Paws and Reflect_Exploring the Bond Between Gay Men and Their Dogs

by Neil S. Plakcy

  We were all excited to see our new dog. She was a terrier mix with a mottled brown coat. As soon as Judy put her down on the floor, she ran under the kitchen table and wouldn’t come out. I crawled down and reached out to pet her, but she backed away. My mother said she spent the whole first night sitting under the table, trembling. She was afraid of everybody and everything. It made us wonder if she had been abused.

  My dad put her in a crate, and she whined a lot. He let her out, and my brother Tom fed her treats and talked gently to her, and she bonded with him. She decided he was her human, and she stuck by him. She even slept in bed with him at night.

  We named her Taffy. She was not the nicest dog in the world. She never really bit anybody, but she threatened to. She bared her teeth and growled at anybody she didn’t know.

  A year later Tom got married and moved to his own house. He couldn’t take Taffy because she didn’t like his wife—or anyone else, for that matter. She decided to be friends with my next brother in line, Mark. But it was the same story with him. He was already eighteen, and two years later he got married and moved out. At that point, Taffy latched onto me. I was the only kid left at home, so she really didn’t have any other choice. We both missed my brothers. I was pleased that this funny-looking creature had decided to love me.

  I wasn’t a lonely child, but I was alone a lot. I had friends, but not a best friend. Taffy became my best friend. She waited at the front door for me to come home from school and followed me through the fields on my walks. At night she jumped up on my bed and snuggled under my arm. I was comforted by the gentle rise of her ribs with each breath and I fell asleep with her nose pressed against my skin.

  She had at least four litters of puppies. She was the only female dog on our block, so when she went into heat, it seemed all the males came a-calling. She’d be in the front yard, bumping uglies with my friend John’s dog. And nine weeks later, out came the puppies. They were very cute. My mother found homes for them.

  To the outside world, she was not the nicest dog, but to me, she was a great love. We had something special. She gave me an experience of something I would never forget, unconditional love.

  She came with me when I moved away from home. She was getting older, and she had separation-anxiety issues. She didn’t want to be left alone. I had to have her put down when she was seventeen. But she had a great life.

  Fast-forward to the year 1984. I was living in Milwaukee, involved in a lot of athletics and playing softball for a gay bar called M&Ms. On Memorial Day, we were playing in the Wreck Room Classic against twenty-six softball teams from all over the country.

  I happened to notice one guy in particular. He had a big bushy mustache and was very handsome. He saw me looking at him, and he shot me a smile that just about melted my heart. He kept on walking, but then he turned around and asked me to dinner. I accepted. I was all of twenty-one at the time and he was thirty-two. That was John Brooke.

  He was such a wonderful man. He went back to Atlanta after that weekend, but we kept in touch and visited each other, and pretty soon I was asking my friends whether I should move to Atlanta or not. Everyone said the same thing: “He’s too old for you.”

  I didn’t think that at all. I went with my heart. By August, I was living in Atlanta with him.

  Naturally we told each other everything, all about our childhoods and former relationship stories. I told him Taffy was my great love, before him.

  Our first Christmas together he surprised me; my present was a beautiful Miniature Schnauzer. We named her Foxxy because the man we got her from was named Tom Fox. She was just a ball of fur, but she grew into a beautiful silver and gray dog with a wonderful personality. We bought our home together in the summer of 1986, the same house John had rented for many years. It was a stressful time, but we managed. You know what it takes to ease some of the problems a couple can have? A little of that unconditional love. I hadn’t realized it, but my dogs were a good learning experience.

  When I moved here to be with John, there was no such thing as safe sex, but in 1985 the first international conference on AIDS was held in Atlanta, so we heard about it all the time on the news: Some 5, 600 people died that year of AIDS, including Rock Hudson.

  We started to play safe with each other. John decided to get tested for HIV in 1987, but he wasn’t sick, so we weren’t too nervous. At that point, we still didn’t know many people who had it. He came home from the doctor’s office and just stared at me with an almost terrified look. He said his life was over as we knew it. He had tested positive.

  That news just about crushed us. Any long-term plans we had made as a couple were put on hold. We had to concentrate on the here and now. All my energy went into taking care of John’s health.

  It took me another year before I went to get tested. I had pretty much psyched myself up for the fact that I was going to be positive. After all, with John sick, I saw the writing on the wall. To my utter shock, when the counselor told me I was negative, I broke down in tears. I told him, “How could that be? My lover is positive. How am I supposed to go home and tell him that I am negative?”

  John was so relieved that he had not given it to me that we both cried. He had told me that I could leave—he would not ask me to go through all of what was to come. I told him that I was not in just for the fun of it; we were committed to each other for the long haul. I loved him all the more for being so sensitive to my feelings.

  John started to show symptoms in 1989. He had to have a blood transfusion six months after starting AZT. No other drugs had been approved yet, so it was a guessing game for doctors. From the onset, John was on no less than twenty pills a day. He was also involved in studies for new drugs. He thought it might one day lead to the eradication of this horrible disease.

  From that time forward, when he was home sick, Foxxy was by his side. She was like his little nurse. She would lie next to him in bed and give him all her attention. It’s funny, the way dogs have this sense that something is wrong. It was like she was trying to give him something, as though she knew he had AIDS—she wanted him to fight and come through it.

  For five years, John battled this terrible disease. John, Foxxy, and I all battled it together, like a tight little family. But in April 1993, after all his valiant effort, my lover, John P. Brooke, died.

  Foxxy and I felt lost. There just seemed no way to repair the huge hole of John’s absence. We didn’t want to go out of the house or talk to anybody. We couldn’t feel good about anything, even grilling a steak or some special thing to eat. I didn’t want to go on, but Foxxy was there, and she needed me. Some days the only thing that kept me going was needing to feed her and take her for her walk.

  When you lose someone close to you, it never leaves you. I was just thirty years old. That was the worst year of my life. My mother told me that I was way too young to be having this much death in my life.

  In 1999, Foxxy was fifteen years old. First she started to have some female problems; then she developed a tumor that became an open sore. The vet told me that, at her age, it was just not treatable. I finally realized that her time was coming very soon.

  I really didn’t want to let her go. She was the last vestige of John. But she was sick. I could tell that her suffering had become pretty bad.

  So I told all my friends that I was going to Florida for a long weekend. On that Friday night I took her to the Humane Society to have her put down. The staff gave me all the time I needed to say my goodbyes. All the pain of losing John came back as I sat in the exam room with her. I stroked her and promised her that she was going to see John in just a few minutes and she could lick and kiss him all she wanted.

  When it came right down to it, I just couldn’t be in there when she passed. The loss was very profound.

  It took me two years before I could think about getting another dog. When I finally got one, I decided it had to be completely different from any dog that I had ever had before. I’d had only small dogs, so I thought a big
dog would be nice. That’s how I got it in my head to get a Rottweiler.

  I named him Caesar. He was very sweet. He would not hurt a flea, but had way too much energy for me. I felt guilty for not spending enough time with him to get rid of that excess energy. The first week I got him, I had to travel on business, so I took him to my friend’s house. When I came to pick him up, my friend said, “Never again.”

  Turns out that Caesar had completely ripped up a bathroom, and just before dinner guests arrived, he had crapped all over the house.

  None of my friends wanted to take care of him because he was so rambunctious. I was traveling a lot and just didn’t have enough time to dedicate to him. I finally realized that it was just not fair for him to be cooped up all the time. I had to put him up for adoption.

  Into my life came a very nice woman named Patience. She called and told me she had always had Rotties and she would have nothing but another one. She had a female who was seven years old, but the dog had cancer. Patience wanted another Rottie to ease her other dog’s last days. So I invited her to come over and meet Caesar.

  I’ll never forget that day. A woman with two kids drove Patience to my house. Out of the station wagon came this small woman, about eighty-five years old, with gray hair, five foot two, and using a walker. The kids ran up to me and started playing with Caesar right away. I had to walk him down the drive to Patience because it was too hard for her to walk up. I thought, This won’t work—he’ll knock her down, and she’ll pass on.

  But then she told me her story. I had noticed she was kind of bruised and battered. She said a door-to-door salesman had come to her house trying to sell her some pest control for her house. When she said she didn’t want that service, he became angry and started yelling at her. Then he took the pesticide and sprayed her in the face. He tried to rob her, but she blocked the way with her walker and started screaming. He ran away. The story was in all the papers. She was in the hospital for quite a long time, and her skin still looked burned. The police caught the guy, and she was suing him and the company he worked for. It was a terrible ordeal for her.

  I told her how rambunctious Caesar was, but that didn’t bother her. She said she was quite good at dog training, and she had a caregiver living with her to help.

  Even though it didn’t seem like the best situation for an eight-month-old Rottweiler puppy, there was something about Patience that made me say OK.

  So she took Caesar home with her.

  Patience calls me all the time to tell me how happy Caesar is. She has a huge yard for him to run in. I went up to see him about six months ago, and he was just as wild as he ever was. He was so happy to see me that he leapt straight up in the air. But he’s so careful around Patience. He doesn’t knock her over. And there have been no more incidents with angry salesmen! Looking at Caesar with Patience, I felt that I had made the right decision.

  By 2005, I was wanting a dog again. This time, though, I was going to look for one that was very sweet, not as big as Caesar, and certainly not as wild. I decided on a Boxer. I looked for about three months. In December, I came across an ad in the paper about a litter of Boxers. I called the people, and they came across as careful, professional breeders.

  On a warm Saturday morning, I drove up to Conyers, which is not exactly close. I was invited in and was shocked at how the people lived. No one had cleaned that house in a long time. There was a heavy smell of dogs. There were dishes of food, coffee cups, newspapers, hairpins, wet towels, empty rolls of toilet paper, and hundreds of toys lying all over the floor. There was a two-year-old girl standing in the corner.

  The guy looked embarrassed and said, “Let’s go around back.” The dogs were out in the backyard. His wife came out, and she was kind of disheveled, too.

  They told me it was their first litter, which was not the impression they had given over the phone. They had the mother and father on site. She had had a litter of ten. They had six left— two boys and four girls. I wanted a male. I had grown up with female dogs, and Foxxy, of course, and I wanted to switch to a boy.

  Well, of the two boys, one had mange and was a bit on the smallish side. The other boy came right up to me. They had just put a huge bowl of food down for them to eat. All the puppies were eating ravenously, but this one kept running back and forth from me to the food. I had them take him out of the fenced area. He and I played for about forty-five minutes. He was cute, cuddly, and wanted to be with me, not back with his family.

  But the thing that really got me was the small patch of gray just under his lower lip. You see, I’ve had a goatee for many years. Until I turned thirty, it had been brown, just like the hair on my head. In the year after John died, my goatee turned gray, just like this puppy’s. We looked like each other. Once again, I felt my heart say, “That’s the one.”

  I had to have him. He is a beautiful brindle, just like his daddy, sleek and muscular, with big brown eyes.

  Coming home in the truck, he bundled himself up under my jacket and went to sleep. Like he knew he was safe. At home, he was no problem. He trained himself. I never had to yell at him. He hasn’t barked yet, except for the time he turned around and saw himself in the bedroom mirror. Scared the piss out of him! He thought another dog had snuck up on him, and he let out a yelp.

  Last month, I started to feel a pain in my gut, as if I had eaten something bad, and Samson all of a sudden had to be right with me. I lay down, and he lay down on top of me. I got up, and he was stuck to my side. The pain was getting worse and worse, and finally I had to call Dan to take me to the emergency room. Samson was so worried, but we couldn’t peel him off me. It took both of us to get him in his kennel. He knew something was wrong.

  We got to the hospital, and they rushed me into surgery. I had a ruptured appendix. It’s funny, but Samson knew it—he had a sense that something was wrong, even more than I did. All the dogs I’ve had have been like that.

  Now Samson is about seven months old and thinks he owns the place. He’s sweet, loves to cuddle, and is not rambunctious— most of the time. He is content to lie at my feet. He makes me laugh. He lies in bed with me to make sure I am warm and loved. He is carrying on the work of every other dog I have ever had. At forty-three, I think I won’t ever be without a dog again. The unconditional love they give is powerful and rich. I just hope I exude that kind of love to him.

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  MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE FOR DOGS

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  Jay Quinn: TRAVIS

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  Job Michael Evans, the late, great monk of New Skete dog trainer, used to say that every dog trainer in the world has his secret closet of failures, dogs whom it was simply impossible to train. And anyone who said they didn’t was lying.

  Evans, who passed away from AIDS in 1995, said that the challenge was what to do about such dogs, because they simply could not be permitted to live in human society. He also said that putting a dog to sleep was not the worst thing that could happen to a dog, that sometimes not euthanizing the dog was worse because then disaster would thrive for the humans and for the dog.

  Any dog lover understands that dogs have physical limitations that mean we will most likely outlive them. Though we may not like it, we acknowledge that cancers, infections, organ failure, or the simple fact of old age may one day separate us from our beloved companion. But what if a dog’s problems are mental rather than physical? Is there a dog so bad that neither love nor pharmaceuticals can help him?

  Jay Quinn, the talented author of the novels Metes and Bounds and Back Where He Started, faced that problem with his “boy dog, ”Travis.

  Jay took full responsibility for Travis. Working with his vet, he did the best he could to train Travis, and then to medicate him when training just wasn’t enough. His story is a model for love and sacrifice, as Jay did what a loving owner must to do to protect other dogs, and in the end, to protect Travis as well.

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  NO ONE CAN EVER SAY I didn’t want Travis. He was my baby, my buddy. In many ways, he was my alter ego and we glommed onto each other’s neuroses like parent and child often do. I found my entire household working to accommodate his moods and his idiosyncrasies with the benevolence sometimes extended to troubled children. I did everything I could for seven years. No one can say I didn’t.

  I am a dog person. I’ve always had dogs, and I would have dogs as part of my new home with my partner. I wanted a pair of yellow Labs. However, purebred dogs would have set me back far more than my budget at the time would have allowed. Instead I combed the pet section of the classified ads for mixed-bred puppies that were close to the loving nature of Labs.

  An ad appeared one Saturday in February for puppies that were half yellow Lab and half red Doberman Pinscher. The pups were waiting for adoption at a pet-rescue facility run by a veterinarian way up on the western side of Boca Raton. I called and told them to hold onto any males they had, I was on my way up.

  I got a newspaper-recycle bin small enough to fit in the cab of the pickup and lined it with shredded newspapers. I knew the pups would probably get motion-sick or piddle as a result of riding in the truck on the way home. I was well prepared in that event, and in others as well. I had already gone to the pet superstore and bought metal bowls for food and water. There were two new kennels, waiting to be set up. I’d also bought teal-colored leashes and collars.