Tag Archives: Steve

What a good dog

I’m sitting here writing at my kitchen table and my dog, Steve, is just staring at me. He’s in the living room, he’s sitting on the couch, and his head is propped up at the armrest so he can stare at me without really expending any effort. I wonder what he’s thinking about, because he’s always staring at me.

I’ll be watching TV and I won’t be thinking about my dog at all, and then for whatever reason I’ll look his way, and he’ll be lying on his back on the floor, staring at me upside down. I’m not thinking about him, but he’s looking right at me. And so, no, I don’t know if that means he’s thinking about me. I can’t tell what’s going through anybody else’s head, let alone a dog’s. But when I’m staring directly at somebody or something, I’m usually thinking of them, if not actively, then my mind is at least making its mental registry.

Sometimes I’ll get up in the morning and I’ll be rushing around, trying to get out of the house on time. Right before I go, I’ll take Steve for a walk and then feed him breakfast. But, and he does this a lot, if I’m not there, he won’t eat. I won’t come back until much later in the afternoon and when I go in the kitchen, his bowl is still full from earlier in the day. And he comes in right behind me, because all he does is follow me around and stare at me, and then he starts chowing down. I’m like, were you waiting for me? Please, Steve, go ahead and eat without me, I won’t be offended.

And even that doesn’t make any sense, because while he’s nothing but a gentleman when it comes to his dog food, if I let my guard down at the wrong time, I’ll look over and, yeah, he’s staring at me still, but from under the kitchen table. That’s Steve-speak for, I just did something bad, and I’m hiding so that when you find out what I did, you won’t be able to see me.

Except that I can totally see you Steve, and you’re making it even more obvious, just constantly staring at me. I always wonder, when he busts into the garbage to start eating old aluminum foil or browned banana peels, is he still thinking about me? Is his constant eye contact really as affectionate as I’m making it out to be in my head? Or is he spending all of that time looking at me for plotting purposes, not wanting to miss the smallest opportunity to sneak behind my back and cause some destruction?

And now that I think about it, the whole not eating breakfast thing, what else are you eating, Steve? Do you have like a secret stash of garbage somewhere? I don’t want to give him too much credit, but he’s showed feats of intelligence before. Like after we realized that he was getting in the garbage, we bought a new can that closed automatically, the one where you step on a pedal to open it up. Steve learned how to work it. For months I had no idea what was going on, and then I caught him in the act, pressing his paws on the pedal and sticking his head in to bob for treasure. And when I threw that garbage can out and bought a new one that locked shut, I came home from work that day and found the entire trashcan on its side, dragged across the room.

So either he loves me, or he’s just really, really interested in what I’m up to, probably for some sort of selfish game. Or maybe it’s both. Maybe he loves me, but he also loves garbage equally. It would make sense. One time he broke through the barrier preventing him from going upstairs, he dragged the bathroom trashcan onto my bed and rolled around in all of my dirty Q-tips and used floss picks.

That was the worst, because when I came home that night, Steve was sitting on the couch like everything was cool. So I came over and started petting him, telling him how good of a dog he was. I wonder what went through his head, like wow, I really did a good job here, he really loves it when I get upstairs and make a huge mess in his bedroom. And I’m just like, “Yeah, good boy Steve, what a good dog.”

Where’s my buddy?

We’re going away on vacation tomorrow, and so we had to drop the dog off at the boarder earlier this afternoon. Generally I think of my dog as a pretty dumb animal, like when I call him he rarely comes over, and I’ve never been able to get him to master any sorts of tricks besides “sit” and “give me your paw.” But he’s somehow developed this doggy superpower, that whenever we’re about to actually leave the house to go anywhere, he knows it. Before we ever even have a chance to make a move like we’re going to get our stuff ready to leave, he’s going crazy.

At first I attributed it to association. Whenever we go away, we inevitably bring our suitcases and bags downstairs. And so I thought, all right, maybe he just associates the bags with leaving, with getting in the car, and he gets all excited. But it’s got to be something more nuanced. Because a few days ago I went in the basement to look for our suitcases. And there was no reaction. He knew we weren’t leaving yet, and so he was just lying there on the couch, oblivious to the world and his surroundings.

But last weekend we brought the dog with us to visit my parents. After the initial surge of energy and excitement that always comes along with seeing a bunch of new faces, he quickly died down and commandeered both doggy-beds my parents have in the kitchen for their golden retrievers.

He’s pretty mellow. He doesn’t beg for food and, aside from occasionally shifting positions, he’s content to just hang out and watch everybody. But then at some point toward the end of the night, I looked at my wife, I made a motion to my watch as if to say, it’s kind of late, we should think about maybe making an exit soon.

And the dog knew. He got up and he started getting all antsy, gnawing at his leash, whining and crying. It was the same exact reaction when he knows that we’re going somewhere. And I’d barely said anything at all. Was he just sitting there watching us? Waiting for some sort of a subtle cue to get up and start acting crazy?

And then today, I dropped him off at the border. All I had to do was take out a Zip-lock back, as in, OK, I’m going to put some food in a bag for you so you can eat your own food for the next several days. And that was all it took. He started flipping out.

What’s really weird is, the boarder, definitely one of his favorite spots, a big space where all the dogs get to hang out in a pack, it shares the same building as one of his most hated places, the vet. And I’m telling you, he can tell where we’re going. I’ll park the car and take him toward that building and, even though there’s really no way that he should be able to divine which room inside is his destination, he does. If it’s time for a checkup or a vaccination, he’s pulling away, he’s struggling. But to the Dog House? Man, he can’t get inside fast enough.

Whenever I drop him off for a few days, there’s always a little surplus time where I have to live in this house without our dog. I can’t explain it, but it just feels dead in here. I went out to run an errand and when I came back, I instinctively called out, “Where’s my buddy?” even though before I had a chance to finish my sentence, my brain was like, oh yeah, he’s not here, I’m alone.

And I don’t get it. I don’t get how people live like that, without dogs to greet you when you come home, or to hide from you after they’ve gotten into the trash and made a huge mess strewing garbage all over the living room. Even though the space in between the two couches isn’t really a good hiding spot. And if you’re in there, I already know that something’s up. And so you can figure out when we’re going on a trip, but you can’t figure out how not to stay out of the trash?

The soda elitist

Last weekend we had a bunch of people over for dinner. I picked up a few two-liter bottles of soda, which, I don’t know, I couldn’t really figure out how many I should have bought, I had no idea how much soda people were planning on drinking. I’d say in total, about one and a half liters went, but it was like half a liter from each bottle. And so, as the rest of the week went by, I’d stare at these bottles, wanting to dump them all down the drain, but my roommate insisted on keeping them around, “I’ll drink them!” he said.

And maybe he had a glass the next day, but no more than a glass, because the days passed and I started to keep track of the soda level inside each bottle. Day after day, it wasn’t going down, I told Bill, I was like, “Hey man, we really have to get rid of this soda,” and he was like, “Why? Just leave it there, it doesn’t matter,” but I tried to argue, I was like, “Bill, that stuff’s getting flatter every day, nobody’s ever going to drink it, let’s just dump it, what is it, like three dollars? Come on, you couldn’t pay me three dollars to drink a cup of flat soda.”

But I think I pushed a little too far, now Bill was starting to push back just for the sake of pushing back, which I don’t get, not everything has to be a huge power struggle, but still, he averted his eyes, I think he might have called me a “soda elitist,” which I actually took as a compliment, because yes, when it comes to soft drinks, I think you have to be exacting in your standards. Otherwise why spend money at all on bottled drinks? If you don’t care about the carbonation, you might as well just buy packets of Kool-Aid, it’s significantly cheaper.

We were at a stalemate. I started buying new soda, smaller sized bottles. I’d keep them nice and cold in the fridge. On Wednesday night I ordered some pizzas and asked Bill, “Hey man, help yourself. You want a nice cold Coke to go with that?” It was the Mexican kind, the stuff that comes in the glass “hecho en Mexico” bottles, real sugar, delicious. “Yeah man, that sounds great.” And so I popped one open and extended my arm before laying down, “So, uh, I guess this means we can get rid of those big guys over there, right?”

“Actually,” he recoiled his hand, “That’s a good point. You have the bottle, I’m going to work on those leftovers.” What a jerk. Just admit it when you’re wrong. And he went over to the counter, the bottle had all of these little condensation drops on the inside from having not been opened in so long, when he opened the top, and I was listening, there wasn’t even the slightest sound of any air escaping. That soda had to have been completely flat for a few days now.

But he filled up his glass with ice, I asked him for a glass also, for my fresh Coke, I wanted him to see the bubbles dancing out of the top, when I took that first sip, I made this exaggerated face, like they tickling my nose. “Ahh,” that ridiculous refreshing sound after I took my first sip, to which Bill offered the same thing with his sip, but I could tell by the look on his face that it was gross, he kind of puckered up as he tried to choke it down.

But what came next, it was probably the low point of our friendship. I was like a slice and a half deep into dinner, and I had just taken a huge sip from my drink. While I had the rest of the pizza in my hand, Bill grabbed the two liter bottle and poured the sickly contents of that expired plastic bottle right into my cup, right on top of my good soda. I still had probably more than twenty-five percent of the cup filled with the good stuff, and it was ruined, the rest of my drink spoiled by Bill polluting it with his week-old poison.

I turned my head and said, “Get that shit out of my face,” placing extra emphasis on the word shit, just to really drive home that point, like hey Bill, that was a real dick move buddy, you want to play games with your own soda? Fine. But you’ve totally crossed a line here. And he just kind of smiled at me, “What? Just giving you a little refill,” before taking a huge bite out of his slice, the pizza that I bought for him.

I went into a rage. I grabbed that bottle, I ran to the sink, I started emptying it out down the drain. There were still the other two bottles, and Bill made a move toward the kitchen, like what was he going to do, try and stop me? I grabbed a knife out of the block and stabbed a few holes right in the bottom. “What the hell man? That’s my soda!” he screamed as I placed the leaking bottles from the counter into the kitchen sink.

Bill looked like he was going to make a move, like he was going to push me or something, and so, I don’t know, I guess I was a little more agitated than I thought. I held out the knife still in my hands, like go ahead and try something. Not that I had any intentions of actually stabbing him. The whole situation had steered out of control. And that’s when I screamed out, “Steve!” because while we were fighting in the kitchen, my dog Steve had quietly jumped off the couch and made a move for the pizza. And he got it, it only took him like three or four bites, and he polished off everything.

Tell Frank I say hi

If you see Frank, tell him I said hi. Tell him, “Hey Frank, I just ran into Rob, and he says hi.” And then give me a call and tell me if he says anything back. Like maybe Frank’s going to be like, “Oh, that’s really nice. Tell Rob I say hi also!” And then I’ll text you back, I’ll say something like, “Tell Frank I say thanks for saying hi. Ask him how he’s doing.” Just ask him. Just be like, “Frank, I just got a text back from Rob, he says thanks for saying hi back. He wants know how you’re doing.”

Let me know what he says. I’m assuming it’ll be something like, “I’m doing great. Ask Rob how he’s doing,” to which I’ll have you tell him, “Rob says he’s also doing great,” onto which I’ll change topics slightly, tell him, “Rob wants to know if you’ve seen Riddick.” If I know Frank like I think I know Frank, the answer’s going to be something like, “Rob, Frank says he hasn’t seen Riddick yet, although he liked Pitch Black when he was in high school.” I need you tell him, “Frank, Rob wants me to tell you to do yourself a favor, to go and see Riddick. Rob says he saw it last week and it was awesome. Even though he saw it already, he said that he’s more than happy to go see it again with you next weekend.”

And then I think I know how things are going to play out from there, let me know what he says, because I’ll bet you anything it’s going to be something like, “Well, tell Rob that I’d love to go to the movies with him, but you know, with the wife and kids, it’s really not as easy to get out like it was when we were younger.” Frank’s always saying stuff like that, like, “Another time maybe,” or, “Yeah, we should make plans to do something sometime soon.”

I’ll be like, “How’s next week?” and he’ll be like, “To make plans to do something?” and I’ll say, “No, to do something. This is the making plans.” He’ll give me some nonsense, last time it was something like, “Well, next week I might be able to make plans for something in the future sometime, but I don’t know. You know how it is. Wife. Kids. But hey, let’s think about maybe calling each other up someday, maybe we’ll eventually figure something out.”

So tell him, tell Frank, “Frank, look, Rob wants you to know that he knows where you’re headed with all of this. He says not to worry about it. He hired a sitter. He told his sister that your wife can come over and hang out with her. Also, Rob says that he bought two tickets for Friday night. It’s Riddick. It’s IMAX. Look, I don’t want to get in the middle here, but you should totally go for it. I mean, a free night out? Not having to worry about the wife and kids? IMAX? That sounds too good to be true.”

Come on, just tell him that. Well, if the conversation gets that far, just please, tell him about the tickets, about the sitter, remind him that we were supposed to go see Pearl Jam back in 2009, and that even after I bought the tickets, he texted me a month before the show, “Is it too late to back out? I think it’s my sister-in-law’s birthday that night.” And those were not easy tickets to get, no. Just, you don’t have to mention Pearl Jam, but keep it in your head. I guess use it if you have to.

Exactly, if it gets that far. Start by telling him I said hi. Eventually get to Riddick. It’s a ten-fifteen show, which, I know, it’s kind of late for a dude with kids, but it’s an all-night sitter, I found her on craigslist. We could even go out afterward. Like, we could really go out, bars, clubs, everything. My sister could take his wife out too, if she’s into it.

All right, well, tell him I said hi. Tell him “hey” for me.

Hey Steve! If you see Shaun, tell him I say “What’s up,” and also, tell him, “Shaun, Rob wants me to remind you to tell Frank that he says hi, and something about Riddick and maybe Pearl Jam, he didn’t give me all of the details, but he says you’ll know what I’m talking about. Here, he wrote it down. Do you want me to read it to you? Do you want me to come with you and read it to Frank? Can you just give me Frank’s new phone number to give to Rob? He says he promises no more late night phone calls. Just tell him hey. Tell everyone Rob says hi, it’s been too long, we all really need to get together soon.”

My dog Steve

I try to be a good dog owner. I really do. But my dog is such an asshole. His name is Steve. We got him while we were living in Ecuador. We lived in a really rural mountain town where packs of stray dogs were constantly wandering the streets. There were puppies everywhere. Maybe one out of every two hundred puppies actually made it to be three months old. All of the little kids in town would keep the puppies and play with them until they got to be too big, and then they would toss them out on the street and find a new puppy to play with. This little girl who lived next door to us had this puppy and, after about a month, her dad told her it couldn’t stay in the house anymore, so she asked us to take care of it. So we did. That wasn’t Steve, that was Gladys. Gladys didn’t make it back to the US. Let’s just say that veterinarian care in rural Ecuador isn’t exactly what it is here in the States.

So Gladys died and all of our neighbors thought we were crazy for getting so upset. What’s the big deal? There are puppies everywhere. Look. Here. And the very next day after I had to put Gladys in a sack and drag her to the woods and actually dig a deep enough hole to bury her, one of our neighbors showed up at our house with this … thing. It looked a hamster. It was maybe the size of a softball. It was covered in fleas. Like, I thought his fur was grey until I looked closer and saw just swarms of tiny insects living off of this thing’s skin. We didn’t really want it, but this thing would have survived maybe another hour or two if we didn’t adopt it right then.

So we named him Steve. He actually looks like a Steve. I know that’s a crazy thing to say, but if you saw him, you’d agree. But like I said, Steve is also a huge asshole. He’s not mean or anything. He’s probably one of the friendliest dogs you’ll ever meet in your life. The problem is that he has way too much energy. Like, he never gets tired, ever. And he’s big. When we first got him, he would fall asleep in my sneakers. But now he’s pushing eighty pounds. And he’s lean, all muscle. Seriously, sometimes I don’t know who is walking who when he’s on a leash. He’s energetic, big, and he’s also pretty intelligent. That’s to say, he knows how to open doors and get inside places and make us think that he’s a good dog just long enough for us to let our guards down for a second, so he can then surprise us and wreak some havoc.

He’s intelligent and completely remorseless. I think that generations of street breeding have resulted in Steve, literally, the fittest to have survived on the streets of Ecuador, where so few dogs make it past puppyhood, where only the strongest, most resourceful, most willing to eat anything dogs have a chance at seeing another day. And I’m not talking about mean. Mean dogs get put down. Seriously, someone will just put out a bowl of poison soup and that’s it. Successful street dogs have to make humans think that they’re friendly, all while waiting for the perfect opportunity for you to look the other way while it jumps up and steals an ice cream cone right out of your hand.

Steve knows he’s not supposed to eat our stuff. Steve knows that he’s not supposed to jump on the furniture. He knows all of these but he doesn’t care. He cares about getting caught, and that’s it. We’ve totally given up on keeping him off the couch. It was the most losing fight I’ve ever been a part of in my entire life. He would jump on the couch. I would push him off and tell him no. He would wait ten minutes and jump on again. This pattern repeated itself, without pause, for about two months. Are you surprised I gave up? I’m surprised I lasted that long. Steve could have kept it up for the rest of his life.

He eats anything. It’s in his DNA. When I take him out, he has his nose constantly to the ground, ready to chomp at anything he’s lucky enough to get close to. He eats grass until he throws up. He rips apart and eats a whole rope dog toy in a day, those rope toys that normal dogs play with for years. One time we bought him a rope toy and the next day it was missing. Disappeared. A few days later he starts gagging like he’s going to throw up, and the whole toy finally came out, like he had swallowed it whole. And he just starts going right back at it again, determined to have it pass through his entire digestive system.

He tricks us all the time. Twice now he’s acted fine without any behavioral problems for a week or two. So we think, OK, it’s about time that we can leave him out of his cage when we’re not around. I always feel bad locking him up while I’m at work, so it was a relief to have him be able to at least hang out on the couch. And for the first four days or so he was fine. But then I came home one day and he had totally destroyed the couch. Stuffing everywhere. Back to the cage buddy. But then after a few months he started behaving again, so I figured I’d give him another shot at freedom. I really liked the way I’d come home and he’d be at the door all jumping up and wagging his tail. But again, after four days or so, I come downstairs one morning and he’s sitting next to a pile of debris. He had jumped on the table and found my wallet and all the cash I had in my pockets, and he made confetti out of all of my credit cards, my driver’s license, my money. And I start yelling at him, but he probably did it hours ago. He didn’t remember. I was yelling at him and he’s just wagging his tail.

I’m pretty sure that, somewhere along his family tree, one of his descendents started to become undomesticated. They strayed just a little too far from civilization and realized that they could survive without being completely obedient to humans. So Steve isn’t completely feral, but he’s just feral enough that when he’s sitting next to me on the couch, and I call his name, and he realizes that I’m not giving out treats, and he completely ignores me, I’m wondering, what is this wild animal that I’ve let inside of my home? What is he capable of? What kind of trouble is Steve the Destroyer going to get into next time? Because there’s definitely going to be a next time. I can’t be totally vigilant. It’s too much work. He’ll just wait me out every time.

I try to be a good dog owner. I used to be really confident that, if I were just consistent with my behavior towards Steve, if I just tried really, really hard, I’d somehow will him into submission. I’d tell people, “No, he’s getting better. Steve! Stop it! Stop! Steve! He’s getting better.” But now I’m just resigned to the fact that he’s probably only going to be a good dog when he gets so old that all he wants to do is sit around and sleep. And guessing by the resourcefulness of Steve’s lineage, that’s probably not going to be for another twenty years or so.