The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  One season, in addition to my own rounds (in a mix of light rain and snow), I covered clients for another dog walker who’d booked a full plate, but had to leave town for a family emergency. I did this through the entire arc of a rather nasty flu, basically NyQuilling myself into unconsciousness every moment I wasn’t working—on the couch, because climbing the stairs to the client’s guest room was implausible and merely put added yardage in play. The whole process felt so unthinkable and ill advised that I actually kind of relished the sheer lunacy of throwing myself into it, at each stage. When it was over, I slept for three days straight.

  It should come as no surprise that people laboring in such a capacity might avail themselves of all manner of relief and recreation during downtime, even just to get out of their own heads. For most of my peers, this probably involved drinking, weed, and so on. I happen to be sober. My recreation mostly took the form of Chinese delivery, Arrested Development marathons, and sex.

  Before you get all scandalized about that last bit, let me just say something for the record: if you hire someone to suspend their normal life in order to live out of your house, with your companion animal, and you don’t think they’re going to do what people always do with any nominal privacy … you’re an idiot. Seriously. That’s primarily what homes are for. Most everything else can be done elsewhere, with little risk or transgression, and if I learned nothing else in my time keying in and out of them for a living, it’s that homes are primarily the enclosures in which people shit, fuck, bleed, masturbate, and break.

  Unlike guests, or even the odd workman or contractor, I encountered homes in all their candid vulnerability, day to day. When you woke up late, rushed into the shower, and left your skid-marked tighty-whities laying where you stepped out of them on the bathroom floor? I saw them. The note your girlfriend left you on the kitchen island, thanking you for the breakfast and the sex? I wasn’t even trying to see it. The panties that suggested an ER–worthy hemorrhage that you left next to the bed, before your trip to your sister’s wedding? I placed them on your dresser, using a pencil, out of your dog’s reach. And then (using the same pencil) put them back where I found them an hour before you got back, so you could at least hope your modesty survived the weekend. The positive home pregnancy test your family didn’t know about for another two to three months? I felt so special to be included in your secret. The iPad you left sitting next to the legal pad where you had me leave you notes about the walk? You had iMessage running, so I saw your prior night’s booty call’s half of your sexting session from the office, in real-time push notifications, as I let you know your puppy finally took a shit somewhere other than your living-room floor. The ten-item to-do list you’d made and left out before your business trip, which featured picking up dry-cleaning and having sex? I mostly wondered which end of the list suggested priority, and why—in either case—sex was number seven.

  There’s a passive voyeurism that comes with that sort of access. I didn’t want to know these things about you. I certainly didn’t try to. Sure, I had friends and girlfriends who snooped in your homes when they visited me. They found your weed, your giant dildos, your anal beads. They giggled like children, and invited me to join, and I declined. I actually had no desire to know more about you than you yourselves revealed; professionally, it seemed most prudent to allow you to drive that process, and be known on your own terms. And I guarded that delicate equilibrium quite studiously.

  But seriously, you were terrible at keeping your own secrets, and worse—you advertised the parts of yourselves I’d have never expected you to. To this day, I wonder about a quirky young woman whose rescued pugs I walked for a year or so; a staffer for a somewhat tragically progressive congressman. Going in, it was clear she was new to dogs. But the more time I spent in her apartment, the more I wondered if she was just new to life. Each week, a new fad diet portioned out in individual Tupperware, meticulously stacked in the fridge. A college report card framed and hung in the hallway to the bathroom. Once, a stack of library books on the kitchen island, among them, How to Have Conversations with People.

  Anyone in my position who cultivates condescension from such discoveries is a sociopath. And such people are likely, and sadly, abundant. These mishaps—these windows into the messy complexity of a life—are not scandalous, humiliating anomalies in a field of general and effortless grace. Rather, they are our common condition. They are the field. They lay bare our fallibility—and more importantly, our fragility—in ways that ought to appeal to instincts of mutual care and empathy. I can assure you, the world as reflected in the appearances we keep up, propelled by ego, career, or even higher pursuits … is a silly and childish facade. And it gives way to the worst in us, concealing what’s softest, most humble, most compassionate.

  So, to rage against the blunting of our best selves, and because we’re all in this together—I fucked in your house. A lot. Like, every chance I got. If your neighbors didn’t know you’d skipped town, they were probably really happy for you.

  No need to thank me. Just doing my part.

  21

  THE PLAN, PT. 1 (THEIRS)

  London’s Stansted Airport was pretty bare bones in the fall of 2005. If you’ve ever traveled on one of Europe’s budget airlines, you know its type. Typically, these facilities are well outside of the actual city to which they’re attached, more so even than the major airports, and they offer little in the way of amenities. Tile floors, mesh-wire seating consoles, and, in this case, few actual walls. It was a fairly inhospitable place to find oneself overnight, and yet, it would be serving as my hotel room. After a brief tour through the UK with a band I’d been playing in, our drummer and I had flown to Sweden, spending a week between Stockholm and Umeå, visiting friends and attending the premiere of a documentary about the latter city’s legendary hardcore band Refused. Stansted served as something of a hub for Ryanair, so we’d landed there on the back end of our trip, with a night to kill before my drummer friend grabbed an early-a.m. bus to a flight home out of Gatwick, and I continued on to visit a ladyfriend in Italy.

  Neither of us being meat-eaters, we’d each procured a plate of greasy potatoes from the only food option in the building—a shitty diner near its center. The closing gates were coming down for the evening as we made our way to a table. Smartphones were only just getting around, wi-fi was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now, and I’d read both of the books I’d brought during our drives in the UK. Having washed up and shaved in the airport bathroom, we were left with nothing but each other to pass the time.

  He’d quit a job in a graduate-school library a few months prior, anticipating a month-long U.S. tour with his other band and then our trip across the Atlantic. This was how it went with musicians. You either had some sort of job you could come and go from with relative ease, or you strung stopgap work between tours, with no real trajectory or aim other than the ease of getting into a van every few months to run your life into the ground again. By this point, I’d quit working for dog-walking agencies, and had cultivated a fairly lucrative, stable freelance client base via Craigslist. I thus had a number of friends eager to sub for me when I wanted to travel. Many of them were dog walkers themselves, and the return on even a few weeks working my route was often worth quitting a job with an agency.

  My drummer friend, on the other hand, was flying back to D.C. with no real prospects beyond groveling for some job he didn’t want and wouldn’t care about, which he’d quit six months later when his next tour kicked off. With the wee hours staring us down, I inquired as to his plans, and he more or less confirmed what anyone familiar with the circumstances would’ve assumed. Despite leaving Bates College with degrees in both literature and music, he’d likely be temping. “Why don’t you go work for a dog-walking agency?” I asked. “It’s a shorter workday, and once you can say you’ve done it, you’re always going to find someone willing to hire you.” As it happened, my claim was borne out by institutional shifts afoot back in D.C. More so, in fact,
than either of us probably could’ve imagined.

  Unlike every other city in the United States, the District of Columbia exists as a sort of landlocked colony. While each of the city’s roughly 600,000 residents pays taxes to the federal government, they enjoy no representation within it. The federal government intervenes in the city’s internal politics and administration routinely, often at odds with the stated aspirations of its residents, with precisely zero structural accountability. In its shadow, the District operated for many years as a near-failed state, especially since the ’68 riots. A feature-length Frontline special from 1990 depicted people in the city’s Shaw neighborhood living in conditions straight out of apartheid South Africa; concrete shells of homes, with sheets for doors. It was illustratively titled “Throwaway People.” Remember the final shot in Independence Day; the multistory house with the facade sheared off and the rooms exposed? That was an actual structure near the corner of Fourth and Massachusetts NW, facing a major city corridor, on the edge of D.C.’s Chinatown. It wasn’t staged for the movie. It stood exposed like that, a reminder to residents of their vulnerability, for what must’ve been decades. D.C. would eventually—rather famously—be crowned the murder capital of the world, prompting the local NBA team to change its name from the Bullets to the Wizards.

  When I moved there in the mid-nineties, several public schools couldn’t open on time, due to gaping holes in the ceilings. Illiteracy was widespread, and HIV/AIDS ravaged the population (coming in as the eighth worst such epidemic in the world—the worst result in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti). Understandably desperate to exact some triage in the havoc HIV had wrought on the city, residents passed a number of referendums, with telling results. The first of these (in my memory) was an initiative to establish a publicly funded needle-exchange program. Lacking budgetary autonomy—a condition of which no other city in the United States was left wanting—the funds for the program were withheld by the U.S. Congress, and all near-term hopes for it collapsed. Another was an effort to decriminalize medical marijuana, particularly for residents living with full-blown AIDS, facing its latter stages—“wasting syndrome”: loss of appetite, chronic pain, and diarrhea that leaves one practically withering away. The day of the referendum, then Republican representative Bob Barr moved to seize the ballots and have them locked away in a vault, before they could even be counted. It took several years before a federal judge would order them turned over and tallied. The Bush administration, in its typical, fanatical wisdom, barred all sex education that departed from an abstinence-only model, with predictable, disastrous results in an already battered, neglected youth population.

  Some have argued that the city’s overwhelmingly center-left to left politics account for the persistent refusal of the federal government to enfranchise its residents. Roughly 93 percent of the population votes Democrat, down the ticket, in every local election, and the local Green Party enjoys more support than the GOP. Were the District to be granted statehood, it would arguably amount to the most solidly left voting bloc in the country.

  From my vantage point, as a fifteen-year resident of the city, D.C.’s disenfranchisement was about something far more insidious than partisan stonewalling. It was keenly racialized. For the latter half of the last century, D.C. was colloquially known as “Chocolate City”—at one point, its population was upward of 80 percent African American. (It’s also home to the largest Ethiopian population outside the country itself.) Unlike other U.S. cities with comparable demographics, it is not subsumed within a majority-white state. And this makes it utterly (and gravely) unique. What no one seems to want to admit about the District’s status within American democracy is what no white person wants to admit about the status of blackness in our culture: that it might speak for itself, in its own voice, cannot be tolerated. At any cost.

  In the meantime, the city’s suburbs in Maryland and Virginia have seen fit to forge a dizzyingly parasitic relationship with the whole arrangement. While the District is actually home to more jobs than people, two-thirds of the income earned in the city goes to nonresidents; people who utilize the city’s public infrastructure, and capitalize on the vibrant, resilient economy driven by the presence of the federal government, but who don’t pay for any of it. The income they earn in the District is taxed where they live—in Maryland and Virginia.

  Montgomery County (Maryland) and Arlington County (Virginia) boast some of the highest-ranked public-school and library systems in the United States. Their fire, EMS, and police departments are similarly well regarded. The states themselves have robust, reputable public university systems, financed in no small part by the tax base pouring out of D.C. As a corrective to this extractive obscenity, the District has on multiple occasions sought to impose a commuter tax, or some system by which income earned in the city would be—to some extent—taxed in the city. And on each and every one of those occasions, the congressional representatives elected by the suburbs mobilized congress to deter, overturn, or neutralize the process. District residents, of course, have had no one to meaningfully intervene on their behalf. Ironically, as if to underscore the naked contempt the suburbs have for the city, District residents working in the suburbs have been obliged to pay taxes in both the District and whichever state they commute to for work.

  The whole setup is so breathtakingly crass and, on its very face, predatory that lifelong, black District residents have sometimes resorted to making sense of it by way of a sort of folk myth known as “The Plan”: basically, a superstition that a conspiracy exists to empty D.C. of black people. Ride a city bus, or shuffle about in the right corners of the District, and you’re likely to hear mention of it. It’s simple enough to wince at its cliché irrationality, but—quite sadly—there’s a level at which it’s not necessarily any more farfetched or blunt-object than the reality on the ground.

  At the time of our overnight stay at Stansted, Mayor Anthony Williams was two years into his final term, and practically untouchable, having followed on the heels of Marion Barry’s post-prison return to the city’s helm. Williams inaugurated his final stint announcing his intention to bring 100,000 new residents to the District within a decade. Despite the massive figure—and its proportion to the city’s existing population, and the fact that it amounted to a reversal of the District’s net decline in residents at that point—it wasn’t an entirely implausible goal. Gentrification was fast afoot, and entire neighborhoods were being transformed almost overnight, with condo construction virtually everywhere, artificially inflating real-estate prices. Williams had no small role in enticing developers to the banquet, and his administration had undertaken a concerted rebranding campaign: “City Living, D.C. Style.” In the end, it mostly succeeded. By 2013, data showed a net increase of 83,000 residents.

  This came with predictable effects, not least because they were baked into Williams’s strategy. He’d modeled the whole plan on a Brookings report titled Envisioning a Future Washington, drafted by a former chief of the District’s financial control board. The report referred to something called “The Adult Strategy,” which worked from the premise that an increase in high-earning, childless residents would greatly increase the District’s tax base. Higher incomes and higher property values = greater tax base. Textbook gentrification strategy. Nothing groundbreaking. Higher property values would yield higher tax obligations for existing, lower-income homeowners, and—even according to the report’s own language—likely push them out “unless strenuous efforts were made to enable them to stay.”

  No metric was offered, however, for what sorts of efforts to retain low-income residents would qualify as “strenuous.” In fact, the document was quite candid in projecting the impact such a plan would have on the city’s racial demographics, noting it would “probably increase the ratio of whites to African Americans.” That lack of subtlety pervaded the report’s wording. “Long-time residents might fear that newcomers lacked lasting commitment to Washington,” it warned, arguing such residents might perceiv
e new residents as “[un] likely to fight for better schools or help for low-income families.”

  All of this, while touting the District’s cultural diversity as a draw, and tacitly suggesting former and downsized psychiatric and homeless facilities could be repurposed for commercial or residential development. In effect, inasmuch as racially and culturally diverse communities served as marketing fodder, they were a critical piece of the proposed vision. Once that vision was set in motion, however, said communities would be scattered to the wind, their cries little more than an ethereal “perception problem.”

  Then, there was the “childless” bit, which struck me as positively breathtaking. When Mayor Williams announced this plan, I remember wondering aloud whether it was the first time in U.S. history that an elected politician had gone on record with an antifamily policy proposal. The obvious—and rather nakedly cynical—play being made was that children were a tax burden. They had to be educated, and provided for via public coffers in other myriad ways. The bait and switch implied by this strategy was: if the city is remade to lure twenty- and thirty-somethings, it will continue to draw them. When they have children, and the city’s orientation and priorities no longer prove accommodating, they’ll leave. At which point, new single residents will replace them.

  In effect, the strategy appeared to grow the city’s tax base (mostly) by reducing its obligations (to children). If the District’s unique tax-base challenges were viewed as analogous to a critical economic downturn (and the report devoted considerable space to setting it up in almost exactly this way), this was little more than what corporations would call an asset-based recovery; downsize, do more with fewer people, and never bring back the workers cut loose.