Saved

by Karin Winegar

  “I majored in phys ed to please my dad, but I hated kids and didn’t want to teach it,” he says. “So then I became the worst flight attendant in the world—I worked for Eastern, TWA, and Ozark. I did it for the travel, but what I really did was pick up strays in other countries and smuggle them home in the airplane restroom. If you were ever flying and wondered why the restroom was always in use, that was me. But I didn’t want to make a career of asking people, ‘Do you want chicken or beef?’ all my f—g life.”

  And he hasn’t: since founding Stray Rescue in 1998, Randy has helped redeem more than five thousand dogs as well as hundreds of cats from starvation and neglect on the streets of the city. At any given time, there are 150 to 300 rescued cats and dogs in Stray Rescue foster homes, and he and his three hundred volunteers manage to rescue one to two thousand dogs each year.

  “Quentin did more for me than a therapist did in fifteen years,” says Randy, who has written about Quentin in Miracle Dog: How Quentin Survived the Gas Chamber to Speak for Animals on Death Row. “We are a match made in heaven. We are supposed to work together, to do good things for animals. Either that or I can let my phobias and anxieties keep me staying in a box. That’s why God created pills—and dogs.”

  Randy drives onto a corner, where a man, swigging from a bottle in a paper bag, shuffles through the back door of his home as a golden, short-haired female and a longer-haired black male dog bounce up to greet Randy. Randy has supplied the two primitive doghouses on the unfenced yard, which is junk free and neatly mowed, and these two strays come and go as they please, showing up for their daily feeding.

  “Where’s my Charlie? There’s my girl!” he says, patting them and feeding them treats. “Honey, hang in there. I’ll be back for you.”

  And he will. This pair (Randy refers to them as a married couple and vows he will see them adopted together) is trusting enough to allow him to handle them. And soon—once there is room at the vet, with one of his foster families, or at the shelter—they will get off the streets. They have a chance at successful adoption, but that’s not true of all his cats and dogs.

  “People say we are ‘no kill’ but I hate the term ‘no kill,’” he says emphatically, blowing cigarette smoke out of the jeep’s window. “What do you do with unadoptable dogs? And how many Randys are there? We put down five to ten a year, and what we do is responsible kill.”

  Randy estimates there are forty thousand stray dogs in St. Louis alone. That’s not uncommon for big cities, he believes, and it’s most common where there’s urban decay.

  “In this neighborhood, you don’t even see police; there’s no vets here, nothing to help the animals,” he rails. “We are the only non-third-world country with this problem. The ‘rules’ say I’m only supposed to handle adoptable animals. How do we make it politically correct to care about these guys? Why are they second-class citizens?”

  Off Forest Street, Randy parks the jeep and enters a yard strewn with ruptured plastic bags of garbage, from which a cordial young black-and-white dog is trying to make a meal. In the overgrown jumble marked with homemade crucifixes, plywood gnomes, and peeling wooden Santas, he finds four roly-poly puppies cuddling for warmth on a piece of foam rubber in the brush. Randy judges they are seven to eight weeks old, mature enough to leave their mother, and scoops them up. He scavenges a red plastic milk crate from the junk, and the four pups—three black and one chocolate brown, probably pit-bull mixes—go into the crate, which I hold on my lap. After one or two dignified sniffs, Quentin ignores them, and the puppies, complaining in tiny squeaky groans, swiftly fall asleep in a pile.

  Dark is coming—no time for us to be on the East Side—and we need to get the puppies to the clinic, so we drive back to the city. “When I die, just filet me and throw me over on the East Side so the dogs can have some food,” says Randy as the jeep barrels away from the melancholy land below the freeway exit.

  We deliver the pups to Stray Rescue headquarters in the Lafayette Square neighborhood. A vivid and cheerful Charles Houska animal mural brightens the parking-lot wall, and framed Houska prints are on display around the lobby of the single-storey modern building. The facility has five full-time staff, and Randy serves as director and fund-raiser, as well as keeper of the group’s spokesdog.

  Handing the puppies over to the enthusiastic women behind the reception counter, Randy leads us backstage to visit Hop, the dog that was used as pit-bull bait. Hop is a compact, golden-brown mixed breed, possibly Labrador and shepherd, with numerous shaved patches revealing fresh sutures on his side, chest, and legs. He puts no weight on his left front leg as he greets Randy with humble excitement.

  “My booboodoo—I’m very proud of you,” coos Randy, who squats in the narrow kennel to stroke the dog’s shoulders and kiss the scarred forehead. Hop looks up at him with meek and adoring eyes. “This is just the best—when they come to trust you, because on the street they are so wary.”

  Another population of rescued dogs waits for us at Randy’s three-storey red-brick Victorian townhouse in the gentrifying neighborhood of Benton Park. The home faces a large tranquil park replete with ponds and sits just down a rise from the Anheuser-Busch brewery. We clump up steep stairs to the elegant hideaway, with high ceilings and doorway transoms and a dining-room table ornamented with a vase of stately calla lilies garnished with a red bandana. A hockey stick autographed by center Keith Tkachuk of the St. Louis Blues rests on an ottoman, and the bronze-and-gold walls display portraits of Quentin and some of Randy’s previous dogs.

  “Being gay doesn’t automatically mean I love Judy Garland—I love ice hockey and ballroom dance,” says Randy. “But who’d want to date me? I have eight dogs in my house. Are you guys sure it doesn’t smell in here? Tell me the truth.” We reassure him it doesn’t smell the least bit doggy—and it doesn’t.

  Randy has sawed off the top half of the dining room door to the kitchen, and three or four blonde dog heads peer over the top of it. We look over it toward the kitchen at the far end of the floor and a shaggy black head peeks down the kitchen staircase—this is Horse, a deaf husky mix.

  “Half my kids are ancient—they’re fourteen to sixteen—and the others are two to seven years old, so I know half my family is gonna die in the next few years,” says Randy.

  I make the mistake of moving toward the pack, and there’s a horrendous rush and boom as something hard and determined smacks the half-door, bellowing at me.

  “Charlie! No! Sit!” Randy says in a commanding bass voice, interposing himself and shoving me back from the doorway. “Don’t look at Charlie—that’s him—and for God’s sake don’t try to touch him. The others are okay. I rescued Charlie from a fight ring; he wants to kill everyone. He’s good with other dogs, and he’s my sleeping buddy, but at the shelter he bit everyone and all the volunteers. He has to wear a wire muzzle like Hannibal Lecter when he goes anywhere.”

  In his “Zen room”—the palm-thick front parlor—the walls and fireplace mantel are painted bright gold, and there is a Moroccan-style hanging lamp framed by tent-like swags of tropical mosquito netting. In the center of the room, in a blue bowl poised on a hanging marble table, is a Siamese fighting fish named Pumpernickel, also rescued (“Kids were going to flush him down the toilet,” Randy explains).

  A teeny blonde mongrel not much bigger than a large caterpillar and sporting a blue-and-green pastel plaid coat scrabbles across the pine floors and leaps joyously at us, begging to be picked up, then slurps our chins, noses, and eyes. “Ichi!” Randy says, hugging the dog. “This little guy—Ichiban—was going to be euthanized at a shelter, and I was doing a book-signing there and smuggled him out under my coat. Something was wrong with his back knees, but after surgery, he could run like crazy.”

  “My favorite thing in the whole world is to lie in bed with my dogs and watch cartoons,” he says. (Not quite: Randy takes ballroom dance lessons several times a week, and he and his dance partner won jive and cha-cha at the national ballroom dance competition
.)

  Randy’s least favorite thing are germs (he was convinced he had the plague, anthrax, and bird flu, among others) and being with unfamiliar humans. Despite those very real phobias, he travels often to promote humane practices—lately to North Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Kansas, and Oklahoma—with Quentin serving as the news peg for meetings and the photo op for media. Randy says the two of them have persuaded fifty communities to close gas chambers. Three states have banned them statewide, including, most recently, Illinois, where Quentin and Randy appeared with the governor at the signing of the new regulation.

  “Quentin taught me how to help more animals than I thought I could,” says Randy, at ease among the pillows of his living-room sofa. “He really knows his job; he hopes it’s gonna help other dogs.”

  “We recently went to a town in Georgia where the animal-control staff were very proud of their new gas chamber. They told me, ‘We just stopped shooting them,’” he says. “In situations like that, I can’t let how I really feel take over. So I thought, Randy, you have to act! Show them they can be progressive, make their town look good, get some good news in the press about them. I talked to them with no judgment, and Quentin does his job.”

  Tomorrow morning, Randy and Quentin will mount a rescue expedition back to East St. Louis. Tonight he is with his rescued pack: Quentin in his arms, Ichi washing his ears, and Charlie and crew panting behind the sawed-off door.

  “I’m only one person working for animals,” Randy says. “I’m no hero; this is not a job; it’s what I am.”

  Jack and Bob spend part of the year in Indio, California, and part in Montana, but they are always together.

  14

  DOG IS MY CO-PILOT

  BOB BRADLEY AND HIS DOG, JACK

  IT’S NOT THE 1966 Jaguar XKE in which Bob Bradley is driving twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. It’s not his fleet of polo ponies—bay and black, taut and fit, purchased in New Zealand, Mexico, and Argentina.

  It’s Bob himself, who is wiry with thick silver hair, bright blue eyes, and a smattering of movie-star glamour. He’s the kind of man who, even in his sixties, provokes gorgeous young women to lean out of their pickup-truck windows and purr, “Hi, honey, you’re lookin’ sharp,” and mean it.

  And there are plenty of pretty women and gorgeous horses in Bob’s winter habitat, the El Dorado Polo Club, part of the vast, irrigated green fields in the Coachella Valley in the California desert near Indio. Bob is one of twenty-one partners who keep their polo ponies in these hundred and seventy lush, flat acres framed in white fences and high hedges of pink oleander.

  Around the edge of the polo fields, a series of single-storey brick buildings contain box stalls of fine, lean horses with shaved manes above slim necks and restless bodies. Bob’s office—at one end of his stable—features a shower and dressing area and is tasteful in a sporting club way. It is part utilitarian and part shrine to the high-spirited times that come with the sport.

  Somebody gave him a life-sized cardboard cutout of a bikinied model, and a ten-foot python skin spans one wall above photographs of Bob with Hillary Clinton; of shirtless Argentinean polo players doing the limbo under a hitching rail (“when those Argentineans get liquor in ’em, they take their clothes off,” says Bob chuckling); of Bob and famed natural-horsemanship trainer Buck Brannaman. “I know Buck,” says Bob. “His stuff works if you have one or two cow horses. When you have eighteen horses giving you shit, it doesn’t. You don’t take the time you need to take.”

  Polo is like bumper cars at high speed without seatbelts. Riders gallop half a dozen horses into a lather over six time periods called chukkers. It’s a matter of certainty that the players will be injured, and Bob has played for more than thirty years. “Let’s see, yeah, I broke a couple of ribs with horses going over,” he recalls. “I fell on my own hand. I broke collar bones, got forty stitches in the back of my head from hooves . . .” Bob is genuinely cool about the battering he takes. All of this is de rigueur for a speedy equestrian sport.

  As a retired, successful corporate CEO, Bob could do anything he likes. What he likes is polo, he says, for the down-to-earth people, for the outdoor life, and for the creatures.

  When he was a boy, Bob wanted to be a doctor—he opened an office in an Allied moving box when he was about ten. Ultimately, though, he went into business. He and his father, Lee, a mechanical engineer, started a company in St. Paul, Minnesota, manufacturing metal component parts for agricultural, automotive, and aircraft use—everything from cribbage boards to diesel engines. Bob sold the company for tens of millions in 1997. Along the way, he started playing polo on Sundays in Maple Plain, Minnesota, and then in California. There followed a divorce from his first wife, and a marriage to a much younger woman who also played polo. And not long after that, Bob found himself on the receiving end of heartbreak from his second wife.

  “My heart said she’s the rest of my life,” he says. “It became a fight between my brain and my heart, and the brain said, ‘Get out,’ and the heart said, ‘Ah, give it another chance.’ It’s the same damn thing; the heart overrules the brain for awhile. Love is a risky thing, while business is a calculated risk. The worst is that pain in the stomach. That lasts for a long time.”

  So there was a second divorce. And then he was alone in his various paradises, at least for the time being. But not quite. Bob met a puppy, the last of a litter of five offspring of an Australian shepherd and blue-heeler bitch crossed with a Catahoula dog father. “Jack was the last of the litter; nobody wanted him,” says Bob. “He talked me into it.”

  From the floor of his office in the polo barn today, sturdy, bobtailed Jack gazes up adoringly at Bob, the flicker of banked fun in his watchful eyes along with a spooky-deep intelligence.

  “Jack has become the best dog I ever had, my best friend and companion,” says Bob, who has a good-sized population of past dogs to compare him with, among them Drake, his German shepherd; Basil, a bassett hound; Bubba, a bloodhound; and Sarge, a black Labrador. Jackie is Bob’s polo, trail, ranch, and cow dog, and something more. When Bob was in bed for three days recently with an exceptionally nasty flu, Jack sat beside the bed and watched him.

  “Dogs don’t have another agenda. He’s a dog for a single person, more focused on me,” says Bob. “But he’ll ask to go out if things are boring, right, Jackie?” Jack mumble-growls like a man with his mouth full of sandwich, shoots Bob a look, and does a shoulder roll across the toes of Bob’s cowboy boots as if to say, “Look at me! Rub my stomach! Let’s go! God, it’s boring in here!”

  So we get a move on, at Jack’s insistence. The grass at each stable is golf-tee fine and verdant, the aisles neatly raked. Bob and Jack lead us down the shady stable aisle, making introductions: to a sorrel Mexican Thoroughbred named Bonbon; to Gato, an Argentine Thoroughbred; to Suave, an Argentine Thoroughbred mare with the distinctive South American Criollo blood that gives her speckled roan legs; and to a New Zealand Thoroughbred named Hanna.

  “Some say mares have more heart,” Bob explains. “I don’t care whether it’s a mare or a gelding, as long as they have four good legs and work well.”

  “Argentinean horses can be shy—training methods in America, New Zealand, and England are kinder, gentler,” he explains, as some horses dodge our outstretched hands and hide their faces in the corners of the tile stalls. “Ministro, you old fart!” he greets one gelding, a black Argentinean horse with white stockings whose markings give him the appearance of wearing a clerical collar and cuffs.

  When Bob moves toward the shed to get his golf cart, Jack bounds ahead, ready to ride shotgun. He knows his place, and it’s in the passenger seat.

  An orchestra of mynah birds sings among the pink and white roses on the stable patio beside a black Kenworth semitruck tractor trailer. Bob hauls his fifteen horses in this high and glossy rig. This is the last week of the winter season at the Palm Springs area polo clubs, and many ponies are already turned out in neighboring ranches on the spring grass,
their lean ribs beginning to fatten in the off-season. Soon Bob and Jack and the horses will head for northwest Wyoming and his Hoback River ranch, where a cut-throat trout stream runs just out the front door of a log house built to order with old-fashioned elegance and a view of the Wyoming Range. He will make this drive, as he makes all his drives, with Jack in the co-pilot seat.

  Bob may still have those stomach pains for his lost love, but he isn’t saying much about that. He will say Jack saved his life in a way, that Jack takes care of him, that his leftover pup has stood by him. “More and more I realize how unusual Jack is,” he says. “He is kind with dogs and people. There’s a lot going on behind those brown eyes.”

  15

  NO MATTER WHAT

  SHANNON LARSON AND HER DOG MASON

  WHEN MASON SMILES—and he always smiles—he grins all the way back to his ears, his outsized tongue lolls out like a pink hand towel, and his deep brown eyes shine. It’s a mouth easily big enough to encircle Harley, his Lhasa apso pal, who at this moment is trying vainly to gain some purchase on Mason’s back from the vantage point of a crushed velvet sofa so he can hump his way to doggie dominance. Mason is unperturbed. Very little bothers him: not the yipping, dancing Harley; not the chickens in a farmyard where he often plays; not assorted children thumping and pulling on him.

  But once, a crucial once, he was perturbed; he got his way and it saved lives.

  Mason belongs to Shannon Larson, a single mom in her mid-twenties whose round cheekbones, hairband, and bangs give her the appearance of a more serene Sally Field. Shannon lives in the tiny town of Banks in the Willamette Valley of Oregon about forty-five minutes from the coast. It’s a moist, green paradise of sheep pastures, hazelnut orchards, and vegetable stands, where mammoth logging trucks hauling Douglas fir topped with melting slush roar out of the mountains and down to the mills, one of which you can see from the tract townhouse development where Shannon lives with her stepmother and her daughter, Kennedy.