Paws and Reflect_Exploring the Bond Between Gay Men and Their Dogs

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Prima, painfully shy, was clearly the femme, a pretty, mostly Shepherd mix with no pedigree but gracious manners. Jenny, a registered Springer who seemed aware of her superiority to the unregistered rest of us, was the aggressive member of our ménage, an in-your-face sort, although she could be sweet and even demure when she chose.

  They were both bright and clever. They did none of the usual doggish tricks, however. I am always astonished to see dogs roll over on command, or beg, or walk on their hind legs—all of which would have been too show-offy for Prima, and which Jenny would have disdained as beneath her dignity. In any case, I could never have managed to teach the girls such tricks. Truth to tell, I never managed to teach them much of anything. Jenny was self-taught in all matters concerning deportment, and Prima was Jenny-taught, by a system the secret of which entirely eluded me.

  Jenny was with me first. When I went to the breeder’s home to pick a puppy from the litter, her brothers and sisters were busy across the pen, but Jenny dashed over to greet me and to announce that I had been chosen for her future partner. I took her home that evening, and by the next morning she had housebroken herself.

  I did try to teach her about leashes, but she was not fond of being paraded around on a chain like the inferior partner in some bondage relationship. She made it clear on our first day at it that she could walk perfectly well beside me on her own, and if I wanted her to heel, I had only to snap my fingers and she would do so as well as any dog in a show ring, thank you very much. So we gave up leashes, except in those places where they were required by ordinance. She seemed to understand the difference, and would behave perfectly well while on one, but with a certain long-suffering attitude and the occasional huff of impatience.

  I came to believe that she was able to divine, by some super sense, what it was that I wanted, and so could do it without actual training. Certainly I never met anyone, dog or human, with whom I shared such an uncanny rapport. There was the time, for instance, during her puppyhood, when she developed a penchant for eating things. She never quite got over that, and throughout most of her life regarded anything that didn’t bark back at her or run faster than she could as fair game for a snack.

  On this occasion, she ate a palm tree. It was only a small one, admittedly, in a little pot on the floor by the window, where I thought it would be encouraged to grow into something large and lush and add a certain opulence to my not-very-elegant decor.

  I don’t mean that she ate a leaf or two. I mean, she ate it: leaves, trunk, roots, everything but the pot and the soil. It seemed to do her no lasting damage, but you have never known dog gas until yours has devoured a palm tree.

  I discussed this chewing issue with her breeder, afraid of what might succumb next to her peculiar appetite, and the breeder said, “You must surprise her at it, and scold her while she is in the act.”

  That sounded reasonable enough. I left her home alone the next afternoon, got in the car, slamming the door loudly for her benefit, drove several blocks away, and parked. Then I stole back to the house, crawled around the corner (literally on hands and knees), and lifted my head to look in through the den window— and found Jenny staring directly at me with an amused expression. All in all, I thought it wiser just to buy no more palm trees.

  There were demonstrations aplenty, however, of her eerie gift of knowing where I was and what I was doing. In those days I often visited a publisher far out in the San Fernando Valley, and I would usually stop for lunch at a coffee shop on the way, leaving Jenny in the car, and taking a window table so I could keep an eye on her. With her head out the window of the car, she would turn left, turn right, left again and right again, using some sort of radar to slowly zero in on my location. The coffee shop windows were darkly tinted; it was impossible to see in from outside. Yet within a few minutes she would be staring directly at me with a look of extreme annoyance, and her gaze would not waver until lunch was finished and I returned to the car with abject apologies and, needless to say, some sort of payoff for neglecting her.

  She was a year old when a boyfriend—mine, not hers—arrived one day carrying in his arms a peculiar-looking little animal that purported to be a German Shepherd with the ears of a jackrabbit. Her name, he informed me, was Prima, and she had been terribly abused in her previous home. I pointed out that I had neither the desire nor the room for a second pet, and reminded him that my landlord had not been happy about the first one, but he asked plaintively if I would just keep her for a day or so while he found a home for her. I made the mistake of saying yes.

  In all fairness, he did warn me that she was not yet housebroken. By the next morning, however, Jennie had seen to that, and they were going outside together. That struck me as even more mysterious, since it was not the sort of oddity you would expect to have happen twice. Still, I had no reason to complain.

  Since we lived in the city, I tried training the newcomer to a leash, thinking that Jennie’s instant understanding of that necessity was certainly not likely to repeat itself, as the toilet training had. But Prima was such a frightened little thing that, no sooner had you put any kind of collar around her neck than she fell to the floor in a quivering, peeing mass and could not be induced to regain her feet until the collar was removed and she had been reassured that no physical violence was intended.

  It was Jenny once again who took charge. To my astonishment, by the next day she had taught Prima to heel at the snap of my fingers, and from then on I could walk down a busy sidewalk in, say, West Hollywood, with both girls safely and politely at perfect heel.

  How had Jenny done that? What secret language had passed between them? I only knew that whatever I wanted her to do Jenny divined, and whatever Jenny did Prima did as well. So I could come out of the kitchen into the den, where the rug had just been shampooed, and walk around the bare-floor perimeter to cross the room, and Jenny would follow after me, and Prima after her, and not a paw upon the damp rug. I could entertain less–dog enthusiastic guests in the living room and, though the girls had the run of the house, they would sit politely in the doorway while I sipped cocktails with the guests. I have had two legged friends whose manners weren’t so good.

  They could be parted from me only by trickery. If, of necessity, I left them home without me, they would sit at the upstairs window and cry in great mournful howls until I returned, to be greeted with wagging tails and scathing looks.

  The girls shared my life for fifteen happy and loving years. About halfway through that span, we moved to a cabin in the mountains. They loved it: the great outdoors, exploring together, creeks to splash in, all sorts of scents to investigate. In the summer we took long treks in the woods; in the winter, they liked me to throw snowballs for them to catch. They got friendly with the squirrels, who lost their fear of the girls and would leap over Prima when she slept in the doorway to come inside and beg for a snack.

  Jenny was a jumper, and would dash over the most astonishing obstacles while I gaped open-mouthed. Prima liked to run because it was something at which she could beat both of us, since I was slow and Jenny, incurably curious, was forever distracted. Prima was not much of a swimmer, but Jenny the spaniel would plunge with delight into any stream, pond, or pool, although a single raindrop on her nose was enough to cut short a walk beyond the bare necessity of business.

  Prima discovered that the field mice were afraid of her, and it bolstered her self-esteem that someone thought her ferocious. Not so very ferocious, however. She came home one day with what appeared to be an odd case of the mumps, her cheeks swollen grotesquely. She came directly to me and began to disgorge from her mouth one, two, three, six in all, baby bunnies, obviously newborn, quite unharmed.

  She had brought them home for me to raise, apparently—no doubt having innocently terrified their desolate mother into abandoning them. Jennie regarded these blind, helpless intruders with scorn, but Prima stayed close and watched with hopeful eye as I did my best to save her orphans. It was to no avail, however. She seemed to gr
ieve when I buried them in a box in the backyard, and Jenny sat dutifully, if unmoved.

  Jenny still ate shamelessly, preferably people food: the stem ends of tomatoes, pieces of carrots or celery, pie or cake—if it was on my plate or in my hand, it was surely meant for her as well, as she saw it. If a visitor left a strawberry daiquiri sitting on the floor by her chair, she would shortly find her glass mysteriously empty, and Jenny would sport a pink moustache.

  Prima, on the other hand, would eat and drink only proper dog things. If I attempted to test her by hiding a couple of green peas in her kibble, the bowl would be licked clean, the peas untouched in its bottom.

  The years passed, and we all got older. Jenny went mostly blind, and did not hear well, and had a bad back from all that youthful jumping. She liked to doze on the deck in the afternoon sun, and Prima and I would sit guard to watch for any hungry coyotes, who tended to look at Jenny as something desirous to be taken home for dinner and would sometimes steal close to extend the invitation.

  Prima got a little gray around the snout, and her hip bothered her when the weather got cold, but otherwise she remained frisky and looked quite young for her years. She had finally grown into those jackrabbit ears and was quite a handsome little devil.

  They would not sleep in my bed, even when invited in the dead of winter, but they must be right next to it on the floor—together, of course. When Jenny stumbled one night and fell down the stairs from the loft bedroom, I made my bed on the living room floor in front of the fireplace, and that was where the three of us slept afterward. Jenny sometimes snored. Prima liked to have me warm my feet on her back.

  As a result, no doubt, of her reckless eating, Jenny developed a stomach tumor, which had to be removed—with much trepidation on my part because the doctor warned that surgery was iffy at her age. She survived, but I began to worry about her mortality. She was fifteen now, Prima fourteen. That was old for dogs of their size.

  Astonishingly, it was Prima, who had always seemed the picture of health, whom I lost first. She got a fever, sudden and severe. I rushed her to the hospital, and the doctor put her on an intravenous solution to combat the dehydration, and I left her with him. He called me the next morning to say we had lost her.

  Her death was painful to me, but watching Jenny over the next few weeks was nearly unbearable. Carson McCullers says that there is a lover and a beloved, and that they come from different countries. No one outside of any relationship can ever know its intricacies, and certainly theirs was beyond my ken, but I had always had the impression that in this pairing Jenny was the beloved and Prima the lover.

  I said before that their relationship was lesbian in nature, but I have no doubt some would argue that it was really more a matter of “sisters.”That may well be, but of one thing there can be no argument: it was love, as profound as any celebrated by bard or songsmith.

  Jenny spent her first day alone searching the house for her beloved friend; concluding finally that Prima was truly gone, she stopped eating. Jenny, who had sometimes seemed to live to eat, never ate again.

  At the doctor’s advice, I tried to force-feed her. As soon as my hand was gone, back up came everything that I had managed to get down. Nothing, none of her favorite foods, would tempt her. She went outside for business, but she had no interest any longer in our walks in the woods. She would rest on my lap and welcome my petting, but of gladness she showed not a trace. Her once-happy tail was still.

  With each day, she got thinner and weaker, while my heart broke for her. And finally, all too soon, the morning came when she could no longer stand, her emaciated legs too weak to support her. I held her and stroked her head, and whispered things to her that many would no doubt think foolish. I could only hope that, as so often in the past, she understood what was on my mind and in my heart.

  Without the girls, I no longer cared for the cabin in the woods. I moved back to the city. Some weeks later I ran into an old friend, who asked after the girls.

  “They’re gone, ”I told him, “Prima died of a sudden fever. And Jenny died of a broken heart.” That was years ago, but I still wake sometimes in the night, and think I hear a happy panting on the floor by my bed, and I will reach to pet them, and find no one there.

  Then I lie in the darkness, remembering; after a time, I dry my eyes, and go back to sleep, and dream of the girls.

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  Jack Morton: PERFECT COMPATIBILITY

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  When Jack Morton decided to share his comfortable Georgia home with a puppy, it was the first step on a lifelong discovery of how rich interspecies friendship can be. He retraced for me the path from the initial joy of naming his new friend, to the shared comfort of middle age with his current dogs.

  Jack juggles the demands of an increasingly successful hair-styling career with the need to love, cherish, and make a home for his partner and the other couple in their household, two elegant and exuberant Shih Tzus. When the men made a decision to expand their business interests to run a high-end gift store near their second home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a question arose. How could they run separate businesses in separate cities and still share the company of dogs who both feel are necessary to their existence? The answer is a dilemma with which they still struggle.

  Jack spoke with me in interviews from his Atlanta home and from his luxurious salon about both the practical and the inexplicable benefits of including dogs in the family.

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  MY FIRST DOG was a tiny Shih Tzu puppy, and the name on his papers read, “Baron Security.” When I first brought him home, I took him outside, and said, “Come on, little one, let’s go.”

  “Little One” fit him so well, the name stuck. I spelled it “Liddlewun.” When Liddlewun was about three, I got a second Shih Tzu named Blake. Those two dogs were devoted to each other and spent every minute together.

  I had always had dogs as a kid, but I don’t think I appreciated them as much as I do as an adult. I think it has to do with the fact that I don’t have children. My dogs are my children. They are such a part of my life, and I’m devoted to them. The vet tells me, “Your dogs live on love.”

  I have a wonderful salon in Atlanta called Indulgence, and I get called a lot to work on press junkets when people are coming through town: Jane Fonda, Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Laura Linney, Alfre Woodard. I’m even on television myself; I do a makeover segment on the local NBC affiliate. Viewers send in letters telling why they need a makeover, and I transform them. I’ve been doing it for about twenty years.

  One day I was working at my salon, and I got a hysterical phone call from my housekeeper. I had a fenced-in area at the back of my house, but for some reason the gate was open and she didn’t know it.

  She said, “I can’t find Blake!”

  I immediately left the salon, drove home, and started looking everywhere for him. I was terrified that he would go into the street and be run over. When they’re used to being with you all the time, they don’t know anything about traffic.

  He wasn’t in the street, so I thought that somebody must have picked him up. I had flyers printed up, and I put them everywhere. For twenty-four hours I was a disaster. I didn’t go to work the next day. My appointments are booked a year ahead, so it’s big trouble if I don’t go in.

  Two days went by, and I was just frantic. I was everywhere, asking every business owner, going door to door in the neighborhood.

  Finally I got a phone call from my vet. He said, “Jack, did you lose Blake?”

  I said, “Oh, my god, do you have him? Is he OK? Was he injured?”

  He said, “I have a lady here who brought him in, and she says he’s her dog. She wants me to give him all his shots. But I know it’s Blake. I need you to come here.”

  The assistant told the woman something like “We’re doing some tests, and you have to wait for the results.”

  I drove there like a madman. I wal
ked in, and the moment Blake saw me, he went crazy. I told the woman, who was very well-dressed and in her forties, “This is my dog.”

  She said that didn’t prove anything, they all look alike, and he’s a friendly dog.

  I said, “OK, but he has a growth behind his ear that we’ve been watching. The doctor is going to do surgery and take it off.”

  They looked, and of course it was there.

  She was so angry. She said, “This is my dog. I brought him in for his shots.”

  I said, “You found that dog.”

  Finally she admitted that she had found him. But she said, “He was abandoned!”

  That made me furious. I said, “Ma’am, look at him. He is a healthy, well-cared-for animal. He was not living out on the street like a homeless person. He is certainly not abandoned. There are signs up all over this area.”