by Dave Nasser
As it was, she would content herself with watching him on TV, and the place she most liked to do that was curled up in bed, late at night, with a glass of wine. It was on one such occasion—I was puttering around the house, doing jobs at the time—that it became clear that George’s attachment to lower legs was becoming a little bit distracting for her.
“Dave!” she yelled. “Honey, you just have to come see this!”
Naturally, being a dutiful and loving husband, I would always respond immediately to such requests from my wife.
“What’s up?” I asked her as I entered the bedroom.
Christie gestured with her glass of wine, which along with the rest of her, was subject to a small but persistent tremor. George was there too—a great hairy mound sprawled right across her, oblivious to my coming in, oblivious to our conversation, oblivious to just about everything.
“Will you take a look at this animal!” she said, shaking her head. “Honestly, Dave, it’s like he’s possessed!”
I noticed then that she seemed to have a tear on her cheek. I gestured toward it. “You okay, honey?”
She laughed. “You know what?” she said, waving a hand toward the TV. “I was just sitting here thinking how crazy this is. There’s me sitting here, massive lump in my throat, trying not to cry, totally in the zone, and all the while this mutt—” She slapped his rump. “Georg-eee! Will you quit that! This mutt has been going at it like a steam train! It’s like the whole bed is in the epicenter of an earthquake or something. I’m honestly not sure if I’m watching a movie or on my very own personally tailored amusement park ride!”
She reached for a tissue and dabbed at her cheek. “Which really does kind of spoil the moment, you know?”
I looked at the TV, where the “moment” was still in full flow—well, as much as these kinds of moments can be said to “flow.” While George continued to loosen all the nuts in our bed frame, Mr. Darcy or whoever (they all looked the same to me) was staring moodily out of the television screen, saying precisely nothing whatsoever. But then he didn’t really need to say anything, did he? He just looked so completely unamused.
It wasn’t only the vibrating bed that was a problem, or George’s endless attachment to straddling chair legs; George had morphed into this huge, manic, permanently excitable animal, who, given his massive size, was now potentially a hazard to smaller animals, whether he intended to be or not. His intentions may at all times have been both amicable and amorous, but he was one big old boy to have coming in your direction when his libido was active.
It made people squirm. With spectacularly bad timing, we first really became aware of this when my family was over for dinner one night. We’d just finished, and had moved into the living room, where my parents had settled down on one of the couches. George, who always liked to be right in the thick of it, had made himself comfortable on the other with Christie, sitting beside her in the way that he usually did—haunches on the couch, front paws on the floor.
I’d been into the kitchen to brew up some coffee, and when I rejoined them, the first thing I saw was his “lipstick,” as we’d recently taken to calling it, at “full volume.” I went and sat beside my parents, where the view was even more arresting. Christie, of course, was oblivious. But if there’s one thing you don’t want to share with your folks, it’s anything to do with that sort of thing. I also felt for them—they must have been mortified. George was a big dog, so it was completely unmissable. And they were respectable folks in their late sixties.
Conscious it was becoming a real conversation stopper, I stood up again. “Hey, Georgie,” I said, “you want a treat?”
“No, he doesn’t,” Christie came back at me, as quick as you like. “He’s already pinched way too many scraps for one day.” She clamped an arm around him. “No treats for you.”
I sat down again, and willed it to disappear, which it showed absolutely no sign of doing. I then tried doing things with my eyes to alert Christie, but she looked at me as if I were mad.
I was just about to overrule her and take him to the kitchen, when my dad said, “You getting that dog fixed, Dave? Seems like he’s only got one thing on his mind.”
“Sorry, Dad,” I said, as Christie suddenly became fully aware of the situation too.
“No worries.” My dad chuckled. “We’ve all been there.”
Happily, George was closing on the nine months of age that Doc Wallace had told us was the earliest he could fix him. Less happily, though the gastropexy was obviously important for his health and needed to be done, I felt like I was betraying George by secretly plotting to take away his manhood.
We had, for a short time, considered breeding George. As a pure blue, with not so much as a single hair of white on him, he was a potentially brilliant asset to the gene pool. Before getting him, we’d been to a dog show, out of curiosity, which was held in the courtyard of a hotel in town. It was specifically for Great Danes and had been put on by a local Great Dane Club, with owners traveling long distances from several neighboring cities and states to be there and show their animals. We were surprised by the variety of fur colors of these Danes and had marveled at the amount of commitment and energy, not to mention organization, that it seemed to take to show and breed dogs.
But the word “commitment” said it all really. If you took it seriously, showing dogs was way too much work to be called a hobby, and even if you kept it simple and made it your hobby, you’d have no time for doing anything else, it seemed to us. As well as all the logistics of traveling long distances with your pet (something we would find out—boy, and how—in a couple of years), there was stuff like getting them trained, early on in life, specifically for the show ring, by having them learn to walk on your left at all times and training them to understand a multitude of commands. Start that too late and you probably never caught up.
Plus we were not really hobby people at this time in our lives. We both worked long hours because we really enjoyed our jobs, and in our downtime, when we weren’t up to our necks in the house remodeling, we mostly liked to chill. Christie liked music—to see bands, go to concerts—and we both liked to eat out (given the state of our kitchen, not really a luxury) and were getting to know all the restaurants around Tucson. We both loved the variety there was, living where we lived: steaks, lots of Mexican, as well as Thai, Italian and sushi. Not that we were picky anyway—basically, if someone else cooked it, we loved it.
All in all, we didn’t think we had enough spare time to get involved in such a major undertaking as rearing a show dog. We didn’t think we were set for breeding either, in the end. Though George was clearly an amazingly good specimen of Great Dane—that coat of his really did make him special and rare—we didn’t see him as a stud. Had we gotten ourselves a bitch, perhaps it would have been the right thing to have a litter, but as things stood, we didn’t see any great purpose—he was bought as a family pet and that was what he was. Evolution could probably manage just fine, we decided, without his genes being dropped in the pool.
Despite that, it was with a heavy heart that I took George along to Doc Wallace’s surgical unit on a blisteringly hot day in late September. It is no small thing to put an animal under anesthetic, certainly, but I hadn’t been prepared for my feelings of anxiety about leaving him there that morning.
With both procedures to be performed, I knew he’d be under for a couple of hours and I also knew Christie wouldn’t relax for a second till he was safely conscious once more. It was a weekday, of course, so we were both hard at work, though our minds and hearts were anything but.
I got my first text from Christie around eleven:
Hi hon. You heard anything yet?
Nope, I haven’t, I texted back. It’s too early.
You think? Text me soon as you do, okay?
You too.
What, text you? You think they’ll call me, then? You gave them your number didn’t you?
I think I gave them both.
But I have to
switch my phone off in a minute. I have a meeting.
So they’ll call me. And I’ll text you. Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.
But shouldn’t he be out by now???:-s
Not sure. You want me to call them to see?
I think… no, it’s okay. They’ll call us when he’s out, won’t they?
They’ll call us. Stop WORRYING. He’ll be fine.
I do know that. It’s just—what if he’s not fine?
He’ll be fine.
You really think so?
YES. You want me to call them?
No. I’m being stupid, aren’t I?
No, you’re not. You’re just being a mom, honey. Stop worrying.
I am trying… :-s
You sure you don’t want me to call them?
No. It’s okay. xx
Exactly!
… and so on.
We were texting again at 11:30, and then at 11:45, and then at 12:00… The big thing, I decided—what really blew me away—was how agitated I was about the whole thing myself. I felt guilty, obviously—it was me, a fellow male, who was responsible for removing his manhood, after all—but I was also stressed by the thought that something might go wrong, no matter how much I tried to reassure Christie that it wouldn’t. And it wasn’t just because I knew she’d be inconsolable, either.
It had been less than a year since we picked up our puppy, far less time since I’d cursed him under my breath (and out loud) for all the inconvenience and hassle he’d brought into my life. It had been even less time—a few hours—since I’d picked up his poops and muttered to myself about having to do such an unpleasant job every day. Yet, as I worked (I was ripping out some old cabinets that day—good, solid, take-your-mind-off-stuff toil), I had my ears on full alert for the sound of my phone and the call from the clinic with the news that it was over, and all was well—Georgie was okay.
The call came in a little after noon, and when I phoned Christie, which I did immediately, I could hear the relief in her voice too. George was supposed to stay overnight at the clinic, so they could keep an eye on him, but neither Christie nor I could imagine us not being with him that night. We wanted him home safe with us. It wasn’t what normally happened, they told us, but as long as we were sure we could keep a close eye on him, they agreed that we could come pick him up.
We met back at home, then set off together in the truck, and arrived around seven in the evening. We were so glad to see him, looking sleepy but well.
It was one hell of a thing to get him up into the truck, though. I couldn’t help but wince when I thought about the location of his stitches, and how they must really, really hurt, especially when we hefted him up into his bed on the backseats, and he whimpered in obvious pain. But soon we were home and, though he was moving very slowly, we could see he still had a spark of the old George in his eyes.
Getting onto our bed was obviously beyond him, even though I’m betting it was the place in the world he most wanted to be. You could almost see him standing there, weighing the options: should he risk attempting it or not? On the plus side, there’d be the comfort, but on the other, the pain—how much agony would he have to deal with to get up there? He hovered beside our bed for a moment, swaying slightly, looking tempted, but then lowered himself gingerly down onto his own bed.
He was up only once more—to totter outside into the yard to use the bathroom. In the end, he spent the entire rest of the night on the bedroom carpet, not even attempting to climb back onto his bed. But he slept soundly, even if we didn’t.
CHAPTER 7
Party Animal
Was it a displacement activity, or was it inevitable? Christie and I weren’t sure, but, as we approached the end of George’s first year, he seemed to have found something different to do instead of humping furniture. He’d calmed down, and then some, in the furniture department, but he’d replaced that activity with eating—eating, that is, as an Olympic sport.
It wasn’t that he was obviously scoffing a lot more. He’d been eating an awful lot of food since we’d gotten him, and had never shown any sign of wanting to slow down. If we’d have let him, we knew he’d have eaten way more. But his growth spurt had become something different—not so much a spurt as a heavy-duty juggernaut. He was putting on weight in spades, and it was showing.
His last weigh-in with Doc Wallace, which was done as a part of his post-op check, had seen him tip the scales at one hundred and eighty pounds. He definitely weighed more than me now—more than a whole lot of other guys, in fact—and he wasn’t showing any sign of stopping.
And he’d not just grown wider; he’d grown taller as well. By now we’d learned not to leave anything edible on the kitchen counter, as any foodstuff that was placed within reach of a quick tongue-swipe would be gone long before you could open your mouth in amazement, let alone say, “No George! Get down!”—although “get down” was no longer the right command; he was already down, wasn’t he? Likewise, the business of having a barbecue, previously such an undramatic, everyday pastime, had become similarly fraught with new dangers. Either he was too stupid to recognize it (which, on past evidence, was unlikely) or too sassy and too quick (way more likely, we figured), but a steak on the coals was like a siren to a passing sailor—you didn’t dare turn your back for one minute or he’d have the meat off and away like lightning, and he’d have devoured most of it before you could tell him, “Hey! That’s hot!”
Nothing, basically, was off-limits to our dog, so we had to have eyes in the back of our heads. Not only could he reach the counter, he could reach the back of the counter—unsurprisingly, since he could get his whole head in the sink. So it wasn’t just a case of moving things out of his reach, but of putting everything away. It was either that or have things up so high on the walls that Christie couldn’t reach them herself. Once again, we knew this because we tested it out. We were exploring new territory all the time.
And it wasn’t just food that attracted George’s interest; he’d also developed a passion for the sound of the doorbell. He would have made a perfect recruit for Pavlov—it was textbook conditioning. He’d learned, as puppies do, that the doorbell meant visitors. And visitors meant new things to smell, and lots of stroking. Visitors meant fun and a whole load of attention. So when the doorbell rang, George jumped—all one hundred and eighty pounds of him—to go see what was up. And when one hundred and eighty pounds of excited dog is on a mission, very little is going to stand in his way.
He’d also bark like you’d never heard barking before. The bigger he’d grown, the louder it had become—it now sounded pretty much like a string of sonic booms, and would terrify anyone who heard it. And though this obviously didn’t apply to anyone who knew him for the softie he really was, for those who didn’t, it must have sounded truly awesome. Plus if he made it to the door with you (most of the time, it was before you), it was a mammoth job to stop him from greeting any visitors into trembling submission, overwhelmed—literally—by his boundless affection and great quantities of flying Georgie-drool. We were beginning to learn that if we were expecting any callers, it made a lot of sense to keep him penned in the bedroom just before they got there, and to let him out only once the doorbell had rung, and the visitors were in the house, prepared for him.
We also had to be careful around paper. Georgie was developing a real personality, and it seemed that, if he’d been human, he’d have been office bound, for sure, or, if not, he’d have had a job working at USA Today. But it wasn’t just newspaper he loved: George had a mania for any kind of paper. As with steaks and chops, nothing made from wood pulp was safe, as George’s jaws were completely undiscriminating: magazines, reports, paperbacks, cardboard boxes, shopping bags, toilet paper, writing paper—he didn’t care. Any and all of these he’d trail all over the house. But his absolute favorite to get his paws around was a roll of paper towels, which would send him into raptures of excitement. We pretty soon decided against the idea we’d had of putting a paper towel dispenser o
n the wall.
As well as turning paper into mush, George could also turn heads, which he did every time we went out. And nice though it was at first to have him arouse so much interest, the attention wasn’t always that positive. We started noticing that the jokes were coming thick and fast: “Is that a horse?” and “Hey, do you have a saddle for that thing?” If we heard it once, we heard it a dozen times. And everyone, of course, thought they were being real smart, like we’d never heard any of these wisecracks before. It was getting a bit tiresome, but then it was pretty understandable too. You took George out, and people noticed him. People stared.
Much less pleasant was the flip side of this attention when we were out. It soon became clear that some folks were a little scared of our gentle giant, and some folks were a lot scared. We began noticing that some people—particularly people with children—would cross the sidewalk or the parking lot to avoid coming too close to him. This was sad to watch, because our Georgie clearly wasn’t any sort of threat to anyone, but we couldn’t do anything much about it. He was big and, to a lot of people, big equaled scary.
“I wonder,” I said to Christie one day, when we came home from Christmas shopping, “how big the rest of his litter has turned out?”
“You know,” she said, piling all the bags of gifts on the kitchen counter and kicking off her shoes with a relieved sigh, “I was thinking the exact same thing yesterday, when I went down to the dog park with George. I saw Drake in the park and, you know, the difference in his and Georgie’s size now is incredible. He seemed so big when we first saw him, d’you remember? But Georgie towers over him now—like, already. And Drake is what now, five? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Perhaps our boy is part of some big genetic mutation or something.”