You Had Me at Woof

by Julie Klam

  Kevin gasped and said, “Wow! Did you see that? That dirt went like thirty feet!”

  I said, “Yes, he’s quite talented.”

  Kyra said, “Isn’t that the kind of dog Travis wants?”

  “No,” Kevin said dismissively, “that’s a pug.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, determined to stay in the conversation. “Pugs.”

  We met Dianne Wiest and her terrier; hunky Chris Cuomo, son of the then governor Mario Cuomo, with his black Lab; Billy Baldwin and Chynna Phillips and their dog Thurman (after New York Yankee Thurman Munson); Carol Kane and her pug George. Other celebrities like Cameron Diaz and Rosie O’Donnell just stopped to pet him because he was so cute. Having Otto opened my world. I found that a good percentage of people liked to pet cute dogs, and even when they ignored me I’d get to say the never tiresome, “Say, Thank you for petting me. I’m Otto and I love to get my tummy scratched.” I made friends with other people though none of us knew each other’s name—we were Otto’s owner, Mercedes’ owner, Amy’s owner, and Scungilli’s owner. I also couldn’t count the number of times an elderly person told me that a Boston terrier had been the first dog they’d had or it was the kind of dog their aunt or uncle or grandparent had. And their names were almost always Buster. I surmised it was because they look like Buster Brown’s dog, Tige, who was actually an American pit bull terrier.

  I also made friends with my upstairs neighbor John, a guy who lived across the hall from his partner. He had four dogs, so he walked them a lot. We started going out on our walks together, and I liked that I didn’t have to go it alone, plus we gossiped and made fun of everyone so it was good times all around. Little by little Otto implanted himself in every part of my life. I took him to parties and to bars, he slept in my bed (under the covers), and we traveled together. A month or so after I got him I took him to Barbara’s office so her friend, the one who referred me, could meet him. I told him about our intense relationship and he shook his head.

  “I used to be like that with Buster but not anymore,” he said self-righteously. “He has his life and I have mine.”

  I felt like he had just called me a loser. I was the grown-up equivalent of the kid in my second-grade class who brought his stuffed bear to school every day. How the hell was Otto going to have his own life? Was he supposed to call other dogs for movie dates? And what about me? What was I going to do?

  In late September, I sat with Otto on our couch and we began the process of finding him a Halloween costume. I knew he had no idea what was going on, but my enthusiasm was enough to make him know he was going to hate it. Halloween has been my favorite holiday, but after the year I went to a grown-up party dressed as the Wicked Queen from Sleeping Beauty and everyone else was dressed as people who are too cool for Halloween, I stopped celebrating. When I found out that there was a doggie Halloween parade at the dog run, I nearly blew a nerd gasket. Dog Halloween costumes had become increasingly popular and nowhere was that more evident than the Upper West Side dog world. I went through the costumes in the catalog, dismissing any that seemed undignified (the hot dog) or too cutesy (bunny or bumblebee) or ones that simply made no sense (Superman?). In the end, Otto and I went with a handsome Howard Hughes costume with a faux-leather aviator hat, white silk scarf, and goggles that wouldn’t stay on and just swung around his neck.

  On Halloween, I dressed him up and walked him to the dog run. We passed through a group of high school kids who laughed at him (or at me). One of them said to me, “Why don’t you just have a kid?” Once we got to the dog run, we were insulated from that kind of attitude. Otto started chasing after a Jack Russell dressed up as Jane Russell and enjoyed a treat bag of Liv-A-Snaps and Beggin’ Strips.

  Every occasion was a chance to be together. I worried about doing anything that would keep me away from him too long. I cut out of work early and took the subway instead of walking home from the office to save time. I didn’t want him to be lonely for one extra second. Our bond was entirely different from what I had with our family dogs growing up. Dogs who need to be walked and not just let out in the yard are much more connected to you. You know, though you may wish you didn’t, their whole potty schedule, for example. My dogs growing up lay on their dog beds in the kitchen regardless of where we were, but Otto was never out of my vision. I used to fantasize about coming home and finding a note from him: “Went to La Bohème and for a quick bite with Maud and Addie. Don’t wait up!”

  In my first years with him, we’d often go out to dinner to restaurants that had dining alfresco. Otto would start on the ground next to me and before anyone knew it, he’d be on the chair facing me. Many a passerby did a double take. Not because he was a dog at the table, but because he appeared to be a person. He was very well behaved, ignoring the bark of intractable four-legged pedestrians (it really seemed to piss them off to see him sitting at the table, those dogs who were just dogs). To me, it wasn’t so much my doing as Otto’s, since he insisted upon being a member of the family. The sooner everyone got that through their heads, the better.

  As we got to know each other, I learned so much more about Otto:• He didn’t lick. If he was particularly excited to see you he would “snoofle” at you. That is, blow air and “wet” through his nose at you. It sounds gross when you say it, but it was really very cute. It was like a very cheery blowhole.

  • If you were petting him and you stopped, he’d tap you with his paw till you started again. If you didn’t start petting him again the taps became more insistent until they were hits.

  • He was an amazing soccer player. He could juggle a ball on his nose for minutes, block any shot, and dribble around multi-table legs.

  • He enjoyed salmon in all ways: grilled, raw, smoked, or croquetted.

  • He liked to sleep under the covers and would sometimes stand under them and bark.

  • He would wear a winter coat, but refused a hooded raincoat and boots.

  • He hated water for anything but drinking. If you swam he’d yell at you, and if you gave him a bath he acted like he was being violated in the worst of ways; if you took him out in the rain, he’d do an about-face.

  • A veterinary ophthalmologist once told me his eyes were “exceptionally bulgy.”

  • He smelled like Fritos.

  More than just emotionally changed by our bond, I had practically restructured my life for Otto, without even realizing it. I didn’t order spicy foods because he couldn’t eat them, and I always ordered enough for two. If he got up during the night, I jumped up and took him out. If he had an accident on the floor, I gave him Pepto-Bismol. I never resented anything I had to do for him. The only way I could justify leaving him for a workout was if it was before he woke up in the morning. So I’d slip out at 4:45 and return by 6:30, a full fifteen minutes before he woke up. For my whole life up to that point I had worried that I was too selfish to get married. I couldn’t imagine finding someone whom I’d want to live with all the time. What if we didn’t like the same TV shows? What if he didn’t want to have Mexican or pizza when I wanted Mexican or pizza? What if he expected me to have six-pack abs? My fears were always about what would be taken from me, never what I might gain. It took time, but my relationship with Otto made me realize that if you love someone, you’re more than willing to compromise to meet their needs—whether it be more nights of roast chicken than you would ordinarily choose, skipping an evening on the town, or not watching a television show with a barking dog.

  It made me feel good to see him content. I took care of him and he took care of me. Within six months of adopting him, I grew up.

  HAVING OTTO TAUGHT ME about the give-and-take that is needed to succeed in a relationship. He gave me the courage to try things and the feeling that there was someone waiting for me. If I could’ve turned Otto into a man, Pinocchio-style, maybe with a tad less gas and eyes that looked straight ahead, I thought at the time, I might actually be able to have a viable relationship. So what if I met a man who wanted to do nothing but watch
baseball game after baseball game or eat in restaurants that scored poorly on the Department of Health’s inspection? I now knew I could compromise. It might work. It was certainly worth finding out.

  LESSON TWO

  How to Find the Parachute Color That’s Most Flattering to You

  Acouple of years into my life with Otto, I decided I wanted a job that would allow me to spend more time with him. I thought about writing a children’s book about him called Otto in the City, but it probably wouldn’t earn me enough to support the two of us. I needed to find a dog-inclusive career. I think somehow I also knew that were the day to come when I’d have human children, this kind of career would be useful in making time for them as well. I looked into a variety of careers that I was either unqualified for or uninterested in—like groomer, veterinary technician, receptionist for a vet office. And then my Omega Institute catalog arrived. I’d been to Omega with my mother a couple of times for various new age workshops. Located in bucolic Rhinebeck, New York, the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies is a new age retreat with classes in everything from Past Life Therapy Training to Kabbalistic Healing to Meditations and Yoga to Spring Ecstatic Chant and The Elixir of Passion to knitting with Indiana Jones’s own Karen Allen.

  Looking through the catalog, I quickly passed over career training in topics like Feng Shui Landscaping and Bodywork Artistry. Then I fell upon the answer: I would be an animal communicator. I’d had a session with one when I first got Otto—over the phone—and she was not unlike the psychics I’d consulted for myself. She told me what Otto thought about various things in my apartment (didn’t like the loft, liked the oversized mirror) and that he wanted to visit the big white house (there was a photo of my house in Katonah on the wall; I asked the animal communicator to tell Otto it had been sold). He felt my choices in dog coats were not working for him, particularly the belted ones (it sounded like a long-winded way of saying “too gay”). And he spent a good deal of time talking about food (“Save your money on the dog food, I like people food better”). All in all, I was impressed and jealous. I wanted to talk to Otto, too. Now I could learn to talk to him and every other animal on the planet. I would be Dr. Do-little-or-nothing. And I’d charge the one hundred and fifty dollars for a forty-five-minute hour that I’d shelled out. It was shaping up into a brilliant plan.

  I signed up for the three-day workshop. Omega was like being at a Grateful Dead sleepaway camp, with lots of rainbow batik, white-people dreadlocks, and that vegan/vegetarian/ macrobiotic food that some people who don’t happen to be me really like. A few years later, I would come with my friend Barbara for a writing workshop taught by Lynda Barry and every night when we turned the lights out in our cabin, a cloud of bats swarmed in through the cracks in the eaves. I stayed under the covers emitting bursts of bloodcurdling screams while Barbara attempted to reason with them (and laughed at me). When we’d tell people at breakfast about the horrors of our night, they’d say, “Oooh, you’re so lucky!” “That’s a wonderful blessing!” “Oh, I wish bats came into my room!”

  I took the bus upstate on Friday afternoon. It was an Omega bus but it picked you up on a street beside Penn Station. There was no need to check the sign in the bus window; Omega students were unmistakable, with their bongos, nose rings, tie-dye, and Guatemalan beads. I got on behind a woman who asked the bus driver if it was okay to bring chapati on the bus.

  “No, no pets on the bus!” he said.

  “It’s bread,” she clarified.

  “Oh, bread’s okay,” he confirmed.

  WE ARRIVED LATE IN the day but there was so much to do in this course over just one weekend that a Friday evening class was scheduled for 7 to 10 P.M. Our teacher was Penelope Smith, the foremost animal communicator (this was before animal communicators had their own TV shows and channels). With her oversized Coke-bottle glasses and cherubic face, she greeted the class—over one hundred students—with the kind of grin that made you think she knew a wonderful secret, which of course she did if she knew how to talk to animals. I felt very encouraged by that as I found a seat on the floor of the enormous, screened-in gazebo in the woods of Omega. We all looked at her smiling eyes and everyone got very, very quiet. There was a long pause as she looked around at the expectant faces framed by the purple dusk.

  “Listen,” she said and then said nothing. I guessed she didn’t mean “listen to me” because she wasn’t saying anything. Many students smiled knowingly and nodded as if they knew what we were listening to.

  “Do you hear the crickets?” I thought it was a good sign that I had heard the crickets. How sharp my skills were already!

  “What are they saying?”

  I knew what they were saying: “chirp, chirp!” I was communicating with the animals. Five cents, please! There were lots of nodding heads, including mine.

  Many hands went up so I raised mine, too. I was going to say, “Chirp, chirp,” or maybe “Chip, chip.”

  She called on a woman with a deep tan on her very plump face and wild blond curls pulled back in a hand-dyed iridescent lilac bandanna. “I hear one saying”—here she paused, straining to make sure she got the message right—“it’s going to rain.” Penelope nodded yes; she’d apparently heard the same cricket. I slowly pulled my hand down.

  Another woman whipped up her arm, very encouraged, and said, “There seems to be a lot of concern about the weather!” Interesting. The crickets were just like my grandparents’ friends in Fort Lauderdale.

  Now the class was on fire. The crickets were warning one another about a storm coming from the Northeast, assigning tasks of who was to bring what to the shelter (“Don’t everyone bring dessert!”). There was also a pregnant cricket and another one who was mad about missing the season finale of Home Improvement. I walked back to my cabin alone, where I heard a squirrel say, “Hey, do you believe these people paid five hundred bucks to try to figure out what crickets are saying?”

  The next morning after a breakfast of tofu-eggs and what seemed like a seventy-five-pound whole wheat roll with ghee, I headed to the classroom, wondering who we would be talking to today—a fly? A hydra? I was very happy to see actual dogs there; I thought I had a much better chance of hearing them.

  Penelope told us stories of the different animals she’d communicated with in her work and at home—she lived on a nature preserve in Point Reyes, California, a place that sounded like magickal-unicorn-rainbows-of-love land.

  We were instructed to start by just listening and imagining what we heard. We each took turns with the dogs. I was beside a boxer so I decided to chat with him. I did what I was told—closed my eyes, tried to empty my mind and hear what he said. Nothing was coming and I imagined him saying, “What? What am I supposed to say?” I thought if I were him, I would not have liked having my ears and tail docked so I made him say, “I didn’t like having my ears and tail docked.” Later, we went around the room and I raised my hand and told Penelope what I’d “heard.” She nodded that yes, he had said that. I asked her how you know if they’re saying it or if you’re making it up. She looked me in the eye and said, “You don’t have to worry, you’re already doing it.” Me, no one else—she knew I had the gift. I looked around at all the other students with great smugness and started figuring out how I could get the money together to take Animal Communication II at the Point Reyes Commune.

  What Penelope described to us about being an animal communicator was something like being in a country where you don’t speak the language and then going off and learning it and coming back. It was like a switch went on and all of the voices were clear. She told us about a time when there was a great fire on her nature preserve (everything she said sounded like a plot point in a Disney movie) and she’d been so upset that for a brief period of time she couldn’t hear the animals speak! She’d lost her sense. “I knew what it was like to be a ‘normal’ person,” she said in a chilling tone.

  I walked around Omega imagining every sparrow and kitty cat was talking to me. Curiously, they all
seemed to have my personality.

  The one thing that did ring true to me was when Penelope talked about the ways in which you were already communicating with your dog. Aside from the sit/stay/leave it type commands, you knew if your dog had to go out for a walk or they’d stand by their food bowl to tell you they were hungry. There were other things. My aunt Mattie always knew when her dog was getting a stomachache because he’d do a certain kind of stretching, and I knew when Otto needed his anal glands expressed because he’d perform a very special dance. He’d sit on the rug and with one leg drag himself around and around in circles and he’d look at me every time he came around, like a ballerina spotting during a series of pirouettes.

  On the bus back to New York, I talked to people who’d taken other workshops and we all had the same self-satisfied sense that we were now in possession of superhuman abilities. We could have driven the bus back with our minds or, better yet, transported ourselves by breaking down our molecular structures. One woman who’d done some kind of automatic writing class asked me if I could talk to her cat for her (you don’t need to try to convince these people—they drank the Kool-Aid in the Omega dining hall). The cat was back in San Luis Obispo, California. She showed me his picture in her wallet and asked me to see if he was okay. I stopped and concentrated hard on his picture and San Luis Obispo and I thought about the swallows in Capistrano and finally decided yes, he was okay. I had a very strong feeling that he was. You know, because he looked fine in the picture. Why wouldn’t he be? She was really relieved because she’d talked to a friend on the phone the night before and there’d been a hurricane and she was worried that her cat had been scared or worse.