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For Minnie and Harry and, of course, Carol
one
CHANCE ENCOUNTER
On most Saturday mornings, I leave for the Union Square farmers market early, when Manhattan feels as if it belongs just to me. I need to go there every week I’m in town. That need has less to do with fruits and vegetables, cheese and flowers, more to do with a New York state of mind. I need the brightness of day, the emptiness of the streets, the license to look at the city, listen to it, when it’s still sleepy, just waking up. I need the weather, season to season. And I need at least one dog walking along beside me, even better, two, as I push my grocery cart east, across town, and then back. Without a dog or two beside me, I feel incomplete. I catch myself talking to one or the other even if they’re not there and then feel like an idiot.
I know the route so well I can walk it in my mind. I can conjure it up in winter when the light is thin and gray, the color of old stone buildings, or in the summer when the morning sun blinds me as I head east on Twenty-second Street. In the spring, when cherry blossoms make the sidewalks look like natural parade floats arched in pink pom-poms, and in the fall, when West Chelsea brownstones dress up for Halloween.
As I walk, I love to look at the ornate facades of what passed for skyscrapers a century or so ago reflected as mocking, fun-house distortions of themselves on the new glass boxes around them. I wonder when I see the row of stone lion heads above the windows of the Old Navy store what sort of past lives the building had. I always stop and get out a dollar bill well before I reach, propped against his wall, the homeless man who likes dogs. He’s there most Saturday mornings and has asked me to follow him on YouTube rapping.
On each block, there are a hundred things to notice: a man in a bright orange shirt riding a bike no-handed, slaloming down Broadway singing, a stretch of sidewalk laid with worn squares of slate shiny after being hosed down, giant blow-up soccer balls outside bars during the World Cup. For dogs: garbage and dropped pizza slices and little rivers to be sniffed and other dogs.
In my opinion, the Union Square farmers market is reason enough to live in New York City. On Saturdays in the summer, there are more than sixty stalls. Chefs, accompanied by helpers pushing giant wheelbarrows or carts, cruise for the best strawberries or exotic kale or the tastiest heirloom tomatoes to turn into somebody’s birthday or date-night meal. The market is about possibility.
When I began going to the Union Square farmers market in 1994, not long after I moved to New York, Piggy went with me. My first bull terrier, he was a brindle, meaning he looked like a white dog wearing a blackish-brownish striped jacket that was too small. I got him as a crazy puppy, while I was the CBS News correspondent in South Africa. I was transferred to London and eventually back to the United States. He came along. Making our way to and from the farmers market, a three-mile round-trip, was more like waterskiing or chariot driving than walking. I accompanied him. He didn’t accompany me. We went his way, and the route was different every week. He considered the farmers market one vast treat opportunity. I’d buy him apples and pears, plums and peaches, whatever was in season, whatever was heaped high on tables or in crates on the ground.
* * *
GOING TO THE farmers market with Piggy, I always felt as if we were up to something together. It was fun. At some point, I couldn’t say when, our weekly expeditions became important to me.
On Saturday mornings, Piggy and I would get to the market just as it was opening, to avoid crowds, and in the summer, to avoid the heat. There, we would usually meet another bull terrier, Zeke, and his owners, Mike and Julia. More than twenty-five years later, I still see Mike and Julia every Saturday. After Zeke came Simon. After Simon came Sunny, a brindle like Piggy, but bigger and much, much better behaved. Likewise, after Piggy came Goose, a scoundrel and a thief if there ever was one, and then Minnie joined us. A sorry-looking rescue when I got her, she transformed into a sleek glamour-puss, full of attitude.
Bull terriers are not that common a breed. To see one is fairly unusual, but if you went to the Union Square farmers market on a Saturday morning leading up to the time the events in this story took place, you might have seen as many as four. Sunny; Seamus, a wildly exuberant miniature who looked like a junior version of Sunny; Minnie and Goose, that is until Goose had to be put down. Then there were three.
The Saturday market is loaded with dogs, all kinds. But I have to say, tourists go crazy at the sight of a whole gathering of bull terriers standing together and have to take pictures. The jam ladies always smiled and waved as I went by with Minnie. So did the NYC rooftop-honey man. A woman with streaks of pink in her hair always knelt to pet her. We always seemed to run into her near the goat-cheese stall. Annie, a seventy-something-year-old psychologist who always wears a baseball cap, wanders the market feeding her favorite dogs fistfuls of treats, regaling their owners with stories about her various preoccupations, which include NASCAR races and how to be happy. Where I buy apples, the man in charge of the stand always used to laugh when Goose would help himself to a big juicy one from a crate on the ground. I’d offer to pay, but most of the time the man would wave me away. When Goose couldn’t make it all the way to the market anymore, the man asked me where he was. If the weather was really bad, if it was too hot or too cold or raining or snowing, and Minnie refused to go with me, I felt invisible. I’ve been a correspondent with CBS News for more than forty years. Six million or more people watch CBS Sunday Morning, where I’ve worked since 1993. I get recognized every day no matter where I am, but the funny thing is, when I go to the Union Square market dogless, it’s as if I don’t exist, which has advantages, sometimes. I like being a bit player in the happy weekly street theater that takes place among the fruits and vegetables and flowers, in which the four-legged actors, not the two-legged ones, are the stars.
* * *
JULY 23, 2016, started out the way most summer Saturdays did. It was warm, sunny. Six months after Goose’s death, Minnie still didn’t want to go on walks. She still missed him, still looked for him, still seemed sad, so getting her to the market took some convincing. Bull terriers are exceptionally good at refusing. They’re genetically wired to be stubborn, so we carried on our argument until I tugged and nudged her to the end of our block. We crossed the street, and she gave in.
* * *
SOMETIME IN EARLY 2007, Minnie was dumped to die. She wore no collar or anything else to identify her. She had just had puppies, so maybe a puppy mill had used her for breeding and then gotten rid of her. Who knows what happened to the puppies? It was cold, days around twenty degrees, nights around ten. How she survived is a miracle. She was picked up in a rough area east of East Flatbush in Brooklyn by New York’s Animal Care & Control dogcatchers and taken to the big ACC shelter not far away. Thousands of animals are destroyed there every year.
On a Saturday early that February, a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine, Coco McPherson, embedded herself as a volunteer at the shelter hoping to write an article about how its kill policy worked and why it was so difficult to find out which animals were docketed to die and when. She’d adopted a succession of unwanted pit bulls and multiple cats from shelters. She was surprised to find a purebred bull terrier at such a place. The workers had named the dog Lil’ Kim,
after the rapper who went to prison for lying about her friends’ involvement in a shooting. The poor thing was a wreck, so emaciated she looked like a skeleton, all the bones in her tail showing, all her ribs. Underneath the filth, she was white. She’d had a bath, but this was grime that would have to grow out. A broad stripe of yellow fur ran down the middle of her back, the result of malnutrition. Because she had given birth so recently, her tits still hung down. After a week at the shelter living on borrowed time, she charmed Coco McPherson. “Spay her, and I’ll pick her up next week. She’s too cute to kill.”
The same day, Coco went into the Barking Zoo, her neighborhood pet-accessory store in Chelsea, and mine. She asked the clerks if they knew anybody who might be willing to adopt a bull terrier. She had three dogs and two cats and couldn’t manage another animal in her apartment. A woman behind the counter said, “Oh, we know a woman with a big, sweet bull terrier. Maybe she’d take her.” On weekends, I typically walked Goose to the Barking Zoo and bought him a big jerky treat, like a mother taking her child for an ice cream. It was a bribe, a way to make him get some exercise, so he wouldn’t just stand around refusing to move away from the front stoop. On Sunday, the day after Coco McPherson had been in, I convinced Goose it would be worth his while to make the trip. The woman who rang up his treat said, “Oh, am I glad to see you.” Suspicious, I responded, “Why? I was in here yesterday.” She told me about the bull terrier in the shelter and asked if I would consider taking her. I replied, “I don’t want a second dog. One is enough.” She asked me to think about it and said she would have Coco McPherson call me. I could discuss it with her.
I’m a soft touch. I agreed to “foster” the dog. The following Saturday at noon, I arrived at the Barking Zoo with Goose. Coco brought the rescue dog. In the crowded, busy store, the two of them sized each other up. Goose was more interested in treats than in this other animal, who seemed shell-shocked and too scared to be interested in anything at all. Coco bought her a sweater. We led the two dogs to my apartment, then decided to take the rescue dog to the vet, whose clinic was at the end of my block, a five-minute walk unless you’re walking a bull terrier. After a week and a half of being fed in the shelter, she weighed just barely thirty-four pounds. Her appropriate weight is around fifty pounds. Her spaying had been botched, so she had a serious infection. A thousand dollars later, I took her home. I think I had already decided to keep her, rationalizing the decision by saying to myself that it would be unfair to put her through yet another rupture. She had suffered enough. I decided to rename her Minnie, not Mini like the car or because she was small, but Minnie, as in Mouse. She just seemed like a Minnie.
At first, she seemed terrified to eat. She would stand over her bowl rigid, staring at it. I found myself trying to imagine her story, to figure out the mystery of her past. Minnie immediately took over my laundry bin. It’s tubular, maybe two and a half feet high, and is made out of stiffened canvas reinforced with wires. She tipped it over and burrowed inside with my dirty clothes. The first time, before I’d realized she was inside, I saw it convulse suddenly. I jumped and then saw her. Every time I ironed, she sat under the ironing board. She liked women but was afraid of some men. I could imagine a half dozen scenarios, given those clues.
Every day she tried to kill Goose. He was a generous, sweet boy who was happy to welcome a companion. Minnie would stare at him, and everybody else for that matter, with a wild, wary devil-dog look. She figured out quickly that I was the key to her well-being, to meals and warmth and attention. She would attack Goose whenever he tried to get near me. When bull terriers fight, it can be dangerous. They’re strong. After multiple bloody dogfights, I worried that I would have to give her up. I didn’t want to think about shunting her off to someone else, but I didn’t want a dead dog or to be seriously injured myself trying to separate the two of them.
It troubled me that Minnie never seemed to learn her name. No matter how many times I repeated it or how loudly I said it, she failed to react. She seemed to be startled and would instinctively snarl and lunge if anyone came up behind her. Soon I suspected she might be deaf and had her tested. Sure enough. It explained a lot about her behavior. Learning that she couldn’t hear at all made me marvel again at how she’d managed to survive in a not-so-nice part of New York City before being picked up by the dogcatchers. How had she avoided getting hit by a car?
When the fights were at their worst, I was working on a CBS Sunday Morning story about a man named Bill Berloni, who trains shelter dogs for Broadway shows and is the behaviorist for the New York Humane Society. He evaluates new arrivals at the Humane Society shelter to determine whether they’re ready for placement and what sort of home each needs. I told him about Minnie and how afraid I was I’d have to give her up. His advice: establish a hierarchy. In the Teichner pack, I had to be Number One, the Alpha. Then came Goose. Minnie came last. He suggested physically positioning Minnie behind Goose in the kitchen when treats were being given out or when they got their meals. When we headed out on walks, I had to arrange to go out the door first, then Goose, then Minnie. If she snarled at Goose, my instructions were to reprimand her and put her in her crate. If she looked at me before picking a fight, I was supposed to praise her. With Bill Berloni’s help, within a month, the fights stopped.
Minnie became devoted to Goose. He was her guide and eventually her sneaky partner in crime. When she arrived, she wasn’t housebroken. Goose taught her to go outside. She wouldn’t walk without him. Every day, when I got home, Goose would find a way to tip over my handbag on the floor. It didn’t matter how high up I put it, he’d get it. With the contents spread out under my dining table, he’d carefully hunt for cough drops. He wasn’t interested in the pens or my hairbrush or checkbook. He loved cough drops. Given my line of work, I always had cough drops in my bag. Broadcasters tend to need them. Minnie would appear, take some for herself, then disappear, leaving Goose to get in trouble for piracy. She usually hid in my bed. As soon as the bed is made, Minnie unmakes it. She snorts, paws at the sheets ferociously, tosses back the duvet with her nose, then buries herself underneath the covers. I find her wrapped up as if she were in a cocoon or else sleeping with her head on a pillow, looking innocent enough to suggest that she should be a saint. It took a year, but Skinny Minnie filled out and became very grand indeed in the jeweled collar I felt she had to have, convinced as she was that she was a glamorous movie star or maybe a princess.
For nearly half his life, Goose had serious heart issues. By the time I had to have him put to sleep, at the beginning of 2016, he was taking half a dozen different medications. He could barely walk. We were in South Carolina when he collapsed. I took him to the vet, but she misdiagnosed or underestimated his condition.
I took him home. Seeing him suffer was terrible. Minnie would sniff Goose from time to time and try to make me pay attention to her. She watched at the door as I struggled to get Goose into the car when I took him back to the vet. Only later, when I came home without him, when Minnie realized he was gone, did she react. She looked everywhere for him, not just in South Carolina but once we got back to New York. She checked under the stairs down to the garden, where he always went to pee, and in the kitchen by his water bowl. She sniffed his bed, his toys, his sweaters, not just once but every day, again and again. She seemed scared, vulnerable, the little deaf dog who had lost her companion of nine years, her protector, her good luck charm. Getting her to go for walks became an ordeal. She didn’t want to eat. She stopped being a cheeky, joyful flirt. Goose died in January. Well into the summer, Minnie was still despondent. Dogs do mourn. I was afraid she would be permanently depressed. I decided I needed to find an older, male bull terrier to keep her company and kept checking all the rescue websites, but none materialized.
I told myself I was trying to help her, but the truth is, I was just as sad as Minnie. I missed my Goosey desperately. I got him from a breeder in North Carolina in the fall of 2002. On the day I picked him up, when he was three months ol
d, my cousin went with me. She gave him a woolly fleece toy shaped rather like a gingerbread man. He immediately put it between his front paws and began kneading it and sucking one of its arms, as if he were nursing. Over time, the arm stretched out, so it looked a little grotesque. Goosey never outgrew sucking on his fleece man. He wore out many. He and Minnie played tug-of-war with a few and tore them to pieces. Often on Sunday mornings, while I watched CBS Sunday Morning, I sewed them up with whatever color thread came in all the little hotel sewing kits I had collected in my travels, so most of Goose’s fleece men had strange red or blue or gray Frankenstein scars. After he died, for months I took the last of his fleece men to bed with me and clung to him. I packed him in my suitcase when I traveled on assignment, just to have him with me in whatever unfamiliar hotel room I checked into late at night. I still have him on a bench near my bed.
* * *
SO, ON THAT July 23, as Minnie and I made our way to the Union Square market, some of the bright, Saturday-morning pleasure I always felt was dulled by how much we still missed Goose. We had no idea what we were about to walk into, that our lives were about to be transformed, that a chance encounter would soon set in motion a sad and wonderful New York story … this story.
It was eight-thirty, and that mattered, as it turned out. I had bought my flowers already. Minnie and I were standing at the northeast corner of the market, for anybody who knows the place, between the Stokes Farm stand and Cato Corner Cheese. I was talking to Mike and Julia, Sunny’s people. Minnie was ignoring Sunny, as she usually did. A couple of other acquaintances had stopped to chat, too.
A stocky, bearded man with tattoos on his arms approached us. He had a large, fluffy golden retriever with him. I recognized them from walking with Goose and Minnie early in the morning in the park along the Hudson River at Chelsea Piers. Once, big steamships docked at Chelsea Piers. Now it’s a big sports complex surrounded by grassy areas and bike paths. It had been a couple of years since I’d seen the man and his dog there. Goose could still make it to the river then. For months this man and I had talked, carrying on long, meaty conversations some days, just saying hello other times. I’d go away on assignment. When I got back, he’d be there. I don’t think he ever knew my name or I his, but we knew each other’s dogs’ names. Typical among New York dog-walking friends. Then, suddenly, he disappeared. Another Chelsea Piers dog-walking acquaintance told me he’d moved way uptown. Now here he was at the farmers market.
When Harry Met Minnie Page 1
