The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  More still, my mastering the routine it set up served to accommodate and normalize difference. It served to make other ways of living more possible. Not just for him. For me. That had the effect of making the general ecosystem in which I lived and worked measurably more conducive to people’s freedom. In real, tangible terms. I can’t imagine that being uninteresting. I can’t imagine it not being absolutely invigorating.

  I can’t imagine it being anything but utterly necessary, required reading. I was grateful for it, every time I showed up.

  25

  EXPIRATION DATES

  I’d watched his building go up over the course of about a year, one of a handful in the neighborhood planting the flag of eastward gentrification. Its layout was maze-like, the route to his unit running the length of several impractically carpeted hallways from the elevator, broken by a corner roughly midway. At the consultation, I discovered just how significant and harrowing that stretch would prove. His dog, Jimmy, was ancient. Deaf, nearly blind, barely able to stand. Getting the poor guy outside, day to day, was like walking a coffee table, and I was white knuckled with terror that he’d empty himself in one manner or another somewhere between his door and the elevator. Jimmy clearly loathed being dragged out each day. Worse, he seemed painfully bewildered by the whole process, each new excursion seeming to underscore his having forgotten the last one. I felt like an orderly, hauling some senile old man out of his home, for a routine that had negligibly little to do with his comfort or well-being.

  This was the unsettling dilemma I found buried in so many of these encounters. It wasn’t about Jimmy or his needs. It was about the client’s, and the symbiosis of human-animal relationships. And the human half invariably dominated. The dogs gave few fucks about when I showed up, in most cases, but humans absolutely panicked. Dogs mostly loved absolutely everyone, and yet consultations almost always involved a client projecting onto me some particularly compelling “connection.” I lost count of how many times one of the dogs rolled around in something dead during a walk, but I know exactly how many times I informed a client their guy or gal was rubbing it all over their apartment: zero.

  That delicate dance with human emotional needs proved a trial by fire, really. The process was never just mediated by my relationship with a dog, or my rapport with a given client. I had keys to these people’s homes. I knew their partners, in many cases; saw those relationships ebb and flow. I knew where they visited their families, where they vacationed for anniversaries. I saw them sick, injured, laid off from their jobs, grieving loved ones. Once, I was struck by a car while biking to a client’s house; I took out the rear passenger window with my lower back, leaving ugly glass lacerations at the point of impact (which were later glued shut in an ER). The client raced home from work to clean my wounds and bandage me up. There was often a real intimacy coursing through the various relationships I had with these people, and even where there wasn’t, I had an incidental, disproportionate knowledge of their lives that acted on our dynamic, whether I wanted it to or not.

  I nonetheless felt some accountability to the argument that domesticating animals has at its core a real selfishness. In Jimmy’s case, this was absolutely true. Animals can’t tell us when they’re in pain. Typically, given the option, cats and dogs will leave and find some place to die when the time comes. When they’re confined, that dignity is kept from them. If you deny them that, you take on responsibility for any suffering they endure at being artificially kept alive. And what this client wanted was for me to humor and affirm his delusions about the normalcy of his situation—and the encouragement he took from his dog’s sporadic, fleeting improvements. It wasn’t cynical, and I didn’t resent him for it. He just wasn’t ready.

  As a caregiver, and someone reasonably confident in the capacity of adults to handle certain difficult truths, I generally came down on the side of compassion for nonhumans in the face of human obliviousness. More than once, I gently advised clients that it was, perhaps, time to let go. Thankfully, that never blew up in my face. This case was different. Having interacted with this client somewhat regularly and spent enough time in his apartment to survey his books and other various tastes, I deduced two significant things. First, he was firmly in the closet. Second, it would be charitable to say this fact had radically constrained his social life. Jimmy was very likely the most substantive day-to-day relationship he had. Letting go of him was not simply letting go of an animal companion, it was letting go of a refuge; one that allowed for an otherwise untenable authenticity and depth of character—that allowed for feeling fully seen.

  Quite literally, the only thing that can be said with 100 percent accuracy and consistency when we speak of relationships is the one thing none of us ever really wants to confront: they end. Always. Every single one of them. Arguably, it’s their defining feature. In human relationships, it’s probably more common that things come undone in some abrupt break or a drifting apart. But the best-case scenario is that a relationship is successful and rewarding for such a duration that one of the people involved simply dies. That’s actually as good as it gets; the target we aim for, ostensibly.

  I realize this isn’t breaking news. That said, judging by the volume of artistic output devoted to mourning these endings (to say nothing of the mess of human drama that unfolds in response to them), it hardly seems foregone that humans have fully digested it, or that it figures in the foreground of most people’s decision making. The fact is, as philosopher Judith Butler illustrates in a downright gorgeous passage in the opening chapter of her work Undoing Gender, as selves, we are socially constituted. That is, our self as we understand it exists in relation to others; an image culled from bouncing signals off a constellation of the familiar. Be that people, places, routines, sounds, or animal friends. Hence, mourning. That exhausting disorientation isn’t simply a matter of sadness at loss. It’s that in that loss, we have been irrevocably changed against our will, and time is required to adjust to whatever new self results.

  Following a surgery during which famed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died and was then revived on the operating table, he penned a lengthy poem titled Mural, reflecting on selfhood in the face of glaring impermanence. Its closing lines almost propose an ethics for living:

  And my name, though I mispronounce it over the coffin, is mine.

  As for me, filled with every reason to leave,

  I am not mine.

  I am not mine.

  I am not mine.

  Consciously being in relationship with others, as opposed to being in relation simply as a passive, inert fact of existence, is to consciously acknowledge we are not strictly our own. It’s letting go of parts of our selves that reside in others. It’s knowingly accepting the nonnegotiability of expiration dates, and that they will take from us not only those familiar to us or loved by us, but the selves we’ve come to know and with which we’ve become dexterous. Those will—with some regularity—exit stage, never to return. The only choice we’ll have is in how fully we show up to that.

  There is an extraordinary courage in that showing up. And because we’re so susceptible to discounting the inevitability of endings, and relating to them as these disruptive, unjust anomalies in a narrative with some other thematic arc—I don’t think we really give ourselves credit for what we have to summon just in order to be with each other. Something of that is stolen in vows of “till death do us part.” Being together is not an “in the meantime” thing. It’s a “one day you are going to die and one day I am going to die, and this moment is all we fucking have” affair. The fact that we perceive something so vital and valuable that we sign up for inevitable loss, disjuncture, and all that comes with both without recoiling in absolute horror—and that we will do it multiple times over—is nothing short of breathtaking.

  With human relationships, lifespans are such that endings tend to figure as abstractions so distant as to be imponderable. With nonhumans, especially those of which people tend to be fond, the endpoints
are keenly concrete. A decade or so. Maybe two, if nature’s feeling generous. If I did my job well, it meant I’d be around when animals I worked with died. I knew that going in, every time. On a first foray out into the world together, I’d quietly acknowledge to both myself and the dog that I would likely experience their passing. And I would do so smiling. Because that was the best-case scenario.

  The courage we summon in signing up to watch another person die, and in summoning that anew with each beginning, is magnified in human-animal relationships. And my admiration for clients in showing up to that undertaking was fierce. With some of them, I went through generations of companions they adopted and lost and adopted again. That resilience, that unfazed persistent devotion to discovering and falling in love with strangers over and over again, left me stunned and humbled. Every. Single. Time.

  This left my walks with Jimmy wrought, and left me feeling hogtied and mute with relation to his human. Each day, each time I punched my security code into that building, I felt as though I were taking up an unworkable ball of knots; a series of mutually unsatisfactory options—all of which I was mostly powerless to improve. The yawning gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be has never been more of an acute experience for me than in those agonizing moments where power, institutional inertia, and happenstance conspire against someone’s desire to simply love well. It is rage inducing, in every instance. With any development or decision enacted in our lives—social, political, economic, whatever—it seems fundamental to me that that metric ought to be applied: how does this enable people to love well?

  As far as I’m concerned, anything that obstructs or inhibits that capacity ought to be burned to the fucking ground, no questions asked, if for no other reason than that when the curtain begins to draw on the short lives we race through, little else will have mattered. All other ends to which social forces bend are irrelevant in its absence.

  26

  EXIT INTERVIEW

  So I’m just gonna ask: Why’d you quit?

  The easy answer is that the job was never particularly intellectually challenging, and anyone doing it knows that. You do it well, lock in a fairly localized and stable client base, and that’s really it. After that, it’s just repetition and maintenance, and provided you’re nominally charismatic and not a complete fuckup, the latter mostly takes care of itself. Once you hit that autopilot, there’s no getting around that it offers few opportunities for really pushing the life of one’s mind.

  Toward the end of my freelancing days, I realized I’d pretty much hit the ceiling on that front. I could go the entrepreneurial route, and “get creative” with engineering other people’s exploitation and squeezing greater volumes of surplus value from their labor as a boss (and then maybe eventually sell that business). Or I could go the route that I did, putting my politics into conversation with this trade I’d learned, and create something that would expand democratic prospects as it grew. Beyond that, there wasn’t really a move available to me that wasn’t strictly lateral. And you know—as it should be, at least in the economic sphere. A commitment to arrangements of equality and democracy necessarily comes with certain tangible, material limits. I never really had the conversation with myself that goes I’ll never make more than this, because I didn’t need to. In a sane world, none of us should; certainly not at the expense of others. I felt enormously fortunate at having carved out the situation I had, for myself. And wanting more than that—on any front—felt like looking a gift horse in the mouth.

  But over the years, my tastes changed, and I got more and more restless to be intellectually engaged in things that had real stakes.

  So you walked away to pursue more challenging options?

  Eh, the picture is a bit messier than that, and far less romantic. I’d spent fifteen years in D.C.—a notoriously transient city in a lot of ways. So, every few years, the landscape changed and I had a different arrangement of peers. There were steadily fewer “lifers” around; most lasted maybe four years. People would cycle out, new people would cycle in, activist and organizing formations would come and go, and all of it yielded subtle but nonetheless significant transformations. What I didn’t really take into account was how that stacked the deck against the functioning of experience and institutional memory. The radical landscape was always getting younger, newer. And because much of that was happening well after the high-profile organizing and mass actions that followed the 1999 Seattle uprising, it came with a lot of self-convinced romance. There were fewer and fewer people around to testify to the gritty, long-haul work that went into the storied things that had drawn younger activists to the District. Especially as social media came into prominence, it was enough to simply announce to your networks that you’d done something. Its effects were, at best, an afterthought.

  So, for example, whereas the spring of 2000 saw 30,000 people take to the streets of downtown D.C. against the IMF and World Bank meetings, putting the words “structural adjustment” into the mainstream press probably more times than they had appeared in the previous quarter century—an enormous feat of coalition-building, skill-cultivation, and strategy—within a decade those meetings were met with fifty folks wielding torches and nonspecific slogans, on a march through residential streets nowhere near either institution, seemingly unaware of their resemblance to racist lynch mobs. Radical politics was kinda reduced to a “fake it till you make it” mentality. And because of the city’s transience, and the (perhaps perfectly understandable) unwillingness of folks who’d done important work to stick around—that tendency just went uncontested most of the time, and became more and more convinced of its own efficacy, despite pretty apparent diminishing returns.

  And rather stupidly, I remained driven by this intense identification with a “home” that no longer existed, and for which fewer and fewer people shared my sense of loss. Worse, the landscape I wanted to create and contribute to had been foreclosed on probably long before I even noticed. So continuing to fight for it made for a really toxic, acrimonious relationships. It never actually occurred to me that I might grow or change in ways that made D.C. a bad fit, and reaching that stage in life where you recognize not everything is achievable or within your control is mostly a matter of time. After beating my head against a wall for probably half a decade, I took a look around and realized that, if my happiness mattered—and as I’ve gotten older, it’s mattered more and more—I needed to step out of my comfort zone and seek out other things.

  But that’s about place, not dog walking, really.

  No, no. Totally. And when I left, I had no intention of quitting the trade, actually. I’d been toying with the idea of moving elsewhere, for about a year—but somewhere I could continue working in the trade. I was actually genuinely enticed by the challenge of building a new client base somewhere else, and the prospect of building a cooperative workplace with different parameters, different demands, different challenges (all with the benefit of previous trial and error)—as well as just the opportunity to pursue new things outside my day job.

  I’d actually considered Buenos Aires, for a bit, and was tentatively researching a possible move there. A friend had introduced me to Naomi Klein and her partner Avi Lewis a few times, explaining that I’d been inspired by their documentary The Take, about Argentine worker self-management following the 2001 financial collapse, and they’d offered to make virtual introductions for me with their contacts there, if I wanted. That would’ve made for an enormous opportunity to really deepen my engagement with democratic workplaces, even if I never came back to dog walking. At the same time, I’d been coming and going from New York with more frequency, attending conferences, speaking on panels, visiting friends. I loathed Manhattan, but Brooklyn felt more human scaled, and relationships I’d formed there were taking up more and more space in my internal life. If nothing else, a number of my favorite people from D.C. had moved there, and the idea of rebooting my life with those relationships at the center was incredibly appealing. Then
one day, a professor and sort of mentor of mine invited me to squat a graduate course he was guest-teaching at The New School, and it suddenly felt like time to pull the trigger.

  So you just picked up and left?

  Not entirely. I had met this other dog walker up there, through neighbors of mine in D.C., and she’d asked if I had any interest in subbing her holiday clients, since she was skipping the rush and going home to see family for a change. Anticipating how lucrative that would be, the contacts it would generate, and the cushion it would give me for establishing a foothold in New York, I jumped on it, and moved my shit into an apartment just off the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge. The first month or so, I was still working clients in D.C. during the week and “living” in Brooklyn on the weekends. A month or so in, she told me all but one of her holiday clients had cancelled. All of a sudden, rather than seamlessly phasing out of one city and into another, I was straddling the space between them, well and truly fucked. And what followed was the ass-kicking of my life.

  What do you mean?

  For starters, New York is a much bigger place. Just geographically. So scaling up something like a dog-walking outfit is incredibly difficult and slow going. Regardless of the city, the odds your initial clients are going to be concentrated in the same neighborhood are pretty slim. In D.C., that was a matter of clients being maybe four miles apart—in the worst case. New York City feels larger than some European countries. My first client was on West Twentieth, near the Flatiron. My second was on East Eighty-First Street. My third and fourth clients were in Park Slope. To make that work time-wise, I was beginning in the Flatiron District, biking up the West Side bike path to avoid lights, then cutting east on West Seventy-Seventh, racing cars through the Seventy-Ninth Street transverse in Central Park, then up to East Eighty-First. From there, I would bike the roughly ten miles down Second Avenue, across the Manhattan Bridge, and down Flatbush to Park Slope. It was categorically insane, and it kicked the living shit out of me. Living in Brooklyn, I was biking probably thirty miles for a client base worth maybe eighty dollars a day, initially. If I blew a tire or something, everything snarled and got royally fucked. But I didn’t have any other choice. It was quite literally a matter of survival.