The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  At the same time, wealth in New York City is a thing of real obscenity, and it produces a completely different culture and psychology than what one finds in D.C. The biggest assholes you’re going to encounter in D.C. are either war criminals or enterprising, right-wing, bootstrap shitbags who pride themselves on their economization of everything. The average war criminal is almost definitely adjuncting at Georgetown, and lives out of some corporate temporary living suite, sans-dog. That leaves you the other breed of monster. If you provide a quality service for even a fraction less than a competitor, his very identity is bound up in hiring you. In New York? Conspicuous consumption is a very real thing. The first consultation I ever did there began with the building’s elevator opening into the client’s dining room. When they moved, I saw flyers for the apartments they were viewing—rents running from $10,000 to $15,000 monthly. For a not insignificant number of people, the performance of status that comes with dropping $100 a day on doggie daycare in Gramercy is its own reward. They don’t care about spending less, or whether you’re doing better work. It’s a completely different sport, and the skills and intuition I’d cultivated in D.C. were effectively useless in the face of that.

  So what happened?

  I’d spent about a year desperately scraping together a client base in New York, and by about October of 2011, I’d finally gotten my head above water. Things were growing in such a way that I was en route to breaking my work into two routes and apprenticing someone to take one of them, so as to create more localized client concentrations. But I was also pretty battered. To cut down expenses, I’d illegally subletted my apartment and moved into a shithole place on South Third in Williamsburg, where a friend had a spare room. The courtyard area was basically the building’s trash collection area, and there was no air-conditioning, so in the hotter months, the place reeked from rotting garbage wafting up and into the open windows. There was a water leak of some sort directly above the upper half of my bed, so each night I’d brush damp fallen plaster dust off of it, and then shower off whatever landed on me in my sleep the next morning. Our super’s kid broke in and relieved me of my laptop. My cat died. The fact that work was finally turning around was really the only thing going well.

  Then, at the end of the year, without any notice whatsoever, two of my biggest clients (one of whom had multiple walks a day) abruptly suspended service, on account of both having just brought home newborns. I started 2012 with my newly stable income nearly halved. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was a huge setback. And I was already only just catching my breath.

  It sounds like you were in fight mode, though, anyway. Was that enough to throw your confidence?

  No. Not really. But the fact that I got no advance notice of it, despite that newborns are hardly unanticipated, seemed worth noticing. In both cases, I found out when I contacted the clients to confirm their schedules. For them, it was an afterthought. It wasn’t as though I’d performed poorly, or some interpersonal fissure precipitated it. These were people with whom I was on really good terms; people who added me on Facebook in some cases. So the lack of consideration—even if totally unintentional—felt foreboding.

  At the same time, Occupy Wall Street had been underway for months, and the encampment had been evicted from Zuccotti Park only a few weeks prior. I’d been neck deep in it, pulling various duties in the education and empowerment working group and consulting a little with efforts to launch worker-cooperatives out of other working groups, as well as participating in the neighborhood assemblies the movement had spun off in the outer boroughs—specifically Occupy Williamsburg and Occupy Brooklyn. I’d been on the Brooklyn Bridge during the showdown with the NYPD back in October, which was probably the first thing that really got the mainstream’s attention, and I’d thus become a go-to source for a few journalists. I’d also been solicited to write on what was happening, for various movement websites. Occupy was the story in the mainstream, at that point, and was increasingly the national story, as well.

  The publication of and breakout bestseller numbers on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years had also lent a certain new legitimacy to the distinctly anarchist politics coming out of Occupy. So those of us who were versed in prior, similar grassroots movements and could provide context for what was unfolding were taken a lot more seriously. A whole generation of journalists cropped up, almost overnight. People I’d met in the park before the eviction wound up writing for Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera, and other mainstream outlets. Suddenly, I had opportunities to exercise faculties and skillsets I’d back-burnered for a number of years, and in really engaging contexts. There was a real and materially substantive demand for knowledge production around radical politics and the like. And thus, there were outlets for doing that that weren’t dependent upon my bending my day job toward political ends.

  And amid all that, a number of my movement mentors were encouraging me to step back from things and devote real time to just writing. So it wasn’t so much that the income setback threw my confidence in some determinative way. Other passions were creeping into the foreground, from my periphery, and I guess I was just a lot less single-minded about primary commitments.

  So what was it that gave you the final shove?

  Sometime in January, when I was already skipping meals to account for the sudden lost income, I biked through a midday of that shitty, not-quite-freezing rain typical of the season, to my only remaining Upper East Side client. She lived on the sixth floor of a walkup near the Met. The climb was a routine feature of my day, but that particular day, I was spent from stress, undereating, and biking anywhere had become almost unbearable thanks to some bilateral nerve issue that left me with excruciating pain in my upper arms for weeks at a time. At that point, I’d assumed it was just my body telling me I was nutrient deficient, which just kind of spit into the overall wound that my life had become. Working scattered off-time walks or overnight gigs was my only salvation those months, and because those were often a vector for new midday clients, taking an evening job somewhere was an opportunity cost I couldn’t afford. So I was kinda confined to this course that was breaking me down on a daily basis. Climbing those stairs off Lexington was like this ritual walking meditation on how miserable I was.

  I’d been mulling, for some time, the fact that D.C. clients had regularly texted or called me to warn me of changes or contingencies that had no bearing on me whatsoever—a potted plant was moved, or something comparably insignificant. While in New York, two clients had just shrugged at the option of giving me any advance notice on schedule changes that would cost me upward of $1,200 a month. I was probably mulling that very contrast as I climbed those stairs that day. So when I reached my client’s landing and found a refrigerator in front of her door, something in me just fucking broke.

  I pretty quickly figured out that she’d put it out there for the super or some other person to retrieve. She had fostered this rescued pit bull and had fallen so in love with him that she just kept him. But he was still a pit bull, and people were irrationally afraid of him. Clearly, her fridge had shit the bed, needed to be replaced, and the super or whoever was scared to go into her apartment without her there. The problem was that moving refrigerators was pretty squarely outside my job description. If she’d locked a deadbolt for which I didn’t have a key, it’d have been out of my hands that I couldn’t walk her dog. This was only different in that I was staring at an oversized home appliance that doubled as a sort of absurdist “fuck you,” doubling down on the lack of consideration I’d been mulling over for several weeks. The takeaway seemed to be that, in a city of 8.5 million people, there’s a sort of learned self-effacing that happens. Virtually no one assumes that what they do in any given moment matters. Inversely, no one assumes that what they don’t do matters. And in whatever fight lay ahead of me, possibly one every bit as soul crushing as the last year had been, that would be a factor. There would be more costly afterthoughts from clients. There would be more refrigerators.

&n
bsp; Standing on that landing, exhausted, soaked in freezing rain, my arms aching so badly I wanted to die … I just decided I was done.

  Wait. So that was it? The refrigerator?

  Yep.

  Isn’t that a little … drastic? Silly? Petty, even? I mean, you’re talking about a career that had, at least for some time, treated you really well.

  Maybe. It’s not as though I arrived at all of this without some self-examination. I chose to be there, in those particular conditions. At every stage up to that moment, I had made certain decisions. Many of which may have been grave errors. Certainly, I’d misjudged any number of risks I’d taken. I could’ve made entirely other decisions. I have no doubt someone smarter than me would’ve gone about it other ways. And none of this is to say that I took the fortune I’d enjoyed for a full decade in that line of work for granted. I was exceedingly aware of the manner in which I’d cheated despair and boredom the whole time. Honestly, it felt like a fucking heist, most days.

  But from where I was standing in that moment, the one thing that had kept me in the trade, that kept me from—speaking strictly pragmatically—monetizing other skills, was that dog walking was so much less risky, so much less stressful. I could make a comfortable living and sleep soundly each night knowing that I didn’t have to worry about how the following day might make or break my material well-being, or how someone could pull the whole rug out from under me arbitrarily. It didn’t come with all the unknowns and precarity that other careers did. The tradeoff was that it wouldn’t ever likely yield any meaningful accomplishment, either. Its joys and victories were quiet, modest, and mostly private.

  The fact was: it was no longer taking care of me. I didn’t claim any definitive knowledge of why that was. It’s quite possible that I just couldn’t hack it and got in over my head rolling the dice in New York. Such explanations—whatever their content—weren’t altogether useful to me, in that moment. All I could really think was, If I’ve gotta entertain this kind of instability and deprivation, there are far more interesting ways of doing that. I didn’t have any other prospects looming, so I resolved to keep working my remaining clients until something else presented itself. But it was strictly a survival strategy. I was no longer committed to staying in it or making it work.

  How much longer were you at it?

  My memory of that day is hazy, now, so I don’t really recall exactly how much longer I worked. I know my last day in the field was mid-March 2012.

  So, presumably, something else came up that allowed you to bail out.

  Sort of, yeah. Being on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, I’d had my hand in a number of publishing projects in the previous years. I’d provided some limited editorial consultation on a couple books in a series we curated with AK Press, and I’d edited most of this pamphlet series we’d done targeting younger activists when Occupy kicked off—which proved wildly popular. Another board member worked as a freelance editor and copyeditor, professionally, and got pitched an editing gig that she couldn’t take on. So she recommended me. It was a massive manuscript, and the author had a budget of a few grand to get it down to roughly half the size of the draft he handed off. It was more money than I’d seen at one time in years.

  During those very same weeks, Will Potter—an investigative journalist out of the animal-rights movements, covering state repression and criminalization of activists—also contacted me. Ironically, we’d met because I’d once walked his dog. A German publication had commissioned him to do a piece on the state’s response to the Occupy movement, and they wanted photos to go with it. I’d been pretty prolific in photographing the movement, so he asked if he could use some of what I’d produced. In exchange, the magazine was offering more than what I’d paid for the iPhone I’d used to shoot the photos.

  But that couldn’t have really paid much more than walking dogs at that point, right? So you were still in the same boat, no?

  Yeah. Similar numbers, and more irregular, but it enabled greater mobility. My mom had been asking me to visit her in Spain, and a friend in Jerusalem had been inviting me to stay in her guest room for months. Having an income that didn’t bind me to a particular geography, I moved out of the shithole on South Third, and headed across the Atlantic. By April, I was talking anarchism and Occupy to audiences in Greece. By June, I was doing the same in London and Lancaster. In between, I interviewed anarchists in the West Bank for a magazine out of Beirut, picked up editing for a couple freelance journalists, and ghostwrote a term paper for a grad student in Geneva. It wasn’t steady work, and I was struggling in many of the same ways I had been the prior year, but I also saw the Islamic tile art of the Alhambra that inspired Escher’s best work, climbed a thousand year old mosque in Cairo, and somehow wound up having coffee opposite Mandy Patinkin in Ramallah.

  The fact that I can say any of that out loud feels light years from staring at that fucking refrigerator.

  Do you miss it?

  Absolutely. Look, there’s no job I can think of that combines its particular elements. I’m honestly not sure it gets better than someone paying you to amble about early-summer Crown Heights with an iced coffee and two dogs acting out their own excited wonder at the world between approval-seeking over-the-shoulder glances. Like, are you kidding me? I would pick that over reading spy novels on a beach in Thailand, any day of the week. And I’ve never even been to Thailand.

  And to be totally honest, I’ve done some pet care by request here and there, since “retiring.” I’ve pet-sat for friends and family in Oakland, Naples, Istanbul, and Ramallah, and even pinch-hit for a friend with a freelance route in Brooklyn a few days a week, one summer. I also did some consulting and training work for a nonprofit that was helping launch an immigrant-run cooperative dog-walking agency in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. I’ve never really gotten it out of my system, and I’m not sure I want to. A lot of my friends are still dog walkers, and our day-to-day banter has a certain knowing to it that comes from our shared DNA there. At the end of the day, whatever adventures my life’s afforded me, it’s impossible not to miss rolling out of bed, throwing on jeans, a hoodie, and slip-ons, and showing up for no one but dogs.

  The only world I’m interested in fighting for is one in which everyone’s life is that rewarding. I say that quite seriously.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe James Birmingham, Jay Cassano, and Nathan Schneider an enormous thanks for nudging this into fruition and Cindy Milstein for being tireless in her support and encouragement. The same goes for Dennis Johnson at Melville House, for having any faith whatsoever that I’d pull this off. Along the way, Jaime Taylor, Nick Pimentel, and Christy Thornton provided me with crucial research assistance. Atheer Yacoub, Reuben Blanchard, Welch Canavan, and Kotu Bajaj delivered priceless feedback as readers, and Mark Krotov exerted ninja-level sarcasm in the process, both as my editor and my chief Twitter distraction. A great deal of thanks goes to Willow and Harjit in Oakland, Karla and Joseph in Istanbul, Mira in Utrecht, Breezy in Los Angeles, and my mom in Napoli—all of whose homes served as sort-of writing retreats, usually while I pet-sat their little ones and drank their coffee.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joshua Stephens’s writing has appeared in AlterNet, Truthout, NOW (Lebanon), Jadaliyya, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.