by Larry Levin
“C’mon, Oogy. You need to get into the box.”
Oogy did not move.
I went back to the crate and called his name several times without, it seemed to me, the slightest hint of threat in my tone of voice. Oogy continued to lie on the floor and stare at me.
As he was not going to cooperate, my only solution was to pick him up and put him in the crate, which I did. He struggled and resisted. I had to push his behind in and swiftly shut the door, sliding the latching mechanism into place. As soon as he was inside, he turned around and began barking furiously. Each bark was as loud and as distinct as a gunshot in a train car.
Separation anxiety, I told myself.
“I’ll be back, you don’t have to worry about that,” I said to him. “I won’t leave you alone for more than a few hours. I want to be here when the boys get home.”
Oogy continued barking. He barked as I left the room and walked down the hall, and when I went into the driveway I could hear him barking and barking. I felt terrible that he missed me so much and thought he had been abandoned, but I saw no other choice. I needed to go to work, and I had to believe, based on what everyone had told me about crating, that Oogy would adapt and feel protected within its confines.
I knew the boys usually got home from school at a little before three, so I made sure to beat them by fifteen minutes. When I opened the back door, Oogy immediately began barking, and I could hear him banging around in the cage, his tail whacking the sides, making the metal joints ring like some atonal wind chime. His complete and utter joy at seeing me walk into the living room warmed my heart. I knelt and opened the door of the cage and he burst out, running around and into me while I patted his head and flanks and rubbed his back. That excitement level continued unabated as we walked back into the kitchen, where I put him on the leash and took him outside. As we were completing the second circuit of the house, I saw the boys crossing the neighbor’s front yard. When they saw Oogy, they came running over, surrounding him. They dropped their backpacks and knelt, and he raced back and forth between the two of them. I thought back to the laundry room earlier in the day and our first meeting and wondered what connections might be reverberating in his head.
“Welcome home, Oogy,” Noah said. “Welcome to our house.”
“We’re glad you’re here,” said Dan. “You’re part of our family now.”
The four of us went into the house. In the kitchen, the boys shed sweatshirts and backpacks. Oogy followed them into the family room, where the boys sat on the couch. Oogy jumped up and sat between them. He was already a part of them, and they each placed a hand on him. I sat on the coffee table in front of them and told them everything Diane had told me. I explained about the crate, the blue lotion, what behavior to expect. I told them it would be nice if they participated in walking and feeding Oogy. While experience told me there was little chance of that happening, it was worth a shot. But to see the way the three of them now sat together on the couch was the most important thing. Really, it was the only thing.
The boys’ late afternoon routine consisted of snacks and some TV to decompress. Oogy whined and barked at them while they ate, demanding to be included. Later, the boys began their homework while I started dinner and, afterward, did the dishes. When they tried to do their homework at the same time, Oogy refused to let them. He yapped and ran around, bit at their cuffs, picked up a chew toy, and butted them with it. As soon as someone paid attention to him, he calmed down. As a result, the boys quickly learned that one of them had to keep Oogy company, pay attention to him, while the other worked. After I was done cleaning up, I took over keeping Oogy occupied, giving him the attention he craved. He insisted on recognition. He insisted on inclusion. The family dynamics had been completely altered.
Jennifer had called to say she was going out to dinner with a client and anticipated she would be home sometime around 10:00. She asked how Oogy was doing.
“He’s great,” I told her. “The boys are madly in love with him already.”
After giving Oogy a peanut-butter bone, which I placed on an old blanket that forever after would be Oogy’s dedicated bone blanket, I sat on the couch and read. When he was finished with his bone, Oogy climbed up next to me and went to sleep. I realized that once Oogy understood that he could get my attention, his need for it changed.
After the boys had completed their homework, they joined us on the couch.
That night, Dan took his bath first. I filled the tub for him, testing the water, which he never liked to be too hot. Oogy stood in the room with me while I did this, then followed me downstairs while the tub filled and went back upstairs with Dan and me for the bath. I left the two of them in the bathroom, the door open, while I folded laundry.
Suddenly Oogy began barking, the sound reverberating off the walls of the bathroom like a dinner bell. I turned my head to look from where I was seated on the floor by the mound of clean laundry that always seemed to overflow the basket. Dan was submerged, completely out of sight, rinsing off his hair. Oogy had placed his forelegs on the side of the tub and raised himself in alert; the boy he loved had disappeared. As soon as Dan brought his head out of the water, Oogy’s anxiety disappeared and the barking ceased. Dan then moved closer to Oogy through the softly lapping water with an almost instinctual understanding of what would calm him. Oogy began to lick Dan’s face.
I helped Dan towel off, relishing the fruity scent of the shampoo, after which I drained and refilled the tub for Noah. Oogy stayed downstairs with Dan while Noah bathed. Then we were ready for the next phase of Oogy’s introduction into our lives.
From the first day that the boys had come home, we had read to them after bath time, a routine we followed, and which deeply involved us, until the boys started high school. It was a wonderfully bonding experience. Jennifer and I would take turns reading to them if we were both at home when bedtime arrived. Otherwise, whoever was at home would do it.
The boys had slept in the same room until they were ten. They were in cribs side by side for their first three years, and one would invariably climb over the sides into the other’s crib, and they would giggle and cavort until they fell asleep next to each other. After we moved, they slept in bunk beds and, for years, still often slept together. After the bunk beds, too, had been outgrown, as part of the process of confirming their separate identities, each of the boys got his own room, and each got to pick the color of his room. We alternated the room in which we read each night. Depending on how tired they were, the boys would still frequently fall asleep in the same bed.
The first night Oogy was with us, I read to them in Noah’s room.
I put a pillow against the wall and stretched out lengthwise across the foot of the bed. The only light came from a lamp on the windowsill to my right. The boys climbed in and got under the covers, their feet facing my left side. Each was wearing one of my T-shirts to sleep in, as they did every night. Oogy jumped onto the bed and curled up at their feet between them. I read for twenty minutes, and by then Noah was asleep, as was Oogy. I asked Dan if he wanted to go to his room.
“Stay here,” he mumbled, his eyes unable to open. Then he turned on his side and drifted off.
The original plan had called for Oogy to spend nights in the sheltering confines of his crate. But when the time came, I simply could not bring myself to remove him forcibly from Noah’s bed to put him in it. I thought of his insistent barking earlier in the day when he was separated from human contact, and since he would not be alone and I couldn’t imagine him leaving the bed for anything, let alone to destroy the house, I decided to give Oogy the benefit of the doubt. Clearly, he was much happier here than he would be alone in his crate. And after all, wasn’t this what it was all supposed to be about, anyway? What would be served by separating Oogy and the boys when they could stay together like this? He had slipped into place without disruption. It was almost as though he had always been there.
I reached over and switched off the lamp. The picture of the three of them sleeping
together that first night, illuminated by light outside the window, where a strong wind rustled the trees, imprinted itself indelibly in my memory. Two young boys, backs to each other, curling hair against the pillows, and a little, white one-eared dog between them. Then, exhausted by the whirlwind events of the day, the book on my lap, I drifted off, and the four of us slept, me at a right angle to the three of them, until Jennifer came home and woke me.
“Hello, Oogy,” she whispered sweetly. “Welcome to our house.”
His tail thumped the bed, but otherwise he did not move. He was surrounded by love for the first time in his life, and he was not about to give that up for anything.
Years later, Noah told me that he remembered lying on the bed with Oogy that first night, and he thought, I hope my parents felt as good about us the day they brought us home as I feel about this dog right now. Oogy’s need for contact, the way he leapt onto the bed with them as though he were perfectly entitled to do so and went to sleep between them, allowed Dan to immediately appreciate that there was something special in the nature of the dog.
The fact that a brutalized, mutilated pup had so immediately and so completely reposed his trust in us made all of us feel that we had been rewarded.
He was one of us.
CHAPTER 6
The Third Twin
the next morning, the second day of Oogy in our lives, when the alarm went off and I managed to wrestle myself out of bed, I did not make it three feet before I heard a thump from Noah’s room, the clacking of toenails on the hardwood floor, and the jingling of the tags on Oogy’s collar as he ran to greet me. I dropped to one knee and said, “Good morning, pal. Good morning, Oogy. Did you sleep okay?” I gave him a vigorous rubdown, slapped him gently on the flanks. “And what would you like for breakfast this morning?” I asked him. “Pancakes okay with you?”
He followed me into the bathroom, standing there while I washed my face and brushed my teeth. He followed me downstairs into the kitchen, wagging his tail the entire time as though it were motorized. I mixed up his food, and snuffling and grunting, he bent to it. After starting the coffee, I clipped the leash on him and we headed outside, where a bitter wind was blowing. His fur was so short that I wondered if I should buy him a protective covering of some sort.
When we went back inside and I planted myself at the foot of the stairs to call upstairs to wake everyone, Oogy was by my side. In the kitchen, while I made breakfast for the boys, Oogy lay on the floor watching me. He sat with the boys while they ate, wandered upstairs with them while they dressed, sat with them while they watched TV, joined us in the kitchen when they left for school. From the moment he had crossed the doorsill, he had been inseparable from us.
And every weekday morning after Jennifer and the boys had left, and after we’d had our couch time and I was ready to leave the house, I would have to drag Oogy to the crate by his collar and push his backside into it, and he would bark and bark in protest. I wasn’t insensitive to this, but I thought that since crate-trained dogs loved their crates, Oogy was simply complaining that we were leaving him alone and that once he was alone, he would surrender to the safety the crate represented. It never occurred to me that something else might be going on.
Apart from his resistance to the crate, it was remarkable how thoroughly Oogy enjoyed whatever it was he encountered. He was so happy to be where he was that he almost seemed to be carrying an electric charge. When friends came to visit, as soon as he heard a vehicle in the driveway, Oogy would leap off the couch or whatever chair he was on and dash into the hall. For a moment or two his churning legs would search for a foothold on the throw rug there before he would go tearing out the back door. He would greet our visitors by placing both paws on whichever side of the car he could reach first, standing on his hind legs to peer in. As a young dog, he was also fond of standing up on his back legs and placing his front paws on the chest or shoulders of people he was meeting for the first time. This necessitated quite a number of red alerts around the elderly, including Noah and Dan’s great-aunts and great-uncles. One afternoon, Jennifer was playing with Oogy in the yard when he started running in circles. I later learned this was an expression of sheer happiness. This time, though, after one of his circles had been completed, Oogy ran directly into Jennifer, knocking her down. Her right knee was swollen for days. We had no way of knowing at the time that the act of hurling himself against her was a reflection of what he had been bred to do.
Years before the boys were born, my brother had given me a cartoon he’d clipped out of a magazine in which a stern-faced judge in a black robe is looking down at a little doggy and, gavel raised, declares: “Not guilty, because puppies do these things.” Diane had cautioned Jennifer that because Oogy was young and obviously so high-energy, his behavior might not always be what she would like it to be. She also told us that pups calm down after one and a half to two years. “It’s almost like someone has thrown a switch,” she said. While my overall approach was that nothing he did would shock or dismay me, it is fair to say that none of us could have possibly imagined the extent of the havoc he was able to wreak in his puppy days.
In his first six months with us, in addition to chewing up the futon couch, Oogy gnawed the middle out of the seat cushions of the two camelback sofas in the living room. He bit the eraser off any pencil he could find and would climb onto tables and desks to get at them. The decapitated pencils were left where they had fallen. He ate a pair of my glasses and a pair of my mother-in-law’s glasses. He chewed apart a wooden drawer in the kitchen. He ruined videotapes, countless CDs and CD cases, pens, crayons, and markers. He broke through every screen on every door in the house and scratched the paint off doors when he wanted to get out. He ate the antennae off every landline telephone in the house and then ate them off the replacements. He ate boxes of crackers, cookies (packaged and homemade, it made no difference), and loaves of bread.
A number of Noah’s and Dan’s friends were afraid of Oogy’s rapidly expanding size and strength; others were annoyed and even alarmed by the manic energy he exuded and that demanded constant attention. A few, or their parents, distrusted Oogy because of all the bad press pit bulls get. As a result, the number of the boys’ friends who came to visit dwindled. When the visitor was someone Oogy did not know, he would get very excited. His favorite greeting activity was to bite guests at their ankles. As he became familiar with the visitor, his playfulness, or his sense of wanting to be the center of attention, would abate. Oogy quickly became as comfortable around the boys’ friends as he was with the boys themselves. Those of their friends who continued to come by — all boys with dogs in their own households, as it turned out — quickly found themselves the object of Oogy’s affection. After all, he could love Noah and Dan anytime and the rest of the time. It was not an unusual occurrence to come home and find Oogy draped over the lap of one of their friends while the boys sat on the floor playing a video game, or sleeping next to a boy sitting on one of the couches.
When Oogy came to live with us, for Noah and Dan it was in many ways like gaining a little brother. It soon became apparent to all of us that Oogy did not know he was not human; his bond with the boys made itself evident in incident after incident. Whatever the boys did, he insisted on being included; wherever they went, he wanted to go. When the boys ate, Oogy sat next to them watching them, barking at them for food as though they did not understand that he was right there and deserved some of whatever they were having. When the boys wrestled or had a pillow fight, Oogy threw himself into the mix. If they fought with each other, he would begin barking and jumping on them. When they played table tennis, he dashed back and forth with the ball, barking furiously, and when the ball hit the ground, there would be a mad, comic rush to see who got to it first; if it was Oogy, he would scoop it up, often without crushing it, just holding it in his mouth. If they were throwing around a lacrosse ball outside, he would race madly back and forth between them, following the flight of the ball and nipping at their ankle
s. When the three of us would throw a ball around, I was the only one whose ankles went unbitten. “That’s because you’re the alpha male,” Noah suggested. If they went outside to have a catch or play basketball or football with friends, Oogy would demand to participate. If the boys left Oogy inside to go play football or to have a catch, he barked and whined incessantly and clawed at the door, alternately pacing back and forth, barking and yelping with frustration. Eventually, we realized that the only way the boys could play outside was for me to take Oogy off the property for a ride or a walk. We learned that if Oogy saw them leave the house before he did, he would try to follow them and would be uncooperative about getting into the car. As a result, when they wanted to do something outside, I would ask how much time they needed and would head out with Oogy before the boys left the house.
Once the electronic fence had been installed, when the boys left the property Oogy would run their scent to the edge of the yard as soon as I let him outside and sit staring up the street after them. He would sit there as long as I let him.
Oogy simply had no idea that he was a being separate and apart from the boys. In his view, he shared his life with them, and therefore there was never a doubt that they shared their lives with him. Around our house, he became known as “the third twin.” As with any little brother, Oogy’s insistence on being with Noah and Dan and doing whatever it was they were doing could be annoying for them. I repeatedly had to explain to the boys that when they were home alone after school or home with friends, one of them had to pay attention to Oogy, because if they ignored him, he would most likely do something destructive.
“He’s like a little kid,” I told them.
“Yeah,” observed Dan, “but one who’ll never grow up.”
One morning shortly after Oogy came to live with us, and before we had the electric fence, after the boys headed up the street to middle school, I went out the door with Oogy to take him for a walk. He immediately slipped the collar and took off after them, following their scent. I ran along after him, though in a moment he was gone from view. When I found Oogy on the playground, he was surrounded by a dozen kids, including the boys, and a teacher’s aide. Oogy was sitting in front of the group. Several of the children were petting him calmly. I was somewhat embarrassed, but everyone else seemed to think that it was really cute how he had followed the boys up there. And I must admit, he had thoroughly surprised even me. I had run after him expecting the worst, some imagined manifestation of pit bull ferocity preprogrammed into my brain, when all there was to it was pure adoration of the boys and a desire to be with them.