The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  While they recovered, I broke the levity. “En serio. Es mi trabajo. Yo camino con los perros de los ricos.” And so my registration with the community was completed: gringos are so awash in cash that some asshole actually made his living entertaining their dogs. And that asshole had a face. I was off to a good start.

  The origin story of the Zapatistas involves a foco—a term used by Che Guevara to denote a core group of revolutionaries who foment rebellion in a broader population. In this case, Marxist-Leninists who traveled south from Mexico City in the early eighties to sow revolt among the oppressed indigenous. There is, of course, no shortage of leftist chauvinism in such aspirations—what James Baldwin called “the fraud and folly of good intentions.” Upon arriving in the jungles of Chiapas, this foco was confronted with their outsider status. The CliffsNotes of the story might go: “What you ladinos are proposing sounds fine, but in case you haven’t noticed … we have our own history, our own communal and political practices. If we’re gonna do this, it’s going to be on our terms, and with us in the driver’s seat.” In short, a narrative in which a strict sense of self-determination is absolutely paramount.

  Alongside that primacy is a certain immediacy: a self-determination that requires an unfolding awareness of—if not responsiveness to—existing conditions. Prior to the events of New Year’s 1994, Zapatista communities experienced what they call “the first rebellion”—an organized refusal by women to ratify any community decision until a series of demands around gender equality were met. The result was the Women’s Revolutionary Law, a document that stipulates women’s rights to reproductive choice, collective economic self-determination, and among other things, communal sobriety as a material bulwark against domestic violence. It should thus come as little surprise that, among the many proverbs circulating in Zapatismo, one finds the phrase “Caminando, preguntamos”—“Walking, we ask [questions].” Its meaning is twofold: movement, but with an agile humility and curiosity—interrogating all things, not least oneself. It suggests a critical attention to what’s immediate to one’s experience, putting it in conversation with broader realities. In the equation this proverb sets up, movement is not dependent upon answering questions. It is simply aided by their asking. When the young woman leading my course on women and Zapatismo was asked how a community agreement ensuring reproductive choice is reconciled with widespread Catholicism and its corresponding antipathy toward contraception (even within the rebel movement), she replied without hesitation: “Es un proceso.” “It’s a process.” As though a belief that such transformations in people’s hearts could be exacted in less than twenty years was an absurd delusion. What was at work was not a self-sure determination of will ultimately manifested in some cataclysmic toppling of this or that institution, but an orientation against inertia. What it requires is a comfort with and commitment to open questions, one that exposes how institutions can speak through us long after we’ve overthrown them.

  It’s a sentiment that resonates, still, for me. At the risk of seeming trite, I want to suggest a more literal reading, in light of this book’s subject matter. Walking confers real time for asking questions, in a manner most activities do not. Having done it professionally, I know this in my bones—for better or worse. Walking is an activity that offers fewer distractions with each increase in volume. It is exceedingly difficult to escape oneself or one’s circumstances, moving at such a pace. Dilemmas, the sweetness of memory and the joys of possibility, the shame of our shortcomings and the sadness of loss, the banality and the novelty of the everyday—it all draws into crisp, sometimes unbearable focus. I would argue that it’s amid all of this that questions of real consequence even occur to us.

  There’s also the matter of walking as a dislocation, an interstitial state of being; between places, between references or narratives. Often, without realizing it, we nominate later moments or milestones for the deferral of particular questions. The bridges we opt to cross once we’ve come to them. We’ll entertain the connection and demands of loving fully once we’ve “found” ourselves, or acquired this or that insight about our lives. We’ll travel once we’ve banked some quantity of years at a given job, or built the necessary CV for one later one. Even the manner in which many of us hang so much of our well-being on careers in which we have negligible (and steadily decreasing) control—our healthcare, our long term material stability—at some point suggests a pattern of deferment that borders on pathological.

  Key in this subtle, inherited calculus is the distinction of arrival. Time spent in motion becomes null, impotent—even wasted, or counted against productive or meaningful activity, as though it cancels our capacities or as though what we do with it is of no consequence. Often enough, it’s not clear we even regard it as our own. We appear to have gleaned, almost in spite of ourselves, that the means of producing our own joy have been foreclosed, stolen off to be bought back. It’s not merely a macropolitical carrot-stick narrative; it’s become how we understand ourselves. And it is, despite whatever spin we give it, ultimately little more than a refusal to begin. As though we are not on borrowed time, as though everything we acquire in the not-walking moments will not be taken away from us (likely by the whim of a boss, a landlord, or some or another “market correction”—well before death claims what’s left)—and as though we can know in this moment that we will be better equipped in some later one. Better to focus on arrival and resolution, we say. We assume questions cannot or will not remain open, or evolve, or be subject to revision; we assume we are exempt from having to live with or within them. The impulse against beginning where we are is as persistent as it is seductive. And, in addition to it being incoherent, irrational, and politically unpalatable in the abstract, it is—consequentially speaking—categorically insane.

  Working as a dog walker inverted this conventional approach to time and movement for me, with rote precision. Walking was not a matter of reaching pursuits, the speed with which it carried me between them. Quite the opposite; it was effectively irreducible. I was tasked with filling time with motion undertaken for its own sake. A half-hour walk simply needed to be a half hour of walking. It largely did not matter where that took me, or how I minimized interstitial time between moments of presumed greater significance. In turn, what I did with that time became significant. It’s not that I sought to be more economizing, making use of dead time, like a kid opting to study during detention. I simply stopped seeing time as empty or dormant, and began to show up more fully to everything that happened. Architecture. Seasons. City sounds. Coffee. Living things. Strangers. Dog walking was a daily repeated exercise in contesting a vision of life that is, at its core, contemptuous of living.

  We should be embracing open questions; relishing what is unresolved. Both represent ideal terrain for experimentation. And ideally, the questions we ask in the in-between spaces ought to be predominantly social questions; questions that interrogate fiercely the options presented to us—all of us; questions that ask us to imagine other possible lives, and the conditions most likely to bolster them. Not self-soothing daydreams that drown out what hurts or overwhelms us, but what Brazil’s landless workers’ movement describes as “expanding the floor of our cage until the bars can no longer contain it.” Not merely politically, but emotionally; how we show up for each other, and the surfaces against which that occurs. And not merely questions about what’s possible, but on how to bring other possibilities into being. The here to there. The mechanics.

  I could’ve been any number of things. Many more conventionally understood to be ripe with transformative possibilities. But the clock was ticking, and I happened to be a dog walker. We begin where we are. One foot in front of the other. As we are. Without recourse to some later, more optimal moment or qualification. However imperfect this moment may be.

  Un proceso.

  Walking.

  With questions.

  3

  A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF PROFESSIONAL DOG WALKING

  A few words on dog-
walking history.

  Most available material traces the first professional dog-walking outfit to Jim Buck, the son of a well-to-do family on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Buck shows up in newspaper articles everywhere from The New York Times to The Times of London. They all more or less tell the same story. In his adolescence, he’d shown dogs, and later spent a good deal of time training horses on a farm run by his family in Connecticut, a trade he took to with apparent zeal and considerable talent—enough to land himself an invitation to audition for the U.S. equestrian team in the lead-up to the Rome Olympics. According to a short 1965 profile in The New Yorker, he had to decline. “By then I’d done what was expected of me, and gone to work downtown,” he said; after stints in shipping and other areas, he eventually wound up the vice president of a small electronics firm.

  His wife, Ann, was born into a hotel family, and had spent time around dogs as a kid. Predictably, she and Jim eventually had dogs of their own. “I discovered soon enough that I preferred walking them and the neighbors’ dogs in Central Park to putting on my tie and getting downtown to the office,” he told The New Yorker. “But it didn’t occur to me to go professional and forget about downtown until I stumbled on the realization that a Great Dane can be trained exactly like a show horse.” So was born Jim Buck’s School for Dogs, in 1964, which would cater to the dogs of Manhattan’s well-heeled for the next four decades, until Buck’s retirement. Along the way, he hired as many as two dozen “assistants,” mostly recruited by word of mouth at Upper East Side cocktail parties, mostly former equestriennes who’d landed in the city chasing careers in modeling, nursing, or as airline stewardesses. Much as Buck had himself, they found repurposing horse-training skills as dog walkers preferable to their various professional environs. Understandably. Some pulled in as much as five hundred dollars a week, a not altogether terrible haul for an agency dog walker, even by contemporary standards.

  Buck’s story has been the origin story for the trade ever since, revived in various international obituaries upon his death in 2013. And one can understand why. The son of an Upper East Side family who passed on college life in favor of an apprenticeship in an elite recreation; his shot at Olympic glory stymied by the pressure of convention and the obligation to enter professional life; vice president by his early thirties, despite little more than a high-school diploma. All this, only to then forsake all his inherited luck and access, Buddha-like, to pass the next forty years as a fedora’d dandy quasi-celebrity who wore through his soles every two weeks, allegedly keeping a certain cobbler in business. All hail the genius of the uptown golden boy, whose entrepreneurial tenacity saw him identify a gap in the market that he then successfully exploited. Buck thrived while discreetly servicing the gilded, and gave distinction to what was effectively manual labor. It’s about as textbook an Upper East Side fairy tale as one can imagine.

  The problem is, it’s not true. Or, at least, it’s not the origin story of dog walking. Apparently, no one who wrote about Buck at The New York Times ever bothered to check their own archives. If they had, they’d have come across a headline in their January 5, 1935, edition, which reads “WALKING THE DOG NOW BIG BUSINESS.” A thirty-four-year-old building super on West Seventy-Fourth Street named James Daley was days from opening an office on Broadway, north of Columbus Circle, out of which he was running Daily Dogwalking Service, Inc., offering daily dog walks for five dollars a month. Daley had observed clearly annoyed husbands sent out by their wives, who’d have “rather read the last chapter of a detective story late at night than act as a nurse for a frolicsome canine.” So he dispatched “porters, chambermaids, elevator operators, even his own wife” to perform the task in their stead. In many parts of the world, this is still more the norm than a designated walker, but Daley saw in it a task that could be managed by one outfit, across multiple buildings—across the country eventually, he hoped. “I’m the originator,” he told the Times. “It was my idea. I couldn’t sleep nights, sometimes, thinking about it.”

  It turns out that this is not entirely true, either. While Daley had taken a decidedly professional approach to the trade—even devising plans for liability insurance to cover death, injury, or the loss of a dog in the care of his walkers—the construction of the service goes further back, still. That is, at least according to yet another story in the paper of record. The previous year, the Times apparently ruled newsworthy that the dean of Barnard College, Virginia C. Gildersleeve, had decreed that the students she’d been paying fifty cents an hour for the last three years to look after her Cairn terrier, Culag, would be subject to new regulations to accommodate the dog’s advanced age. (Lest you scoff at fifty cents, by the way, it was a figure based on going rates for childcare at the time. Then again, maybe you should still scoff.) “The dog is to be exercised for an hour in the morning, generally from 10 to 11,” read the original rules. “I allow a few minutes leeway at the beginning or end of the hour for class purposes, but think he should be out at least fifty minutes. In the afternoon he is to be walked for forty minutes from 3 to 3:40 and then cleaned and brushed for a quarter of an hour.” The new rules stipulated that Culag should not be forced into “violent exercise,” or dragged “against his inclination.”

  Why any of this was worthy of column space in The New York Times, I have no idea. But it suggests that professional dog walking was happening at least as early as 1931, and was eyed as a scalable industry with national franchising possibilities by 1935. It also suggests that its professionalization as a designated trade had its roots not with a flamboyant son of fortune—but, more likely, with working-class folks who’d cleaved it off from various jobs into which it had been traditionally folded.

  History. Written by the victors. Or the rich kids protesting, “No, no. It’s not manual labor. It’s repurposed equestrianism.” Right.

  4

  ANY PORT IN A STORM

  “Mmmm. I love chest hair.” Her hand traced the gap between my collarbones, then snaked up around the back of my neck, settling in the half-assed haircut a friend had given me in Pittsburgh the week prior. The words poured out in a postcoital purr so clichéd I almost cringed. They weren’t helped by the fact that the stated preference seemed unlikely. In the two-and-a-half days we’d known each other, she’d been pretty forthcoming about her lifelong lesbianism. I couldn’t tell if I were being humored in some clumsy attempt at pillow talk, or witnessing a personal reassessment well out of proportion with our germinal rapport.

  The sun was still up, beating through the windows of her Westfalia, where we lay tangled in hastily shed clothes on a foldout bed, trespassing in some stranger’s cornfield. Nowhere, Minnesota. An impromptu “rest stop,” the purpose of which was plain to the both of us, without so much as a word. She was making her way home to Olympia from an eastward solo road trip through Canada. I was undertaking a short-lived and ill-advised move to Seattle after a crushing breakup and a yearlong torrent of shitty news. I’d set out from D.C. for some anarchist conference in Louisville, planning to meet a ride to the West Coast from there. The weekend came and went, without any sign of or word from my ride. Faced with being stranded in Louisville, I accepted a friend’s offer of passage to his place four hours north in Pittsburgh, and spent the next week in a university computer lab, pinging contacts to coordinate my way out. I was about a day from booking a flight when a friend referred me to a woman he’d met at some gathering at the Institute for Social Ecology (a now defunct, sort of anarchist college) in Vermont, who was about to drive west across the United States. “You’re welcome to ride with me!” she wrote back. “One catch: You’ll need to meet me in Pittsburgh.”

  It was a welcome, if unlikely, bit of serendipity. The preceding nine months had taken such a toll that I’d developed a bit of an eating disorder I’d miraculously hid from everyone around me. It had the unfortunate side effect of occasional hypoglycemic fits that less occasionally resulted in fainting. The most recent such incident had occurred after standing still for the twe
nty minutes it took my friend to finish the aforementioned haircut. He graciously peeled me off the floor, force-fed me, and took me on a walk. On better days, I headed off such embarrassment with Charlie Chaplain–esque attempts at normalcy, like propping myself upright using the counter of a Chinese take-out joint, as a date and I waited for food. I was threadbare, running on fumes.

  Staring at the ceiling of the Westfalia, still damp with the sweat of my impromptu travel companion, I traced the chain of events up to that moment. More likely than not, I was a regrettable exception for her, made in a moment of intense disorientation. The morning prior to our tryst—our first in each other’s company—began in sleeping bags on the living-room floor of a house in Bowling Green, Ohio, where the anarchist magazine Clamor was published. “You guys should get up,” one of the editors said, waking us. “Someone’s flying passenger jets into the World Trade Center.”

  By the time I reached Seattle, the economy was in a free fall. Coming from D.C., a city whose primary economic engine was the one institution unlikely to come unglued anytime soon, I was accustomed to there always being some odd thing I could get paid to do, in a pinch. Peers were known to pull in considerable hourly rates line-standing for lobbyists at various congressional offices, for instance, and the larger labor unions typically had budgets to hire people to cause trouble for business-friendly efforts on Capitol Hill—disrupting some sham panel, or a hearing, or what have you. I once made a day’s work of delivering to congressional offices cookies decorated as pie charts of defense versus all other discretionary spending, and farting in as many of them as I could manage. In Seattle, I was generally overqualified for each of the ten jobs I applied to daily, and never received as much as a confirmation e-mail in reply. Worse, the friend who’d invited me out, who had dangled the “spare room” in his house as a surefire residence, had neglected to run it by any of his housemates. It turned out that some of them were rather firm in their belief that the TV room should remain the TV room. Unemployed, broke, and facing the prospect of hunting for housing in a city I barely knew, I fired off three resumes to nonprofit jobs back in D.C. one day, mostly out of exhaustion and half-hearted curiosity. Within half an hour, I had replies from all of them, and I immediately gave myself till the end of the month before I left. In the interim, the ex with whom I’d split flew out to reconcile, sealing the deal. Almost two years to the day, we’d be married. By the time I left, I had lasted all of about eight weeks in Seattle.