Bad Dog Read Free

smiled at me, ambled between my legs, and flopped onto the ground with that full-throated yogic breath release I’ve come to know so well. It’s like they’re exhaling all the bad vibrations in the world.
    The owner was a rambling, friendly guy with about a hundred kids, and my wife got to asking him what the dogs were like.
    “Let’s just say,” he said, “you have to include them. They don’t like to be left out.”
    Color me similar.
    Gloria claims she got my permission to look for a Bernese of our own. I was still swimming in moonshine at this point, which didn’t help my memory, but I’d hate to think she took advantage of this for her own schemes. She told me later she just wanted a friend in the house for a change. I was home with my wife very rarely, even when I was home with my wife, if you get what I mean.
    “I want a puppy,” she supposedly said.
    “That’s okay by me,” I theoretically answered. “What kind?”
    “A Bernese mountain dog. They’re very sweet.”
    “As big as that one in Vermont?”
    “Oh, no,” she lied to my face. “The females are much smaller.”
    “Okey dokey,” I hypothetically concluded, cracking open another Mickey’s Wide Mouth.
    At the time I shared the prejudice—common to co-op boards, landlords, and other fools the world over—that smaller dogs are somehow more domesticated. Nothing could be furtherfrom the truth. Big dogs might seem like more trouble, but they tend to be lazy and fat. Small dogs are like the most annoying runt you ever knew in high school, plus fangs.
    As their name implies, purebreds tend to come from breeders, and breeders are a class apart. When it comes to deciding who is worthy of their spawn, the best ones are as selective as the Harvard Admissions Committee. More selective, actually—Harvard doesn’t do home inspections.
    “How’s it going?” I’d ask Gloria by phone from the Marriott, watching the Mondavi swoosh against the bathroom water glass.
    “Not too good,” she’d say.
    “What’s the problem this time? We don’t know Dick Cheney? We’re not on
American Idol
?”
    “It’s the yard. We don’t have a fenced-in yard.”
    “We live in the New York area, for fuck’s sake. Nobody has a yard.”
    “And we never had a Bernese before. That’s a problem, too.”
    “First time for everything,” I fumed. “What’re we, supposed to get our dog from a pet store?”
    Sick silence as we thought about where pet store puppies come from. If you haven’t heard of puppy mills I won’t kill your buzz by describing them. Just imagine the saddest song you’ve ever heard and add barking.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “The last one made me fill out this four-page application and give references. I had to swear to feed the dog organic liver. We had an easier time getting the mortgage.”
    “What’s so great about this dog anyway? It’s just a stupid pet.”
    “I have to go,” said my wife. “The other phone’s ringing.”
    It was only after she hung up I remembered we didn’t have another phone.
    Eventually, she did find a breeder up in Rochester who agreed to part with a precious pet-quality Bernese for two thousand dollars. That this breeder was not in the first rank was confirmed a few years later when I mentioned her name to one of the champion Berner owners backstage at the Westminster Dog Show in Madison Square Garden.
    Pursed lips. “You have to be careful,” she said.
    But still, it wasn’t a puppy mill and it’s not like we had options.
    My approach to marriage has been to give myself one
no
per year, whether I need it or not. That’s how I show who’s in charge. I was this close to hauling out that
no
after we wandered into the kitchen of the breeder’s roomy suburban ranch house and I heard a loud
thump!
and saw an abominable snowman slam against the back screen door—closed, mercifully—stretching its massive paws six feet in the air as it tried to smash the door in and go about its evil work.
    I