The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  Nascent possible new lives, exactly as Debord had suggested.

  6

  SPOILER: DOGS ARE ASSHOLES

  One of the first things people say when you tell them you’re a dog walker is, while predictable, a bit grating in its lack of perspective: “Oh, you must love dogs!”

  Here’s the thing, folks: I’ve been vegan more than half my life. I cut my teeth as an activist by gluing the locks of fur stores. Of course I love dogs. I love all animals. Enough to build into my life a discipline that insists they’re not means to my ends. Enough to have spent a number of years professionally jockeying the databases and outreach tables of animal-rights organizations for no benefits and the pay such organizations offer entry-level candidates. Enough to suffer the tunnel vision and garbage social skills of people who show up for anything animal rights related. Enough to avoid getting fired from such work by humoring a cougar-like board member of my workplace who’d cornered me at an event to make a case for some moral distinction between zoophilia and bestiality that I can now never unhear.

  What you all mean is that I must enjoy dogs.

  Yeah.

  That feels weird, now that you’re wondering whether that cougar-lady enjoyed dogs, doesn’t it?

  Anyway. While working with them gave me a deeper, far more candid appreciation of dogs and their personalities, the fact is that doing the job day in and day out kinda required me to enjoy dogs less. What we so love about dogs—what must drive at least 50 percent of YouTube’s traffic—is the utter lack of fucks they give about even being intelligible to humans much of the time, to say nothing of their being creatures to whom our interests are generally incidental and inane. Both of these are enormous impediments to retrieving dogs from their homes; walking them grouped with other dogs they may or may not know, through a veritable obstacle course of distractions; and regimenting it all on sometimes airtight timelines. Enjoying the quirky novelty and lack of predictability dogs often exhibit is likely to get you fired by most agencies. Sure. In hindsight, the shit dogs do is hilarious, charming—even downright heart melting sometimes. But in the moment, in the field? It’s an enormous pain in the ass.

  And often, this put me quietly at odds with clients, their needs and expectations clashing with their illusions about their animal(s). In just about any case, a client is unlikely to be impressed that you never managed to get their sweet, fragile little baby outside because she refused to be leashed up and sprinted laps around the apartment, colliding with just about every vertical surface, while you laughed your face off instead of doing your job. And that assumes you even have a relationship with the client. If you work for an agency, they’re going to complain to your boss, and your boss is typically 100 percent uninterested in anything but the revenue stream your labor represents.

  So, to prove I’m not a just being a total dick here, in no particular order, is:

  A Possible Top Ten Asshole Dog Moments of My Career

  1. The dog who, upon seeing a family unloading gifts from their SUV onto the sidewalk of an adjacent house on Christmas Day, opted to piss on said gifts while neither I nor the people in question were looking.

  2. The English sheepdog whose size and lack of discipline made walking him a gamble on serious injury, who so hated the fenced-in dog park (where he might’ve actually gotten meaningful exercise without blowing out one of my knees) that, upon entering on any given day, promptly took a giant shit and then stood at its center, barking incessantly, thus confirming local residents’ predictions of noise and nuisance when the park was initially proposed.

  3. The golden retriever who managed to outsmart a prong collar by rearing up and crossing his front paws over the leash, neutralizing the collar’s coercive effect, and making me seriously ponder an impending golden retriever rebellion-turned-global-dictatorship.

  4. The springer spaniel puppies that filled their crate with straight-up liquid feces one morning, leaving it to soak invisibly into the newspapers covering the crate’s floor, and me calling my boss to ask if the clients were hiding a corpse.

  5. The pit bull that shredded a lover’s panties, discarded in haste while she joined me on a dog sit.

  6. The other English sheepdog that—if the visual evidence was to be believed—fired diarrhea at the walls from a canon while his people were out.

  7. The stick-obsessed pit bull that refused to relinquish a fallen tree branch, and proceeded to basically key every parked car for three long blocks.

  8. Any dog I ever had to walk while the client was home, acting as though I were dragging them off to be gassed, as passersby stared in disapproving horror.

  9. The basset hounds that scavenged everything and taunted my gag reflex at the sight of wet tissue, by hoovering up several errant wads of it after a rainstorm on trash day.

  10. The golden lab that—living up to its breed’s child-friendly reputation—saw a toddler take a spill in the park and promptly set about mounting the kid, in front of his mother.

  7

  KEYS: A USER’S MANUAL

  Half of each of my days at the Ruckus training camp in 1999 was spent learning how to climb. The goal was to learn to hang banners from buildings, bridges, and the like; the methods were those of mountaineering and rock climbing. I was horrid at it. The two things I clearly recall my trainer saying to me, in plaintive exasperation, were “Why do you do everything wrong?” and “Get out of the harness. Right now.” The process nonetheless imbued me with a particular awareness.

  A central concept in climbing is what is known as a point of protection—a juncture at which a climber’s weight is held, to prevent plummeting to one’s death (typically). This could be a knot, a carabineer, a loop or ring in a harness or mounted to a climbing surface, and so on. There are usually a series of these doing work at any moment in a climbing scenario, and each substantive movement within a climb requires one to check the entire line of them, in a very specific order. There’s a deliberate, built-in redundancy to it, and I found it excruciatingly tedious. I dropped out of high school with exactly zero math credit, and the whole routine of checking points of protection felt cumbersome; like the FOIL method in algebra or writing out one’s multiplication with addition. If I missed a point of protection, my trainer would demand I start over and check my way through the series from the beginning. Some sessions, I’d move up the rope only two or three steps, because I simply couldn’t retain the order of the points of protection I was tasked with checking. The disaster against which this convoluted process allayed was apparent enough, and yet the impulse to shrug at it and lurch forward was practically irresistible. My trainer, however, thankfully enforced firm boundaries with me, effective enough to sear at least their premise onto my consciousness.

  The often cacophonous, high-school janitor-worthy ensemble of keys that distinguishes professional dog walkers from everyone else ambling about with a canine is a thing of comparable critical significance. To a casual observer, it probably figures as a collection of responsibilities, represented visually. And it is that. But more so than any other tool that a dog walker might need, it cannot be improvised. There’s a certain severity to that distinction. Your keys are either where you need them to be, or they’re not. They are, simply put, the most essential among one’s points of protection, and short of informing a client their companion animal has actually died on your watch, few things hold a megaphone to your lack of professional competence like the news you’ve locked yourself out of someone’s house. Such incidents render your function in the client’s life fully inverted; rather than enabling them to go about their workday seamlessly, you are a disruption—one for which they typically have considerably less affection than the dog they would’ve come home to let out in the first place. It is a scenario absolutely agonizing in its drawn-out, multistaged humiliation, and it is to be studiously avoided.

  Thus, engineering key transport and storage is an extraordinarily detail-driven matter of skill and attention. A quick guide for the uninitiated might
go as follows:

  • You typically have two types of keys, and they should be organized as such: midday and off-time. Midday keys ought to be to clients’ homes you visit at least once a week. Off-time keys are for the occasional pet-sitting gig or that client who invariably calls you last minute to squeeze onto the day’s schedule. Neither should be grouped with your personal home/car/bike keys. Carrying all your keys every day is, simply put, Amateur Hour. If nothing else—even if you’re meticulous in keeping tabs on your things—muggings are a thing in U.S. cities, if less frequent than popular imagination would have it. If someone snatches your bag, and all your work keys are in it, you’re left with a scenario not unlike getting bad news from the STI clinic. Not only are you stuck calling every client you’ve ever had, to sheepishly inform them of your now shared misfortune, and then acquiring new keys from those that don’t spook and fire you outright—you’re having that conversation with clients to whom you speak less frequently, and with whom you have less of a rapport. They are far less likely to empathize or forgive.

  Embedded in an approach any less rigorous than this one is a sort of delusional assumption of invincibility, and a failure to account for a world that is bigger than one’s self—a willingness to take unnecessary risks, mostly to dispense with nominal front-end labor (or perhaps just out of ignorance that that labor even exists). And invariably, that work will be off-loaded to someone else when the unexpected toccurs. Further, it shorts the significance of human relationships in this trade. A monkey can handle the bulk of the manual labor. It’s the delicate management of clients and their—quite natural—emotional inclinations that certifies your competence. Case in point: even if a client might express surprise at your separating keys by way of this taxonomy (and you’d do well to subtly perform that task in front of them during any initial consultation, to seed this curiosity), the opportunity it affords to display foresight and innovation here covers considerable distance in demonstrating they’ve hired someone smarter than the average bear. Be that smarter bear. Always.

  • Your keys should have two to three homes, tops. By that, I mean that they should either be on you, hanging from a hook on your wall, or in your bag. Period. End of story. They should not be on the end table next to your couch, on the kitchen counter, in the car of whomever you’re sleeping with, on the table at the bar when you’re drinking with your friends, or anywhere else. At all. Ever. In fact, fuck your bag. Don’t put your keys in your bag. It’s too mobile. People tend to set bags down, and I’ve lost count of how many walkers I know who’ve left a bag in a client’s house while doing walks, not realizing that they’d shoved their keys back in it before leashing up the dogs and proceeding to lock themselves out. We’ll leave alone entirely those who’ve left their bags in cafés, dressing rooms, on buses, and god knows where else. As a bonus, jagged metal has a tendency to wear holes in the materials from which bags are usually made, which is a recipe for absolute disaster. Just don’t do it.

  • While we’re at it, this is true of your phone, as well. It should be in your pocket, or on its charger. Nowhere else. In other words, if you’re working, it should be on your person—no exceptions. Again: You are not omnipotent. Don’t get comfortable. I used to pass a woman on my Capitol Hill route walking a German shepherd around the neighborhood off leash (note: I’m pretty sure Hitler walked his dog off leash), as she casually read a book. Like the world was her castle courtyard. Such oblivious, lunatic people abound. (You can often find them behind the wheel of a car.) Should some emergency situation arise, and you don’t have your phone, you deserve every misfortune that befalls you. I was once tasked with dispatching a coworker’s client to his own home, forced to Google him from my phone and be redirected via his former workplace (the only Google hit I could find), after his walker had locked herself out of his building. With his dogs. And other dogs. Without her phone.

  “No, you can’t call her to give her the building access code.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well …”

  You’d think such situations comically implausible in an allegedly professional sphere. And you would be very, very wrong.

  • Never, ever be that monster that puts clients’ identifying info on key tabs. Seriously. The only things that should appear on these are the dog’s name, and your phone number. Even pet-care agency owners fuck up on this one, inexplicably. A friend in the business once told me of a coworker who’d driven off with his work keys on the roof of his car. Every one of which had its corresponding address attached to it. They were, of course, never seen again. Aside from the obvious liability of some ne’er-do-well tracking a key to a client’s home and relieving them of their possessions (or worse), ensuring a Good Samaritan contacts you, rather than your client, saves you considerable face.

  • Before you close any door behind you, make visual contact—not only with your keys generally, but with the very key(s) you need to get back into that door. If you don’t see the key(s) in question, do not close that door. This is not merely tepid recommendation. It is an essential practice; the visual confirmation of points of protection prior to an irrevocable change of position. Generally speaking, life is a less complicated enterprise when afforded such deliberate pauses for reflection, even in the most mundane acts. Monumental stupidity and hubris lurk in the impulse to shrug out “It’s cool, I’ve got this.” No. You don’t. None of us do. You are the sum of your practices and your resistance to habitual inertia. Everything else is inherited, and requires interrogation—lest you find yourself confined to the options one enjoys on the wrong side of a locked door.

  • Hand-carrying such a massive, jagged wad of metal through a workday is prohibitive, and if the bottom half of your day-to-day getup is baggy enough for your pockets to prove accommodating to the task … well, you probably have a bit of soul-searching to do.

  The most common method for carrying work keys is a clip of some sort. But people tend to choose the worst options, here. Spring-loaded anything is a terrible idea in any item that gets heavy use, for the simple fact that springs eventually give out. Those key-clips popular with hipsters, bike messengers, and their ilk? They’re garbage. Just don’t. The enclosing mechanism that secures them is worthless once that spring goes. Plus, belt loops aren’t designed to carry that kind of weight, or any weight, really. Blow one out, and you’ve basically ruined your jeans. Carabineers are a comparably popular remedy, but pose the same hazard of ripping belt loops, with the additional risk of closing onto the fabric of the loop, rather than around it—rendering the device as functional as the aforementioned clip, with a blown spring. Ask around and you’re bound to find someone who lost a whole ring, for this very reason.

  • After much trial and error, I decided that the most optimal methods of transporting keys were those with the fewest moving parts—the fewest parts, even. Moving or otherwise. Your average hardware store carries a solid metal clip that slips over and hugs the belt itself—a far more sturdy resting surface—with a tensioned closure for the key ring, not unlike a safety pin. No hinges, no springs, and better still—the entire device is one contiguous piece of metal. Keep it simple, kids. You’ll be glad you did.

  • Whenever possible, make backup copies. Don’t ask the client; just make them. Have a backup ring with a copy of every key on it, and keep it somewhere accessible to your work route. Real-estate agents keep keys to properties they’re showing in lockable key boxes attached to porch railings and the like, often opened by combination. If your ring is small enough to fit, find a coffee house or some other friendly business nearby where you can lock a key box in a not-obvious spot. If your ring is too big, make friends with the staff at a business nearby, and leave your spare ring behind the counter. Yes, you’ll be handing your clients’ keys off to little more than strangers. But provided you’re not an oblivious dickhole and haven’t put any clients’ info on the keys, they’re useless to anyone but you. If you find yourself without your keys or only a single key, you’ll be than
kful replacement didn’t require trekking home. And your clients will be grateful they hired such a reliable, consistent, and punctual dog walker—all the while blissfully ignorant of the long-arc lateral save you’ve just orchestrated, behind the scenes.

  8

  KEYS: A TEMPLE TO GOLDILOCKS

  When I returned to the United States at eighteen, I took a job at a one-hour photo lab in the Bel Air Mall, in the northern suburbs of Baltimore. The workspace looked out onto a corridor that dead ended at the food court a few yards down, and our photo printer was oriented such that prints rolled out just inches from the glass wall at the front of the shop, so waiting customers could watch from outside as their memories spilled forth for everyone to see. Why this struck anyone as a good idea, or anything but an invasion of privacy, I’ll never know.

  Under certain conditions, to obscure the production process, a one-foot roll of industrial-brown paper towels was affixed by its end to the top of the printer and rolled down along the conveyer. One such instance was when the Harford County Sheriff’s Office would drop off its forensics photos for developing. Usually autopsy images of a woman beaten to death by an enraged partner, or some teenager attacked in the woods on a shortcut home from a weekend party, left to die of exposure, limbs and clothing in telltale arrangements. In every case, I’m sure the outsourcing was illegal. It was certainly an obscene violation of the victims and their families, and I resented being made accomplice to it. When the boss wasn’t there to ensure I rang up the cops under their corporate account, I would conveniently “forget” to give them their 50 percent discount, in retaliation.