Her reproof contained the sting of a salt bath in a leper colony. I’ve been called worse — in fact, I am worse. But the charge held extra resonance since it was leveled by my wife, who possesses a special knack for pinning the tail on my peculiarities with a fat, blunt acuity that leaves little room for denial.
We’d been meandering through an art gallery — all French doors and blond hardwoods and overpriced landscapes, with the owner’s yellow Lab sprawled on the floor. Other patrons smiled politely and stroked his head once. But I was on my fourth pass, having moved from the dog’s face, back, and belly to the intimate flea patch at the base of his tail, which made his posterior turn northward when scratched.
My wife looked at me as if she were dragging a wayward toddler through the mall. “Knock it off, or they’ll know,” she cautioned. “Know what?” I asked, as if I didn’t know. She leaned into me as if she were going to share a secret, though her voice grew louder: “That you’re a DOG WEIRDO.”
I abhor confessionals, but I must cop to Dog Weirdom. I cannot, nor do I desire to, keep my hands off other people’s dogs, and I will go to great lengths to satisfy these longings.
Not that I want for my own dog. I do have Simon, a barrel-torsoed Dalmatian of stout heart and meager brains who affixes his teeth to the front bumpers of moving cars when they brake in the turns. He is beginning to slow down, having scored only three kills this year (a rabbit, a squirrel, and my sister- inlaw’s cockatoo). But with age, our relationship grows more symbiotic; though his manhood (let me call it) is only a dim memory, he still prefers the company of my leg to that of canine acquaintances.
For me however, it is not enough. I crave the new, the exotic, the Other, with a desire both insatiable and platonic (I’m not that kind of Dog Weirdo). And so it has been ever since my parents deprived me of a dog in favor of a hamster, Rocky, who escaped his Habitrail and met a bloody demise in our dryer under a particularly heavy load of permanent press. Some say it was no accident — I guess we’ll never know. But I grieved two doors down with Choo-Choo, a drooly boxer who regularly ran the span of his fence until he came to the end, leapt high in the air, and turned his dog sprinkler on anyone within territorymarking range.
There have been no more Rockys, but many more Choo-Choos. I have taken comfort in others’ dogs on the street and behind privacy fences, sometimes after asking, others times after breaking and entering. There were the jellybean feedings with the mongrel Duchess and the shaved Virginia-honey-ham feedings with the pointer Heidi, whose owners thought she was on a strict Purina High-Pro diet (Heidi never talked). As a college student, I once slipped into a stranger’s house to pet his deaf St. Bernard, Jocko, a precarious move since you had to stomp your feet so the dog would feel the vibrations and not get startled into snapping off a limb. And there was the time I absentmindedly slipped a seeingeye dog a Bennigan’s Buffalo wing while copping a pet. Only after much silent prayer did the small chicken bones ease their way down her gullet, with her master never knowing how close he came to losing his ride home.
If I see any English bulldog (my favorite breed), even while in my car, I will pull over and pump its owner with questions about jaw turn-up and hocks and flews and other things only pros or fetishists could possibly care about. Recently, upon leaving my favorite restaurant in Baltimore’s Little Italy, I rapped on the door of a Sicilian woman’s basement apartment to summon her bulldog, Luke. I still don’t know her name, though I’ve visited her dog frequently, and once again I left her standing on the street in her bathrobe at 10:30 p.m. talking to my wife, while Luke took me for a run in hot pursuit of osso buco and prosciutto.
Despite my wife’s counsel, I will not seek professional help. For even as I write this — with the neighborhood children at school and their parents at work — I am just returned from petting dogs. And with my own dog stationed by my desk, my obsession with his kind is validated. Ours is a bond forged beyond mere similarities: our disdain for cats and UPS uniforms, our enthusiasm for porch loitering, scratching ourselves, and table food. As my scent belies faithlessness, he remains faithful, incapable of passing judgment, or at least articulating it. Instead, he rests contentedly, brush- thumping his tail against the floor like a canine Art Blakey. He has one eye on my corn chips, the other on my leg.
MATT LABASH
