DOGS: Bad Dogs, Bad Dogs-- Whatcha Gonna Do, Whatcha Gonna Do...

It's no secret that I love "COPS." I love COPS even more than I love Gilbert & Sullivan-- and I may be the only person in the whole goddamn world who can say that sentence in all seriousness. Give me a choice between a night at the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and a marathon of "COPS," I would be hard-pressed to choose those expertly-trained voices over a couple hours of baton-bashing, dumbass-tasing fun.

I mean-- a free night of Gilbert & Sullivan might sway me-- but opera tickets are expensive, and COPS is free and out on bail.

My wife is a "COPS" (and G&S) convert, I'm happy to say-- and I didn't even have to resort to the last-ditch tactic of cuffing and stuffing her... on the sofa in front of the TV on a Saturday night. She went willingly. Maybe she gets all misty-eyed and remembers the times when we were first long-distance dating and I would be watching "COPS" at my place in suburban Philadelphia, and she would be watching "COPS" at her place in Pittsburgh and we would discuss the various foot pursuits and felony car stops with intense sexual longing.

Like most couples do.

One of the things that my wife likes to poke some justified fun at are the police pontifications that inevitably occur at the beginning of each segment.

They're unscripted, but they might as well be, because they're all the fucking same:

I always knew I wanted to be a cop.

I got into law enforcement 'cuz I wanted to help people.

My dad's a cop, his dad was a cop, my uncles and cousins are all cops-- my wife's a dispatcher, my grandmother was a cop-- kicked the shit out of Al Capone once-- and my dog's a K-9 cop. My gerbil's a sergeant on the tactical entry unit of the SWAT team the next county over.

You meet a lot of interesting people in this job.

Every day you come into work, you never know what's going to happen.

It's that last one that gets me every time. Pal, nobody knows what the fuck is going to happen when they come into work. Yes, you might be getting mooned by a busload of drunken frat assholes from the local community college one minute and be arresting some banged-up hooker with tit-rings and anal leakage the next-- but, like, last week, I went to "Staples" and both of the black-and-white photocopiers were broken. Not only that, but the line at the post office was nine people long, and I had to take my bulk mailing in the next day, because, well, I just couldn't wait that long.

I mean-- I sure didn't know that was going to happen.

On Wednesday night, my wife and I got a puppy. Her name is Molly. She's very cute. God takes great pains to make puppies extra special cute so you don't beat their heads in with their empty food bowl when they hot-shit all over your brand new hand-woven oriental hallway runner.

I admit that I don't know what being a cop is like, but I suspect that, judging from the opening monologues diligently recited by police officers the country over that it's a lot like being the owner of a puppy.

"Every day, you never know what's going to happen."

Fuckin' aye, Ossifer. After a day or two of being a Puppy Daddy, I feel that shit. Hard. At 1:45 in the morning, I have also been known to step in it, bleary-eyed, on our bedroom floor.

On Thursday, I popped in on our little pup three times, to see how she was doing. We keep our veteran dog gated in the kitchen, because he has a nasty tendency to scratch/eat through doors when left alone, and so we thought we'd try gating our rookie dog with him until such time as we could procure a crate to crate-train the little Molly Monster. When I arrived home for Check-up #1, I entered the house and it was very, very quiet.

You never know what's gonna happen...

As I made my way to the kitchen, I saw one big, gray head in the kitchen doorway, above the top of the gate. Ah, hello, Finley, you good, old dog. But there was no sweet, small, blonde head to be seen. Finley was alone in the kitchen, the gate was still up.

"Oh, my God," I thought to myself, "she's dead."

And so, as a cop would, I cleared room after room. Kitchen: clear! Dining room: clear! Living room: clear! I started up the stairs one by one, smelling something unfortunate. As I stepped on the fifth or six stair, I saw that little blonde head poking out. And then I saw her little chocolate muffin treats all over our rug. Oh, and a pee-pee lake in the office. She had pushed against the gate with her head until it made enough of a space for her to crawl under.

The second time I came home, she showed Daddy her new trick: vaulting clear over the gate like an Olympic hurdle star.

When you own a puppy, you come home and take stock. The snow shovel is on the ground. There's a wet spot on the couch. The rug's mussed up. The bathroom door is ajar. The old dog looks very disturbed. A sweater is on the floor. It smells like a nursing home. It's time to play everybody's favorite game: "Find That Shitheap."

Predictability, like the ho-hum, hum-drum of the cubicle/office/non-profit administration world, is gone-- at least, until she's housebroken.

Until then, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do....

Molly

Now we've done it.

After we met Knucklehead, the obsessive-compulsive, penis-vacuuming Beagle, I was somewhat disheartened and disenfranchised with the whole dog-adopting thing. Then, on Saturday morning, the phone rang. It was the dog adoption people. I wanted to ask them if this new dog had any Liberace-like tendencies-- a gold sequins dog collar, for example, but I held my tongue and listened patiently to the description.

Female. Golden in color. Short statured. Shy at first. 8 months old. Cockapoolador.

My wife and I drove downtown later that afternoon, leaving Finley at home, to meet this new girl. They said the previous owners gave her up for adoption because they felt the dog "needed more space."

"A.K.A. 'Hi, we got a puppy and it was really cute but now we don't know what the hell to do with it' the adoption agent helpfully translated."

"Needs more space" is something you say to a soon-to-be-former significant other when what you really want to say is, "Get the fuck away from me, preferably out of my zipcode." After meeting this dog, I cannot imagine anyone breaking up with her, let alone not wanting to be in her zipcode.

She was indeed shy at first, very, very wary of my wife and I-- probably because of both of our prominent noses and vintage eyeglasses. I mean-- imagine how all of that looks to a dog. She hid prodigiously behind the adoption center Ford Econoline van, parked inside the gated, pavement-covered area where we were introduced to the dog.

"Her name is 'Miley,'" the adoption agent said, rolling her eyes. "I can barely bring myself to say it-- I'm sure the idiots named her after Miley Cyrus." I'm sure, too. Them and their eight-year-old daughter who promised to clean up all its shit with her fingers crossed behind her back.

That didn't come out right-- nevermind.

Slowly, slowly, Miley warmed up to us. After ten minutes, she crept up onto my lap and stayed there. Until, that is, she started pawing gently at my chest and I rolled back onto the pavement, where she beached herself on top of my chest.

"Oh, man-- you're done," the adoption agent said, smiling, as she walked past us. "You are totally done. She's got you good." Two licks of my chin finished me off.

It wasn't a done deal, for real, though, until we could drive back to our house, throw Finley in the car, and drag his dumpy, gray ass down to the shelter to meet Miley. If he bit her face off, or if she treated his penis like a gasoline syphoning implement: no dice. But the two dogs when put together were largely indifferent to each other. Miley was definitely curious about Finley, and Finley played it with a relatively cool air.

Cool, except for the fact that he began foaming at the mouth like a heterosexual shark inside the Playboy mansion's hot-tub. The froth was as thick as shaving cream and it stuck to his beard and dripped down like stalagtites. I'd never seen anything like it. If it wasn't for his month-old rabies tag, I probably would have had him shot down, just to be safe. I guess he really, really liked what he was seeing-- or smelling. But there wasn't all that much interaction. Yes, the traditional nose-up-the-asshole bit was ritually done, and done, but not much else. She got in his face a couple times, and he did not growl as he had done with Knucklehead. He just, you know, foamed on her head a little bit. But that's what siblings do. Right?

He didn't even mind terribly when Miley climbed back into the relative safety of my lap, and that surprised me. I looked over at my wife. The adoption agent came back.

"Is this a match?" she asked.

"It's a match," I said. I said it before doing the silent check-in with Mrs. Apron, but I couldn't help myself. It was the first time I've ever been in love with two females at the same time in the same space.

"But we've got to do something about that name," my wife said, "it's awful."

"Well," I replied, rubbing the dog's incredibly soft, velvet ears, "I think we can very easily transition her from 'Miley' to 'Molly.' And that's an acceptable, very serviceable dog's name." My wife smiled, knowing just what I meant.

When I used to work for a non-profit that processed loan applications for people with disabilities, one of our board members, a 4'11" elderly blind woman named Noreen had a seeing eye dog named "Molly." When I knew Noreen, she had just gotten Molly after her former seeing eye dog of fifteen years had passed away. He was an excellent dog. Molly, a puppy, was a "goof" as Noreen said. I remember the first time I met Noreen. It was at a board meeting. This board had never gotten together in person before-- all votes and discussions were held over teleconference or by email. The entire board had assembled and Noreen was the only person who hadn't yet arrived. 10 minutes after the meeting began, the doors opened and there was this tiny little woman with a big ass, squinty eyes, and a silly looking black lab, its tongue dangling out of the side of its mouth and its eyes bugging out. Noreen stood there for a moment while everybody looked at her.

"Hi..." she said, in a squeaky, funny little balloon-air voice, "I'm Noreen...." She stood there awkwardly and struggled for a moment, I think, to think of something interesting to say. "And... I'm blind!"

Our Molly will come home on Wednesday. She's being spayed on Tuesday, and, while I feel sorry that she has to have surgery, I'm also relieved. We had a crazy lesbian health teacher who loved to regale us with stories about holding her dog over a vertically-stablized tampon and plopping the dog down on it. I'm happy to admit that I'm just not man enough for those kind of antics, though I'm sure they would make for great blog fodder.

I'm confident that Molly will not wreck our house, or our marriage. She might wreck the car, or the sofa-- but not our lives. I think she and Finley will get along just fine-- she may even make a new man out of him, although I rather like the old man.

I also am pretty sure that Molly will be a little bit of a goof and, dare I say, a knucklehead herself, and I'm also pretty sure that she'll be a great dog.

Meeting Knucklehead

What do you call a malnourished, hyperactive, A.D.D. one-year-old who wriggles around like a worm, crawls under cabinets like a cat, and goes to the bathroom wherever and whenever it pleases?

If it's a beagle, you call it "Knucklehead."

There's an old song by Tom Waits called, "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You." It goes like this,

"Well, I hope that I don't fall in love with you.
'Cause fallin' in love just makes me blue."

I know, I know-- rhyming "you" with "blue" isn't exactly W. S. Gilbert territory, but it's a great song, about the rough, down-n-out people Tom Waits knows so well, and loves almost against his will. The song's about people, of course, eyeing each other in a bar, drinking and smoking, and missing the chance to connect, and, even though it probably would have ended in disaster, regretting it forever. The song, though, could just as easily have been about setting eyes on a dog. After hearing a brief summary of this beagle on the phone from the adoption agency on Monday, I knew one thing very, very clearly: I should not, under any circumstances, go down and meet it.

Yesterday, I met the dog that I quickly named "Knucklehead." He bounded into the smelly, kennel-filled room as if there were a lit firecracker up its ass. Nose diligently to the ground, in typical beagle posture, it proceeded to vacuum every square inch of the room with its nose, barely acknowledging my presence. Until I said, "Hey, you knucklehead!" His head perked up and he pounced at my knees and immediately fell onto his back and lay there until his belly was appropriately rubbed. His eyes rolled back into his head as his rear legs twitched with delight.

"Well, you two kids have fun," the adoption agent said to me, smiling, as she left the room, closing the door behind her.

"God, I hope this fucking sucker takes that crazy-ass beagle," I'm sure she said to herself.

I didn't know exactly what to do with the dog, who was now standing on its hind legs, trying very hard to get at a fat black cat who was in a locked kennel marked "QUARANTINE."

"Uh... no! You don't want to go in there, Knucklehead," I said as my eyes scanned the room for something to distract it. I found a little tug-of-war knotted rope toy.

"Here!" I cried, "look at this fucking thing!"

Knucklehead turned his distinguished nose and brow in my direction and his eyes lit up like a nuclear winter. I'm 6 foot tall, and I swear to God this little dog leapt right up to my hairline as I jerked the rope-toy up into the air. He proceeded to do another series of Olympian vaults as Quarantine Kitty watched him warily from inside her forced confinement.

"Sonofabitch! You can jump!" I yelled as he latched his jaws onto the toy, his tail fiercely wagging. I looked at Knucklehead, obsessively chewing on the rope-toy and I thought two things, "Uh-oh, is this love?" and "Charles Schulz never set eyes on a fucking real beagle in his life."

"No!" I said and, immediately, is mouth opened. He stared at me and said, "NO? I'M A BEAGLE, MOTHERFUCKER!" This he said by a series of classic beagle howls-- but short, controlled ones. But tenor, nevertheless.

"No, Knucklehead. Sit," I brazenly commanded. And this dog, who, for nine months of his life was left out in some asshole's backyard, almost completely untrained, sat.

"Holy shit," I said, out loud. Then I uttered the more traditional, "Good boy!" and gave him the toy he desired. Then he proceeded to climb into an empty cage and smell it from corner to corner.

The adoption agent came back in.

"Sounds like a party in here," she said.

"He sat for me," I said.

"He knows sit?!" she exclaimed.

She made no bones about this dog. "You're about to meet the worst puppy in the world," she said, but with a smile.

"Are you the worst puppy in the world?" I asked Knucklehead, as he wriggled around in my lap and attacked my face with his tongue.

Didn't seem likely, but how do you know until it's too late? Well, fortunately, with an adoption center, it's never "too late," they'll always take a dog back rather than read in the paper that you smashed its head with a cinder block after it ate all your mortgage papers and throw pillows.

"I can't emphasize the importance of crate-training enough with this guy," she said, "but he will grow out of this teenager stage and he will make an outstanding dog," she said, turning up the sell. I looked around the room.

"Where the hell is he?"

"He's crawled underneath all the cages-- he likes to pretend he's a cat."

The long-and-short of it? He's on hold for us until Friday at 3:00pm. That's the witching hour. I know that bringing Knucklehead into our home and our lives will turn our home and our lives upthefucksidedown. I know that a one year old, un-housebroken beagle will be something like a medium-sized nightmare. I know my wife will flat-out say "no."

"I want a dog, I don't want a project." Well, Knucklehead isn't emotionally damaged or disordered like the charity-case dogs her mother insists on adopting every seven minutes, but emotionally and developmentally, he's probably about half his actual age, which isn't much. But he's affectionate and energetic and re-directable. He's part dog, part project.

This is what I do. This is my nature. I fall in love with cars that are totally impractical-- make absolutely no sense for my needs or my lifestyle and I try to bring them home. The house we bought, we bought mostly with our hearts-- our brains were somewhere around the block, struggling to keep up. Fixer-uppers, not-quite-theres, from the dubious to the out-and-out insane, my heart is a wayward, untameable, nonsensical beast-- rather like Knucklehead himself. I've never been in the position to have to make a dog out of a puppy before-- Finley came to me at five years old-- already a stately gentleman.

And, yes, he's still very much here. So what would he make of Knucklehead? Would Knucklehead give Finley a second puppyhood? Finley's still kind of having his first puppyhood, inspite of the odd goiter here and there. What would these two nutjobs do with, and to, each other? I just don't know.

I've got beagle fur all over my pants. And I miss him already.