THE DOG WALKER
Copyright © 2015 by Joshua Stephens
First Melville House Printing: September 2015
Melville House Publishing
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Brooklyn, NY 11201
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Islington
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ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-452-3
Design by Marina Drukman
v3.1
For Blake, an anarchist and once dog walker who, given the opportunity, would’ve written a far smarter, far funnier book than this one
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1. Reverse-Indexing Smug, Saber-Rattling Shitheads, or How I Became an Anarchist
2. Walking, We Ask
3. A People’s History of Professional Dog Walking
4. Any Port in a Storm
5. The Drift
6. Spoiler: Dogs Are Assholes
7. Keys: A User’s Manual
8. Keys: A Temple to Goldilocks
9. A Note on Privilege
10. That Question You’re Dying to Ask
11. Moses
12. Moving Targets
13. Lube: It’s Not Just for Sex Anymore
14. Indicator Species
15. Even State Department Staffers Get the Blues
16. In Which We All Learn a Valuable Lesson About Scheduling
17. The Wyoming
18. A Note on Boarding
19. Little Deaths
20. Merry Christmas: I Had Sex in Your House
21. The Plan, Pt. 1 (Theirs)
22. The Plan, Pt. 2 (Ours)
23. Pug Life
24. Omar
25. Expiration Dates
26. Exit Interview
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
This book began (in earnest, anyway) in a vegan restaurant off Manhattan’s Union Square, over a dinner marking my thirty-sixth birthday. Seated at the table that night was sometimes anarchist academic James Birmingham who, in keeping with the conventions of such occasions, inquired as to whether I was ever going to do anything with the idea of writing about my time as a dog walker.
“Didn’t you do some interview with The Washington Post or something?” he asked.
It didn’t really have anything to do with writing a book, but he wasn’t wrong.
In 2011, the style section had run a story on a worker-cooperative dog-walking agency I’d cofounded back in 2006. Having already relocated from D.C. to Brooklyn, I’d initially only seen the web version. But further into the day, seated in Madison Square Park’s dog run, next to a handful of what looked like soccer moms busy rehearsing two-syllable, outer-borough-accented pronunciations of the word whore, I noticed someone fingering through the print edition. I was shocked to find that the story had somehow made the front page of the A-section. Above the fold.
Below the fold was the latest on New York congressman Anthony Weiner, who was resigning from office after tweeting his barely concealed penis to some young woman—and thereafter, the world. And then, for some time after the image was leaked, bewildering everyone by pretending he couldn’t place the obvious piece of side-pipe staring back at him. By the time the Post came knocking, I’d actually already left the dog-walking cooperative in question. But even so, I took some joy in the Post’s layout that day. Top story: Anarchists provide proof-of-concept. Also in the news: disgraced, politically reprehensible politician falls victim to (a) own horrible decisions and (b) cock quips.
Joining us at the table that night was Jay Cassano, a freelance journalist covering technology and social movements. He’d come into my life more recently, and had never heard me say a word about the book idea. Jay reminded me of our mutual friend’s (then) fiancé, who works at the publishing house that would eventually get behind this book. But even this bit of insider info failed to stir me in any immediate way. Coasting on four years of lazy, idea-stage inertia, I shrugged, and returned to what seemed the far more pressing matter of shoveling strawberry shortcake into my face.
Remarkably, against all likely odds, here we are. What you’re holding in your hands prevailed against both my nonexistent attention span and New York City’s unparalleled vegan dessert offerings. I’m still sort of shocked no one beat me to the punch. Someone sharper, more enterprising—at the very least, more proactive. Dog walkers, after all, are a cultural institution—and they’ve steadily become more and more visible in the developed world. An urban scene for a film or TV show can scarcely be staged without an extra cast as one, passing in the background. There’s a built-in intelligibility to dog walkers—a set of automatic assumptions. They signify—correctly or not—various features of urban (and, more and more, suburban) life. Conspicuous consumption. The quaint priorities of aging Gen Xers who’ve graduated to professional life and have begun to hire Millennials, who themselves are scraping by amid the diminishing returns of artistic pursuits. These angles aren’t wrong, exactly, but the authentic aspect of the trade they tend to capture is superficial at best.
As adult professionals increasingly postpone having families, dogs have become “starter children,” and thus dog walkers feature in everyday life much as babysitters have for generations—though with virtually none of the broad familiarity or detailed rendering. While nanny diaries fly off shelves and make for blockbuster cinema (and this is after decades of cultural dominance by the Baby-Sitters Club) and bike couriers receive both action-film and reality-TV treatments, the urban figure nestled between, who in many ways combines the salient features of the two, slips in and out of frame in the background, not unnoticed, but nonetheless unknown. This opacity—a kind of incompleteness of perspective—conceals two very rich narratives. The first: the (often ethically questionable) antics one can get up to when one has unfettered access to the lives of others, combined with relative anonymity; the second: just how many of our secrets and stories are known by these relatively anonymous figures.
Also, there is poop. And animals mounting one another’s faces in front of small children.
It’d have been easy enough to pack my story with navel-gazing reflections on the contrast between conventional careers and healthy priorities à la Oprah, or Gwyneth Paltrow, or some other bright-eyed lifestyle charlatan. I know this because such sentiments were buried in the refrain of virtually every liberal-minded actual adult who ever inquired as to what I did for a living. It was always a nakedly vicarious and invariably unsettling sort of approval, with a predictable refrain nestled somewhere within it: find something you love and do it for the rest of your life. And if you can weave in some cute animals, so much the better. They’ll enrich your experience, bring you back to the simple things in life, and remind you not to sweat the small stuff.
Someone somewhere is bound to write that book.
This is not that book.
In fact, it’s my quiet hope to preemptively torpedo the authority of such an effort. Because there’s a lot more to this story—to this life—than the warm wishes and charmed fantasies of strangers. Dog walking, after all, is a line of work. Like all work, the social, political, and economic backdrop against which it unfolds matters. Not only does that matter, I’m convinced that it’s far more compelling to any reader than, say, what I learned from gazing into the eyes of a retarded corgi, or how many times I jerked off in the homes of congressional staffers.
I wouldn’t wish some book full of tears and pithy life lesso
ns on anyone. I certainly wouldn’t write the thing. Which is not to say dog walking didn’t teach me a great deal. It most definitely did. Further, it afforded me enough quiet and introspection to fully investigate what I was both learning and witnessing. An unfortunate side effect of quiet and introspection, however, is that when most people acquire any quantity of either, they squander it, simply by assuming it’s a product of their own unique grit and determination; as if they deserve it more than anyone else does. I’d like the record to reflect that I did not deserve it at all. My years as a dog walker thus served as a sort of master class in the practice of gratitude. And in giving some account of those years, I’ve tried to convey something nominally less assholish than the self-convinced entrepreneurial “insight” such a book would typically give center stage. I’ve tried to say something at least worth the time someone won’t get back, having read it.
Then again, I’m terrible at most things. So … no promises.
What you’re about to read is a selection of field notes. The conventional memoir format seemed a poor fit, inasmuch as my life just isn’t that interesting, and wasn’t likely to be made more so by committing it to chronologically accurate exposition. I’ve opted, instead, to represent the experience exactly as I had it: as a series of vignettes through which I saw refracted any number of human experiences, mostly unrelated if not for the fact that they occurred and intersected at the feet of a dog walker. A dog walker who happened to have a particular politics, and a corresponding FBI file. Within these stories, I’ve sought to weave a fairly detailed view of what the trade entails. How a workday spent in the elements collides with various seasons. What it feels like to work in and around the front lines of gentrification, before developers have had a chance to move in the yoga studios some focus group has indicated are a vital ambient comfort to white women. What it means to fall in love with place. How work can be a crucible for prefiguring new ways of being together. The practical and emotional skill sets required in servicing human-animal relationships, left of frame for the casual observer.
Mostly, I’ve tried to do justice to what I still believe is probably the greatest job in the world, for all that it gave me, and all it enabled and provoked me to do. Enjoy.
1
REVERSE-INDEXING SMUG, SABER-RATTLING SHITHEADS, OR HOW I BECAME AN ANARCHIST
I had Spanish first period the day the United States began bombing Iraq in 1991. Or rather, I was supposed to. Instead, my teacher arranged the desks in a circle and staged what was probably a well-meaning but ill-advised group therapy session. As it happened, we were less than a thousand miles from Baghdad, on a U.S. naval air station. The one from which the airstrikes were being staged. So it arguably had a bit more weight than it might’ve otherwise.
Here’s what I remember about the awkward fifty minutes we spent together that day:
1. It was readily apparent our teacher had grossly overestimated the emotional and intellectual sophistication of a room full of teenagers. She had expected adolescents socialized within the U.S. military to need the space to “process,” but for that to be true, said adolescents would’ve had to access any perspective whatsoever on events that contrasted with those beamed through U.S. military media. And they’d have had to give a shit. Mere mention of the fact the United States had backed Saddam Hussein (even through his worst crimes—the United States had increased weapons transfers after he gassed his own people) would’ve likely led to at least one or two students spontaneously combusting, or left janitors cleaning adolescent brain fragments off the windows. It was, as it was destined to be, anticlimactic. The usual, inherited platitudes were expressed, ambivalence was feigned lest anyone’s vanity suffer for their evident, unquestioning indifference. Hair was twirled.
2. The exception, here, was the one girl who stared straight ahead, silently but evidently horrified. Her father was a pilot. But she was mostly sidelined by the one junior naïve enough to play grown-up by dating an enlisted guy; in our social world, this was an Icarus-esque kiss of death for one’s romantic or sexual prospects among one’s actual peers. Being that girl made you untouchable, inasmuch as everyone knew you were sleeping with someone who almost certainly frequented brothels in the corner of Catania known as The Gut. She sat sobbing, not over her lackluster judgment, but as an overcompensating performance of the higher stakes of her “adult” relationship.
3. The impact Desert Storm might have on Iraqis was never mentioned.
I was thirteen. I don’t claim to have had a terribly robust or dynamic politics, but the first album I bought with my own money, at age ten, was Anthrax’s Among the Living, which happened to include songs about militarism and the genocide of Native Americans. By the time the first Gulf War kicked off, I’d moved on to punk rock, and was not squeamish about saying that—regardless of whatever “complexity” upon which adults in my midst insisted—raining bombs down on people was a terrible idea. I’d also recently seen George Carlin’s stand-up routine about not believing anything the government said, nor, for that matter, anything reported by the corporate media (the only media I really had), which was in Carlin’s estimation merely an unofficial PR wing of the State. All of this was more formative for me than one might imagine; every conversation I encountered about the war now felt incomplete at best—or, more often, like total bullshit. I was imparted with an unapologetic confidence in withholding trust from State actors and advocates, alike.
So when, a few weeks later, the same Spanish teacher showed us some segment from Good Morning America or the like, about how Peter Cetera (famous front man of eighties hit factory, Chicago—as well as the man behind that epic theme song to The Karate Kid 2) had a songwriting partner who’d penned a protroop anthem titled “Voices That Care,” I had no patience for any of it. Within a few weeks, she’d used some elaborate MS-DOS function to produce a dot-matrix-printed banner with the song’s chorus, which she had the class hang for soldiers passing through the base’s air station. By the spring, the administration forced the school’s chorus (a class: performances were a factor in students’ grades) to sing it at an evening event for parents and the extended base community. This struck me as ironic. We’d actively targeted the Amiriyah shelter for women and children with missiles, in the name of publicly spanking some tyrant to whom we’d previously provided serious financial and military aid—and to underscore the nobility of the gesture, students in my school were given a choice: literally sing its praises, or risk failing a class. Why bother assigning Orwell, really?
Thankfully, I wasn’t in the chorus class. But some of my classmates in other courses were. When I queried them one day about whether or not they felt put upon at being forced to cheerlead the bombing of school buses and ambulances, or the use of tanks to bury people alive in the desert, I was shouted down and threatened within an inch of my life in front of our English teacher—an older woman married to a Sicilian, mostly helpless to make sense of navy brats, much less control them. As we crowded out of class, I was shoved down the stairs.
When historians and political philosophers distinguish the fascism of World War II Europe from conventional totalitarianism, the key ingredient is typically that the former was not simply imposed from above. There was a popular, grassroots animus. A micropolitics; what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described as a fascism of the province, of the town, of the village, or of the household. In the case of Germany, anti-Semitism. In Spain and Italy, national identity. All of which held militarism in highest esteem. Little is more demonstrative of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of elected officials than their lip service to the military as the “best” our culture has to offer. Its version of community life was the crucible of my adolescence, and I owe it the ease with which I absorbed Deleuze and Guattari’s notoriously painful writing, when it came to fascism.
Each day of my high-school years, as the sun dipped, the flags would be lowered at the front gate of the base, and “Taps” would be played through a loudspeaker nearby. Anyone outdoors
, within earshot, was expected to stop, face the front gate, remove any hat, and remain still for the duration of the ritual. Not only those in uniform. Everyone. And they policed each other, to ensure compliance. I was routinely chastised by middle-aged uniformed men for continuing to skateboard at various sites around the base as they stood at attention; none of them was terribly enthused to hear me reply (usually over my shoulder) that they had made the choice to join up, not me, and that that was how the freedom-cookie crumbled. To this day, the previews at movie screenings in base theaters operated by the U.S. military are preceded by a playing of the national anthem, for which all moviegoers—including children—are required to stand. In a fucking movie theater. One not in 1930s Nuremberg.
The racism and jingoism I saw pervading the military community—even among spouses and children—was appalling. The expressed attitudes toward local nationals (in this case, Sicilians) were as abhorrent as they were unapologetic. U.S. minorities weren’t off-limits, either—despite that they populated the enlisted ranks in considerable numbers. Jokes about black men found at the bottom of lakes, having “stole[n] more chain than they could swim with” were not uncommon. At a quasi-medieval-themed dinner venue where my mom was dining with officers and representatives of private-sector military systems providers, I was grilled by the wife of a commander with a (half-drunken) “But don’t you think Jesus would really enrich your interest in social concerns?” in virtually the same moment that her husband responded—annoyed—to a performance by dancers in ambiguously “eastern” dress with “Didn’t we colonize those people?” These attitudes, as shit is wont to, rolled downhill to my peers. Many ducked back into the military as soon as they graduated—perhaps simply because they knew nothing else, and the contrast of the outside world was more than anyone had prepared them for. Some now work as privately contracted mercenaries. When the Abu Ghraib story broke in 2004, I was reasonably confident I went to high school with someone involved.
The Dog Walker Page 1