The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  iMessage still works when I’ve got wifi. So if you’ve got an iPhone, we’re all good.

  Sex: [Male/Female]

  I have a penis, but I’m guessing any dog would figure that out pretty quickly. Good lookin’ out.

  What is your background with animals? (Did you have pets growing up, if so what kinds and breeds, have you ever given medication to an animal if yes what kind, do you have pets currently, have you ever volunteered at animal shelter, petsat for friends/family if yes list details of breeds)

  I’ve been a dog walker for over a decade. So I can confidently say both that I’ve given most varieties of medication to dogs/cats, and that the details of the breeds I grew up around factor precisely zero in any background you should be interested in, if you’ve ever done this job or live on planet Earth. Asking about breeds makes you look like a pretentious ass-hat, totally winging it at a care trade. It’s a lousy strategy. Here are a few questions of actual relevance you might’ve asked, instead:

  • Do have full use of your limbs?

  • Can you handle walking nonstop for four to six hours, in all local weather conditions?

  • How many times have you lost your keys? Be honest.

  • Can you manage a finicky lock without completely losing your shit?

  • Have you ever been told you have anger-management issues?

  • True or false? Bodily functions are absolutely hilarious.

  • Did you grow up in a community where dogs were weaponized by police or other security outfits, to terrify or coerce people?

  • Have you been otherwise traumatized by experiences with dogs?

  • Can you explain the difference between a choke collar and a pinch collar? Do you know which is more humane?

  Are you currently working (please list any things you do that pay $$ even if its [sic] not full time, and how much per week you make doing it) if yes what are you doing and what days/hours do you do it, this is a supplementary income so we need to be confident you can do this for at least 6 months as this won’t pay your rent.

  It’s relatively uncontroversial that a central cost of doing business is the reproduction of one’s workforce. (Even Adam Smith thought so.) By that, I mean compensating workers at such a nominal rate that you don’t find yourself short a guy on account of his having shuffled off from starvation or exposure after last clocking out. Shelter seems a pretty nonnegotiable provision, here.

  If I understand the question correctly, explicit conditions of my employment with your operation are as follows:

  • I acknowledge you will not pay me enough to cover my rent.

  • I supply you with detailed confirmation of some outside subsidy to your extracting surplus value from my labor.

  What you’re actually saying here is that neoliberalism has apparently gone so off the rails that the role of “job creator” has been stripped of its usefulness to society. A job, according to this rubric, is something contingent on another job (or even a third job!), or (more likely) externally held debt. That, or you’re an astoundingly brazen piece of shit that any workforce would rightfully lock in a closet, for eternity.

  It’s telling that the assumption at work in all of this is “such are the conditions of the market; if you can’t hang, don’t work here.” There’s a sort of moral weight applied in this calculation, shouldered entirely by workers. (Every time you hear a pundit speak with smarmy confidence about “worker flexibility,” you’re encountering the same thing.) We’re supposed to feel stupid and naïve for thinking we deserve to survive, and recalibrate our sense of worth accordingly.

  But it’s unclear to me why the logic doesn’t tilt in another direction. Perhaps: “Them’s the breaks. If you can’t do business without a subsidy, GTFO.” Or, “Here’s the deal: If your business requires collective risk, the price of admission is collective administration and reward-distribution.” But what the fuck do I know? I’m just a dog walker.

  For the sake of argument, I’ll stick to what’s appropriate to my calling. The vast majority of demand in this trade falls between the hours of 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.—the middle chunk of the average work-a-day job. You know, the kind your clients have, preventing them from being home to walk their own dogs. That’ll likely break down thus:

  11:00–11:30

  Four dogs grouped from separate households, billed at $19 each.

  TOTAL: $76

  11:30–12:00

  Four dogs, two from one household at a 25 percent discount.

  TOTAL: $66.50

  Then multiplied by five, for an average daily gross of $712.50, and a per-minute rate of about $2.38. From one worker, among an armada. None of whose rent you can cover. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the average hourly wage of a dog walker at $9.60, which you’ll pay under a 1099, absolving you of any costs associated with workers’ income taxes, even though you treat them as employees in every other way. This could as much as halve their take-home pay.

  And since they’ll be showing up during the bulk of the standard business day, whatever second or third gig they’ll be working to afford the privilege of making one tenth of what they’re generating for you will have to fit into the hours that remain. So your clients can expect them to be overworked, underslept, maybe drug addled (to power through all these work hours, or to cope with the stress of managing it all), inattentive, and broke—thus prone to cutting corners on the job, neglecting dogs, forgetting to lock doors, or even stealing from clients’ homes. They can also expect rampant turnover, meaning the stability that companion animals typically require is out the window, and about the only quality control you can offer is some Orwellian GPS tracking app you’re installing on your workers’ smartphones (which, by the way, constitute a subsidy to your business model, as you’re not paying for the devices). They should probably expect their walker to endure the odd stress fracture, or other repetitive stress injury, as well.

  Why should clients expect all that, you ask? Oh I don’t know. Maybe because you’re announcing it on your site, with this downright insane application form.

  Do you have any planned trips out of town in next 3–4 months (if yes please list exact dates, any weddings, vacations, business trip, visiting friends or family)?

  To be honest, with all the rent I won’t be able to pay, I was kinda just gonna pass my nights on the subway. So no travel beyond the more scenic corners of the five boroughs.

  What specific neighborhood do you currently live in, will you be moving in the next 6 months, are you on a lease if yes when does it expire?

  C’mon. This is just … Well, actually, you’re aware that punctuation is a thing, right?

  Look, the subtext of this question is pretty clear. If your business’s viability is so reliant upon the stability of my living arrangement, that is literally a textbook cost of doing business, for you. If you’re not in a position to cover that financially, you’re not looking for an employee; you’re looking for an investor—investment in the form of uncompensated labor. Sweat equity. Only, you’re not offering me any stake in the return. If my investment of labor in your enterprise performs well, I will see nothing. And your reliance on my investment will afford me no decision-making power or input. It’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence that you think it appropriate to subtly admonish my precarity in the same breath with which you openly declare your intent to perpetuate it.

  What are your hobbies? What are your dreams and aspirations? Where do you see yourself in a year?

  Dog walkers are broadly intelligible as creatives covering material bases in a manual trade while carrying out various unpaid labors of love in their downtime. Music, art, theater, writing, comedy. As stereotypes go, this one actually has some basis in truth. And it’s precisely why so many dog-walking agencies feature profiles of their employees waxing exuberant about how when Jonathan isn’t strolling pups around Park Slope, he’s a music producer in Bushwick. Or how, prior to pet care, Ashley did an MFA and has choreographed performances at P.S. 122 in
recent years.

  The dreams and aspirations of your workforce are free marketing content for your website. And you know it. Abstractions of their creative work—ignoring its content entirely—are sold to your clients, alongside the manual labor that won’t even finance their most basic necessities. And yet, you’re terrified of the incredibly unlikely prospect that one of them might catch a break and be able to convert their actual creative output into compensation for which you cannot play parasite. The audacity coursing through all that stuns the senses, really.

  Which brings me to a final point: inasmuch as you have stopped just shy of declaring you give not a single fuck whether I live or die, my dreams and aspirations are none of your fucking business. You’re not entitled to that sort of intimacy with me, no matter how badly you want to paper over the crudely extractive relation you’re attempting to establish, here. Your “care” means shit to me, and does not stand in for my survival.

  To quote a celebrated Scorsese film immortalizing the sentiments of the very criminal manifestations of capitalism your racket embodies: Fuck you. Pay me.

  15

  EVEN STATE DEPARTMENT STAFFERS GET THE BLUES

  “Heyyyyyyyyy. You’re here!”

  The exuberance felt out of place to me, but then again, people who hire dog walkers are a fairly broad sample set. You encounter all types, and when you do actually meet clients face to face, the context clues by which you might navigate other exchanges tend to flee the scene. While you are technically on the job, and thus bound by some intelligible set of behavioral parameters, clients are not. Often times, they’re just caught between the formalities of a professional encounter and the casual behaviors to which they’re inclined in their own homes—and the latter often comes more naturally. The familiarity of their own environment yields a predictable entitlement to that at-ease inertia—and a given client’s at-ease could be anything. The initial consultation is always an away game. There are no reliable common denominators. The odds you’d even know the person you’re pitching suffered a stroke five minutes before you arrived are relatively slim.

  I rarely had occasion to meet coworkers’ clients. Pretty much the only circumstance under which such introductions were made was when someone was out of pocket for one reason or another, and an unusually jumpy client wanted to meet the walker subbing in. This particular evening was such an occasion. A duplex. A woman employed with the State Department in some fashion. I’d been to the house before, even met the dog; a young, practically inexhaustible Boston, obsessed with fetching. But the client he lived with was a total stranger to me. And it might’ve been better for everyone involved had she remained so.

  “God, I’m really sorry. Do you guys think my house is okay? Should I arrange the furniture differently?”

  I once briefly walked a puppy for a couple on Capitol Hill, both with careers in warmongering. Him, a marine. Her, some position or another at the Pentagon. I remember being perched atop the toilet in the half-bathroom off their living room, reading the back-cover synopsis of some ridiculous, almost certainly vanity-published work they had on hand about how the Muslim world hates the West because it feels emasculated by the latter’s surpassing the once great Islamic contributions to math, science, and (probably) soap. I don’t, however, have the foggiest recollection of what the place looked like. I was far more likely to giddily text friends evidence of a client’s terrible taste in literature than I was their interior decor, if only because the former better served the ends of skewering meritocracy. “Six fucking figures. And she reads at a Harry Potter level!” And even still, none of that had any bearing whatsoever on whether or not I’d hang with their dog or take their money. I’d walked dogs for trust-fund Georgetown grads and DoD employees—people with sufficient means to have their shit together, or at least a well-guarded vanity—whose homes resembled the aftermath of a tactical SWAT detonation. There’s only so long you can indulge astonishment at such things without being forced to choose between emotional exhaustion, or a revised understanding of median adulthood.

  I knew her question wasn’t really about that, though. Especially as my years in the trade wore on, client consultations meant being face to face with people more or less my age. And they were often visibly ambivalent about their lives, prone to projecting some mixture of “cool”—and whatever of that they imagined they’d forfeited—onto mine. There was a lot of needless apologizing and contrived shame over nominal affluence performed in my presence, as though my approval conferred some exemption from the character of their compromises; as though my opinion of anyone’s lifestyle mattered in any equation whatsoever; or as though I wasn’t fully aware of why they’d pursued particular comforts and even shared in their appreciation of them. Upon learning I was her age and in the process of getting divorced, one client—a married woman staffing for a prominent Democratic senator—inexplicably turned wistful and blurted out “I feel like I’ve done nothing with my life!” Such exchanges became so routine that I half-wondered how many of my clients were writing me checks each week for access to some vicarious sense of what amounted, for them, to adventure or conversation pieces at Hill happy hours. “Our dog walker went to Palestine! Yeah, crazy, right?”

  The Boston, beside himself at my coworker’s off-time visit and unable to contain his elation, was by all appearances halfway to a full-on seizure. “Does he behave okay? Should I be doing something differently in training him?” On the surface, not an altogether odd inquiry, coming from a client. They frequently mistook us for dog trainers, likely unaware that such credentials would command a considerably higher price point. But this particular evening, in practically the same breath as her soliciting our input on her furniture arrangement, the question felt more loaded; like she was just nervously fumbling through prompts, unaware that their cumulative effect was an embarrassing, barely veiled scramble for the approval of two tattooed young men, sweaty from biking across town. It suddenly hit me that her eyes were reddish and puffy. I tried to change the subject, asking about the dog’s typical daily routine.

  “Well, we usually take him to the park around the corner first thing, on weekends … I mean … Ugh, I guess I have to stop saying ‘we’ now.”

  I shot a stern, wide-eyed sideways glance at my coworker, half-suspicious that he knew we were walking into the wake of a breakup and thought it’d be funny not to tell me. Worse, my attempt to diffuse an awkward situation and steer us back into practical terrain had uncorked an excruciating tailspin from which we would never recover.

  “Oh, I should show you the guest room, so you know where you’ll be staying.”

  I leapt at her suggestion, if only because leaving my coworker in the living room meant one less set of eyes on her and her steadily more embarrassing meltdown. When she turned to me at the top of the steps, I could smell the booze. I fought every muscle in my face, suppressing a visible shudder.

  I let her show me the room, and nodded while hearing absolutely nothing she said, as she went over what I’m sure were self-evident details. “So,” she said, having burned through all relevant topics of discussion, stepping awkwardly into my personal space, “Blake tells me you write? What do you write about?” Fuck. The last place I needed to be was standing at the foot of a bed, casually queried about what I did with my downtime by a drunkenly oblivious thirty-something on the rebound, who gave every indication of having completely lost the plot. I hadn’t actually written anything beyond a few pieces for anarchist journals, and discussing them with a State Department employee was almost certainly among the least interesting ways I could imagine spending even a few fleeting seconds of my evening. My coworker had probably just checked off whatever conventional details he could convey over the phone when scheduling our introduction, to make me seem interesting and unthreatening. In his wildest dreams nothing he’d relayed would ever have become fodder for the world’s most untimely and inappropriate attempt at rebound-seduction. Under no circumstances would I egg her on, humoring the discussion. I
noticed the dog had followed us upstairs, and was out of frame from where she stood, so I pretended he was up to something that required intervention, as an excuse to derail her. “Maybe we should get you back downstairs before you get into something you shouldn’t.”

  There was relief in saying it out loud, even if directed at the dog.

  Rounding the base of the stairs, back into the living room, I locked eyes with my coworker, futilely trying to convey the code red in which we were immersed, but before I could steer the encounter to a speedy close, our host lobbed a verbal drunk-grenade into the whole thing.

  “You guys are really smart, you know? Have you ever thought about taking the Foreign Service exam?”

  We silently stared at her, hostage to the realization that she was twice as likely to pass out and come crashing through the coffee table at our feet as she was to realize the lunacy of what she’d just said. Neither seemed in the offing. My coworker laughed, nervously, then went for broke.

  “Uh, no. That’s about the worst idea ever.”

  She was undeterred, firmly convinced of her own genius, in that way only inebriation allows.

  “No. Listen for a sec … The State Department represents all Americans. All of ’em! We want diversity.”

  She was slurring, now. Vaguely combative. And she’d mysteriously concluded that two hetero-passing white guys would really shake up the State Department’s workplace demographics. I wouldn’t have minded the few hundred bucks she was worth to me, but the whole encounter had gone so sideways that nothing mattered in that moment beyond getting the fuck out of her house and preempting some full-blown catastrophe. We were already well off the rails.

  “Look. I have an FBI file,” I said. “Not maybe. Definitely. I know because my fingerprints were put straight into the FBI database; it’s standard when you’re arrested on federal charges. I’m pretty sure that rules me out.”