The first week of dog-having, though, was a constant horror punctuated by occasional angelic snuggles. Mike had warned us that Bizzy didn’t like sleeping in her crate, but I was unprepared for the depths of her loathing. When we put her inside, she barked furiously at the indignation, like the drunken son of a senator being thrown in jail overnight. She refused to stop barking unless we put her in bed with us, and once we did, she refused to not throw up on the blankets. Until the early morning, Bizzy circled and probed the spaces between our feet, her constant wheezing dry and scratchy like acrylic nails thrumming against a wicker basket.
“If this is what having a pet is like, I don’t know if I can do it,” I moaned to Maris (and the heavens) somewhere between one and two in the morning on the third night. Maybe we can find someone else who wants this dog was the unspoken second half of that thought.
I’d begun to worry that I didn’t have the constitution for pet ownership, which certainly boded poorly for my potential future as the parent of a human. You hear all the time about people getting a pet as training for kids. You rarely hear about them then deciding, Nope. Never mind. Not that we had even decided we wanted children, but other people had started to bring it up, in part because of how quickly we took on a pet.
When you and your partner get a dog, everyone in your life takes it as a sign that you’re practicing to have kids. Of course, once you’re married, people take everything as a sign you’re about to have kids. Moving into a bigger apartment? Room for a nursery. Going on vacation? A last hurrah before the baby. Buying new pajamas? That’s the outfit in which you plan to conceive. With every decision you make, friends and relatives can’t wait to read the tea leaves, and it always seems to be You’re Having a Baby! brand tea.
But at least, if we had to, we could give the dog away, which is not quite as easy to do with a baby. There is a lot of red tape in passing off a human infant, and people ask questions.
Maris and I were also starting to have some questions about Bizzy and her curiously no-strings-attached adoption. When we started sifting through her paperwork so we could schedule her an appointment with a local vet, we learned that she wasn’t six years old, as Mike had told us; she was actually eight. Two years isn’t a huge difference, but it was enough that it may have dissuaded us from meeting her in the first place, especially since we’d started off hoping to find a dog between ages one and two. In dog years, the difference between one and eight is the difference between taking in a second-grader and adopting your mom’s friend Alice who’s almost ready to retire.
But, for someone who had taken in a needy pup on short notice, confusing a six-year-old pug with an eight-year-old one seemed like an understandable error. After all, you can’t ask a dog how old she is, nor will she reveal that information with a sassy T-shirt reading FORTY IS THE NEW FLIRTY or PINOT MONEY, PINOT PROBLEMS.
There were other issues with Mike’s story, too, though. Soon after we met him, I started poking around online for videos of his comedy or listings for shows he’d performed on. I wanted to learn more about his work so I could help him adjust to the New York City comedy scene. And what came up was . . . nothing. Not a single flyer for a gig at a bar. Not a second of footage of him onstage. Not one credit on the IMDB page for the show he told us he worked for. Again, though, I could imagine a world in which those omissions made sense. Not every opening act for a big name shows up on a venue’s website. And sometimes certain credits fall through the cracks at IMDB.
And yeah, some people, even when they work in entertainment, prefer to stay more or less “off the grid.” On the other hand, a desire to reduce his digital footprint didn’t quite square with the fact that we’d met him online. There was also his constant lurking on Maris’s and my social media accounts and rapid comments (“So cute!” “Miss ya, Bizzy!”) on any pug-related photos or statuses we posted. But it was precisely the enthusiasm of those comments that kept us from worrying too much. “He’s so nice!” we reasoned. “There must be some reasonable explanation for this other stuff.”
Meanwhile, Bizzy settled into her new home. As she adjusted, the mist of her anxiety dissipated, and her regular disposition began to reveal itself. Within two weeks, she started sleeping through the night as well as most of the day. Her personality, it turned out, was basically “teddy bear that came some of the way to life.” She loves to snack and to snuggle, and she gets winded after just a few minutes of exercise. A dog after my own heart. Maybe I’m projecting, or maybe it’s just that we were the ones with access to her treats, but it felt like Bizzy started to love us, too.
After her initial period of bed vomiting, Bizzy turned out to be what you might call a Very Good Girl. Most important, she doesn’t do the three things you really don’t want a dog to do (spewing bodily fluids in the house, chewing up your stuff, and biting people). She does have some stubborn habits, though, and like the old dogs you read about, she refuses to break them. She hates the sound of our doorbell, and she barks when she hears other dogs in the hallway. As soon as she sees who it is, though, she calms right down, because she loves anything she can see, and her worst enemy is anyone she can only hear.
Also, after dinner, without fail, Bizzy climbs onto my wife’s leg and humps wildly until she gets winded and falls off after seven seconds, like a reverse bull ride. It happens every night. It happens only to my wife, never to me, which makes me feel bad because I’m not the favorite, and then I feel insane for being disappointed that a dog doesn’t want to have sex with my leg. Also, while she no longer spends all night rooting around the bed like a truffle pig, Bizzy prefers to sleep between my or my wife’s legs through the night, which is more comfortable for the twenty-four-pound dog than the person-size person who has to contort around her. But I don’t care that much, because she’s so cute I could die.
Since Bizzy didn’t require housebreaking or leash training, taking her in felt less like having a baby and more like taking on a new roommate. We were never on high alert that she would pee on our shoes, but we did have to become attuned to the times of day she expected to go out. Bizzy has preferences and predilections, and by choosing to have her in our life, we had to accept her as she is. If we wanted her (and we did!), we had to accept the occasional hypervigilant barking and the separation anxiety and leg sex.
It’s the same as when you meet human adults. It’s helpful to admit that you’re not going to change who they are. Sure, they may adjust to you a little, but at some point you have to decide whether you’re going to let them sleep between your knees (metaphorically speaking, usually) because that’s just what they do. Instead of assuming what others want, you have to really listen to them and give them what they actually need. Once Bizzy became less of a yapping, puking terror and more of a sweet old lady who ate off my floor, I felt more Zen about the whole experience.
A few weeks into our relationship’s BC (Bizzy centric) era, Maris got a text from a friend named (let’s say) Carly, asking if we knew a guy named (let’s say) Mike Lastname. She replied that we did, and in fact he was a very nice guy who’d given us a dog for free. Carly’s reply:
Oh, I met him at a bar, and he told me he used to date my friend and that he wrote a bunch of songs for her band. But I texted her and she said that they never dated, and he was just an acquaintance who watched her big dog while her band went on tour.
In retrospect, that should have told us anything we needed to know about Mike, but his weird behavior seemed like an aberration rather than a pattern. After all, he had given us a dog for free. A dog who, by this time, no longer reacted to every noise in the hallway by barking like she was doing background vocals on a DMX song. We tried to give Mike the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, we thought, he was just insecure about his accomplishments after moving to a new city, so he embellished his professional connections. Everyone has lied on a résumé, right? Well, he was just showing that punched-up résumé to people outside his professional sphere. Yes, looking back, I know how ridiculous that sounds.
That was not the last we heard of Mike. He continued to leave messages on Instagram and Facebook by pictures of Biz (“Those jowls!” “What a queen!”). He showed up at one of my stand-up shows and chatted up other friends in the crowd. He seemed, to our faces and on our feeds, like a sweet and charming dude.
But then another female friend reached out, over a Twitter direct message:
Hey? Do you know Mike Lastname?
This time I was more wary.
A little. We got our dog from him, but we’re not close. Why do you ask?
I dreaded her response. My friend wrote back,
I met him at a bar, and he told me he was working on a TV pilot with Well-Known but Not Household Name Famous TV Writer Woman. I know her a little bit and asked her about it, and she’d never heard of him.
Shit. If we didn’t before, we now definitely had both enough information and enough distance to relax our gaze and let the real picture of Mike Lastname emerge from the Magic Eye poster of his lies. All his flimsy show business stories shared a common trait: they were both impressive and incredibly hard to verify. The fake jobs he bragged about were always the kind that were hard to cross-check against the credits of a TV show or on the internet. Unfortunately for him, he kept lying to people who had legitimate connections to the world he pretended to inhabit.
Who knows how many other people he told that he was a personal assistant to Chris Rock or a dialect coach for Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and never bothered to vet his story. I don’t know why he was doing it. Maybe to convince people to have sex with him. Definitely that was the reason, right? But why was he lying to us, too? Had he been trying to arrange a foursome with me, Maris, and Kelly? There have to be easier ways to do that than acquiring and giving away a pug. Plus he made up the fact that he owned a dog of his own, which is a true sociopath move. That’s basically the way you make the audience sympathize with an unlikable movie character. “Oh sure, he’s a hit man. But he loves that dog so much.” THAT IS LITERALLY THE PREMISE OF THE MOVIE JOHN WICK.
By the time Kelly (who Maris and I knew had dated Mike because we met her UNLESS SHE WAS A PAID ACTRESS OR A CYBORG, WHICH AT THIS POINT WAS NOT OFF THE TABLE) wrote to tell us that Mike was a “toxic” person whom we should “beware” of and that she had “cut him out of her life,” we thanked her for her insight, but we weren’t surprised. We didn’t know anything about Mike that seemed sinister enough to make a public scene, but we quietly unfriended him on Facebook and unfollowed him on Instagram.
A few more months passed, and we didn’t hear about Mike much at all. Bizzy had become such a part of our lives that she didn’t even remind us of him anymore. She was ours, through and through. And then one night Mike flew too close to the sun. Apparently he had been out at a bar again, lying about punching up jokes for a show starring an Actually Famous Actress, who was alerted to his untruths and did not take kindly to them. I know that because a couple of days later, my various online newsfeeds were full of headlines like “Actually Famous Actress Rips into Liar for Pretending to Work on Her Show.” Even before I read the article, my first thought was, Hey! I know that guy! Actually Famous Actress had not let the résumé embellishing slide the way other people had in the past, and she called him out onstage by name during a live performance she was doing.
“That’s so weird,” Maris said after I forwarded her one of the many articles outing Mike Lastname as a dirtbag. “I had seen a picture of him with Actually Famous Actress on his Instagram. I assumed they were real-life friends.” It hit us both together. Mike hadn’t been trying to recruit us for an orgy. We were his alibi. Our correspondence was designed to make him seem legitimate to outsiders. All the clues were right there in front of us. I wish I had been holding a coffee cup with Mike’s name on it that I could have dropped and watched shatter in slow motion. We immediately called up his Instagram profile to see who else he’d been using for sinister gains, but he had deleted all of his social media accounts. Just like that, he was gone.2
Of all the deceit, misinformation, and misunderstanding that happened over the course of Bizzy’s adoption, one moment stung the most. As it became clear that Mike had misled us on just about every detail he’d offered, we figured out that he was (at best) a pathological liar. But there was one thing we couldn’t get over: Who lies about having a dog? Maris couldn’t shake the fear that because of Mike’s deception, we had somehow come into possession of a stolen pug.3 Under any other circumstances, I would have immediately written off the theory that someone had stolen an elderly dog, brought it across state lines, and given it away to strangers for free. But in this case, we had to at least entertain the idea. After all, the rest of Mike’s backstory had been a sham; maybe Bizzy’s was, too. Maybe there were no elderly friends of the family in Vermont who went into assisted living, as Mike had told us. Maybe he’d seen a pug in the window of a pet store in Queens, smashed the glass, scooped the dog up, and unloaded her on a couple of saps, just to feel alive.
Maris did a quick series of Google searches (“stolen + pug,” “stolen + pug + Vermont,” “stolen + pug + elderly,” etc.), which turned up no incriminating results. If Bizzy was dognapped, it had gone unreported. On the other hand, lots of crime victims never go to the police. Maybe there was some element of blackmail involved. Maybe Bizzy’s old family consisted of undocumented immigrants who didn’t trust law enforcement. Our capacity for conspiracy theory by this point was off the charts.
In a final effort to learn the truth, I shuffled through Bizzy’s paperwork and called a number I found on a scrap of paper.
“Hello?” answered the voice of an older woman.
“Hi. I’m Josh. I have a pug named Bizzy, but maybe she used to belong to you or someone you know. Her name may have been Suzie back then. Mike gave her to us. We just wanted to make sure that no one else had a rightful claim to the dog.”
Silence. I realized that if I wasn’t talking to the right person, what I had just said must have sounded like the ramblings of a truly deranged weirdo. Finally she replied.
“Oh. Huh. Yeah, nobody wants that dog.”
I still don’t know who was on the other end of the line. She may have been Bizzy’s previous owner. She could have been the next of kin. Maybe she was just Mike, wearing a wig and doing an old lady voice. I’m not sure why, but I imagine if he was doing the voice, he’d be wearing a wig. Whoever she was, she was wrong. Because Maris really wanted that dog, and finally, I did, too.
One night at a comedy show six months later, I ran into Actually Famous Actress. I was drunk, and Also Famous Comedian Friend convinced me to tell her all about Bizzy and our strange connection. Actually Famous Actress, a stranger, did not have any interest in hearing about my dog. So in that way, it was like having a kid after all.
A Partial List of Names I Call My Dog, Whose Real Name Is Bizzy
Biz
Bizzy
Bizzy Bee
Bizzy Bean
Business
Lil’ Business
Lil’ Miss
Bunny
Bunches
Bunz
Bunzo
Bunzou
Bunzadonna
Bunzadella
Bunzadelia
Sweet Pea
Fatso
Flatso (when she lies down flat on the ground)
Flopsy
Sass Monster
Munchkin
Goob
Goober
Pudge
Smush
Smushington
Monster
Gremlin
Goblin
Mrs. Velvet Ears
“I Also Do Michael Jackson”
“So,” said Bengey (or, as we knew him now, “DJ Bengey”) as he leaned forward from his perch on the love seat in our living room, “in addition to my DJ services . . . I also do Michael Jackson. Would you like me to do that at the wedding?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, precisely. To be diplomatic, it’s
fair to say the youngest member of the Jackson 5 was known for several different things. Was Bengey offering to use our wedding reception as a venue for turning a backyard into an amusement park? Bringing zombies back to life? Or, perhaps most improbably and inappropriately, winning a posthumous lifetime achievement Grammy Award? It’s not your day, dude. Then there were the issues of MJ’s—let’s say, diplomatically again—unorthodox childcare strategy. I figured that was not what he was proposing. But I didn’t know exactly what was at stake for my wedding day, and I didn’t ask.
“Sure!” I said. “That sounds really cool!”
Bengey had been having a tough time. He moonlit1 as a professional dog walker in north Brooklyn, which was the capacity in which we met him, but his real passion was music. When Union Hall, a beloved local venue, shut down for several months after a fire,2 Bengey’s most reliable DJ gig dried up, leaving him scrambling for work. When Maris and I came home from work one day to a note on our kitchen counter asking if we knew of anyone with the need for a disc jockey in the near future, we hired him right away to do our wedding. Sure, we didn’t know him as well as Bizzy, our fat pug who spent forty-five minutes with him three days a week while Maris and I were at work. But how well do you know any DJ, really?
And yes, that sounds like a metaphysical question (What is a DJ? How can one know if one truly possesses DJ qualities?) but is really very practical. The DJ is the person you know the least who has the biggest influence on your wedding reception—I mean, unless the caterer decides to poison you. But Bengey seemed nice. Bizzy liked him, after all, which we knew because she occasionally refused to poop for substitute walkers and always pooped when Bengey took her out. That is a high compliment coming from a dog.
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