Sleeps with Dogs (23 page)

The stairs within the house itself were almost as plentiful and steep as the ones outside that led to the front door; the house totaled four stories from basement to attic. There were spiderwebs in the stairwell, housing some of the biggest spiders I have ever seen in my life. I wondered if this guy left them there for the company. Arachnophobic to my very core, it took all of my will to ignore them and focus instead on making it down the steps without hyperventilating. My fear is bad enough that I might have declined the job had I known there'd be mammoth spiders in the mix. The stairs themselves did provide a bit of a distraction from the horrors above—the thick pile of the carpet might have once been a creamy white but had since turned the color of old snow.

The owner presumably rode one of his motorcycles to the show, but he had two more in mint condition sitting in his immaculate garage. Clearly he spent the balance of his time here in the basement, and not in the ruins of the rest of the house.

The dogs shat like horses: while they walked, and with even less warning than a horse might give. No tail-lifting, just wet clods of dog shit hitting the pavement behind them. On our first walk, I kept waiting for the telltale pause-and-hunch that signaled a normal dog emission was on its way. None came, and, after we'd turned and walked home, I was appalled to find that someone had not picked up after their dogs, wondering how I'd missed the big piles at near-regular intervals like ellipses along the sidewalk. Trying to avoid the mess, I fell behind the dogs, and only then did I witness their unique and inconvenient method of crapping. What was more, they just plowed through their poop like it was nothing, leaving brown paw prints in their collective wake. No wonder the carpet in the house was a muddy beige.

Over the long weekend of visits, I became adept at trailing behind the dogs, scooping up the loose leavings as best I could. I couldn't really help the marks left behind on the pavement, illustrating graphically the path we'd taken on our walk like the fecal equivalent of Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumb trail.

I tried to avoid touching the dogs—and anything else in the house—as much as possible, and to keep the damage to the public walkways to a minimum. On the rare occasion that I passed another pedestrian, I pretended I had no idea where all that shit was coming from and tried to look appropriately annoyed and disgusted by the liberally soiled sidewalk.

The client never called me again, and I was relieved. I knew it wasn't anything I'd done wrong, but more likely his inability to remember my name or find my contact information amidst the garbage and fur and dishes that were slowly overtaking his once-enviable house.

I was grateful, too, that he never requested an overnight stay. The money might have swayed me toward a yes, which would have
been the wrong answer. I did, however, spend the night at Drew's, just once, for a weekend, which was one too many.

This was before the roommate was there; the second bedroom still stood empty but for a few boxes that I guessed his wife had yet to collect. I had the presence of mind to bring my own linens to drape over Drew's. His mattress sat directly on the floor under the kind of poly-fill comforter you buy in a bag with a matching pair of coarse sheets for your first year of college. His wife must have gotten the bed frame in the separation. I wished I'd just brought a sleeping bag and slept on the floor of the spare room. Marginally less cushioning, to be sure, but the intimacy of staying in Drew's room, sleeping on his mattress, was far more uncomfortable. The space was a study in depression: not his own, but the emotion his surroundings evoked in me.

He had a piece of paper taped to his mirrored closet door titled “Goals for Life,” broken down into one-year increments; his underwear was tightly rolled and sorted by color in a bin in the closet, left open for me or anyone else to see. But nothing got my nose out of joint quite as much as the condom—unwrapped and seemingly unused, sitting atop the dresser. I didn't investigate too closely, and instead tried and failed to explain away its presence there. Did he forget he'd unwrapped it and left it there? Why did he unwrap it and put it there in the first place? How could he possibly overlook this before leaving for the weekend? I slept very poorly those two nights, wishing more than I have wished for almost anything else that I had not needed to accept this overnight job.

Amongst these unfortunate encounters with love's disenfranchised, I met someone. My roommate from college had recently moved to San Francisco from Atlanta for a position with HGTV, and we were out in the city celebrating her first day at the new job.
Her new roommate was there, a British guy who seemed to have taken a shine to her in the few days she'd been living in their shared Western Addition walk-up. His friend was to join us at some point, and, in the meantime, I was letting their roommate romance play out while I sipped the cheapest beer the bar had to offer.

It wasn't beer goggles or lowered inhibitions that suggested to me that this friend, who finally showed up, was a catch. He was quiet and unassuming, buying us all a round of drinks with little fanfare and an earnestness that seemed out of place in the packed, noisy bar. He had dimples, and a job, and he asked me questions about my job and the dogs I looked after with genuine interest, which made me blush profusely. No one outside of my family ever asked me about work, and in such detail. Certainly not devastatingly handsome strangers. At the end of the night, he donned my coat, wrapped my black chenille scarf around his neck, and walked out the bar. I had no choice but to follow.

Intrigued as I was, my recent run-ins with sad bachelor clients had me feeling rather more than circumspect about single guys. True, this guy, Patrick, wasn't a divorcée—at least that I knew of. By dint of pure coincidence, he worked at the same tech company that Ian did, but in a different field. There was no evidence to suggest that he was anything but normal, and maybe even exceptional, but neither could I banish the thoughts of sticky dishes and unwrapped condoms and malingering animals that sprung unbidden to my mind when I thought about pursuing him. I resolved to put him out of my mind, even though he lived around the corner from my friend's apartment and I was seeing him regularly as a result.

The troubles with Drew didn't start until months after the roommate moved in. Late one morning, on a day that should have been like any other, I opened the front door to the smell of pot, so
strong it seemed to thicken the air I was breathing. Drew's roommate smoked frequently enough that I wasn't unaccustomed to walking in to the scent of weed, but this was something altogether different.

Baxter was passed out just inside the doorframe of Drew's room, and I wondered if it was from a contact high. No one seemed to be home, but I popped up the stairs for a peek into the living room just to see if the smell was coming from boy wonder and his five-foot bong. There were two giant Rubbermaid bins stacked in the middle of the living room, the kind of containers you keep Christmas or Halloween decorations in. Or that's what I'd use them for. I had a strong suspicion that these were not filled with strings of lights or inflatable zombies. And I was alone in the house with them.

I hustled Baxter out of the house and onto the trail, sucking in the fresh air in an effort to clear my head. My clothes were going to reek, too, if I wasn't careful. I wondered if I should have wiped my fingerprints from the doorknob. Or just left the house altogether and foregone the walk? I looked down at Baxter, who seemed none the worse for his fragrant morning.

My phone rang moments after Baxter and I started walking away from the house. It was Drew, canceling the walk.

“I am already here,” I said, opting for truth.

There was a silence on the line.

“Ah . . . Well! I trust you can be discreet, then. About whatever you . . . might've seen.”

“Right. No problem.”

“All right, then. Well, thanks! Kiss Baxter for me.” He said this last bit in his special Baxter voice.

I hung up the phone, wondering if it was weird that I thought an apology was in order. Maybe a, “Don't worry—there aren't going to be cops surrounding the place when you get back from your walk
with Baxter,” or “Nobody's going to try to hijack the thousands of dollars' worth of illegal drugs sitting on my living room floor while you're there with my dog.” If I'd expected it, I sure didn't get it. And when I returned Baxter, I essentially pushed him through the door and locked up behind me, hightailing it to my car like it was base in a high-stakes game of chase.

I wasn't some kind of puritan when it came to pot; I knew that marijuana was common enough in the area and that plenty of clients, and colleagues, for that matter, regularly partook. This was Berkeley, after all. A colleague of mine had called me one night, trying to ask me if I could cover a walk for her but having a hard time articulating her request. She finally confessed that she was high out of her mind because she had snuck a cookie at a clients' house—they'd been sitting out on a plate in the kitchen—never suspecting it was a “special” cookie. She'd done her best to get through the rest of her day but was kind of freaking the fuck out trying to get all the dogs home from her final group walk.

Neither would I try to pretend that I hadn't smoked my own share of weed. I'd gone to college. But I needed Drew to know that it wasn't cool to assume I was okay with what had happened. I couldn't be in his house, alone, if some shit went down. So, crying inside at the loss of wages, I sent Drew a letter two days later resigning as Baxter's dog walker.

What I received in response to my letter was a sincere apology, a humble request for me to resume my visits, and the promise that this would never, ever happen again. I didn't totally believe him, but I was grateful for the lip service and elated to keep Baxter on as a regular walk. By sending Drew my resignation, I felt I'd done due diligence in preserving my unimpeachable reputation among my peers, and no one would judge me too harshly for taking Drew and his ancient dog back.

For a short while, everything really was okay. Drew commissioned me to take Bax to the self-serve doggy wash down by the bay. I loaded him into a cubicle custom-built for pet baths, shampoo provided, and scrubbed him down, which he seemed to love. He kept looking over his shoulder at me like, “Hey, isn't this fun?” I was almost as wet as he was and smelled just as much like a wet dog, but it
was
fun, like a field trip.

As it turned out, I was extra glad to have that bonding opportunity with Baxter.

I was driving into San Francisco for my first official date with Patrick when I picked up a message from Drew. Baxter needed to go to the vet, and he wondered if I could take him. I couldn't tell from the voice mail whether Bax's need was urgent, or if this was a longer-term “at some point” request, like the bath had been. I was cresting the hill on Geary, about to descend toward Japantown and my date-to-be's apartment beyond. I decided to be safe and wait until I'd parked to call back. The proximity of that neighborhood to both the Fillmore and Pac Heights made finding an open and legal place to park extraordinarily difficult, but patience and luck won out, and I eventually scored a spot just around the corner from Patrick's apartment.

Drew picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, so can you take him?”

“Um . . . I'm in the city right now. What's going on?”

“Okay, well he's been acting weird all day and he needs to go now. Can you come back?”

“Weird how?”

“I dunno, he isn't getting up or moving much, and his eyes look funny.”

That sounded like Baxter. I had to guess his usual immobility and the rheumy glaze to his eyes was extra accentuated because that description pretty much covered his usual MO.

“Listen, I am really sorry. I can't make it back this minute, but I could take him in tomorrow when I come in the morning.”

“No, it has to be now. I gotta go.”

I didn't know in the moment whether to feel bad that I wasn't sacrificing my first date to rush back to the East Bay and Baxter's side, or pissed that Drew was being such a dick. I tried to take a deep breath and simply write off Drew's rudeness on the phone as worry for Bax. Which I hoped very sincerely was unfounded. He was, after all, an old, old man in dog years.

Feeling worried for Baxter, my anxiety altogether supplanting the butterflies I'd had over the very exciting and imminent first date with someone I really liked, I tried to put it out of my mind.

The next morning, I was on my way back over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco because my date with Patrick—the kind and funny and generous and miraculously single and not at all an egotistical womanizer, as I'd feared—had gone that well, when I picked up another message from Drew. Baxter had died in the night, at the vet after all, though he didn't say how Baxter had gotten there. I couldn't help but feel that there was a tone of recrimination in Drew's voice, as though my inability to take him to the vet equaled an unwillingness to save his life. A life which, I was sad to learn, wasn't salvageable.

I continued to walk Matilda for the remainder of the week and then submitted my final invoice to Drew for services rendered, bath included. And he never paid. Despite numerous phone calls and emails, a check for the $150 he owed never appeared in my mailbox. I felt petty worrying over that amount of money, especially in the wake of Baxter's death, which he was surely torn up over. I was, too. But that sum, however small, made an enormous difference in my ability to pay my own bills. Then there was the principle of it, which I tried not to dwell on. I contemplated taking him to small claims
court and then quickly abandoned the notion; it wasn't worth the hassle and the bad juju and would probably cost me more than he owed in the first place.