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Dog is awful for everyone, not just me!
Now that I wasn’t the one being made the fool, I had to admit, the scene was pretty hilarious. The two of them, having reached the end of the park- ing lot, turned and came lurching back toward us in fits and starts, Miss Dominatrix scowling with what clearly was apoplectic rage, Marley joyous John Grogan beyond words. She yanked furiously at the leash, and Marley, frothing at the mouth, yanked back harder still, clearly enjoying this excellent new tug-of-war game his teacher had called on him to demonstrate. When he caught sight of me, he hit the gas. With a near-supernatural burst of adren- aline, he made a dash for me, forcing Miss Domi- natrix to break into a sprint to keep from being pulled off her feet. Marley didn’t stop until he slammed into me with his usual joie de vivre. Miss Dominatrix shot me a look that told me I had crossed some invisible line and there would be no crossing back. Marley had made a mockery of everything she preached about dogs and disci- pline; he had publicly humiliated her. She handed the leash back to me and, turning to the class as if this unfortunate little episode had never occurred, said, “Okay, class, on the count of three...” When the lesson was over, she asked if I could stay after for a minute. I waited with Marley as she patiently fielded questions from other students in the class. When the last one had left, she turned to me and, in a newly conciliatory voice, said, “I think your dog is still a little young for structured obedience training.” “He’s a handful, isn’t he?” I said, feeling a new camaraderie with her now that we’d shared the same humiliating experience. Marley & Me “He’s simply not ready for this,” she said. “He has some growing up to do.” It was beginning to dawn on me what she was getting at. “Are you trying to tell me—” “He’s a distraction to the other dogs.” “—that you’re—” “He’s just too excitable.” “—kicking us out of class?” “You can always bring him back in another six or eight months.” “So you’re kicking us out?” “I’ll happily give you a full refund.” “You’re kicking us out.” “Yes,” she finally said. “I’m kicking you out.” Marley, as if on cue, lifted his leg and let loose a raging stream of urine, missing his beloved in- structor’s foot by mere centimeters. Sometimes a man needs to get angry to get seri- ous. Miss Dominatrix had made me angry. I owned a beautiful, purebred Labrador retriever, a proud member of the breed famous for its ability to guide the blind, rescue disaster victims, assist hunters, and pluck fish from roiling ocean swells, all with calm intelligence. How dare she write him off after just two lessons? So he was a bit on the spirited side; he was filled with nothing but John Grogan good intentions. I was going to prove to that in-
sufferable stuffed shirt that Grogan’s Majestic Marley of Churchill was no quitter. We’d see her at Westminster. First thing the next morning, I had Marley out in the backyard with me. “Nobody kicks the Gro- gan boys out of obedience school,” I told him. “Untrainable? We’ll see who’s untrainable. Right?” He bounced up and down. “Can we do it, Marley?” He wiggled. “I can’t hear you! Can we do it?” He yelped. “That’s better. Now let’s get to work.” We started with the sit command, which I had been practicing with him since he was a small puppy and which he already was quite good at. I towered over him, gave him my best alpha-dog scowl, and in a firm but calm voice ordered him to sit. He sat. I praised. We repeated the exercise several times. Next we moved to the down com- mand, another one I had been practicing with him. He stared intently into my eyes, neck strain- ing forward, anticipating my directive. I slowly raised my hand in the air and held it there as he waited for the word. With a sharp downward mo- tion, I snapped my fingers, pointed at the ground and said, “Down!” Marley collapsed in a heap, hitting the ground with a thud. He could not pos- sibly have gone down with more gusto had a mor- Marley & Me tar shell just exploded behind him. Jenny, sitting on the porch with her coffee, noticed it, too, and yelled out, “Incoming!” After several rounds of hit-the-deck, I decided to move up to the next challenge: come on com- mand. This was a tough one for Marley. The com- ing part was not the problem; it was waiting in place until we summoned him that he could not get. Our attention-deficit dog was so anxious to be plastered against us he could not sit still while we walked away from him. I put him in the sit position facing me and fixed my eyes on his. As we stared at each other, I raised my palm, holding it out in front of me like a cross- ing guard. “Stay,” I said, and took a step back- ward. He froze, staring anxiously, waiting for the slightest sign that he could join me. On my fourth step backward, he could take it no longer and broke free, racing up and tumbling against me. I admonished him and tried it again. And again and again. Each time he allowed me to get a little far- ther away before charging. Eventually, I stood fifty feet across the yard, my palm out toward him. I waited. He sat, locked in position, his entire body quaking with anticipation. I could see the nervous energy building in him; he was like a volcano ready to blow. But he held fast. I counted to ten. He did not budge. His eyes froze on me; his mus- John Grogan cles bulged. Okay, enough torture, I thought. I dropped my hand and yelled, “Marley, come!” As he catapulted forward, I squatted and clapped my hands to encourage him. I thought he might go racing willy-nilly across the yard, but he made a beeline for me. Perfect! I thought. “C’mon, boy!” I coached. “C’mon!” And come he did. He was barreling right at me. “Slow it down, boy,” I said. He just kept coming. “Slow down!” He had this vacant, crazed look on his face, and in the instant before impact I realized the pilot had left the wheelhouse. It was a one-dog stampede. I
had time for one final command. “STOP!” I screamed. Blam! He plowed into me without breaking stride and I pitched backward, slamming hard to the ground. When I opened my eyes a few seconds later, he was straddling me with all four paws, lying on my chest and desperately licking my face. How did I do, boss? Technically speak- ing, he had followed orders exactly. After all, I had failed to mention anything about stopping once he got to me. “Mission accomplished,” I said with a groan. Jenny peered out the kitchen window at us and shouted, “I’m off to work. When you two are done making out, don’t forget to close the win- dows. It’s supposed to rain this afternoon.” I gave Marley & Me Linebacker Dog a snack, then showered and headed off to work myself. When I arrived home that night, Jenny was wait- ing for me at the front door, and I could tell she was upset. “Go look in the garage,” she said. I opened the door into the garage and the first thing I spotted was Marley, lying on his carpet, looking dejected. In that instant snapshot image, I could see that his snout and front paws were not right. They were dark brown, not their usual light yellow, caked in dried blood. Then my focus zoomed out and I sucked in my breath. The garage—our indestructible bunker—was a sham- bles. Throw rugs were shredded, paint was clawed off the concrete walls, and the ironing board was tipped over, its fabric cover hanging in ribbons. Worst of all, the doorway in which I stood looked like it had been attacked with a chipper-shredder. Bits of wood were sprayed in a ten-foot semicircle around the door, which was gouged halfway through to the other side. The bottom three feet of the doorjamb were missing entirely and nowhere to be found. Blood streaked the walls from where Marley had shredded his paws and muzzle. “Damn,” I said, more in awe than anger. John Grogan My mind flashed to poor Mrs. Nedermier and the chainsaw murder across the street. I felt like I was standing in the middle of a crime scene. Jenny’s voice came from behind me. “When I came home for lunch, everything was fine,” she said. “But I could tell it was getting ready to rain.” After she was back at work, an intense storm moved through, bringing with it sheets of rain, dazzling flashes of lightning, and thunder so pow- erful you could almost feel it thump against your chest. When she arrived home a couple of hours later, Marley, standing amid the carnage of his desper- ate escape attempt, was in a complete, panic- stricken lather. He was so pathetic she couldn’t bring herself to yell at him. Besides, the incident was over; he would have no idea what he was being punished for. Yet she was so heartsick about the wanton attack on our new house, the house we had worked so hard on, that she could not bear to deal with it or him. “Wait till your father gets home!” she had threatened, and closed the door on him. Over dinner, we tried to put what we were now calling “the wilding” in perspective. All we could figure was that, alone and terrified as the storm descended on the neighborhood, Marley decided his best chance at survival was to begin digging his Marley & Me way into the house. He was probably listening to some ancient denning instinct handed down from his ancestor, the wolf. And he pursued his goal with a zealous efficiency I wouldn’t have thought possible without the aid of heavy machinery. When the dishes were done, Jenny and I went out into the garage where Marley, back to his old self, grabbed a chew toy and bounced around us, looking for a little tug-of-war action. I held him still while Jenny sponged the blood off his fur. Then he watched us, tail wagging, as we cleaned up his handiwork. We threw out the rugs and ironing-board cover, swept up the shredded re-
mains of our door, mopped his blood off the walls, and made a list of materials we would need from the hardware store to repair the damage— the first of countless such repairs I would end up making over the course of his life. Marley seemed positively ebullient to have us out there, lending a hand with his remodeling efforts. “You don’t have to look so happy about it,” I scowled, and brought him inside for the night. C H A P T E R 9 The Stuff Males Are Made Of ❉ Every dog needs a good veterinarian, a trained professional who can keep it healthy and strong and immunized against disease. Every new dog owner needs one, too, mostly for the advice and reassurance and free counsel veterinarians find themselves spending inordinate amounts of their time dispensing. We had a few false starts finding a keeper. One was so elusive we only ever saw his high-school-aged helper; another was so old I was convinced he could no longer tell a Chi- huahua from a cat. A third clearly was catering to Palm Beach heiresses and their palm-sized acces- sory dogs. Then we stumbled upon the doctor of our dreams. His name was Jay Butan—Dr. Jay to all who knew him—and he was young, smart, hip, and extraordinarily kind. Dr. Jay understood dogs like the best mechanics understand cars, intu- John Grogan itively. He clearly adored animals yet maintained a healthy sensibility about their role in the human world. In those early months, we kept him on speed dial and consulted him about the most inane concerns. When Marley began to develop rough scaly patches on his elbows, I feared he was devel- oping some rare and, for all we knew, contagious skin ailment. Relax, Dr. Jay told me, those were just calluses from lying on the floor. One day Mar- ley yawned wide and I spotted an odd purple dis- coloration on the back of his tongue. Oh my God, I thought. He has cancer. Kaposi’s sarcoma of the mouth. Relax, Dr. Jay advised, it was just a birthmark. Now, on this afternoon, Jenny and I stood in an exam room with him, discussing Marley’s deepen- ing neurosis over thunderstorms. We had hoped the chipper-shredder incident in the garage was an isolated aberration, but it turned out to be just the beginning of what would become a lifelong pattern of phobic, irrational behavior. Despite Labs’ reputation as excellent gun dogs, we had ended up with one who was mortally terrified of anything louder than a popping champagne cork. Firecrackers, backfiring engines, and gunshots all terrified him. Thunder was a house of horrors all its own. Even the hint of a storm would throw Marley into a meltdown. If we were home, he Marley & Me would press against us, shaking and drooling un- controllably, his eyes darting nervously, ears folded back, tail tucked between his legs. When he was alone, he turned destructive, gouging away at whatever stood between him and perceived safety. One day Jenny arrived home as clouds gathered to find a wild-eyed Marley standing on top of the washing machine, dancing a desperate jig, his nails clicking on the enamel top. How he got up there and why he felt the urge in the first place, we never determined. People could be certifiably nuts, and as best as we could figure, so could dogs. Dr. Jay pressed a vial of small yellow pills into my hand and said, “Don’t hesitate to use these.” They were sedatives that would, as he put it, “take the edge off Marley’s anxiety.” The hope, he said, was that, aided by the calming effects of the drug,
Marley would be able to more rationally cope with storms and eventually realize they were nothing but a lot of harmless noise. Thunder anxiety was not unusual in dogs, he told us, especially in Florida, where huge boomers rolled across the peninsula nearly every afternoon during the torpid summer months. Marley nosed the vial in my hands, apparently eager to get started on a life of drug dependency. Dr. Jay scruffed Marley’s neck and began work- ing his lips as though he had something important John Grogan to say but wasn’t quite sure how to say it. “And,” he said, pausing, “you probably want to start thinking seriously about having him neutered.” “Neutered?” I repeated. “You mean, as in...” I looked down at the enormous set of testicles— comically huge orbs—swinging between Marley’s hind legs. Dr. Jay gazed down at them, too, and nodded. I must have winced, maybe even grabbed myself, because he quickly added: “It’s painless, really, and he’ll be a lot more comfortable.” Dr. Jay knew all about the challenges Marley presented. He was our sounding board on all things Marley and knew about the disastrous obedience training, the numbskull antics, the destructiveness, the hyper- activity. And lately Marley, who was seven months old, had begun humping anything that moved, in- cluding our dinner guests. “It’ll just remove all that nervous sexual energy and make him a hap- pier, calmer dog,” he said. He promised it wouldn’t dampen Marley’s sunny exuberance. “God, I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems so... so final.” Jenny, on the other hand, was having no such compunctions. “Let’s snip those suckers off!” she said. “But what about siring a litter?” I asked. “What Marley & Me about carrying on his bloodline?” All those lucra- tive stud fees flashed before my eyes. Again Dr. Jay seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “I think you need to be realistic about that,” he said. “Marley’s a great family pet, but I’m not sure he’s got the credentials he would need to be in demand for stud.” He was being as diplomatic as possible, but the expression on his face gave him away. It almost screamed out, Good God, man! For the sake of future generations,
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