A few minutes later, Randy and one of his rescuing partners, Donna, convened at an abandoned one-story house that had recently been destroyed by a fire.
“So many dogs I loved died in there,” Randy said, facing the charred, white-shingled structure. “For some reason, they all came here to die.”
Glad to see the house gone, Donna and Randy held hands and skipped up to what remained of the building. They walked gingerly through its remains, joking about how they might decorate the place.
“I think this area would make a nice study,” Randy said.
“I’ll take this bedroom,” Donna added.
When they’d finished celebrating the house’s demise, Randy screamed, “Good-bye, fucked-up death house!”
ACCORDING TO Alan Beck, who wrote The Ecology of Stray Dogs, the average life expectancy of a stray is just over two years.
“Dogs out here look like they’re ninety-five, but they’re actually only one or two,” Randy explained. “It’s amazing to see the transformation once we get them fixed up and cleaned up and in foster care or adopted. Without the stress of living out here, they look their age again.”
Over the course of our first week together, Randy and I came upon a handful of dogs he wanted to save but couldn’t. Either he didn’t have space at the Stray Rescue of St. Louis shelter, or the dogs weren’t in bad enough shape.
“I’m basically like a vet and a dog psychologist,” he explained. “I’m triaging out here. I look for the dogs who need medical attention first. If it’s a close call, then I try to read the dog’s mind.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, are they happy enough out here? Will they survive if I can only rescue them in a week or two? The problem with a lot of these dogs is that they don’t really know how to be wild dogs. You’ll see a starving dog walking down the street with a dead rabbit in its mouth, but it doesn’t realize how to eat the rabbit. Many of these dogs are domesticated animals trying to survive in the wild.”
But other dogs do manage to survive on the streets. Unless they’re injured, Randy doesn’t bother trying to rescue truly feral dogs that live in packs—oftentimes out of view of humans. “Some dogs are actually happier out here than they’d be in an apartment or a house,” he said.
A good example was a large black dog Randy had been feeding for years, slowly earning its trust. The courtship was complete by my first visit to East St. Louis; the dog ran up to Randy’s Jeep as we turned onto the block where he lived with his pack. The other dogs kept their distance—I could see their heads poking out from the vegetation of an overgrown field.
“How’s my boy doing?” Randy said, kneeling on the ground to pet the dog, who wagged his tail in excitement.
“Have you thought about rescuing him?” I asked.
“All the time. But I don’t think that’s what he wants. He sort of runs the neighborhood. He has his harem.”
Two days later, though, when the dog came hobbling up to us with a limp, Randy changed his mind. He lifted the black dog into his Jeep, but almost as soon as the dog was inside the car, it jumped back out.
“He obviously doesn’t want to be rescued today,” Randy said. “And I’m not going to force him. In his case, I think he actually knows what’s best for him.”
MOST DOGS don’t jump voluntarily into Randy’s Jeep. Most need some convincing.
After picking me up at the St. Louis RV Park on the first of my two days in town to see him this time, Randy drove us to North St. Louis, another area ravaged by poverty and violence. He’d been told that a stray Pit Bull and her puppies were living in an overgrown yard behind a vacant house.
“Ready to save some doggie lives?” Randy asked me with a smile.
It was great to see him again. “I’ve been looking forward to this the whole trip!”
“How’s the journey been? You meet any crazier dog-people than me?”
“You still get the gold,” I assured him.
Though Randy seemed happy to see me, he hadn’t yet recovered from what he’d witnessed a few days earlier in a vacant four-family building in North St. Louis.
“Benoit, it was the worst abuse I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And I thought I’d seen everything.”
Randy told me that five dogs had been tortured—they were burned, shot in the neck and spine, and strangled. When Randy had arrived at the scene, one dead Pit Bull was hanging out a window.
“When we catch whoever did this,” Randy promised, “I want to be in the courtroom so I can make a big white-trash scene. It’s going to be like the Jerry Springer Show up in there!”
A few minutes later, a detective called to update Randy on the investigation. The deaths had been widely reported in the news, and unlike so many other cruelty cases where Randy felt like Stray Rescue was the only organization that cared, this one had triggered a police investigation.
“What did the detective say?” I asked when Randy dropped his phone back in his lap.
“They’re pulling out all the stops,” he said. “They’re going to try to get DNA evidence. There’s going to be a reward. And they’re talking to everyone to see who might know something. He told me they’re going to ask the prostitutes in the area what they know, because prostitutes always know something. I’m not sure why everyone tells their secrets to prostitutes, but apparently they do.”
Randy didn’t have to drive over any bridges to get to North St. Louis on this day, so we made it to the Pit Bull and her pups without a panic attack. We couldn’t find the dogs at first, but then Randy spotted the adult dog’s nose poking out from inside a plastic igloo doghouse.
“Hey, little girl,” Randy said, slowly making his way into the yard.
He’d told me earlier that when he rescues a dog he slows down his heart rate and breathing. “I try to go into a meditative state, which calms down the dog,” he explained. “Everyone thinks I’m working some kind of miracle, but it’s not that. I’m just calm as a cucumber.”
This particular stray—a beautiful white Pit Bull with cropped ears—was wary of Randy at first, but that was nothing his baby voice and a few bags of cold cuts couldn’t fix. Before long, Randy had slipped an orange collar around her neck and was ordering me to grab a discarded mop bucket and pile the seven pups inside.
“We have to name the mom and the pups,” he announced as we drove away with our adorable haul.
“Don’t look at me—I’m terrible at dog names.”
He lit a cigarette and turned up the volume on his car stereo, which was playing one of the songs he reserves for successful rescues—“Dancing on My Own” by Robyn.
“You write for a newspaper—let’s name the dogs after papers,” he suggested.
We settled on Time, News, Trib, Post, Dispatch, Star, Chronicle, and Enquirer. “I feel bad for whoever gets stuck with Enquirer,” I said. “That’s a terrible dog name.”
AS WE drove back to Stray Rescue’s headquarters to have the mom and pups checked out by a vet, we passed near an abandoned block where Randy and I had spent three days rescuing an emaciated Boxer mix in 2009. A friend of Randy’s had alerted us to the dog, who was surviving on scraps from a gas station near a lumberyard and sleeping in a vacant house. We’d found her resting near an electrical pole in foot-high grass, a thick leather collar fastened tightly around her neck.
“Someone probably dumped her, or she got away,” Randy had said as he’d parked the Jeep, grabbed a bag of hot dogs, and went about trying to bribe the animal with food. She was hungry, but she was also scared. Randy could only get within a few feet of her before she’d back away, quickly snatching a hot dog Randy left on the ground.
He eventually set up a cage trap, loading it with hot dogs and chunks of chicken. Then he called his mom. “Hey mom! I need a favor. I need something really good for the trap. Can you make me a roast? No, no, it doesn’t have to be cooked all the way through. Dogs like it rare.”
While we were on the subject of moms, Randy told me tha
t dog-loving mothers can be the bane of a dog rescuer’s existence. “You’ll spend a week trying to get a dog, the dog finally goes in the trap you left overnight, and then the next morning some lady will get there before you do and say, ‘Oh, poor dog! Someone trapped it!’ And then she lets the dog go, thinking she’s done some good in the world.”
This particular dog turned out to be what Randy called “trap-savvy.” She would tiptoe into the cage and crane her neck forward to grab a chunk of roasted chicken, careful not to step far enough inside to trigger the trap door.
While we sat in the Jeep and watched the dog outsmart us, Randy suggested we pass the time by playing one of his favorite games—Kill, Fuck, or Marry. “I’ll pick three people, and you have to decide which one you would kill, which one you would fuck, and which one you would marry,” he said.
“I know the rules,” I assured him.
“I wasn’t sure you would, being half-French and all.”
“My American half is better developed,” I said.
“Oh good. You know, you have to be able to have some fun when you’re rescuing dogs,” he went on. “It makes up for all the nights when I go home and cry.” He opened the driver-side window and lit a cigarette. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any mutual friends. So we’ll have to use famous people.”
He offered me three unenviable choices: Tom Arnold, Roseanne Barr, and Ed McMahon.
“Isn’t Ed McMahon dead?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. Let’s say Ed McMahon a week before his death.”
“That’s in rather poor taste.”
“That’s the whole point of the game!”
I sighed. “I suppose I’d kill Ed McMahon, because he’s near death anyway. I’d probably have sex with Tom Arnold, even though that visual disturbs me. And I guess I’d marry Roseanne.”
“Oh, that sucks for you. Can you imagine being married to Roseanne?”
Thirty minutes and several games of Kill, Fuck, or Marry later, the dog had managed to clean most of the food out of the trap. Randy grudgingly decided to try to catch her with a net. Randy hates using his net because if he misses “the dog knows you’re a bad person who’s trying to trap her in a net. Any trust is gone.”
Randy also happens to be a terrible net thrower. “What kind of dog rescuer are you?” I said as I watched him toss the net toward the dog, only to have it miss her by a good three feet. “That was the worst throw ever.”
As Randy tried to figure out our next move (his mother’s roast wouldn’t be ready until later that night), I confessed that I was hooked on dog rescuing.
“I get why you do this,” I told him.
“Because I’m crazy?”
“No, because I’ve never felt so alive. I don’t know how to explain it without sounding cheesy . . .”
“No, I get what you mean,” he said, nodding.
“Usually when I’m doing something my mind is half there, half somewhere else. With you, out here, it’s like the only thing that matters is the dogs. It’s an adrenaline rush like I’ve never felt.”
“Totally. The rest of my life can suck—hell, it usually does. I’m a mess. But when I’m out here, I forget about all that.”
“I haven’t checked my cell phone once today,” I told him, genuinely astonished. “That never happens.”
“Maybe you should move out here and rescue dogs with me,” he said, smiling. “Can you believe I used to be a flight attendant?”
“Isn’t that a problematic job for someone afraid of people and germs?”
“Yeah, trust me—you didn’t want to be on my flight.”
ON OUR way back to Stray Rescue headquarters with the Pit Bull and her pups, Randy told me it was no surprise he ended up rescuing dogs for a living. As a kid, he’d lived under the tyranny of an abusive father—the only time his family got along was when Randy brought a stray dog home.
“I’m probably trying to fix my childhood with every dog I rescue,” he said. “All my self-worth comes from dogs. Always has. These stray and feral dogs are my kids. They’re what I live for. I think I’ll probably be single forever, because all I really care about are these dogs.”
Randy lives with eight rescues in his modest St. Louis home. “The few dogs that truly can’t really be rehabilitated come to live with me,” he told me. Randy is on the perpetual prowl for more foster and adoptive homes for the dogs he rescues, and he joked that he should start a website called StrayHarmony.com.
“It would be a site for lonely people to find the lonely stray dog of their dreams,” he explained. “People could check a box that says ‘I hate men,’ and if the dog also hated men, we’d match them up. It’s the perfect way to connect the freaks of the world with the freaky dogs of the world.”
At a red light, an especially sad-looking shepherd mix shuffled across the pavement in front of us. “I haven’t seen that dog before,” Randy said. He jumped out of the car, kneeled down in the street next to an uncovered manhole, and fed the dog hot dogs while a car behind us honked.
The dog seemed desperate for this unexpected human kindness, even following Randy back to the Jeep. “Oh, honey, I can’t take you with me today,” he said. “I’ve got a full car already.”
The dog got the picture, continuing on to wherever it was headed. We pulled away, and as Randy barreled down a highway toward Stray Rescue headquarters, I told him about nineteenth-century French writer Charles Baudelaire.
“You would have liked him,” I said. “He loved street dogs and wrote the most beautiful poem about them.”
I shuffled through my notebook, looking for where I’d noted Baudelaire’s words. “Can I read the passage to you?”
“You better,” he said.
I cleared my throat: “I sing the mangy dog, the pitiful, the homeless dog, the roving dog, the circus dog. . . . I sing the luckless dog who wanders alone through the winding ravines of huge cities, or the one who blinks up at some poor outcast of society with its soulful eyes, as much as to say, ‘Take me with you, and out of our joint misery we will make a kind of happiness.’ ”
Randy didn’t say anything at first. Then he wept.
MARC FLEW into St. Louis on my last night in town, and the next morning we hit the road on our way to western Indiana—and then Chicago.
While I drove us north through Indiana, Marc spent most of his time at the dinette studying for an important medical school exam. Every hour or so he’d make his way up to the front and massage my upper back, which, if it could speak, would have insisted I never again get behind the wheel of an RV.
We stopped at several dog parks on the way to Chicago. I’d discovered a handy iPhone app, DogGoes, which pointed us to nearby fenced-in parks where we could let the dogs loose. In Lafayette, Indiana, we paid $5 for a day pass to the Shamrock Dog Park, a membership-driven park accessible only with a keycard. I’d never had to pay to exercise my dogs, but Rezzy still couldn’t be trusted off-leash in an open area—if she spotted a cat, rabbit, or squirrel, there was no telling how far she might chase it.
There was another reason Rezzy couldn’t be trusted. Cesar Millan had predicted that she might gain more confidence as she grew accustomed to her post-reservation life, but I never imagined that she would morph into a dog park bully. Rezzy had recently developed a dislike for some dogs larger than herself, especially if we were in an enclosed area. Twice in the previous few weeks I’d had to pull her off a dog. And she wasn’t play-fighting—she’d hurled herself at the animals, teeth bared.
Rezzy’s occasional aggression made me realize how much I’d been spoiled by Casey’s California-style amiability. Though I could do without his humping, he’s never been aggressive. If a dog comes after him, he turns his head away and defuses the situation. After a few weeks of Rezzy’s unpredictability, I understood why a friend of mine had always seemed so tense—so miserable, even—while we walked our dogs together in a park. She never knew what her dog might do, which dog her dog might hurt.
Fortunately, Rezzy beh
aved herself at the Shamrock Dog Park. She spent some time sniffing an eleven-year-old Lab/Shar-Pei mix named Soapie, whose owner told us that the dog had been an accident: a Lab breeder and Shar-Pei breeder had lived next door to each other, and while the breeders never thought to introduce their dogs, a loose gate and the promise of sex brought the unlikely pair together.
“I guess we can call Soapie a Labpei,” Marc said.
The plan was to stay four days in the Chicago area—two at the home of a college friend’s parents, and two at the pet-friendly Monaco Hotel in downtown Chicago. My friend’s parents’ house wasn’t far from my alma mater, Northwestern, so on our first full day in Illinois I took Marc and the dogs on a tour of the campus. On a bright, clear late-spring afternoon, students read books or played Frisbee at the edge of Lake Michigan.
As nice as that walk was, Marc and I were going through a bit of a rough patch. We didn’t acknowledge it then, but we both sensed it. I didn’t feel as connected to him as I had on previous visits, and we were seemingly running out of things to talk about. Still, I wasn’t going to panic over a couple days of distance. I still liked him.
On the day we were scheduled to head to Chicago and the Monaco Hotel, I joined my college friend’s mom, a therapist named Sue, on a dog park excursion with Casey and Rezzy and her family’s two Tibetan Terriers. (Marc said he needed to stay at the house to study.) The dogs all had fun at the thirty-acre Independence Grove dog exercise area, and I took pictures of a white Ibizan Hound, a dog with the biggest ears I’d ever seen.
When we got back to Sue’s, I walked upstairs to the guest room Marc and I were sharing. But Marc wasn’t there. Neither was his suitcase.
On the bedside table, I spotted a note.
ONE OF my favorite things about Casey is his predictability. After so many years together, I usually know what he’s going to do well before he does.
That’s how I knew he would lie down on the carpet next to me (without a sigh, since he’d just been on a long walk and was content) as I sat down on the bed to read the note and process what had just happened. Had Marc really just left? For the airport? Without saying good-bye? While I was at the dog park?
Travels with Casey Page 30
