Cesar moves into the living room. The fight begins. “Look how he involves the dog,” Tortora said. “He’s letting the dog lead. He’s giving the dog room.” This was not a Secret Service agent wrestling an assailant to the ground. Cesar had his body vertical, and his hand high above JonBee holding the leash, and, as JonBee turned and snapped and squirmed and spun and jumped and lunged and struggled, Cesar seemed to be moving along with him, providing a loose structure for his aggression. It may have looked like a fight, but Cesar wasn’t fighting. And what was JonBee doing? Child psychologists talk about the idea of regulation. If you expose healthy babies, repeatedly, to a very loud noise, eventually they will be able to fall asleep. They’ll become habituated to the noise: the first time the noise is disruptive, but, by the second or third time, they’ve learned to handle the disruption, and block it out. They’ve regulated themselves. Children throwing tantrums are said to be in a state of dysregulation. They’ve been knocked off-kilter in some way, and cannot bring themselves back to baseline. JonBee was dysregulated. He wasn’t fighting; he was throwing a tantrum. And Cesar was the understanding parent. When JonBee paused, to catch his breath, Cesar paused with him. When JonBee bit Cesar, Cesar brought his finger to his mouth, instinctively, but in a smooth and fluid and calm motion that betrayed no anxiety. “Timing is a big part of Cesar’s repertoire,” Tortora went on. “His movements right now aren’t complex. There aren’t a lot of efforts together at one time. His range of movement qualities is limited. Look at how he’s narrowing. Now he’s enclosing.” As JonBee calmed down, Cesar began caressing him. His touch was firm but not aggressive; not so strong as to be abusive and not so light as to be insubstantial and irritating. Using the language of movement—the plainest and most transparent of all languages—Cesar was telling JonBee that he was safe. Now JonBee was lying on his side, mouth relaxed, tongue out. “Look at that, look at the dog’s face,” Tortora said. This was not defeat; this was relief.
Later, when Cesar tried to show Scott how to placate JonBee, Scott couldn’t do it, and Cesar made him stop. “You’re still nervous,” Cesar told him. “You are still unsure. That’s how you become a target.” It isn’t as easy as it sounds to calm a dog. “There, there,” in a soothing voice, accompanied by a nice belly scratch, wasn’t enough for JonBee, because he was reading gesture and posture and symmetry and the precise meaning of touch. He was looking for clarity and consistency. Scott didn’t have it. “Look at the tension and aggression in his face,” Tortora said, when the camera turned to Scott. It was true. Scott had a long and craggy face, with high, wide cheekbones and pronounced lips, and his movements were taut and twitchy. “There’s a bombardment of actions, quickness combined with tension, a quality in how he is using his eyes and focus—a darting,” Tortora said. “He gesticulates in a way that is complex. There is a lot going on. So many different qualities of movement happening at the same time. It leads those who watch him to get distracted.” Scott is a character actor, with a list of credits going back thirty years. The tension and aggression in his manner made him interesting and complicated—which works for Hollywood but doesn’t work for a troubled dog. Scott said he loved JonBee, but the quality of his movement did not match his emotions.
“They’re all sons of bitches.”
For a number of years, Tortora has worked with Eric (not his real name), an autistic boy with severe language and communication problems. Tortora video-taped some of their sessions, and in one, four months after they started to work together, Eric is standing in the middle of Tortora’s studio in Cold Spring, New York, a beautiful dark-haired three-and-a-half-year-old, wearing only a diaper. His mother is sitting to the side, against the wall. In the background, you can hear the soundtrack to Riverdance, which happens to be Eric’s favorite album. Eric is having a tantrum.
He gets up and runs toward the stereo. Then he runs back and throws himself down on his stomach, arms and legs flailing. Tortora throws herself down on the ground, just as he did. He sits up. She sits up. He twists. She twists. He squirms. She squirms. “When Eric is running around, I didn’t say, ‘Let’s put on quiet music.’ I can’t turn him off, because he can’t turn off,” Tortora said. “He can’t go from zero to sixty and then back down to zero. With a typical child, you might say, ‘Take a deep breath. Reason with me’—and that might work. But not with children like this. They are in their world by themselves. I have to go in there and meet them and bring them back out.”
Tortora sits up on her knees, and faces Eric. His legs are moving in every direction, and she takes his feet into her hands. Slowly, and subtly, she begins to move his legs in time with the music. Eric gets up and runs to the corner of the room and back again. Tortora gets up and mirrors his action, but this time she moves more fluidly and gracefully than he did. She takes his feet again. This time, she moves Eric’s entire torso, opening the pelvis in a contra-lateral twist. “I’m standing above him, looking directly at him. I am very symmetrical. So I’m saying to him, I’m stable. I’m here. I’m calm. I’m holding him at the knees and giving him sensory input. It’s firm and clear. Touch is an incredible tool. It’s another way to speak.”
She starts to rock his knees from side to side. Eric begins to calm down. He begins to make slight adjustments to the music. His legs move more freely, more lyrically. His movement is starting to get organized. He goes back into his mother’s arms. He’s still upset, but his cry has softened. Tortora sits and faces him—stable, symmetrical, direct eye contact.
His mother says, “You need a tissue?”
Eric nods.
Tortora brings him a tissue. Eric’s mother says that she needs a tissue. Eric gives his tissue to his mother.
“Can we dance?” Tortora asks him.
“O.K.,” he says, in a small voice.
It was impossible to see Tortora with Eric and not think of Cesar with JonBee: here was the same extraordinary energy and intelligence and personal force marshalled on behalf of the helpless, the same calm in the face of chaos, and, perhaps most surprising, the same gentleness. When we talk about people with presence, we often assume that they have a strong personality—that they sweep us all up in their own personal whirlwind. Our model is the Pied Piper, who played his irresistible tune and every child in Hamelin blindly followed. But Cesar Millan and Suzi Tortora play different tunes, in different situations. And they don’t turn their back, and expect others to follow. Cesar let JonBee lead; Tortora’s approaches to Eric were dictated by Eric. Presence is not just versatile; it’s also reactive. Certain people, we say, “command our attention,” but the verb is all wrong. There is no commanding, only soliciting. The dogs in the dog run wanted someone to tell them when to start and stop; they were refugees from anarchy and disorder. Eric wanted to enjoy Riverdance. It was his favorite music. Tortora did not say, “Let us dance.” She asked, “Can we dance?”
Then Tortora gets a drum, and starts to play. Eric’s mother stands up and starts to circle the room, in an Irish step dance. Eric is lying on the ground, and slowly his feet start to tap in time with the music. He gets up. He walks to the corner of the room, disappears behind a partition, and then reenters, triumphant. He begins to dance, playing an imaginary flute as he circles the room.
When Cesar was twenty-one, he travelled from his home town to Tijuana, and a “coyote” took him across the border, for a hundred dollars. They waited in a hole, up to their chests in water, and then ran over the mudflats, through a junk yard, and across a freeway. A taxi took him to San Diego. After a month on the streets, grimy and dirty, he walked into a dog-grooming salon and got a job, working with the difficult cases and sleeping in the offices at night. He moved to Los Angeles, and took a day job detailing limousines while he ran his dog-psychology business out of a white Chevy Astrovan. When he was twenty-three, he fell in love with an American girl named Illusion. She was seventeen, small, dark, and very beautiful. A year later, they got married.
“Cesar was a macho-istic, egocentric person wh
o thought the world revolved around him,” Illusion recalled, of their first few years together. “His view was that marriage was where a man tells a woman what to do. Never give affection. Never give compassion or understanding. Marriage is about keeping the man happy, and that’s where it ends.” Early in their marriage, Illusion got sick, and was in the hospital for three weeks. “Cesar visited once, for less than two hours,” she said. “I thought to myself, This relationship is not working out. He just wanted to be with his dogs.” They had a new baby, and no money. They separated. Illusion told Cesar that she would divorce him if he didn’t get into therapy. He agreed, reluctantly. “The therapist’s name was Wilma,” Illusion went on. “She was a strong African-American woman. She said, ‘You want your wife to take care of you, to clean the house. Well, she wants something, too. She wants your affection and love.’ ” Illusion remembers Cesar scribbling furiously on a pad. “He wrote that down. He said, ‘That’s it! It’s like the dogs. They need exercise, discipline, and affection.’ ” Illusion laughed. “I looked at him, upset, because why the hell are you talking about your dogs when you should be talking about us?”
“I was fighting it,” Cesar said. “Two women against me, blah, blah, blah. I had to get rid of the fight in my mind. That was very difficult. But that’s when the light bulb came on. Women have their own psychology.”
Cesar could calm a stray off the street, yet, at least in the beginning, he did not grasp the simplest of truths about his own wife. “Cesar related to dogs because he didn’t feel connected to people,” Illusion said. “His dogs were his way of feeling like he belonged in the world, because he wasn’t people friendly. And it was hard for him to get out of that.” In Mexico, on his grandfather’s farm, dogs were dogs and humans were humans: each knew its place. But in America dogs were treated like children, and owners had shaken up the hierarchy of human and animal. Sugar’s problem was Lynda. JonBee’s problem was Scott. Cesar calls that epiphany in the therapist’s office the most important moment in his life, because it was the moment when he understood that to succeed in the world he could not just be a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer.
For his show, Cesar once took a case involving a Chihuahua named Bandit. Bandit had a large, rapper-style diamond-encrusted necklace around his neck spelling “Stud.” His owner was Lori, a voluptuous woman with an oval face and large, pleading eyes. Bandit was out of control, terrorizing guests and menacing other dogs. Three trainers had failed to get him under control.
Lori was on the couch in her living room as she spoke to Cesar. Bandit was sitting in her lap. Her teen-age son, Tyler, was sitting next to her.
“About two weeks after his first visit with the vet, he started to lose a lot of hair,” Lori said. “They said that he had Demodex mange.” Bandit had been sold to her as a show-quality dog, she recounted, but she had the bloodline checked, and learned that he had come from a puppy mill. “He didn’t have any human contact,” she went on. “So for three months he was getting dipped every week to try to get rid of the symptoms.” As she spoke, her hands gently encased Bandit. “He would hide inside my shirt and lay his head right by my heart, and stay there.” Her eyes were moist. “He was right here on my chest.”
“So your husband cooperated?” Cesar asked. He was focussed on Lori, not on Bandit. This is what the new Cesar understood that the old Cesar did not.
“He was our baby. He was in need of being nurtured and helped and he was so scared all the time.”
“Do you still feel the need of feeling sorry about him?”
“Yeah. He’s so cute.”
Cesar seemed puzzled. He didn’t know why Lori would still feel sorry for her dog.
Lori tried to explain. “He’s so small and he’s helpless.”
“But do you believe that he feels helpless?”
Lori still had her hands over the dog, stroking him. Tyler was looking at Cesar, and then at his mother, and then down at Bandit. Bandit tensed. Tyler reached over to touch the dog, and Bandit leaped out of Lori’s arms and attacked him, barking and snapping and growling. Tyler, startled, jumped back. Lori, alarmed, reached out, and—this was the critical thing—put her hands around Bandit in a worried, caressing motion, and lifted him back into her lap. It happened in an instant.
Cesar stood up. “Give me the space,” he said, gesturing for Tyler to move aside. “Enough dogs attacking humans, and humans not really blocking him, so he is only becoming more narcissistic. It is all about him. He owns you.” Cesar was about as angry as he ever gets. “It seems like you are favoring the dog, and hopefully that is not the truth.… If Tyler kicked the dog, you would correct him. The dog is biting your son, and you are not correcting hard enough.” Cesar was in emphatic mode now, his phrasing sure and unambiguous. “I don’t understand why you are not putting two and two together.”
Bandit was nervous. He started to back up on the couch. He started to bark. Cesar gave him a look out of the corner of his eye. Bandit shrank. Cesar kept talking. Bandit came at Cesar. Cesar stood up. “I have to touch,” he said, and he gave Bandit a sharp nudge with his elbow. Lori looked horrified.
Cesar laughed, incredulously. “You are saying that it is fair for him to touch us but not fair for us to touch him?” he asked.
Lori leaned forward to object.
“You don’t like that, do you?” Cesar said, in his frustration speaking to the whole room now. “It’s not going to work. This is a case that is not going to work, because the owner doesn’t want to allow what you normally do with your kids.… The hardest part for me is that the father or mother chooses the dog instead of the son. That’s hard for me. I love dogs. I’m the dog whisperer. You follow what I’m saying? But I would never choose a dog over my son.”
He stopped. He had had enough of talking. There was too much talking, anyhow. People saying, “I love you,” with a touch that didn’t mean “I love you.” People saying, “There, there,” with gestures that did not soothe. People saying, “I’m your mother,” while reaching out to a Chihuahua instead of their own flesh and blood. Tyler looked stricken. Lori shifted nervously in her seat. Bandit growled. Cesar turned to the dog and said “Sh-h-h.” And everyone was still.
| 2006 |
BULLDOG
Fiction
ARTHUR MILLER
He saw this tiny ad in the paper: “Black Brindle Bull puppies, $3.00 each.” He had something like ten dollars from his housepainting job, which he hadn’t deposited yet, but they had never had a dog in the house. His father was taking a long nap when the idea crested in his mind, and his mother, in the middle of a bridge game when he asked her if it would be all right, shrugged absently and threw a card. He walked around the house trying to decide, and the feeling spread through him that he’d better hurry, before somebody else got the puppy first. In his mind, there was already one particular puppy that belonged to him—it was his puppy and the puppy knew it. He had no idea what a brindle bull looked like, but it sounded tough and wonderful. And he had the three dollars, though it soured him to think of spending it when they had such bad money worries, with his father gone bankrupt again. The tiny ad hadn’t mentioned how many puppies there were. Maybe there were only two or three, which might be bought by this time.
The address was on Schermerhorn Street, which he had never heard of. He called, and a woman with a husky voice explained how to get there and on which line. He was coming from the Midwood section, and the elevated Culver line, so he would have to change at Church Avenue. He wrote everything down and read it all back to her. She still had the puppies, thank God. It took more than an hour, but the train was almost empty, this being Sunday, and with a breeze from its open wood-framed windows it was cooler than down in the street. Below in empty lots he could see old Italian women, their heads covered with red bandannas, bent over and loading their aprons with dandelions. His Italian school friends said they were for wine and salads. He remembered trying to eat one once when he was playing left field in the lot near
his house, but it was bitter and salty as tears. The old wooden train, practically unloaded, rocked and clattered lightly through the hot afternoon. He passed above a block where men were standing in driveways watering their cars as though they were hot elephants. Dust floated pleasantly through the air.
The Schermerhorn Street neighborhood was a surprise, totally different from his own, in Midwood. The houses here were made of brownstone, and were not at all like the clapboard ones on his block, which had been put up only a few years before or, in the earliest cases, in the twenties. Even the sidewalks looked old, with big squares of stone instead of cement, and bits of grass growing in the cracks between them. He could tell that Jews didn’t live here, maybe because it was so quiet and unenergetic and not a soul was sitting outside to enjoy the sun. Lots of windows were wide open, with expressionless people leaning on their elbows and staring out, and cats stretched out on some of the sills, many of the women in their bras and the men in underwear trying to catch a breeze. Trickles of sweat were creeping down his back, not only from the heat but also because he realized now that he was the only one who wanted the dog, since his parents hadn’t really had an opinion and his brother, who was older, had said, “What are you, crazy, spending your few dollars on a puppy? Who knows if it will be any good? And what are you going to feed it?” He thought bones, and his brother, who always knew what was right or wrong, yelled, “Bones! They have no teeth yet!” Well, maybe soup, he had mumbled. “Soup! You going to feed a puppy soup?” Suddenly he saw that he had arrived at the address. Standing there, he felt the bottom falling out, and he knew it was all a mistake, like one of his dreams or a lie that he had stupidly tried to defend as being real. His heart sped up and he felt he was blushing and walked on for half a block or so. He was the only one out, and people in a few of the windows were watching him on the empty street. But how could he go home after he had come so far? It seemed he’d been travelling for weeks or a year. And now to get back on the subway with nothing? Maybe he ought at least to get a look at the puppy, if the woman would let him. He had looked it up in the Book of Knowledge, where they had two full pages of dog pictures, and there had been a white English bulldog with bent front legs and teeth that stuck out from its lower jaw, and a little black-and-white Boston bull, and a long-nosed pit bull, but they had no picture of a brindle bull. When you came down to it, all he really knew about brindle bulls was that they would cost three dollars. But he had to at least get a look at him, his puppy, so he went back down the block and rang the basement doorbell, as the woman had told him to do. The sound was so loud it startled him, but he felt if he ran away and she came out in time to see him it would be even more embarrassing, so he stood there with sweat running down over his lip.
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