In reality, I was deeply dog-less. Until I was six, I had no pets at all, despite trying to catch rabbits in a net at the park and lure turtles with Sun Chips at other people’s country houses. My first (and worst) pet was a newt that choked to death on a bad worm. Next came a hairless cat my mother bought on Greene Street. Both were poor substitutes for the dog I wanted but couldn’t have. We didn’t have a proper home. We lived in what was essentially one big room, on Broadway. And all my promises to care for the dog were futile: I wasn’t even allowed to go outside alone.
My parents’ childhood dogs loomed large in our family mythology. My mother had been the proud owner of Cindy, a shepherd-collie mix with serious aggression issues and a pathological obsession with Ritz crackers. She was tied to a tree all day on the lawn outside my mother’s neo-Tudor house. At the age of six, my mother was both her captor and her protector. One of the first sentences I learned was “Cindy was a bad dog.”
A few states away, my father had General George Armstrong Custer (General for short), a runt dachshund whose claim to fame was that he’d once eaten an entire eighteen-pound ham. For days thereafter, General’s gut dragged along the ground. When it was really hot, he liked to run to the riverbank and roll in dead eels. He survived a German-shepherd attack in which he lost part of an ear. He died at eighteen, curled beneath my grandfather’s desk.
Both these dogs seemed to me like outcasts, kooks, pains in the ass who the adults secretly wished would just succumb to their own vices already. And so I concluded that dogs were not man’s best friend but, rather, the mischievous sidekicks of misunderstood children.
When I was fifteen, I took the box-of-puppies fantasy into my own hands. Walking down the main drag of Brooklyn Heights, where we now lived, I stopped to pet a tan mutt, the mascot of an animal-rescue group that had set up a booth at the corner of Montague and Hicks. As I scratched the scarred head of a sleepy “chow mix,” the group explained its mission: to end animal homelessness in our borough.
“My parents won’t let me have a dog,” I said.
“Well, maybe you can foster.”
I don’t remember exactly who the person in charge of the booth was. There were several girls and a man. The situation was so oddly traumatic that in my mind the man is played by the character actor Elias Koteas, of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” fame. I do remember, though, that what came next was a very bad afternoon. It involved my dreams coming true and the empty dread that often follows that experience. I climbed into a van with Elias Koteas, who told me that there was a pit-bull mother dead (in a box!) in a parking lot near the Gowanus Canal and three puppies that desperately needed a foster home. As he drove me out of my neighborhood, away from the bagel shops and the squash players, and into industrial Brooklyn, I suddenly recalled my mother’s countless warnings about “climbing into vans with strangers.” Somehow, this situation seemed outside the bounds of her edict. Just think of the puppies—three of them, he had said, their bodies cold, starving. In the van, one of his colleagues, a silent frizzy-haired woman, filled dog bowls with dirty water. I could hear it sloshing as we rumbled down Atlantic Avenue.
It was dusk by the time we reached the parking lot. It had started to drizzle. Elias Koteas told me to follow him, and I did, to a shipping crate in the corner of the lot. I peered in. The mother wasn’t dead. She lifted her head with tremendous effort, sad-eyed and gaunt, like Fantine, in “Les Misérables.” A mother in a desperate situation. Maybe that’s why she didn’t even growl when I reached in and took her babies, one by one.
They were barely puppies. More like kidney beans, slick and cool, eyes still sealed shut. They whimpered, but quietly, no louder than baby birds. Elias Koteas urged me back to the van. He told me to buy bottles and a heating pad and “make sure they’re warm all night.” I was dropped off near a subway stop.
by Lena Dunham, New Yorker | Read more:
