The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  She went somber, pensive—in that Kathy-Bates-in-Misery sort of way.

  “What’d you do?”

  I was suddenly very aware that I was talking to an agent of the State, and may have just kicked a hornets’ nest of surveillance and official harassment. But I was set on forking the whole shit-show, and was ready to bet on her pulling very little weight in whatever professional role she held.

  “I shut down an embassy. And my passport’s flagged with a major U.S. ally.”

  She stared off at nothing, as though I’d just told her I was her son.

  “This could have ramifications for me, for my job.”

  In reality, it couldn’t. My mom retired near the top of the civil-service pay scale, a career DoD employee. By the spring of 2001, when her security clearance was up for review and the FBI dispatched an agent to interview me over tea in Dupont Circle, I’d been arrested more than a handful of times, more than once on federal property of some sort (including one major military base). In late 1997, some agency or another had seen fit to plaster every university in northwest D.C. with flyers encouraging people interested in “killing cops and making incendiary devices” to attend a conference on civil disobedience that I was helping organize. Conveniently, the only number that appeared on these flyers was mine; a fact that wasn’t lost on the intelligence division of the D.C. police, who interviewed me for a solid two hours. The spring of 2000, the FBI had stationed an agent in the group house upstairs from the apartment I shared with two other local anarchists; all of us hip deep in plans to shut down the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. For one piece of our organizing, my housemate had cobbled together a list of the limo companies contracted to shuttle delegates to the meetings, and had begun planning to dispatch groups to lock down on each company’s lot for the first morning. Before we could set any of it in motion, our apartment was broken into, with no signs of forced entry, and the only thing missing was said list. An enraged phone call followed from our landlord, who turned out to be some sort of Turkish closet fascist—a higher-up with the Ataturk Society of America. “I know what you’re doing!” he shouted. Clearly, whatever agency had stolen our scouting notes had collaborated with him to gain access to our home. Hence the lack of forced entry.

  But Mom’s security clearance was still somehow kosher. My hanging out with a dog and sleeping in the home of a State Department staffer, by comparison, was unlikely to raise even the quietest alarms. But this woman didn’t need to know that. I offered half-hearted assurances, and my coworker and I took the lull in her meltdown as a window through which to exit, almost without a word.

  Her voicemail beat us to our destination. A jumbled, stammering mess of sentence fragments, the thrust of which was that she didn’t need a dog sitter, after all.

  Thank fuck.

  16

  IN WHICH WE ALL LEARN A VALUABLE LESSON ABOUT SCHEDULING

  Clients routinely schedule walks they wind up not needing, and they’re then surprised to see some person keying into their front door. No one expects a stranger to just key into their front door, unannounced. It’s the stuff of psycho-thrillers. And it’s usually about the only reason you see your clients in person, after an initial consultation. A certain unweighted intimacy usually results—the kind of thing you don’t get to inhabit with many people on a daily basis. Safely holding that experience, between near strangers, can be profoundly humanizing. It’s the stuff we’re told can’t happen; the reason we have home security systems, don’t talk to strangers, and think it anything but patently absurd when cops shoot unarmed people.

  Given what he got up to, it was probably more a personal day than a sick day.

  The apartment’s layout was atypical; the bulk of it recessed below the main entrance, with a set of stairs between, so that the first few feet inside figured as a sort of balcony overlooking the living room. Directly below, out of view to the entrance, was the sitting area. A couch, a recliner, some side tables. Standard stuff. The far wall, all mirrors. Who knew what for? Maybe a dancer had bought and renovated the place at some point. Whatever its function, it clearly mattered little to him. He’d assembled an entertainment center against it, outfitted with a sizable flat-screen TV, leaving only limited glimpses of the room reflected in the mirrors’ margins at the edges of the wall.

  He made coffee. Listened to NPR’s Morning Edition while feeding the dogs. Then walked them to the nicer of the neighborhood’s dog parks, near the top of Seventeenth Street NW, just below U Street. It was fenced in, Astroturfed, and laid out as a sort of knoll, so that a daily hosing would rinse all accumulated residue downhill into the surrounding mulch. He mingled, threw a ball, played with a few dogs he recognized. And then he cycled out of the rotation of visitors, per routine.

  He was one of the legacy members of the area’s gay history, and as that community began to disperse or migrate eastward, the dog park served to highlight the neighborhood’s changing demographics. There wasn’t much tension per se, but the dog park increasingly became one of the few noncommercial spaces in which public life unfolded—a fact that was true of most dog parks, actually. One learned as much about what was happening in the neighborhood from conversations there as one did at community forums staged by city council members, and one could estimate property values and local rates of telecommuting by simply observing the waves of people gathering there throughout the day.

  After dropping the dogs off at home, he hit the gym, grabbing iced coffee on the walk home. It was 10:30 a.m. He still hadn’t remembered to call the dog walker to cancel for the day. Under the best of conditions, this was an annoyance to the walker. It’s fairly standard for clients, when first hiring a walker, to stipulate a time they’d like their dog walked. And any walker who tells a client they’ll show up at an appointed time is a liar. Dogs themselves are unpredictable. Weather affects how one routes one’s day. Urban life conspires against you at every turn.

  And then there are the dogs you don’t need to walk, but don’t know you don’t need to walk them, because a client neglected to tell you. So you budget your time and movements to accommodate what amounts to a null value. Depending on the client, you may have walked three dogs a half mile through the rain to reach a house you didn’t need to be at. You may have already been a half hour behind schedule, because some dog was crated with explosive diarrhea that morning, and while you’re not the client’s housemaid, not cleaning up the disaster that greeted you before recrating the poor pup would be grounds for criminal prosecution. Cancellations are the crumpled twenty you find while doing laundry. They can be the difference between a decent day, and ripping your hair out.

  She was probably circling her group from Seventeenth, maybe R Street, hooking them on a loop across Connecticut Avenue, down Twentieth and back eastward via Q Street. Checking her phone for the time, mentally routing her day, plotting a coffee stop on Fourteenth at some point. He was toweling off from his shower, with the bathroom door wide open. The dogs chewing on toys in the hallway, expectant. They were probably surprised when he didn’t beat his normal path to the bedroom’s walk-in closet; not dressing as he normally did following such rituals. Curious, they followed him to the living room. The cast iron encircling his building, much as with most such District residences, doubled as dog parking. Unlike other cities, D.C. thankfully wasn’t such a hot spot for dog theft, probably on account of it being so small. Short of fleeing the city with one’s captive, it’d be hard to conceal such an act. Community LISTSERVs and blogs functioned with a sometimes staggering efficiency, for better or worse. Regardless, leashing dogs outside an apartment building was common practice, and most passersby would be wary of going near them. She threaded the leashes through a few of the bars and hooked the hand loops over the top of one post, shortening the lengths enough to prevent any real trouble from the dogs. She had no need of the front-door key, drifting in behind a UPS worker on delivery, both of them brushing past the mailman.

  He’d brough
t the towel with him, figuring he might as well. He was still a bit damp, and it was better than getting the couch wet. The flat-screen booted up across the room. He fished the lube from a drawer in the side table, and began scrolling through pay-per-view. Some leather-daddy fare. She wound her way through the faux-industrial decor of the common areas and hallways, toward the apartment. An elevator bell dinged a few yards back. As her key hit the door, he instinctively scrambled for his phone, but quickly realized there was nothing to be done and nowhere to go. Her first gaze into the apartment met his eyes in the foot-wide sliver of mirror on the far wall. His shoulders rounded, he was leaning slightly forward. Midstroke, death grip. The dogs’ heads spun upward toward the landing. An “Oh my god” spilled out of her, with as much volume as can be managed in a gasp. The door slammed shut.

  He found his phone, feverishly thumbing through its address book for the agency’s number. Thankfully, it was owned by a friend. He never got to say a word.

  “Dave. I already know.”

  17

  THE WYOMING

  Near the corner of Nineteenth Street and Florida Avenue NW sits the Washington Hilton, where an attempt on former president Ronald Reagan’s life was made in March of 1981, just over two months into his first term. While it remains a site of many high-profile events, political and otherwise, the hotel has never really escaped that day’s shadow. To this day, one can find locals calling the hotel “The Hinckley Hilton,” a reference to Reagan’s shooter, John Hinckley Jr. Less an homage than a consequentialist moral evaluation; a realpolitik. However batshit Hinckley was, Reagan’s impact on the world was so abominable and monstrous, even inadvertent tributes were untenable. While Reagan’s breaking an air-traffic controller strike didn’t prevent the federal government from naming Washington National Airport after him, it took nearly a decade, and a congressional threat of suspended funding, to force the D.C. Metro to include the name on station maps.

  Set behind and overlooking the Hilton is the Wyoming, a sort of old-guard apartment structure at the eastern end of Columbia Road NW, the east–west corridor of Adams Morgan. In its layout, it’s atypical of the District. Two freestanding ornate stone towers, straddling a ground-level lobby. It wouldn’t be out of place on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the feel and culture of the building owing less to Adams Morgan, and more to the smattering of diplomatic outposts along the adjacent stretch of Connecticut Avenue running between Dupont Circle and Woodley Park. Just a few blocks to the north, one finds the Chinese Embassy; to the south and west, the near end of Massachusetts Avenue’s “Embassy Row,” which stretches all the way to the vice president’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory.

  My first clients in The Wyoming were a semiretired couple who easily could’ve been characters cast as the conscience of a Woody Allen film. Their apartment had a similar feel—an extensive, hardcover-heavy library in the sitting room; tasteful antique furniture—and was tellingly left unlocked, as a rule. They’d hired me when the husband, a former editor at a major newspaper, underwent knee surgery that made repeated walks throughout the day prohibitive. The wife had some role at one of the museums on the National Mall and wasn’t always available to step in, so I was brought on as relief. Visits to their apartment bookended my days. I’d walk their dog to Eighteenth Street and grab coffee midmorning, then round out my day’s route back at the Wyoming late afternoon, heading to the nearby gym afterward, or the public pool on the edge of Georgetown during the warmer months.

  The afternoon walks often coincided with late-day routines in the building. Residents whose workdays ended on the earlier side, nannies carting toddlers back from the park up the street, or daily mail delivery. I wasn’t allowed to hold keys, and had to be announced to my clients by the concierge, so the increased traffic at this hour often made for delays. During one such wait, I found myself standing next to Christopher Hitchens, the late public intellectual and author, perhaps most well known to my generation for his alcoholism and his practically birthing “New Atheism,” a questionable tradition now upheld by noted assholes Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens had been something of a mainstay of left-wing intellectual life and human-rights discourse, authoring an impressive array of articles and other works, including a book written in collaboration with Palestinian literary critic Edward Said. Hitchens’s polemicist tenacity and abrasive wit yielded a sort of scorched-earth orientation toward the hypocrisy and violence of Western imperialism. He didn’t simply indict those he took to task. He eviscerated them, his bravado matched only by his lack of apology.

  After 9/11, he became something else, entirely. Islamophobic, bloodthirsty, turning his rage on the very populations victimized by his former foes. Suddenly, the U.S. government whose backing was instrumental in the dictatorship of Pinochet for which he’d put Henry Kissinger on “trial” in one book was nobly inviolate in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Ironically, after this turn he authored a work titled Why Orwell Matters.

  I knew Hitchens to be a British national, and had no idea he lived in the United States, much less the District. I’d passed him on the street once, as he stumbled, red-faced and bleary-eyed, out of La Tomate, a bistro in Dupont Circle. My first thought was, Wow. That guy is really lit. Moments later, it hit me who he was. Since then, as a lifelong chain-smoker with few rivals, he’d been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. His condition had been reported in the press, and he’d given a few interviews on it here and there, mostly to assure everyone that no road-to-Damascus conversion was in the offing. Standing in the lobby of The Wyoming, on the far side of chemotherapy, he was nearly unrecognizable. I began furtively texting my clients. “I’m downstairs. Am I standing next to fucking Christopher Hitchens?!” The reply came seconds later: “Oh yes. ‘The Hitch’ and his family have the largest unit in the building. We know them well.”

  The urge suddenly came over me to confront him. After all, I’d suffered beatings—as well as out-and-out torture—at the hands of cops while taking the streets for the causes by which he’d rose to prominence. I was ready to be escorted from the building, and subsequently fired. The words welled up in my throat, “Hey, guy. Help me out. I’ve always wondered: Where exactly do you keep your Orwell suit?” But looking at his pathetic, chemically battered form—one foot already in the grave—I realized it’d amount to little better than punching down (a pastime I was happy to forfeit to him). He was already gone. Already irrelevant. Withering away in an old apartment overlooking Dupont Circle, disowned by all but the proudly cynical. We made eye contact. I don’t recall my exact expression, but his suggested that I’d given away my knowing contempt. He shuffled back to the elevator with his mail, while I waited to be announced by the concierge.

  My second clients in The Wyoming were a couple living in its east tower, one a higher-up in a major labor union. I’d been referred to them by a friend working as one of the union’s paralegals. They were more sporadic, given they were cat people, and only called on me when they were heading out of town and in need of check-ins for their rather skittish, elderly little lady. It was something of a fiasco, as the cat required thyroid medication that it avoided when placed in food. She hid from me every time I showed up, so administering meds proved a nonstarter. I remember going to great lengths to smash the pills on their counter with the butt of a butter knife and then distributing their powdered remnants in wet food so as to be minimally detectable. Usually, with little effect.

  On one such visit, an early-evening stop I made en route to a friend’s birthday dinner, I found a young woman of grad-school age waiting at the elevator. She was in running shorts and a nondescript T-shirt, as though she’d come from a run or the gym, and was eyeballing her mail. Her attire and age were conspicuous in that space. It was host to a mostly unspoken but nonetheless stifling decorum. I ventured she either inherited her place, or had some familial benefactor footing the bill. The Wyoming was not a grad-school residence, and no one so young would be far enough into th
eir career to cover the cost of living there. The doors opened, and I followed her in.

  “What floor?” she asked, reaching for the buttons.

  “Uh, five. Thanks.” I was always hyperaware of my outsider status in these spaces; the apprehension of residents who saw me as unfamiliar. On more than one occasion, unknown residents had complained about perfectly innocuous things I’d done, like somehow treading too loudly on the carpeted hallway of one floor at 10 a.m. I did my best to avoid taking up space or making anyone suspicious of my presence. In fact, I did my best to be pretty much invisible.

  “That’s my floor,” she said, reaching to illuminate the corresponding button on the elevator’s front wall.

  “Great.” I was rather inanely relieved not to cause her the additional labor of pressing another floor.

  My first few years in the trade, I was treated to pretty much the same curiosity each time I disclosed what I did for a living. “You ever fuck any of your clients?” I never quite got my head around why this question occurred to anyone. “You do realize, don’t you, that people typically hire me to do a thing they can’t because they’re not home, right?” Best I could deduce, dog walkers figured for many people much as pool boys have in literary and cinematic tropes. The key distinction between the two, much to the disappointment of anyone convinced of this unwieldy conflation, is that the work pool boys perform occurs at the home. My primary obligation was to get the fuck out of it. Ideally with one or more dogs in tow.

  I certainly made friends with clients. Enduring friendships, even. In one case, while doing a morning walk for a small dog home alone for a night, I ran into the woman he lived with, home earlier than expected. She was a doctor in the trauma center at George Washington University Hospital who, given her digs, must’ve been transplanted into town on pretty quick notice. I’d had a number of clients in her building, which seemed to serve as sort of corporate short-term housing when law firms or the like needed to bring in someone for a month or so. The units often looked more like hotel suites than apartments. She was landing more permanently, but had been placed in one of them as an interim measure, I guessed. Presumably lacking much time for cultivating a social life in her new surroundings (given her job description), she queried me about why I liked the District. My day was open, so I offered to show her around. We wound up spending the day together. I couldn’t tell if it was a date. She very well may have approached it as such. I didn’t really care, and hadn’t made the offer with that in mind. We kept our hands to ourselves, and I walked away with a free scrip for multiple refills on my asthma inhaler. This was, in effect, as close to anything sexual or romantic that I ever got up to with clients.