What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I've Learned

by Merrill Markoe

  He seems to know a great many specific statistics. “A person has to see a thing nine times before it registers, before they react,” he says, though he doesn’t say where he learned this and no one bothers to ask.

  “Now, what are you going to sell?” he asks, answering before anyone in class can start to suggest things. “You have to have an identity. You have to be somebody particular. You need to be straight, sadomasochist, something. You needs content. Not shitty stuff, either.”

  “You have to have your own specialty,” pipes up one of the brown-haired twentysomethings who, it turns out, likes to raise his hand and state the obvious.

  I ponder briefly what will make my site special. Is there an area of porn that hasn’t been done yet? I am contemplating the idea of naked people with terrible head colds (you click on a blonde in a suggestive pose and she says, “I have a nasty sinus infection”) when I notice that for the first time the class has sort of come to life. They love suggesting examples of specialty sex.

  “Foot fetish,” says one. “Lesbian,” says another. “Some people like huge people,” says one of the sunburned blondes in denim. A twentysomething knows a guy who makes $60,000 a month displaying pictures of underpants.

  “Yes, exactly. And all kinds of ethnic groups are doing good right now,” says the instructor. “The Spanish are coming up very strong. The Asian people have always been popular. You also have the Big Babies—the guys who wear the diapers. And the baby boomer is getting old, so now we can recycle Grandma! A guy I knows does very well with the women after sixty!” He pauses for dramatic effect. “But you better know your specialty,” he warns us. “If you yourself are not a homosexual, how you going to know what the hell they want? Like the people who shits on each other.” He pauses again, making a face to let us know he is not among them. “This is not my thing,” he continues diplomatically, “but these sells for eight hundred dollars. Just another avenue that maybe you want to think about.”

  Yes, there is much to think about. The creative possibilities are apparently limitless in the world of Internet porn. Although it turns out there is one area to avoid totally: “Do not show pictures of your girlfriend,” our expert says emphatically. “Everyone who has done that is in trouble. They get sued. It just never works.” I heave a giant sigh of relief on behalf of girlfriends everywhere.

  “You have to know your market, do your research,” he reiterates. “If your site is sadomasochist, you’re gonna sell a lot of shackles. But if you don’t know your area … well …” He shrugs, growing wistful as he recalls the guy who put up a bondage site but failed to do sufficient research. “He got the knots and ties all wrong, and ooh, it was a big mess. All the bondage people were mad as hell and complaining.”

  That this didn’t have to happen is the point he is trying to make. There is, after all, a special bondage consultant you can hire for $4,000 a day who dresses in a little checkered schoolgirl outfit and will guarantee your knots are of the finest quality.

  “It’s like opening up a restaurant,” our instructor says casually, for the first of five times this evening. “You have to listen to your clients when you make up your menu. They gonna tell you about what they want. You are in business to serve your client. Who here is their own content? Anyone?”

  A pockmarked, goateed guy in a red shirt with the sleeves cut off and a red cap with sunglasses balancing on top of it raises his hand.

  “Especially for you who is your own content,” the instructor repeats. “In another class I have a girl who is her own content. She got a request that somebody want to see her naked by the refrigerator eating a banana. So she do it. Set up a guest book where they can tell you what they want.”

  “I’ll do anything. I don’t give a shit,” says Redcap, taking the title, in that moment, of Scariest Guy in the Class.

  “People on the Internet wants instant gratification,” our instructor cautions as he prepares to share one of his fiendishly clever trade secrets. “You have ten seconds to sell them something. That is the reason we make our video clips only one and a half minutes long!” he confides, craftily. “Because when a guy starts to jerk off, and the clip ends, he has no choice but to buy some more! You see?”

  Using our restaurant analogy, it would be like serving the customer an unusually small hamburger. Which, come to think of it, worked pretty well for McDonald’s.

  One of the blondes raises her hand. “How many pictures do we need? Twenty? Fifty? Two thousand?”

  “We’re getting to that,” the instructor tells us. “It’s illegal to use someone else’s pictures. How do you enforce that? It’s impossible! But remember, you can take the same ass, just put different heads on them.”

  But there is more to the assembling of a good website than just the same old asses with an array of new faces.

  “All kinds of links you can have,” he tells us, showcasing just how diverse a pornographer can really be. “I just finished doing the site for the ultimate masturbating machine. Costs nine hundred thirty-five dollars, delivered. This machine will suck the dick. It’s incredible! I put my fingers in it only and I’m going to buy it! You can put a banner for it up on your site,” he suggests. “Sturdy, portable, and disposable” is how it is described in a brochure he passes around. “A hygienic substitute for sexual intercourse.”

  “Or you find stuff at the sex shows, the electronic shows. Go look around Chinatown. The Chinese are very good for this stuff.” Case in point. “I know a guy who packages Velcro straps that you put around your dick. He is calling it the new Viagra! The guy makes two, three thousand bucks a month.”

  Yes. The ever expanding world of future porn holds more riches than small minds like mine can presently imagine. “You will be able to take a dildo, we put some ceramic sensor on it, you have the reverse sensor on his dick and boom—she can make love to twenty thousand men at the same time. This is here,” he says blithely, barely acknowledging the magnitude of the dream he is providing for women everywhere. What little girl doesn’t grow up hoping to live in a world where she will be able to make love to 20,000 men at once and not even have to cook a single one of them breakfast?

  On this inspirational note, it is time for a break. I join the people gathered around the table at the front of the room to look at the samples he has brought with him: a disembodied breast made of spongy material with advertising printed on it; a magazine offering advice on the basics of flogging that contains a photo of a nude woman suspended in midair, not unlike Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Someone clearly ponied up the $4,000 to bring in a bondage consultant. Those knots certainly appear to be correctly executed.

  As the class begins to wrap up, we learn a lot of brass-tacks basics, like how to list your site with the twenty best search engines by putting a lot of keywords after your metatag. For instance: “fuck,” “ass,” “cunt,” “blowjobs,” “homosexuals,” and “fetishism” will get us a lot of coverage from web browsers.

  “We have a major problem,” he tells us finally, “to get paid on the Internet. The credit card is the only way you are going to get paid.

  “How many of you are worried about your privacy?”

  I proudly hold up my hand.

  “Don’t worry about it. Forget it. Sleep tight. It’s all over thirty years ago,” he says. “The French, the Germans, the English, the U.S., the Australians all have a relationship to spy on each other.”

  Now we get to the real point of all this: He, Phillip LeMarque, owner of the wildly popular website Virtual Sin, can be our server for $35 a month. He can give us bandwidth for $7 a giga. He can get us a $495 site already set up with the links to make money—links to Amsterdam, a chat room, a toy store—plus supply us with sixty good pictures. (And that’s before we start to switch heads and the asses around.) We only need to make an initial investment of $6,700 to get ourselves going, up $1,700 from the first estimate of $5,000 earlier in the evening.

  Well, I think to myself as we all head toward the elevator, I’ll b
ear that in mind. Maybe instead of naked people with head colds, I will use myself as my content. I will sit in front of a camera in my underwear, and when customers make their requests I will tell them why I think they are nuts for even being there. People will pay to be insulted by the grouchy naked woman. Kind of the way they love those rude N.Y. deli waitresses.

  And if that doesn’t make me the Internet millions that are rightfully mine, maybe I’ll try the same thing using someone else’s head or ass.

  It’s a Wonderful Lewis

  It was a dark, damp, wintry evening when Lewis wandered out alone onto the dark, damp, rickety Malibu pier. He had not announced his departure, just vanished through a hole of his own construction in the front fence. In the process his collar had come off … name tag, rabies tag, everything. He was untraceable now. Simply gone. History.

  He just could no longer think of a valid reason to stay. Scheduled dining was over for the evening, leaving no hope for another meal until the next day. Unless Merrill held one of those spontaneous snack times. Which she frequently did.

  He guessed he could have hung around and stared at her mournfully, allowing long rubbery drools to coagulate in the corners of his lips. That seemed to encourage her some of the time. But not all of the time. Maybe that was what finally drove him to leave. This powerful inconsistent reinforcement was making him insane. He knew he had to get out of there.

  Alone, looking down at the waves as they crashed, Lewis was suddenly overcome by the smell of … was that food? It beckoned him. “Lewis. Lewis. Come.” A wrapper floated by in the murky deep. That was it. He poised himself for a dive.

  Just then he became aware of a ghostly presence. Or perhaps it was an angelic one. He had never really absorbed enough television to know the difference. It seemed to have materialized out of a flash of light in the sky. So, unless it was a fly of some kind … hmmm, maybe it was a fly. He began to snap at it. But before he could secure it between his teeth, it began to speak.

  “Hello, Lewis,” the angelic presence said to him. “You’re not really thinking about jumping in there, are you?”

  “Maybe,” said Lewis. “… Smells like food in there.”

  “They have a raw sewage problem out here,” the angel explained. “That’s not really food. Well, it is in a way, but it’s too disgusting to talk about. Even to you. Besides, it’s freezing in there. Not only will you get hepatitis and a host of other dreadful diseases, the tide will pull you out to sea. The undertow will push you down and hold you under.”

  “Yes,” said Lewis, “but it smells like food in there.” He poised once again for the jump.

  “Wait. Wait. Lewis. Wait. Or maybe I should phrase it this way: Stay. Before you jump and endanger your life in the name of a poisonous hors d’oeuvre, why not stop and consider what life would be like if you had never been born?”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Imagine,” said the angel, “a world into which you had never been born. Let’s look in on Merrill. Your mother. Can you see her? Look.”

  “Yes,” said Lewis, suddenly seeing. “There she is. But what’s that she’s wearing?”

  “On her head? Ah, a hat.”

  “She never wears a hat,” said Lewis.

  “No,” said the angel, “not since you ate them all. But since you were never born, she has a fine assortment of hats. Look. She’s taking that one off and putting on another one.”

  “My God,” said Lewis, feeling little globs of drool beginning to form in the corners of his mouth, “and look what she’s got on her feet!”

  “Yes,” said the angel, “those are the suede boots you ate the day she brought you home from the pound. She has several pairs now. In different styles and colors. To match her hats. And the jackets she’s not afraid to buy now either.”

  “The living room looks different,” Lewis noticed.

  “Yes,” said the angel. “More cushions, for one thing. Lots more cushions. The ones you ate, plus a bunch of new ones.”

  “And what’s that in the middle of the room?” Lewis asked.

  “That’s the antique coffee table she bought with the money she saved on vet bills. Since you were never born, you never got parvo, and she had an extra eighteen hundred dollars. And of course, once again, since she didn’t have to worry that you would wreck it, she’s really enjoying it. Notice how she gazes at it so fondly. And notice all those fragile little crystal items she has displayed on its surface.”

  “Geez,” said Lewis, “and who the hell is that?”

  “That’s her amazingly well behaved new dog, Phil,” said the angel. “She got him out of the pound the same day she didn’t get you because you had never been born. He’s one of those naturally attentive, obedient, smart dogs who doesn’t even require a trainer. Look how he sits at her feet and adores her. People are telling her that he could be the next Benji, or Lassie. She’s already had offers from movie companies and dog-food manufacturers who are interested in him for commercials.”

  “I can’t take this,” said Lewis. “I have to get over there right away. All that extra income will corrupt her. She really needs me.”

  “Go to her, Lewis,” said the angel. “Go to her. Return to her life and remind her that materialism is a superficial value. Teach her to cope with loss. Discourage her from being such a damn control freak. Remember, Lewis … no dog’s life is a failure so long as he still has expensive items to shred.”

  And so, the angel watched as the big wet dog galumph-galumph-galumphed back to his home.

  Ed Is Coming to Town!

  When love relationships are over, people have different ways of getting on with their lives. Some stay in touch with their exes, redefine the broken bonds, and become friends. Others absorb themselves in acts of violence and spite. And then there are those who put the past behind them and simply get on with the business of living. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’re mature enough to be one of the latter.

  But say the person with whom you have broken up is a public figure. Let’s call this old boyfriend of yours “Ed.” Maybe both you and Ed worked in media during your relationship so you were used to publicity and fame playing a certain part in the proceedings. Fine. No big deal so far.

  But then what if, say, after you broke up, his career began to escalate rather dramatically and he was all over the place with alarming regularity? Still, it didn’t have that much effect on you because you moved to the opposite coast and it’s pretty easy to avoid scheduled TV appearances. Okay, so maybe more and more you find pictures of Ed making sneak attacks from the newspaper or magazine lying at the base of the Stair-Master you’re on. So you see Ed grinning at you almost every time you open your TV Guide. Big deal. Don’t buy TV Guide.

  But then say it escalates one step further—to a point where you begin to think that maybe God is writing a new Kafka novel and has decided to give you the lead. What other explanation could there be for the fact that suddenly everywhere you drive in your own town you encounter entire billboards featuring a photo of Ed beaming down at you? And not just the occasional billboard, mind you. One on almost every block. And what if, simultaneously, nearly every time you punch the buttons on your car radio to listen to your usual dopey stations, you’re caught off-guard by an announcer screaming: “LOOK OUT, EVERYONE! ED IS COMING TO TOWN!” And what if everything culminates in a moment when you find yourself listening to one of those announcements while simultaneously looking up at a billboard of Ed?

  So let’s say you retreat to the sanctuary of your own home to eat some dinner and distract yourself with a little prime-time trash TV. And the first thing you hear from your set is: “Coming up next on Hard Copy … ‘The Girlfriends of Ed!’ ” Stunned, you sit there and have a little debate with yourself: Should you leave the TV on? As a former girlfriend of Ed’s, you can’t help but be curious. It’s been quite a while since you broke up. Will they mention you? You think they probably won’t. But let’s say that, against your better judgment,
you leave the TV on. And as you sit there in your own home, you feel your jaw dropping when you realize that not only are they mentioning you on Hard Copy, they have built the entire episode around you. For some reason the reporters were too lazy to get any information about Ed’s fifteen million other exgirlfriends, but managed to find tons of clips that have you in them. Which is when you realize you can’t hear what the show is saying about you because the cuckoo-clock noises in your head are drowning out the sound.

  But, okay, okay, okay—you compose yourself. You’re overreacting. Good thing you have tickets to hear some music that night. Give you a chance to regain some perspective. So let’s say you go to a concert—maybe it’s someone like Elvis Costello—and about fifteen minutes into the show the performer looks out at the audience and asks: “Hey! Anyone here see Ed last night?” And the whole audience cheers.

  What would you do?

  Come Dine with Me in 1093

  They used to call it the Dark Ages when I was first learning the names of historical periods back in grade school. And that phrase still colors all my associations with the Middle Ages: feudalism, bloodletting and leeches, hooded monks chanting mournfully and flagellating themselves in dank, torch-lit corridors, chastity belts, the Hundred Years War, the Black Plague. And of course the more I dwell on these images, the hungrier I get for a three-course chicken dinner with herb-baked potato and a fruity wine cocktail. Which is why I am very lucky that one of the Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament Restaurant franchises (“where the year is 1093 A.D. and you are the guests of the royal castle”) is only about a two-hour drive from my house. Talk about the promise of a rousing good time! Pinch me! I must be dreaming!

  I probably would have gone there sooner, but until last week I could never get any of my so-called friends to say yes to an invitation to join me … even after I offered to pay! And it didn’t really sound like the kind of place I could go to by myself and sit inconspicuously in a corner, pretending to be lost in important thought. So I was both impressed and grateful when my friends Polly and Michael not only didn’t back out on me at the last minute but also didn’t bolt out of the car as we turned into the parking lot of the only castle on the block.