. What, I wondered, could be learned about modern American life by exploring our relationship to our dogs? How do the ways we treat—or mistreat—our pets help us understand our values?