Animal come from, and how can we send him

back? At the end of the day one of the assistants,

clipboard in hand, told us the shooting lineup was

still undecided for the next morning. “Don’t

bother coming in tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll call

if we need Marley.” And to ensure there was no

confusion, he repeated: “So unless you hear from

us, don’t show up. Got it?” Yeah, I got it, loud and

clear. Gosse had sent his underling to do the dirty

work. Marley’s fledgling acting career was over.

Not that I could blame them. With the possible

exception of that scene in The Ten Command-

ments where Charlton Heston parts the Red Sea,

Marley had presented the biggest logistical night-

mare in the history of cinema. He had caused who

knows how many thousands of dollars in needless

delays and wasted film. He had slimed countless

costumes, raided the snack table, and nearly top-

pled a thirty-thousand-dollar camera. They were

cutting their losses, writing us out. It was the old

“Don’t call us, we’ll call you” routine.

“Marley,” I said when we got home, “your big

chance and you really blew it.”

Marley & Me

❉ ❉ ❉

The next morning I was still fretting over our

dashed dreams of stardom when the phone rang.

It was the assistant, telling us to get Marley to the

hotel as soon as possible. “You mean you want him

back?” I asked.

“Right away,” he said. “Bob wants him in the

next scene.”

I arrived thirty minutes later, not quite believ-

ing they had invited us back. Gosse was ebullient.

He had watched the raw footage from the day be-

fore and couldn’t have been happier. “The dog

was hysterical!” he gushed. “Just hilarious. Pure

madcap genius!” I could feel myself standing

taller, chest puffing out.

“We always knew he was a natural,” Jenny said.

Shooting continued around Lake Worth for sev-

eral more days, and Marley continued to rise to

the occasion. We hovered in the wings with the

other stage parents and hangers-on, chatting, so-

cializing, and then falling abruptly silent whenever

the stagehand yelled, “Ready on set!” When the

word “Cut!” rang out, the party continued. Jenny

even managed to get Gary Carter and Dave Win-

field, the Baseball Hall of Fame all-star who was

making a cameo in the movie, to sign baseballs for

each of the boys.

John Grogan

Marley was lapping up stardom. The crew, espe-

cially the women, fawned over him. The weather

was brutally hot, and one assistant was assigned the

exclusive duty of following Marley around with a

bowl and a bottle of spring water, pouring him

drinks at will. Everyone, it seemed, was feeding

him snacks off the buffet table. I left him with the

crew for a couple of hours while I checked in at

work, and when I returned I found him sprawled

out like King Tut, paws in the air, accepting a

leisurely belly rub from the strikingly gorgeous

makeup artist. “He’s such a lover!” she cooed.

Stardom was starting to go to my head, too. I

began introducing myself as “Marley the Dog’s

handler” and dropping lines such as “For his next

movie, we’re hoping for a barking part.” During

one break in the shooting, I walked into the hotel

lobby to use the pay phone. Marley was off his

leash and sniffing around the furniture several feet

away. A concierge, apparently mistaking my star

for a stray, intercepted him and tried to hustle him

out a side door. “Go home!” he scolded. “Shoo!”

“Excuse me?” I said, cupping my hand over the

mouthpiece of the phone and leveling the

concierge with my most withering stare. “Do you

have any idea who you’re talking to?”

We remained on the set for four straight days,

and by the time we were told Marley’s scenes were

Marley & Me

all completed and his services no longer needed,

Jenny and I both felt we were part of the Shooting

Gallery family. Granted, the only unpaid members

of the family, but members nonetheless. “We love

you guys!” Jenny blurted out to all within earshot

as we herded Marley into the minivan. “Can’t wait

to see the final cut!”

But wait we did. One of the producers told us to

give them eight months and then call and they’d

mail us an advance copy. After eight months when

I called, however, a front-desk person put me on

hold and returned several minutes later to say,

“Why don’t you try in another couple months?” I

waited and tried, waited and tried, but each time

was put off. I started feeling like a stalker, and I

could imagine the receptionist, hand cupped over

the phone, whispering to Gosse at the editing

table, “It’s that crazy dog guy again. What do you

want me to tell him this time?”

Eventually I stopped calling, resigned that we

would never see The Last Home Run, convinced

that no one ever would, that the project had been

abandoned on the editing-room floor on account

of the overwhelming challenges of trying to edit

that damn dog out of every scene. It would be two

full years later before I would finally get my

chance to see Marley’s acting skills.

I was in Blockbuster when on a whim I asked

John Grogan

the clerk if he knew anything about a movie called

The Last Home Run. Not only did he know about

it; he had it in stock. In fact, as luck would have it,

not a single copy was checked out.

Only later would I learn the whole sad story.

Unable to attract a national distributor, the Shoot-

ing Gallery had no choice but to relegate Marley’s

movie debut to that most ignoble of celluloid

fates. The Last Home Run had gone straight to

video. I didn’t care. I raced home with a copy and

yelled to Jenny and the kids to gather round the

VCR. All told, Marley was on-screen for less than

two minutes, but I had to say they were two of the

livelier minutes in the film. We laughed! We cried!

We cheered!

“Waddy, that you!” Conor screamed.

“We’re famous!” Patrick yelled.

Marley, never one to get hung up on pretenses,

seemed unimpressed. He yawned and crawled be-

neath the coffee table. By the time the end credits

rolled, he was sound asleep. We waited with

breath held as the names of all the actors of the

two-legged variety had scrolled by. For a minute, I

thought our dog was not going to merit a credit.

But then there it was, listed in big letters across

the screen for all to see: “Marley the Dog... As

Himself.”

C H A P T E R 1 7

In the Land of Bocahontas

❉

One month after filming ended for The Last

Home Run, we said good-bye to West Palm

Beach and all the memories it held. There had

been two more murders within a block of our

home, but in the end it was clutter, not crime, that

drove us from our little bungalow on Churchill

Road. With two children and all the accou-

trements that went with them, we were packed,

quite literally, to the rafters. The house had taken

on the pallid sheen of a Toys “R” Us factory out-

let. Marley was ninety-seven pounds, and he

could not turn around without knocking some-

thing over. Ours was a two-bedroom house, and

we foolishly thought the boys could share the sec-

ond room. But when they kept waking each other

up, doubling our nocturnal adventures, we moved

Conor out to a narrow space between the kitchen

John Grogan

and the garage. Officially, it was my “home of-

fice,” where I played guitar and paid bills. To any-

one who saw it, though, there was really no

sugarcoating it: We had moved our baby out into

the breezeway. It sounded horrible. A breezeway

was just a half step up from a garage, which, in

turn, was nearly synonymous with a barn. And

what kind of parents would raise their boy in a

barn? A breezeway had a certain unsecured sound

to it: a place open to the wind—and anything else

that might blow in. Dirt, allergens, stinging in-

sects, bats, criminals, perverts. A breezeway was

where you would expect to find the garbage cans

and wet tennis shoes. And in fact it was the place

where we kept Marley’s food and water bowls,

even after Conor took up residence there, not be-

cause it was a space fit only for an animal but sim-

ply because that’s where Marley had come to

expect them.

Our breezeway-cum-nursery sounded Dicken-

sian, but it really wasn’t that bad; it was almost

charming. Originally, it was built as a covered,

open-air pass-through between the house and

garage, and the previous owners had closed it in

years earlier. Before declaring it a nursery, I re-

placed the old leaky jalousies with modern, tight-

fitting windows. I hung new blinds and applied a

fresh coat of paint. Jenny covered the floor with

Marley & Me

soft rugs, hung cheerful drawings, and dangled

whimsical mobiles from the ceiling. Still, how did

it look? Our son was sleeping in the breezeway

while the dog had full run of the master bedroom.

Besides, Jenny was now working half-time for

the Post ’s feature section, and mostly from home,

as she attempted to juggle children and career. It

only made sense for us to relocate closer to my of-

fice. We agreed it was time to move.

Life is full of little ironies, and one of them was

the fact that, after months of searching, we settled

on a house in the one South Florida city I took the

greatest glee in publicly ridiculing. That place was

Boca Raton, which, translated from the Spanish,

means literally “Mouth of the Rat.” And what a

mouth it was.

Boca Raton was a wealthy Republican bastion

largely populated with recent arrivals from New

Jersey and New York. Most of the money in town

was new money, and most of those who had it

didn’t know how to enjoy it without making fools

of themselves. Boca Raton was a land of luxury

sedans, red sports cars, pink stucco mansions

crammed onto postage-stamp lots, and balkanized

walled developments with guards at the gates. The

men favored linen pants and Italian loafers sans

socks and spent inordinate amounts of time mak-

ing important-sounding cell-phone calls to one

John Grogan

another. The women were tanned to the consis-

tency of the Gucci leather bags they favored, their

burnished skin set off by hair dyed alarming

shades of silver and platinum.

The city crawled with plastic surgeons, and they

had the biggest homes and most radiant smiles of

all. For Boca’s well-preserved women, breast im-

plants were a virtual requirement of residency.

The younger women all had magnificent boob

jobs; the older women all had magnificent boob

jobs and face-lifts. Butt sculpting, nose jobs,

tummy tucks, and tattooed mascara rounded out

the cosmetic lineup, giving the city’s female popu-

lation the odd appearance of being foot soldiers in

an army of anatomically correct inflatable dolls.

As I once sang in a song I wrote for a press skit,

“Liposuction and silicone, a girl’s best friends in

Boca Raton.”

In my column I had been poking fun at the Boca

lifestyle, starting with the name itself. Residents

of Boca Raton never actually called their city

Boca Raton. They simply referred to it by the fa-

miliar “Boca.” And they did not pronounce it as

the dictionary said they should, with a long O,

BO-kuh. Rather they gave it a soft, nasal, Jersey-

tinged inflection. It was BOHW-kuh! as in, “Oh,

the manicured shrubbery is bew-tee-ful here in

BOHW-kuh!”

Marley & Me

The Disney movie Pocahontas was in the the-

aters then, and I launched a running spoof on the

Indian-princess theme, which I titled “Bocahon-

tas.” My gold-draped protagonist was an indige-

nous suburban princess who drove a pink BMW,

her rock-hard, surgically enhanced breasts jutting

into the steering wheel, allowing her to drive

hands-free, talking on her cell phone and teasing

her frosted hair in the rearview mirror as she

raced to the tanning salon. Bocahontas lived in a

pastel designer wigwam, worked out each morn-

ing at the tribal gym—but only if she could find

parking within ten feet of the front door—and

spent her afternoons stalking wild furs, trusty

AmEx card in hand, at the ceremonial hunting

grounds known as Town Center Mall.

“Bury my Visa at Mizner Park,” Bocahontas in-

tones solemnly in one of my columns, a reference

to the city’s toniest shopping strip. In another, she

adjusts her buckskin Wonderbra and campaigns to

make cosmetic surgery tax-deductible.

My characterization was cruel. It was unchari-

table. It was only slightly exaggerated. Boca’s

real-life Bocahontases were the biggest fans of

those columns, trying to figure out which of them

had inspired my fictional heroine. (I’ll never tell.)

I was frequently invited to speak before social and

community groups and invariably someone would

John Grogan

stand up and ask, “Why do you hate BOHW-kuh

so much?” It wasn’t that I hated Boca, I told them;

it was just that I loved high farce. No place on

earth delivered it quite like the pretty-in-pink

Mouth of the Rat.

So it only made sense that when Jenny and I fi-

nally settled on a house, it was located at ground

zero of the Boca experience, midway between the

waterfront estates of east Boca Raton and the

snooty gated communities of west Boca Raton

(which, I relished pointing out to the very zip-

code-conscious residents, fell outside the city lim-

its in unincorporated Palm Beach County). Our

new neighborhood was in one of the few middle-

class sections in the city, and its residents liked to

joke with a certain reverse snobbery that they

were on the wrong side of both sets of tracks.

Sure enough, there were two sets of railroad

tracks, one defining the eastern boundary of the

neighborhood and one the western. At night you

could lie in bed and listen to the freight trains

moving through on their way to and from Miami.

“Are you crazy?” I said to Jenny. “We can’t

move to Boca! I’ll be run out of town on a rail.

They’ll serve my head up on a bed of organic

mesclun greens.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You’re exaggerating

again.”

Marley & Me

My paper, the Sun-Sentinel, was the dominant

newspaper in Boca Raton, far outpacing the Miami

Herald, the Palm Beach Post, or even the local

Boca Raton News in circulation. My work was

widely read in the city and its western develop-

ments, and because my photograph appeared above

my column, I was frequently recognized. I didn’t

think I was exaggerating. “They’ll skin me alive

and hang my carcass in front of Tiffany’s,” I said.

But we had been looking for months, and this

was the first house that met all our criteria. It was

the right size at the right price and in the right

place, strategically located between the two offices

where I split my time. The public schools were

about as good as public schools got in South

Florida, and for all its superficialities, Boca Raton

had an excellent park system, including some of

the most pristine ocean beaches in the Miami–

Palm Beach metropolitan area. With more than a

little trepidation, I agreed to go forward with the

purchase. I felt like a not-so-secret agent infiltrat-

ing the enemy’s encampment. The barbarian was

about to slip inside the gate, an unapologetic

Boca-basher crashing the Boca garden party. Who

could blame them for not wanting me?

When we first arrived, I slinked around town

self-consciously, convinced all eyes were on me.

My ears burned, imagining people were whisper-

John Grogan

ing as I passed. After I wrote a column welcoming

myself to the neighborhood (and eating a fair

amount of crow in the process), I received a num-

ber of letters saying things like “You trash our city

and now you want to live here? What a shameless

hypocrite!” I had to admit, they made a point. An

ardent city booster I knew from work couldn’t

wait to confront me. “So,” he said gleefully, “you

decided tacky Boca isn’t such a bad place after all,

huh? The parks and the tax rate and the schools

and beaches and zoning, all that’s not so bad when

it comes time to buy a house, is it?” All I could do

was roll over and cry uncle.

I soon discovered, however, that most of my

neighbors here on the wrong side of both sets of

tracks were sympathetic to my written assaults on

what one of them called “the gauche and vulgar

among us.” Pretty soon I felt right at home.

Our house was a 1970s-vintage four-bedroom

ranch with twice the square footage of our first

home and none of the charm. The place had po-

tential, though, and gradually we put our mark on

it. We ripped up the wall-to-wall shag carpeting

and installed oak floors in the living room and Ital-

ian tile everywhere else. We replaced the ugly slid-

ing glass doors with varnished French doors, and I

Marley & Me

slowly turned the bereft front yard into a tropical

garden teeming with gingers and heliconias and

passion vines that butterflies and passersby alike

stopped to drink in.

The two best features of our new home had

nothing to do with the house itself. Visible from

our living room window was a small city park

filled with playground equipment beneath tower-

ing pines. The children adored it. And in the

backyard, right off the new French doors, was an

in-ground swimming pool. We hadn’t wanted a

pool, worrying about the risk to our two toddlers,

and Jenny made our Realtor blanch when she sug-

gested filling it in. Our first act on the day we

moved in was to surround the pool with a four-

foot-high fence worthy of a maximum-security

prison. The boys—Patrick had just turned three

and Conor eighteen months when we arrived—

took to the water like a pair of dolphins. The park

became an extension of our backyard and the pool

an extension of the mild season we so cherished. A

swimming pool in Florida, we soon learned, made

the difference between barely enduring the with-

ering summer months and actually enjoying them.

No one loved the backyard pool more than our

water dog, that proud descendant of fishermen’s

retrievers plying the ocean swells off the coast of

Newfoundland. If the pool gate was open, Marley

John Grogan

would charge for the water, getting a running start

from the family room, going airborne out the open

French doors and, with one bounce off the brick

patio, landing in the pool on his belly with a giant

flop that sent a geyser into the air and waves over

the edge. Swimming with Marley was a potentially

life-threatening adventure, a little like swimming

with an ocean liner. He would come at you full

speed ahead, his paws flailing out in front of him.

You’d expect him to veer away at the last minute,

but he would simply crash into you and try to

climb aboard. If you were over your head, he

pushed you beneath the surface. “What do I look

like, a dock?” I would say, and cradle him in my

arms to let him catch his breath, his front paws

still paddling away on autopilot as he licked the

water off my face.

One thing our new house did not have was a

Marley-proof bunker. At our old house, the con-

crete one-car garage was pretty much indestructi-

ble, and it had two windows, which kept it

tolerably comfortable even in the dead of summer.

Our Boca house had a two-car garage, but it was

unsuitable for housing Marley or any other life-

form that could not survive temperatures above

150 degrees. The garage had no windows and was

stiflingly hot. Besides, it was finished in drywall,

not concrete, which Marley had already proved

Marley & Me

himself quite adept at pulverizing. His thunder-

induced panic attacks were only getting worse, de-

spite the tranquilizers.

The first time we left him alone in our new

house, we shut him in the laundry room, just off

the kitchen, with a blanket and a big bowl of wa-

ter. When we returned a few hours later, he had

scratched up the door. The damage was minor, but

we had just mortgaged our lives for the next thirty

years to buy this house, and we knew it didn’t

bode well. “Maybe he’s just getting used to his

new surroundings,” I offered.

“There’s not even a cloud in the sky,” Jenny ob-

served skeptically. “What’s going to happen the

first time a storm hits?”

The next time we left him alone, we found out.

As thunderheads rolled in, we cut our outing short

and hurried home, but it was too late. Jenny was a

few steps ahead of me, and when she opened the

laundry-room door she stopped short and uttered,

“Oh my God.” She said it the way you would if

you had just discovered a body hanging from the

chandelier. Again: “Oh... My... God.” I

peeked in over her shoulder, and it was uglier than

I had feared. Marley was standing there, panting

frantically, his paws and mouth bleeding. Loose

fur was everywhere, as though the thunder had

scared the hair right out of his coat. The damage

John Grogan

was worse than anything he had done before, and

that was saying a lot. An entire wall was gouged

open, obliterated clear down to the studs. Plaster

and wood chips and bent nails were everywhere.

Electric wiring lay exposed. Blood smeared the

floor and the walls. It looked, literally, like the

scene of a shotgun homicide.

“Oh my God,” Jenny said a third time.

“Oh my God,” I repeated. It was all either of us

could say.

After several seconds of just standing there

mute, staring at the carnage, I finally said, “Okay,

we can handle this. It’s all fixable.” Jenny shot me

her look; she had seen my repairs. “I’ll call a dry-

wall guy and have it professionally repaired,” I

said. “I won’t even try to do this one myself.” I

slipped Marley one of his tranquilizers and wor-

ried silently that this latest destructive jag might

just throw Jenny back into the funk she had sunk

into after Conor’s birth. Those blues, however,

seemed to be long behind her. She was surpris-

ingly philosophical about it.

“A few hundred bucks and we’ll be good as

new,” she chirped.

“That’s what I’m thinking, too,” I said. “I’ll

give a few extra speeches to bring in some cash.

That’ll pay for it.”

Within a few minutes, Marley was beginning to

Marley & Me

mellow. His eyelids grew heavy and his eyes

deeply bloodshot, as they always did when he was

doped up. He looked like he belonged at a Grate-

ful Dead concert. I hated to see him this way, I al-

ways hated it, and always resisted sedating him.

But the pills helped him move past the terror, past

the deadly threat that existed only in his mind. If

he were human, I would call him certifiably psy-

chotic. He was delusional, paranoid, convinced a

dark, evil force was coming from the heavens to

take him. He curled up on the rug in front of the

kitchen sink and let out a deep sigh. I knelt beside

him and stroked his blood-caked fur. “Geez,

dog,” I said. “What are we going to do with you?”

Without lifting his head, he looked up at me with

those bloodshot stoner eyes of his, the saddest,

most mournful, eyes I have ever seen, and just

gazed at me. It was as if he were trying to tell me

something, something important he needed me to

understand. “I know,” I said. “I know you can’t

help it.”

The next day Jenny and I took the boys with us to

the pet store and bought a giant cage. They came

in all different sizes, and when I described Marley

to the clerk he led us to the largest of them all. It

was enormous, big enough for a lion to stand up

John Grogan

and turn around in. Made out of heavy steel grat-

ing, it had two bolt-action barrel locks to hold the

door securely shut and a heavy steel pan for a

floor. This was our answer, our own portable Alca-

traz. Conor and Patrick both crawled inside and I

slid the bolts shut, locking them in for a moment.

“What do you guys think?” I asked. “Will this

hold our Superdog?”

Conor teetered at the cage door, his fingers

through the bars like a veteran inmate, and said,

“Me in jail.”

“Waddy’s going to be our prisoner!” Patrick

chimed in, delighted at the prospect.

Back home, we set up the crate next to the

washing machine. Portable Alcatraz took up

nearly half the laundry room. “Come here, Mar-

ley!” I called when it was fully assembled. I tossed

a Milk-Bone in and he happily pranced in after it.

I closed and bolted the door behind him, and he

stood there chewing his treat, unfazed by the new

life experience he was about to enter, the one

known in mental-health circles as “involuntary

commitment.”

“This is going to be your new home when we’re

away,” I said cheerfully. Marley stood there pant-

ing contentedly, not a trace of concern on his face,

and then he lay down and let out a sigh. “A good

sign,” I said to Jenny. “A very good sign.”

Marley & Me

That evening we decided to give the maximum-

security dog-containment unit a test run. This

time I didn’t even need a Milk-Bone to lure Mar-

ley in. I simply opened the gate, gave a whistle,

and in he walked, tail banging the metal sides. “Be

a good boy, Marley,” I said. As we loaded the boys

into the minivan to go out to dinner, Jenny said,

“You know something?”

“What?” I asked.

“This is the first time since we got him that I

don’t have a pit in my stomach leaving Marley

alone in the house,” she said. “I never even real-

ized how much it put me on edge until now.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “It was always

a guessing game: ‘What will our dog destroy this

time?’ ”

“Like, ‘How much will this little night out at

the movies cost us?’ ”

“It was like Russian roulette.”

“I think that crate is going to be the best money

we ever spent,” she said.

“We should have done this a long time ago,” I

agreed. “You can’t put a price on peace of mind.”

We had a great dinner out, followed by a sunset

stroll on the beach. The boys splashed in the surf,

chased seagulls, threw fistfuls of sand in the water.

Jenny was uncharacteristically relaxed. Just know-

ing Marley was safely secured inside Alcatraz, un-

John Grogan

able to hurt himself or anything else, was a balm.

“What a nice outing this has been,” she said as we

walked up the front sidewalk to our house.

I was about to agree with her when I noticed

something in my peripheral vision, something up

ahead that wasn’t quite right. I turned my head and

stared at the window beside the front door. The

miniblinds were shut, as they always were when we

left the house. But about a foot up from the bottom

of the window the metal slats were bent apart and

something was sticking through them.

Something black. And wet. And pressed up

against the glass. “What the—?” I said. “How

could... Marley?”

When I opened the front door, sure enough,

there was our one-dog welcoming committee,

wiggling all over the foyer, pleased as punch to

have us home again. We fanned out across the

house, checking every room and closet for telltales

of Marley’s unsupervised adventure. The house

was fine, untouched. We converged on the laundry

room. The crate’s door stood wide open, swung

back like the stone to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morn-

ing. It was as if some secret accomplice had snuck

in and sprung our inmate. I squatted down beside

the cage to have a closer look. The two bolt-action

barrel locks were slid back in the open position,

and—a significant clue—they were dripping with

Marley & Me

saliva. “It looks like an inside job,” I said. “Some-

how Houdini here licked his way out of the Big

House.”

“I can’t believe it,” Jenny said. Then she uttered

a word I was glad the children were not close

enough to hear.

We always fancied Marley to be as dumb as al-

gae, but he had been clever enough to figure out

how to use his long, strong tongue through the

bars to slowly work the barrels free from their

slots. He had licked his way to freedom, and he

proved over the coming weeks that he was able to

easily repeat the trick whenever he wanted. Our

maximum-security prison had in fact turned out

to be a halfway house. Some days we would return

to find him resting peacefully in the cage; other

days he’d be waiting at the front window. Involun-

tary commitment was not a concept Marley was

going to take lying down.

We took to wiring both locks in place with

heavy electrical cable. That worked for a while,

but one day, with distant rumbles on the horizon,

we came home to find that the bottom corner of

the cage’s gate had been peeled back as though

with a giant can opener, and a panicky Marley, his

paws again bloodied, was firmly stuck around the

rib cage, half in and half out of the tight opening.

I bent the steel gate back in place as best I could,

John Grogan

and we began wiring not only the slide bolts in

place but all four corners of the door as well.

Pretty soon we were reinforcing the corners of the

cage itself as Marley continued to put his brawn

into busting out. Within three months the gleam-

ing steel cage we had thought so impregnable

looked like it had taken a direct hit from a how-

itzer. The bars were twisted and bent, the frame

pried apart, the door an ill-fitting mess, the sides

bulging outward. I continued to reinforce it as best

I could, and it continued to hold tenuously against

Marley’s full-bodied assaults. Whatever false

sense of security the contraption had once offered

us was gone. Each time we left, even for a half

hour, we wondered whether this would be the

time that our manic inmate would bust out and go

on another couch-shredding, wall-gouging, door-

eating rampage. So much for peace of mind.

C H A P T E R 1 8

Alfresco Dining

❉

Marley didn’t fit into the Boca Raton scene

any better than I did. Boca had (and surely

still has) a disproportionate share of the world’s

smallest, yappiest, most pampered dogs, the kind

of pets that the Bocahontas set favored as fashion

accessories. They were precious little things, often

with bows in their fur and cologne spritzed on

their necks, some even with painted toenails, and

you would spot them in the most unlikely of

places—peeking out of a designer handbag at you

as you waited in line at the bagel shop; snoozing

on their mistresses’ towels at the beach; leading

the charge on a rhinestone-studded leash into a

pricey antiques store. Mostly, you could find them

cruising around town in Lexuses, Mercedes-

Benzes, and Jaguars, perched aristocratically be-

hind the steering wheels on their owners’ laps.

John Grogan

They were to Marley what Grace Kelly was to

Gomer Pyle. They were petite, sophisticated, and

of discriminating taste. Marley was big, clunky,

and a sniffer of genitalia. He wanted so much to

have them invite him into their circle; they so

much were not about to.

With his recently digested obedience certificate

under his belt, Marley was fairly manageable on

walks, but if he saw something he liked, he still

wouldn’t hesitate to lunge for it, threat of strangu-

lation be damned. When we took strolls around

town, the high-rent pooches were always worth

getting all choked up over. Each time he spotted

one, he would break into a gallop, barreling up to

it, dragging Jenny or me behind him at the end of

the leash, the noose tightening around his throat,

making him gasp and cough. Each time Marley

would be roundly snubbed, not only by the Boca

minidog but by the Boca minidog’s owner, who

would snatch up young Fifi or Suzi or Cheri as if

rescuing her from the jaws of an alligator. Marley

didn’t seem to mind. The next minidog to come

into sight, he would do it all over again, unde-

terred by his previous jilting. As a guy who was

never very good at the rejection part of dating, I

admired his perseverance.

Outside dining was a big part of the Boca expe-

rience, and many restaurants in town offered al-

Marley & Me

fresco seating beneath palm trees whose trunks

and fronds were studded with strings of tiny

white lights. These were places to see and be seen,

to sip caffè lattes and jabber into cell phones as

your companion stared vacantly at the sky. The

Boca minidog was an important part of the al-

fresco ambience. Couples brought their dogs with

them and hooked their leashes to the wrought-

iron tables where the dogs would contentedly curl

up at their feet or sometimes even sit up at the

table beside their masters, holding their heads

high in an imperious manner as if miffed by the

waiters’ inattentiveness.

One Sunday afternoon Jenny and I thought it

would be fun to take the whole family for an out-

side meal at one of the popular meeting places.

“When in Boca, do as the Bocalites,” I said. We

loaded the boys and the dog into the minivan and

headed to Mizner Park, the downtown shopping

plaza modeled after an Italian piazza with wide

sidewalks and endless dining possibilities. We

parked and strolled up one side of the three-block

strip and down the other, seeing and being seen—

and what a sight we must have made. Jenny had

the boys strapped into a double stroller that could

have been mistaken for a maintenance cart, loaded

up in the back with all manner of toddler para-

phernalia, from applesauce to wet wipes. I walked

John Grogan

beside her, Marley, on full Boca minidog alert,

barely contained at my side. He was even wilder

than usual, beside himself at the possibility of

getting near one of the little purebreds prancing

about, and I gripped hard on his leash. His tongue

hung out and he panted like a locomotive.

We settled on a restaurant with one of the more

affordable menus on the strip and hovered nearby

until a sidewalk table opened up. The table was

perfect—shaded, with a view of the piazza’s cen-

tral fountain, and heavy enough, we were sure, to

secure an excitable hundred-pound Lab. I hooked

the end of Marley’s leash to one of the legs, and

we ordered drinks all around, two beers and two

apple juices.

“To a beautiful day with my beautiful family,”

Jenny said, holding up her glass for a toast. We

clicked our beer bottles; the boys smashed their

sippy cups together. That’s when it happened. So

fast, in fact, that we didn’t even realize it had hap-

pened. All we knew was that one instant we were

sitting at a lovely outdoor table toasting the beau-

tiful day, and the next our table was on the move,

crashing its way through the sea of other tables,

banging into innocent bystanders, and making a

horrible, ear-piercing, industrial-grade shriek as it

scraped over the concrete pavers. In that first split

second, before either of us realized exactly what

Marley & Me

bad fate had befallen us, it seemed distinctly possi-

ble that our table was possessed, fleeing our family

of unwashed Boca invaders, which most certainly

did not belong here. In the next split second, I saw

that it wasn’t our table that was haunted, but our

dog. Marley was out in front, chugging forward

with every ounce of rippling muscle he had, the

leash stretched tight as piano wire.

In the fraction of a second after that, I saw just

where Marley was heading, table in tow. Fifty feet

down the sidewalk, a delicate French poodle lin-

gered at her owner’s side, nose in the air. Damn, I

remember thinking, what is his thing for poo-

dles? Jenny and I both sat there for a moment

longer, drinks in hand, the boys between us in

their stroller, our perfect little Sunday afternoon

unblemished except for the fact that our table was

now motoring its way through the crowd. An in-

stant later we were on our feet, screaming, run-

ning, apologizing to the customers around us as we

went. I was the first to reach the runaway table as

it surged and scraped down the piazza. I grabbed

on, planted my feet, and leaned back with every-

thing I had. Soon Jenny was beside me, pulling

back, too. I felt like we were action heroes in a

western, giving our all to rein in the runaway train

before it jumped the tracks and plunged over a

cliff. In the middle of all the bedlam, Jenny actu-

John Grogan

ally turned and called over her shoulder, “Be right

back, boys!” Be right back? She made it sound so

ordinary, so expected, so planned, as if we often

did this sort of thing, deciding on the spur of the

moment that, oh, why not, it might just be fun to

let Marley lead us on a little table stroll around

town, maybe doing a bit of window-shopping

along the way, before we circled back in time for

appetizers.

When we finally got the table stopped and Mar-

ley reeled in, just feet from the poodle and her

mortified owner, I turned back to check on the

boys, and that’s when I got my first good look at

the faces of my fellow alfresco diners. It was like a

scene out of one of those E. F. Hutton commer-

cials where an entire bustling crowd freezes in si-

lence, waiting to hear a whispered word of

investment advice. Men stopped in midconversa-

tion, cell phones in their hands. Women stared

with opened mouths. The Bocalites were aghast.

It was finally Conor who broke the silence.

“Waddy go walk!” he screamed with delight.

A waiter rushed up and helped me drag the table

back into place as Jenny held Marley, still fixated

on the object of his desire, in a death grip. “Let me

get some new place settings,” the waiter said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Jenny said noncha-

Marley & Me

lantly. “We’ll just be paying for our drinks and

going.”

It wasn’t long after our excellent excursion into

the Boca alfresco-dining scene that I found a book

in the library titled No Bad Dogs by the acclaimed

British dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse. As the ti-

tle implied, No Bad Dogs advanced the same be-

lief that Marley’s first instructor, Miss

Dominatrix, held so dear—that the only thing

standing between an incorrigible canine and

greatness was a befuddled, indecisive, weak-

willed human master. Dogs weren’t the problem,

Woodhouse held; people were. That said, the

book went on to describe, chapter after chapter,

some of the most egregious canine behaviors

imaginable. There were dogs that howled inces-

santly, dug incessantly, fought incessantly,

humped incessantly, and bit incessantly. There

were dogs that hated all men and dogs that hated

all women; dogs that stole from their masters and

dogs that jealously attacked defenseless infants.

There were even dogs that ate their own feces.

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